by Dan Chaon
He felt his hand against the gear shift, putting the car into park, and then he turned the key in the ignition and the idling car went dead. A weight settled over him. Even after all this time, it was still only the two of them, just as she had said.
——
He was a little past his twenty-second birthday when she died. He had been working at the old folks’ home, washing dishes, and when he came into the house everything was silent.
“Mom?” he’d said. “Mom?” For years he had been rehearsing the moment when he would come home and find her dead. His shoulders tensed; the skeletons of expectations began to erect themselves around him.
He’d pressed his hand against her door, and rattled the knob. “Mom?” he said, and for some reason he knew that it was real this time. He could feel her inside the room, the flick of a fishtail, a muscle spasm before the fish was cut open, its mouth closing on dry, useless air. He pressed open the door, and there she was, as he had pictured her so often: her nightgown pushed up past her thighs, her mouth ajar, her hands stiffened. He stood there in the doorway, pretty sure that she was dead.
“Mom . . . ?” he said, and his heart quickened. The radio was still going. Her eyes were open as an announcer gave the weather, introducing a song. Her body seemed to be stiff, and he was prepared to put his fingers on her eyelids and push them closed.
He never did find out how many pills she had taken, how many different poisons she’d consumed. There was probably an autopsy report, but he never saw it. All he remembered was that when the pads of his fingertips touched her eyes, to close them, she opened her mouth, and an emptiness poured out. Her lips tried to form words. She gagged, her throat muscles suddenly beginning to work. One eye fixed on him while the other drifted off.
He always told himself that there was nothing he could do at that point. The doctors were unsurprised by her death; they didn’t seem surprised that he hadn’t saved her, but she herself had widened her eyes. “Don’t make me go,” she whispered, and her fist closed around his pinkie finger, the way an infant will clasp whatever is pressed into its palm. “I don’t want to go,” she said, and pressed her damp mouth against the side of his face.
For a moment, sitting there along the road, he recalled what her fingers felt like as they clenched tight and then, step by step, became dead. It wasn’t like in a movie. The grip pulsed for a while, squeezing and unsqueezing, but it didn’t stop. It kept on for some time, spasmodically, long after his mother had stopped making sounds, stopped breathing. The last part of her that moved was her legs, kicking out suddenly. Her feet flexed, shoving off, as if she were in deep water, trying to make her way to the surface.
31
June 4, 1997
It was going to be a short ride, at first. They were going to spend a few hours together. But now Jonah isn’t sure how far, exactly, he’s gone. An hour, two hours? He watches the speedometer, he passes cars and is passed by them, though mostly he stays in the right-hand lane. He can feel his steering-wheel hands and accelerator feet merging with the movement of the car.
Landscapes pass but don’t really impress themselves on his brain, sliding through his eyes and out the back of his head—the painted lines, the signs with their shining reflector strip lettering, the barren prairie sod divided by fences for no clear reason, jagged buttes rising up, clusters of shacks, occasional cow or tree, thunderstorm. Jonah can feel the road beneath him, a taut string that his wheels are riding on, and he tries to put his mind in order. They cross into Wyoming, and Loomis rises up from dozing and presses his cheek against the cool backseat window.
“Where are we now?” Loomis says, and Jonah curls his fingers. He can feel the body of the car more than he can feel his own body.
“We’re outside of a town called Torrington,” Jonah says. “I’m still looking for an interesting place for us to visit.”
Loomis is silent, gazing out, blinking. Driving, he says, makes him tired.
“I’m thinking maybe we’ll head south for a while,” Jonah says. “That might be better.”
Loomis considers this for a moment, his face stern with sleepiness.
“Okay,” he says.
——
It’s probably early afternoon when they get off the interstate and onto the back roads. Loomis is sleeping again, and Jonah has settled into the unconscious posture of the long-distance driver, which is itself a kind of sleep, a kind of hypnosis.
