100 Sideways Miles

by Andrew Smith

  And Cade said, “I’ll only have one if you drink one with me, Finn.”

  “Uh. Okay.”

  Cade got up from his sleeping bag and pulled two beers from the cooler.

  Julia leaned to my ear and whispered, “I think you’re a good person, Finn. I love you. And it was a funny story.”

  She kissed the side of my face and rolled onto her back, watching the sky.

  Before I could answer her, I heard the pop! pop! as Cade Hernandez opened each beer. Then, wearing nothing but a pair of white cotton briefs, he sat down in the dirt beside me and Julia.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “Cheers.”

  We tapped cans together.

  “You know what’s out there?” Cade said.

  “A bunch of fourteen-billion-year-old shit and a big fucking knackery,” I said.

  I was just a little irritated by my friend.

  “No.” Cade spit again and pointed north, past the front end of his truck. “Not up there. Out that way. There’s an empty prison. Did you know that? Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. Did you know that? An empty fucking prison.”

  In fact, I did not know that.

  We sure found out, though.

  WELCOMING THE ALIENS

  Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary was shut down in 1981 after a riot that lasted for three weeks. Three weeks is about thirty-six million miles. Dozens of inmates and corrections officers died in the riot. It must have been like a little war, an out-of-control knackery all safely encased within concrete and razor wire.

  Cade Hernandez dunked his entire head into the freezing mix of ice cubes, water, and empty beer cans sloshing in the cooler beside Laika’s Sputnik 2.

  He screamed.

  It sounded like he was being murdered. I sat up in my sleeping bag. It was morning in the desert, and Julia had already gotten out of bed and was boiling coffee on a propane stove we’d set up on the tailgate of Cade’s pickup.

  Cade said, “That’s how you take a camping bath in the middle of the desert.”

  As the water dripped from his hair, he rubbed it into his armpits and over his chest.

  Then he said, “You want to take one, Finn?”

  “Um. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “Dude. You are such a little bitch.”

  “I know that. It’s my bullfighter name, remember? Also, I need to pee.”

  And that was the day Julia Bishop, Cade Hernandez, and I broke in to Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary.

  Nobody breaks in to a prison.

  In the morning light, I could see we’d been camped out in the middle of a prestamped, formatted pattern of concrete slabs—the intended foundations for a stillborn community of never-built homes that would have been named Aberdeen Lake.

  If the homes had been built, there would have been a real lake, too, one with water in it instead of a couple of kids’ piss and a bunch of trash blown on the wind. The lake had been formed and dug to a uniform depth of nine feet, with small wooden boat docks fingering out from its waterless shores where the most desirable concrete slabs had been poured.

  I pulled on my T-shirt and shorts and released Laika from Sputnik 2. Then I hid on the other side of Cade’s pickup so I could pee into that starved lake.

  Julia took more photographs while we sat and had coffee. And Cade announced, “We’re going to have fun today. Let’s poke around inside that old prison and mess with shit before we go home.”

  “You mess with shit every day,” I said.

  Cade nodded. He couldn’t argue with that.

  And Julia said, “I bet that prison’s haunted.”

  “If there was ever a place more prone than a prison to having sticky atoms hanging around, I wouldn’t know what it would be,” I said.

  “A collapsed dam, maybe,” Julia said.

  Cade stood up suddenly, as though he’d been stung.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  Cade dug around in the jumble of gear thrown into the bed of his truck. Eventually, he pulled out a can of fluorescent spray paint he’d lifted from an unattended public-works survey truck a few months before.

  Cade said, “Come on,” and took off down the shore of the empty lake.

  • • •

  Cade Hernandez’s idea was this: He wanted to spray paint a message on sixteen of the sun-bleached foundations at the nonexistent resort community of Aberdeen Lake.

  On one of the most desirable streets, which was actually not so much a street as a gravelly span of dried weeds that gapped a swath of abandonment between one side and the other, we wrote out on the foundations—eight on each side of what was supposed to have been called Lakeside Drive—the following message:

  W-E-L-C-O-M-E,

  A-L-I-E-N-S-!

  The exclamation point said it all: Aberdeen Lake was the place for fun!

  Just in case anyone was looking for a good, flat place to land.

  Cade said, “This is to fuck with all the crazies in the world.”

  “There are enough of them,” I said.

  And Julia Bishop took pictures of us.

  The paint was fluorescent orange. You couldn’t help but see it from outer space.

  • • •

  After breakfast, we hiked out across the hardpan of the lake bottom. We headed toward Cade Hernandez’s promised abandoned prison.

  Trash and old charred fire rings peppered the bottom of the never-filled lake. Dirt-bike riders came here in the cool seasons and camped down in the bed of Aberdeen Lake, where they found minimal shelter from the blasting sundowner winds that came to the desert late afternoons every spring and fall.

  So here were countless empty propane canisters, cigarette butts, discarded condoms, beer cans, a nylon sleeping bag that looked like someone had taken a shit on it—all the usual stuff you’d expect from city scumbags who didn’t care what they left behind, or what they slept next to.

  Cade wore a nylon backpack carrying some water bottles, tobacco, a flashlight, candy bars, a few tools, and our phones. Laika followed along, enthusiastic about the mission to explore the abandoned prison.

