Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

Yo.

Tomorrow you should have a bath. And brush your hair.

Why? she said.

Tomorrow we get to Twentynine Palms, I said. I can help you with your hair if you want.

Tomorrow?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’ll be there tomorrow. Tomorrow night. If we can get the van fixed in the morning, I said.

I was waiting for her to talk, to spring into action, to illuminate the room with some Theban fact or question or comment or pronouncement or definition or something, anything. I stroked her hair. I put my arms around her and held her close and she didn’t say a word. I wouldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t think about the possibility of this being our last night together for a long time. I could hear Logan swearing in the shower. I could hear Marc breathing next to me. I could hear my father cracking a lame joke and I could hear Min laughing.

I WOKE UP AROUND MIDNIGHT and tried as delicately as I could to extricate myself from Thebes’s Jurassic grip and to get out of bed and find a cigarette in my backpack. I was trying, and failing, for the most part, to smoke only while she was unconscious. And then I noticed that Logan wasn’t in the other bed. And he wasn’t in the bathroom. And he wasn’t in the closet. He wasn’t in our motel room, period. I went to the window and moved the curtain and looked outside at the parking lot.

Yeah, the van was gone. Of course it was.

I know the score, boy, I thought to myself. I’ve run away too. I sat on the edge of the tub in the dark with the fan on and finished my cigarette and then wrote a note for Thebes in case she woke up and wondered why she was all alone.

I wandered down the road and passed a bunch of other cheap motels and cheesy chain restaurants and closed gas stations. If there had been a church I’d have gone inside and prayed. I would have said please bring the little fucker back safe and sound, G od, I mean it. But instead the most I could do was say his name over and over. Logan, I whispered. Logan, Logan, Logan. Where the hell are you? I passed a panhandler sitting under a streetlight at an intersection and he had a sign that said Need 37 Million Dollars for Trip to Space. I could get behind that. I gave him two bucks. I headed for a bar across the street and ducked inside to find the pay phone, punched my old Paris number and listened to it ring and ring and ring.

When I went back out to the parking lot some hippies looked up at me from their toke and said hey.

What’s up? I said.

Check out the moon, man, said one of them. He pointed up like maybe I was one of those people who always forgot things like keys and wallets and the location of the moon.

I stared at it for what seemed like a really long time. I didn’t see Logan in any of the moon’s craters or shadows.

It’s really beautiful, I said. And I mean really beautiful. Seriously.

The stoners nodded and agreed and asked me if I wanted to join them.

Thanks, I said. But I can’t. I’m looking for someone.

Who are you looking for? one of them asked.

My nephew, I said. His name is Logan. He’s fifteen. This tall. Black hoodie. He’s driving a Ford Aerostar.

Whoa! said the guy. Wait. Who?

My nephew, I said.

Man, he said, how’d you lose him?

We’re staying at a motel down there and I fell asleep and he took off, I said.

That’s messed up, he said.

Yeah.

Think you’ll find him? he said.

What do you mean? I asked. Like, ever? Yeah. He’s probably off shooting somewhere.

What? said the guy.

Hoops, I said. Basketball.

It’s like the middle of the night, he said.

Hey, do you guys have a car? I asked.

Noooooo, said the guy. Nope.

Yeah we do, Ding Dong, said a girl from the huddle.

We do? said the guy.

It’s a truck, said a different guy. He had his arm around the girl.

The car is a truck? said the guy. Cool.

Do you guys want to drive around and help me look for him? I said.

Oh, yeah! They were into that.

I sat in the box with a few of them, including Ding Dong, who said it was totally dope with him if I sat in his lap, and the girl drove. We watched one another’s hair go wild in the wind and the clouds cover and uncover the moon like a blanket, like a nervous mother. It would have been a great time if I hadn’t just lost my sister’s kid.

None of the people in the truck were actually from Flagstaff, they were all seasonal employees from somewhere else, so they didn’t really know where the basketball courts might be.

Before we could begin our search we had to go to one of their dorms or lodges or whatever and pick up some more weed. I asked Ding Dong if it was close and he said yeah and that Ding Dong wasn’t actually his name, it was Adam.

When we got there the others got out of the truck and went in, but Adam said they’d be fine, they could get the stuff, why didn’t he and I just sit there and talk.

I told him I liked the idea of talking but I was preoccupied with my missing nephew and didn’t really know what to say. I wanted to find Logan. Adam said we’d find Logan. He knew it. He told me a lot of things about himself. He and a friend of his had just been fired by a Spanish religious radio station called Radio Sinai for translating Cheech and Chong dialogues into Spanish and airing them late at night. Or something like that. I found out that he wasn’t close to his father at all but that he and his mother talked pretty often, even though she wasn’t really in touch with her own emotions. He had a girlfriend, sort of, whom he’d recently reconnected with after a couple of years of not talking. She was an actress and sweet but they screamed at each other a lot. He didn’t think she really appreciated him. His sister was a single mother with an eight-year-old daughter and they hung out. He helped her when he could. He told me he spoke a little Sango, a dialect of Ngbandi. He asked me what my nephew and I were doing in Flagstaff and I told him the whole story. When I had finished he put his hand on mine and said he was sorry I was so unhappy. He asked me if I thought all this stuff was happening for a reason.

No, I said. I don’t think so. Where do you think the others are? I asked him.

Then he asked me if I’d heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I’m not sure, I said.

He told me it was the idea that the momentum and location of a certain particle cannot be determined at the same time.

Wow, that’s pretty interesting, I said. I told him I was going to walk back to the hotel because all of this was taking too long and I had to check on Thebes.

No, man, hold up, he said. I’ll go find out what the deal is. I’ll be right back. Please don’t go, he said. Okay? Please?

I stared some more at the moon and at the rippled surface of the box that I was sitting in. I thought about how good it felt to have somebody ask me to stay. I thought about how pathetic it was that it felt so good to have somebody ask me to stay. Adam came running back to the truck and said that the others were so done, they’d kind of forgotten about us, they were gonna hang out at the lodge and watch Drugstore Cowboy but they’d given him the key to the truck. They’d said to wish me luck with the search.

Let’s blast, he said.

We drove back to the motel first so I could peek in on Thebes. I told Adam he could wait in the truck but he said he’d like to come with me. We went to the room and stood in the doorway and looked at the sleeping Thebes.

I like her hair, Adam whispered. I nodded and smiled. You’re a good aunt, he said.

I shook my head and whispered no, I wasn’t. I was a disaster. He put his arm around my shoulder and we looked at Thebes for another minute or two, like we were the brand-new parents of an oversized baby girl, and then we quietly left the room and went back to the truck.