100 Sideways Miles

  So when she heard the angry noise from the first fracture and the rumbling growl of the water as it grew louder and louder, Lillian Curtis told her husband that she would carry their three-year-old son, Danny, up the face of the canyon.

  Three years is less than two billion miles.

  Lyman Curtis agreed to take their daughters, Marjorie and Mazie, but he needed to check in at Power Plant No. 1 first. I have never understood why men with regular, difficult jobs can sometimes feel an unexplainable dedication to a company, but my atoms have not been together for so many miles.

  Lyman Curtis was a true Edison Company man.

  Lillian ran, barefoot and in her nightgown, up the canyon wall, carrying the little boy. The family’s dog, whose name was Spot, followed.

  They were the only three to survive.

  In 1928, lots of people had dogs named Spot. Now, not so much.

  Lillian and Danny sat at the top of the canyon and waited until the following morning. Lillian Curtis’s feet were so badly cut that she had to tear bandages from her nightgown. She believed she would find Lyman and the girls again, but her husband apparently never came back for the girls.

  Marjorie and Mazie’s bodies were so covered in mud and oil that they were not easily identified. I don’t know exactly where the oil came from, although there are still a few working oil wells not far from the site of William Mulholland’s death trap.

  The sisters’ bodies were kept about ten miles from the dam in a makeshift morgue for victims. Lyman’s body was found more than twenty miles away.

  Imagine that.

  And I saw those little girls in my house the night I blanked out and pissed myself in front of Julia Bishop.

  Here is one more thing about my father’s book, The Lazarus Door: The story is set in 1928, and part of it takes place in San Francisquito Canyon the night of the failure of the St. Francis Dam.

  Sometimes—especially those times when I feel as though I’ve been trapped inside my father’s book—I wonder if I haven’t actually been on this Finn trip for many more miles than seventeen years might carry a guy.

  • • •

  Getting out of the van was more difficult than getting into it. The kid scratched and kicked. What would you expect? He was terrified and probably thought I was some alien monster. And the van tipped, shuddering as the flow of the river pushed through the open side door.

  I wrapped the boy under my right arm; and he held on so tight, I could feel each one of his little fingernails cutting smiles into the skin on my chest and ribs. The dog squirmed free just as I found the doorway, and when the kid jerked to catch the thing, he brought his knee right up into my balls.

  The hurt knocked all the air from my lungs, and I choked, convinced the two of us were about to drown. Somehow, I managed to kick away from the van and raised my face up into rainfall again, blurry eyed, knotted in painful cramps, and coughing so hard, I thought I’d puke.

  The boy was nearly drowned. He spit and snotted all over my neck as he tried to gulp air.

  And Cade was there, struggling to pull himself over the roof of the van as the current tipped it toward him. The van was rolling onto its side.

  Cade gurgled as he fought the river. “Fuck!”

  I coughed and kicked, treading water with one arm while trying to keep the kid’s face above the surface.

  Cade thrashed behind the van. “Are you okay?”

  “There’s someone else in there. In the driver’s seat.” I shook my head, hoping Cade would know I didn’t think it was worth the risk of him going under for that shadowy body.

  But once the kid and I made it around the nose end of the van, the current pulled us into the deep center of the river, away from Cade and the van, carrying us under the bridge. My guts constricted in pain, and my legs burned with acid. I was too weak to swim against the current with the drag of the fighting kid under my arm.

  I looked up and saw the black bar of the bridge span pass over us. I couldn’t see the van or Cade Hernandez at all. I rolled onto my side so the kid was on top of me, and scissored my legs in an attempt to have the river push us toward the opposite bank.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  It took so long. The muddy river distorted and widened, kept us helpless in the groove of its central channel, pulling and pulling.

  “Just relax. You’re going to be okay.”

  I don’t know if I said it to myself or to the kid. The boy seemed to soften and calm down. I could not say how far we’d gone, but at a widening bend of the river, I felt us slow in the eddying current along the other shore.

