The Flying Troutmans

by Miriam Toews

  So, said Thebes, is that what we’re going to do? Find

  Cherkis?

  I think we’ll try, I said. How does that sound to you?

  Thebes said she didn’t know. Good, she guessed, probably, it was strange, kind of exciting, a little weird, she’d probably get a stomach ache, no, it was good, just a small stomach ache, yeah, it would be fine. Probably. If that was what Min really wanted.

  Well, yeah, I said. It is. And I’m so sorry for lying to you.

  Later that evening I lay down in Min’s empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all. I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room… Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids. I opened my eyes and stared at her pill bottles and squinted until they all blurred together. I stopped squinting and lined up the bottles, smallest to biggest, in rows, like a class photo. All her life Min had been surrounded by pills and sometimes she took them and sometimes she didn’t and sometimes she took way too many of them. She’d always keep one small, blue pill under her pillow, like a tooth. Or a cyanide capsule right there at the ready.

  I remembered the time she had agreed to go rabbit hunting with our uncle and was so horrified by the idea of killing something that she consumed an entire jar of my aunt’s diet pills so that her aim would be way off and the rabbits would escape. But Min, my mother had said, you could have said no, or intentionally misfired. You almost killed yourself in order not to kill a rabbit? That just doesn’t make any sense.

  I turned on Min’s radio, heard someone laughing and turned it off again. There was still paint on it from when she and I, as teenagers, spent a summer painting a giant dairy barn. We painted in our bathing suits, and made scaffolding for ourselves from giant tractor tires and two by-fours. We played the radio all day and knew the words to every song. Min fell hard for one of the farmhands and ended up getting pregnant after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark. She lost the farmhand’s tiny embryo a month or so later in the washroom of a bar called Club Soda, and cried for days and days, and then stopped talking. Sometimes, before I went to bed, I would tap the wall between our bedrooms, and sometimes she’d tap back, very softly, but mostly she didn’t, and eventually I stopped tapping too.

  I lay in Min’s bed and tried really hard not to think about Marc, about his soft kisses and how his arm felt around my shoulders and the way he breathed when we made love and the way he hopped around when he was happy and the stuff he said about my eyes and my hips and the small of my back, and what the hell can an ashram offer that I can’t? I mean besides silence and solitude and spiritual revitalization. I tried to float again. I could hear Thebes and her friend rehearsing When I Go Mad, a horror play about an insane mother that they were planning to put on for the neighbour kids. They used British accents. Thebes was the insane mother. Here’s a snippet.

  Thebes: Good night, dahling, I’m off to the bar. Friend: New, new, Mutha, please sing to me first. Thebes: Oooookay, I shall siiiiing to you, yeeees, of course, but while I sing you must close your eyes.

  Then there’s the murder attempt and the screaming part, which they were having a really hard time getting through without laughing. They were already on take thirty-five or something.

  I got up and knocked on Thebes’s door. There were Groovy Girls stickers all over the door and goofy photos of her and her friends.

  Bonjourno! Thebes said. C’mon in. Take five, Abbey, she said to her friend. Thebes was wearing this glittery silver sash that she had ripped off a fake Christmas present when they were in Mexico one year, and her friend was wearing one of Thebes’s old Winnie-the-Pooh nightgowns over her jeans. They were flushed and out of breath from all that psychotic killing and bar-hopping.

  When does Logan usually get home? I asked her.

  Eleven is his curfew during the week, but he ignores it, she said. She was reapplying her lipstick, using a CD as a mirror. Abbey was curled up in the fetal position on the bed. Archie comics were everywhere, walls of them, and a big hardcover called A Criminal History of Mankind propped the window open.

  When he gets home, we’re gonna talk about this whole deal, I said.

  Thebes was warming to the idea of looking for Cherkis. She thought he was a poet but she didn’t know exactly. She remembered seeing him when she was three or four, after her operation when the piece of scalpel broke off in her brain.

