by Pete Hautman
We spent a while looking over the chalkboard menu. All the drinks had weirdly aggressive names—Cherry Bomb, Brain Freeze, Killer Kiwi—things like that.
I figured Gaia would order a Black Mamba—it sounded cool—but she went for the Nuclear Sunrise, a neon-yellow concoction with swirls of mango puree.
I’d never had a Black Mamba, so I ordered one.
As we carried our drinks to a table, I looked at her smoothie and said, “That thing looks like it could fry your retinas.”
“It matches my shirt.”
“What is that, anyway?”
“A Georgia O’Keeffe painting.”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“Yeah, well, she’s kind of famous.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.
The Black Mamba was totally disgusting, like sugary dirt mixed with snail slime. I took a few sips, but it just kept getting worse.
“Try this,” I said, pushing the Mamba toward Gaia.
She looked at it suspiciously, sniffed it, lifted out the straw, deposited a single drop of gray slime onto the tip of her pinky, and touched it to her tongue.
“Earthy,” she said.
I took another sip, just to remind myself how awful it was.
“If you don’t like it, why drink it?” Gaia asked.
“I’m taking it back,” I said.
The girl working the counter listened as I told her the Black Mamba she had made for me tasted like crap.
“It’s a Mamba,” she said, as if that explained anything.
“I know what it’s called. It’s undrinkable.”
“Mambas are supposed to taste bad,” she said.
“Then why do you make them?”
She shrugged. “Some people think if it tastes bad, it must be good for you.”
“Well, I don’t want it. They should write on the menu that it tastes horrible.”
“You want me to dump it for you?”
“I want you to replace it with something drinkable.”
“You already drank half of it.”
“More like a third. You want that back too?”
She looked askance at my rejected drink. “I’d have to ask my boss.”
She didn’t move.
“So ask him.”
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Then why don’t you give me something that doesn’t taste like crap and tell him later.”
The girl gave me this pissy look and said, “I think maybe you’d better leave.”
“Not till you give me my money back.”
She didn’t say anything, just pulled her phone out of her pocket and punched in three numbers. A second later she said, “I got this guy here who refuses to leave. . . . Yeah. Yeah, I feel threatened. . . . Wigglesworth’s, on Pine Street. . . . Okay.” She hung up. “You better go,” she said.
That was when I dumped the Black Mamba onto the counter. The girl jumped back to keep from getting splashed, but she didn’t quite make it. I went back to the table. Gaia was watching.
“You sure know how to get along with people.”
“She was being a bitch.”
Gaia hitched her purse up over her shoulder and stood up. We headed for the door and almost made it out of there before the cops showed up. But we didn’t quite.
• • •
There’s not much more to the Wigglesworth’s story. I explained to the cops what had happened and tried to get them to try a Black Mamba so they could taste for themselves how bad it was. They wouldn’t do it. The counter girl lied and told them I threw the drink at her. I said I’d accidentally tipped it over. Gaia claimed she hadn’t seen anything but supported my contention that the Mamba was epically awful. The cops were amused at first, then bored. They told me to leave and not come back, and that was it. Except, after that, if we wanted something fun to drink, we had to go all the way over to the Main Squeeze and drink bubble tea.
• • •
Gaia didn’t hold the Wigglesworth’s thing against me, even though she didn’t get a chance to finish her smoothie. She let me gripe about it for a block. I was saying how I was going to put up a bunch of bad reviews online, when she stopped abruptly.
“You know, maybe if you’d been nicer, she would have made you a new drink. She probably made it exactly like she was supposed to. I mean, she just works there.”
That took me by surprise; I didn’t know what to say. She started walking again. I fell in beside her.
I said, “Maybe. But she should know how crappy her product is. It’s my responsibility as a consumer to provide helpful feedback.”
Gaia laughed. “Where did you hear that?”
“From my dad.” I thought about that for a second. “He thought it was important to tell people when they did something wrong.”
“Yeah? How did that work out for him?”
I stopped walking. She looked back at me—I think my mouth was hanging open—and she said, “Oh shit. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! That was stupid.”
I drew a breath. “It’s okay,” I said. “Forget about it.”
“Sometimes stuff just comes out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I know. I think we’re kind of the same. Only I’m more sappy.”
“Sappy?”
“Puppies make me cry.”
We kept going, neither of us talking. It was okay. I was imagining Gaia holding a puppy and crying. I had no idea why that would make her cry. I was just glad she was walking next to me.
“Tom Sawyer”
Rush
4:34
The Mark Twain signs start showing up as soon as I hit Missouri.
Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, a little river town on the Mississippi—that’s where he set his famous books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I read Tom Sawyer when I was in fourth grade, but I couldn’t hack Huck Finn, which starts out pretty good but then slows way down.
I used to read a lot, but since Dad died, not so much.
