The Flying Troutmans

by Miriam Toews

  Is that true? the guy asked Logan.

  Yeah.

  This your aunt? he asked Thebes.

  Nothing.

  Hey there, darlin’, said the guy, this your aunt?

  Nothing.

  Logan turned around and looked at her. I stared straight ahead into the great nation of America, waiting for the onset of dogs and AK-47s.

  She doesn’t talk, said Logan. Like, she can’t. She’s profoundly retarded.

  The guy looked at me. She don’t talk? he said.

  Right, I said. She makes sounds sometimes but it’s impossible to know what she means. I felt Thebie’s foot through the back of my seat, gradually exerting pressure.

  Her folks should get her checked out, said the guy.

  Oh, I know, they have, but—

  It’s your guys’ health care, right? he said. Socialism is really nice in theory but not when you’ve got a retarded kid that needs treatment, right?

  I smiled. Yeah, exactly, I said.

  It’s too bad, he said. He looked at Thebes, shook his head.

  I know, I said. Logan cleared his throat and started tapping the dashboard with his foot.

  All right, said the guy, well, y’all have a good reunion. It’s real sweet you’re taking her with you.

  Hey, yeah, I said. Thanks. She likes to travel.

  Thebes picked up a book and lay down in the back seat. What are you reading? I asked her.

  Corporate Media: Threat to Democracy, she said.

  Thebes, man, said Logan, just say “this” and then hold up the book. God. Like you would actually say “Corporate Media: Threat to Democracy.”

  Well, she said, I don’t date a girl who wets her bed.

  She doesn’t wet her bed, said Logan.

  She wears Batman bedsheets, said Thebes.

  Logan turned up the volume on his Discman and then stuck his head out the window like one of those stop signs that pops out of the side of a school bus. Thebes said that if she was eighteen and old enough to drink she’d start a book club.

  We drove straight south into the heartland. Billboards told us not to abort our fetuses or to let our sins get us down or to worry about our bad credit and criminal records. For instant cash all we had to do was call a certain number. Bingo. Logan pulled his head back into the van and took a knife from his pocket.

  What the hell is that? I asked him. A shiv?

  Don’t say “shiv,” he said. He started to carve something into the dashboard.

  Whoa, I said, stop that. He kept carving. Stop that! I said again.

  What’s he doing? asked Thebes. What’s he doing? She was sucking on ice that she’d taken out of the cooler and water was dripping down her face and onto her terry cloth outfit. She took an ice cube out of her mouth and rubbed it on her forehead and then popped it back into her mouth. She was wearing a necklace with a huge, pear-sized plastic jewel dangling from it and a ring with an angel, arms outstretched.

  Where’d you get that? I asked her.

  Logan, she said. For Christmas.

  My hands were shaking. We passed a lot of fields and a few houses and a barn with giant words painted on the side. Bubba Where Are You, it said.

  I miss Min, said Thebes. She leaned forward and put an arm around each of us.

  I know, I said. I wanted to ask her why she regretted being born, if it was a knife-in-the-heart all-consuming regret or an intermittent, passing regret like a loose tooth you worry with your tongue every once in a while. I didn’t know how to say the words. I didn’t know how I’d answer her answer.

  Why can’t she be happy? asked Thebes.

  She often is, I said. Life takes a long time. What the hell does that mean, anyway? Why would I say that to a kid who was already regretting being born?

  Thebes sat back and tapped her Sharpie against her teeth. In the rear-view mirror I saw her squint against the setting sun like a desperado trying to get oriented. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I was bracing myself for another question I wouldn’t be able to answer. But she didn’t ask it. Just kept knocking on her teeth with her marker and staring out at the darkening world. Logan had ignored my plea about not carving into the van and had written into the dash the words Fear Yourself.

  Okay, that’s it, we’re stopping somewhere to eat, I said. This is what parents do when they’re stumped, I thought. They feed their children.

  Like what, said Logan, are we gonna graze in a field? I don’t see any restaurants.

  Sandwiches in the cooler, I said. Ham and cheese. There’s fruit.

  Awesome, he said. Budget.