  I went into Logan’s room for a look around. There were books and CDs all over the floor and band posters covering the walls. I stared back at the naked guy in the Pixies poster giving the thumbs-down to the world. On the wall by his bed Logan had written a poem or a mission statement or a prayer or something in very tiny letters that slanted down, down, and farther down, until one line obliterated the next.

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  You’re not stylish or cool

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  Be nicer to people

  three

  THAT NIGHT LOGAN CAME HOME DRUNK. I heard him fall down in the kitchen. I went in and switched on the light and he said, Oh man, dude, that is a seriously diaphanous nightgown you’ve got on. I switched the light off again and knelt down beside his head. C’mon, let’s get you up to bed. He wanted to stay there.

  What’s that smell? he asked.

  Cascade, I said. C’mon, let’s go. He pawed at the box of Cascade and spilled it all over the floor and himself.

  Shit, he said. Thebes came downstairs rubbing her eyes, still covered in candy necklace crap, and asked us what was up.

  We’re at the beach, said Logan. Check out the sand. He moved his fingers around in the Cascade crystals.

  Logan’s hammered, I said. Help me get him up to bed. She grabbed one of his feet and began to drag him across the kitchen floor and down the hall.

  Okay, okay, don’t, don’t, he said. I’ll walk. He rambled on about renaming the thumb. We should totally rename the thumb, just the three of us, tonight!

  What do you want to call it? asked Thebes.

  Renée! said Logan. No, Shenée! Yeah…

  We helped him up the stairs and pushed him onto his bed. He fell face down, and I punched the pillow next to his head so he’d have an air hole. Thebes took off his shoes and a condom fell out of one of them.

  Yeah, right, she said.

  Does he have a girlfriend? I asked her.

  Deborah Solomon, she said.

  Logan moaned. I love her! he said.

  She’s a writer with The New York Times, said Thebes.

  Logan’s arm slipped off the bed and he picked up a Public Enemy CD that was lying on the floor and held it to his face.

  He thinks that’s Deborah Solomon, whispered Thebes.

  Logan was out. Thebes hustled off to her bedroom, took a running jump from the doorway and landed on her bed. Righteous air, I said. Sweet dreams.

  I went downstairs and cleaned up the Cascade and then headed back up to make sure Logan was still breathing and hadn’t choked on his own vomit. He was fine, snoring softly, hadn’t moved at all. But I could hear Thebes crying. I went into her room and sat down beside her on the bed. Hey, I said. She was hiding her face behind a book. What’s up, buttercup? I asked. She couldn’t talk. I gently pulled the book away from her face so I could have a look at her. I smiled. She was a mess. I put her book down on the floor and held her and sang a few lame songs and told her Min was going to pull through, she always does, she’s strong. She’s so strong.

  Thebes told me she’d stuck her arm in a machine at Pharma Plus and found out that her blood pressure is high but not dangerously high.

  High’s the new normal around here, I
think, I told her. I rocked her like a baby. I sang every lullaby I knew, and some old Talking Heads and even some George Clinton. She told me I’d lost her place in her Quidditch Through the Ages book but it was okay. Eventually she fell asleep in my arms.

  That night I had a dream that Min had showered, and the kids and I had thrown a party. Hundreds of people showed up, people from around the world. Logan was in charge of the music and Thebes poured the champagne. Even Cherkis showed up, but he stayed in the yard and the kids scampered in and out of the house bringing him stuff and exchanging furtive messages.

  Thebes was all business in the morning, running around the house getting her school stuff together, talking non-stop. Every so often she’d inhale sharply like she really needed an infusion of air right then to get her through her next story. It reminded me of Min and how she used to demonstrate her hyperventilating technique. Her goal had been to pass out in our tree house and then “accidentally” fall out of the tree to her death.

  Thebes was still wearing her blue terry cloth outfit, but she’d washed her face and combed her hair a bit, on the sides, in the front. I was still stretched out in her little bed going, Mmmm-hmmmm, mmmm-hmmmm, really, yeah, wow, mmmm-hmmmmm, while she motored around the place getting ready.

  You know what I hate? she said.

