100 Sideways Miles Page 5

  Not very much hair grew.

  I got up, wiped my face, and came out, wrapped in a towel.

  I called down from the top of the stairs, “Are you still here?”

  Then Julia Bishop appeared below.

  She was looking at me.

  “I thought you knew my name. It’s Julia,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you needed help or anything,” Julia said.

  “I’m really sorry for how I acted, um, Julia.” I felt myself turning red, backing away from the upstairs railing, unable to stop looking at her, wishing she wouldn’t look at me. I shook my head apologetically. “I’m not very nice. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Finn. Really. I . . . um. I cleaned up your floor.”

  I was horrified.

  “Why?”

  But before Julia Bishop could answer me, the front door swung open and Cade Hernandez, awkwardly carrying two Flat Face Pizza boxes in one hand, jangling car keys and a paper sack containing what I clearly saw to be at least two twelve-packs of beer in the other, came into the house.

  Monica Fassbinder was right behind him, hanging on to his elbow.

  Cade and Monica looked up at me as I stood at the top of the stairs, naked except for a damp bath towel wrapped around my hips. Then Cade glanced at Julia Bishop before he looked back at me one more time.

  He was chewing tobacco. I could see it growing like desert tumbleweeds below the teeth that showed in Cade’s astonished grin.

  Cade Hernandez nearly dropped his pizza boxes and sack of beer.

  He was very drunk.

  Twenty miles.

  Monica Fassbinder said, “Oh. Ha ha! Oops, Finn.”

  Twenty miles.

  And Cade said, “Holy fucking shit, Finn! You better have used a condom!”

  Ridiculous.

  • • •

  I could have died on the spot.

  What else could possibly have gone wrong?

  I threw my hands up in defeat and said, “Cade Hernandez, Monica Fassbinder: Meet Julia Bishop, my new neighbor. Julia: This is Cade, my best friend. He’s staying here for the next five days, trying to kill me with embarrassment while my parents are in New York, and this is his . . . um . . . girlfriend, Monica. Why don’t you all chat amongst yourselves while I go and change into something that isn’t quite so fucking naked ?”

  And with that, I backed away from the railing and shut myself inside my bedroom.

  Slam!

  • • •

  I did not get dressed.

  Inside my room, in the dark, my towel and I climbed up onto my bed, and I lay there with a pillow over my face.

  I could easily have started to cry; I was acting like such a baby.

  But I just wanted everything to disappear, to drift away into namelessness again, and then stay that way for another fourteen billion years.

  And I did not intend to go back downstairs either. I lay there imagining all the terrible things Cade Hernandez might be saying or doing to ensure the complete ruination of any chance I might ever have at finding a normal, decent friend who also happened to be a beautiful girl.

  What was I thinking?

  Eventually—who knew how many miles it was—the door opened and the light flicked on.

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” I said.

  “You okay, Finn?”

  “I got a headache.”

  “Dude.”

  “What?”

  “That girl.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say nothing, Finn.”

  “Sure she didn’t.”

  I felt Cade lean against the top bunk, beside my knees. Even with my pillow pressed over my face, I could smell the booze on him, the atoms from what he’d been getting drunk on wheezing out into the universe with each breath Cade Hernandez exhaled.

  “You . . . uh . . . did that thing, didn’t you?”

  Cade Hernandez knew I blanked out.

  “Yes. I did my fucking thing, Cade.”

  “Um. Your dad made me promise I would call him if it happened. What time is it in New York?”

  “Here plus three,” I said.

  Cade answered, “You and your fucking math.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you, too, Win-Win. And as long as you’re going to call my dad, just pass the phone over to me, because he made me promise I’d call him if you ever got drunk.”

  “Fuck that. I ain’t calling, Finn. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Dude.”

  “What?”

  “That girl.”

  “I know.”

  WILLIAM MULHOLLAND’S SELF-TAUGHT MISTAKE

  Cade Hernandez could talk me into doing just about anything.

  He said, “Dude. Come downstairs with us and have some fun. But put some clothes on first. I can see your balls.”

  I made him stay in my room with me while I got dressed. There was no way I’d go downstairs by myself and make some kind of pathetic entrance like a freak in a sideshow.

  Step right up! Come see the epileptic boy!

  So I climbed down from bed and pulled on some shorts and a tank top. I slipped my bare feet into a new pair of tennis shoes Dad had given me the week before, and I followed Cade Hernandez out of my room to face my audience.

  My dog waited for me in the hallway.

  When she saw me, Laika curled up into a little ball and watched me with guilty dog eyes.

  “You’re so dumb,” I said. But she squirmed happily when I bent down so I could scratch behind her ears.

  Laika had wild and sudden emotional swings.

  That’s my dog.

  • • •

  When we got downstairs, Cade announced, “He fell asleep. I had to wake him up.”

  The girls sat on the living room couch. Monica drank a beer and pretended to be checking something important on her cell phone.

  Monica Fassbinder had a permanently distracted look in her eyes, like nothing could possibly happen fast enough for that girl. I wondered if she would have been pleased at forty miles per second.

