by Will Weaver
I woke to the sound of panting. The light was brighter now, a brilliant dry fog that stung my eyeballs. For a second I didn’t know where I was.
“Wind’s shifted,” my father said.
“This is hard,” Sarah groaned, pedaling and making a big show of being totally exhausted. I took a moment to savor the sight of my sister actually doing some work, then fished out my map.
“We’re just north of Little Falls. We’re on Highway 10 now,” my mother said.
“How much longer do we have to pedal?” Sarah asked.
The answer was a sudden slap-whacka, whacka!
“Chain off!” I said, springing into action. “Pull over. Nice and slow.”
My father spilled the sail as my mother steered us neatly onto the shoulder. When we’d stopped, they glanced at each other: It must have been a marriage moment, as I called them—something about working together.
“Good, because I have to pee anyway, plus I’m hungry,” Sarah said.
“You kids’ timing was always amazing,” my mother replied. She looked ahead up the highway to a cluster of buildings including a tall golden arches sign. “On our trips up north you always woke up about here—just before we stopped for gas and McDonald’s.”
“It’s probably closed and boarded up—like everything else,” Sarah said, looking toward the far-off yellow arches.
We climbed off and slapped dust from our clothes. There was a grove of short, shaggy pine trees, someone’s Christmas tree plantation, just off the expressway. My cabin was deep in the pines. I didn’t want anybody sneaking up on me. I kept all my important stuff hidden. You can’t trust nobody these days.
“Let’s push the Princess in here, out of sight, then walk,” I said.
After we secured the Princess out of sight, which necessitated dropping the mast, we waited as my mother put on “the vest.” It was a backpack sewn under a smock, from when she had us kids. Now the maternity blouse held all our money, papers, shot records, etc. As my mother shifted it over her belly, Sarah rolled her eyes (she thought it was embarrassing). My father thought it was funny. I thought it was clever, even brave of her. With the vest in place, she looked perfectly, naturally, pregnant.
“Nothing, not a word from anyone,” she warned us.
“Did we say anything?” I asked.
“No, but you were about to.”
We trudged along the shoulder toward the golden arches. In the parking lot were several farm tractors, dust free, plus a convoy of six tractor trailers.
“Here we are,” my mother said, “back to civilization. So to speak.”
We quickened our pace. I was hungry too.
As we approached the parking lot, a large man with a shaved head and a tattered NWO T-shirt swung out of the nearest cab and stood on the running board. Clearly an unemployed pro wrestler, now he carried a major-looking assault rifle.
“Good morning!” my mother said cheerfully.
“It’s just us, the Swiss Family Robinson,” Sarah said softly. I have to admit that, on rare occasions, she has a sense of humor. And she’s really not dumb, just pathetic most of the time.
“Do not approach the trucks,” the guard said, stiffening his back. He wore mirrored sunglasses. What a cliché, I thought. But that rifle was impressive.
“Just heading to the restaurant,” my mother said pleasantly. “It is open, yes?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” the guard growled.
My mother flashed him a smile. “Have a great day,” she said. Under her breath she added, “That guy has clearly taken too many body slams.”
Inside, the place was full of farmer types and businessmen. There was a major pause as they gave us the twice-over. We smiled. My mother waddled to the counter. Slowly their conversation resumed, but I kept looking around. It was odd to see a full restaurant of people drinking coffee and eating eggs and pancakes like it was back in the 1990s.
“Order me a number three, okay?” Sarah said as she headed to the bathroom. Several men followed her with their eyes. Behind the counter the greaseheads wore the usual short-sleeved stupid uniforms with shiny name tags that said SHERRI and JUSTIN and DAVE—ASST. MANAGER. Everybody had the usual perky smiles. Above the counter were the usual mug shots of burgers and drinks, though I noticed that the prices were blank.
“Maybe the sky’s not falling after all,” my mother said to my father as she looked around the place.
He said something back that made her laugh.