It has begun to occur to him that, officially, he might be considered a kidnapper. Especially with those small-town, St. Bonaventure policemen. Especially with everything he has heard about Judy Keene. And he’s becoming nervous. It doesn’t yet seem that he has done anything criminal—Loomis isn’t unhappy, he thinks, Loomis had come with him willingly. Just for a ride, just for a day together. But at the same time, as he looks out at the road, he can’t help but worry about what might be happening back in St. Bonaventure. She might have called the police by now, he thinks, and he imagines a search party, focused at first on the immediate area but then tracking in ever-widening circles; authorities will begin to transmit information about a “missing child” to policemen in other towns and other states. Maybe he is exaggerating.
So far Loomis himself hasn’t questioned anything, and maybe there’s nothing to question. He was glad to see Jonah. Jonah had been away on a long trip, but he’d come back to St. Bonaventure just to visit Loomis. Just to see him one last time.
He isn’t even sure when the idea of taking Loomis for a drive had occurred to him. Was it the moment when he arrived back in St. Bonaventure after his long trip? Was it when he found himself, that June morning, parking his newly purchased used car in the alleyway behind Judy’s house? Was it the moment when the opportunity presented itself, the moment when he stood, hidden at the edge of Judy Keene’s yard, watching as Loomis lifted up rocks along the fence to look for worms and insects, the child’s face stolid and scientific as he bent down?
“Loomis,” Jonah had whispered, when the child came close to the shadows of the lilac branches, and the boy had looked up, startled.
“What are you up to today?” Jonah had said, and tossed another dog treat into the neighbors’ yard. By that time, after so many visits to Judy’s house, the neighbor dog had come to know him, to see him as another food bringer, and though the animal made Jonah tense, he felt fairly secure. It was chained to a clothesline. It didn’t bark, as it had the first few times.
“Hello,” Loomis said.
“Hi,” Jonah said. “I came back to visit you. I missed you.”
“You did?” Loomis said, curiously.
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I actually missed you a lot.”
“It’s been boring around here,” Loomis said, and Jonah glanced in the direction of the house. He could hear the television turned up, a chorus of people singing some old-fashioned song—“June Is Busting Out All Over.” Maybe that was the moment.
“Would you like to go for a little ride?” Jonah had said, without really thinking. “Maybe go on a picnic or something? I have something important I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh, really?” Loomis had said, and then he’d given a little shrug. “Okay,” he said, and when Jonah reached down, Loomis held his arms up with a kind of gentlemanly dignity, allowing Jonah to lift his body over the fence.
They trusted each other, Jonah thinks. It just seemed like the right thing to do, for both of them. Let’s spend a day together, Jonah had said, and if Loomis had said no he would have accepted it without question.
But Loomis had wanted to come with him, he thinks. He observes in the rearview mirror as Loomis breathes experimentally on the rain-cooled window, then draws an L through the condensation with his finger. When Loomis glances up, Jonah smiles.
“Is it a lot longer?” Loomis says.
Jonah is still trying to formulate the scenario in his own mind. Where, exactly, are they going?
“I don’t know yet,” he says. His eyes
focus on the car in front of him and he pinches his mouth tightly, considering. He can feel the tires revolving against the seamless highway, the river of wind parting before the car’s prow, rushing in flapping pennants along its sides.
——
It is almost two when they stop in the small town of Straub, in between Wyoming and Colorado. Fuel and food. The gas station they pull into is part of a national chain, done up in bright, unpleasant yellows and oranges, the windows adorned with signs for beer and soda and cigarettes, the rows of gas pumps sheltered under a long aluminum canopy, high enough for a semi to rest comfortably beneath it. Jonah gets out and inserts the nozzle into his gas tank, compressing the trigger on the handle, watching the face of the pump as the dollars and cents and gallons begin to tumble upward, numbers rolling on an axis like the slots in a gambling machine. It had stopped raining quite a while back, but the air is green-smelling, full of pollen and stirred-up dust.
When he finishes pumping, he opens the back door and leans in. Loomis is awake, but bleary, his eyes still thick with sleep, the imprint of the car seat on one side of his face.
“Do you want a pop?” Jonah says, cheerfully.
But Loomis gives him a solemn look. “I’m not supposed to drink it,” he says. “It’s bad for my teeth.”