  No, what.

  When my teacher uses carpet as a verb, she said. She put on her teacher voice. We’re carpeting. After carpet I’ll help you work out your personal problems. When we carpet we keep our hands in our laps.

  What’s carpeting? I asked.

  We sit on a carpet and talk, said Thebes.

  That sounds nice, I said.

  Show me ten! said Thebes.

  What? I asked.

  My teacher says that all the time, she said. It means show me ten fingers, like show me your hands so I know you’re not fooling around with them during carpet. I told Thebes that the next time her teacher asks them to show her ten, she should say she’s only got two, and hold up her middle fingers.

  Uh, no, said Thebes. She stopped shoving things into her backpack long enough to give me a look. First of all, she told me, eleven-year-olds at her school don’t do that, yet. Well, not the girls. And second, she already was not enjoying a lot of status at school, partly because of her prodigious kung fu skills that she couldn’t help, and partly because of her habit of knocking herself in the head in a vain attempt to dislodge the fragment of scalpel stuck inside. I’m on thin ice in the social hierarchy department, she told me. I’m not exactly a popular girl.

  Hey, but, I said, where do you think it would go?

  Where what would go? she said.

  The scalpel, I said, like if you did manage to dislodge it. I mean, it would still be stuck in your head, right?

  Yeah, she said, but not in my brain. It would be somewhere between my brain and my skull, in that nook, and then it would be a simple laser procedure or something like that to remove it.

  Where’s Logan? I asked her. She didn’t know. He’d left already. Oh, okay, I said. Does he often come home drunk?

  No, said Thebes. That was an aberration. Then she started talking about her commemorative-plate project. She had to glue things onto a paper plate, things that had sort of defined her world in the last year. Her teacher had told her that she couldn’t glue on pictures of the World Trade Center towers.

  Why can’t you? I asked her.

  Because, said Thebes, that didn’t involve me personally.

  Well, I said, but in a broader sense, yeah, it did…

  Other kids, said Thebes, have Stomp ticket stubs and birthday cake candles and photo-booth pictures, things like that, and now I have to start all over again.

  Hey, I said, why don’t you put some of your lyrics on the plate. That would be cool.

  On my plate? said Thebes. Which will be pinned up in public along the blackboard with all the others? Are you insane? Like that wouldn’t totally clinch my status as top dork of the universe. Are you going to stay in bed all day? She frowned.

  No, I said. Definitely not. We have to get ready.

  She came over and put her hands on my legs and her face close to mine. I’ll flip you later, she told me. You’ll love it.

  Hey, I said, really, your lyrics are beautiful, you know.

  No, they’re embarrassing, she said.

  Why? I asked her. I told her that I wrote sometimes. Poems or short stories, I said, whatever, if I’m feeling…you know…

  Thebes looked at me like I’d just admitted to occasionally starting grease fires at old folks homes or something, just every once in a while, just to make sense of my world. Hmmm, yeah, she said. Well, what are they about? she asked. Wait! Let me guess! Sex and death?

  And love, I told her.

  Sick, she said. She told me that tonight she had to start working on her “Helping the United Nations Rid the World of Racial Discrimination” speech and read an entire book for the read-a-thon to raise funds for the children of some Vietnamese province.

  Holy shit, I said, and lay down again. Can I just give you twenty bucks? Like, who would know if you’d read the book or not?

  She said no, that would be cheating.

  I’ll be home at 3:45 precisely, she said. Shalom. She waved from the hall and left. I stared at the ceiling. She returned.

  Hey! she said.

  Yeah?

  Did you know that I’ve been banned from Zellers for two years for having a perfume testers war with my friends?

  No, I said, that’s funny.

  That I have friends? said Thebes.

  No! I said.

  Just kidding, she said. I had a mug shot taken, she told me. They had those measuring lines and everything. That’s why my hair is purple now. I dyed it after they took my photo so I can still cut through Zellers undercover on my way to school.

  Okay, I said. See ya later.

  Not if I see you first, said Thebes. Psych. She left. She came back again.