My parents (probably all parents) have coded language they’ve developed, and I can usually interpret it, but today I was too hungry to bother. It was just nice to see them together, talking. When we finished ordering, the cashier (Sherri) looked up brightly and said to my mother, “That will be ninety-two fifty.”
“Excuse me?” my mother asked.
The clerk repeated the price.
“Are you kidding?” My mother laughed. “Almost a hundred bucks for breakfast at McDonald’s?”
The clerk shrugged. Her smile slipped, and conversation died as people turned to stare.
My mother glanced about at the full restaurant, then back to the clerk. “So tell me, is everyone in this town rich? How do all these people afford such prices?”
“Well, actually they don’t,” Sherri murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, they live here.”
There was absolute silence in the restaurant. Sherri looked behind for help.
“Just pay,” I whispered to my mother.
“You mean you have two sets of prices?” my mother pressed.
Dave the Assistant Manager stepped forward. “That’s right, folks. One for local people. One for strangers.”
At the word strangers, the silence got even quieter.
“Miles is right,” my father said softly to my mother. “Just pay, and we’ll be on our way.”
My mother bit her lower lip and slapped down five twenty-dollar bills.
“Here or to go?” the clerk asked. Her cheerful face was back.
“Here!” my mother said. “If we’re going to pay over ninety dollars for breakfast, at least we deserve a damn table.”
We ate, and made sure we used plenty of syrup and catsup. My mother continued to fume over the prices, but the rest of us ate. And ate. It was like we’d never had fast food before. We were sweaty by the time we finished pancakes and eggs, juice and milk and coffees. A man in the next booth watched us eat. He had a kindly, round face and a seed-corn cap tilted to one side.
“You folks must have been hungry.” He smiled.
“You got that right,” my mother said.
“Passing through?”
“That’s right,” she answered.
“That’s good,” he said; his kindly smile slipped a bit.
My mother raised one dark eyebrow; she didn’t reply.
“What I mean is, we got more and more people think they got to get out of the cities,” the man said. “They think if they get themselves to a small town, other people will take care of them.” Men around him nodded.
“Nope, that wouldn’t be us,” my mother said, her voice picking up the edges of his speech, finding his own rhythms and bouncing them back. “We’re headed north … on vacation. Right, gang?”
We all nodded pleasantly, then bent low to wipe our mouths.
Outside, my father let out a long breath.
“That was scary,” Sarah said, looking over her shoulder.
“We’d best keep moving,” my father said, looking up at the sky. The light was grayer now, and the air felt cooler. I looked over my shoulder and saw white, round faces staring at us through the windows of McDonald’s. The truck convoy guard stood motionless as we passed. I could feel his eyeballs moving sideways behind his mirrors.
Back at the pine plantation I took some time to get the chain back on and inspect the running gear. I didn’t like the way the pumice had worn down the teeth on the main sprocket. The sharp points were rounded off a full eighth
inch. I considered oiling the chain but decided against it; the oil was picking up grit, and the grit was grinding down the metal points. I had two spare chains and a spare sprocket, but still, the amount of wear worried me.
“Everything okay, motorhead?” Sarah asked. It was her way of apologizing for being occasionally pathetic. There was a chance she might turn into a decent teenager someday.
“Ten four. We’re good to go.” I hoisted the mainmast and locked it in place.
“Maybe in a previous life you were a trucker,” Sarah said.
“Or a sailor,” my father said.
“Mechanic, I think,” my mother added.
It was their way of thanking me, and under my dust mask I smiled.
“The wind is switching to the northwest,” my father said. “Cold front coming in.” My father knew his weather; that always impressed me.
“Which means?” my mother said. After stashing the vest, she was back to her regular slim shape.
“Just like sailing. Means we may have to hunker in for a while somewhere and wait it out,” he said.
“But not here,” Sarah answered, looking over her shoulder toward the McDonald’s. “It’s way too creepy.”