  We’re not gonna eat in restaurants the whole time, I said. I had a wad of cash in my backpack that I hoped would get us through. I pulled into a rest stop next to a shitting chihuahua and two old RVers reading a newspaper at a picnic table.

  We got out and walked around awhile, stretching our bodies, enjoying less proximity to each other, and I smoked a cigarette behind the women’s can until Thebes caught me and told me I was going to get AIDS. There was only one picnic table, so the three of us squeezed in next to the old couple and ate our sandwiches.

  Where are you headed? the man asked.

  Um, Murdo? I said.

  Never heard of it, he said.

  I told him I hadn’t either until yesterday.

  Honey, said the woman, ask your mom for a napkin. She was talking to Thebes, who had mayonnaise and mustard running down her face.

  Logan ignored us all. He had his giant air traffic controller headphones on and his hoodie up and was staring intensely at the chihuahua like he was wondering what the most painful way of killing it might be.

  Is that your natural colour of hair? the man asked Thebes.

  Yo! Dude! It’s purple! What do you think?

  I gave her a nudge under the table and passed her a paper bag to wipe the stuff off her face. She put it over her head and drew a face on it, blind. Big cartoon eyes and a mouth where the nose should be. I told her to go get the Frisbee, and without removing the bag she stumbled and weaved and crashed her way to the van. She finally took the bag off her head and she and I threw the Frisbee around for a while before Logan joined in. He tried to make each of his throws deflect off the van’s windshield and then he decided that we should play Frisbee through the van, with both side doors open and Thebes sitting on the seat in the van. She was entirely down with that and Logan had a blast whipping the Frisbee inches from her face, until he accidentally hit her and her nose bled, she cried, he apologized, said she was stand-up for playing the game, apologized again, and again, she forgave him with a karate kick to the ’nads, which he handled with an off-hand grace, said he deserved it, the old people shook their heads like bobblehead dolls and we all hit the road once again.

  We kept driving south down the I-29, past the tiny hamlets of Wahpeton and Harkinson and Sisseton. Thebes said we should drive in directions that spelled something, like a giant word carved by us into the American landscape.

  What word did you want to spell? I asked her.

  Min, she said.

  I traced the letters of my sister’s name in my mind and realized there were no curves, so it might even have been possible to write her name in giant, hundred-mile-long letters if the roads had matched up with the lines, but they didn’t. There were rivers and mountain ranges and deserts and gullies that separated M-I-N from posterity on the map.

  By the time the sun had almost set, the kids had dozed off again. Thebes was curled up in a ball in the front now and Logan had stretched out in the back. I could hear the faint bass coming from his headphones and ice cubes sloshing around in the cooler. Giant, endless semis blasted past us and I waved to the drivers every time but they couldn’t see me in the dark. I was looking for a cheap motel with a pool and free breakfast.

  Thebes woke up and asked me what was going on. Help me find a motel, I said.

  Will you give me a dollar?

  Yeah.

  What kind of motel?

  Like in Psycho—have
you seen it?

  Yeah, she said.

  Yeah? I said. Really? Aren’t you kind of young?

  Everybody knows Psycho, she said.

  Yeah, but it’s an old movie, I said.

  Logan owns the original, said Thebes. She started doing the music from the shower scene. She told me that one time she’d pulled a Norman Bates on Min and it had gone badly. She was in the shower so I decided to attack her, she said. It wasn’t a good idea. It was a bad choice, like they say in Guidance, she told me, which I never go to any more, by the way, since Mrs. Zefferelli told us that ultimately we’re all alone in the world. Oh, said Thebes, going into one of her voices. Like, thanks, man! You’re the Guidance teacher and you’re basically, like, okay, kids, get lost, every man to himself, you’re a rock, I’m an island, we’re alone, we have no one, we die and then we rot. Scene.

  What happened with the Norman Bates thing? I asked her.

  Min screamed, she said. Okay, that worked. But then she stopped screaming and she sat down in the corner of the shower and started crying. I just stood there on the other side of the curtain and whispered that I was sorry and all that. I didn’t know what to do. And then I decided to stick my hand around the curtain and try to hold Min’s hand.