“Oh really?” Jonah says, still smiling hopefully. “Wouldn’t you like to try that red cherry kind?”
“No thank you.”
“Okay,” Jonah says. There is a minor deflation. “What about some juice? Or . . . chocolate milk, maybe?”
“Juice would be fine.”
“And a snack?”
“Okay.”
Inside, Jonah scopes the aisles. He finds a juicelike drink in the cooler, and picks out a variety of foodstuffs—some beef jerky for him, chips, a mass-produced pastry with cherry filling, peanuts, bright orange cheese-cracker squares with peanut butter spread in the middle, sunflower seeds, candy. A plush, cross-eyed toy dog that giggles and says “Do it again!” when you press its belly. A set of eight crayons and a coloring book with robots.
He sets all this on the counter, and the old man at the cash register watches him carefully, looking hard at Jonah’s scars. Jonah is used to being watched carefully.
“How’s it going?” Jonah says.
“Not bad,” the man says. He appears to be in the late stages of alcoholism—gaunt, with nicotine-stained yellow-white hair and rosettes of blood vessels on his cheeks and nose. “Is this all for you today?”
“I also have the gas,” Jonah says, and he glances out, looking at the numbers on each of the pumps. “On three, I think.” He watches uncertainly as the man begins to ring up his items. “A little something to keep my kid entertained. I’m on vacation with my son.”
“Is that right?” the old man says.
“Yes,” Jonah says, “I think that’s right,” and the man fingers his purchases, turning them slowly to find the bar codes, touching the cash register buttons with his old, soft fingertips. Jonah thinks: My wife died recently, and my son and I decided to take a trip for a while. Just to get a change of scenery, you know? Get our heads clear.
“I haven’t been in Colorado since I was a little kid myself,” Jonah says, as the man rubs a candy bar vigorously across the electronic eye that reads the prices. “I was born here.”
“Well,” the old man says, “welcome home then.” And Jonah smiles tightly even though the man isn’t looking at him.
——
He tries to remember what his mother said about Colorado. Had they lived there together once? Or was that something that had happened to her before he was conceived? He tries to remember the various stories she’d told him—many of them lies, no doubt. As they cross back out onto the highway, Jonah lets her cross his mind, letting her out of the small compartment that he relegates her to on most days. Her bare feet walk across gray, mossy stones, those long toes gripping delicately, the nails painted red. He tries to get a good look at her expression, to guess at what she might be thinking, but her long hair droops around her face.
I think we’ll always be lonely, you and I, she says softly, and he presses his teeth against the inside of his lip. That’s not the direction he wants to travel.
“Hey,” Jonah says to Loomis, who is gently dangling his legs over the edge of the backseat, who has cautiously taken a single bite of a cheese cracker. Loomis lifts his head, raising his eyebrows expectantly.
“How would you like to sleep in a tent?” Jonah says. “Does that sound like fun?”
——
Even now he’s not sure how far he plans to go. He’s not a kidnapper, he thinks, and in many ways he may even be doing Troy a favor. He remembers what Troy had said during one of those long conversations they’d had that past winter, when they were trying to become friends.
“I think I’m about to get fucked,” Troy had said. “I think I’m going to lose my kid.”
“How could they do that?” Jonah asked.
“These lawyers,” Troy had said, “they can do whatever they want to a person like me.”
“Oh,” Jonah said, but he hadn’t believed it then. He didn’t realize it was true until later, when he’d talked to Crystal that one time.
“Oh, Jonah,” she’d said, “things aren’t going so well for Troy. I guess his mother-in-law is going to get custody of Loomis for a while. Even after he gets off parole. Isn’t that terrible?”
“Yes,” Jonah had said, holding on to the pay-phone receiver, which felt like a bone in his hand. He could picture the time he’d seen Judy and Loomis at the supermarket, how she’d had Loomis sitting in that uncomfortable child seat, with the humiliating strap of a sort of seat belt around Loomis’s waist. Judy was fat but not jolly; her jaw had a squared-off, somewhat militaristic quality, and she seemed to be angry about something as she looked at the ingredients on a cereal box. Loomis was more subdued than Jonah had ever seen him, sitting there, staring at his palm, and he didn’t look up though Jonah had liked the idea of their eyes meeting, of exchanging a secret wink.
