He pulls a radio out of his backpack, plugs it in and sets it in between stations so that it plays only static. He takes the comforter off the bed and spreads it out on the floor.
We shut out the lights and in the darkness I want to talk to him and ask him one thousand other questions, but I don’t.
I’m here.
He’s allowed me to be here. I don’t want to do anything that might disturb the magic of the words: Suit yourself.
When I wake up he’s already packed and dressed and I’m pretty sure he’d have given me the slip if it weren’t for his tripping over the cord of the radio and causing a clatter so loud it yanked me right out of a dream.
“Where to?” I ask.
“Get up and maybe you’ll find out.”
Maria gives us egg sandwiches for the road. From her front stoop she wishes us luck.
Wishing somebody luck implies there’s something they’re headed toward—a place, a situation, somewhere luck might come in handy.
Wishing somebody luck implies there’s a destination.
A plan.
That unlike in the movie from yesterday, there’s a plot.
We thank her for the food, the cake, the room with its single bed, though nothing we say strikes me as enough, and we say goodbye and we begin to walk.
Bo breaks a four-hour silence to ask me if I’m hungry.
I’m pretty much always hungry. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at me. But if you put food in front of me, no matter what it is, you can be pretty sure I’ll eat it.
Zim is the same way.
We’ve talked about starting a reality show where we travel all over the world, to every obscure corner of the globe, and we eat whatever food people make us. We call our show We’ll Eat Anything. Obviously there are kinks to work out. We could use a better title. And there’s the matter of Zim’s sensitive stomach. But the show would seriously kick ass.
So yes, I’m hungry.
We go to a diner. The sign just says DINER in red neon that looks like it’s about to short out.
It feels great sitting down, even though I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. Some days I’ve run farther than we’ve walked, but something about the backpack, or the silence, has worn me to the bone.
We order burgers and milk shakes from a waitress who’s insanely cute. I mean, crazy, crazy cute. She’s got these shimmery lips and sparkly eyes. Her hair is held up on top of her head by a pair of chopsticks in a feat that seems to defy basic principles of gravity.
And yes, her tits are spectacular.
I invent a history for her on the spot. Home for the summer from a fancy college where she’s on scholarship. The quiet type in high school. She’s studying to be a molecular biologist. A poet, maybe.
“Anything else I can get you guys?” Her smile’s a killer.
“No thanks,” Bo says.
“All right then.” She stands a minute, watching Bo, waiting for him to say more, to give her a reason to linger, but he’s too lost to notice. She turns around and takes her order pad through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Bo stares out the window. The gravel parking lot. The occasional car driving past. A crow on a fence.
It’s hard to avoid talking when you’re the only two people sitting in a booth.
“She’s smoking,” I say.
“Who’s smoking?”
“No, I mean our waitress. She’s hot. Don’t you think?”
“Sure.” He goes back to the window.
My cell phone rings. I hit ignore when I see it’s Pearl. She’ll be full of questions.
I shove the phone in my backpack and take out a deck of cards.
“Wanna play something?”
“Nah.”
I start shuffling them. I do a bridge. Dov taught me how. We used to play this game called Knock-Knock, but it’s been a long time. I can’t remember the rules. All I know is Dov used to clobber me. He claimed to have the luck of the elderly on his side.
The crow on the fence has turned into a dozen crows. Loud and excited. Something heavy is going down in Crow Land.
Bo isn’t even watching. He’s looking someplace else.
“Check out that flock of crows,” I say. “They’re seriously pissed.”
“It’s a murder.” Our waitress is back with our burgers. She puts the baskets down in front of us and takes a bottle of ketchup out of her apron pocket. “A murder of crows.”
I think I’m in love.
“Right,” I say. “I knew that. Like a gaggle of geese. Or a pride of lions.”
“A sleuth of bears,” she says.
She smiles at Bo again. This time he smiles back.
“So where are you guys headed?” She gestures to our backpacks propped up next to us in the booth.
“Ask him,” I say.
“Where you headed, soldier?”
“Someplace,” he says.
“Someplace like where?”
“Just someplace.”
She still smiles but she turns the wattage way down. “That so?”
“Yep.”
“Thanks for sharing.” She drops the check on the table.
Maybe it would be better if Bo would just keep quiet.
FOURTEEN
FOR TWO DAYS WE DON’T DO MUCH other than walk. We have very little interaction with each other, or with anybody else—only the people who take our money in exchange for food, bottles of water and a dingy motel room with threadbare sheets and ugly art.
When Boaz goes off to go to the bathroom or to take a shower or to run his electric clippers over his head, I take a look at my maps. It’s useless. There’s no answer in there. All roads lead to Washington, DC, or someplace near it, but I knew that already. What I still don’t know is why.
I sneak a call to Pearl. I tell her I need her help.
She conferences in Zim, who’s on the job at Videorama, which means he’s sitting behind the counter not doing much of anything. She usually goes out of her way to exclude Zim, so there must have been something desperate in my voice.
While Zim’s phone is ringing I ask Pearl how things are going with Il Duce.
