Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

I’m quitting right now, this second, he said.

Thebes came hopping over on one foot with an Archie comic and a new knife for Logan. She laid it across his throat for him to find if he ever woke up.

We got into the van and I started it up while he and Thebes were chatting. Logan slept through all of this. The guy’s name was Colt.

Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse?

I guess, said the guy, or a gun.

Well, which do you prefer? she said.

What do you mean? he asked.

Like, how do you prefer to think of yourself? As a baby, male horse?

No, he said, he didn’t really like to think of himself that way.

Well, then, as a gun? she said.

No, not really, he said. He preferred basically not to think of himself at all.

Isn’t that impossible? she said. How can you not think of yourself at all?

Well, he said, he just thought about other things.

Such as? said Thebes.

About his girlfriend, mostly, he said.

Yeah, she said, but not in relation to yourself? He didn’t think so. Anything else? said Thebes.

Well, I do think about life on other planets, he said.

Really? she said.

He said yeah, he thought a lot about this planet called Moralia.

C’mon, she said, there is no planet called Moralia.

This was good. I’d picked up a violent nutcase named after a gun who believed in a planet that didn’t exist.

Do you mind if I smoke? he asked.

Not at all…may I have one of those? I said.

Actually, we do mind, said Thebes.

Then she started relating to this guy by telling him how, when she was a little kid, she had this magazine and in it was an advertisement for this miniature fake town called Thomas Kinkade Lamplight Village. She wanted to live there so badly. She would lie in her bed gazing at this village, with its cute gabled houses and meandering, narrow pathways and smoking chimneys and thatched roofs and homey lanterns and warm, orange glow and cry her eyes out wishing she was in it.

Word, said Colt, I’m down. I wished I lived on Moralia. Thebes had found a soulmate in this homicidal cosmonaut. Impeccably, sombrely united in their mutual, impossible longing to live in places that weren’t real, they high-fived and punched and slapped and then gazed for a while out the window at the real world, the one they’d had it with.

Nice head, said Colt, finally. He pointed to the dash.

Yeah, I said. The guy sleeping next to you with the knife on his throat made it in Thebes’s art class.

Who’s Thebes? he said.

That one, I said, nodding my head in Thebes’s direction.

In Old English, said Thebes, colt means young ass or camel. She slammed her dictionary shut.

Hey, isn’t the Grand Canyon around here somewhere? she said.

Hey, another chunk of the world missing from our lives. Another giant hole in the surface of our universe. Let’s find it!

Yabsolutely, said Colt. Where are you guys from, anyway?

The True North strong and free, said Thebes.

Cool, he said, where are you going?

Twentynine Palms, she said.

Where’s that? he asked.

California, she said.

What for?

To meet our father, she said.

Are you the mother? he asked me.

I’m the aunt, I said.

Then Colt told us a story about how he was a conduit for love, but I’d stopped listening.

Logan woke up and he and Colt politely introduced themselves to each other and then Thebes said we had to see the Grand Canyon. I said I was worried about the van and really wanted to get to Flagstaff. But Logan said yeah, he wouldn’t mind checking out the canyon, and Colt said he wouldn’t mind either, he had a window before he was scheduled to break his girlfriend’s head.

I don’t know what to say about the Grand Canyon that the name itself doesn’t evoke. It’s big and deep and brown. The four of us stood at the edge of it and looked down and saw a line of donkeys with tourists on them snaking along a path at the bottom.

With her underwater camera Thebes took a picture of Logan, Colt and me beside the canyon looking slightly dazed and disappointed.

Let’s get outta here, I said. It gave me the creeps. I snapped at Thebes to back away from the edge. I yelled at Logan when he pretended to push her over, that’s so not fucking funny, and begged Colt for one of his smokes. Yabsolutely!

I glared at a swarm of tourists who were staring like they recognized me from Rosemary’s Baby and flicked my butt into the canyon when I was done.

Logan wanted to drive into Flagstaff, so I let him, partly in a glasnost attempt to make up for screaming at him earlier. Wild West. And mostly he was using one hand, his good one, to drive. Someday he’d have a valid licence and in the meantime he needed to practise. I knew he thought it looked lame to be riding into a new town with his sister and his aunt and I knew he thought Colt was a goof. Ideally he would have had us all duck down and make ourselves invisible while he drove around listening to his tunes, playing it cool, pretending he was something other than a fifteen-year-old Canadian boy in a leaking Ford Aerostar minivan.

We dropped Colt off in a 7-Eleven parking lot. He said he needed to buy a newspaper and a razor and some other things and he could get to where he was going from there.

Not Moralia, said Thebes. Later, skater. She was yawning.

Hey, I said, act nice and gentle, eh? Nice meeting you.

You too, said Colt. Thanks for the ride.

Take it easy, said Logan. They shook hands, awkwardly because of his cast.

Logan peeled out of the parking lot and we drove around looking for a hotel. It was late, around ten, and I’d have to find a garage in the morning. We found a cheap Motel 6 and while I checked us in and Thebes lay down on a ratty sofa in the lobby and read some literature on Flagstaff, Logan carried our stuff to the room. When Thebes and I got there the TV was blaring and Logan was pacing around, fuming.

That fucker jacked my knife, he said.

Colt? said Thebes. The new one I bought you?

Yeah, he said, when I was sleeping. He must have.

I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. We’ll buy you a new one, I said. We’ll just keep buying knives and pistols.

Thebes lay down beside me and continued to read her brochures. Did you know that Flagstaff has a disproportionate number of methamphetamine addicts and scam artists? she said.

I didn’t know why a hotel would have a brochure with that kind of information. Is there anything in there about horseback riding or museums or anything like that? I asked. I thought maybe there’d be something fun to do the next day while the van was getting fixed.

Um, said Thebes, it says there’s a psychiatric museum housed in an abandoned mental asylum somewhere around here. Apparently it’s haunted with—

Okay, no, we’re not doing that. Maybe we’ll see a movie or something.

Logan asked if he could take the van and drive around and look for a basketball court.

No, I said. I was an ugly wall of no. It’s late. It’s dark. And I don’t trust the van. And didn’t you hear what Thebes just said? This place is crawling with meth-heads. I was also afraid that he’d try to find Colt to get his knife back, but I didn’t want to tell him that in case he hadn’t actually thought of it.

And can you turn that TV off? I said.

He went into the bathroom and slammed the door and turned on the shower.

I lay on the bed with my eyes closed and tried to calm myself down doing some yogic breathing Marc had tried to teach me as an alternative to Gauloises. Thebes was quiet too. She was tired. She was already under the blanket. Her holster and the tourist brochures lay on the floor beside the bed.

Thebie? I said.