The Flying Troutmans

by Miriam Toews

  Thebes also bought some eggshell tank tops and eggshell terry cloth shorts and eggshell knee socks and eggshell Converse Chucks.

  Then we went to find Logan at the basketball court. We got lost on the way, drove around in circles, and then finally remembered the name of the street it was on. When we got there Logan was talking to some cops. Not the same cops, according to Thebes, that had told us we couldn’t sleep in the parking lot.

  I jumped out of the van and went over there and asked them what was up. Logan was obviously in pain and the cops pointed at his wrist.

  It’s broken, they said. He won’t tell us how it happened. His wrist dangled grotesquely from his arm and the cops said he’d have to get it plastered.

  God, Logan, I said, are you okay?

  Yeah, yeah, said Logan. His eyes were watering. Turned out that Logan had been hustling some of the kids at the court with his standard ten-for-eleven scam, pretending to suck at first to lure them in and make them put their money on the table.

  How’d you break your wrist? I asked him. He shrugged. Whoever broke his wrist must have threatened him with something worse if he told anyone. Or, he broke it himself on another guy’s face and wouldn’t admit it. There was nobody else around.

  The cops said if we left town immediately after he got a cast put on that thing, they wouldn’t press any charges.

  But what charges would you press? I asked. I mean, they’re just kids, right? Playing?

  Mischief, said one of the cops.

  Yeah, but, what do you mean, mischief? I mean—

  We don’t want any trouble, said one of them.

  Yeah, well, I understand that, I hate trouble too, but I mean—

  We’re actually trying to give you a break, here, said one of the cops. Are you always this mouthy?

  I don’t think I’m being mouthy, I said. I’m just trying to figure this out. I want some information. Like, what he’d actually be charged with…I’m just not clear on the nature of these so-called charges. You know?

  The cops were very calm and actually quite reasonable. It was making me nuts. I wanted a fight too. I wanted to break my wrist on a stranger’s head and scam some Moabites and get run out of town for being better at something than the other kids.

  Okay, listen, said one of the cops. We’re talking Fraud. We’re talking Extortion. We’re talking Illegal Gambling.

  No, c’mon, gimme a break, you are not talking about those things, dude, I said. He’s fifteen freaking years old! It’s a stupid basketball game! What do you mean, extortion? That is so ridiculous. Do you make this shit up or what? What do you do, just drive around town busting kids for being kids? Thebes was tugging on my shirt and Logan was staring at me with a familiar combination of pain and pity, those cobalt eyes going off like alarms way deep in his hoodie. I reminded myself of my mother shorting out on everyone after my father drowned saving our lives.

  The cops were quiet. They folded their arms and cocked their heads and looked at me.

  Why don’t the three of you just leave, ma’am, said one of them, not unkindly. He put his hand out like, here’s the way, go, we’re letting you off. Thebes and Logan started walking back to the van. I began to cry, stupidly. I asked them where the hospital was and they gave me directions and wished me well. They said Logan should join an after-school basketball program instead of hustling other kids.

  Well, yeah, but he’s been expelled, I said.

  They understood. It happened. Boys. You know. One of them shook my hand empathetically and said he had a houseful of teenage boys waiting for him when he got off his shift.

  Still got the green? asked Thebes when we were all back in the van.

  Logan said no, the other guys had rolled him and taken his cash and his knife and his ball. Wicked outfit, T., he added.

  At the hospital he got a cast and a lecture and a tetanus shot because he’d also cut his hand grabbing onto the rusty hoop after the dopest dunk, man, and the bill was seventy million bucks, or, I’m not sure, four hundred and ninety billion, and would be sent to Marc Babin at my old address in Paris. It was the only official address I had on my ID.

  Coolio, said Thebes, let’s roll. We got back into the van and she dove into the back seat, spelunking through her art supplies until she found her favourite indelible markers and pleading with Logan to let her beautify his cast.

