As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth Page 3

  Del had taken note of all this while Ry was gazing fixedly at the truck. He guessed at Ry’s age—fourteen? Fifteen? And wondered who had roughed him up. He wondered if the boy would tell him. “How’s it going?” had apparently been way too intrusive. Maybe he was hungry. Maybe the best thing would be to feed him.

  “I was just about to go get a bite to eat,” he said. “Have you eaten?”

  “You mean, like, today?” asked Ry.

  “I mean, like, recently,” said Del.

  “No,” said Ry. “I had breakfast.”

  “Okay,” said Del. “Wait a minute.” He opened one of the truck doors, leaned inside, and emerged with a clean, folded T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops.

  “Here,” he said. “Put these on. We’re not going anyplace fancy, but your shirt’s looking a little unappetizing, and you need to have shoes on both feet. My name is Del.”

  “I’m Ry,” said Ry.

  “Do you want to go inside and wash up first?” asked Del. “The bathroom is straight ahead.”

  Ry had never before been so happy about soap and warm water, and then a towel. He felt like singing. But didn’t. He examined his reflection in the mirror. It was true that his T-shirt was now a shredded dirty rag. Looking down, he remembered that it was bloodstained, too, from his nose. He pulled it off and put on the fresh one, which was tan and had a picture of a tree on it.

  He checked himself out in the mirror again, this time admiring his blossoming black eye. His eyeball blinked back at him through a crevice in the swollen discolored hillock that was now the most striking feature of his sunburned face. Kind of cool looking except that it hurt. A dull ache with a throb.

  It occurred to him that the mirror was the door of a medicine cabinet. On the premise that medicine cabinets were like bathrooms in fast food restaurants—a shared resource for the common good—he opened the door. There was a razor and a shaving brush. Toothpaste and toothbrush. Earwax removal fluid. A jar of Vaseline. A bottle of generic aspirin that had two tablets left.

  Ry hesitated. He put the bottle back on the shelf and closed the door.

  The velvet black sky was crammed thick now with stars. And the air was chilly, especially on sunburned flesh. Ry shivered, and put his hands as deep in his pockets as they would go. His bare toes and heels hung over the edges of the flip-flops. They looked like girl flip-flops. Kind of skinny, and they were turquoise. Del came out of the garage, pulled the door down, and nodded toward the truck.

  “Hop in,” he said. “Let’s see if we can drive it on a regular road.”

  Climbing up into the old truck was like stepping into a time machine. The worn leathery seat and the spacious darkness of the cab, with lighted dials glowing from the dashboard, lighting the rounded edges of knobs and levers, gave off an immense feeling of safety. Ry wanted to stay there forever, except that he was starving. His stomach was now making the cartoon sound effects for two space aliens having a fistfight. Or whatever kind of fight they had.

  “What are you doing to this truck?” he asked again. “I mean, why are you putting the other truck on top of it?”

  “Everyone wants to ride in the front seat,” said Del. “Everyone wants to look out the front window.”

  “How will people get up there?” asked Ry.

  “I haven’t quite figured that out,” said Del. “But I’m working on it. I have some ideas.”

  “Do you have a big family?” asked Ry. Because he was wondering who “everyone” was, who needed to have seats in the front.

  Del considered the question before answering.

  “Not strictly speaking,” he said. “Do you?”

  “No,” said Ry. “Just my mom and dad. And our dogs. And my grandpa.” Mentioning them was like looking down from the tightrope, remembering the precariousness of his situation, losing his balance. Looking up, he saw that they were pulling into a small gravel parking lot alongside a boxy gray building.

  “Do they know where you are?” ventured Del as they got out of the truck. The doors ka-thunked shut, they walked the short distance to the restaurant.

  “I don’t even know where I am,” said Ry.

