As Easy As Falling Off The Face Of The Earth Part 9

Oh, shut up, Ruth, thought Betty. "I hope he's not lying facedown in a ditch somewhere," she said.

Which, oddly enough, Lloyd was. Five minutes into his escape, his head cleared, and he remembered: Betty, the neighbor. The family cabin.

Feeling foolish, he turned to go back. He could see the tiny windows lighting up in the cabin in the distance. He felt for the ground with his feet and held his hands in front of him to fend off unseen branches. What tripped him up was a half-fallen sapling, at s.h.i.+n height. He came up against it and went down like a mousetrap snapping shut. He had just enough time to put out his arms and break his fall. Thus fracturing his collarbone. And one of his wrists.

So, technically, there wasn't a ditch, Ruth might have said.

To which we say, Oh, shut up, Ruth.

AND NOW BACK TO RY, SLEEPING ON SHARON'S COUCH His sleep was not quite as restful as it might have been had he slept next to a radio stuck between stations, or under the dripping pipe on the kitchen before Del fixed it. His dreams made their way over a soggy, wafer-thin floor littered with obstacles. Phones were ringing in faraway rooms. He needed to find them and answer them, but the noise he had to move through made it hard to figure out where they were. The phones would tell him what it was that he was supposed to do. Time and again he was on the verge of finding one when it turned out to be something else. Chirping birds in a cage. An alarm clock. A microwave oven announcing that the burrito was warmed up now. He took the burrito out of the microwave. The microwave was in a gas station convenience store. Someone grabbed his arm and said, "Hey," and he realized that the burrito belonged to that person. It was Del. The burrito belonged to Del. Del was shaking his arm gently, and he opened his eyes and it really was Del.

"I think we better get going," said Del.

You have to be asleep for someone to wake you up, so Ry must have slept, but he felt woozy and unrested. He eased up to a sitting position and leaned his face into his hands, not ready for the lamplight Del had switched on. After an indeterminate amount of time, he pushed his way up into a standing position. The swath of pain that flashed through his groin as he did so went a long way toward waking him up more thoroughly. He walked stiffly toward the kitchen and squinted into its fluorescent brightness.

It was tidy as a pin. Whatever that means. The heap of rubbish had been removed, and in front of the sink was a st.u.r.dy, neatly built mosaic of pieces of wood Del had found in the bas.e.m.e.nt. They were different colors. It looked kind of cool, really. Like if people saw it, they would want one, too. Ry went over and stood on it. Solid as a rock. Then he stepped back and pulled open the cabinet door. A similarly crafted level surface held up the bottles and buckets and whatever else was underneath there.

"We should go," Del said again. He looked tired, but happy. They turned out the light in the kitchen and the lamp in the living room and stepped out the front door and pulled it shut with a quiet click. The screen door banged lightly behind them. The world had freshened up overnight: the air was cool and moist, a couple of birds sang back and forth, a new sky had barely begun its glimmering over at the horizon.

Del climbed behind the wheel and Ry thought maybe he had decided to drive after all. But he only navigated the twists and turns to the on-ramp, then pulled over.

"I probably won't sleep more than a couple of hours," he said. "We're on this road for quite a ways now, so all you have to do is stay on it." He crawled over the seat into the back. Ry slid over into the driver's seat. He fastened his seatbelt and heard Del's boots come off and land on the floor, heard Del sliding down into his bag and arranging himself.

"Wake me up for breakfast," Del said. So Ry put the w.i.l.l.ys in gear and headed up onto the highway.

YOU ARE HERE.

It was exhilarating to be alone at the helm. At first it was enough just to be driving down the highway. The time of day itself was kind of amazing. It wasn't often that Ry was doing anything useful at this hour. Not that many other people were either, apparently; traffic was spa.r.s.e. He felt himself one of a small brotherhood: The Few. The Proud. The Awake.

The sun rose orange from the edge of a clear sky and the countryside went all golden and emerald around him, with houses and barns set here and there catching the light and casting deep westerly shadows.

And then it was regular morning. Still nice, but less spectacular. Feeling an urge to put something in his mouth, Ry took a sip of his beverage from the night before, a blend of root beer, Sprite, Hawaiian Punch, and c.o.ke. It tasted pretty lousy. It was better when it was fresh and had carbonation. Or maybe it was an evening/morning thing. He tried a sip of Del's leftover beverage, a coffee. Bleahh. Even worse. He would have to hold off for a while.

