Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

We drove through a town called Kennebec. We were getting close to Murdo. When we saw a beat-up looking basketball court next to an empty swimming pool, Logan asked if we could stop so he could shoot some hoops. He’d been holding his basketball in his lap like a sleeping newborn for hours. I pulled up next to the court and he turned around and chucked his ball at Thebes.

Yo, T., heads up, he said. She caught it, thrilled to death that he wanted to play with her, and they were off.

I lay down in the prickly brown grass next to the court and watched them play. Thebes would get the rebounds and pass them back to Logan or try to block him. Sometimes she’d sit beside me on the sidelines and yell like she was his coach.

The backboard exists for a reason, Troutman! she’d say. Wake up! She took off her shoe and threw it on the ground in despair. Stay with your man, Troutman! A couple of maintenance men in white overalls walked over to where we were sitting. They asked me what we were doing there and I said we were just resting, playing some basketball, hanging out.

Nobody ever comes here, said one of the men.

I said, Yeah, I can see that. I wondered what exactly these guys were maintaining. The kids came over and asked me what was up. We’re just talking, I said. One of the guys asked Logan his name.

Logan said Lloyd Banks, and the guy took out a pen and wrote that down on the back of an envelope. Then he asked Thebes her name, and she said Veronica Lodge, and he wrote that down too. He asked them where they were from, the island of Togo? And then they laughed and said they were kidding. Logan said they were from Riverdale, Thebes’s dream town. They wrote that down too.

Why are you writing this stuff down? I asked one of the guys.

He said they were doing an independent survey to determine who and what type of people use the playground.

After they left, we all sat on the grass and talked about who they might be. Aliens, religious freaks, FBI, scouts for the Lakers. Then Logan told Thebes that the best way to deal with school and life is to pretend that everyone is stoned. The teachers, mom, friends, me, the bus driver, grandma when she was alive, kids, everyone. So that when someone says to you something like, Thebes, we’re worried about your home life, or Thebes, it’s come to our attention that you’ve missed sixteen consecutive band practices, or Hey, kid, you’ve gotta pay to ride the bus, you can just laugh and laugh at the lunacy of it all. Then Thebes went over to the van and took out a giant novelty cheque she’d made for Logan. It was about four feet long. She’d made it with cardboard and markers and Popsicle sticks for ballast on the back so it wouldn’t bend. She brought it over to us and looked at Logan, who squinted up at her, one hand blocking the sun that made her look like she was on fire.

I’d like to present this to you, Logan, for…I’m not sure what, she said.

She just likes making oversized novelty cheques, he explained to me. I get them all the time. How much is it worth? he asked her.

One million dollars, she said. Congratulations for being my brother. She held it in front of his face and he took it and looked at it.

Thanks, Thebes, he said.

Do you make a speech now? I asked him.

No, he said.

Don’t worry, you’ll get one too, said Thebes. She sat down on the grass again and then lay down and put her head in my lap. While she braided grass, I pulled some art supply stuff out of her hair and blew in her face. There’s no way you’ll be able to comb your hair, I told her. You’ll have to shave your head or grow dreads.

I know, she said.

I gently massaged her scalp. It was discoloured from the purple dye and speckled with dirt and glue and glitter. Hey, I said, where’s the scalpel stuck?

Here, she said, and guided one of my fingers over to the right side of her head.

Does it ever hurt? I asked her.

Nah, she said.

We were quiet, watching dragonflies and braiding grass.

This is way better than being in Paris with that Gandhi guy, right? she said.

Logan stared off at the highway. I admired his tactful restraint. I liked the way he didn’t always correct her, how he sometimes just turned away and let things go.

Driving the home stretch into Murdo. It was a tiny, innocuous speck of a thing on the map, but for us, at least for me, it loomed large suddenly like the shadow of King Kong, or like we were approaching the Kandahar city limits in the back of a U.S. tank with a giant American flag. It scared me. I had no plan, really. Well, I had a plan. I had an outcome planned. But I had no real plan that would logically get me to the plan’s outcome, which was, of course, to find Cherkis and beg him to take care of his kids. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what to say to them or how to comfort them. I wondered if Min believed in a random world or one with a divine purpose. There were so many things we hadn’t talked about and now it all seemed too late. Sometimes she could pull the parenting thing off on her own, get things done, function, we’d laugh on the phone, I’d visit maybe once a year, it was fun, normal, but then…who knows what happened. Water through her fingers. Sand, air. It slipped away.

When I was eight years old I spent an entire week living among three wards of the biggest hospital in town. My father was having his gallbladder removed, my mother was having a balloon inserted somewhere into her body and Min was locked up in the psych ward. I would spend twenty minutes, silently, at each bedside, and then spend twenty minutes searching every vending machine for change. Then I’d spend twenty minutes reading trashy magazines in whichever waiting area I felt like sitting in, and then I’d start all over again. It was really important to me that every thing I did in the hospital lasted no more and no less than twenty minutes. It was my twenty-minute survival plan. You can do anything for twenty minutes. You can survive. Maybe not underwater, but otherwise.

Did you know, said Thebes, that most but not all secret agents have blue eyes?

No, I said.

There was a pen museum in Murdo, apparently. I saw one of those beat-up signs on wheels by the side of the road. Someone had changed the museum’s “slogan” to The Penis Mightier Than the S Word. I willed Thebes not to comment on it but she was busy constructing something less mighty in the back seat anyway and didn’t notice. Someone who has a pen museum in a place like Murdo could very well have known Cherkis, who after all had a crap museum in Murdo, and how many whacked-out DIY curators can live in a town this size without knowing each other?

I followed the directions to a storefront on Main Street. Logan and Thebes were suddenly very alert, like we were poised to launch a sting op and bring it all down.

Right there, said Logan. He pointed at the building.

Thebes jumped out of the van before I could put it in park. She was carrying another one of her homemade novelty cheques, written out to Cherkis for a thousand dollars. Logan got a million, I thought. How does she decide, or does she just run out of space for zeros and then quit?

Thebes, I said, I don’t think he’s here any more. I’m just gonna talk to whoever is here and find out if they know where he might be.

Cool, baby, cool, said Thebes. The wind was howling and she was struggling to keep herself and the giant cheque from flying away. Logan had his security blanket ball with him and threw it once against the side of the van and said, Coming? We went into the pen museum together.

A middle-aged woman sat like Christ in the Last Supper at a long wooden table covered with stuff, mostly pens, yeah, and we all said hi.