“Whatever,” she says. “I’m so over him.”
“Hey, sugar,” Zim answers.
“Hey, yourself,” I say. Sugar? Really?
“Levi!”
“I thought I was sugar.”
Is this really happening? Pearl and Zim?
“Okay, you two. Stop flirting,” Pearl says. “Levi called because he needs our help. And as we know from all the great books and TV shows about dynamic trios, the job of the others is to drop everything when one espouses that particular sort of need.”
“Speak English,” Zim says.
“I think you mean to say Speak English, sugar.” I can’t help myself. This is too much fun.
“Jesus, Richard. You really are a numbskull. Espouses. Not exactly a million-dollar word. Expresses. Levi is expressing the desire for our help.”
“Oh, because I’m sitting here in front of a computer, and according to dictionary dot com, espouses means to adopt or champion, which makes what you said not exactly stellar English.”
“Hello,” I say. “I’m on this call too.”
“Right,” they say in unison.
So I ask them to help me with some research. Since I know where we’re going, and I can guess roughly when we’ll get there, I ask my friends to try to find out if there’s an event, a meeting, a rally, something, anything of note happening in the greater Washington, DC, area within a week to ten days of when I expect us to arrive.
I finally get Boaz to agree to a game of cards.
Four slices of the pizza we ordered to our room are deadweight in the depths of my stomach. We’re seated across from each other at a table with a wobbly leg. The bulb in the lamp hanging from the ceiling is too bright for the moths. They dart around our heads instead.
“So, what’ll it be? Your call.” I shuffle and do my bridge.
Bo shrugs. �
�Whatever.”
“A game of chance or a game of skill?”
“Aren’t they all games of chance?”
“I don’t think so.”
Bo just looks at me.
“We could play Knock-Knock, but I can’t remember the rules.”
“Knock-Knock?”
“You know, that game Dov taught us.”
“I’ve never played cards with Dov.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I don’t know why I find this so hard to believe. I guess I’ve always thought everything I did was because Boaz did it first.
“How about blackjack?” he says.
I do another bridge. This has got to be the most thoroughly shuffled deck in the history of cards.
“Okay. But you’ll have to teach me how to play.”
“For starters, we need a second deck.
“Good thing I came prepared.” I grab the other deck out of my pack.
After several more minutes of shuffling, and bridges that are much harder to make look cool when two decks of cards are involved, I’m ready to deal.
“Let’s go.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“We need a wager,” he says. “Something has to be at stake, or else what’s the point?”
“Okay …”
“Your Red Sox hat.”
“That’s my lucky hat! Plus, it keeps the sun off my face and I’m trying to preserve my boyish good looks.”
“Good. That means it’s worth something to you.”
He gave me that hat for my birthday six years ago. He probably doesn’t remember. He probably doesn’t even know it came from him. I’m guessing Mom bought it for me and slapped his name on the card. But anyway, I love that hat. So yes, it’s most definitely worth something to me.
“So what do I get if I win?” I ask.
“You get to keep it another day.”
We’re talking, so I’m hesitant to actually start dealing the cards. Or to point out his lopsided rules.
Bo rubs his palms together. “Game on.”
One round in and we realize our plan doesn’t work. We need chips. Amounts to bet with hand by hand.
There’s a bag of mixed nuts in Bo’s backpack. We assign them value: ten points for cashews, five for almonds, one for peanuts. At the end of the night, whoever’s got the most points gets the hat. Brilliant.
I go to grab the bag and when I do, I see the top of that Marty Muldoon’s shoe box. The clown in his huge shoes smiling up at me. The place for all the special, all the secret things.
I reach in to grab it, to pull it out and ask what’s in it, but I don’t because we’re about to play cards, and we’re knocking on the door of having a good time, and we’re hanging out together and he’s talking.
So we play blackjack.
And in the morning, when we pack up to leave for another day of walking, because he is always better than me at everything we do, he’s the one who keeps the sun off his face with my favorite, lucky hat.
I make a call to Mom while Boaz runs into a store to buy more water. I keep it brief and vague on the details because even after all the maps I’ve looked at the last few weeks I still can’t say with any kind of certainty where the Appalachian Trail goes and where it doesn’t.
I tell her we’re having a great time. I tell her how I love being so far away from everything. How quickly I’ve adapted to the absence of all those things that make life more comfortable.
She asks me about big-leaf aster. We share a laugh. And I pretend I’m losing her before she can ask to speak to Boaz.
Here’s something I didn’t know before all this walking: the interstate sounds like an accordion. It gets louder and softer, louder and softer, depending on how far away you’ve strayed from it.
Boots on gravel sound like eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts.
Birds scream like children on a playground.
This is what I’d been thinking when it happened. Thinking about sounds.
There’s no telling what Bo had been thinking. We hadn’t talked in miles. We hadn’t seen much either. There was nothing to hold on to out there other than your own thoughts.
Looking back on it, I’m guessing it had been some time since a car passed us. I didn’t notice that then, though. Some things you stop paying attention to.