It wouldn't be bad to have the radio on, though. He could play it softly. His eyes dropped momentarily down to the dashboard. Like many other parts of the w.i.l.l.ys, the radio had been recruited from some other career and installed in a way that was obvious and made perfect sense to Del. Anyone else had to look at it for a minute or two and experiment a little. Open the mind to new possibilities. Think of all the ways a thing might be switched on.

I'm not saying that Ry didn't keep glancing up to make sure he was on the road, staying in his lane. But he wasn't looking at signs. He didn't think he had to. They were staying on the same road. For quite a ways. But sometimes, staying on the same road means you have to choose the left part of a Y or take an exit to the left side of the road. Sometimes both, in quick succession. Sometimes you have to look at the signs to get where you want to go.

He found a decent station and settled back in. The highway had widened-it had six lanes now-and it was getting busier. A lot of trucks barreled past and moved in and out of lanes behind him and ahead of him. The trucks were like planets with their own gravity; he could feel his own course being altered when they roared by. Too close for comfort. He heightened his powers of concentration. It was like Need for Speed. In Sensurround. He was glad he had turned on the radio. Tunes made him feel braver. More confident.

You can get used to anything. Before long Ry was unfazed by the vehicular tonnage careening all around him. He found the Flow. Serenely, his eyes took in his surroundings in a video game kind of way. In the present tense. Respond to what pops up in front of you.

It popped into his head that it was surprising that they weren't driving more into the sun, since they were heading southeast. The sun was actually behind them. They were heading west. But roads often twist and turn. Though this one seemed straight enough.

What felt good was, he was doing what needed to be done. He wasn't waiting for someone else to do it for him. It's true that he couldn't be doing it without Del, but he was doing his part, too. They were going to figure it all out. Find out the facts. They were on the way.

He drove under one of those overhead signs that tell which lane you should be in depending on where you are going. He looked at this one and couldn't help noticing that none of the choices applied to him, to them, to their plan. And then suddenly the road was splitting into three strands, each veering off in a radically different direction-right/left, up/down, over/under-lanes of traffic coming from every which way, and Ry had no idea where he should go.

He rode the traffic like a wave, deciding that survival was the main thing, but looking for clues, for the sign with his name on it. He was supposed to stay on the same road. Maybe this was just part of it. But the number wasn't right. The cities weren't right.

Calmness had left him, but he drove on. He couldn't exactly stop. Not in the middle of the spaghetti. His road dipped under and curved around and shot out high above a river, and then as quickly as he had entered the tangled knot he was out of it. Driving through the countryside. The wrong countryside, he was pretty sure.

Salvation came in the form of a highway rest area. He pulled off just so he could stop for a minute and think. Del's voice came from behind him, asking sleepily if it was time for breakfast.

"No," said Ry. "Not yet. I just have to..."

He got out of the w.i.l.l.ys, leaving Del to fill in the blank. Walking inside the building, he glanced to his right and saw the giant map. The Blessed Map. The difference between this map and Del's road atlas was that this one had the magical You Are Here arrow. Fortunately, the map was large enough to include not only Where He Was, but Where He Was Supposed To Be. That was not shown by an arrow, but he found it. He didn't know how he had strayed. He was just glad he could find a hypotenusal route to get him back there that avoided the splitting, weaving rat's nest of roads he had just clenched his way through.

He zipped to the restroom, then returned to the map and studied it again. He memorized what he had to do. There were three parts to it. Three road numbers, plus three town names where he made changes. He made up a singsongy rhyme to help him remember. It had the three parts, then it went, uh-huh, oh yeah, or la la la or something. Some beats to finish it off.

When he started up the Jeep, Del's voice asked, "Are we there yet?"

Ry said, "No, go back to sleep." Realizing he had been abrupt, he added, "I mean, I think we should go a little farther."

He made his way back into the stream of traffic. The first change came up almost right away. He guided the w.i.l.l.ys into the lane under the desired route number and curved smoothly to the south while the other lane continued stubbornly, misguidedly west. The rhyme song shrank to two main parts. More filler. La la la la la, shaboom, shaboom.

He didn't want Del to know he had messed up. He didn't want Del to save him this time. He wanted to fix it himself. He didn't have any clear idea of how long he had been going the wrong way or how long it would be till they were right again. It was twelve miles to the next change, according to the sign. A few eons pa.s.sed, then it was five miles. One mile. And now, here was the exit. Here was the road that would lead them to the right road. This road was a secondary road. It rambled along from one tiny town to another. It had potholes. It had traffic lights.

Ry aimed for maximum smoothness. He tried to smoothly swerve around the potholes. Some of them were canyons that trenched across both lanes. Sometimes the abundance of them didn't allow for weaving. You just had to jolt through as damage-free as possible. He eased to a halt as smoothly as he could when the lights went red and, as smoothly as he could, s.h.i.+fted back up to speed when they went green.