  At the opposite shore, we sat on the edge of a dry-rotted wooden boat dock and dangled our feet over the Mars surface of the dead lake, which was nine feet below us. Cade and I took off our shirts, and we shared a bottle of water with Julia. And Laika came skittering proudly down the dock carrying something that looked like rope in her teeth.

  Laika had found a dead snake.

  Dead snakes do not stink like dead mammals. The one Laika found was dried and flat, an old rattler that had become an S-shaped band of snake jerky.

  “Put that down!” I said.

  Laika, who for whatever reasons had an excessively guilty conscience, immediately dropped the snake and curled up in her “please don’t kill me” pose.

  I had never hit my dog in my entire life.

  “Dumb dog,” I said.

  I got up and kicked the snake carcass off the dock.

  And Cade Hernandez, his stiffened index finger aimed at my back, said, “A double-pierced vagina.”

  “Ew,” Julia said.

  “Yeah. Good one, Win-Win.”

  “I try,” Cade said.

  At least I was off the hook for the rest of the day. Cade Hernandez never created more than one title for my scar on any given day.

  • • •

  By noon, Julia, Cade, and I arrived at the prison’s outer fence.

  There was something incredibly foreboding about the place—massive and silent, adorned with the empty black frames of barred or meshed windows and broken-down metal doors. Jutting up squarely from the quiet desert, butted against rust-colored mountains of tumbled boulders, it was something that would have terrified me if I were there alone. Cade Hernandez and Julia Bishop made everything different.

  Three separate rings of fencing surrounded Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. Most of the fence lines tilted drunkenly but still retained their intimidating character. Although the fen
ce perimeters sagged and slanted here and there, we still had to use heavy wire cutters to open small doorways in each ring of chain-link for the four of us—counting Laika—to enter the prison grounds.

  Cade cut holes for us in each layer of concentric perimeter fencing, and we were in.

  We had broken in to prison.

  On the inside, we paused for a moment for Julia to snap trophy pictures of all of us, and Laika, too. She propped her camera on a five-gallon-size rumpled jerry can that at one time contained cooking oil, and set the timer.

  Our little group of explorers posed. Julia held Laika and stood between me and Cade, both of us shirtless with our arms around her. Cade messed with me during the photograph. He sensually rubbed his fingers on my forearm, and I slapped his hand.

  We entered the prison yard near a corner of the main structure, beneath a guard tower that stuck out from the outer walls like a castle’s turret. As close as we stood, I could see how dilapidated the prison had become over the decades. The outer layer of plaster had peeled and flaked away from most of the building, showing ancient red-brick walls that were absolutely straight, rising up higher than twenty feet from the yard.

  Atop each corner of the cell-block’s wall, rounded guard towers seemed to sag sadly at their edges as though the prison itself had exhaled a final dying gasp. And all along the rooftop of the structure stood twelve-foot-tall steel posts, a picket line of uppercase Ys, each of them strung with razor wire.

  Here, just below one of the guard towers in the yard’s corner, the prison designers had installed a basketball court. I suppose there had been some confident belief in the rehabilitative effects of playing a good American team sport. The concrete of the court was cracked everywhere, as though an army of robot jackhammers had trampled through. Sprouting up from every one of the broken faults in the basketball court grew giant weeds and sticker bushes as high as our waists.

  Cade and Julia followed me around toward the back of the yard.

  We looked for a way to get inside the cell block.

  Around the far side of the prison, rows of windows were stacked three stories high in straight floors, forty-five cells to each side of a tier. I counted them. The windows were barred and narrow, which gave the prison building the appearance of being much taller than it actually was. Every window on every floor had been broken out. Some of them had no glass remaining inside their frames at all; others looked like mouths with jagged teeth.

  In the center of the bottom tier, a black doorway—a main entrance—sat open. There had obviously once been some sort of stairway or porch at the threshold, because the bottom of the doorway was at least four feet higher than the ground where we stood.

  There was junk everywhere in the yard.

  Jumbled piles of debris that had once been fixtures and conveniences inside the prison lay scattered all over the grounds. Nearly all of the garbage was buried beneath old yellow foam pads that used to serve as the innards for the inmates’ mattresses. Cade found an old wooden pallet and tipped it up to the bottom of the doorway so we could use it as a ladder and climb up into the cell block.

  Julia took some more pictures at the open doorway before following us into Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary.

  Being in the prison was as much like stepping inside the carcass of a dead dinosaur as I could ever imagine.

  “This is spookier than shit, Finn,” Cade said.

  “Why are you whispering?” I whispered.

  “What if someone’s here?”

  “Someone is here—us,” Julia answered.

  Laika didn’t seem worried at all, but then again the place probably had that pleasant reek of death which so satisfied my dog’s finely tuned sense of smell.

  The doorway we’d come through must have been some kind of receiving entrance for the lower floor of the cell block. There were small officelike windows on both sides of a short hallway, with triple sets of barred doors, all left open, that led out to the T of the lower tier’s walkway.

  This was where the new arrivals had come in to Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary.