I didn’t even hear it coming.
A white Toyota pickup passes on the left, and Bo takes a headfirst dive into the weedy, dusty ditch to the right. He doesn’t even scream. He just dives, and he covers the back of his head with his arms.
When I run over to him he’s breathing heavy. Sweat on the back of his neck.
“WHAT THE FUCK?” I shout.
My first thought is that the truck somehow hit him. Impossible. I was doing what Abba always did with me on our walks through the neighborhood, what he did to keep me safe—I kept to Bo’s outside.
Then I think maybe someone threw something out the window that knocked him into the ditch.
I’m afraid to touch him. He just stays like that, breathing heavy, lying facedown.
“Are you okay?”
Slowly he turns over and lifts himself up into a sitting position. He brushes the debris from his knees. Stretches his arms over his head.
“No.”
“Is something broken?”
Bo puts his face in his hands and lets out a sound that’s one part laughter, one part sigh of resignation.
“I’m afraid it’s my motherboard.”
FIFTEEN
“BINGO,” PEARL SAYS.
We’re walking. I drop a few paces behind Bo, but that doesn’t really give me any sort of privacy.
“What do you know?”
“A ton. About everything. I’m not sure you quite appreciate this about me, but I’m like an off-the-charts genius. But we don’t have all day to explore the depths of my mental prowess. So I’ll just tell you what I know about the calendar of upcoming events in our nation’s capital.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a dog show. It looks like a biggie. The Breeders’ Association of North America.”
“Pass.”
“There’s a premiere of a modern Danish opera.”
“Pearl.”
“Okay. Seriously, Levi, this was kind of easy. I’m not quite sure why you didn’t think to go looking at this before, but I didn’t think of it either, so I’ll cut you some slack. There’s a big march. A support the troops rally on the Mall. There’s some country singer performing who we’re supposed to have heard of and they’re prepping for a massive crowd. I guess there’s some bill in the works in Congress about cutting back funding to the military.”
“Huh.”
“You don’t sound so sure this is it.”
I’m not sure of anything anymore. It sounds plausible enough. Obvious, even.
But here’s an idea that woke me in the middle of the night. That’s often when my ideas come. It’s like they’re on a different sleep schedule than I am. I can’t say it out loud to Pearl because, like I said, there’s no privacy out here, no door to close. But here’s my idea: maybe this is about Christina.
Maybe, after all, this long walk is for the love of a beautiful girl. Maybe he somehow knows she’s here with her boyfriend, Max, and he’s coming to reclaim her.
That. Or a support the troops rally. Both ideas sound totally right and impossibly wrong.
“So what’s up with you and Zim?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Whatever you say, sugar.”
“Oh, Levi. You know me. I’m just a flirt.”
“But this is Zim we’re talking about here. You hate Zim.”
“Didn’t anybody ever teach you that hate is a strong word?”
“It’s one of your favorite words.”
“True. But did you know that Richard reads? I mean, he actually reads. Like, for pleasure. He’s not a moron. He’s kinda smart.”
“Of course Zim is sm
art. And sort of deranged. And anyway, what about Maddie Green?”
“Levi, are you trying to stir up trouble?”
Maybe I am. Pearl is usually right about these sorts of things. I’m not sure why the idea of Pearl and Zim together would bother me. I love Pearl, but I don’t love Pearl. And I certainly don’t love Zim. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’m just afraid that they’ll leave me behind.
“No,” I tell her. “I’m just messing with you. That’s what friends do, and I’m just trying to do my job.”
I’m getting an idiot’s tan out here wearing sunglasses and no hat. White around the eyes, red everywhere else. I tell Boaz I need a hat.
“Then we’ll get you a hat.”
An hour later we pass a secondhand clothing store.
“Wait here.” The bell tied to the door jingles as Bo shuts it behind him, leaving me alone out front.
I’m tired. Exhausted. Mom used to tell me that boredom is a state of mind, but I think it might be a physical state too. My legs feel bored from all the walking.
The door jingles again.
“Here you go.” He hands me the new hat.
“You have got to be kidding.”
“Nope. Put it on.”
It’s a canvas bucket hat with a wide brim and a green ribbon around the middle, printed all over in large pink roses.
“I can’t wear this hat.”
He puts it on top of my head. “If you don’t like it, maybe you’ll start getting better at blackjack.”
I’m pretty sure I know where we’re going tonight. It’s an address from the ocean: 314 Olive Street, Riverside, New Jersey.
It fits. It’s the right distance from where we began. But I don’t know anything about why this address. Why this destination.
Once we get to the block I don’t need to look at the numbers on the houses, because it’s pretty obvious which one it is.
We’re faced with a small crowd gathered on the front lawn.
There may be only twelve people total, but twelve’s a lot when they’re strangers and they burst into applause at the sight of you.
Without turning toward him I can sense Bo tensing up. Some things you just know.
A banner hangs between the windows on the second story of this gray-shingled house. It’s a large sheet, spray-painted red, white and blue.
The Things a Brother Knows Page 13