Finally, she shrugged. “Okay.”
“Cool,” Jake said.
“So you don’t have a car?”
“Us?” Jake said. “Nah. We don’t believe in cars. They’re hard on the environment, you know.”
That was the problem with Jake. He never knew when to quit.
chapter eleven
Anju hung out in our room another hour, just shooting the breeze about important stuff like why Coke was better than Pepsi and whether Vin Diesel could really act, and by then I was so wired that I couldn’t settle my mind down. I lay there in the dark, listening to the occasional truck rumble by on the road, a few hotel doors opening and closing, some footsteps passing by on the sidewalk outside, but mostly silence. Jake didn’t have any problems, though. Ten minutes after turning out the light, I heard his breathing become deep and regular. When you’re sleeping in the same room as someone who’s sleeping, and you can’t sleep, it makes you angry that that they’re able to sleep when you’re not. Which, of course, only makes it harder to fall asleep.
Jake finally rolled out of bed a little after nine in morning—I had been watching a Little House on the Prairie marathon with the volume muted, while working on Dad’s portrait—and we got cleaned up and headed next door. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, and the back of my eyelids felt as sticky as flypaper. Anju was just finished packing her little tan suitcase. Steam hung in the air from her shower, and her hair, loose instead of in a ponytail, still looked slick. She wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and blue jeans rolled up at the hems. The dark circles under her eyes made me wonder if she’d slept either.
About ten o’clock, we’d managed to check out of the hotel and pile into her silver Honda Accord, me in the back, and head east on Highway 20. The sky was a dirty gray with strange circular cloud streaks that made me think of a manhole cover. The inside of the car smelled strongly of cigarettes.
“I don’t smoke,” she said, as if she was expecting us to ask. “I just bought this from a guy who smoked, that’s why it smells.”
“Smoking should be banned everywhere,” Jake said. “Nasty habit.”
I wondered if Jake even had to put out any effort to lie, or whether it was something that happened automatically for him, like sneezing. I was tired of letting him get away with it all the time.
“That’s funny,” I said. “I kind of remember you having some cigarettes just yesterday.”
Anju laughed. I expected Jake to get angry, but he just shrugged.
“I was just smoking so you’d feel comfortable,” he said.
“I don’t smoke, Jake.”
“Oh sure, I know. Still.”
I wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “Still what?”
“Oh. You know. You have this certain image of me. I just didn’t want to, you know, change your image of me. When so much other stuff was happening. Thought it would be easier. Enough change as it was. Give you something to count on. The old Jake, still the same.”
I wanted to keep nailing him to the wall, but then we might have to explain to Anju the real purpose of our trip, plus maybe the whole Leo incident, and I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I simmered in silence.
We soon cleared town and were out in the desert country east of Bend. The land on either side of the highway was flat and desolate, wide stretches of sagebrush interrupted by a few juniper trees now and then, a band of purple hills way off in the distance. We saw some herds of cattle. The farther we went, the fewer cars we saw, until it was just the occasional mud-caked SUV with wide-eyed tourists behind the wheel or old dented trucks driven by burly guys with faces like worn leather.
Jake and Anju kept talking, but it was hard to hear from the back with all the road noise, so I just gave up and let myself daydream. I found myself thinking about Dad again, wondering how he was going to react when I gave him the picture. Every time I tried to imagine how it was going to be, my heart started to pound and my hands felt sweaty. I don’t know why. Sometimes, in my fantasies, he would cry and sweep me up in a big bear hug, then tell me how sorry he was he hadn’t been there for me, how it was just a big misunderstanding and we’d work it all out. In almost all of my fantasies, he asked me to come live with him. I always told him I had to think about it.
Anju was a fast driver, and we made good time, cresting a small hill and pulling into the little town of Burns, Oregon, around noon. The place made Bend seem like New York City. There were a few more trees and bushes than out in the desert country, but it was still pretty sparse compared to all the lush green back in Rexton. Everybody was hungry. We cruised past a grocery store, a hardware store, and a couple of banks, skipped a couple of ma-and-pa-type diners, finally settling on the Dairy Queen—because, like Jake said, at least you knew what you were going to get.
Ahead of us in line, there were a half-dozen guys in cowboy hats. Anju took the opportunity to duck into the restroom. Standing there in line, Jake leaned over and whispered to me.
“Dude, we really have to watch her,” he said.
“Huh?”
“She’s messed up, man. Really down. I’m worried about her.”
“Well sure,” I said. “Her boyfriend dumped her. Of course she’s going to be down.”
He shook his head. “It’s really bad, though. You can tell. She just . . . she kind of drifts off sometimes when she’s talking, and you can just see how sad she is. I’m telling you, she might do something stupid.”
“Like what?”
He gave me a look like I was the densest person in the world. “Think about it, Chuckster.”
“You mean like . . . commit suicide?”
“Shh. Yeah, something like that. I just get this feeling, that’s all. She was down before, but something’s changed. We just need to watch her.”
