The Other Way Around (23 page)

It's too late at night for this comment to annoy me. “Hmmm,” I say, “He's going to be different.”

G leans forward. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like how?”

“Like he's going to know what he wants.”

“Wow,” G says, like I've said something really profound. “That's a tall order.”

“Most of the time,” I amend it.

“That's probably more like it,” she says.

“Thanks.” I flick one of the playing cards at her, and she bats it away with the back of her hand. I could say more. Like how surprised I am that it isn't that hard. That I want Emily and apple crisp and somewhere warm to lie down at night. And out here those things are enough. Back home, I'm not so sure. “Okay, your turn.” I stare up into the sky, trying to think of a good one for G. “There. See those three stars right in a row?”

“You mean Orion's Belt?”

“Not anymore. From now on that's known as G's Trapeze.” I wait for a moment. “You have to tell me the story of how it got there.”

“I'm thinking,” she says. “Okay, but this is kind of a long one.”

“Okay,” I say. “Let me check my calendar. Nope, nothing doing for the next few hours. Take your time.”

“Wiseass.” She pauses a moment longer. “Okay, G's first trapeze was in her backyard at home. It was part of a swing set in her backyard. It had green and yellow wooden bars, and it was the nicest thing in their not-so-nice neighborhood. It was better than the one at the park that was missing rungs and only
had one swing that hung uneven. Her dad bought it when he won at the track. He put it together one fall afternoon while she and her sisters ran circles around him, waiting for it to be finished. He drank cans of Miller Lite and when he finished one, he would crumple it up and throw it at the girls, who would squeal and run away.”

“Your dad threw beer cans at you?”

“Yeah, and that was when he was being nice. Anyway, it didn't last long. That winter he lost a lot. He lost at the track and on the boxing matches. So he took it down so they could burn it in the fireplace because they couldn't afford to pay for heat. That was before they burned the girls' schoolbooks and made them lie about losing them to their teachers. And instead of throwing beer cans he threw the furniture and the lamps. But even then it wasn't that bad, as long as she wasn't drinking. Once she started, that's when things got really ugly.

“G and her sisters basically took care of themselves. They started hiding the food so they would have something to bring to school for lunch. Nobody checked that to see that there wasn't anything between the slices of bread. Their clothes were clean enough to escape the teacher's notice. Who knows how long it could have lasted?

“It would have lasted except for the fire. She was the last one up. She was supposed to put the screen in front of the fire like she'd been told a hundred times. But she fell asleep. And when she woke up the carpet was sparkling with orange embers. She didn't do anything, even when the embers curled into yellow flames. She didn't do anything because for once it was warm in the living room. She just watched the flames devour the carpet, and as they moved hungrily toward the couch, that
was when she realized that it might be getting out of hand. But it was too late.”

“Did they die?” I whisper in the darkness.

“No. Everyone made it out. But her older sister, not the oldest one, the middle one, her blanket caught on fire as they were crawling out of the house. She wouldn't let it go and it burned her arm and her shoulder. I think the oldest knew what happened. She knew why the fire had started. She never said anything, but G never went back. Somehow, when the family moved from the shelter to the apartment found by their church, G didn't go with them. She went to live with her Uncle Paul and her Aunt Ginger until she was too much for them to handle. And after that it was the state—foster home after foster home. No one ever came to visit, and she never asked if she could go home. It was like
she
died in the fire.”

I don't say anything. I'm not an idiot. I can tell that this is a true story.

“So the next time she saw a trapeze it was many years later. She had always been fearless, but on the trapeze she was even more so. When she's up on the ropes twisting in the air, she has nothing to lose and nothing to prove. But when she's up there she always thinks of the first one, the one that burned. So that's why it burns in the sky.” She's quiet for a moment. “The end, I guess.”

“Wow,” I say after a few minutes of saying nothing. “I'm sorry.” As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn't. It's not what I meant. “I mean thank you.”

“Thank you for what?” G says suspiciously.

“Thank you for thinking enough of me to tell me that story.”

