The Flying Troutmans

ten

WHEN I WOKE UP we were in a corner of the parking lot of a motel, parked under a dim streetlight covered in moths. Logan was slumped, asleep, over the wheel and Thebes was lying on the floor, also asleep, between the back and the front seats. I sat up carefully and silently and looked at them. The streetlight was buzzing but not very loudly and some moths were gently throwing themselves against the windshield of the van. Logan was snoring very, very quietly and still gripping the wheel with both hands. His music had stopped. His notebook was in his lap. I reached around to the front and picked it up and stared at it. Logan had used a fat Sharpie to write Hot Tears Is a Concept on the cover. I put it back in his lap.

Thebes looked a little confused while she slept, like she was trying to remember what the distance was between the sun and the earth or why it was, again, that she’d had to be born. She had a thin moustache of sweat on her upper lip and her hair was plastered to her head. She had corked up my bottle of wine, and I meticulously uncorked it again and sat there sipping plonk and wondering what it would feel like to leave these two homies behind.

Hi, Hattie, whispered Thebes. Are you awake? Where are we?

Hey, I said. I don’t know. Moab, probably. You okay?

Rock solid, she said. She glanced at Logan draped over the wheel. Did he get shot?

No, I said. He’s sleeping.

She wiped her eyes and mouth with one filthy hand and patted my knee with the other one. Drinking alone? she said.

No, you’re here, I said.

I don’t count, she said. Want to hear my dream?

Yeah, I said. Tell me.

I dreamt that there was a thirteenth month, she said. And everybody knew about it except me. Like, it had been there all along, like all throughout time. A thirteenth month, and nobody had told me. And then I found out that even my birthday was in the thirteenth month, which was squeezed somewhere in between February and March. And this month, the thirteenth month, was called Shtetl. So, like, my birthday was Shtetl the Eighth.

Shtetl, I said.

Do you know what that is? she said. She was busy adjusting her holster.

No, I said, well, yeah, sort of. Like, a small town. I think it’s a Hebrew word, like Moab. Maybe that’s why you had the dream.

But I didn’t know that word before my dream, said Thebes.

We tried to wake Logan up but it was impossible. He wouldn’t budge.

Sure he hasn’t been capped? said Thebes.

Yeah, I said, you can hear him snoring, can’t you?

We decided to spend the night in the parking lot, in the van. We’d save some money, and the night was almost over anyway.

Cops came around at dawn, apparently — I didn’t notice, I was sleeping — and they asked Thebes what we were doing there and she said sleeping and they said we weren’t allowed to sleep there, it wasn’t a campground, and the motel front-desk person was suspicious, and Thebes said okay, we’d leave, except that her peeps were still asleep, one at the wheel, and so what was she supposed to do?

They said all right, that was fine, we could sleep for a while. Better that than another exhausted motorist on the highway. They didn’t ask to see Logan’s licence. As soon as I opened my eyes a crack, Thebes was in my face.

Popo says when Lo wakes up we’re outie, she said.

Thebes, I said. This talking thing? The way you talk, it’s—

No, no, she said, shhh, please don’t tell me how to talk. I have to do it this way, okay? I won’t always. She looked like she was about to cry again so I told her no, no, it was fine, she could talk however she wanted, it was stupid of me to have brought it up, we were good.

Logan woke up. He moaned and swore and stretched and then slumped over the wheel again. Smells like ass in here, he said. Thebes and I said good morning and asked him if he knew where we were.

Moab, he said. He got out of the van and walked way over to some trees to pee and stood with his back to us for a few minutes. When he got back he rifled around in his fake alligator suitcase and pulled out a stick of incense and lit it and waved it around the van, mostly in Thebes’s general direction. She whipped out one of her pistols and fired a few rounds at his head.

You die, hippie, she said.

We all agreed we’d drive around Moab, check out the sights, and have breakfast in a restaurant instead of eating soggy shabu-shabu sandwiches or whatever rotten fruit was bobbing around in the cooler. We ate at a dive, Logan’s choice, called King Solomon’s, in honour of Deborah Solomon, the love of his life. He’d bought a copy of The New York Times to see where she was at. I left the kids at the table to fight over the miniature jukebox and gawk at Moabites while I wandered around the restaurant in search of a pay phone and a machine that might sell Advil or Tylenol or morphine. I called the hospital and got a hold of the same woman, oh, harbinger of grim, at least I think it was the same woman, and asked if I could speak with Min. She said no, she was sorry, it wasn’t possible, the doctor hadn’t made his rounds, Min was in a locked-down recovery room, there had been some trouble that morning and, no, I couldn’t speak to her.

Yeah, but, what the fuck! I said, and immediately apologized. Silence on the other end. I’m sorry, I said. I’d like to know if she’s okay right now. And, also, what do you mean, trouble? I’m sorry, again.

