by Andrew Smith
She held out her hand, palm upward, catching flakes that melted instantly when they touched her skin.
I grabbed her hand and pulled. “Come on.”
The Exact Opposite of Stuck
In the morning I was overcome by a sickening feeling.
I think it was guilt.
One time I asked my dads about having sex, not that I’d had sex, well, with another person, because I was only fourteen at the time. And Dad told me that feeling guilty happened when you did something good, when all the before-the hole rules told you it was not.
So I had never felt guilty, or thought about what it could be, until then.
I’d managed to finally sleep after dragging Mel back inside the van. We dried ourselves off and took turns brushing the snow from each other’s backs with our hands. It was innocent and confusing, all at the same time, and I never wanted it to stop.
“This is crazy,” I said.
“This is fun,” she argued.
We managed to figure out how to start the motorhome’s generator in order to warm the place, and then we went back to our separate beds without saying a word.
I opened my eyes when the windows glowed a dull gray light. I lay there, trying to hear if Mel was also awake, but I couldn’t tell. It was the first time in my life I had ever awoken to a light that did not come from some kind of device inside the hole, the first time I had ever opened my eyes outside the hole.
And then I thought about what must be going on back there now—how Wendy, Mom, and Connie would be talking about us, most likely getting everything wrong.
I thought about the wrong things they’d say.
What if I’m wrong?
And I thought, If this is what’s going to happen to my head and my heart after leaving the hole, I don’t want any part of it.
“I hate myself,” I said.
Apparently, Mel had been lying there, awake, too.
“Why do you hate yourself?”
I stared up at the ceiling of the Mercedes van. It was white, with a very pale green pattern of geometric shapes.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
Mel said, “But you did. So, why do you hate yourself?”
“I think Wendy and my mom are probably very upset with me.”
“So, based on that, you would let the fear of someone being mad at you keep you in the hole—as you call it—for the rest of your life?”
I rubbed my eyes. Damn Amelie Sing Brees’s matter-of-fact grasp of everything.
I said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, if it makes any difference, I left my mom a letter. They’ll know where we are. Not exactly where we are, I mean, but they’ll know I came with you to look for your dad and Robby,” Mel said.
“You did?”
I heard Mel shift in her bed. “Like you said, they couldn’t have stopped you. And I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted you to go alone. I didn’t want you to go alone. That’s why I came.”
“Mel?”
“What.”
“You remember that day when I caught all those fish with my dad?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“That day, we stood on a lake that was frozen. I was afraid the ice was going to break, and we would all fall through. That’s what this feels like now.”
“We’re not on a lake, Arek. We’re on a road.”
I got out of bed and put on my outside Iowa-boy clothes and hat. I felt awkward, self-conscious, and embarrassed getting dressed in front of Mel in our small space. She watched me and said nothing. I said nothing. Something new was happening to me, and I didn’t like it. I worried I was transforming somehow into a before-the-hole human being, afraid that maybe I’d start doing all the terrible things I’d read about in books or seen in movies that human beings used to always do to themselves, without end.
“I brought some food. Are you hungry?”
• • •
We ate eggs and biscuits that Louis had stored in the kitchen in the hole.
We were going to run out of food and water. I would need to find gas tanks and siphon fuel for the Mercedes. I’d have to use the .22 to shoot rabbits and birds for our meals. And Mel didn’t have proper clothes to be out here. I was done suggesting—or even hinting to her—that we go back. My head swirled and roiled like the sea in Max Beckmann’s painting.
It was all so much, without end, this eternal expanse of the world outside the hole.
This is why Dad and Robby kept coming out.
The wind and snow stopped before sunrise.
This was only the second time in my life that I’d been out of the hole at the beginning of a day. Although we could see through the side window above Mel’s bed, the windshield was completely covered with snow.
Mel didn’t want to take my gloves and coat, but I told her she’d have to, and that we were going to scavenge for some non-hole clothes for her. Then we went outside to clear the snow from the windshield.
“Fuckbucket!” I said.
Mel laughed. “What’s wrong now?”
I stretched out my arm and pointed in the direction the van was facing. “The road is gone.”
Only a few inches of snow had accumulated from the storm in the night, but it was impossible to tell where the road was and where it was not. Everything was covered beneath a perfectly white blanket. Something else I hadn’t thought of: Roads could simply vanish overnight.
Mel said, “That’s beautiful.”
“We’re stuck,” I said.
“We’ve been stuck for sixteen years. This is the exact opposite of stuck.”
I shaped my hands into shovels and swept lines of snow from the windshield. It was so cold it stung, but all I could think about was how I needed to try to see things more like Mel did.
While I scooped away the snow, Mel walked up the road ahead of the van. I could just make out the shape of her reflection in the windshield.
“We’re going to have to wait a bit, to see if it clears up enough to drive,” I said.
And Mel answered, “That’s okay with me.”
“Everything’s wrong,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“My dad tried to assemble a model of the world for me, down in the hole. And now we’re barely pissing distance away from it, and I can already see that he didn’t get anything right.”