  There’d been a girl outside the hospital, smoking, and I’d joined her for a minute while Logan was getting his cast and Thebes was chatting with an orderly who was also dressed in white.

  I didn’t know exactly, but I think the smoking girl’s friend had just OD’ed. The girl had leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She’d looked so tired, so sad and messed up.

  What do you think the chances are of everything being okay? she said. I told her I didn’t know. I had no idea. Her guess was as good as mine. It was like I was having a conversation with myself and hadn’t worried so much about being polite and hopeful because it was only me.

  Now, as we were heading out of town, I felt bad. I had this urge to go back and find her and say something more consoling. I thought about what that might be. I remembered Min after one of her unsuccessful suicide attempts waking up in the hospital, surrounded by me and our parents, and the only thing she said was, rats, dark ages. When she came home, our mother offered to give her a haircut but halfway through Min decided she hated having scissors snipping at her neck and ears and asked our mother to stop. For three months she had a bob that was six inches shorter on one side and even when she went back to school and kids made fun of her she pretended not to care.

  Logan said he was going to do some work on his Robert Goulet project, just in case they ever let him back into his school. He didn’t want to be so far behind that he’d be one of those guys, one of those grown men, with a beard and children and two ex-wives, crammed into a too-small desk trying to get his grade twelve.

  We had to pick a Western Canadian historical figure, he said. He said he was writing a diary in Robert Goulet’s voice, about his childhood and rise to fame. Did you know, he said, that when Robert Goulet was five years old, his family took a burnt cork and covered his face in “blackface” and watched him perform?

  Thebes was drawing on Logan’s cast. She drew a heart with his name and Deborah Solomon’s in it. He made her change it.

  She looked up something in her dictionary. I know, she said. I’ll draw an ulna. She drew an ulna along the cast, and the other bone and joint parts of his arm and wrist and hand. Then she coloured it black all around that, so the white bony parts stood out and it looked pretty good, quite skeletal. She asked Logan if she could write two very short poems entitled “The Sunset” and “The Room” on the other side of his cast and he said yeah.

  Min had once put me in a body cast, for a school art project. I’d been so eager and excited when she’d asked me to help her out. Our parents were away for the weekend and Min really relished being in charge.

  I wore my bathing suit, and she slathered two giant jars of Vaseline that she’d bought onto my body, and then she stuck layers and layers of plaster on me and told me I’d have to wait for two hours until it had hardened and then she’d cut it off and I’d be free. She told me she had to zip out for a few minutes to buy something, but she didn’t come back until the next day and I was left alone in the house in a body cast, unable to move. I stood in the middle of the living room for a long time, and then I tipped myself over onto the floor and lay there trying not to cry because I didn’t want the salt in my tears to make me thirstier than I already was.

  Please don’t tell Mom and Dad, she said, when she finally returned. Or we’ll never be left alone again. I promised I wouldn’t but I didn’t agree with her reasoning. I didn’t think I wanted to be left alone with her again.

  She cut the plaster off with a saw and several knives. It took hours and by the time she was finished I had tiny cuts all over my body and a bright red rash. It’s perfect, she said, of the life-sized c
ast. It looks more like you than you.

  The van was making strange sounds. Logan asked me if I’d heard it and I said yeah, but I was going to ignore it.

  Well, he said, but you should listen to it carefully, like to the type of sound it is, so you can tell someone if we break down. Articulate the problem, he said. You know?

  No, I said, I don’t know. But you’re right.

  Thebes made me a gift certificate. It entitled me to have her keep up to ten secrets for me. She drew ten squares at the bottom that we could punch out with the hole puncher she’d brought along. She also made one for herself that said This Certificate entitles Theodora Troutman to become an actress at any time she chooses.

  Did you know that the original owners of our neighbours’ house are buried in the basement walls? she asked me.

  What? I said. I was taking Logan’s advice and trying to listen to the aberrant sounds of the van and figure out a way of describing them.