  My feet dragged against something solid as we neared the bank, and I attempted to stand, holding the little boy in my aching arms. We fell down three times, and I bashed my shins into the river rocks at the shallow edge. Finally, I could let go of the kid, and he scrambled up through the mud and weeds like a wet cat breaking frantic from a bathtub.

  By some miracle, the kid’s little dog was there too, shaking and licking at the boy while he puked and puked onto the ground between his hands.

  Exhausted, I could barely stand in the waist-deep current, tangled up in my shorts, which had pulled halfway down to my knees. I was scuffed and raked with scratches from the clawing kid, who curled up on his side and hugged his legs in a tight little ball on the shore, shivering and watching me with accusing eyes as though I had done this to him.

  And from everywhere came the sweet scent of flowers.

  Ridiculous.

  What could I do?

  Twenty miles.

  The drifting set in, the sandstorm of atoms spraying across my field of vision as I pushed myself toward the shore and howled in my head to not let go, not let go, while the river seemed to erase everything below my knees, washing it all away into the nameless rain.

  THE DOG HOSPITAL

  I woke up in what looked like an alien spacecraft.

  To be honest, I had no idea what any of it was—the words were so stubborn about finding their way back to the epileptic’s drained lexicon.

  A tiny, brilliant sun waved in my eye.

  It was some time, thousands and thousands of miles, before allthis and allthat congealed into something definable: I was lying there naked and covered with a blanket atop a cold examination table at a veterinarian’s clinic.

  It was ridiculous.

  The white-hot pinpoint of sun winked out.

  “Cade? Your name is Cade, right? Do you have any idea what happened?”

  Of course I could not remember anything at all. And all I could see was a blurry orange chrysanthemum where the pinpoint sun had burned its memory into my eye. But something clicked when the floating voice asked me if my name was Cade.

  I remembered two words: Cade Hernandez.

  And two more: Wernicke’s area.

  I did not know what that meant.

  Imagine that.

  “Where am I?”

  The chrysanthemum faded.

  “Sorry about the accommodations. You’re kind of in a dog hospital, I guess.”

  Dog.

  Hospital.

  Plaid.

  That’s the name of the pattern on the man’s shirt.

  Green.

  Welcome home, words!

  And then I was pissed off; I was pissed off about being naked and cold in a hospital for fucking dogs, and for knowing almost nothing else.

  I was pissed off about everything, the constriction of my universe down to a dozen or so words, but I didn’t exactly know why.

  There had to be more words than these; I just couldn’t find them.

  “You passed out,” the man told me. “You must have hit your head. You don’t have a concussion, though, and I couldn’t find any injury on your scalp. Cade?”

  Why was he calling me that? But I couldn’t remember if it was my name or not.

  Imagine that.

  He smiled. He had a kind face, tan and wrinkled around his eyes. He slipped the light-pen into the po
cket of his shirt and removed his black-framed reading glasses, which hung in front of his chest on a thick cord. The walls of the room were pale yellow, and behind him I saw a glossy poster with a puppy on it—an advertisement for a flea treatment. A stethoscope coiled like a snake inside a slotted Plexiglas wall bracket.

  A round stool with a black vinyl cushion sat in the corner of the room.

  Everything was wet. I thought I might have pissed myself. I still couldn’t remember anything at all that happened before I opened my eyes inside the dog hospital.

  I might as well have just been born, or just wormed through a Lazarus Door—one atom at a time.

  I asked it again. “Where am I?”

  The man frowned and leaned over me, staring directly into my eyes as though he might be able to see the empty shelves behind them.

  “Interesting. Heterochromatic eyes. I just told you. You’re in my clinic. It’s for animals, but the closest ER is sixty miles from here.”

  Sixty miles.

  Three seconds.

  He went on, “Do you feel pain anywhere?”

  My arms and legs weren’t fully connected yet. I shook my head.