“Up the road a ways. The Mississippi should be just ahead,” I said.
We pedaled briskly past the exit ramp and didn’t look back. My father tried to tack left and right against the wind, but the freeway was not wide enough to make the angling effective. Pedaling was harder and harder.
“It feels like we’re going uphill,” Sarah panted.
“We are, slightly,” I said. “We’re following the river, which flows south. In fact there’s almost five hundred feet of elevation drop from the headwaters to Minneapolis.”
“Ask Mr. Science,” Sarah said.
“Hey, I’ve done my homework—what have you done?”
“Children, children,” my mother said.
“It’s the syrup,” my father said to her. “The post-McDonald’s sugar burst, remember?” He looked at her.
“All too well!” she said. I could tell that she was smiling underneath her dust mask.
A couple miles north of the interchange, where the highway angles northwest, the wind turned full against us.
“Let’s pull in up ahead, by the river,” I called.
Nobody argued. When we stopped, I lowered her mast, and then we rolled the Princess off the road and carefully down by the bridge and the river. We lay on the dusty, grassy slope and got our breath. Above us, swallows fluttered and dipped through the bridge supports, annoyed at our presence. They had little mud nests tucked up under the massive concrete forms.
“So, here we are,” Sarah began.
“Good progress for day one,” I said.
Nobody said anything.
“How long we gonna be here?” Sarah said, looking up at the dark concrete roof.
“For a while. Until the wind shifts,” I said.
“So what do we do while we’re here?” Sarah asked.
“Whatever,” I said.
My father lay fully back and closed his eyes. Soon my parents were dozing and Sarah was reading. I checked the map. We were way more than halfway: at least ninety miles away from home, and fifty or less miles to go.
Birch Bay, that was our name for it. A log cabin on Gull Lake. It had belonged to my grandparents, whom I never knew, and was surrounded by birch and pine trees. We went there every summer for several weeks when my father was a teacher. In the last few years, however, we had made it up there only a couple of weekends during the summer. Birch Bay was one of the reasons I had wanted to get my driver’s license: so I could drive up to the cabin myself. There was an old garage with ancient tools—wood saws and planes and rasps and cutting chisels—and every summer I made a different little wooden boat. The cabin itself had a fieldstone fireplace and bunk beds in the loft. I loved it there. I even didn’t mind taking naps—as long as I could sleep outside on the big screened porch. Birch Bay always felt like the safest place in the world.
Unlike this gloomy spot under the freeway bridge. It was damp and smelled odd. Even the Mississippi River was siltier than I expected—as if somebody not far upstream was rinsing a huge brush full of white latex paint. Still, there weren’t so many dead fish drifting along now, not like in Minneapolis. Even as I thought that, I saw movement in the shallows. A carp nosed around the rocks, kissing them with his rubbery lips. He was sucking at algae of some kind. I stooped low and tried to get closer for a better look—but he saw me and made a bee line (a fish line?) toward deep water.
“Ha, ha,” Sarah said, watching me.
I sat down on a rock and flicked little pebbles into the water.
After a while Sarah said, “You know, it’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” I said without looking up.
“I’m reading this novel, but it’s like our lives are suddenly way stranger than fiction.”
I looked up. I shrugged. We were silent.
“When we get to Birch Bay, we’ll be fine,” I said.
She didn’t reply.
“I think we’ve got plenty of money,” I said softly, glancing at my parents. “Even the way food costs, we’ll be okay.”
“And if the money runs out?” she said. Her voice was suddenly not so tough.
“We’ll eat fish,” I said, pointing. The big old carp had eased back to the shallows just upstream; his dorsal fin poked out of the water and sent out ripples as he nuzzled the mossy rocks. “I’m going to see if I can sneak up on him.”
“Don’t hurt him!” Sarah said.