He watched for signs telling him how far he still needed to go. He knew he was running out of time, if he wanted his goof-up to remain undiscovered. More potholes, a spattering of them. Bada boom. Shaboom, shaboom, la la la boom. It was an anti-lullaby. An unlullaby, like machine-gun fire.

And another intersection: Stop. Wait. Start.

A newly paved stretch of asphalt appeared and slipped itself beneath the wheels. The sudden quiet was velvety; it was like church. A sign rose up and announced that only one mile remained until the elusive, conclusive junction. And then there it was. The on-ramp curling gracefully ahead and to the right. Ry put on the turn signal. Victory flowed through his veins. He had done it. He had found his way back. Choirs of angels gathered on pinheads and sang. Del would never know. La la la la la la la.

"It looks like we're almost out of gas," Del said. Ry flew up out of his skin, b.u.mped his head on the ceiling, and almost went off the road. That is, two of those things seemed to happen and one of them did happen.

"We'd better get some before we get back on the highway," said Del. He was leaning over the back of the pa.s.senger seat. How long had he been there? Ry stayed on the road but missed the ramp. He made the sound of raspberries at the exit, the road ahead, his doomed effort.

"Well, we won't get very far without it," Del said. "Look, there's a place right there. And we can get breakfast.

"Where are we, anyway?" he asked. "Why are we off the highway?"

And Ry realized that maybe Del still didn't know what had happened. He made a couple more raspberries, the sound of a motor puttering along.

"Detour," he said. "I think there was an accident."

He was just summarizing. It was one way of putting it.

DOGS.

TENNESSEE. GEORGIA. FLORIDA.

There was highway ahead and highway behind.

Somewhere in the afternoon, while Del was behind the wheel, Ry noticed how the sun made funky shadows of the stairs curving up around a grove of giant cylindrical storage tanks.

He said to Del, "So, is Yulia, like, your girlfriend or something?"

So much time pa.s.sed before Del answered that Ry thought maybe he hadn't heard the question, and then he wondered if he had even said it aloud or only thought it.

Then Del said, "I guess you would say she's my ex-girlfriend. She's still a girl, and she's still willing to be my friend, but not my girlfriend."

"Do you still like her, though?" Ry asked. Because he got the feeling Del did.

"Once I'm smitten, I seem to stay smitten," said Del. "At least until something else smites me. Or someone."

Ry wanted to ask, So why did she dump you? But he thought that might be too personal. Del told him anyway.

"I guess I drove her nuts," he said.

"Like how?" asked Ry. "What did you do?"

Del shrugged. "She thought I was too stubborn," he said. "But I don't see it that way."

Ry didn't see it that way either.

"I don't think you're stubborn," he said. "At least, not in a bad way. Except maybe about pickles."

Del's face did its invisible smiling thing.

"That's only because you haven't known me very long," he said. "I've been compared to a brick wall. Among other things."

"So, you are stubborn?" asked Ry.

"I never said I wasn't stubborn," said Del. "I only said I wasn't too stubborn."

A number of pine trees whipped by. A mind-boggling number. Maybe an infinite number. An imaginary, abstract number. The dirt was red and the land was flat. There were billboards about pecans. This went on for quite a while: hours. Eons.

"So, is the airplane really homemade?" asked Ry.

Del smiled. "There are different levels of homemade," he said. "It's not like we'll be riding bicycles and flapping our arms. Would you feel better if I said it was hand built by a brilliant and meticulous aeros.p.a.ce engineer?"

"Uh-huh," said Ry. "I would."

"Well, it's not exactly like that, either," said Del. "It's somewhere in between."

A few minutes later, he said, "Closer to the engineer than to the bicycle."

And after another minute he said, "But maybe not by much."

Palm trees and twinkling lights erupted from the gathering darkness. The stars that are always out there, even in the daytime, could now be seen in the dimming airy pool of the sky. Traffic ripped along around them, pus.h.i.+ng and pulling. A full day of riding with the windows open had long ago blown away any crispiness; the morning had happened years ago. Still, they had to keep going. They weren't there yet.

As much as Ry was tired of sitting in a car, he wasn't sure he even wanted to get there. He wasn't exactly sure about this next part, with the airplane.

