The Flying Troutmans

thirteen

I WOKE UP AROUND MIDNIGHT and tried as delicately as I could to extricate myself from Thebes’s Jurassic grip and to get out of bed and find a cigarette in my backpack. I was trying, and failing, for the most part, to smoke only while she was unconscious. And then I noticed that Logan wasn’t in the other bed. And he wasn’t in the bathroom. And he wasn’t in the closet. He wasn’t in our motel room, period. I went to the window and moved the curtain and looked outside at the parking lot.

Yeah, the van was gone. Of course it was.

I know the score, boy, I thought to myself. I’ve run away too. I sat on the edge of the tub in the dark with the fan on and finished my cigarette and then wrote a note for Thebes in case she woke up and wondered why she was all alone.

I wandered down the road and passed a bunch of other cheap motels and cheesy chain restaurants and closed gas stations. If there had been a church I’d have gone inside and prayed. I would have said please bring the little fucker back safe and sound, God, I mean it. But instead the most I could do was say his name over and over. Logan, I whispered. Logan, Logan, Logan. Where the hell are you? I passed a panhandler sitting under a streetlight at an intersection and he had a sign that said Need 37 Million Dollars for Trip to Space. I could get behind that. I gave him two bucks. I headed for a bar across the street and ducked inside to find the pay phone, punched my old Paris number and listened to it ring and ring and ring.

When I went back out to the parking lot some hippies looked up at me from their toke and said hey.

What’s up? I said.

Check out the moon, man, said one of them. He pointed up like maybe I was one of those people who always forgot things like keys and wallets and the location of the moon.

I stared at it for what seemed like a really long time. I didn’t see Logan in any of the moon’s craters or shadows.

It’s really beautiful, I said. And I mean really beautiful. Seriously.

The stoners nodded and agreed and asked me if I wanted to join them.

Thanks, I said. But I can’t. I’m looking for someone.

Who are you looking for? one of them asked.

My nephew, I said. His name is Logan. He’s fifteen. This tall. Black hoodie. He’s driving a Ford Aerostar.

Whoa! said the guy. Wait. Who?

My nephew, I said.

Man, he said, how’d you lose him?

We’re staying at a motel down there and I fell asleep and he took off, I said.

That’s messed up, he said.

Yeah.

Think you’ll find him? he said.

What do you mean? I asked. Like, ever? Yeah. He’s probably off shooting somewhere.

What? said the guy.

Hoops, I said. Basketball.

It’s like the middle of the night, he said.

Hey, do you guys have a car? I asked.

Noooooo, said the guy. Nope.

Yeah we do, Ding Dong, said a girl from the huddle.

We do? said the guy.

It’s a truck, said a different guy. He had his arm around the girl.

The car is a truck? said the guy. Cool.

Do you guys want to drive around and help me look for him? I said.

Oh, yeah! They were into that.

I sat in the box with a few of them, including Ding Dong, who said it was totally dope with him if I sat in his lap, and the girl drove. We watched one another’s hair go wild in the wind and the clouds cover and uncover the moon like a blanket, like a nervous mother. It would have been a great time if I hadn’t just lost my sister’s kid.

None of the people in the truck were actually from Flagstaff, they were all seasonal employees from somewhere else, so they didn’t really know where the basketball courts might be.

Before we could begin our search we had to go to one of their dorms or lodges or whatever and pick up some more weed. I asked Ding Dong if it was close and he said yeah and that Ding Dong wasn’t actually his name, it was Adam.

When we got there the others got out of the truck and went in, but Adam said they’d be fine, they could get the stuff, why didn’t he and I just sit there and talk.

