The Flying Troutmans

by Miriam Toews

  Logan was wearing shiny, black basketball shorts way down low on his hips, with blood red boxers bubbling up on top, like he’d cut a major artery in his ass. He’d taken his T-shirt and hoodie off and his back was shiny with sweat. He was skinny and pale. Scars, faded hickeys and plaster cast. Where had he got that scar from anyway? He was darting around under the net, blocking and being blocked by imaginary players and going in for layup after layup.

  Hey, gangster, I said, your pants are falling off.

  He whirled around and then back again, to the net, and caught his rebound and stood there breathing heavily and looking at me.

  What are you doing here? he asked me.

  Give me that, I said. He threw me his ball and I took a few shots and missed.

  Okay, I said, quick game of Horse, let’s hurry, Thebes is alone in the room.

  I thought you’d be really mad, said Logan. It had started to rain and Marvin Gaye was singing “What’s Going On” softly in the van.

  I am really mad, I said, but I don’t know what to do about it.

  He beat me at Horse and then as we walked to the van we took turns throwing the ball, hard, at each other. I aimed for his head but he caught it every time and beaned it back at mine.

  Jerk, I said.

  Control freak, he said.

  What? I said. You have got to be kidding me.

  Not really, he said, you’re—

  I’m gonna break your other arm, I said.

  We got into the van and it wouldn’t start and I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my hand the way my father used to do when his car, along with all the other aspects of his life, broke down.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, I said, now you’ve killed the battery. I tried again.

  Well, don’t flood it, man, said Logan.

  I thought about the other options I’d had that evening, the roads less travelled. I could have been necking with a sweet, American hippie in the back of a truck under a full yellow moon. At the very least I could have been asleep with Thebes, the human giraffe, all tangled up around me. Or, maybe, I could have been in Paris singing like Piaf and swinging from street lamps with a bottle of Bordeaux in one hand and Marc at an open window with a flower box, beckoning me to join him upstairs for some gallant lovemaking and some shrugging off of life’s tiresome little tragedies.

  How did you find me? asked Logan.

  By looking, I said.

  I’m just asking, he said, you don’t have to—

  Just…you know what? I said. I shook my head. Let’s not talk. Let’s pray.

  I don’t pray, he said.

  Do now, I said. Pray that this fucking piece of shit will start so we can get the hell out of here.

  We were quiet for a minute. Our eyes were closed. Okay, I said. Here we go. I tried to start the van and nothing happened.

  We gave up on prayer and got out of the van and played another game of Horse and then tried the van again. This time it started, and we took off for the motel.

  Somehow I’d lost my room key, maybe I’d left it in Adam’s truck, and Logan hadn’t bothered to take one when he left, so I had to go to the front desk and ask for another one. The woman asked me if I had a little girl with me.

  Well, yeah, I said, she’s in the room.

  She’s been making some long-distance phone calls all the way up to Canada, said the woman. I had to help her with the code.

  Thanks, I said. I’m really sorry—

  I thought about calling the police, said the woman.

  What? I said. Why?

  She was all alone, said the woman. How was I supposed to know you hadn’t left her there?

  Yeah, well, yeah, but…I know, but she was okay, right? I had to go find this guy—I pointed at Logan—and I did check on her at one point…I know. I know. Normally…I left her a note, I added.

  The woman turned around and started fiddling with the fax machine. The sun was coming up.

  All right, I said. Can I just…okay, thank you, really, thank you for not calling the cops. I appreciate it.

  Checkout’s at eleven, she said.

  Thebes was sitting on the edge of the bed. She’d changed out of her dirty white suit and back to her old royal blue terry cloth outfit. She was looking at the TV but it wasn’t on. Her hands were folded in her lap and she didn’t say anything when we came in.

  Thebie, I said. I sat down beside her and put my arms around her. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? You got my note, right? Are you hungry?