The night air was humid, but not unpleasant. It was soft, but insistent, caressing his face like the tongues of an infinite number of puppies. Ry closed his eyes and became one with the air, and the seat he was molded to, and the radio station that was playing. It was an oldies radio station, which he was not usually so fond of, but he became one with it anyway. He let it empty out his mind of everything but danceable field reports from the battleground of love. Plus some outliers on other topics-the science fiction future, cheeseburgers, haircuts. Del sampled his way up and down the dial, then switched it off. Ry became one with the absence of the radio. He became one with dozing off.

He was awakened by a change in velocity, then a stop. Ry squinted out the window, not willing to open his eyes the whole way. They were moving again, but they had left the highway. The missing roar of rus.h.i.+ng air and traffic felt at first like silence, but it wasn't. The relative stillness of the air meant you could smell things, non-automotive things: Growth. Efflorescence. Perfume of flowers. The sea. Musk of animals. Stench of decaying same. Alligators. Burgers.

At three A.M. they turned and crunched quietly into a gravel driveway. Del turned off the engine. Black nutrient-rich night poured silently into the car. The air was heavy enough to pin a person down, but both Ry and Del had by now acc.u.mulated irrepressible desires to stand up, and they opened their doors and stood. That was all, for a minute or two. Standing, looking up, around, stretching the arms up overhead.

It may have been the siren call of exposed-armpit aroma that beckoned to the mosquitos. More likely they were just a standard ingredient of the air here. They seemed to account for roughly 10 percent of it. Definitely enough to qualify as a pollutant in the form of suspended particulate. Or even a plague. Probably not a plague.

One window glowed faintly. Ry walked closer to peer inside, through the horizontal slats of old-fas.h.i.+oned venetian blinds. The window was open. Moths fluttered from the screen as Ry came near, then made their returns to it. The back side of someone's head, lit by a shaded lamp, was half obscured by the back of an easy chair, like the sun half hidden at the horizon. An electric fan hummed on a nearby tabletop. It fluffed the hair on the head, then let it fall as it oscillated to and fro, left and right, side to side. Fluff, fall, fluff, fall. A hand reached for a gla.s.s on the table, then replaced it and disappeared. Ry tiptoed back.

"Someone's awake," he said, smearing yet another soft-bodied insect blood-wise across his face. A sharp, quiet slap sounded from the direction of Del, who said, "I hope Everett's house has an air lock."

As they headed for what they could make out as the door of the house, it was suddenly illuminated by a porch light. A buzzer went off somewhere inside. The door behind the screen door was open, and the click of dog toenails on a linoleum floor came toward them. Followed by the silhouette of a man, back lit by motion-activated recessed lights in the ceiling of a hallway. The lights didn't come on until he had already pa.s.sed under them, so they didn't see his face until he reached the screen door. Even then, the porch light mainly lit up the screen itself. He remained mostly in silhouette. He was shortish. And he was wearing shorts. That's all Ry could tell.

Along with activating the porch light, the sound of the car doors and/or their approach had activated a couple of bug zappers at the corners of the porch. They zapped sharply, in quick succession. Ry jumped as if he had stepped on a live wire, turning as he did to see and hear the glowing violet zappers take down two more victims.

When he landed and thought to turn back, Everett had opened the door and was inviting them in. He and Del exchanged "h.e.l.los" as if it were only mildly surprising to appear on someone's doorstep from out of nowhere, in the wee hours of the morning. Ry trailed behind them down the hallway, which had gone dark again but now relit as they pa.s.sed. He saw that the lights were aimed at pictures that hung on the walls on one side. But if he stood still to look at them, the lights went out. He had to kind of s.h.i.+ft back and forth to keep the light on.

There were four pictures, four lights in the ceiling. The first light shone on a painting of a s.h.i.+pwreck. It was a real painting, and it looked old. Maybe because the frame looked old; it was golden and ornate, and pieces of it had broken off. But the painting looked old, too. The colors had a nostalgic yellowed cast, and a lot of it was just dark, one part indistinguishable from the next. But some of the water around the boat was catching the light. The waves heaved up in a translucent emerald that suggested the darkness below was cold and deep and wet and forbidding. A few people huddled on the end of the boat that still protruded from the water, waiting their turn to ride the breeches buoy, the bucket with leg holes sliding along a thick rope knotted onto a mast. Would they get their turn? Hard to say. Within the painting, they were doomed to huddle and wait forever.

Ry shuffled sideways to the next one. This was an engraving, also old, of a train derailment. Hey, Everett, cheery theme. To be specific, the engraving showed the front part of the train dangling from a bridge. A trestle. Pa.s.sengers were disembarking from the part of the train that was still earth based, still on the track, like ants when the anthill is flooded. In the foreground a few of them had opened a picnic basket and spread a cloth on the ground. One of them, a woman in a voluminous dress covered in tiny stripes going every which way as the fabric folded on itself, gazed pensively at the dangling engine as she sipped a gla.s.s of wine. In her other hand, she held a drumstick of the poultry variety. She was coping.