  Before the third and final set of sliding iron gates, a large tiled room opened off to our right. It looked eerily similar in design to the boys’ locker room at Burnt Mill Creek High School, except this one was just a little more battered and abused.

  The place had not aged well. Many of its atoms had scattered away.

  In fact, the entire prison emitted a distressed kind of fog, like a lingering odor from all the terrible things that had happened there.

  You could almost feel all the sticky atoms.

  The floor of the room was smoothed concrete; dusted everywhere with flakes and chips from the painted plaster that had peeled away from the top of the walls and the ceiling. Glossy black and beige tiles lined the lower two-thirds of the surrounding walls, creating a backsplash of sorts that was higher than the top of my head. It was as though the room had been designed to be hosed out for efficient cleaning.

  “I couldn’t imagine how horrible it would be to wind up stuck in a place like this,” Julia said.

  At the back of this room, a row of thin metal slots looked out onto the main hallway of the cell block. Each of the two opposing side walls were lined with galvanized shower nozzles, and a row of squat and lidless concrete toilets.

  Not a very nice place.

  Cade stepped through all the crap on the floor and peered out between the slats in the far wall.

  He said, “This place is amazing.”

  Julia clicked off some more photos, then walked out into the hallway. Cade and I pissed into one of the old toilets.

  “It must suck being a girl,” Cade said.

  “Uh.”

  I kicked the toe of my tennis shoe against the metal flush button sticking out from the tiles behind the toilet. No water came, but the thing moaned a groaning squeak, like a cat that had been stepped on.

  And Cade said, “Remind me to take a shit in here before we leave.”

  I said, “Yeah. I’ll do that for you.”

  I walked back out into the hallway. Julia and I stepped through the third set of jail doors, toward the open hall beneath the tiers.

  Laika ran out to the wide main floor of the lower tier, and when Julia and I followed her, Cade Hernandez played like he was going to shut the iron barred door behind us to lock us inside, but he couldn’t move the thing.

  Apparently, somebody had had the foresight to weld those entry doors permanently open.

  I said, “Don’t be a dick, Cade. My dad would hate you more than he already does if you accidentally killed me and Julia.”

  “Good point,” Cade agreed.

  • • •

  It looked as though a tornado had blown through the main floor of the cell block.

  The center of the hallway rose upward, creating a massive atrium with shattered glass skylights that cut through the roof forty feet above. Each of the two upper tiers had been built so they staggered outward, reversed stair steps. I imagine this was to provide some degree of protection for the people below in case there was anything—or anyone—thrown down from above. Aside from the architectural safety, there was also what looked like a chain-link net that ran the entire length and width of the building, now stretched and sagging across the bottom of the uppermost tier’s walkway.

  Upon this net lay a jumble of artifacts—desks, chairs, metal bunk-bed frames, clothing, tables, books, shoes, even a sink basin. Looking up at the constellation of garbage, it was as though gravity had abandoned the place and all that junk simply floated, magically free, above our heads.

  Julia took more pictures, and Cade said, “Holy shit, you guys. This is amazing.”

  As much trash as there was thrown out onto the net above was matched and surpassed by the quantity of broken and discarded stuff that had been scattered all along the floor in front of us.

  Laika sniffed and ran from pile to pile.

  This was heaven for my dog. She stopped and watched me with guilty
eyes as she hunched her back and took a shit beneath one of the circular molded table-and-bench arrangements bolted in place to the prison’s main floor.

  Most of the cell doors stood open. Like the three gates at the receiving entrance, the doors were large rectangles of rounded steel bars that slid on rolling tracks. Each cell was identical: four feet wide, about eight feet deep, concrete and steel toilet, sink, steel-slatted bunk beds.

  Black numbers had been stenciled above every doorway: 75, 76, 77. . . .

  Cade and Julia walked away from me, down the length of the corridor where the block made a right-angle turn to the left.

  Julia held her camera to her eye.

  Cade snapped a can of tobacco between his fingers.

  Flowers.

  I smelled flowers.

  “Uh. Cade . . .”

  I instinctively moved my hand to try grabbing anything so I might steady myself, but there was nothing to hold on to.

  It is the story of my life.

  And everything vaporized into the nameless chaos of my twenty-miles-per-second universe.

  Why would I even care about it?

  I have a dim recollection of something I doubted could be real. It was this: I wondered why Cade Hernandez and Julia were running toward me, away from where they’d been standing, asking me something—if I was okay.

  And following my friends, I believed I saw Marjorie and Mazie Curtis—the girls who’d been killed in William Mulholland’s 1928 flood.

  Shadow puppets.

  The words were all evaporating at the time, but I was certain in my mind that ghosts had been there in the prison with us all along.

  Imagine that.

  Crazy.

  Look: How can I ever describe the wordless universe I enter at times like these, and do it on paper, using words?

  There’s one for the books.

  I know this: First, I smelled flowers. Cade and Julia drifted toward me, down the trash-strewn and swirling corridor, followed by two shadow puppets. Maybe they were just the shadows of my own scattered atoms. The flower smell got thicker, almost sickening. I looked up and saw the outline of a horse lying on its side, suspended in the mesh net of chain-link overhead.