I told him I liked the idea of talking but I was preoccupied with my missing nephew and didn’t really know what to say. I wanted to find Logan. Adam said we’d find Logan. He knew it. He told me a lot of things about himself. He and a friend of his had just been fired by a Spanish religious radio station called Radio Sinai for translating Cheech and Chong dialogues into Spanish and airing them late at night. Or something like that. I found out that he wasn’t close to his father at all but that he and his mother talked pretty often, even though she wasn’t really in touch with her own emotions. He had a girlfriend, sort of, whom he’d recently reconnected with after a couple of years of not talking. She was an actress and sweet but they screamed at each other a lot. He didn’t think she really appreciated him. His sister was a single mother with an eight-year-old daughter and they hung out. He helped her when he could. He told me he spoke a little Sango, a dialect of Ngbandi. He asked me what my nephew and I were doing in Flagstaff and I told him the whole story. When I had finished he put his hand on mine and said he was sorry I was so unhappy. He asked me if I thought all this stuff was happening for a reason.

No, I said. I don’t think so. Where do you think the others are? I asked him.

Then he asked me if I’d heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I’m not sure, I said.

He told me it was the idea that the momentum and location of a certain particle cannot be determined at the same time.

Wow, that’s pretty interesting, I said. I told him I was going to walk back to the hotel because all of this was taking too long and I had to check on Thebes.

No, man, hold up, he said. I’ll go find out what the deal is. I’ll be right back. Please don’t go, he said. Okay? Please?

I stared some more at the moon and at the rippled surface of the box that I was sitting in. I thought about how good it felt to have somebody ask me to stay. I thought about how pathetic it was that it felt so good to have somebody ask me to stay. Adam came running back to the truck and said that the others were so done, they’d kind of forgotten about us, they were gonna hang out at the lodge and watch Drugstore Cowboy but they’d given him the key to the truck. They’d said to wish me luck with the search.

Let’s blast, he said.

We drove back to the motel first so I could peek in on Thebes. I told Adam he could wait in the truck but he said he’d like to come with me. We went to the room and stood in the doorway and looked at the sleeping Thebes.

I like her hair, Adam whispered. I nodded and smiled. You’re a good aunt, he said.

I shook my head and whispered no, I wasn’t. I was a disaster. He put his arm around my shoulder and we looked at Thebes for another minute or two, like we were the brand-new parents of an oversized baby girl, and then we quietly left the room and went back to the truck.

He asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said yeah, well, no, past tense. But I still loved him. I thought I did.

Adam said that was cool, that was beautiful, right, why should I stop, we were always meant to be moving in a love direction, always.

We drove around the dark suburban streets of Flagstaff looking for basketball courts and Logan. Adam played an old Pavement CD and talked the whole time about a variety of things and I tried to listen and occasionally interject with some thought of my own or some polite encouragement but mostly I was thinking about what a colossal mess I’d made of things and trying mentally to defibrillate myself. I was seeing Logan everywhere and then not seeing him. I was having a panic attack. I was having trouble breathing. Adam stopped talking and put his hand on my knee and asked me if I was okay.

No, I said.

Do you want to stop for a minute? he asked.

No, I said.

Different music? he said.

No, no, it’s good, I said.

We’ll find him, said Adam, I guarantee it. Honestly. We won’t stop looking until we do.

I told Adam about my father, how he’d drowned in the ocean after rescuing Min and me. And how I used to search for Min all the time when we were kids. She’d take off and scare the shit out of everyone, I said. One time she broke out of the hospital and ran eight miles in a rainstorm in her nightgown, barefoot, with cops chasing her the whole time.

I told Adam how I was still hoping to be with Marc someday, how futile that was, and how tomorrow was the day that we were supposed to find Cherkis, but probably wouldn’t. I told him that Min had run away, again, from the psych ward and that Logan had said he was going to do whatever he wanted to do and I didn’t know what any of it meant.

Adam parked the truck in front of some ugly, prefab houses and turned off the ignition. He looked around at the houses and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel.

Canadians are not that different from us, after all, he said. What would happen if you slid over just a little?

Well, we’d be closer, I said. I slid over and he put his arm around my shoulders, again, and sang a Leon Redbone song in a really low key.

My mom used to sing that to me, he said.