  Logan came over and put his hand up for five but she didn’t lift hers. Thebes? he said. She began to cry. Logan sat down on the bed and said he felt so bad, this was all his fault, he would let her sit in the front of the van and do poetry with her if she wanted him to. Or crafts, or whatever. She could have permanent control of the remote.

  I took her hands in mine and saw thin red scratch marks on the inside of her wrists. Thebie, I whispered. I kissed her hands. Thebie, I said again.

  Logan hadn’t noticed. He got up and said he was going to have a shower and went into the bathroom. Then he came back out.

  Thebes! Dude! he said. You found my knife! Thanks! He went back into the bathroom.

  Thebes, I said. What did you do? She didn’t say anything. Please, Thebie, talk to me, I said. Tell me what happened, okay? I won’t tell anyone, I promise. Not even Logan. I won’t tell a soul.

  She told me she had woken up and we were gone and she was afraid and worried. She had noticed that the van was gone too. She hadn’t seen the note until later. She didn’t know what to do at first. Then she decided to call the hospital to see if she could talk to Min. She phoned the front desk to ask for help, and eventually, after six or seven tries, managed to get through to the hospital. The nurse told her it was the middle of the night and Thebes said she was sorry to be calling so late but Min was her mom and she really needed to talk to her. Somehow, for some reason, the nurse had said all right, she’d see if she could wake Min up. Then a few minutes later Min was on the phone. She said hello. Thebes was so excited she was jumping from bed to bed. Min! she said. It’s me! At that point in the story Thebes started crying again. Logan came out of the washroom.

  What’s up? he said. What’s wrong?

  I told him I needed to talk to Thebes, alone, and asked him to go back into the washroom. He said no problem and left.

  What did she say? I asked Thebes. She was crying too hard to answer. I bet she was so happy to hear your voice, I said. I held her some more and let her cry. What did she say? I asked her again. Finally, Thebes had stopped crying long enough to speak.

  She kept calling me Hattie, she said. She thought I was you.

  She did? I said.

  And every time I’d say no, no, Min, this is Thebes, it’s Thebie. Theodora. Remember? But she didn’t know who I was and she just kept calling me Hattie and asking me if I had the tickets for some show she wanted to see and I didn’t know what to say. I kept saying this is Thebes, this is Thebes. And then she’d say like, oh, Hattie, what are we going to wear or stuff like that and then finally I just said no, I didn’t have the tickets but I’d get them and I’d call her back. And that was it.

  Oh god, Thebes, I said. She’s on so much medication, you know? And she’d probably been fast asleep, like in the middle of a dream or something of when she was young, and probably right after she hung up she thought to herself, wait, hold on! That was Thebes! Not Hattie! But she couldn’t call you back because she didn’t know where you were calling from and probably the nurse made her go back to bed, and tomorrow when we call her it’ll all be clear and we’ll just…laugh, right?

  Thebes didn’t think anybody was going to be laughing. No, she said, well, maybe. Well, no. She said she guessed she should have that bath I’d been talking about before. Wash her hair, all that.

  Logan came out of the washroom and I asked him for just two more minutes alone with Thebes. Yep, he said, and turned around again.

  So, then, after you talked to Min…you did thi
s? I said. I touched her wrists. She said yeah, but she wasn’t serious. She was just fooling around and bored and didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t meant it. I thought of all the times Thebes had pretended to be somebody else on the phone and now when she was being herself it hadn’t worked out.

  Hey, come over here, I said, and led her by the hand to the window. See, I said, look at that. I pointed to the sun the way Adam had earlier directed me to the moon. Over there, I said. I didn’t know what to say but I kept talking. It’s coming up, I said. It’s shining like a champ. I didn’t know what to do besides pointing out something that was constant in her life, even if it was only an uninhabitable ball of fire that you couldn’t look at without flinching or experiencing pain.

  Yeah, so? said Thebes.