  And I also wondered if she got text messages in German. I planned to ask her about it one day.

  One of the pizza boxes lay with its lid folded back on our coffee table.

  Maybe it was my own personal hang-up, but I felt like both girls were waiting to see if I would flip out or something.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  I sat down on the floor across from Julia. I couldn’t help but scan the living room to see if it was true that she’d actually cleaned up after me. She caught me looking for it too.

  The floor was completely dry and spotless.

  Why would anyone do something like that?

  I wasn’t even nice to her at all.

  I pursed my lips straight and nodded at her. I would have said thank you, but it was too embarrassing.

  Cade Hernandez opened his can of chewing tobacco and pushed a fresh wad of the stuff down behind his lower lip. Here was a kid who could actually chew tobacco and drink beer at the same time.

  That was complex modern multitasking for a high school athlete.

  Julia and I ate pizza. Cade offered Julia a beer, but she told him no.

  He started to pass one in my direction, but I raised my hand and shook my head. I couldn’t drink a beer after blanking out. It would kill me.

  Cade and I had gotten drunk together in the past.

  It was fun. Cade had taught me how to do it. The first time we’d gotten drunk together, we were fourteen years old. I passed out at Cade’s house and we missed school the next morning. Dad grounded me and took away my cell phone for two weeks, but he never found out I’d been drinking. I told him Cade and I had been playing video games.

  Imagine that.

  Cade spit into an empty can and said, “We’re going to a party at Blake Grunwald’s house. His parents are in Vegas.”

  I looked at Cade in disbelief.

>   “Blake invited us to his house?”

  “Well, he said we could come as long as we brought girls and beer. We might be out of beer by the time we get there, but at least we have some girls. Blake and his friends . . . you know—they’re total losers. The place is like a fucking locker room—all guys. All ballplayers. Well, there’s some girls, but they’re ugly enough to be guys. But lots of booze, Finn.”

  “You were there?” I asked.

  “Delivered pizza.” Cade spit and opened another beer. Then he laughed. “You should have seen what me and Monica did to that dickhead’s pizza.”

  I looked at Monica. She had a bored and confused look on her face that said she didn’t really get the stuff we American boys joked about, and why we thought certain things were such big deals. I believed it was Monica’s act.

  Cade silently mouthed five dollars to me and pointed at the pizza.

  He laughed.

  I suddenly lost my appetite.

  I said, “Well, you are not going to drive anywhere. You’re drunk. And so’s Monica.”

  Cade slid his keys across the coffee table. They landed on the floor beside my knee. Cade had taught me how to drive, too.

  I was horrible!

  My dad would have a stroke if he knew I’d driven Cade’s truck before; and driving right after a seizure was definitely a dangerous idea. One time, I’d crashed Cade’s truck into somebody’s mailbox. Cade Hernandez thought it was hilarious. I still felt guilty over bending the mailbox.

  Someone had to be the grown-up, I thought.

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” I said. “If you drive, we end up in jail, and if I drive, we end up in the hospital. Lose-lose, Win-Win.”

  Then Julia said, “I have a car. I can drive.”

  • • •

  So the four of us started off, walking toward Julia Bishop’s house. Actually, it was five, counting Laika.

  We crossed the road and followed the creekbed north.

  In May, there was no water in San Francisquito Creek, just a few spots where puddles had been trapped in some of the deeper depressions of the bed.

  Cade and Monica followed slowly at a distance, like twin satellites being pulled along by the gravity of Julia Bishop and me. I’d turn around from time to time and catch one of them opening another beer. Once, I saw Cade pissing into the brush.

  On the way up the canyon, Julia Bishop told me she’d come out only to look at the moon. She said the moon was in perigee that night, the closest it got to the planet of humans and dogs.

  “So,” I said, “were you just going for a walk to see the moon, or were you honestly trying to meet your epileptic neighbor?”

  Julia Bishop was a good subject-changer. “Did you know this is the second brightest moon tonight in more than a century?”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you could see it from anywhere,” I pointed out.

  “Okay, then,” Julia admitted, “I heard you lived in that big house. I wanted to see.”

  “Um,” I said.

  I cleared my throat and toe-kicked a rock. “You didn’t get a chance to answer my question before. Why did you do that—clean up after me, I mean? You didn’t have to do something like that.”

  “I felt bad for you. You were so sad, and I thought you were just scared,” Julia said.

  “But that was, um . . . pretty disgusting, what I did,” I said.

  “It was no big deal. I’ve done it before.”

  “What? Cleaned up a sixteen-year-old kid’s pee?” I said.

  “Well, no. But I’ve changed a baby’s diaper,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said. “A diaper. That really makes me feel like killing myself right about now.”

  Then she laughed and touched my arm.

  She said, “Forget about it.”

  I said, “Well, sorry. And thank you for what you did, Julia.”

  Cade and Monica weren’t paying attention to us at all.

  Laika had run off somewhere into the dry wash of the canyon.

  While the earth travels twenty miles per second, it pulls the moon with it through space. And the moon, dragged along, trudges around us at a little more than half a mile per second.

  The moon is slow.

  It is the hair of the earth.

