Dead End

by Howard Odentz

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “Ausable Chasm,” she said. “It’s over the border in New York some place.”

  “Sounds Ausably awesome. But a canyon is just another word for a hole and a hole is low. You said we need high.”

  Prianka put the Ausable Chasm brochure to the back of her pile. “Here’s another one for some place called FunTowne,” she said. She held up the front of the brochure. It showed pictures of video games and pool tables. Also, the people playing the games looked like they were refugees from the eighties or even earlier.

  On the bottom was the address for FunTowne.

  “Springfield again,” I said. “Just like The Basketball Hall of Fame. Too many poxers and no height either.” A little twinge of melancholy stuck in my throat. I’d never be in a place like FunTowne again, playing video games and scarfing down nachos with my friends. Prianka and I would never go out to an arcade, just the two of us, holding hands and laughing all night long.

  Who had time to laugh anymore?

  Prianka’s words jolted me out of my funk.

  “Hey,” she said. “This could work.”

  I didn’t even look over at her. I was staring at the pile of brochures in my own hands but not really seeing them at all. “What is it?” I asked. “Another zoo or something where all the animals are dead?”

  “No,” she said. “Look.” She passed the brochure in her hand over to me. It looked like all the others, except for a picture of something that appeared to be a giant space ship on the cover.

  “Is that a flying saucer? If it is, the moon is high. The moon is really high.”

  Prianka turned over the brochure in my hand. “You’re looking at the wrong side,” she said.

  I glanced down at the big purple words, all loopy and glossy, staring up at me.

  “The Peace Pagoda,” I read aloud. “What’s that?”

  12

  MY PARENTS WEREN’T homebodies. They used to bring us to places like the beach or to cool fairs on town greens where the Ferris wheels were barely held together with Elmer’s glue and duct tape. Every once in a while, my father would even take a holiday from his muscle-building diet and bring the family to one of those food truck extravaganzas where you could buy really gross crap like fried butter or bananas dipped in peanut butter and chocolate, shoved on a stick then frozen.

  In all those great adventures that we had as a family, I never heard of something called the Peace Pagoda.

  It looked like it was only a little over an hour from Littleham—the place I used to call home. As a matter of fact, the Peace Pagoda, according to the brochure, wasn’t even all that far from Greenfield:

  ‘The New England Peace Pagoda was completed in 1985. There are other peace pagodas around the country and around the world.

  A peace pagoda is a Buddhist monument designed to provide a focus for all the peoples of the world to help unite them in their search for global peace.

  Most peace pagodas built since World War II have been erected under the guidance of a Japanese monk who devoted his life to promoting non-violence. The New England Peace Pagoda sits atop a mountain in the hills of Western Massachusetts and is a shining example of peace and unity for the region.’

  “What mountain?” I said as I flipped the brochure over and over looking for an address.

  Prianka pulled the paper from my hand and unfolded it. There was a map on one of the panels and an address beneath the map. We both read what it said then looked at each other.

  “Hey, Jimmy?” I called out. He was still in the front of the bus with his hands resting on my sister’s shoulders.

  “Yo.”

  “You ever hear of something called the Peace Pagoda?”

  “Sure,” he said as pulled his hands from Trina and turned around to face us. “It’s up in Leverett near this really cool artist collective where you can take classes on how to make pottery or stained glass. I think they have workshops on batik and raku and even bandhani and shibori and . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You ever been there?”

  “The artist collective? Of course.”

  Prianka squeezed my knee the same time that I squeezed hers. “Have you been to the Peace Pagoda?” she asked. It was so much easier to let her do the talking.

  “Loads of times,” he said. “It’s amazing up there.” Jimmy bit his lip and began grooving out to a tune inside his head that no one else could hear. “Totally zen, you know?

  No, I didn’t know. Jimmy was the one who knew all about zen stuff, or even what ‘zen’ meant. He was the one who almost wet himself when we first met Stella Rathbone because she was the author of a book called Urban Green that taught people how to live off the grid in an urban setting.

  “It’s on top of a mountain, right?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Remember Sugarloaf where we climbed the tower? I don’t think it’s too far from there.”

  I looked at Prianka and smiled. Then I pulled myself up from the seat and walked down the aisle to where Sanjay and Bullseye were still sleeping. Newfie was up. He lumbered to his feet and stuck his head under my hand with his tongue hanging out of his mouth and a little bit of slobber gooping on the floor between his paws.

  Andrew was awake, too. He was perched above Sanjay on the top of the seat. For the first time ever, he cocked his eyes in my direction, stretched his wings, and jumped up to my shoulder.

  I think I was touched. I’m not sure. “I like you, too, Birdbrain,” I said to him. Andrew gently stuck his beak in my ear and rummaged around in there for a minute. I patiently waited until his beak was out of my ear canal and nothing pointy was scant centimeters from my brain. “I hope you’re through,” I whispered to the crow. “Because that? That was kind of gross.”

  “Gross,” twittered Andrew and Sanjay’s deep brown eyes slid open.

  “Sanjay, listen—do you think you could help us out?”

  “Of where?” he said softly.