  Yeah, I said, you see? See what? What was I trying to accomplish? I told Thebes about how when Min and I were kids we got to see a solar eclipse and the whole world went dark. We wore welding helmets, I said. Min got them from some body shop guys she knew. We were out in a field with these giant black things on our heads, they covered our faces, we looked like Darth Vader, we were laughing, Min was standing there all, Luke, I am your father, you know, and waiting for it to happen, it only happens once, maybe twice, in a person’s lifetime. Min was super-excited about it but I hadn’t really cared. Oh, the sun gets obliterated, day turns to night, big whoop, but she forced me out there, she came to my school and dragged me out of class, and we lay on our backs in this field and watched the whole thing, it was so wild, it was amazing, and Min told me that she loved the sun, that if the sun was ever permanently erased she wouldn’t know what to do, but as long as the sun was around, you know, she was okay, and the thing about the eclipse for her was not about the sun being covered up and the uniqueness of that but about it coming back. You know? So…there it is, again, you know?

  Sure, said Thebes. She patted my knee.

  Think it’ll rain? I asked her.

  Why should it? she said.

  I understood what my mother had gone through with Min. How she’d tried so hard to come up with something, anything, to jar Min’s thinking, to get her to laugh or to hope or to live.

  It’s an illness, she told me one afternoon in the car, it’s not rational. I don’t know what to say to her any more. Sometimes I pray that God will take her, that she’ll die, and this will all be over.

  I hadn’t known what to say to that. If I’d had a knife at the time I’d probably have been carving random thoughts into the dash too, like Logan.

  Later that evening she apologized for scaring me. She told me she didn’t really want to kill herself, she was just so tired and desperate and afraid of losing Min and of not understanding what it was she was supposed to be doing to help her.

  Help me to die.

  No, never.

  I thought of those cheesy Love is…cartoons. Love is…killing your sister when she asks you to? Love is…refusing to kill your sister when she asks you to? I had trouble deciding between leaded and unleaded at the gas station and skim or 2% at the 7-Eleven, how was I supposed to choose the definition of my love for Min?

  One day I came home from school and found Min taping up the windows of the car in the garage. I asked her why she’d waited until four in the afternoon, when she knew I’d be coming home, to tape up the windows. She told me it had taken her some time to get going that morning and she started laughing and I got really mad and shoved her against the car and told her I wished she was a dog because dogs don’t kill themselves and she said she wished she was a dog too, and then she started to cry and I told her I was sorry for shoving her against the car and she went in and I peeled off all the tape from the windows and made a big ball out of it and threw it on the roof of the house. When I went inside, she handed me two bullets. Here, she said, take these too. I asked her why she had bullets, did she have a gun, and she said no, she didn’t have a gun. I went outside and threw the bullets on the roof and then went back in and watched TV with Min for a few hours until dinner. Min tried to say a few things to me but every time she started to talk I’d put my hand up and say, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I should have listened to every word she had to say but I was so freaked out that even the stupid, predictable words coming from the TV didn’t make any sense to me.

  Thebes, I said, do you want to have a pillow fight?

  Do you?

  Well, I don’t know, it could be fun…do you?

  I guess, if you do.

  So for the next half-hour or so, while the Dickwad family in the room next to us pounded on their walls and told us to shut up, I fought the kids with a Polyfil pillow and eventually let them beat me into a fetal position on the floor. It was maybe seven-thirty or eight in the morning. I had to get the van into a shop, but this time we were all going together.

  First, though, Thebes had a long, hot bath and I washed her hair and tried to dig the chunks of dirt out of her scalp without removing her brains. How long before this dye comes out? I asked her.

  I don’t know, she said. Ten or twelve washes.

  Well, shit, I said, you’ll be like twenty-two years old before it’s gone.

  Your mama, she said.

  No, yours, I said and she splashed water in my face.

  fourteen

  WE WERE PACKED UP, READY TO GO, Thebes was clean and shiny, in her secondary white outfit, and Logan was making a Herculean effort to be charming in spite of having had no sleep that night and no access to the remote control. There was a knock at the door. I thought it would be the cops, the front desk woman with a registered complaint, or the people in the next room waving nunchuks and cans of mace, but then I remembered that this was the United States and all that would happen was that we’d get our faces blown off and die instantly.

