The Flying Troutmans (17 page)

Somehow I'd lost my room key, maybe I'd left it in Adam's truck, and Logan hadn't bothered to take one when he left, so I had to go to the front desk and ask for another one. The woman asked me if I had a little girl with me.

Well, yeah, I said, she's in the room.

She's been making some long-distance phone calls
all the way up to Canada, said the woman. I had to help her with the code.

Thanks, I said. I'm really sorry—

I thought about calling the police, said the woman.

What? I said. Why?

She was all alone, said the woman. How was I supposed to know you hadn't left her there?

Yeah, well, yeah, but…I know, but she was okay, right? I had to go find this guy—I pointed at Logan—and I did check on her at one point…I know. I know. Normally…I left her a note, I added.

The woman turned around and started fiddling with the fax machine. The sun was coming up.

All right, I said. Can I just…okay, thank you, really, thank you for not calling the cops. I appreciate it.

Checkout's at eleven, she said.

 

Thebes was sitting on the edge of the bed. She'd changed out of her dirty white suit and back to her old royal blue terry cloth outfit. She was looking at the TV but it wasn't on. Her hands were folded in her lap and she didn't say anything when we came in.

Thebie, I said. I sat down beside her and put my arms around her. I'm so sorry. Are you okay? You got my note, right? Are you hungry?

Logan came over and put his hand up for five but she didn't lift hers. Thebes? he said. She began to cry. Logan sat down on the bed and said he felt so bad, this was all his fault, he would let her sit in the front of the van and do
poetry with her if she wanted him to. Or crafts, or whatever. She could have permanent control of the remote.

I took her hands in mine and saw thin red scratch marks on the inside of her wrists. Thebie, I whispered. I kissed her hands. Thebie, I said again.

Logan hadn't noticed. He got up and said he was going to have a shower and went into the bathroom. Then he came back out.

Thebes! Dude! he said. You found my knife! Thanks! He went back into the bathroom.

Thebes, I said. What did you do? She didn't say anything. Please, Thebie, talk to me, I said. Tell me what happened, okay? I won't tell anyone, I promise. Not even Logan. I won't tell a soul.

She told me she had woken up and we were gone and she was afraid and worried. She had noticed that the van was gone too. She hadn't seen the note until later. She didn't know what to do at first. Then she decided to call the hospital to see if she could talk to Min. She phoned the front desk to ask for help, and eventually, after six or seven tries, managed to get through to the hospital. The nurse told her it was the middle of the night and Thebes said she was sorry to be calling so late but Min was her mom and she really needed to talk to her. Somehow, for some reason, the nurse had said all right, she'd see if she could wake Min up. Then a few minutes later Min was on the phone. She said hello. Thebes was so excited she was jumping from bed to bed. Min! she said. It's me! At that point in the story Thebes started crying again. Logan came out of the washroom.

What's up? he said. What's wrong?

I told him I needed to talk to Thebes, alone, and asked him to go back into the washroom. He said no problem and left.

What did she say? I asked Thebes. She was crying too hard to answer. I bet she was so happy to hear your voice, I said. I held her some more and let her cry. What did she say? I asked her again. Finally, Thebes had stopped crying long enough to speak.

She kept calling me Hattie, she said. She thought I was you.

She did? I said.

And every time I'd say no, no, Min, this is Thebes, it's Thebie. Theodora. Remember? But she didn't know who I was and she just kept calling me Hattie and asking me if I had the tickets for some show she wanted to see and I didn't know what to say. I kept saying this is Thebes, this is Thebes. And then she'd say like, oh, Hattie, what are we going to wear or stuff like that and then finally I just said no, I didn't have the tickets but I'd get them and I'd call her back. And that was it.

Oh god, Thebes, I said. She's on so much medication, you know? And she'd probably been fast asleep, like in the middle of a dream or something of when she was young, and probably right after she hung up she thought to herself, wait, hold on! That was Thebes! Not Hattie! But she couldn't call you back because she didn't know where you were calling from and probably the nurse made her go back to bed, and tomorrow when we call her it'll all be clear and we'll just…laugh, right?

