100 Sideways Miles (29 page)

FINN: They put dead things in shampoo.

CADE: Oh, yeah, and Mr. Nossik, too.

FINN: A ticking Nazi time bomb.

CADE: Yeah.

FINN: It was a good year, Cade.

CADE: Coming up on our last year, then who knows? It's not like it's been written down for you, dude. You could give your dad a break sometimes. You're not really stuck in anything, and we could prove it by not going to Dunston tomorrow. Take a detour.

FINN: Maybe.

CADE: And tell your dad to write another book. I need to know if you ever get laid or eat someone.

FINN: No.
(Pauses)
So you think a detour to go where?

CADE: Well. I was looking at the map, and I figure we're maybe about eight or nine hours away from Chicago.

FINN: In eight or nine hours, we will be more than half a million miles away from exactly this spot, no matter which way we go. We might as well be sitting in Chicago right now.

CADE: Dude.

FINN: What?

CADE: Don't you want to see her?

FINN: More than anything else I can think of.

CADE: Promise not to eat me?

FINN: You're a shithead.

CADE: Let's go to Chicago tomorrow.

FINN: You're the best human on this planet, Cade.

CADE: Swear to God you won't eat me?

And just before we both shut up and fell asleep, Cade reached over and poked his index finger into my sternum and said, “A centipede with ninety-six amputations.”

I wasn't wearing a shirt.

In the State of California, things got crazy that night.

A man who identified himself as “Doctor” Nathan Pauley phoned Cade Hernandez's parents in Burnt Mill Creek and told them a ridiculous story about finding their naked and unconscious son beside a rain-swollen river in northeastern Oklahoma. He explained that
Cade Hernandez
—their son, me—selflessly dove (although I actually
jumped 
) into the river in order to save the life of a trapped drowning boy and his little dog.

Their son was a hero!

Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez just kept asking the same question, which was this: Was he
sure
it was Cade he found?

So Nathan Pauley, D.V.M., said that he'd seen Cade Hernandez's California driver's license, and even copied down the plates on Cade's pickup. And he also told them that later their son acted aggressively and threatened him and then drove away—naked—before he or the sheriff's office could figure out what had happened at the river. Then Nathan Pauley asked Cade's parents about their son's heterochromatic eyes and the
“Lazarus Door” scar along his spine, and where the family actually came from.

Argentina, they answered politely.

It was ridiculous.

Look: Cade's parents did not speak telephone-English-with-a-crazy-guy-in-Oklahoma very well, but they had read the Spanish-language version of my father's novel, and they had also known me for billions of miles—ever since Cade Hernandez and I became friends. So Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez knew pretty much everything there was to know about the epileptic boy. And they realized Nathan Pauley had mistaken me—Finn Easton, the human—for their son—Cade Hernandez, another human—whom the “doctor” assumed was a fallen angel–cannibal alien here to destroy mankind.

After all, who
wouldn't
think that?

Fifteen minutes, or eighteen thousand miles, later, a man named Billy Gruber from the Craig County, Oklahoma, sheriff's department phoned
my
parents—Mike and Tracy Easton—in an attempt to track down their son. Deputy Billy Gruber told them an equally ridiculous story about something I had never done, which included being found naked in the mud below a bridge on the Little Buffalo River while performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on an elderly man who had nearly drowned when he accidentally drove himself, his grandson, and their wire-haired terrier dog in a minivan loaded with groceries directly into the deep and muddy river.

Finn Easton was a hero too!

Billy Gruber went on to tell my parents that apparently their son—who was actually Cade Hernandez and not me—had
disappeared from the accident scene that night wearing nothing but a paper jailhouse jumpsuit, and that he had either been abducted or perhaps hitched a ride with a friendly trucker, and did they have any idea where their son,
Finn Easton
, might be heading?

“Um, Dunston University?” my dad said.

And, by the way, Deputy Billy Gruber added, had my parents ever read a book called
The Lazarus Door
? Because there was something awfully unsettling about another boy who'd been pulled naked from the Little Buffalo River too, and their son, Finn—who was actually Cade Hernandez and not me—might be in danger of being eaten.

My mother and father kept asking Deputy Billy Gruber the same question, which also was this: Was he
sure
it was their son he was talking about?

And six thousand miles, or five minutes, later, looking like confused and frightened ghosts from the flood, Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez showed up at the front door of my parents' home in San Francisquito Canyon, the site of the worst accident in the history of self-taught civil engineering.

It was a ridiculous night.

• • •

“Um, hello? Dad?”

“Finn? Where the hell are you? What's going on? Do you realize the shit we've been going through all night? Are you okay?”

“Um.”

Five questions.

I had no idea where the jumping-in point to the story of the past one-point-seven million miles would be, but as I stood
there in my shorts and T-shirt, outside on a street in the early afternoon with my face pressed up against a smudged black handset connected to a telephone we actually had to put coins in to operate, which, I thought, most likely contained a knackering universe of pathogens unto itself, I finally realized something.

