100 Sideways Miles (8 page)

“You were there?” I asked.

“Delivered pizza.” Cade spit and opened another beer. Then
he laughed. “You should have seen what me and Monica did to that dickhead's pizza.”

I looked at Monica. She had a bored and confused look on her face that said she didn't really
get
the stuff we American boys joked about, and why we thought certain things were such big deals. I believed it was Monica's act.

Cade silently mouthed
five dollars
to me and pointed at the pizza.

He laughed.

I suddenly lost my appetite.

I said, “Well, you are
not
going to drive anywhere. You're drunk. And so's Monica.”

Cade slid his keys across the coffee table. They landed on the floor beside my knee. Cade had taught me how to drive, too.

I was horrible!

My dad would have a stroke if he knew I'd driven Cade's truck before; and driving right after a seizure was definitely a dangerous idea. One time, I'd crashed Cade's truck into somebody's mailbox. Cade Hernandez thought it was hilarious. I still felt guilty over bending the mailbox.

Someone had to be the grown-up, I thought.

“Oh, yeah. Right,” I said. “If you drive, we end up in jail, and if I drive, we end up in the hospital. Lose-lose, Win-Win.”

Then Julia said, “I have a car. I can drive.”

• • •

So the four of us started off, walking toward Julia Bishop's house. Actually, it was five, counting Laika.

We crossed the road and followed the creekbed north.

In May, there was no water in San Francisquito Creek, just a
few spots where puddles had been trapped in some of the deeper depressions of the bed.

Cade and Monica followed slowly at a distance, like twin satellites being pulled along by the gravity of Julia Bishop and me. I'd turn around from time to time and catch one of them opening another beer. Once, I saw Cade pissing into the brush.

On the way up the canyon, Julia Bishop told me she'd come out only to look at the moon. She said the moon was in perigee that night, the closest it got to the planet of humans and dogs.

“So,” I said, “were you just going for a walk to see the moon, or were you honestly trying to meet your epileptic neighbor?”

Julia Bishop was a good subject-changer. “Did you know this is the second brightest moon tonight in more than a century?”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then you could see it from anywhere,” I pointed out.

“Okay, then,” Julia admitted, “I heard you lived in that big house. I wanted to see.”

“Um,” I said.

I cleared my throat and toe-kicked a rock. “You didn't get a chance to answer my question before. Why did you do that—clean up after me, I mean? You didn't have to do something like that.”

“I felt bad for you. You were so sad, and I thought you were just scared,” Julia said.

“But that was, um . . . pretty disgusting, what I did,” I said.

“It was no big deal. I've done it before.”

“What? Cleaned up a sixteen-year-old kid's pee?” I said.

“Well, no. But I've changed a baby's diaper,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “A diaper. That really makes me feel like killing myself right about now.”

Then she laughed and touched my arm.

She said, “Forget about it.”

I said, “Well, sorry. And thank you for what you did, Julia.”

Cade and Monica weren't paying attention to us at all.

Laika had run off somewhere into the dry wash of the canyon.

While the earth travels twenty miles per second, it pulls the moon with it through space. And the moon, dragged along, trudges around us at a little more than half a mile per second.

The moon is slow.

It is the hair of the earth.

“Compared with us, the moon moves like a glacier in space,” I said.

• • •

There has never been a shortage of dead things in San Francisquito Canyon.

Julia Bishop had no idea. There were hundreds of accounts of ghosts wandering the canyon at night. I do not believe in ghosts, unless they are just lingering atoms from the dead; atoms that didn't know how to let go of one another.

So I told her about William Mulholland, who was a self-taught civil engineer.

Self-taught civil engineers are probably as trustworthy as self-taught brain surgeons and self-taught airline pilots.

Like sexual confusion and atom bombs, self-taught civil engineers are causally associated with extinction.

William Mulholland built a concrete dam in San Francisquito
Canyon in 1926. The dam was called the St. Francis Dam, and it filled the canyon with a massive reservoir.

Twelve billion gallons.

At that time, it was approximately six gallons of water—about fifty pounds' worth—for every human being alive on the planet.

In 1928, William Mulholland's dam collapsed, releasing a one-hundred-forty-foot wall of water and tumbling chunks of concrete as big as locomotives. Twelve billion gallons of water suddenly decided to make a run for the Pacific Ocean, which is about fifty miles from here.

Nobody knows for certain how many people died in the disaster. Many estimates place the number of dead at around five hundred.

Bodies washed ashore as far away as coastal Mexico.

Our homes were built along the same channel where countless corpses were dragged and pummeled by William Mulholland's self-taught mistake.

The knackery never shuts down.

Laika found a dead coyote. The thing lay decaying in the knackery of San Francisquito Canyon's creekbed.

“Something fucking stinks,” Cade announced.

Monica Fassbinder pecked at her cell phone. She had a distracted and bored
are-we-there-yet
look on her face.

The moon was full and bright enough that I found the mangled coyote between clumps of wild blooming buckwheat, where some other creature had likely dragged it. Its side had been laid wide open, and in the white-hot light from the moon, I could see bones and the fetid yellow coils of rotting innards. The coyote had probably been hit by a car on the highway and then limped out here into the middle of the wash to lie down and die.