  Did you find it? I asked.

  Yeah, said Thebes, she took my hand and so we were just holding hands like that, with the curtain between us. And she was sitting down all naked and crying. My sleeve was getting soaked but I didn’t mind.

  That’s nice, though, I said. I mean…holding her hand like that. Like walking in the rain.

  And then I told her again that I was sorry for scaring her, said Thebes. I told her I was being Norman Bates, and she was all, like, she knew that, she just hadn’t been expecting it, that’s all.

  Mmm, yeah, well…, I said.

  And then, said Thebes, I realized my Norman Bates would never work if she expected to expect it every time. I mean the whole point—

  Yeah, I said. Yeah.

  Thebes spotted a motel, low-slung with lots of neon, a tiny outdoor pool and a basketball net. There was a permanent vacancy sign flickering on and off in the window next to the front desk and a sign that said No Repares Aloud in Lot. Logan shot hoops outside in the dark while Thebes and I checked in.

  He’s gonna have to stop that at eleven, said the woman behind the desk.

  When we got to the room we stood next to the bed and stared at it. Thebes still had half-moons of dried blood around the edges of her nostrils from being hit in the face with the Frisbee. Do you ever wash? I asked her. Am I supposed to tell you to?

  She decided that instead we’d all go swimming. She told me to go over to the window and look outside while she changed into her bathing suit.

  There were two people sitting in a car in the parking lot, an older guy in a suit and a girl with a ponytail and an orange ball cap. The girl was giving the guy a hand job. Her arm was flying back and forth fast, like a school kid rubbing out mistakes with an eraser. It looked painful. The guy’s eyes were squeezed shut.

  Tada! said Thebes.

  Hey, cute suit, I said. Let’s go! I tried to hustle her away from the window.

  You don’t even have your bathing suit on, she said. I’ll look away and you can change.

  No, I don’t feel like swimming, I said. I’ll watch you, though. I could throw things into the water that you could dive for. Hey, I said, did you know that right after you were born Min and Cherkis put you in a little pool and you swam, naturally, like a champ.

  Really? said Thebes. Were they trying to drown me?

  No, I said, of course not, it was just something that they’d heard infants knew how to do.

  Years ago I’d asked my mother the same question about Min. Had she been trying to drown me in Acapulco? She said well, no, she didn’t think so, Min had been scared and frantic and hadn’t known that she was pushing me under, that was all. After a while, I let the story stand. I hadn’t wanted to believe my version of it anyway.

  At our father’s funeral Min held my hand and whispered in my ear that she’d take care of me, that she’d make sure I was okay, that she’d be strong for both of us. I nodded yeah, great, thanks, does that caring come with a complimentary drowning, because didn’t you just try to…but no, I didn’t say that. But I did pull my hand out of hers and stick it in the waistband of my ugly dress so she wouldn’t try holding it again. I never doubted her conviction and her desire to be strong for both of us but I got this idea into my head that Min wanted me dead in order to protect me from some horrible danger in life that only she knew about, a fate worse than death, as they say. That she was, in fact, trying to take care of me. I wanted to ask her about that and have it all verified. But how do you begin a conversation like that? If she had come right out and said it, Hattie, I wish you were dead, I’d have nodded in acknowledgment. I’d have told her calmly that I knew it. And maybe, from that admission, we could have established a new way of being sisters. One that might have had me looking over my shoulder frequently but at least it would have been out in the open.

  Logan and Thebes goofed around in the pool and I used our Frisbee to scoop a dead bird out of the shallow end when they weren’t looking. Logan was floating on his back with an empty plastic wineglass balanced on his stomach and Thebes was trying to fill it up with filthy pool water that she was squirting through her teeth. Then the hand-job girl came cannonballing into the pool from out of nowhere, or the parking lot, and bobbed over to Logan and Thebes.

  Are y’all saved? she asked.

  From what, yo? said Thebes. Logan ignored the girl and kept floating around on his back, balancing the glass.

  The wrath of Christ, said the girl.

  Oh, that, said Thebes. I don’t know if we all are saved. Let me put it to my bro. Logan? Are we all saved from the wrath of Christ?

