Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

Mother of All Bombs, said Logan.

No, I said. Well, yeah, but…Or it’s a place…in Jordan? Egypt? Moab. Hmmm.

Moab, said Thebes. Bastard son of Lot. Moab, said Thebes. An ancient region by the Dead Sea, or its people. Etymology of Moab, she said. A corruption of “seed of a father” or as a participial form from “to desire,” thus connoting “the desirable land.”

Thanks, Thebes, I said.

The Holy Rashi in Humash, said Thebes, explains the word Moav to mean “from the father” since “av” in Hebrew means “father.”

Great, Thebes, thanks, I said.

Fritz Hommel, said Thebes, regards Moab as an abbreviation of “Immo-ab,” which means “his mother is his father.”

Thebes, thank you.

Just helping a brother out, she said, and slammed her dictionary shut.

So, yeah, let’s go there, said Logan.

Thebes, I said, do you want to?

I’m down, she said. Where is it?

Logan was still studying the map. Hey, he said, if we went to Moab we could check out Mexican Hat and Tuba City. They’re kind of on the way to the Painted Desert.

Are they towns? asked Thebes.

Yeah, he said. I guess so. Concept towns or something.

When Logan was a baby Min would tie him up in a bike seat with an old scarf and then they’d ride all over the city. Sometimes he’d fall asleep, and wearing this huge kid’s bike helmet he looked like an extraterrestrial, and it would thump against her back and she’d have to reach around and prop it up and hold it there, his giant, oversized head, while she rode around with one hand. She put him to sleep under tables in cafés, on friends’ couches, in fields at rock concerts. She took him everywhere. When he was four he’d get up really early in the morning and make calls to people he knew, like me, to see how we were doing and to tell us about his morning.

Hey, I said, remember how much Min hated your kindergarten teacher?

Yeah, he said. His kindergarten teacher had called Min up and told her that he was concerned that Logan didn’t know how to stand on one foot and that he didn’t know his colours.

That was crap, Min had said. He’d been hopping on one foot since he was a year old and knew his colours at two. She asked the teacher if maybe Logan was just being funny in a five-year-old way when he said blue was red or whatever, or maybe he just didn’t feel like hopping around on one foot, why should he? Then the teacher told Min that he’d send Logan, this tiny kid who had just barely started school, to the principal’s office if he didn’t cooperate with the testing thing. So Min had said okay, as soon as he did that he should call her because she’d have his ass fired at the very same time.

And then Logan told me this story about how one day, long after he was out of kindergarten, like when he was eleven or twelve, he and Min had seen that teacher waiting at a bus stop when they were walking home from the grocery store and Min started hopping around him on one foot and saying all kinds of goofy things like oh, look, it’s very important to be able to do this. Can you do this? Because if you are not able to hop on one foot you may as well kill yourself. Nobody will hire you. Nobody will marry you. Nobody will want to be your friend. She went on and on.

I had to beg her to stop, said Logan.

She was still pissed after all those years, eh? I said.

That’s a long time to be mad, said Logan.

Then I told Logan about something else he’d done when he was four or five. Min had asked me to take him to his Orff class at the conservatory. It was the first one and the teacher had gone around the room asking their names. Logan said his name was Logan “I don’t wanna be here” Troutman.

Yeah, he said, he vaguely remembered that. He hadn’t felt like doing that Orff stuff either.

So, yeah, I said, while the other kids were dinging the triangle or knocking some pieces of wood together, you were lying on the floor doing this seal act, rocking on your chest with your arms behind your back going orf, orf, orf.

I used to be cute, he said. Adoptable.

Oh, c’mon, I said. You’re still adoptable. It was supposed to be a joke, but it was a stupid one given the circumstances.

Thebes popped up. See, she said, Logan did funny, clever things and all I liked to do was lie in the sandbox and have a nice, long crap in my diaper and then fall asleep in the sun. Min said it was my favourite thing. Like I was some rat or wino or something.

You were a contented kid, I said.

Not that ambitious, said Logan.

But really, he said, who adopts fifteen-year-old boys?

Well, I said, I guess, yeah…not many people.

They go into group homes, said Logan.

Or foster homes, I said. But only until they’re eighteen.

And then? asked Logan.

Well, I said, they go wherever. They do their thing. They’re adults then.

Hey, said Thebes. She punched Logan in the arm. Remember when you burst that blood vessel in your eye from vomiting so hard when you got drunk with your basketball team?

I still have it, he said. He opened his left eye wide and looked at Thebes.

Dude! she said. You should wear a patch. I’ll make you one.

They went on like that for a while. I was happy they were talking. Remembering. Reminiscing about their childhood, like it hadn’t all been one long march to the frozen Gulag.

But, said Logan, a fifteen-year-old could technically live on his own, right?

Okay, bad times are gonna roll, I thought. Logan is planning to run away before we find Cherkis.

No, a fifteen-year-old cannot live on his own, I said.

Pippi Longstocking wasn’t even fifteen, said Thebes, and she—

Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.

And she was Swedish, said Logan.

So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to help keep her afloat, I said. It doesn’t work here.

Yeah, but the point of Pippi was that she didn’t need anybody or any social programs to help her, said Logan. She was that strong.

Yeah, I said, but unhumanly so. She could lift a horse. Can you?

Well, I don’t know, said Logan. A small one, maybe, but that’s not my point. There was more to her strength than that. It was—

You could so not lift a horse, said Thebes.

Yeah, I probably could, said Logan.

No, you couldn’t, she said. But I could probably flip a horse.

I could eat a horse, said Logan.

Oh, the things they could do to horses. They pingponged back and forth for a long time about horses and tough Swedish girls while I looked for a gas station and/or grocery store.

Min was married briefly to a grip a few years ago, long after Cherkis had hit the road. The grip’s name was Darius. They met on a movie set. Min was working as a driver, or maybe as a caterer. I wasn’t sure. When the shooting was finished, they drove down to Vegas to spend Min’s wages on blackjack. The plan was that if she and Darius made enough money from blackjack they would get married at the Elvis chapel, for the hell of it.

Logan didn’t care what they did. Min told me that he spent the entire time in Vegas in front of the cracked bathroom mirror of the hotel room perfecting his Robert De Niro impersonation and trying to get the family thrown out of as many casinos as he could.

Min and Darius chose package B, which included a limo to pick them up and drop them off, a medley of Elvis tunes by the impersonator, some flowers, a videotape of the wedding, and a guy named Juan to be the minister. Is it real or what? Darius asked Min. Of course it’s real, she told him. Not that she really cared. She didn’t care about being married to anyone, she just wanted to be loved. But she didn’t want to be taken care of. Or she did. She told me that Thebes had taken her hand and crammed it into Darius’s. She wore a dress that was red on the top and then gradually faded into light orange at the very bottom.