What I realized was this: I was in my own story now, and I had the power to tell it—or not tell it—to my father.

“Normal,” I said. “I am in a city called Normal, which is in the middle of Illinois, Dad.”

Who'd have ever thought I'd have to go to Illinois to be in Normal?

“What are you doing there?”

“Um, I am talking on a phone that you have to put quarters in to make it work, like one of those vibrating helicopter rides for toddlers in front of supermarkets. And then Cade and I are going to drive up to see Julia Bishop, Dad.”

I heard my dad sigh. Through the earpiece it sounded like fine-grain sandpaper brushing on whitewood.

“Are you both okay?”

“Yes. We're fine.”

I continued. “We saw an accident where a van drove into a river. Cade and I pulled the people out of the water. That's what happened yesterday, and now we're here, in Normal.”

Dad said, “Cade's parents got a crazy phone call from some doctor in Oklahoma.”

“Nathan Pauley. He's a dog doctor.”

“And a sheriff's deputy called us last night. We couldn't figure out who anyone was talking about.”

“They thought I was Cade and Cade was me,” I said. “Dad? They actually thought we were really from the book.”

“I know.”

“People are stupid.”

Then my dad said, “I'm sorry for all this shit, Finn. It's all been my fault. Maybe I should write all those assholes another book.”

“Just keep me out of it,” I said. “But Cade said you could put him in it, and you could even kill him if you want.”

Dad laughed. “Cade Hernandez did
not
actually read the book.”

“Yes,” I said. “He did. The ending pissed him off.”

I had never felt so free of my father's book in my entire life. And that was precisely when I totally figured out how I—Finn Easton—could never have been trapped in my dad's novel in the first place.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

“But you're okay?”

“Back to normal,” I joked.

“I'm catching a flight to Chicago.”

“Dad?”

“What, son?”

“Please let me do this alone. I promise we'll come home. I just need to tell Julia how the play ends.”

The sandpaper sigh came again. I told my dad I loved him and hung up the phone.

• • •

I was so anxious at the thought of seeing Julia Bishop again. Although it had only been about five days—nine million miles—since we said good-bye to each other at her aunt and uncle's house in San Francisquito Canyon, it felt as though the distance had expanded infinite, endless, and I wondered how she would react when she saw me there, awkward and messy, standing nervously at her front door.

What if she didn't even know who I was anymore?

I knew it was a ridiculous thought, but millions of miles are sometimes difficult to bridge. After all, distance is always going to be more important than time.

And before we left the city of Normal, Illinois, to head north on the last leg of our trip that veered away from Dunston University and our planned-out futures, Cade Hernandez, being the natural showman that he was, decided to pick up a few items in order to construct what he decided would be the most fitting way for Finn Easton to appear at Julia Bishop's doorstep.

He told me I'd find out later.

And I said, “Just so long as it is not naked and with wings, one atom at a time.”

Cade said, “Holy shit, that's exactly what I was planning.”

“I feel like I should have taken a bath or something,” I said. “What if I stink?”

“Dude. After yesterday, I don't care if I never get wet again,” Cade said.

“Do I look okay?”

Cade Hernandez steered with one knee. He spit into his portable plastic spittoon and looked across at me.

“If I was a girl, I'd probably make out with you,” he said.

“Um.”

I tried to fix my unruly hair by licking my palm and brushing it. It didn't work so well.

• • •

Julia Bishop lived in a gabled two-story redbrick house with a steep slate roof and wide masonry chimneys. It sat on a street of massive homes and towering trees in a place called Lake Forest. It was not too difficult for me and Cade to find; I'd written Julia's address on the inside flap of the notebook I packed for our university visit that turned out to be not much of a university visit.

Look: It wasn't the detour Cade and I took that brought me to realize how I'd never been trapped inside my father's book in the first place. It was this: In the novel, the incomers were completely loveless. It was something that had never actually dawned on me until I stood there beside a public library in Normal, Illinois, speaking on a pay telephone with my father, whom I love, while on my way to see Julia Bishop, who loved me.

“I know now that I actually came from Earth, the planet of humans and dogs,” I announced to Cade Hernandez as we drove through the streets of Lake Forest.

“Why? Because you don't want to eat me?”

“I've had plenty of opportunities to do it if I ever was hungry enough,” I explained.

Cade spit.

And I said, “My dad told me he was going to write another book.”

“Tell him to hurry up.”

“I said he could put
you
in it this time.”

“As long as I get laid and not eaten,” Cade said, “which kind of gives me a boner and also makes me hungry.”

Cade Hernandez's grand entrance for me was this: He'd taken panels of cardboard from a dumpster behind an electronics store in Normal and, using a black marking pen, he created a very childish-looking book prop. Across the top of the book's flap he wrote THE LAZARUS DOOR, BY FINN'S DAD. He cut a door in the cardboard rectangle so the book could actually swing open, and in the center of it, Cade drew this: