Slide - Kyle Beachy [66]
“My girlfriend cut off all her hair, and now she and this robot girl named Carmel are scouring the European countryside in search of faeries. They have moved from Germany southward with faerie nets strapped to their backpacks.”
“That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“That's right! Jesus, it's good to hear you say that.”
“Fairies won't have anything to do with robots. And you shouldn't say Jesus like that! You only get two a year and you just wasted one for no reason.”
How laid-back this God of his to forgive blasphemy up to twice a year. I wondered if the same rule applied to the other commandments and whether the parents had created this version of religion together.
“This is kind of boring,” he said.
“But you love planes. Planes are awesome.”
“Sort of. I mean, I'm not six.”
“The first flight on record only went one hundred and twenty feet,” I said. “In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.”
“Yeah, and when he was young, Orville had typhoid. Wilbur had to take care of him.”
“Alright. But I bet you a Coke you can't tell me what they worked on before planes.”
“Bikes,” Ian said. “We did all of this in fourth grade.”
“Alright. One Coke.”
We continued along the frontage road back toward the city and Ian flipped the tire gauge in his little fingers while I looked for somewhere more interesting than a gas station to buy his Coke. When I saw a diner ahead, I signaled and pulled into a large old vacant lot.
“Wait, stop. Stop, stop, stop stop stop!”
I stopped the van a good thirty yards from the restaurant. Ian looked carsick and confused, face white and eyes glazed. He bounced shoes on the rubber floor mat and passed the tire gauge from hand to hand.
“I'll wait here,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“I don't want to go in there. My mom and I used to come here sometimes.”
I scanned the lot and wondered if I was allowed to leave him here alone. I had seen enough local news to know of the city threats, the poor and desperate victims of the world. But this was practically the country.
“I'm okay by myself,” he said, and held up the tire gauge. “I got this thing.”
So I left him there and went into the diner. When I got back, Ian had the hood of the van open and was looking inside. I handed him a forty-two-ounce Coke and he stepped back and together we stared at the filthy old engine.
“It's a V8,” he said.
And in the next few minutes while we drank our Cokes, I did not mention his mother or his father, or my own father or mother, or discuss with him what we were supposed to make of marriage, ask how either of us could ever believe in the porcelain institution we'd both seen crumble. And I most certainly did not reveal that I'd aged twenty-two years without knowing what the V stood for in V8.
Through the ride home, Ian stared out the window and clenched the tire gauge. It was a willed quietness, one he believed in. And if silence was what he wanted, I would let him have it. Soon I was steering us back onto Waldwick Drive. I was surprised when he finally broke the silence.
“I got a postcard in the mail the other day. I'll show you if you want. It's not like she left forever or is gonna leave me alone forever with Dad. I just don't want you thinking she like forgot me or something. Because she didn't.”
Ian slipped out and closed the door without turning. I watched him walk back to the house. If I kept going at this pace, by September I'd be in love with the whole Midwest.
six
there are stages of swelter, and as summer progresses, each stage trumps the last. Around mid-July the heat reaches the sort where mere digits lose meaning and even the heat index, that fetish of meteorology, fails, leaving the city's elderly as our de facto authorities, both for their spookily accurate ability to rank current conditions against history and their tendency to expire in these conditions. A city of seniors, already withered, further withering in their un-air-conditioned rooms, stoically riding out a heat wave that can't hold a flame to the Great Heat of 1968, fanning themselves with an old framed photograph or church program