“It's just a story,” she says, even though we both know it's not. Suddenly a pinpoint of bright light flashes across the sky. It's followed by several more that are smaller, more like white ash. “Did you see that?” G says excitedly.

“Yeah, was that it?”

“It's starting.”

We watch the meteor shower in silence. It really is like a shower, like the sky is raining light. I remember the fireworks shows that I used to go to with my parents on the Fourth of July. I lie back in the van the way I used to lie back on our picnic blanket—my head in Mom's lap, the salty smell of the corned beef sandwiches Dad would make in the warm summer air. I watch the silver confetti burst in the night sky. In the hum of Shirley's engine I can hear music, but I guess it's only in my head; the reeling twangs of a banjo and the sharp twangs of a fiddle. An echo following me down the highway from Hot Springs. It's lonely music, traveling music, like something the Joads would have listened to around the fire at night. But it doesn't make me feel lonely. Instead I feel like I could reach out and touch everyone everywhere. G squeezes my foot when there's a really good eruption of light. I think about the story she just told, about the sparks of light in the carpet and trapeze in the sky. I think I know why she called me a douchebag back in Louisville. And I
am
sorry.

Just before dawn, we pull into a rest area outside of Amarillo, Texas, and we all stagger out to use the bathroom. I don't remember the end of the meteor shower, or falling asleep, but both seem like they happened a while ago. Jesse needs to sleep and no one else feels like driving, so we pull out the sleeping bags and curl up in our various spots on the van floor. G and Lyle take the pop-up. Jesse and Tim have the front seats, which leaves me and Emily in the back.

Emily snuggles up to me, her back to my front. I think it's called spooning. She pulls my arm around her, and I shake my head a little to avoid being suffocated by her dreadlocks. She still smells sweet, like Skye's homemade orange and almond lotion. It's moments like these that make me seriously rethink the offhand comments I make about going home.

It's only a few hours before the warmth and brightness of the daylight make sleeping impossible. I walk unsteadily out of the van and splash some water on my face in the rest stop bathroom. Coming out of the bathroom I run into Jesse, who is heading for the convenience store to buy some milk for our granola. “I doubt they'll have any soy milk, but Emily can eat
it plain,” he says. I fall in beside him, ignoring the stares from the family with three small children piling out of the minivan parked next to Shirley.

I scrub a couple dollars from Jesse and leave a message on Mom's machine when I know she'll be at work. It's a total chicken move, I know, but this way Mom will know I'm alive, and I won't have to explain to her for the thousandth time why I'm not on a bus heading back to New York. The message I leave is long and rambling. I tell her stuff about the farm and killing chickens and digging up my food out of the dirt—stuff I didn't even plan on telling her. I don't say anything about when I'll be back. Better not to get her hopes up.

After I leave a message I feel a lot better. Skye's granola is amazing, and once we're back on the road I'm free to sit back and watch the rolling hills of Texas turn into the dry desert country of New Mexico. Jesse tells me the place we're going is just north of Roswell on Route 70. I find it on the map and watch as the tiny desert towns flash by outside the van windows. Everything is beige and brown and dusty green. The buildings aren't more than two stories, and down every side road it's possible to see where civilization ends and the desert takes over.

We stop by the side of the road for lunch by a washed-out creek bed, but there isn't much food left in our supplies. Emily makes some pasta, but all we have for sauce is some olive oil and garlic powder. It's pretty gross, actually, but I manage to choke it down with a few more bites of the last of Skye's granola for dessert. Jesse surveys our supplies. “We'll have to stop in the next big town and do some serious scrounging,” he says. “We've got a little cash for groceries, but I'd rather save it for gas. And I don't want to show up completely empty-handed.”

“Clovis looks like it might have something,” I say, poking at the slightly larger letters on the map. Jesse looks over my shoulder.

“Yeah, we'll try there.”