When I found her, Laika was joyously wriggling on the mat of the carcass, all four of her little paws, dancing, pointed up at the moon and stars.

The atoms that disengaged from the dead coyote smelled worse than anything imaginable. I had to lift the neckline of my
tank top to cover my mouth and nose, just to get within ten feet of the thing.

“You're so stupid!” I said. “I hate you so much.”

Which was true. At that moment, I really did hate my dog.

I have wild mood swings too.

Laika, busted and guilty, rolled away from the mattress of her newfound, dead friend. She curled her tail between her legs, grinned with toothy contrition, and presented her belly at my feet.

“I'm not touching you! Go away! Get in your cage!” I said.

Laika knew what to do. She ran for home. I would find her curled up inside her little spaceship when I went back.

“Aww . . . poor thing,” Julia said.

I pulled my shirt down from my face and moved away from the stink of the carcass.

“My dog is dumb. She rolls in dead things.”

“Maybe it's easier to catch up to dead things. They don't go so fast,” Julia said.

“Everything moves at the same speed, living or dead,” I answered. “Twenty miles per second.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“It's easy to figure out. Pi. The distance to the sun. Three hundred and sixty-five days. It comes out to twenty miles per second, give or take a bit.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “that sounds real easy.”

“Are you messing with me?”

“I'm not trying to.”

“Dude. Julia. How far away
is
your house?” Cade said.

Julia pointed to a light on the west side of the canyon.

“It's right there,” she said.

“I hope you guys have a four-wheel drive or something,” I said.

“I realized I bought the wrong kind of car for living here,” Julia said.

There were only a few homes on the west side of the canyon. In winter, when the flooding came, residents there would have to drive through the creek, which became impassable during heavy rainfall. Frequently, the people on the west bank would have to leave their cars along the shoulder of the highway and try to wade across the raging creek just to get to their homes.

During a couple of the worst seasons, Dad and Mom actually took in what they called West Bank refugees who could not get to their homes. My mom and dad fed the stranded neighbors and allowed them to sleep in our house.

There were no bridges here. I think people in the canyon pretty much gave up on the idea of civil engineering.

“Well, it really stinks here. If we're going to look at the second brightest moon in one hundred years, we should probably move away from dead things,” I said.

• • •

“A century is about sixty billion miles,” I said.

Julia Bishop was sixteen years old. Her skin was dark and smooth, and she had the most perfectly curved slender legs. I tried to devise some strategy that might allow me to casually touch them, just like Julia had touched my arm.

The thought made my atoms feel very alive and aroused, not nearly like the fourteen-billion-year-old sourpusses I was used to.

I was certain I'd never feel anything as flawless as Julia Bishop's skin.

But I was too afraid.

We sat on the ground with our knees bent, at the edge of Julia's yard. From our spot in a clearing between some dried Lydia brooms and spiny mesquite brush, we watched the moon as it rose higher into the sky above the canyon rim.

“Oh,” Julia said, “I can't even imagine what sixty billion
anythings
would look like.”

I thought about it.

“Neither can I,” I said.

Cade and Monica sat away from us, drinking. Cade had his arm around Monica, and occasionally I could hear the wet sounds of their kissing. I didn't really
get
their relationship at all. Cade was athletic, smart, energetic, and high maintenance; Monica was quiet, brooding, and dissatisfied. Monica's wardrobe came in one color: black. And she only listened to bands like the Smiths and the Cure. As far as I could tell, Cade and Monica had only one thing in common.

It was a miracle they were still conscious, too. And they fully intended to have Julia drive us to Blake Grunwald's party, where they would certainly drink more alcohol.

That's what kids do.

“Not many people change schools in May,” I said. “Where did you come from?”

Julia smiled. She was startlingly beautiful. I looked directly into her eyes and saw tiny moons floating in them.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Then she said, “I came from up there.”

Julia Bishop nodded toward the moon and stars.

I said, “Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I guess we all did.”

“No.” Julia said, “I mean I came through a Lazarus Door, just like you.”

“Oh,” I said. It was a groan, actually.

Lazarus Doors.

This is the truth: In the book my father wrote,
The Lazarus Door
, the tiny, atom-size particles the angel-aliens came through to arrive at the endless orgy and dinner table of Planet Earth were called Lazarus Doors.

“You read that book too?” I said.

“Hasn't everyone?” Julia asked.

Cade Hernandez, now animated and enthusiastic, said, “I never read books. Sorry, Finner.”

Then he burped and laughed.

Monica Fassbinder said, “What book?”

Here is another truth: My father once said to me that sometimes the smallest thing—a Lazarus Door–size idea—can force an entire book to squeeze out through it.

Poof!

I believed this.

My father told me the inspiration for his book came from the scar on my back.

Imagine that.

Once they got here, the incomers from Dad's novel decided to surgically remove their wings, in order to blend in better with human beings.

Human beings were not very smart. We never have been, to be honest.

One human in the story, the hero, figured out he could identify the fallen angel–cannibal aliens by examining their naked backs. And the other thing about the incomers was this: They all had heterochromatic eyes.

I was trapped in that book and I couldn't get out.