  The restaurant had a theme of mining. There was a framed brownish photograph of old-time guys with suspenders and brimmed hats standing at the opening to a mine, right inside the door, and a pickax and shovel hanging from the wall behind the counter. Aside from that, the theme of the place was brown. Even if your eyes were closed, the tiny molecules of gravy and meat, the golden brown molecules of the crust of rolls and of French fries, suspended in the air as thick aroma, would tell you that.

  Eyes open, there was brown paneling on the wall, wood-grain Formica tabletops, an all-over brownness. With white lighting: bare fluorescent tubes over the counter and fake oil lanterns on the tables. It was nice. Not like his own home, but homey somehow.

  Del asked the waitress to bring a Baggie filled with ice, and as Ry held it over his eye, he told Del how he had come to be there. Through his other eye, and through a rising tide of tiredness, Del went in and out of focus.

  There was a plaid shirt, sandy wisps of hair, a face that seemed old and young at the same time. The hands lifting his fork or his coffee cup were strong, battered hands that worked hard and could do things.

  The eyes that listened from beneath craggy brows were serious or amused, but unfazed. No big deal. As if these things happened all the time. Bad luck about losing your shoe, though.

  Ry told his story between bites of a roast beef sandwich with gravy on it, mashed potatoes, applesauce, buttered rolls. The warm, soft food in his mouth and stomach made up a warm, soft featherbed for his mind to crawl into. Del listened as Ry’s sentences lost their endings, then their middles, then refused to start up at all. He watched as Ry’s eyes tried to stay open, his head tried to stay upright on his neck, a bowling ball on a stem, but his wavering eyelids fell to, his head wilted down onto his chest with all the weight of gravity.

  Del slid out from his side of the booth and guided Ry into a lying-down position so that he wouldn’t fall into his food. Ry’s eyes fluttered open. He said, “I have some money in my wallet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Del, but Ry didn’t hear him. He was already out. Del returned to his seat to finish his meal. The waitress, warming his coffee, said, “So, who’s this, Del—a nephew?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” said Del. “He showed up in my driveway. I thought he might be a runaway, but he’s got some other story.”

  IN THE NIGHT

  He could hear a heated conversation in hushed voices. Ry couldn’t make out the words, but the sound of it was vehement. And interrupted here and there by clattering mechanical cascades of…of what?

  Straining to hear, he woke himself halfway. His eyes were still closed, but he could sense light through his eyelids. He felt the cushion his back was pressed against, his cramped position, how his bent knees cantilevered out over open air, and he thought he must be lying on a couch, and that the couch was not long enough. His shoulder was cold; pulling the something that covered him up higher, to his chin, he could tell that it was an afghan-y something, textured like that, and with places his finger poked through. It was still warm, though, even with the little holes.

  The people were arguing again. They were in the room, whatever room it was, with him. But not right next to him, maybe across the room. Ry cracked open his left eye, the uninjured one that was closer to the couch, hidden in the recesses of a pillow. A couch-y pillow.

  His part of the room was in darkness, but a few yards beyond his feet was an alcove where a shaded lamp hung low over a small table. A man was sitting at the table typing on an old-fashioned typewriter. He paused in his typing and rolled the paper up in the machine to read it.

  Glasses rested midway down his nose, which in profile was mildly beaklike. Wisps of hair, catching the lamplight, glowed golden. Ry knew the man from somewhere, but could not think, in his grogginess, from where. It came to him that the man’s
name was Del. He was making a hazy connection between the clattering sound and the old typewriter when the guy named Del erupted into a quiet but fierce argument. With…himself? He held his hands out, palms up, a plea for understanding. Then stubbornly folded his arms and sat back, defiant in his chair. Speaking to the air. In the tone you would use if you knew someone was sleeping nearby, but you really had to make your point. The person you were talking to would have to be right in front of you, trying to read your lips and string together the t’s and p’s and k’s as you told him (or her) the urgent thing that couldn’t wait, that had to be said now. But the other person wasn’t there.