Thebes didn't think anybody was going to be laughing. No, she said, well, maybe. Well, no. She said she guessed she should have that bath I'd been talking about before. Wash her hair, all that.

Logan came out of the washroom and I asked him for just two more minutes alone with Thebes. Yep, he said, and turned around again.

So, then, after you talked to Min…you did this? I said. I touched her wrists. She said yeah, but she wasn't serious. She was just fooling around and bored and didn't know what else to do. She hadn't meant it. I thought of all the times Thebes had pretended to be somebody else on the phone and now when she was being herself it hadn't worked out.

Hey, come over here, I said, and led her by the hand to the window. See, I said, look at that. I pointed to the sun the way Adam had earlier directed me to the moon. Over there, I said. I didn't know what to say but I kept talking. It's coming up, I said. It's shining like a champ. I didn't know what to do besides pointing out something that was constant in her life, even if it was only an uninhabitable ball of fire that you couldn't look at without flinching or experiencing pain.

Yeah, so? said Thebes.

Yeah, I said, you see?
See what? What was I trying to accomplish?
I told Thebes about how when Min and I were kids we got to see a solar eclipse and the whole world went dark. We wore welding helmets, I said. Min got them from some body shop guys she knew. We were out in a field with these giant black things on our heads, they
covered our faces, we looked like Darth Vader, we were laughing, Min was standing there all,
Luke, I am your father,
you know, and waiting for it to happen, it only happens once, maybe twice, in a person's lifetime. Min was super-excited about it but I hadn't really cared. Oh, the sun gets obliterated, day turns to night, big whoop, but she forced me out there, she came to my school and dragged me out of class, and we lay on our backs in this field and watched the whole thing, it was so wild, it was amazing, and Min told me that she loved the sun, that if the sun was ever permanently erased she wouldn't know what to do, but as long as the sun was around, you know, she was okay, and the thing about the eclipse for her was not about the sun being covered up and the uniqueness of that but about it coming back. You know? So…there it is, again, you know?

Sure, said Thebes. She patted my knee.

Think it'll rain? I asked her.

Why should it? she said.

 

I understood what my mother had gone through with Min. How she'd tried so hard to come up with something, anything, to jar Min's thinking, to get her to laugh or to hope or to live.

It's an illness, she told me one afternoon in the car, it's not rational. I don't know what to say to her any more. Sometimes I pray that God will take her, that she'll die, and this will all be over.

I hadn't known what to say to that. If I'd had a knife at the time I'd probably have been carving random thoughts into the dash too, like Logan.

Later that evening she apologized for scaring me. She told me she didn't really want to kill herself, she was just so tired and desperate and afraid of losing Min and of not understanding what it was she was supposed to be doing to help her.

Help me to die.

No, never.

I thought of those cheesy
Love is
…cartoons. Love is…killing your sister when she asks you to? Love is…refusing to kill your sister when she asks you to? I had trouble deciding between leaded and unleaded at the gas station and skim or 2% at the 7-Eleven, how was I supposed to choose the definition of my love for Min?

One day I came home from school and found Min taping up the windows of the car in the garage. I asked her why she'd waited until four in the afternoon, when she
knew
I'd be coming home, to tape up the windows. She told me it had taken her some time to get going that morning and she started laughing and I got really mad and shoved her against the car and told her I wished she was a dog because dogs don't kill themselves and she said she wished she was a dog too, and then she started to cry and I told her I was sorry for shoving her against the car and she went in and I peeled off all the tape from the windows and made a big ball out of it and threw it on the roof of the house. When I went inside, she handed me two bullets. Here, she said, take these too. I asked her why she had bullets, did she have a gun, and she said no, she didn't have a gun. I went outside and threw the bullets on the roof and then went back in and watched TV with Min for a few
hours until dinner. Min tried to say a few things to me but every time she started to talk I'd put my hand up and say, I've had enough of this bullshit. I should have listened to every word she had to say but I was so freaked out that even the stupid, predictable words coming from the TV didn't make any sense to me.

 

Thebes, I said, do you want to have a pillow fight?

Do you?

Well, I don't know, it could be fun…do you?

I guess, if you do.