In Clovis we find a local supermarket called Callahan's with a bountiful dumpster. With the memory of pasta and garlic powder fresh in my mind—and on my breath—I have no qualms about jumping right in with everyone else and sorting through the bags. We score some slightly browning bananas, bags of precut lettuce, bags of carrot sticks, several containers of yoghurt, some individual-sized Jell-O pudding cups, and a whole bunch of Halloween-colored Oreo cookies. Tim tears into a package of these and stuffs several orange-and-black cookies in his mouth before anyone can say anything.

“Those are made with horse hooves,” Emily announces.

“That's a myth, actually,” Lyle says quietly.

Either way, Tim is undeterred. “Mmm, horse hooves are my favorite.” He rubs his belly and sprays Oreo crumbs. Emily mostly looks annoyed at Lyle. When she turns away, I grab a stack of Oreos from Tim and shove them into my mouth. They're hardly even stale, and the sugar explodes on my tongue. The final coup from this particular dumpster is the unearthing of four slightly squished premade pies from the bakery section: two cherry, one pecan, and one apple. Jesse suggests that we put these aside to share at Burdock. We pick through for a while longer, but aside from a few more bags of carrots nothing else is uncovered. It seemed like a good haul, but when all the food is laid out in front of us there's not that much to make a meal out of.

Jesse looks at his watch. “Should we try one more? I'd like to make it there before dark.”

“We could drive around and see if there's a Super K or a Walmart on the way out of town,” G suggests.

“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “Strong concerns? Major objections?” No one has any, so we pile back into the van and head west, looking for the nearest big-box establishment. Before going on the road with the Freegans I never realized how many small towns have Super Kmarts or Super Walmart. It's kind of sad when you drive down Main Street and half the storefronts are boarded up. At the end of Main Street there's usually a traffic light and then a few fast-food restaurants and a big chain store, sometimes even two.

For right now, though, I'm glad to see the familiar markings of a Super Kmart since it means I might have more than yoghurt and lettuce for dinner. The first thing we pull out of the Kmart dumpster is a big box of macaroni and cheese packages that an overzealous employee nearly shredded with a box cutter. Each of the individual boxes is slashed open with a sharp cut down the middle. The pasta and artificial cheese packets are in perfect condition, so we pull these out and place them next to the van. In the back corner of the dumpster I find a bag that's impossibly heavy and start tugging on the top. Tim looks at the bag stuffed in the corner and shakes his head. “If it's that heavy, it's probably not worth it man. It's probably some kind of industrial garbage.”

“I don't know. I have a good feeling about it.”

Tim shrugs his shoulders and helps me free the bag, tugging on the bottom while I lift from above. “Dude,” he says, “if this turns out to be an exploding bag of dirty diapers, I'm going to kill you.”

“Whatever it is, it's metal,” I say, pointing to the way the bag is bulging in distinctly can-like formations. We wrestle the bag over the top of the dumpster and onto the ground, where Jesse pulls it apart. It's filled with unmarked canned goods.

“Sweet,” Jesse says. “Mystery cans.”

“Where did the labels go?”

“They peel them off so people like us won't be as tempted to go rooting through their trash.”

“That's lame.”

“Yeah, speaking of which, we should get going,” G says. “We've been out here for a while.”

“So, the worst that can happen is they tell us to move along, right?” I ask a little nervously.

“It depends if they really feel like being dicks or not,” Lyle says. “Technically this is abandoned property, and there's nothing illegal about going through the trash. But the dumpster itself is private property. A lot of people, especially in small towns, have ended up with a night in jail on trespassing charges. It's not really worth fighting it. They usually let you go the next day. It just kind of depends how uptight the locals are.”

I hop over the side of the dumpster and wipe my hands on my jeans. “Let's not find out.”

“Hang on a minute,” Tim says. “I think I just found something cool.”

“Edible?” Jesse asks.

“No, wearable. Dude, check these out.” Tim hops over the side of the dumpster, wearing a thin cotton T-shirt with a bright blue cartoon character on it and orange bubble letters. It's about a size too small for him, and over his clothes it's skin-tight.