  That’s not true, said Logan.

  Yeah, it is, said Thebes.

  That guy was full of shit, he said. He was just trying to scare you.

  Are you talking about that guy who stole your hatchets? I said.

  Yeah, he’s a tool, said Logan. Nobody’s buried in his house.

  They bickered about that for a few minutes and then talked about how an arm and a leg had been found in the Red River, and the newspapers had told people to be on the lookout for body parts, like, yeah, we’d see a leg on the way to school and dust it off and bring it right downtown to Police HQ…They went on like that for a while, and I put in one of my CDs and then took it out again because it reminded me of Marc.

  Then Logan told Thebes he didn’t want to talk about that stuff any more. It was bringing him down and so was a lot of other stuff and he needed to think about something positive. Thebes agreed. She decided to pimp our ride with paper hearts and rainbows.

  Logan told us about his latest dream. A thousand people were gathered in his school gymnasium and one of his teachers was giving a very mean and sad and negative speech about something and then slowly, as he talked, it became more and more joyous, like just incredibly beautiful and celebratory and Logan said he felt, in this dream, so unbelievably great that he did this amazing vertical and slam dunk and it was the most completely satisfying dream he’d ever had.

  He looked at his cast. He banged it against the dash a couple of times. Then he looked at the map and said, Monticello, Blanding, Bluff, Mexican Hat, Tuba City, Flagstaff. He wished he had his knife so he could carve those names into the dash.

  Do you use an IUD, Hattie? asked Thebes.

  What? I said. Why are you asking me that? Min would have stayed calm and classy and answered honestly and respectfully and then maybe have used the occasion for an informative discussion on birth control.

  No, I said. Do you? Stop reading that dictionary.

  eleven

  IN THE WORLD OF CHILDREN, Min was a genius, she could navigate it in her sleep. She could read book after book to them, sing song after song, soothe them for hours, tenderly and humorously cajole them out of their tantrums, build cities and empires with them in the sandbox for an entire day and answer a million questions in a row without ever losing her cool. She had conceived them, given birth to them and nursed them into life. But out there, in that other world, she was continually crashing into things.

  I should give her permission to kill herself, I thought. No, not permission, that’s the wrong word. I should give her my blessing. No, not even blessing. I don’t know what it would be that I’d be giving her, necessarily, by telling her she could do whatever she wanted with her life.

  One day this guy came to her door and asked her if she had any money, he said his wife and kids were freezing to death somewhere, and she said oh, you know what, no, I’m so sorry. So the guy asked her if she had money in the bank. Well, yeah, she said. A bit. And then the guy said well, I’ve got my car here, and I know where there’s an ATM, why don’t we go there right now and you can get some money out of your account. Well, said Min, yeah, okay. So off they go and Min takes out sixty bucks and gives it to him and he asks her if that’s all she has and she says yeah, I’m so sorry, and he takes off, and she walks home alone through the icy streets still worrying about the guy’s wife and kids. And then she tells Cherkis about this and he tells me and asks me what the hell is wrong with that woman? He didn’t say it spitefully or angrily. He said it quietly. He shook his head. He was stumped, genuinely. He wanted to know as badly as I did.

  Once, after she’d deep-sixed another one of her art projects early in its infancy, Min decided that what she really needed was religion and she started going to some church in the north end, in some dilapidated neighbourhood off Main Street.

  At first it was great but then the pastor of the church told the congregation that they were going to start locking the doors of the church during the Sunday sermon because prostitutes were coming in off the street to warm up in the lobby and kids in the hood were coming in off the street to steal coats from the cloakroom.

  Min was enraged. Since when does a church lock its doors, and especially to the community’s most vulnerable individuals? The next Sunday she brought a lawn chair and plunked it down by the front door, which she’d propped open with a sign that said All Are Welcome, and then, clipboard in hand, counted the number of prostitutes and street kids and other disenfranchised folks entering the church.