  Then somehow, without moving from his chair, Del was the other person, arguing back. Patiently explaining. Ry watched from the darkness of the living room. Not moving. At all. Wanting Del not to be nuts. Something else could be happening. Del could just be going over something that had happened, some conversation. Ry had done that, where you come up, hours or days later, with what you should have said, and you say it aloud. He usually said it to the bathroom mirror. In the daytime. With no one around. But everyone is different.

  Or maybe what Del was typing was a play, maybe he was acting out the parts. But in the strangeness of night and the blurriness of being only half awake, Ry didn’t want to think it out; he just wanted it not to be happening. He was about to pull the afghan up over his head when Del abruptly stood up, threw his hands in the air in exasperation, turned off the light, and walked out of the room. For some moments, light and muttering came from further off, then it was silent and dark and Ry would have thought about it some more, tried to figure it out, but with all the silence and darkness, it wasn’t long before he slipped back into sleep.

  EVERYTHING SEEMS MORE NORMAL IN THE MORNING

  When Ry woke again, it was to the muffled sound of snoring, and the air in the room was a dim gray. He lay there as the light gathered, taking in his surroundings. The events of the day before gathered, too, in his mind. They seemed too unlikely to be true. But here he was. Which was where, exactly?

  His eyes fell on an old typewriter, and it stirred something, but it was an elusive something, like a dream you can’t catch before it slips away. Ry padded around the room wrapped in the afghan he had slept under. The furniture seemed old-fashioned, but not as old as really antique furniture. Not carved wood or velvety. Just mismatched and out of style, like yard sale stuff.

  A pile of photographs crowded together on top of a low bookshelf, some in frames and some loose. Several were of groups of people smiling at the camera while mountains or sand dunes or glaciers or jungle-entwined Mayan ruins loomed around them. A few were of Del and other people dangling on ropes, from a tree or from a face of rugged rock into space. Ry looked at the group photos again, and found Del in each of them, at the edge or in the background, a little apart. There was one of Del sitting on a couch laughing as children crawled all over him.

  A black-and-white photo of a woman, unframed and curling, sat tucked among the others. Ry picked it up and uncurled it to look at it more closely. The woman wore a costume, a Three Musketeers sort of costume, with high boots and poufy pants, poufy sleeves, and a laced vest. She must have been acting in a play; it was the kind of posed photograph with a blank background that would be in a newspaper or on a poster. In one hand she held a fencing sword. Her body was turned to the side, ready for action, but she looked over her shoulder into the camera, and her stance and her face somehow showed high drama and, at the same time, that it was all a big joke.

  She was pretty. Her eyebrows had something to do with it. Her eyes almost seemed to be two different colors, but in a black-and-white photo it was hard to tell. It might have been the lighting. Ry turned the photo over. A felt-tip scrawl said, “Del—yours forever. Just kidding. No, really. Yulia.”

  He looked at the front again and said the name aloud, but softly, trying it out. Yulia. It was a funny name. Not funny funny, but unusual. He went to put the photo back where he had found it, but he couldn’t quite remember now where that had been. He hesitated, photo in hand, trying to recall it, until he noticed a shape stenciled out of the light film of dust that lay over the shelf and everything on it. That was the spot.

  Still in investigative mode, he tiptoed over to the table with the typewriter and sat in the chair. He had never used this old-timey kind. Experimentally, he touched one of the keys. You could push it down pretty far without anything actually happening, and then, suddenly, it made that metallic punching sound and the whole thing jumped slightly and Ry pulled his hand back as if he had been stung and realized with dismay that he had typed a j onto the paper, just below what looked like a poem. He froze, listening, but after a short pause, the snoring started up again. He noticed a small plastic bottle of correction fluid beside the typewriter. He read the directions, gave the little bottle a shake, and carefully applied a little blob of the white stuff over the j. It didn’t dry immediately. While he waited, he looked at what was typed onto the top part of the paper.

  Try as I might

  I can’t escape gravity.

  My orbit is elliptical:

  I fling myself far and think I’m free.

  Who am I kidding?

  Invisible forces, and visible ones,

  Pull me back.

  j

  It looked like a poem, but it was about gravity and elliptical orbits. Okay.