“I bet he got some things right, Arek.”
I finished. My hands felt like I’d been stabbed by a thousand needles. I brushed them off on the front of my overalls.
And Mel said, “Arek, look. Something’s over there.”
She pointed off to the right side of the road.
At first I didn’t see what Mel was talking about. But I quickly cursed myself for allowing us to come outside without bringing a rifle and one of the guns Robby and Dad used against the Unstoppable Soldiers.
If I didn’t start being significantly smarter, more careful, Mel and I were not going to make it very far at all.
Then I saw what Mel was pointing at. Across a flat, snow covered field, just at the edge of a picket line of bent black trees, two wolves crept slowly from the edge of the woods. They kept their heads low to the ground as they quietly moved out into the field. Then they began running, directly toward Mel.
I was going to tell her to run back to the van as fast as she could, but she had already decided to do exactly that before the words could get unstuck from my throat.
I slipped in the snow and fell face-first at the front of the van. Something tugged at the suspender straps in back of my overalls, and I thought if this was what being torn apart by sharp teeth felt like, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.
But it wasn’t sharp teeth pulling at me. It was Amelie Sing Brees, and she was telling me to get up and move.
The wolves seemed to fly across the field without making any sound at all. It was an amazing thing, too, because I’d seen wolves in books and on film, but this real-world thing that had been happening to
me since I left the hole was almost too much to take in.
“Get up!” Mel pulled on the Y where my suspenders came together in the back.
I managed to stand, and we made it back into the safety of the van. We watched the wolves through the big side window. They paced around the van, watching, waiting for us to come out. They’d get close and sniff around. One of them pissed in the snow, then took a shit right by the front door.
And I said, “I think we’re going to have to make rules about going outside, Mel.”
In the Middle of a Disappearing Road
This new world was dangerous and beautiful.
In many ways, it was like the world in The Sinking of the Titanic. Mel and I were in our lifeboat, but our lifeboat was completely in the hands of the sea.
When we lived in the hole, the most dangerous thing we would ever have to face was maybe losing electricity, and that had only happened one time—the last day Mel and I were allowed to take our bath together, when I was eleven and Mel was ten. Everything else in the hole was completely sterile, routine, unsurprising. The hole offered us limited diversions: We could bowl, play pool, exercise, watch movies, read books, dance to music; there was even a shooting range where we’d all learned to fire rifles. But the hole lacked the sound of the wind, the bitter sting of wet snow falling, sunrises, and so many other things I couldn’t even begin to imagine after just the one day Mel and I had spent away from the place.
We did not watch television that night. I lit a candle—we people of the hole kept candles everywhere—and I told stories to Mel about how I’d constructed the model of the outside world, only based on artifacts in the library or things my father had told me. Of course, like Breakfast, my visible man, I had no way of knowing for certain whether or not my model was an accurate representation, if it was better, or maybe if it was worse than the truth had been.
During the night, the wolves retreated to the edge of the woods. More came. They howled and yapped a song about hunger and loneliness while they stared across the field at the light inside our van.
I thought they sounded like Bigfoot, but I wasn’t going to say that to Mel.
We lay in our beds listening to them, listening to all the noise of the world for the first time. And Mel and I talked about all the things we would look for out here, out of the hole, until we fell asleep.
• • •
The following day it rained, and by midmorning the vanished road reappeared ahead of us.
One of the things my two fathers had left in the motorhome was a collection of softcover books containing road maps of all the states in the United States of America, none of which existed anymore, as far as we were concerned. The page for Iowa had been marked with a red X where the hole was located. I couldn’t help but trace my finger over that mark and feel the grooves of it, wondering whether it had been intentionally left for me by Dad or Robby.
I studied the map in my bed, listening to the music of the rain as it sang against the skin of our lifeboat.
“Mel, do you know we are on Highway 20, in Iowa, which is in the United States of America, which is on the continent of North America, which is in something else and something else, and on and on, without end?”
Mel looked up from her narrow couch-bed and smiled at me. “Doesn’t the rain sound like magic?”
So, naturally, before I started the van to drive down the now-visible highway leading toward a place called Waterloo, Mel insisted we go outside one more time to feel what rain was like.
This time I brought the small rifle.
The wolves had given up on us, I think.
I peed in the road behind the van while Mel stood guard with the rifle in the rain. She licked her lips and splashed the bottoms of her shoes in the roadway, where the rain pooled inside circular walls of the melting snow.
We climbed up into the front cab on the van and left the place where we’d gotten stuck—and unstuck—in the middle of a disappearing road.
“Robby knows how to fly,” I said.
“He what?”
I could sense Mel’s confusion as she turned in her seat to face me. I kept my eyes on the road. I was not very good at this driving thing.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But it doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Anyway, if anyone bothered to look closely at the books your brother was bringing into the library, it wouldn’t have been much of a secret. Robby knows how to fly.”