Light off, light on. The third picture was a black-and-white photograph of an erupting volcano. Ry thought it was erupting. Maybe it was just smoking. Immense puffy gray clouds hovered in the air, obscuring the mouth, the crater. A village lay scattered over the slopes at the base of the mountain. Lights were on in the village; the clouds of ash had darkened the sky. Ry drew closer to see if people were fleeing, but the motion-sensor spotlight didn't like that and cut him off. He stepped back. Couldn't tell, too far away. He danced sideways to the last picture. What would it be? The Fire of London? The San Francisco Earthquake?

But here it seemed Everett had abandoned his theme. This one was a photo, too, but it was just a candid snapshot of a woman looking over her shoulder at the camera, laughing. Almost like a motion-sensor soundtrack, the sound of laughter came to Ry's ears. But it was male laughing. Everett and Del. Where were they? He peeked around a doorway into the room he had observed through the venetian blinds, but it was empty.

On the far side of the room, another doorway opened onto what turned out to be a screened porch. Ry could see Del's foot at the end of what he deduced would turn out to be Del's leg. He headed on over. The room he pa.s.sed through was a living room. The fan oscillated, with a light variable drone, sending vague wafts of warm air around its ninety-degree purview. The breezes that distributed the dust and dog hair on the floor were a science fairsized version of the forces that shape sand dunes. But the room was dim and Ry walked, in shoes, over a portion of the surface swept bare by the winds. He didn't notice the drifts forming elsewhere.

He did notice a sharp pungency reeking in from the left and was surprised to see, when he turned, that it came from a kitchen. A teakettle boiled merrily on the stove top. Ry stepped in and turned it off. A mug with a tea bag waited on the counter. So he filled it with boiling water and carried it along with him.

On the porch, in the dark, Everett and Del were discussing Everett's methane digester. Everett had a couple of pigs, Rob and Inga, and he was using their manure as a source of gas for his stove and his water heater. But he had taken a shortcut in the venting part of the process. Hence the aroma. It didn't really bother him. He wasn't in a hurry to fix it. It did what he needed it to do.

Everett's voice was jolly. He laughed wholeheartedly at his own jokes, at Del's jokes; he laughed when Ry brought him the mug of tea. Each time Everett laughed, or anyone, though it was Everett who laughed the most, a sound-activated light flickered on overhead and stayed on for about ten seconds. Probably it wasn't designed to be about laughing; probably it was for coming out with your hands full, maybe carrying a tray of food, and you could make a noise, the light would turn on, and you could see where you were going. But for now it was triggered by Everett laughing. It was like watching a series of blackout sketches called "The Everett and Del Show."

The first few times the lights flashed on, Ry looked at Everett, because he hadn't seen him clearly yet. He looked bearded and sunburned, kind of s.h.a.ggy. One hand absentmindedly scratched the head of his dog, who lay next to him, its head on Everett's thigh. Her head. Her name was Lulu. She was a mutt with a collie-esque profile.

Ry gathered that Everett and Del had known each other for a long time. They had climbed mountains together. They had jumped out of airplanes and down into caves. Rafted churning rivers.

That was all a long time ago. But those are the kind of things that, once you do them with someone, you can show up on their doorstep anytime during the rest of your life and ask for an airplane ride.

"You'll have to help me put a new wing on," said Everett. "Actually, I'm glad you're both here to help with that. I'd have a hard time doing it by myself."

"What happened to the wing?" asked Del.

"Oh, I had a small mishap," said Everett. "I was coming back from Yulia's, and I ran into some weather. The engine started acting up, and I had to make an alternate landing in a field. It was getting dark, and I was concentrating on avoiding some utility wires. I didn't even notice this old water tank in the middle of the field. Took the wing right off."

He laughed, and the lights flickered on.

Ry had not said much. He had been listening, half listening, really, waiting to receive his couch a.s.signment. Maybe he would just sleep in this chair, sitting up. Now. Or wander back into the living room and a.s.sess the couch situation there.

This story caught his attention, though. His chin lifted right off his chest. It was the kind of story where your first reaction was, Holy c.r.a.p. Were you okay? And then your second reaction might be, And this is the plane we're going to be flying in? And you're driving?

But Del just said, "From Yulia's?" It seemed to Ry that Del's voice, and his features, were carefully neutral. Probably he didn't want Ry to panic about the plane, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. Probably he was trying to change the subject.