  See who it is, Lo, I said. He peered through the peephole and said it was some dude in a toque and he was carrying a ton of stuff.

  Like, weapons? I said.

  No, said Logan, like casseroles.

  It was Adam. I was so happy to see him. I was inordinately happy to see him. I threw my arms around him and all the stuff he had and hauled him into the room and introduced him to Logan and Thebes, who were looking slightly perplexed. I told them how I knew Adam and Adam told them that he’d seen both of them last night without them seeing him.

  You’re a pretty shooter, he told Logan, who mumbled something, and then Adam told Thebes her hair was awesome and she smiled shyly and thanked him for noticing. She showed him a few of her kung fu moves and he taught her one he knew.

  He’d made the casseroles himself as soon as he had dropped me off at the court, and he also brought some CDs he’d burned and a bag of weed. I tossed the bag into my backpack before Logan could see it and thanked Adam for everything and then I tried to lift him off the ground, which was stupid, and told him we were about to check out and find a mechanic and then hit the road to Twentynine Palms. He said he knew of a guy who could fix our van for really cheap, and so we followed him in his truck to this guy’s place way out on one edge of Flagstaff. When we were driving Thebes asked if Adam was a methamphetamine addict or a scam artist and I said no, I didn’t think he was either of those things, and he wasn’t actually from Flagstaff. And he’s not a ghost either, I said.

  I almost drove off the road in an effort to keep up with Adam and to surreptitiously observe Thebes in her post-trauma recovery. I didn’t know if it was true that she hadn’t really meant to hurt herself. Maybe she hadn’t really meant to kill herself. I didn’t know if this was a typical thing for an eleven-year-old to do when her mother couldn’t remember who she was and she was on her way to visit a father who also probably couldn’t remember who she was.

  I’m gonna see if I can use this mechanic’s phone and I’ll call Min again, I told her.

  I wanna talk to her too, said Logan.

  Yeah, of course, I said. Then it occurred to me that maybe I had just made a tactical error. I’d assumed that Min would be more coherent on the phone duri
ng the day, when she wasn’t under the soporific influence of the blue torpedoes, but maybe she’d be just as spaced as before and this time not only would she not know Thebes, she wouldn’t know Logan, or me, for that matter, and we’d all want to open up a vein.

  I followed Adam onto a gravel driveway and into a yard cluttered with the decaying body parts of old cars, trucks and tractors.

  Doesn’t look like he’s got much of a track record of fixing things, said Logan. A pit bull came flying out of nowhere, barking, and hurled himself against the side of Adam’s truck. Holy shit, man, said Logan, I don’t do pit bulls. Don’t open your door. Thebes said she wasn’t afraid and put her hand on the door handle and Logan grabbed it and said, No, Thebie, don’t, those dogs are banned in Canada.

  Give it some of the casserole, I told Thebes. Logan, let her go, you can stay in the van if you want. Hell yeah, he would, thanks, he said. He put his headphones on and dropped out of view.

  Adam had got out of his truck and was patting the dog and talking to a guy who’d come out of the house. He turned around and waved at us to come on over there. Thebes and I got out of the van to see what was what. Adam told us the guy’s name was Freak and we all introduced ourselves. Freak did the entire hand slapping, punching thing with Thebes, skilfully, and then also told her that he dug her hair and stylin’ holster. And then he went over to the van for a look under the hood.

  He’s the real deal, said Adam. He’ll fix it.

  What’s the dog’s name? said Thebes.

  Lucille, said Adam. After Freak’s mom.

  Freak came back over to us and said he’d have the van fixed in two hours, max, and we could hang out and do whatever we wanted while he worked.

  How’d you get that fur and shit on your front bumper? he asked.

  We hit a deer, I told him.

  I’ll Power Vac it off, he said. But I don’t know if I can fix the dent. I told him there was a boy in the van and not to worry about him, he was afraid of Lucille.