She’s not in any immediate danger, said the woman. I thought about Superman, her certified intrepid roommate, and wondered where she’d got to, what nemesis she’d been busy battling, when Min had been in trouble.

Can you tell me what happened? I said.

You’re family? said the woman. I just need to confirm…

Yes, I said, my name’s Hattie Troutman. I’m her sister. I’ve been calling…

She disappeared for a short time, said the woman. She was gone for about an hour and a half.

Where’d she go? I asked.

Well, she said she was going out for a cigarette, and—

But she doesn’t smoke, I said.

Well, we didn’t know that, said the woman.

And I thought you just said she wasn’t getting out of bed at all, so how did she—?

Well, that’s true, she wasn’t, so we were all quite encouraged by the fact that she had decided to get up for some fresh air. Well, a cigarette.

And then she just walked away or…? I said.

Apparently, yes, she started walking towards the highway. The police picked her up and brought her back. But she is out of danger, like I said, added the woman.

Oh, Min, I thought. C’mon…c’mon!

If I was there, I said, at the hospital, would I be able to see her right now?

Honestly? said the woman.

Yeah! Yes, please!

The doctor has her on a range of meds, said the woman. We’re working…we’re trying to establish what it is she needs and what her body can tolerate. At this point if she were to have guests she’d probably not…She’s not coherent, she’s fairly agitated, she’s refusing to eat…she’s having difficulty remembering aspects of her life, her address, for instance, the names of her kids…I recall telling you earlier that at one point she insisted that she hadn’t had kids.

Oh, you know, I said, I don’t…Really? I actually can’t believe that. I looked at the kids way over on the other side of the restaurant. Thebes had taken all her filthy, sweaty hair and sculpted it upwards like a Smurf’s and stuck a Sharpie through it Pebbles Flintstone — style and even from that distance I could hear her say, Bro, what’s a Lynyrd Skynyrd? Logan’s head was on the table.

I know, said the woman, it’s difficult. It’s a stressful time for the family, but we have every reason to believe that Min will recover and very likely be back at home soon. Provided there’s someone there to help out, or perhaps home care…

Every reason to believe, I said. I wondered what those reasons were, if there was a master copy I could get my hands on, the holy grail, if I could get all those reasons to believe tattooed onto my body and anchored to my brain. Every reason to believe. Maybe there was one single reason to believe, if that, but every reason? I’d seen Min in and out of enough hospitals to know they were bluffing, the medical staff. They had to sound hopeful, for everybody’s sake, and I appreciated it, but I knew it wasn’t true.

I thanked the woman for the information. I asked her to pass hugs and kisses on to Min from Logan and Thebes. Logan and Thebes, I repeated. Those are her kids. I didn’t want to get off the phone with this woman because it meant going back to the table and being face to face with the forgotten ones. But the woman was angling for an exit and people were beginning to stare at Thebes and her Theban ways and I didn’t want someone calling her a retard again.

We drove around the town for a while. Thebes and I dropped Logan off at a basketball court and went to find a store where we could buy her some new clothes.

I want them to be all white, she said.

Noooooo, I said. That is not a good choice for you.

But she really wanted them so I caved and said she could buy whatever clothes she liked.

And when we see Cherkis, she said, he can tie-dye them if he wants.

So, hey, Thebie, I said, how do you feel, are you looking forward to meeting him? We were having this conversation in the store. She was trying on clothes and I was sitting on the floor outside the change room door.

She was and she wasn’t, she said, but wouldn’t or couldn’t elaborate other than to say she was trying to figure out the first thing that she would tell him.

I asked her if she wanted to rehearse it with me. She said no, she wanted it to sound fresh and spontaneous. Then she told me she had always harboured a secret desire to be an actress.

But, she said, I’m sort of depressed about it because I still don’t have an agent.

I didn’t know if she was serious or pretending to be a wannabe in L.A. commiserating with her friends at some audition. I didn’t know if I should laugh or not.

Maybe Cherkis has connections in California, she said.

Maybe, I said. You never know. She burst out of the change room, all in white, all Hi ho, Silver, away! God, you scared me, I said.

What do you think? she asked. She spun around and did a few jumping jacks. She teetered around like Chaplin, twirling an imaginary cane.

You just…I don’t know…You’re beautiful, though. Definitely. Wow!

Does it totally work? she asked.

Yeah! I said. What do you call that colour? Vanilla?

Eggshell, she said.

So we left the store with Thebes wearing a little white double-breasted suit jacket and trousers, shirt, vest and tie.

You look like Hervé Villechaize, or I don’t know…Tom Wolfe, I told her.

Who’s that? she said.

Writer guy, I said.

Brother to Virginia?