  “Compared with us, the moon moves like a glacier in space,” I said.

  • • •

  There has never been a shortage of dead things in San Francisquito Canyon.

  Julia Bishop had no idea. There were hundreds of accounts of ghosts wandering the canyon at night. I do not believe in ghosts, unless they are just lingering atoms from the dead; atoms that didn’t know how to let go of one another.

  So I told her about William Mulholland, who was a self-taught civil engineer.

  Self-taught civil engineers are probably as trustworthy as self-taught brain surgeons and self-taught airline pilots.

  Like sexual confusion and atom bombs, self-taught civil engineers are causally associated with extinction.

  William Mulholland built a concrete dam in San Francisquito Canyon in 1926. The dam was called the St. Francis Dam, and it filled the canyon with a massive reservoir.

  Twelve billion gallons.

  At that time, it was approximately six gallons of water—about fifty pounds’ worth—for every human being alive on the planet.

  In 1928, William Mulholland’s dam collapsed, releasing a one-hundred-forty-foot wall of water and tumbling chunks of concrete as big as locomotives. Twelve billion gallons of water suddenly decided to make a run for the Pacific Ocean, which is about fifty miles from here.

  Nobody knows for certain how many people died in the disaster. Many estimates place the number of dead at around five hundred.

  Bodies washed ashore as far away as coastal Mexico.

  Our homes were built along the same channel where countless corpses were dragged and pummeled by William Mulholland’s self-taught mistake.

  The knackery never shuts down.

  ONE ATOM AT A TIME

  Laika found a dead coyote. The thing lay decaying in the knackery of San Francisquito Canyon’s creekbed.

  “Something fucking stinks,” Cade announced.

  Monica Fassbinder pecked at her cell phone. She had a distracted and bored are-we-there-yet look on her face.

  The moon was full and bright enough that I found the mangled coyote between clumps of wild blooming buckwheat, where some other creature had likely dragged it. Its side had been laid wide open, and in the white-hot light from the moon, I could see bones and the fetid yellow coils of rotting innards. The coyote had probably been hit by a car on the highway and then limped out here into the middle of the wash to lie down and die.

  When I found her, Laika was joyously wriggling on the mat of the carcass, all four of her little paws, dancing, pointed up at the moon and stars.

  The atoms that disengaged from the dead coyote smelled worse than anything imaginable. I had to lift the neckline of my tank top to cover my mouth and nose, just to get within ten feet of the thing.

  “You’re so stupid!” I said. “I hate you so much.”

  Which was true. At that moment, I really did hate my dog.

  I have wild mood swings too.

  Laika, busted and guilty, rolled away from the mattress of her newfound, dead friend. She curled her tail between her legs, grinned with toothy contrition, and presented her belly at my feet.

  “I’m not touching you! Go away! Get in your cage!” I said.

  Laika knew what to do. She ran for home. I would find her curled up inside her little spaceship when I went back.

  “Aww . . . poor thing,” Julia said.

  I pulled my shirt down from my face and moved away from the stink of the carcass.

  “My dog is dumb. She rolls in dead things.”

  “Maybe it’s easier to catch up to dead things. They don’t go so fast,” Julia said.

  “Everything moves at the same speed, living or dead
,” I answered. “Twenty miles per second.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “It’s easy to figure out. Pi. The distance to the sun. Three hundred and sixty-five days. It comes out to twenty miles per second, give or take a bit.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “that sounds real easy.”

  “Are you messing with me?”

  “I’m not trying to.”

  “Dude. Julia. How far away is your house?” Cade said.

  Julia pointed to a light on the west side of the canyon.

  “It’s right there,” she said.

  “I hope you guys have a four-wheel drive or something,” I said.

  “I realized I bought the wrong kind of car for living here,” Julia said.

  There were only a few homes on the west side of the canyon. In winter, when the flooding came, residents there would have to drive through the creek, which became impassable during heavy rainfall. Frequently, the people on the west bank would have to leave their cars along the shoulder of the highway and try to wade across the raging creek just to get to their homes.

  During a couple of the worst seasons, Dad and Mom actually took in what they called West Bank refugees who could not get to their homes. My mom and dad fed the stranded neighbors and allowed them to sleep in our house.

  There were no bridges here. I think people in the canyon pretty much gave up on the idea of civil engineering.

  “Well, it really stinks here. If we’re going to look at the second brightest moon in one hundred years, we should probably move away from dead things,” I said.

  • • •

  “A century is about sixty billion miles,” I said.

  Julia Bishop was sixteen years old. Her skin was dark and smooth, and she had the most perfectly curved slender legs. I tried to devise some strategy that might allow me to casually touch them, just like Julia had touched my arm.

  The thought made my atoms feel very alive and aroused, not nearly like the fourteen-billion-year-old sourpusses I was used to.

  I was certain I’d never feel anything as flawless as Julia Bishop’s skin.

  But I was too afraid.

  We sat on the ground with our knees bent, at the edge of Julia’s yard. From our spot in a clearing between some dried Lydia brooms and spiny mesquite brush, we watched the moon as it rose higher into the sky above the canyon rim.