I thanked him for his friendship and he said I was welcome and thanked me for mine and then he started the truck again, I slid back to my side, and we resumed our search for Logan.

We finally found him at a court next to a high school, not too far from the motel. It was pitch black but he’d aimed the van lights at one of the hoops so he could see what he was doing. He was playing music softly too, some soul. When we saw him I asked Adam to stop the truck so we could watch him shoot for a few minutes and I could cry from monumental relief without him noticing.

I told you we’d find him, said Adam.

C’mon, I said, we both know you didn’t have a clue.

Mmm, yeah, but you gotta bel—

Don’t say you gotta believe, I said.

Nope, okay, he said, I wasn’t. I was gonna say you gotta bleed.

We were quiet, watching Logan make basket after basket and trying to hear what music he had playing in the van, but it wasn’t loud enough.

So, Hattie, he said.

So, Adam, I said.

Would you be at all interested in necking for a short, short period of time, he said. I mean, look, he pointed at Logan, the kid’s all right, right? Although he does have a cast.

I said no, I didn’t want to neck, I had to assemble the troops, reunite the troika, but I’d like to kiss him at least once.

Have you ever kissed an American? he asked.

Hmmmm, I said, let me think about that for a minute. He waited. No, I said, not really, no. Have you ever kissed a Canadian?

Well, yeah, he had, you know how it goes. He smiled and shrugged.

Yeah, no, I said. I kissed him.

Goodbye, Adam.

Goodbye, Hattie.

Love direction, he said.

I said, Always, dude, ’til the end of time, and got out of the truck and walked towards the light.

Logan was wearing shiny, black basketball shorts way down low on his hips, with blood red boxers bubbling up on top, like he’d cut a major artery in his ass. He’d taken his T-shirt and hoodie off and his back was shiny with sweat. He was skinny and pale. Scars, faded hickeys and plaster cast. Where had he got that scar from anyway? He was darting around under the net, blocking and being blocked by imaginary players and going in for layup after layup.

Hey, gangster, I said, your pants are falling off.

He whirled around and then back again, to the net, and caught his rebound and stood there breathing heavily and looking at me.

What are you doing here? he asked me.

Give me that, I said. He threw me his ball and I took a few shots and missed.

Okay, I said, quick game of Horse, let’s hurry, Thebes is alone in the room.

I thought you’d be really mad, said Logan. It had started to rain and Marvin Gaye was singing “What’s Going On” softly in the van.

I am really mad, I said, but I don’t know what to do about it.

He beat me at Horse and then as we walked to the van we took turns throwing the ball, hard, at each other. I aimed for his head but he caught it every time and beaned it back at mine.

Jerk, I said.

Control freak, he said.

What? I said. You have got to be kidding me.

Not really, he said, you’re—

I’m gonna break your other arm, I said.

We got into the van and it wouldn’t start and I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand the way my father used to do when his car, along with all the other aspects of his life, broke down.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I said, now you’ve killed the battery. I tried again.

Well, don’t flood it, man, said Logan.

I thought about the other options I’d had that evening, the roads less travelled. I could have been necking with a sweet, American hippie in the back of a truck under a full yellow moon. At the very least I could have been asleep with Thebes, the human giraffe, all tangled up around me. Or, maybe, I could have been in Paris singing like Piaf and swinging from street lamps with a bottle of Bordeaux in one hand and Marc at an open window with a flower box, beckoning me to join him upstairs for some gallant lovemaking and some shrugging off of life’s tiresome little tragedies.

How did you find me? asked Logan.

By looking, I said.

I’m just asking, he said, you don’t have to—

Just…you know what? I said. I shook my head. Let’s not talk. Let’s pray.

I don’t pray, he said.

Do now, I said. Pray that this fucking piece of shit will start so we can get the hell out of here.

We were quiet for a minute. Our eyes were closed. Okay, I said. Here we go. I tried to start the van and nothing happened.

We gave up on prayer and got out of the van and played another game of Horse and then tried the van again. This time it started, and we took off for the motel.

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.