I was a little jealous that he already felt he knew Anju well enough to be able to detect a subtle change in her mood, and I planned to insist that I ride up front the rest of the way to Boise.
Anju came back and we ordered, me and Jake getting burgers, Anju some fries and a side salad. Then Jake took off to the restroom, leaving me and Anju alone in one of the orange plastic booths. I thought, Now, here’s my chance, I can try to connect with her without Jake around. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. She smiled at me, then picked up the blue triangular thing with our number on it and clicked her fingernails on the hard plastic.
“So,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. Already the conversation was really rolling.
“Going on a road trip, huh?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded as if this was a really deep answer. “Jake said you were going to Denver.”
“That’s right.”
“Why are you going there?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh.”
That pretty much killed the conversation. The problem was, I wasn’t very good at lying, so instead of just making up an answer like Jake would, to keep things rolling, I had to answer with, “I don’t know.” I could tell her the truth, of course, but I wasn’t willing to do that yet. And there wasn’t much she could do with “I don’t know,” which left us both twiddling our thumbs and glancing up at the counter as if we couldn’t believe how long it was taking for our food. It killed me, both of us sitting there not talking. I didn’t know why it was so important to me, but I didn’t want Jake to know her better than me. I didn’t want her to like him better.
“I’m going to see my dad,” I blurted suddenly.
She looked at me, raising her eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He lives there. In Denver.”
“Okay.”
I swallowed. “I haven’t seen him in a long time. He doesn’t know I’m coming. I thought—I thought I would surprise him.”
“Oh. I bet that’ll make him happy.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I think it will. I think he’ll be happy about it.”
She nodded, I nodded, and then we were back to sitt
ing in thumb-twiddling silence. I really thought it would have made a difference, me telling her something personal like that, and I couldn’t understand why it didn’t. I expected us to just open up and tell each other all this innermost secret stuff about ourselves, and suddenly we’d be new best friends.
Then I realized I had killed the conversation again, but this time by lying. I didn’t lie like Jake did, about stuff that didn’t matter. I lied because I didn’t tell her how I was really feeling. I didn’t tell her that, yeah, maybe Dad would be happy to see me, but maybe he was going to be mad. I didn’t tell her that I was afraid he might not even recognize me.
I was trying to stir up enough courage to say all this when Jake came sauntering back to the table, joining us with an insightful comment about what a relief it was to take a good dump. Then our food arrived, we scarfed it down, and a half hour later we were back on the road, all of us still working on the extra-large soft drinks.
And of course, Jake rode shotgun. I was going to say something to him about it being my turn, but it never seemed the right time.
In less than five minutes, we were out of Burns and back in open country, passing through desert lands even more empty than the ones before. If you took away the few bits of sagebrush, we could have been on the moon. To pass the time, I did some sketches, first of cows and scarecrows, then I started one of Anju. I could have worked on Dad’s, but I was afraid I might finish it, and I didn’t want to finish it, not yet.
They talked a little at first. Jake kept trying to get a conversation going, but each time it ended faster, after a while she didn’t even nod or say “yeah,” until finally Jake gave up and stared out the window. Drawing her, I was watching her face closely, and I could see what Jake meant. She looked sad most of the time, but sometimes she got this look of total and utter despair, as if she was going to burst out crying or screaming because she couldn’t take it anymore. It lasted only a second, and I never would have believed I could see all that on her face in that short amount of time, but it really was there.
It rained once, a total downpour that lasted maybe ten minutes, big golf ball raindrops pounding on the roof. Nothing like what we got in Rexton, where it was just weenie drizzle that lasted for hours at a time. This storm let us have it all at once. Anju slowed the car to walking speed, and I thought, My God, it will take an eternity to get to Boise, but then it was over as fast as it started.
We stopped once so Jake could take a leak—which he did right there on the side of the road, barely even bothering to turn his back—but otherwise we just rifled over the gentle hills, passing through both Vale and Ontario in a blur of dust, soon joining up with Interstate 84. I barely noticed when we crossed out of Oregon into Idaho. So far, it was the same wasteland as what we’d just been seeing.
I finished the picture of Anju, then decided to close my eyes for just a second to rest them, but I must have fallen asleep, because I woke when the car stopped and found we were waiting at a traffic light in downtown Boise. It was a wide four-lane road with a pristine park on the right; the domed capitol and some other moderately large buildings were up ahead.
The road was slick with rain, but the sky was clear. A low mountain range that was more like a series of tall hills loomed behind the buildings, smooth and free of trees, a bit of snow cresting the rounded peaks. Anju drove through a downtown area that reminded me of Rexton, big without being big-city big, and pointed at a gray monolithic building that was at least ten stories high.
“That’s where I work,” she said.
“Yeah?” Jake said. “Bet you’re president.”
“I work in the deli in the basement.”
“Oh,” Jake said. “Well . . . I bet you get lots of free sandwiches.”
She shrugged. “It pays the rent.”