So for the next half-hour or so, while the Dickwad family in the room next to us pounded on their walls and told us to shut up, I fought the kids with a Polyfil pillow and eventually let them beat me into a fetal position on the floor. It was maybe seven-thirty or eight in the morning. I had to get the van into a shop, but this time we were all going together.

First, though, Thebes had a long, hot bath and I washed her hair and tried to dig the chunks of dirt out of her scalp without removing her brains. How long before this dye comes out? I asked her.

I don't know, she said. Ten or twelve washes.

Well, shit, I said, you'll be like twenty-two years old before it's gone.

Your mama, she said.

No, yours, I said and she splashed water in my face.

 

fourteen

WE WERE PACKED UP, READY TO GO
, Thebes was clean and shiny, in her secondary white outfit, and Logan was making a Herculean effort to be charming in spite of having had no sleep that night and no access to the remote control. There was a knock at the door. I thought it would be the cops, the front desk woman with a registered complaint, or the people in the next room waving
nunchuks and cans of mace, but then I remembered that this was the United States and all that would happen was that we'd get our faces blown off and die instantly.

See who it is, Lo, I said. He peered through the peephole and said it was some dude in a toque and he was carrying a ton of stuff.

Like, weapons? I said.

No, said Logan, like casseroles.

It was Adam. I was so happy to see him. I was inordinately happy to see him. I threw my arms around him and all the stuff he had and hauled him into the room and introduced him to Logan and Thebes, who were looking slightly perplexed. I told them how I knew Adam and Adam told them that he'd seen both of them last night without them seeing him.

You're a pretty shooter, he told Logan, who mumbled something, and then Adam told Thebes her hair was awesome and she smiled shyly and thanked him for noticing. She showed him a few of her kung fu moves and he taught her one he knew.

He'd made the casseroles himself as soon as he had dropped me off at the court, and he also brought some CDs he'd burned and a bag of weed. I tossed the bag into my backpack before Logan could see it and thanked Adam for everything and then I tried to lift him off the ground, which was stupid, and told him we were about to check out and find a mechanic and then hit the road to Twentynine Palms. He said he knew of a guy who could fix our van for really cheap, and so we followed him in his truck to this guy's place way out on one edge of Flagstaff.
When we were driving Thebes asked if Adam was a methamphetamine addict or a scam artist and I said no, I didn't think he was either of those things, and he wasn't actually from Flagstaff. And he's not a ghost either, I said.

I almost drove off the road in an effort to keep up with Adam and to surreptitiously observe Thebes in her post-trauma recovery. I didn't know if it was true that she hadn't really meant to hurt herself. Maybe she hadn't really meant to
kill
herself. I didn't know if this was a typical thing for an eleven-year-old to do when her mother couldn't remember who she was and she was on her way to visit a father who also probably couldn't remember who she was.

I'm gonna see if I can use this mechanic's phone and I'll call Min again, I told her.

I wanna talk to her too, said Logan.

Yeah, of course, I said. Then it occurred to me that maybe I had just made a tactical error. I'd assumed that Min would be more coherent on the phone during the day, when she wasn't under the soporific influence of the blue torpedoes, but maybe she'd be just as spaced as before and this time not only would she not know Thebes, she wouldn't know Logan, or me, for that matter, and we'd all want to open up a vein.

I followed Adam onto a gravel driveway and into a yard cluttered with the decaying body parts of old cars, trucks and tractors.

Doesn't look like he's got much of a track record of fixing things, said Logan. A pit bull came flying out of nowhere, barking, and hurled himself against the side of Adam's truck. Holy shit, man, said Logan, I don't do pit
bulls. Don't open your door. Thebes said she wasn't afraid and put her hand on the door handle and Logan grabbed it and said, No, Thebie, don't, those dogs are
banned
in Canada.

Give it some of the casserole, I told Thebes. Logan, let her go, you can stay in the van if you want. Hell yeah, he would, thanks, he said. He put his headphones on and dropped out of view.

Adam had got out of his truck and was patting the dog and talking to a guy who'd come out of the house. He turned around and waved at us to come on over there. Thebes and I got out of the van to see what was what. Adam told us the guy's name was Freak and we all introduced ourselves. Freak did the entire hand slapping, punching thing with Thebes, skilfully, and then also told her that he dug her hair and stylin' holster. And then he went over to the van for a look under the hood.