He remembered what Troy had told him. “I know I’ve screwed up,” Troy said. “But I love my son, you know? I do.” And Jonah had nodded. He could imagine the three of them, driving south. A beach in Mexico. A tourist restaurant that he and Troy would open together. Maybe we could just leave, he thought, but he knew how Troy would respond. That ironic cock of the eyebrow, that grimace. As if the world beyond St. Bonaventure were some science-fiction planet.
——
The campground appears about an hour and a half later, eight miles off the highway, along the eastern side of the Rockies: LITTLE ICEBERG LAKE RECREATION AREA. PRIVATELY OWNED AND OPERATED. CAMPING, FISHING, CANOE RENTAL.
“This looks nice, doesn’t it?” Jonah says, and Loomis peers over the lip of the window, his fingers brushing the nipple of the door lock, his eyes serious as they bump down a narrow, poorly maintained dirt road toward what appears to be an old outhouse that has been converted into a guard station.
When Jonah stops, a teenaged girl with short brown hair and a long, acne-ravaged chin comes out of the structure carrying a clipboard. She collects fifteen dollars and when Jonah asks for a “secluded” spot, she consults her clipboard grimly, directs him to Lot 23B. She hands him a photocopied, hand-drawn map, which shows a curving maze of roads lined with numbered boxes. She circles 23B.
Little Iceberg Lake is not a particularly popular destination apparently. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, but so far only four recreational vehicles are parked in the front lots, one of them so ancient and bedraggled that it might be haunted. Circles of rust dot its white, aluminum sides, and a tattered awning near the door is hung with limp wind chimes. Several of the windows are broken—repaired with duct tape and translucent plastic, or not repaired at all, shards of glass still hanging from the edges of the frame. Beyond it is a wooden hut—a set of bathrooms and showers and a pay telephone—and then a trail of tire ruts that leads into the evergreens. The
y pass a few campsites before reaching 23B: two motorcycle men, long-bearded tattooed gnomes sitting on stumps in front of a small bonfire; four college boys, unpacking a polished black Jeep; a family at a picnic table, all blondes of different sizes and genders, eating watermelon; a man and a woman—twins, perhaps—both with their hair plaited into braids, playing Frisbee in an open area. At the far end of this road, a post has been branded with the numbers and letters, 23B, and Jonah pulls up beside it. There is a small picnic table, one leg manacled to the earth by a thick, rusted chain, and a campfire pit, encircled by a ring that appears to be a section of a sawed-off metal drum barrel. The ground is grassless, trampled bare.
“We’ll pitch our tent here,” Jonah says. “Then we can make a fire.”
——
Things seem to be going well for a while. It is interesting to put the long, flexible tent poles together, and Loomis enjoys the patient project of threading them through the eyelets of canvas, the struggle to erect the frame, bending the poles until the canvas skin stretches taut across them, staking the hollow, flat-bottomed balloon of tent to the ground. He is involved in unrolling the sleeping bags inside the structure, pleased by the way the late-afternoon sun glows against the nylon membrane of canvas, the way the opening zips and unzips. It keeps both of them occupied and engaged, and then they drive to a small general store where they can buy marshmallows and hot dogs and ice.
“Are you having fun?” Jonah asks, as they turn back onto the road that leads to Little Iceberg Lake.
“Uh-huh,” Loomis says, but he looks at Jonah guardedly. He is holding the paper bag containing the foodstuffs in his lap, very formally, as if bearing a religious icon. “Jonah,” he says, at last. “Does my grandma know where we are?”
“Of course,” Jonah says. “I called her when I was at the gas station, and she said it was okay. She said that she’s glad you’re getting a nice vacation. She said you should just relax and enjoy yourself.”
“Oh,” Loomis says. For a moment, his gray eyes cloud with concern, uncertainty.