She lived a couple of miles from the capitol, in an old house that had been converted into six apartments. A green Chevette up on blocks, without wheels, was parked out front. A couple of teenagers in faded denim sat on the wooden steps of the house across the street. Anju led us inside, down a dark, narrow hall that smelled like mildew. Hers was the last of three doors.
“Well,” she said, leading us inside, “it’s not much, but it’s mine.”
Like she said, it wasn’t much—a tiny living room, half of which was taken up by a brick fireplace, an alleylike kitchen with a green linoleum floor, and what I at first thought was a closet in the back but turned out to be her bedroom. She had done the best she could with the place, decorating with pots of dried flowers and Van Gogh prints. Anju went to an end table by the fireplace and looked at an answering machine next to a neon-pink phone. She looked at it a long time, and I saw that dark shadow pass over her face again, before she finally turned back to us.
“You’re welcome to crash here for the night,” she said. “Unless you have to get going. Either way. If you want me to drop you off somewhere, I can do that, too. You know, whatever.”
Jake wanted to stay, and I was more of the mind to get going, so we decided to call Greyhound to see when the next bus was to Denver. Jake said he’d rather ride Amtrak if he had to ride anything, but Anju told us there was no Amtrak train service in Boise, just a bus that connected with Amtrak trains. It turned out that the next bus left at ten forty-five, and just to get to Salt Lake City would take over seven hours. There was another bus at eleven in the morning. Jake said we should wait for that one and that, who knows, maybe we’d find a ride before then that would get us there faster. I didn’t want to drag out the trip too long, but spending a little more time with Anju didn’t seem that bad.
We ordered a pizza from a place that Anju said was real good and Jake insisted on paying for it. While we gobbled our Meatlover’s Delight, we shot the breeze about life in Boise, which Anju said was about as boring as a place could be.
“Well, why don’t you move, then?” Jake said, wiping pizza sauce off his chin with a napkin. “You could go anywhere.”
Before she could answer, the person in the next apartment turned on his stereo and blasted his music, the bass turned up so high I felt the vibrations even through the floor. Anju put down her paper plate and banged on the wall three times, hard. A few seconds later, the music’s volume dropped.
“Guy’s an idiot,” Anju said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Jake said.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just no reason to go anywhere else, I guess.”
“Did you grow up here?” Jake said.
She took a bite of her pizza. “Moobed ’ere,” she mumbled.
“Why?”
She frowned. “What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” I exclaimed.
I saw it as my chance to join in, but once again I felt like an idiot when they both gave me confused looks.
“From Monty Python,” I said.
“Oh right,” Anju said. “I had some friends into that.”
“Dude,” Jake said, “that’s so old. Nobody our age watches that stuff.”
I thought he was wrong, that people our age did watch Monty Python, but without other people our age around to ask, I didn’t see any way to prove my point. Instead I just shrugged and went back to eating my pizza, hoping that the warmth I felt on my face was from the pizza and not from blushing.
“Anyway,” Jake said, “I was just curious why you moved here.”
We had to wait while she took her time chewing, but finally she just shrugged again—she was doing a lot of shrugging—and said, “Came up with John.”
“John?” Jake said. “Was that—?”
“Same guy.”
“Oh.”
“We came up from Salt Lake City,” she went on. “I met him in high school. Freshman year, actually. I wouldn’t go out with him at first, but he kept asking. Then we were together all the time . . . I really thought we were going to be together forever, back then.”
Looking at Jake, I could see that he hadn’t expect
ed the conversation to veer in this direction. Anju’s eyes became distant, her shoulders dropped, and she bowed her head, as if her whole body was collapsing.
“A lot of Mormons down there in Utah,” he said, obviously trying to change the subject.
“Yeah,” Anju said. “John was Mormon.”
“Oh,” Jake said.
“It’s why we moved up here,” Anju said. “His parents didn’t want us to be together unless I converted. My mother didn’t want us to be together unless he converted to Catholic. So instead John just asks me to marry him at the senior prom and said we should just move away and start our own life. Love was all that mattered anyway. That’s what he said.” She was quiet a long time, and I was hoping that was it, she’d gotten it out of her system, but then she shook her head and sighed. “I guess I was wrong.”
“Oh,” Jake said, “well, people change.”
She didn’t respond, and it was such a lame comment on his part that I felt like I had to jump in and change the subject.
“Hey, how’s your mom?” I said.
I knew as soon as I said it that my comment was even more lame than his, but there was no taking it back. Jake looked at me as if I was the world’s number 1 moron, and it didn’t make me feel any better when Anju’s expression grew even darker.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Sore subject. Sorry I—”
“She told me when I was packing my things that if I moved away with John that I was no longer her daughter.”
“Ouch,” Jake said.
“Yeah. I sent her a Christmas card the first year. She sent back a white envelope a few days later. I thought, Great, we’re getting somewhere. When I opened the envelope, all I found was my card—torn up into dozens of tiny pieces.”
The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Page 10