Keeping secrets in the hole was impossible.
Except, maybe, for the one I kept from Mel.
Secrets had their own fondness for chewing their way out of the people in the hole, where, as my father had told me, we lived like hippies, without embarrassment or inhibitions. It was like the time Louis, who is Amelie’s father and the official cook for the hole, confessed to us all that he was actually married to someone else besides Connie, who is Robby and Mel’s mother. Robby had a different dad.
Louis’s wife lived in China. Louis came to America to work and find a place for his family to live. He found Iowa and Connie Brees instead.
Louis confessed this over a dinner of roasted rabbit in wild-onion gravy with apples. He said he couldn’t stand holding the secret inside any longer, that it was eating its way through his chest.
Later that night, Dad told me where China was located. Then he explained to me what being married was, which is when he confessed that he was never married to my mother, or to Robby, for that matter; although he told me he and Robby had pretended to get married in a Lutheran church in Cedar Falls when Robby was eighteen and Dad was just seventeen years old—a little more than one year after they came to the hole. I didn’t understand it. Pretending to be married looked just like being married to me, but what do I know? It was all very confusing—all this never-being-married and being-married confusion, and China, Cedar Falls, Robby and Dad, and Lutheran churches.
Dad and Robby were strictly opposed to us pretending to do church things in the hole, even though Wendy had forced me to do it after the incident with my penis in the bath. Wendy and Shannon, my mother, made us celebrate Christmas, too. This was one of Wendy’s rules for the hole. Christmas. I had no idea what it all meant, how it assembled into a model of my life.
Sometimes, a lot of times, it felt like the hole was crushing me.
What else didn’t I know about life as a human before the hole?
When Louis made his confession—and he wept openly, by the way—everyone looked at Connie, to see what her reaction would be. Louis pressed his hands to his eyes and sobbed. A bubble of snot came out of his right nostril, and a little bit of gravy ran down his chin. I looked at Mel. We were scared, I could tell. Displays of emotion like that never really happened in the hole, which, as I said, infected us all with a kind of bland sterility.
But Connie laughed so hard I was afraid she might stop breathing right there during dinner.
The rabbit was good.
She said, “Louis! We’ve been here for more than ten years! How the hell does that matter now, after all this?”
That happened around the same time I was forbidden to take baths with Mel. It was all this marriage stuff, and inhibitions, and the electricity of being naked with someone that must have done me in, I decided.
But what I’d meant when I told Mel that Robby could fly was that her brother had learned how to fly an airplane. And that Robby had kept his airplane at a small airfield outside this place called Waterloo.
This was what my father and Robby had confessed to me.
Well, among other things, I mean.
Robby kept dozens of aviation manuals and flight-training films in our library in the hole. I had asked him about them, so it was not a secret. And although I’d asked Dad and Robby about flying, Dad said that Wendy and my mother would most likely disapprove if they found out the boys would sometimes go up into the sky, and that they had even flown as far away as a place called Kansas at one point.
They did not find any people in Kansas.
&nbs
p; Dad told me they’d landed Robby’s plane in a place called Junction City, so they weren’t expecting to find human beings, anyway.
When I asked them if I could sneak away and go up in Robby’s airplane with them, my dad’s eyes changed. It was because Mom had said never, and slapped my father, on that one day when I was thirteen and the boys had taken me with them, away from the hole.
That was not a secret either.
Robby showed me pictures of the type of plane he’d learned to fly. It was called a PA-46 Malibu. It made me sad and anxious to learn that Robby’s airplane could carry six people. I desperately wished that I could see the world from up in the sky, that I could detach myself from the hole and the pull of all this gravity.
Robby’s airplane looked like this:
Dad told me that he’d had to get very drunk before agreeing to go up in an airplane with Robby, even though he’d waited on the ground a number of times and watched Robby prove he was capable of operating it. It was hard to get used to, he told me, because although he trusted Robby completely, my father didn’t trust the plane, in general.
I would have gone without getting drunk first.
The PA-46 Malibu was actually Robby’s third airplane.
Robby’s first airplane was something called an ultralight. He said the ultralight was uncomfortable and cold, but it was as easy to use as a lawnmower. Then he had to explain what a lawnmower was, even though he confessed—and this was no secret—that he’d never mowed a lawn in his life.
Robby crashed the second plane, which was also a PA-46 Malibu. It skidded on ice, just like the Ford truck I learned how to drive, and then it went in a ditch and sheared off its left wing and bent the propeller. Dad and Robby laughed about that story.
When they laughed like that with me, I could always see how much they loved each other.
Like I said, the hole was usually very sterile, as far as emotion was concerned.
So Robby got himself a new plane, which was the one they’d taken all the way to Junction City, Kansas, and back. Robby told me they were going to fly farther and farther away from the hole, and that he was sure they would eventually find other people and some place better than the hole. Thinking about such things made my rib cage feel like it might explode. I wanted to fly with Robby and Dad so bad my mouth watered.