  He told me his name: Nathan Pauley, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, and that he and Billy Gruber, who was a deputy from someplace called Coal Hill, found my abandoned truck, left with its motor idling near Little Buffalo Bridge. When they searched around the area for me, they passed a little boy standing with his dog on the side of the highway. That was nearly two miles away from the bridge. The boy and his dog had been pulled from the river, and he led the men to where I’d blanked out with my face in the mud of the shore and the rest of me—my shorts twisted around my left ankle—in the cold water. They identified me because Cade Hernandez’s California driver’s license—and all Cade’s belongings—had been left inside the idling truck.

  Of course.

  It was supremely ridiculous, but at that moment I finally remembered who I was. And I imagined here I was poised at the perfect doorway to break out of the prison of my father’s book. I had become someone else.

  Cade Hernandez.

  They’d brought me here and had no idea that Cade was still out there.

  Naturally, the men would not have guessed there were two of us in Cade Hernandez’s truck. The epileptic kid—me, Finn Easton—didn’t have a driver’s license. And Cade had left his wallet sitting on the dashboard when we took off that morning.

  Cade Hernandez and I looked so much alike, we could have been brothers.

  So Nathan Pauley and Billy Gruber had solved the mystery of where the naked and half-drowned kid came from.

  “How did I get here?”

  “In the backseat of Billy Gruber’s Jeep,” Pauley said.

  Billy Gruber, at that moment, was on his way to Coal Hill with a dog and a six-year-old boy named D. J. Klein, the kid I’d pulled from Little Buffalo River, which was big enough to swallow pretty much whatever it wanted to.

  I sat up, dizzy, wrapping the blanket tightly around my waist.

  “That was a very brave thing you did,” Pauley said. “You’re quite a hero.”

  What happened in the river didn’t play clearly in my head.

  “Where’s Cade?” I said. I had a dim memory of seeing Cade Hernandez swimming in my backyard pool. I had no idea at all where I was—that there was such a place called Oklahoma.

  The veterinarian put a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe you should lie back down. Billy’s sending an ambulance out from Coal Hill.”

  “No.”

  Pauley scrunched his eyebrows together.

  Then another word came back, and I said, “I’m an epileptic.”

  Pauley nodded as though the word filled in every blank answer on the scorecard.

  I needed to find Cade. They’d left him at the river. They had no way of knowing there had been anyone else.

  And then I remembered being underwater, inside the van, the floating box of Triscuit crackers pinned to the roof.

  “What about the car?” I said.

  “I followed Billy in it. I brought your truck here. It’s out front.”

  “No. Not that.”

  The dog doctor thought I was talking about my car. I couldn’t force the words out right. I felt like I’d explode.

  “Fuck this,” I said.

  I held the blanket around my waist and stood.

  “Whoa there.” The doctor, who obviously had experience with horses, raised his open hands as though preparing to catch me.

  And I’ll admit it: The rush of blood did make me wobble and take hold of the corner of the metal table I’d been lying on, to keep myself from falling down.

  Twenty miles.

  “My clothes are in the back.”

  I took two steps toward the examination-room’s door. The floor was cold under my feet. Everything felt like refrigerated meat.

  “I can get them for you. Really. You need to take it easy, son.”

  “No.”

  I pushed past the doctor and opened the door.

  And I said it again: “Where the fuck am I?”

  Of course I had no way of knowing how to get out of the clinic. I steered myself toward the end of the hallway, imagining the light I saw there came from the sky, the outside world on the planet of humans and dogs.

  Nathan Pauley stayed right beside me, trying to talk me out of going outside to Cade’s truck, but I wasn’t about to listen. He was careful. Nathan Pauley was a head shorter than me, and I felt like I would punch him if he touched me again. Something about waking up cold, wet, and naked in a dog hospital had made me so incompliant and irritated.

