Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

Are you okay? I asked him.

Yeah, totally, he said. You?

Well, I’m a little freaked out, I said. We just hit a deer.

Thebes couldn’t stop crying.

Hey, T., said Logan, do you wanna play Hangman? You can start.

They played for a long time and Logan played by all of Thebes’s goofy rules and she finally stopped crying and cheered up and Logan climbed back over into the front seat.

Logan was writing or drawing something. Is that a sketchbook? I asked him.

No, he said. It was a black, hardcover notebook with blank, unlined pages. Some of the pages had sketches on them. It looks exactly like a sketchbook, I said.

Mmm, he said.

It is a sketchbook, said Thebes. He doesn’t want people to know about it though.

You mean like your song lyrics? I asked her.

Shut up! she said, and dropped back.

Logan read something out loud, something his art teacher had written about one of his sketches. Logan, she’d written, this is an assignment tailor-made for your particular strengths … weird but fascinating creatures/shapes…very dreamlike.

On the outside of his notebook he had a bunch of strange drawings and odd numbers. He read those to me too.

380 off the dribble

220 off the dribble

80 2 dribble

80 crossover

200 free throws

Ideal: 30 ft., 300 off the dribble, 500 3s, 150 mid-range

Ball handling

Weight, running, jumping

20 wind sprints over 90 minutes

BALL MOVEMENT

Take it to the cup

Fuck the People

Darkleaf

What was that last part? I asked him.

My music, he said.

They say we should wear goggles, said Thebes. The wind is that strong today. She was reading the newspaper. Then she was quiet for a minute. What do you guys think about setting yourself on fire as a means of protest? she asked. Quiet for another minute. We didn’t bother to answer.

Okay, Hattie, she said, you’re a Gemini and that’s an air sign, which means you live more in your head than in your heart and you should try to remember and understand that all of humanity is interconnected and you should also try to be at one with the world and know that if you hurt somebody you’re also hurting yourself.

Got it, I said, although I thought it would be easier to light myself on fire.

I pulled into a gas station and told the guy behind the counter that I’d hit a deer about ten miles back and it was lying dead on the side of the road and asked if he could call someone to have it taken away. He said yeah and asked me if there was any damage to the vehicle and I said yeah, but just a big dent, and the ignition fell out.

The ignition fell out? he said.

Yeah, but I can start it with a screwdriver, I said.

He said well, okay, fine, but if the impact had loosened up the ignition so it fell out then maybe other things would start falling off too, and I said, okay, thanks, we’ll watch out for them, and we left.

So, we’re in a boat, said Logan. This was a dream he had had a few nights ago. And, yeah, he said, we’re just in it floating around in the ocean, and then Grandpa comes up and he’s smiling, this big, huge smile, and, you know, we’re all hauling him into the boat and he says, Man, am I happy to see you guys! He had a moustache, said Logan.

No, he didn’t have a moustache, I said. Logan hadn’t ever actually seen his grandpa.

Well, in my dream he did, he said.

I wanted Logan to keep talking about his dreams and his sketchbook or anything else at all.

Read me this, I said. I handed him his CD case. I wanted to hear his voice so I could remember its exact tone and timbre when I was back in Paris hunting down my boyfriend. So I’d be able to hear Logan saying to me, Jesus, Hat, give it up, man, fuck. But then when he actually did talk it was a question that took me by surprise.

Hey, he said, were you around when Mom first went off the deep end?

No, I said.

No? he said. Well, where were you?

Well, I mean, yeah, I said. I mean, I guess so.

And? he said.

She’d gone out late one evening in February to have a nap under a tree in the field behind the giant Discount Everything store a few blocks from our house. It was so cold our pipes froze that night. It was my job to thaw them out. I had to wrap them up in blankets and then sit on the floor using a hair dryer to blow hot air on them. A barrel fuse blew that night too, and I had to rummage around in the dark with a flashlight.

I remember peering over the fuse box saying, stove, fridge, dryer, stove, fridge, dryer, over and over, trying to figure it out. It was a record cold night, minus fifty-something with a deadly wind chill. Our house was shaking, none of our doors would close, and empty pizza boxes were flying past our windows. It was the kind of night where if you froze to death they’d have had to set up a tent around your body with giant industrial heaters in it, just to be able to peel you off the ground. Even the cool kids were walking backwards down the street to keep the wind from killing them. It was snowing horizontally and the streets all over the city were buckling and collapsing and swallowing up traffic.

It’s so beautiful, Min said when they found her under that tree. She said she’d seen an airplane explode in the air and crash. The cops said later that she’d almost frozen to death but not quite. She’d been out there for two and a half hours. One of them said she was shaking hands with God.

So she had to go to the hospital for a few weeks.

When she came home she thought her fingers would have to be cut off and then her hands and then even her arms, right above the elbow. She said she wouldn’t even be able to wipe her own ass. Nothing we could say would convince her that she was fine, that nothing would be amputated, and then one day she started doing it herself, cutting deep rivets into her wrists, getting it over with, and she had to go back to the hospital for quite a long time.

When she got home, our mother slept with her at night, in Min’s bed, and sometimes I’d curl up at their feet or on the floor in front of her door so she wouldn’t run away. When she was well enough to leave the house I’d follow her. She’d walk for miles sometimes, never stopping at a friend’s place or a store or a park or anything at all, just walking, quickly, and staring at her feet or off into the middle distance. One evening I had convinced her not to go for a walk. I begged her to stay at home and play gin rummy with me and she agreed to, and she made us milk-shakes and popcorn and she told me that she had known that I’d been following her and that she wasn’t angry about it but that I didn’t have to do it any more.

Are you afraid I’ll do something stupid? she asked me, and I said yeah, I was, and she promised me she wouldn’t, although she really couldn’t understand why I would care, and I told her because I loved her, and she smiled and shook her head like I was a complete fool.

Logan had carved Don’t take this the wrong way into the dashboard.

Don’t take what the wrong way? I asked him.

Just, you know what, he said. Try not to be so literal.

Thebes popped up from the back. Where’s North America again? she asked.

Oh my god, said Logan. He shrank into his hoodie.

SO, WE WERE WHISTLING SOUTH ALONG THE I-25 and Logan was looking at the map. I want to go to Moab, he said. Moab, Utah.

Why? I asked.

I don’t know.

What is that again? I said. Moab.

He shrugged. No clue, he said.

I think it’s from the Bible, I said. It’s a people. Moabites or…