He's the real deal, said Adam. He'll fix it.

What's the dog's name? said Thebes.

Lucille, said Adam. After Freak's mom.

Freak came back over to us and said he'd have the van fixed in two hours, max, and we could hang out and do whatever we wanted while he worked.

How'd you get that fur and shit on your front bumper? he asked.

We hit a deer, I told him.

I'll Power Vac it off, he said. But I don't know if I can fix the dent. I told him there was a boy in the van and not to worry about him, he was afraid of Lucille.

Lucille's baked, said Freak. She loves everyone. But I don't really love her. She doesn't know it, though. I got her
from a junkie who was going to rehab and couldn't keep her. I've only had her for like a week and she's already broken into my stash four times. Her name was The Beef, but I'm a vegan and I changed it.

Why? said Thebes. Were you going to eat her?

No way, man, said Freak, she's all muscle. That bitch is ripped. She's mellow now, though, but I still don't love her the way she deserves to be loved.

Well, said Thebes, what does she answer to better, The Beef or Lucille?

Neither, said Freak, she doesn't answer to anything. You can call her whatever you want.

I'm gonna call her Rajbeer, said Thebes.

After that kid in your class who doesn't know you're a person? I said.

Yeah, said Thebes.

Why? asked Adam.

Because I like his name, said Thebes, and because I really wanted to be friends with him.

Cool, said Freak. Rajbeer. He said he was gonna get to work on the van and we should make ourselves at home, his casa was our casa, and there was beer in the fridge.

 

Cherkis had tried to see the kids after Min had chased him down the street, screaming, with Thebes on her hip and me and Logan playing inferno in the backyard. He had sent letters and a bit of money, when he had it, and had tried to ask Min if she wanted him to take the kids for a while, or forever, so she could try to get her life together.
But every time she'd told him to go to hell, she could handle it on her own.

I tried to tell her that he only wanted to see them every once in a while, he was their dad, he missed them, he just wanted to say hi. He was trying to help. One time he showed up at their house and asked to see the kids and she freaked out and told him she'd call the cops and then called me and I had to go over there and ask him to leave and then she bundled the kids up, it was January or something, and put them in the car and they all drove away to one of her friends' places so Cherkis wouldn't be able to find them.

One Christmas I called him up in Tokyo. Min had told me that he was living there then, with another woman. I just wanted to ask him how he was doing and to tell him that the kids were fine, he didn't have to worry. He seemed pretty happy to hear from me and he asked some questions about the kids, like how were they doing at school, did they have friends, were they healthy, were they happy? Did Logan ever talk about him? Thebes was too young to remember him. I told him yeah, oh yeah, all that stuff, they're really good. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was all right, wanted to quit drinking quite so much, but all right. He didn't ask me how Min was, probably because it was too hard to hear the truth, and I didn't tell him, because it was also really hard to tell the truth.

 

Thebes wanted to hang with Freak and play with the dog, so Adam and I went into the house and wandered around
looking at things and being awkward with each other, saying things like, you're so great, no you are, no
you
are, and then he suggested that I sit down with him on the couch and look at Freak's crazy photo album of burned-out cars. When I reached out to smooth the wrinkled plastic covering one of the shots, he put his hand on mine and then some time passed and he was kissing me and I was melting into the couch and moving my hands around on his back and through his tangled hair and then I stopped and reminded him that he had a girlfriend and he said well, yeah, kind of, but about a month ago he'd experimented with quitting smoking pot and during that time, and it was a
rough
three weeks, he'd realized how stupid she was.

Hey, c'mon, I said, that's not a nice thing to say, she likes
you,
and he said that didn't really prove anything but she was…whatever,
anyway,
we didn't need to stop, did we?

Hey, I said, why don't you say some sexy things to me in Sango or whatever that language is that you speak. I told him it'd be great because I wouldn't understand what I was missing and life was so much easier that way. He said something interesting-sounding and oblique and I smiled and nodded. He really wanted me to know what he had said but I begged him not to translate. We messed around sweetly and clumsily on Freak's grimy couch until Thebes crashed through the front door.

Bonjourno! she said.