  I smiled. “I mean do you think you could help Trina with some directions?” I pointed toward my sister at the front of the bus with Jimmy sitting behind her.

  “Why aren’t you driving?” he asked me.

  “My sister’s giving me a break.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Because I wanted to sit next to your sister. I really like her, you know.”

  Sanjay, who was leaning up against the window with his little arms hugging himself, sort of pulled his head down and stared at his feet. He bit his lip. I think he was embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure. “Papa would be mad,” he whispered.

  I didn’t need to mention that his papa wasn’t here anymore. That would have been mean. Mentioning Sanjay’s parents or the fact that the last we knew they were on the other side of the world in India, would have been wrong.

  “Nah,” I said. “I think he’d like me a lot.”

  “Mama would pray to make you go away.” Sanjay’s face grew a few shades darker. “She doesn’t like Prianka being around boys who aren’t Indian.”

  I turned sideways because I didn’t want Sanjay to see me roll my eyes. I think any difference between my lily white skin and her mocha shade had disappeared when the rest of the world died. However, Sanjay’s words gave me a little insight into the type of strict life Prianka must have grown up with at home. No wonder she was always mean to me.

  She didn’t want to like me.

  Praying for me to go away or not, my conversation with Sanjay was almost normal. It was getting easy to forget that with or without autism, he wasn’t so different from the rest of us.

  I nodded my head. “Cool. Let’s table that one for the time being. Meanwhile, Trina needs some directions to this place.” I handed Sanjay the brochure for the Peace Pagoda. He turned it over in his hand
s, then immediately opened it up to reveal the map where the Peace Pagoda lived. He repositioned himself in his seat and stared at it for a bit, then turned the paper over to the other side.

  “No,” he said flatly.

  At first his abrupt answer took me by surprise. Then I realized that Prianka’s little brother wasn’t being rude or difficult. He was simply stating a fact, and the fact was that he couldn’t tell us where to go because he didn’t know where we were. We both stared out the window at the endless forest choking the sides of the road.

  I got it.

  I didn’t either.

  13

  A FEW MILES MORE of trees and leaf-strewn backroads later we found something.

  There was a gas station growing out of four corners in the middle of the woods. We were actually in a town, but I don’t think you could call it a town like Littleham or Amherst, or even Purgatory Chasm. I think you could call it more like a cemetery, because according to the name of the gas station—Bloody Brook Gas and Snacks—we weren’t in a lively part of the world.

  Seriously? I think I would have known if there was a place in Western Massachusetts called Bloody Brook because it sounded damn cool, but I had never heard of it before.

  By then I was at the front of the bus. I still had Andrew on my shoulder, which seemed a little weird and a little normal at the same time, and I was sitting across from Jimmy. Trina had pulled the bus over to the side of the road about 500 feet away from the gas station, just in case there were any dead people around.

  I turned to ask Sanjay if he knew anything about Bloody Brook, Massachusetts and saw Bullseye sitting forlornly on the edge of his seat with his legs in the aisle. He was bent over with his hands clasped together.

  “Home sweet home,” he said.

  Oh no. I forgot that Bullseye had grown up around here somewhere.

  “Do you know where we are?” I asked, but I was a little afraid of his answer.

  He nodded his head. “Bloody Brook is part of Deerfield,” he said almost in a whisper. Then he slowly leaned back and looked out the window at the trees and the gas station ahead of us. “My family lives . . . lived near Bloody Brook,” he said.

  Yikes. I was going to have to pull him aside for a pep talk at some point. I kept forgetting that he was twelve and alone with a bunch of strangers. I’m not sure what I would say when the time came, but I’d come up with something.

  “Freaking Bloody Brook,” Trina hissed as she stared through the giant bus windshield at the gas station up ahead. “Like this doesn’t spell disaster all over it.”

  “Chillax,” Jimmy told her as he massaged her shoulders. “It’s all cool.”

  God, I wish I had some of whatever natural, holistic, happy pill he was on. I needed some happy thoughts in the worst way.

  Sanjay cleared his throat. “The Battle of Bloody Brook was fought on September 18th, 1675 by English colonists and the Pocumtuc tribe,” he said like he was reading a book that no one else but him could see. “The tribe ambushed a train of wagons carrying the harvest from Deerfield to Hadley. The area where the battle took place is now the site of one of the world’s largest candle factories.”

  “Oh, right!” Jimmy exclaimed as he slapped the back of one of the seats. “Candlerama is near here. Talk about a gold mine. Whoever owns that place has made millions on candles. I mean, I don’t usually go for that capitalist stuff, but their organic pachuli vanilla tapers are awesome.”

  “No kidding,” I said, not really caring one whit about pachuli vanilla tapers, or even what a taper was. Instead, I looked out the window at the lonely gas station ahead. The building seemed like it was a thousand years old—like the kind of place where if you wanted gas, you had to wait for an old guy in overalls to pump it while he told you stories about World War II.

  The whole area seemed dead. No wonder they called it Bloody Brook.

  I turned the Peace Pagoda brochure over in my hand, unfolded it and searched for the address again. I found it on the back written in little curly letters that were almost too hard to read.