  Even when the Wite-Out was dry, Ry saw that it didn’t match. There it was, a grayer patch over a still visible j. He put on another coat. He considered typing the whole thing over, but that would definitely make too much noise.

  You could still see it. Oh, well. He rolled the paper back down a few notches. Maybe Del would think he did it himself, in the middle of the night. Maybe he wouldn’t even notice it.

  DEL’S KITCHEN

  Leaving the scene of the crime, Ry rose from the chair and went into the kitchen. Brown-and-white-checkered curtains hung neatly in front of the window over the sink, where dishes soaked in cloudy water.

  The counter held a variety of condiments, empty cans, and surprisingly pretty things, like a flowered china sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a little Dutch boy and girl leaning forward to kiss each other.

  Ry pulled his sleeping cell phone from his pocket and woke it up. It gave forth its swirling musical greeting, friendly and reassuring. But too loud in the quiet house, like a morning person when you aren’t one. His thumb immediately went for the mute button and he said, “Shhh!”

  There was one bar of reception, one bar of battery. Two texts from Jake, who was still bored. One from Amanda: Haha, how would I know?

  He called his grandfather first. Listened to the ringing, then his own recorded voice again on the voice mail. As he left his message, speaking softly, he heard his phone peeping at him, warning him that it would give up the ghost any second now. His parents’ cell phone rang and rang, until the robo voice said the number was unavailable and to try again later. And the phone expired in his hand.

  Ry’s eyes wandered around the little room and fell on the pots and pans sitting on the stove top. Each held food remains so aged that only an archaeologist or a forensic scientist would be able to identify them. Because his mind was a. in a problem-solving mode, and b. easily distracted, he proceeded to solve the four puzzles.

  The dried brown stuff looked like the dried brown stuff in the can that said “Beef Stew.” The dried greenish stuff went with the stuff in the can that said “Split Pea Soup.” The dried reddish-brown stuff had probably started out as spaghetti sauce. The bumps in it might have been meat and onions at some point in time. Easy.

  Ry leaned over to look more closely at a skillet on one of the back burners. Whatever was in it had been there long enough to accumulate dust. He didn’t notice that the snoring had stopped. The sun flooded suddenly between the curtains, blinding him briefly so he didn’t see Del materialize in the still shadowy margins of the room.

  He had lifted the skillet into the
shaft of sunlight and was considering giving it a sniff when Del spoke, and Ry’s feet left the ground and the skillet left his hand and a gurgling noise came out of his throat. He landed before the skillet, which unfortunately flew off at an angle in the direction of Del’s chest. Amazingly, Del put his hand right up and caught it, as if Ry had tossed him a softball.

  What Del had said when he first spoke was, “I guess it’s been a while since I did the dishes.” At least that’s what he started to say. He stopped midway when the skillet came flying toward him. What he said after he caught the skillet and looked into it was “Maybe we’d better just go out for breakfast.”

  STRANGERS, RIDES, AND CANDY

  In the light of day, the backyard had appeared. It was full of old trucks and machinery and large shapes covered by tarps. The seat in the truck was cold, but Ry was beginning to think of it as his. Sometimes, when something really out of the ordinary happens, like you get off your train and it leaves without you and you trudge for hours without food through an alien landscape, the things that happen after that can seem less strange just by comparison. Your threshold of what makes “strange” is raised way up for a while.

  Del took a tin of mints from his pocket, opened it, and popped one into his mouth.

  “Mint?” he asked Ry.

  Ry realized he hadn’t brushed his teeth for about twenty-four hours, was suddenly aware of a furriness inside his mouth. He wondered how foul his breath was.

  “Thanks,” he said, and took one.

  “Strangers offering rides and candy” didn’t occur to him. Only, I have to get a toothbrush. And toothpaste. But Del will probably let me use his toothpaste.

  “Do you have a cell phone charger?” he asked Del. “My phone is completely dead.”