  Thebes, I said, you’re killing me. She asked me if I was going to see Min today.

  Yeah, I said.

  Tell her I love her, said Thebes. Hug her and kiss her for me. But gently.

  I will, I said.

  Remind her of the singing orange on the patio at Hermosa Beach, said Thebes.

  Okay, I will, I said.

  I had this singing orange, said Thebes, you know? And it killed Min. I had like this face on it—oh craps! Thebes had just looked at her clock radio, next to the bed. She said she had to go or she’d get “written up” and she could not afford a third “death note” or…She grabbed her throat and pretended to choke herself.

  You should really go, Thebie, I said.

  Okay, but one last thing? she said. Are you serious about trying to find Cherkis?

  Yeah, I am, I said.

  High-five, said Thebes.

  I got up and went to Logan’s room and knocked on the door. There was a tiny tag from the dry cleaners stuck to the door that said “Press Only.” No answer. I knocked again. Logan? I said. I opened the door.

  Empty room. I walked over to his desk. He’d carved the words Are You a Ghost? into a jagged heart. And had also written in black ink the words It’s Official. That grade 12 girl is now more imagination than reality. Shitty. And also: Hey, there, even if you do get your braces off, there’s still nothing the orthodontist can do about your sad, sad eyes. And next to his computer he’d written a message to himself: No, you will not type the letters you believe make up your father’s name into that small rectangle. Don’t be a loser. And beneath that, he’d carved a rough drawing of the planet Earth and inside it the words: No one can stay.

  Okay. I went downstairs and looked around. Messy. Grey light. Dust everywhere. Piles of books and clothes. Dirty dishes in the kitchen. Crumbs. Old newspapers. No problem. I sent a telepathic message to Marc. I hope you’re having a blast at your ashram. I put on one of Logan’s CDs and started cleaning up. There were small though emphatic stick-it notes all over the kitchen.
Cups! Glasses! Coffee off! I love you, Min! No more fires! Don’t forget your vitamin B stress therapy! You’re the best! All in Thebie’s loopy handwriting.

  The phone rang and I picked it up and said hello. It was the secretary at Logan’s school. Logan hadn’t shown up for his first class. He’s got a doctor’s appointment, I said. That was all right, they said, but next time I should let them know first thing in the morning. Done and done! I said. I appreciate your call. I hung up. Was I supposed to find him? I finished cleaning up and went into the backyard for a smoke.

  The next-door neighbour came out, a big guy in a yellow Haile Selassie T-shirt. Hey, I said. How’s it going?

  Not bad, he said, but it’d be better if you guys weren’t throwing hatchets into my yard all night.

  Oh, yeah, I said. Yeahhh…it won’t happen again.

  No, it won’t, he said. Because I’ve got them all over here and I’m not giving them back.

  Oh, I said, all right. Freaking uptight guy considering the shirt he’s got on, I thought. And there’s got to be a hatchet store around here where I could get reinforcements.

  Who are you, anyway? he asked.

  I’m Hattie, Min’s sister. I’m visiting.

  Yeah? he said.

  Yeah, I said.

  You don’t look anything like her, he said.

  I’ve had a lot of work done, I said. I stared off into space, hoping he’d disappear.

  Hey, I don’t mean to be rude, he said, but your sister there, Min, what’s up with her? What’s her deal?

  Min’s cool, I said. There’s no deal. I got up and went into the house and watched from a window as he and his man Selassie walked away. Then I went back out and sat down on the deck. There was a Ping-Pong table in the centre of the yard, and behind it, up against the yellow fence, a purple playhouse plastered with stencils of frogs and cars and suns and lizards. Three bikes were chained to a tree. There was a little dilapidated shack that had once been Min’s studio, and a fire pit piled with charred logs. I noticed two birdhouses up high in a tree, one painted with pink and purple hearts and the other with orange flames and streaks of dripping blood against a black background. Min had told me about the kids’ birdhouses, how she’d climbed the tree in a dust storm and nailed them to a branch.