  “Look,” Pauley said, “Billy is tracking down your family in California to call them. Do you live in California? Do you remember how to reach them?”

  Too many questions.

  “Get the fuck away from me.”

  I pushed through the door at the end of the hallway and came out into the clinic’s waiting room. There was a floor-to-ceiling window beside the front door, painted with letters that spelled out the doctor’s name and business hours in reverse. It made no sense. Nothing at all made sense to me. And through the window I could see Cade’s truck. It had stopped raining, and the clear sky was just at that darkening point as the sun dipped in the west.

  And then I felt Nathan Pauley’s hand on my shoulder again.

  He said, “That’s an interesting scar you have.”

  “Tell me where you came from.”

  I balled my hand into a fist.

  What an idiot he was! He must have somehow put it all together: the epileptic boy with the two-colored eyes and the Lazarus Door mark along his spine. He probably thought if I hadn’t blanked out, I would have eaten the little kid I pulled from the river.

  Even in the state of Oklahoma—Indian Territory—the boy could not escape the prison of the book.

  I pushed the doctor’s hand away from me and cocked my fist back, but as angry as I was, I couldn’t punch the guy.

  “Leave me alone.”

  I went outside, barefoot and naked inside a dog-hospital blanket. Everything was humid and damp, and whereas I’d been freezing cold inside the examination room, I felt sweat droplets trickling from my armpits by the time I made it to Cade’s truck.

  Nathan Pauley slowed and stood back, watching me outside the clinic’s front door.

  And I was only wishing to myself, Please let the keys be in the truck; please remember how Cade Hernandez taught you to drive; please do not crash; please get the hell out of here.

  He must not have thought I’d actually try to drive off. Nathan Pauley must have assumed I was only going for my clothes, like I told him I was. I guess people in Oklahoma are more reliable and compliant than people from Southern California. But the veterinarian got a troubled and disappointed look on his face when I slid in behind the wheel of Cade’s truck and started it up.

  He stepped forward, waving, “Hey! Wait! You can’t leave! Incomer Boy! Wait!”

  A DETOUR IN
THE YEAR WE GREW UP

  Look: I’ll admit I drive like a drunken twelve-year-old.

  The truck rattled and jerked. I was so uncoordinated with the clutch; and the blanket wrapped around my legs didn’t make driving any easier. So when I came to the exit of the parking lot at the dog hospital, I realized I had no idea where I should go.

  Thisway or thatway?

  I turned right, not because I thought it was the direction that would take me back to the river, back to look for Cade. Although I hoped it was, I turned right because it was easier than pulling across the highway and turning left, and I was naked and wrapped in a flea-infested blanket and pissed off, and I wanted to get the hell away from Nathan Pauley, D.V.M., and the possible return appearance of Deputy Billy Gruber—both of whom probably believed I was a child-eating naked alien named Cade Hernandez.

  As it turned out, the easier choice was the correct choice.

  About a mile from the veterinarian’s clinic, I saw flashing red and blue lights in the rearview mirror.

  It was ridiculous.

  And it was definitely not what I ever imagined would happen to Finn—the incomer boy, not me—when he found himself alone on the planet of humans and dogs at the end of my father’s novel.

  One thing that did not happen at the end of my father’s book was this: Finn did not find himself naked and driving his best friend’s pickup truck while being pursued by some type of emergency vehicle with agonizingly bright headlamps and a flashing red beacon that pulsed so vividly across the flat Oklahoma landscape, the spectacle nearly induced the smell of flowers and another epileptic seizure.

  And it wasn’t just one vehicle behind me; there were several. I pulled the truck onto the gravel of the shoulder and flipped the rearview mirror away so I wouldn’t have to look at all those oncoming lights, which soon passed me and sped off down the highway.

  The lights were attached to a fire truck, an ambulance, a wrecker tow truck, and in the rear of the urgency parade, a black-and-white county sheriff’s patrol vehicle, which was most likely driven by someone named Billy Gruber.