I can tell from the billboards that Hannibal is a tourist trap. The ads are for things like the Becky Thatcher House and the Huck Finn Freedom Center. There is the Mark Twain Brewing Company, the Mark Twain Dinette, Mark Twain’s boyhood home, a Mark Twain Cave tour. . . . I remember the part where Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher get lost in a cave, and they think Injun Joe wants to kill them, and Tom finds a fortune in gold coins. I quit reading the billboards and think about caves. I don’t want to think about caves. Caves make me think about Gaia.
I speed up, thinking that if I drive fast enough to scare myself, I’ll be able to quit thinking about Gaia. The road is a bumpy little two-lane highway. I’ve got the Mustang up to about eighty, when a bird hits the windshield. I think it’s a blue jay. I slow down. Coming around a curve, I see a figure up ahead, standing on the shoulder with his thumb out.
I pull over because I feel bad about the blue jay, and because I think the guy must have been standing there for days, and because I really need to talk to somebody who is not already living inside my head.
Wonder Woman
Every time I saw Gaia, I learned something about her that surprised me. For example, I met her at Starbucks one day in June. I was late. She had her earbuds in and was watching a movie on her phone.
“Dirty Dancing,” she said. She told me she’d watched it ten times. “Sometimes I finish and go right back to the beginning and watch it over again.” She pocketed her phone. “I told you I was sappy. And if you ever tell anybody, I’ll kill you.”
“I watched it once,” I said. “But I didn’t make it to the end.”
“The end is the best part, but you probably wouldn’t like it.”
“I bet you liked Titanic.”
“Hated it.”
“Me too. Wonder Woman?”
Gaia smiled, and it was like a light came on inside her face.
“Me too,” I said.
• • •
The next day she came over to my house to see my Wonder
Woman doll. Yes, I had a Wonder Woman doll. It used to be my mom’s, from the 1970s, still in its original box, with a gray Diana Prince uniform you could put on her.
Wonder Woman was on my Darth Vader shelf. I wasn’t really into Star Wars anymore, but when I was a kid, I was obsessed with Darth, my main man. I had a whole shelf full of Vader toys, from the little tiny figurines to a red lightsaber to a helmet that used to fit on my head. It had a sort of membrane on the mouth to make your voice sound funny.
Gaia didn’t care about Darth Vader, but she was impressed by Wonder Woman.
“You never took her out of the box?”
“My mom says it’s worth more money this way.”
“Kind of a waste.”
“I was more into Vader.”
“Wonder Woman would kick his ass.” She looked over my collection. “You must have every Darth Vader toy ever.”
“Not even close. There are thousands.”
She put Wonder Woman back onto the shelf.
“I know, it’s stupid,” I said. “I was a kid.”
“I bet you could sell all this stuff to that comic book shop,” she said.
She turned to my bookcase and checked out the titles. The Star Wars novels were on the middle shelf, but the rest of the books—stacked every which way and piled high on top—were mostly horror and vampire stories. I even had my copy of Bunnicula from the third grade. It’s about a rabbit with fangs. Naturally, that was the one she pulled out and started paging through.
“I read this,” she said.
I reached past her and grabbed my copy of It, by Stephen King, the fattest book I owned. “You should read this one.”
Gaia wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like scary books. I only like fake-scary books.” She looked around at the rest of my junk. “Your room is really messy.”
“I know where everything is.”
She knelt down and started moving my books around, straightening them up and arranging them. She was so intense about it that I just stood back and watched.
“Um . . . do you want a soda or something?” I asked after a minute.
“Do you have any fizzy water?”
“I think so.” I left her with the books and went to the kitchen. There was no fizzy water in the fridge, but I knew we had a whole case of the stuff. Ever since Dad died, Mom had been going crazy at Sam’s Club, buying massive quantities of everything—cases of canned goods, laundry detergent, water, huge bundles of paper towels and toilet paper. Cartons were stacked on and in front of Dad’s workbench in the garage and on either side of his car. We were ready for the zombie invasion.
It took me a couple minutes of moving boxes around to find the bottled water. It was hiding under a lifetime supply of facial tissues.
The water was warm, of course, so I had to put it in glasses with ice. By the time I got back to my room with the water, Gaia had finished organizing my books and was making my bed. She had also picked up all my dirty clothes from the floor and piled them in the laundry basket.
It was embarrassing, to say the least.
“I didn’t know you were such a neat freak,” I said.
“I didn’t know you were so gross.”
There was a moment when I thought maybe we were going to have an argument, but then, like flipping a switch, we were both laughing.
“God, we are such weirdos,” she said.
I handed her a glass of water; she took it, and our fingers touched. It felt electric. Not like a static electricity shock, but more like a low, buzzy current that lasted for a few seconds even after our hands separated.
It was the first time we had physically touched.
Okay, that’s weird. Because we’d been seeing each other on and off for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to touch her. Some days I thought about nothing else. But she had this invisible shell, and I was afraid that if I reached out to hold her hand, she’d recoil, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that.
