Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

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 cast. 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.