I let out an annoyed sound and took three or four steps closer. I was about to take another when the mortar round landed. A skipping, black-and-white mortar round that landed—PASHOOM—directly on the carp. Sarah shouted; I stumbled back, almost twisting my ankle; my parents jerked upright.
A huge eagle had snatched the carp.
“My God!” my mother cried.
Water sprayed as the eagle fanned its wings. It had come in low and hard, its yellow talons outstretched like spears. The carp twisted and flopped wildly in the eagle’s clutches, but he was a goner. The eagle tilted sideways and flapped its wide wings low over the water, the carp skipping and slapping along the surface, as the eagle slowly gained altitude.
“Amazing!” my father said as the eagle receded.
“Poor fish,” my mother said as she watched him disappear.
I could see that we had a ways to go before we became a hunting-and-gathering family.
As everybody relaxed again, I couldn’t. My mother turned on her little television, and I began to poke around the campsite. There was something about it I didn’t like. Maybe it was the signs of previous campers: broken glass, some McDonald’s wrappers, the remains of a campfire that had blackened the concrete overhead. One area smelled bad; in the rocks was a smudgy white flower of toilet paper. Gross. Camping here was too predictable. I didn’t like being this close to the freeway, plus anyone moving on or along the river would spot the Princess right away.
Nobody knew where I lived, not even that game warden. I used a different trail every time. In winter sometimes I wore my snowshoes backward. You can’t trust anybody these days.
“Turn down that stupid TV, will you?” I said to my mother.
She looked surprised, but obeyed.
I thought of the carp. The lesson here was not to splash around with your fin out of the water.
CHAPTER SIX
BUENA VISTA ON THAT FIRST DAY
“SO WHAT DO YOU WANT from me, anyway?” Mr. Kurz growled.
“I have this assignment to do for ninth-grade social studies,” I began.
“Speak up,” he said. “You’re mumbling.”
I cleared my throat. “It’s called an oral-history project?”
He looked at me blankly.
“Basically it means we’re supposed to talk.”
He was silent.
“Then I write down any stories you’d care to tell.�
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He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Stories?”
“Yes. Anything about your life.”
He drew back; his big white eyebrows rose and fell. “You don’t work for the government?”
I stared. “I’m in ninth grade.”
“That don’t matter. The government’s got spies of every kind. Every age. You can’t trust anyone.”
“Okay then,” I said softly.
He hoisted himself out of bed. He was fully dressed in a red plaid shirt, wool pants, and boots—high, well-oiled leather lace-ups that had seen some miles. It was like he was going hunting or hiking. He tottered over to an armchair by the window. The view was of the gray concrete wall of another wing of the rest home. Buena Vista … right.
“What direction is the wind today?” he asked suddenly.
“The wind? Ah … I don’t know.”
“A man should always know which way the wind blows,” he said. He tried to peer around the concrete corner of the building. “You can never tell here, ’cause you can’t see the leaves move.”
Mr. Kurz sank into his armchair, its back turned to me, and pulled a blanket over his legs. He picked up a paperback from a tall pile beside his chair and began reading. I looked closer at the books; they were all outdoor adventure and cowboy novels, many by Louis L’Amour. Mr. Kurz’s lips moved as he read.
Thought number one: Go see Litzke and get assigned a different geezer. But that would be humiliating. Thought number two: Hang out here, work on my own stuff, and make up the oral-history report. I was creative. I could patch something together for Litzke. Why not?
“So I’ll just sit for a while, if you don’t mind,” I said.
Mr. Kurz had no reply.
From my backpack I took out skateboard trucks and wheel assemblies that I’d just bought, on the cheap, from Ethan Farrell and Dante Billings, who were always getting new gear. I loved used skate stuff. I built excellent boards out of totally trashed equipment. There was nothing wrong with these particular wheel assemblies except for their bearings. One wheel turned hard, and the other had a rattle in it—but no big deal. Replace two sets of bearings at three bucks each, bolt on the tracks, and I had myself a totally rehabbed board.