No.

Have you read her diaries? she asked.

No.

Min has, she said.

That didn’t surprise me. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anna Karenina…Min’s girl guide to the universe of pain. Her library of loss. She was well read.

Thebes also bought some eggshell tank tops and eggshell terry cloth shorts and eggshell knee socks and eggshell Converse Chucks.

Then we went to find Logan at the basketball court. We got lost on the way, drove around in circles, and then finally remembered the name of the street it was on. When we got there Logan was talking to some cops. Not the same cops, according to Thebes, that had told us we couldn’t sleep in the parking lot.

I jumped out of the van and went over there and asked them what was up. Logan was obviously in pain and the cops pointed at his wrist.

It’s broken, they said. He won’t tell us how it happened. His wrist dangled grotesquely from his arm and the cops said he’d have to get it plastered.

God, Logan, I said, are you okay?

Yeah, yeah, said Logan. His eyes were watering. Turned out that Logan had been hustling some of the kids at the court with his standard ten-for-eleven scam, pretending to suck at first to lure them in and make them put their money on the table.

How’d you break your wrist? I asked him. He shrugged. Whoever broke his wrist must have threatened him with something worse if he told anyone. Or, he broke it himself on another guy’s face and wouldn’t admit it. There was nobody else around.

The cops said if we left town immediately after he got a cast put on that thing, they wouldn’t press any charges.

But what charges would you press? I asked. I mean, they’re just kids, right? Playing?

Mischief, said one of the cops.

Yeah, but, what do you mean, mischief? I mean—

We don’t want any trouble, said one of them.

Yeah, well, I understand that, I hate trouble too, but I mean—

We’re actually trying to give you a break, here, said one of the cops. Are you always this mouthy?

I don’t think I’m being mouthy, I said. I’m just trying to figure this out. I want some information. Like, what he’d actually be charged with…I’m just not clear on the nature of these so-called charges. You know?

The cops were very calm and actually quite reasonable. It was making me nuts. I wanted a fight too. I wanted to break my wrist on a stranger’s head and scam some Moabites and get run out of town for being better at something than the other kids.

Okay, listen, said one of the cops. We’re talking Fraud. We’re talking Extortion. We’re talking Illegal Gambling.

No, c’mon, gimme a break, you are not talking about those things, dude, I said. He’s fifteen freaking years old! It’s a stupid basketball game! What do you mean, extortion? That is so ridiculous. Do you make this shit up or what? What do you do, just drive around town busting kids for being kids? Thebes was tugging on my shirt and Logan was staring at me with a familiar combination of pain and pity, those cobalt eyes going off like alarms way deep in his hoodie. I reminded myself of my mother shorting out on everyone after my father drowned saving our lives.

The cops were quiet. They folded their arms and cocked their heads and looked at me.

Why don’t the three of you just leave, ma’am, said one of them, not unkindly. He put his hand out like, here’s the way, go, we’re letting you off. Thebes and Logan started walking back to the van. I began to cry, stupidly. I asked them where the hospital was and they gave me directions and wished me well. They said Logan should join an after-school basketball program instead of hustling other kids.

Well, yeah, but he’s been expelled, I said.

They understood. It happened. Boys. You know. One of them shook my hand empathetically and said he had a houseful of teenage boys waiting for him when he got off his shift.

Still got the green? asked Thebes when we were all back in the van.

Logan said no, the other guys had rolled him and taken his cash and his knife and his ball. Wicked outfit, T., he added.

At the hospital he got a cast and a lecture and a tetanus shot because he’d also cut his hand grabbing onto the rusty hoop after the dopest dunk, man, and the bill was seventy million bucks, or, I’m not sure, four hundred and ninety billion, and would be sent to Marc Babin at my old address in Paris. It was the only official address I had on my ID.

Coolio, said Thebes, let’s roll. We got back into the van and she dove into the back seat, spelunking through her art supplies until she found her favourite indelible markers and pleading with Logan to let her beautify his cast.

There’d been a girl outside the hospital, smoking, and I’d joined her for a minute while Logan was getting his cast and Thebes was chatting with an orderly who was also dressed in white.

I didn’t know exactly, but I think the smoking girl’s friend had just OD’ed. The girl had leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She’d looked so tired, so sad and messed up.

What do you think the chances are of everything being okay? she said. I told her I didn’t know. I had no idea. Her guess was as good as mine. It was like I was having a conversation with myself and hadn’t worried so much about being polite and hopeful because it was only me.

Now, as we were heading out of town, I felt bad. I had this urge to go back and find her and say something more consoling. I thought about what that might be. I remembered Min after one of her unsuccessful suicide attempts waking up in the hospital, surrounded by me and our parents, and the only thing she said was, rats, dark ages. When she came home, our mother offered to give her a haircut but halfway through Min decided she hated having scissors snipping at her neck and ears and asked our mother to stop. For three months she had a bob that was six inches shorter on one side and even when she went back to school and kids made fun of her she pretended not to care.