  I am the wrath of Christ, said Logan.

  Oh, said Thebes. Hold up. I’ll ask my aunt. Hattie! she said. Are we all saved from the—?

  Thebes, I said, shhhhh. Yeah, we are. Tell her we are.

  Word, said Thebes. Yeah, we check out, she told the girl. Wanna play Keep It Up?

  So they played together awhile and I tried not to let the whole thing disturb the hell out of me.

  Later on Logan and Thebes fought about what to watch on TV and who should hold the remote and decided somewhat mutually on Nick at Nite and that nobody would hold the remote. I went to the lobby to make just a phone call to France. I knew he’d be in India but I just wanted to hear his voice on the answering machine. I was wrong, though.

  Marc said hello.

  Hey! I said.

  Hey, he said. Oh, hi!

  Aren’t you supposed to be in India?

  Oh, yeah…well, yeah. Yeah.

  Yeah.

  Yeeeahhh…

  Oh man.

  Hey…

  No, really, I said. Why am I such a loser?

  You’re not a loser, he said. Where are you?

  I’m not sure.

  Well…where are you?

  I really don’t know, I said. South Dakota.

  Wow.

  How’s your centre?

  What? he asked. What are you talking about?

  Did you find it? I asked.

  Hey…c’mon.

  Hey…go fuck yourself.

  You woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me…

  I hung up and then phoned back. I’m sorry, I said.

  No, no, he said. I had nothing to be sorry about. He was sorry. Really sorry. I started to cry. I listened to him tell me how beautiful and cool I was. Major kiss-off. It was so untrue. It was pathetic.

  I really thought you were going to an ashram, I told him.

  I really was going to, he said. Hey, can I put you on speaker?

  No, don’t, I said, okay? Just…And then what happened?

  Well, he said, now he was kind of seeing someone.

  Yeah, I said. I rested my head against the phone booth. The woman behind
the front desk was staring at me.

  Yeah, he said. So…yeah. Yeah. Yeahyeahyeah yeah.

  I couldn’t stop crying. I was trying to.

  Hey, Hat, he said. We had a great time. We had a good run.

  Yeah, I said. No bigger blast on earth.

  We really did, he said.

  Yeah. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Well, I said finally, I have to go back to the room.

  What room? he said.

  My motel room. I have to check on the kids.

  What kids? he asked.

  See you later, I whispered. Namaste.

  Thebes wouldn’t let me back in the room. She thought it was hilarious. Please, please open the door, I said. I started to cry all over again.

  I saw her eye through the peephole. Then the door whipped open and she said, Holy Moly, I’m just kidding around, Hattie, what’s wrong?

  There’s no mini-bar in here, is there? I said, and then flung myself onto the bed and wept like Jesus and was sweetly consoled by my sister’s children there in that shit-ass motel room in the middle of nowhere.

  I told them how pathetic I’d been, calling France just to hear a recorded voice and then being dumped all over again. Thebes wiped my forehead with a cool washcloth, something she said Min did for her when she was feeling sick, at least she used to, and told me a joke. How much does a polar bear weigh?

  I don’t know, I said.

  Enough to break the ice, hi, my name’s Thebes, can I buy you a drink?

  Logan said, That’s not a joke, that’s a lame pickup line. Then he said, Relationships, man…life is easy compared to relationships. Wanna smoke a joint?

  Ater-lay, I told him.

  Hey, said Thebes, I’m the one who invented Pig Latin. She pointed her finger at Logan. And don’t forget, little man, you need pot to spell impotent. She stared hard at him and he told her to shut up, but he was laughing. I told Logan it was really stupid to bring pot, not to mention knives, across the border and he said he hadn’t brought pot across the border, he’d got it from the girl in the pool. I didn’t know when that had happened. Kids are sneaky.

  Thebes sang “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” And then we all fell asleep together in the saggy stained bed while reruns of Laverne and Shirley and The Odd Couple droned on all night long and rats raided our cooler during breaks from relay-racing in the walls. I decided we’d look for partial rather than total dives from now on.