Now we had touched fingers, and we were still okay. She acted as if nothing had happened. But it had.
If we had been in a movie like Dirty Dancing, we would have crashed into each other’s embrace and kissed until our oxygen ran out. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was more like we were two cats touching noses, then backing off.
• • •
I was telling Garf about Gaia hanging out in my bedroom and organizing my books and making my bed. A lot of guys would have asked me if we’d made out, but not Garf. Instead he asked me how she had arranged my books.
“With her hands?” I said.
“No, I mean was it alphabetical by author, or by size, or by the color of the spine?”
“Why would anybody organize books by color?” I asked.
“I saw it in a magazine. It’s kind of cool-looking.”
“I think by author.”
“That’s cool.” Everything was always cool with Garf. “So are you guys, like, into each other?”
“I don’t know. It’s like we’re doing this thing where we try to find things we both like, you know? Only, she doesn’t like horror stories and I don’t like Dirty Dancing.”
“What’s that?”
“This old romance movie. There are a lot of things we both hate, but we both like Wonder Woman.”
“I liked the movie. Hey, I know what you could do. The Fourth is coming up. Maybe she likes fireworks.”
• • •
I should’ve known better than to listen to Garf.
“Fireworks are lame,” Gaia said.
“Lame?”
“Fireworks are a glorification of masculine aggression. Like ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”
“Oh,” I said. “Like Wonder Woman?”
“Not like Wonder Woman. You know what we should do? We should go to the quietest place we can find—someplace with no fireworks.”
I was stunned by that—by the fact that she assumed we would be spending the Fourth of July together.
“Like a library?” I said.
“They won’t be open on the Fourth. You know what we should do? We should go to the mushroom caves.”
The caves. The caves were legendary. I had never been there, but I’d been hearing about them for years.
“Okay,” I said.
“Nobody’ll be there,” she said. “They’ll all be out gawking at the explosions.”
“Okay,” I said. “Have you ever been?”
“I don’t even know where they are, but they’re supposed to be cool.”
Grant
The mushroom caves, I learned online, were not natural caves. They were a network of silica mine shafts dug into the cliffs back in the nineteenth century. “Silica” is another name for “sand.” Why people needed to mine sand, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to find. Maybe there was a sand shortage. Later, the shafts were called the mushroom caves because back in the 1930s, after the sand mining stopped, the caves were converted into an underground mushroom farm. That didn’t last long. A few years later the caves were closed off and nobody used them.
I got all that off the internet. What I didn’t find on the internet was how to get there. For that I had to go to the outernet, which meant texting and talking with real-life people who had been to the caves. Like Grant McMann.
Grant was my cousin on my mom’s side. He was the same age as me, and we went to the same school, but we couldn’t have been more different. Grant was a football player who looked like a two-hundred-pound advertisement for whole milk, beef, and white bread. Also, he was a total dick—the kind of guy who would come up behind you in school and dope slap you so hard, you’d go skidding down the hall on your belly.
In other words, he was the kind of guy I tried to avoid.
But I knew Grant had been to the mushroom caves, so I sent him a text. About thirty seconds later my phone rang. Grant.
“Hi,” I said.
“Twiggy!” he bellowed. Twiggy was his name for me. I hated it.
/> “Yeah,” I said. “So, you been to the caves lately?”
“Oh, hell yeah! We hauled a keg in last weekend. It was off the hook, dude. You going?”
“Thinking about it.” The idea of being underground in the dark with a bunch of beer-drinking jocks was not an attractive proposition. “I was hoping you could tell me how to get there.”
“You never been, Twig? Don’t forget to bring candles!” He laughed. I had no idea what was so funny.
“So how do I find it?”
“Well, they put up a new gate, so you can’t just walk in like we used to. But I can show you.”
I did not want to go to the caves with Grant. I did not want to go anywhere with Grant.
“When did you want to go?” he asked.
“I was thinking Friday.”
“No can do. Friday’s the Fourth, dude. I’m headed up to the lake to blow shit up. Adrian just got back from South Dakota with a whole trunk full of fireworks. It’s gonna be epic. You want to come?”
“No, thanks. I’m supposed to meet somebody at the caves. Maybe you can just tell me how to get there.”
“Okay, sure. It’s kind of complicated. . . .”
“Dem Bones”
(“The Skeleton Dance”)
1:57
I roll down the passenger window. The hitchhiker doesn’t look any better up close, but no worse, either. He frowns at the scratch on the passenger door.
“Looks like you got keyed, man,” he says.
“Yeah, I got keyed. Where you headed?”
“Hannibal,” he says. Hannibal is forty miles downriver.
“Hop in,” I say.
He shrugs off his backpack, tosses it in back, and climbs in front, bringing with him the smell of diesel exhaust, road dust, and body odor.
“Name’s Bob,” he says. “But you can call me ‘Knob.’ Everybody else does.” He’s older than I thought at first—maybe in his forties. He grins, and I see he’s missing one canine tooth.