We flew to opposite ends of the couch like kids and grinned at her like morons.

Hey, sweet crib, she said. What's shakin', homies?
Rajbeer was with her. And then Freak and Logan walked in, Freak had apparently convinced him that the dog was harmless, and then he went to the fridge and got everyone, except Thebes, a beer and told us the van was running like a top, cheers, wicked.

 

More difficult goodbyes. Adam asked for my phone number and I told him I didn't really have one right then. I didn't actually have a home, either, I told him.

Well, you're at home in the universe, he said.

Which universe? I said. I asked him for his number and he said it was disconnected.

Freak said I could call his place and leave a message for Adam if I felt like it and I wrote down his number on the back of a lottery ticket that had let him down months ago. Then Freak asked Thebes if she wanted to keep Lucille because Lucille needed love, and Logan and I put our hands up like stop, stop, stop, but it was way too late.

 

We were headed down the 40 West towards our final destination. Thebes was filthy all over again but who cares, she was alive, and Logan's cast was getting soggy and soft and fraying at the ends and I was aching with love or maybe something shallower and deeper at the same time for Adam, another guy I'd never see again in my life, and Rajbeer had eaten all the food Adam had made us and reeked like hell and wouldn't stop barking at the dying boy on the dash and we were all a little pissed off and
sad and worried and silent. Except that, in spite of all that, I was also feeling kind of okay because I thought, I was pretty sure, I knew what I had to do and what I wanted to do.

You didn't call Min, said Logan.

And there was that. I was the world's worst guardian of children. I was like the neighbourhood cat lady, but with kids. They were filthy, broken and eating themselves and soon they'd feed on my old corpse. I had told them I'd phone their mother—after a really bad night of running away and being abandoned and cutting wrists, all they wanted was to talk to their mom—but instead I'd used that time to fool around with a disenfranchised American pothead.

Well, no, actually, I tried, I said. But I couldn't get through.

You did not, said Logan. Gimme a break.

I put in a CD and Logan took it out again and replaced it with one of his. It's my turn, he said. I've been keeping track. This is going out to Junkie. That was his name for Lucille/Rajbeer/The Beef. He cranked the volume on “Atomic Dog.” Do you like George Clinton? he asked me.

Yeah, I do, I said. He told me he was thinking of starting a band when he got home and calling it The Missed Appointments.

Good name, I said. Do you play an instrument? He said he could play a few chords on the guitar, nothing much.

Hey, said Thebes, did you write this? She was talking to Logan, waving a green piece of construction paper
around. It turned out he'd played Poetry Class with her after all and had written a poem while he was in the van hiding out from the dog.

Can I read it out loud? she asked him.

No, he said. Give me that. He tried to grab it but she yanked it away. Fuck off, Thebes, he said. Give it to me. She started to read. He swore and disappeared into his hoodie.

 

Bury 22 footers (in your eye)

Run the floor

Elevate, finish the deuce

Move the feet, lock it down

Box out

Rise up

Start the break

Hard dribble, pull up (on your head).

Forearm to the chest

Finish with the left

Hard pick, knock you off your feet.

Box out

Rise up

Put back

Shake your head

Jab step, release (in your face)

Get low (put a body on 'em)

Board with one hand

Dribble, spin, fade

It's a beautiful thing.

 

It's a basketball poem! said Thebes.

Give me that, said Logan. Please? He grabbed it from her and tore it up, and then opened the window and threw out the pieces.

Why did you do that? I said. That was a good poem.

Whatever, said Logan.

The rain had started again and it was foggy. I'd forgotten to ask Freak if he could fix the windshield wiper.

We should try to tie the shirt around the thing again, I said.

I can do it, said Logan.

I pulled over and Logan grabbed the T-shirt and got out of the van. Stay in here, Thebes, it's raining, I said.

I took a plastic bag out of the back and joined Logan outside. I asked him to put the bag over his cast so it wouldn't get wet and decompose but he said it would be okay, it wasn't raining that hard. It sure was foggy, though. I told Logan that I had really liked his poem and that he shouldn't have thrown it away. He didn't say anything. He was trying hard to wrap the T-shirt around the wiper blade so that it wouldn't fly off.