  It said 100 Cave Hill Road.

  “Sanjay,” I shouted out without even looking at him. “We’re near Deerfield. Can you tell me how to get to 100 Cave Hill Road in Leverett, Massachusetts?”

  Prianka immediately stood up, muttered something scary and went back to sit with her brother. After a moment she turned and stared at me with daggers in her eyes. I had absolutely no idea why the sharp points were pointing in my direction.

  “Sanjay’s not a magic box,” she growled. “You have to give him a map and show him where we are if you want to get to where you want to go.”

  I could feel my teeth slowly grinding together but I bit my tongue. I completely did not have time for another mood disorder from my girlfriend. Prianka flipping on a dime was the last thing I needed to deal with right now. I stood and headed toward the back of the bus to diffuse whatever tension she thought I had just caused.

  Ten feet down the aisle I saw that Sanjay looked sad, or tired, or something worse. I didn’t know. I wasn’t a parent and never had to deal with kids, let alone a kid like Sanjay.

  “It’s okay,” Prianka was saying to him. “I’m here.” Immediately I felt like an epic douche.

  “Oh, jeez,” I said before I even got all the way back to them. It seems that I had been so used to using Sanjay as a freaking walking computer for the past few weeks, I forgot that there was a little kid behind it all.

  I had to say something.

  I crouched next to Newfie so I was right in front of Sanjay. I knew better than to reach out and touch him. He didn’t like to be touched. After a moment I cleared my throat. “Hey, Buddy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know I keep asking you to do all these things because I think you are about the smartest person I know.”

  Sanjay licked his lips and stared out the window just like Bullseye had done when he mentioned his family.

  Then he totally blindsided me. “Mama and Papa are in India,” he whispered. “I don’t have a map for India. I don’t know where they are.”

  I felt all the air rush out of my body. Since we had started on our little adventure, Sanjay had been blessedly quiet about his parents. I guess when Bullseye mentioned his family it made Sanjay think of his own.

  I could see that Prianka wanted to curl her arms around him and hug him fiercely, but she couldn’t do that with Sanjay, no matter how much she wanted to.

  Her eyes were brimming with tears.

  Double yikes. Now what?

  Thankfully, I recovered quickly. I took a deep breath and slapped my knees. “You know what? We got to go find us some maps, okay?

  Sanjay slowly nodded his head. “Okay,” he said as he dragged Poopy Puppy off the seat at his side and held him to his ear. “And some dog food. Poopy Puppy says we need dog food.”

  Say what? Dog food?

  That’s when Newfie went absolutely nuts.

  14

  A BEADY-EYED monster was staring at us through the bottom of the glass door at the back of the bus, and Newfie was freaking out. He wouldn’t stop barking and he wouldn’t stop wagging his tail. He knocked me flat to the ground and a jolt of pain went right up through my bottom to the very top of my head.

  “What the hell is that?” I cried, staring at the long thin skull and huge round eyes that stared back at me from the rear bumper.

  Newfie bounded to the back of the bus and almost went right through the glass. His tail was going a mile a minute.

  “The poor thing,” Prianka cried and stood up.

  “What is it?” I yelped again.

  On the other side of the door was the saddest excuse for a dog that I had ever seen. It was blindingly white and basically made up of all legs and tail with a long thin face and terrible, sad, eyes.

  “Whippet,”
said Sanjay, staring at the back door with Poopy Puppy still at his ear.

  “Whip it?” I cried. “With what?”

  Bullseye came up to me, his head shaking back and forth. “Wow, was Littleham like in a bubble or something? That’s a whippet. It’s like a little greyhound.”

  “It’s starving,” said Prianka. “We have to give it something to eat.”

  I didn’t even know what to say. Not so long ago, I was the one who was contemplating leaving Jimmy James behind because he was in a wheelchair. A wheelchair was a liability. Did we really need another dog which basically meant another mouth to feed? Besides, whatever a whippet was, it didn’t even look like a dog. It looked like a little kid’s stick figure drawing of a dog.

  In the end, what I thought didn’t matter anyway. Two minutes later we were all outside the bus, with this scrawny creature wagging its tail so fiercely and Newfie acting like he had just found a long lost friend, that we adopted another animal before we even knew it.

  “Newfie’s got a girlfriend,” laughed Jimmy.

  “More like Newfie’s got a dog of his own,” I said. “He can probably crush it with one paw.”

  “Her,” said Trina. “She’s not an ‘it.’ She’s a ‘her.’”

  “What makes you such the animal expert?”

  “Um, health class in like fifth grade. It’s called basic anatomy,” she said and pointed in exactly the spot I wasn’t interested in examining.

  Color me stupid.

  Meanwhile, the dark little cloud that had formed over Sanjay’s head seemed to lift. Whatever power the scrawny dog had over him was working. His whole demeanor changed after the first bout of canine kisses bathed his face.

  The kid was like freaking Doctor Dolittle. Animals flocked to him.

  By that time, Andrew had left my shoulder and was back on Sanjay’s, and the malnourished-looking pooch with the long snout and curly rat tail was rolled over on her back so everyone could scratch her tummy.