Logan said he was going to do some work on his Robert Goulet project, just in case they ever let him back into his school. He didn’t want to be so far behind that he’d be one of those guys, one of those grown men, with a beard and children and two ex-wives, crammed into a too-small desk trying to get his grade twelve.

We had to pick a Western Canadian historical figure, he said. He said he was writing a diary in Robert Goulet’s voice, about his childhood and rise to fame. Did you know, he said, that when Robert Goulet was five years old, his family took a burnt cork and covered his face in “blackface” and watched him perform?

Thebes was drawing on Logan’s cast. She drew a heart with his name and Deborah Solomon’s in it. He made her change it.

She looked up something in her dictionary. I know, she said. I’ll draw an ulna. She drew an ulna along the cast, and the other bone and joint parts of his arm and wrist and hand. Then she coloured it black all around that, so the white bony parts stood out and it looked pretty good, quite skeletal. She asked Logan if she could write two very short poems entitled “The Sunset” and “The Room” on the other side of his cast and he said yeah.

Min had once put me in a body cast, for a school art project. I’d been so eager and excited when she’d asked me to help her out. Our parents were away for the weekend and Min really relished being in charge.

I wore my bathing suit, and she slathered two giant jars of Vaseline that she’d bought onto my body, and then she stuck layers and layers of plaster on me and told me I’d have to wait for two hours until it had hardened and then she’d cut it off and I’d be free. She told me she had to zip out for a few minutes to buy something, but she didn’t come back until the next day and I was left alone in the house in a body cast, unable to move. I stood in the middle of the living room for a long time, and then I tipped myself over onto the floor and lay there trying not to cry because I didn’t want the salt in my tears to make me thirstier than I already was.

Please don’t tell Mom and Dad, she said, when she finally returned. Or we’ll never be left alone again. I promised I wouldn’t but I didn’t agree with her reasoning. I didn’t think I wanted to be left alone with her again.

She cut the plaster off with a saw and several knives. It took hours and by the time she was finished I had tiny cuts all over my body and a bright red rash. It’s perfect, she said, of the life-sized cast. It looks more like you than you.

The van was making strange sounds. Logan asked me if I’d heard it and I said yeah, but I was going to ignore it.

Well, he said, but you should listen to it carefully, like to the type of sound it is, so you can tell someone if we break down. Articulate the problem, he said. You know?

No, I said, I don’t know. But you’re right.

Thebes made me a gift certificate. It entitled me to have her keep up to ten secrets for me. She drew ten squares at the bottom that we could punch out with the hole puncher she’d brought along. She also made one for herself that said This Certificate entitles Theodora Troutman to become an actress at any time she chooses.

Did you know that the original owners of our neighbours’ house are buried in the basement walls? she asked me.

What? I said. I was taking Logan’s advice and trying to listen to the aberrant sounds of the van and figure out a way of describing them.

That’s not true, said Logan.

Yeah, it is, said Thebes.

That guy was full of shit, he said. He was just trying to scare you.

Are you talking about that guy who stole your hatchets? I said.

Yeah, he’s a tool, said Logan. Nobody’s buried in his house.

They bickered about that for a few minutes and then talked about how an arm and a leg had been found in the Red River, and the newspapers had told people to be on the lookout for body parts, like, yeah, we’d see a leg on the way to school and dust it off and bring it right downtown to Police HQ…They went on like that for a while, and I put in one of my CDs and then took it out again because it reminded me of Marc.

Then Logan told Thebes he didn’t want to talk about that stuff any more. It was bringing him down and so was a lot of other stuff and he needed to think about something positive. Thebes agreed. She decided to pimp our ride with paper hearts and rainbows.

Logan told us about his latest dream. A thousand people were gathered in his school gymnasium and one of his teachers was giving a very mean and sad and negative speech about something and then slowly, as he talked, it became more and more joyous, like just incredibly beautiful and celebratory and Logan said he felt, in this dream, so unbelievably great that he did this amazing vertical and slam dunk and it was the most completely satisfying dream he’d ever had.

He looked at his cast. He banged it against the dash a couple of times. Then he looked at the map and said, Monticello, Blanding, Bluff, Mexican Hat, Tuba City, Flagstaff. He wished he had his knife so he could carve those names into the dash.

Do you use an IUD, Hattie? asked Thebes.

What? I said. Why are you asking me that? Min would have stayed calm and classy and answered honestly and respectfully and then maybe have used the occasion for an informative discussion on birth control.

No, I said. Do you? Stop reading that dictionary.