  None! Zero. She did this Sunday after Sunday, there was no thieving going on at all, and then, when her good work was finished, she stormed the pulpit in the middle of his sermon, grabbed the mike and presented her findings to the entire assembly and said if this was Christianity she didn’t want any part of it, she’d rather sell her ass for crack.

  We were making good time now, barrelling through the bodacious curves of southeastern Utah and ignoring all impending signs of trouble with the van. At least I was.

  You guys happy? I said.

  The kids smiled at me like I was a dog chasing my tail, sweet but stupid, and looked away.

  Thebes decided that she and Logan should have Art Class in the van. She would be the teacher and he would be her star pupil. She wanted Logan to attempt, somehow, in whatever medium he chose, to render the majestic beauty of our surroundings.

  Logan said he didn’t want her to impose her definition of art on him and he’d only play if he could do whatever he wanted to do.

  Fine, Thebes said. What do you want to do?

  Logan asked her if he could use the mannequin head she’d brought along and she reluctantly agreed. She had been saving it for something big, but fine, okay, he could have it. Logan crawled into the back with Thebes, for better access to her art supplies, and they hunkered down and got to work. It was difficult for Logan to work with the cast on, but Thebes helped him out with the finer details. They were at it for hours, it was a long class. At one point Logan asked me to pull over onto the shoulder so he could do something to the head. I wasn’t allowed to look. The final project was going to be a surprise.

  By the time he finished, his teacher had fallen fast asleep. Okay, he said, here it is. I pulled over again so I could have a decent look at it.

  He handed me a bloody mannequin head.

  It’s called This Boy Is Obviously Dying, he said.

  On the neck part of the mannequin he’d drawn little pictures of a sun, a girl, the road, a CD player and a basketball jersey.

  There’s a written explanation that goes with the piece, he said. He handed me a scrap of paper.

  I’m driving, I said. Read it to me.

  He began: The goal of this piece was to depict a fictional young victim of typical street violence, attaching a certain level of humanity to a conventional urban casualty. To give it as realistic a feel as possible, I took the head onto the shoulder of a highway somewhere in Utah in the afternoon and beat it with a heavy metal rod for ten minutes. I then painted the head to look as though it was bleeding from all the places wh
ere it was damaged or scraped up. The images on the lower neck represent two contrasting influences on the dying kid, one material, violent and destructive, and the other loving, peaceful and uplifting. I see the presence of these two divergent influences as a fundamental conflict within everyone. A conflict this kid lost.

  God, um…yeah, he did, didn’t he? I said.

  Logan had also included the materials and resources he used for the project: mannequin head, acrylic paint, ballpoint pen, pencil, metal rod, highway shoulder, glue gun.

  Where’d you get a metal rod? I asked him.

  Thebes, he said.

  I put the boy’s head on the dash, facing out towards the road. There was so much blood on it and it looked so real. His hair was covered in it and it was dripping down his face. I didn’t want to look at it or touch it or attempt to understand it. Logan didn’t ask me what I thought. He seemed pretty pleased with it.

  It’s great, I said. Kind of dark, but great. I like the explanation.

  He told me I didn’t have to keep it on the dash if I didn’t want to. In fact, he said, we could throw it out or burn it. He was just trying to make Thebes happy.

  No, no, I said. I like it up here. It makes an interesting contrast with the hearts and rainbows on the back windows. Think it’ll bring us luck?

  Logan put in a CD and closed his eyes.

  Are you going to sleep? I said.

  No answer.

  Logan?

  Yeah?

  Are you—?

  No, I’m just thinking, he said.

  About what?

  He kept his eyes closed while he talked. I don’t know how to say it, really, he said.

  Say what? I asked.

  You know, he said, I kind of know that this whole thing wasn’t Min’s idea. He opened his eyes and looked at me and then turned around and checked to make sure that Thebes was sleeping. Then he closed them again.