100 Sideways Miles (5 page)

Laika means “barker” in Russian.

At least
my
Laika lives through her
Sputnik
experience. The original Laika, as most accepted theories go, died about five hours into her spaceflight when the internal temperature of
Sputnik 2
began to rise sharply and the satellite lost communication with the planet of humans and dogs. Nobody really knew what Laika was doing up there, besides getting uncomfortably hot.

For all that the scientists down here on Planet Earth knew, she could have been singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to herself over and over and over.

Not a very cheerful voyage.

But the satellite stayed in orbit for more than five months after that—a lonely and most certainly dead dog circling and circling overhead while the earth traveled about 240 million miles through space. Eventually, Laika and her spacecraft were incinerated when their orbit decayed in April 1958.

She was definitely dead after that happened.

Laika's fourteen-billion-year-old atoms were free again.

I believe many of those atoms found their way into my corpse-loving rat terrier—possibly into me as well.

The knackery never shuts down.

• • •

After that first day, I did not manage to catch a glimpse of Julia Bishop for the rest of the week.

Thinking about Julia Bishop made me crazy. I found myself considering doing things I would never have thought possible: waiting for her outside classroom doors or taking a walk up the canyon to see where her home was.

I didn't have the nerve.

• • •

I did not say anything to Cade Hernandez about meeting Julia Bishop.

What could I say, anyway? That I had fallen in love with a
girl I didn't even know, just because she admired the socks I was wearing? That she actually noticed my eyes?

That
was ridiculous.

But I had never felt so messed up on the inside. I imagined myself as some kind of hero who could overcome all his self-doubt and do something absurd like ask Julia Bishop, since she was practically my next-door neighbor, if she would like to come over to my house and visit, or maybe look at my socks, or do the kind of shit that normal kids do.

But I knew there was not the slightest chance of that happening.

I didn't know what normal kids did in these situations.

If I asked Cade what I should do about Julia Bishop, he would ruin everything. It would be innocent enough—just Cade being Cade—but it would happen as inevitably as the pull of gravity.

I couldn't let that happen.

So Cade and I drove quietly to school the morning after I met her. We stopped at Coffee Kiosk and bought coffees with sugar and cream, and we drank them in the student parking lot at Burnt Mill Creek High School while everything kept moving, twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second.

• • •

My
actual
next-door neighbor in San Francisquito Canyon was a very old man named Manny Castellan.

Manny Castellan was seventy-three years old. That's an awful lot of miles through space. His atoms were probably getting very tired of holding on to one another.

We lived on four acres. Most of the homes in the canyon had enough land to keep horses. Manny's house had stables, but
they were empty. Our place had a pool, a gazebo, and an entire guest house.

Dad's imagination paid all the bills we ever had.

We lived well.

Manny was from Mexico. His real name was Manuel.

Manuel Castellan used to be a bullfighter in Mexico, forty years ago and about twenty-five billion miles away from here. He complained to me once that modern people had generally lost their respect for the art of bullfighting.

He told me his bullfighter name was Manolito.

I thought it would be cool to have a bullfighter name.

One time I said, “What do you think
my
bullfighter name would be, assuming I ever fought with a bull?”

Mr. Castellan studied me thoughtfully. He looked me up and down as though he were receiving some signal from out there, somewhere.

He said, “I would call you Caballito.”

“What is that?”

“
Caballito
is a little horse.”

“I am not little,” I argued.

“You are for a horse,” Manuel Castellan said.

I nodded.

I wrote down what Manuel Castellan told me. Sometimes I carried a small red moleskine journal in my pocket.

He asked, “Why are you writing that down?”

I said, “I never get to talk to bullfighters.”

“Bullfighting is dead,” Manuel Castellan said.

Good for the bulls.

I asked Mr. Castellan what they did with the losers of the
match, if they were rendered into useful products like explosives, or lubricants on condoms.

Manuel Castellan asked me, “What are condoms?”

I had to tell him what condoms are. It wasn't embarrassing, and the bullfighter was fascinated by my description of how condoms worked. Then he asked if I had one I could show him, and I told him no.

Why would I ever need a condom?

The bullfighter said, “You never know, Caballito.”

Manuel Castellan told me the dead bulls were dragged away and their meat was sold in butcher shops. Dead, tormented bulls produced a very popular meat.

Who knew?

They could have thrown them from bridges for all I knew.

At the end of the school week—the week of Nazi Day and Julia Bishop—Cade Hernandez brought a suitcase filled with his belongings to my house in San Francisquito Canyon.

My parents and sister were leaving to spend five days in New York City without me.

I pouted to Mom and Dad, “I never get to go anywhere.”

As soon as I'd said it I calculated the worthlessness of this autopilot adolescent protest.

Tracy said, “What about that trip you have planned to visit Dunston University with Cade this summer?”

If Cade didn't get drafted into the big leagues in his senior year, we had plans on going to college together, and Dunston was the place. Dunston University was a private school in Oklahoma, with a top-notch baseball program and one of the nation's best liberal arts schools.

“That doesn't count. It's a school.”

“I'm sure you and Cade will manage to turn the next five days
into a vacation filled with debauchery and vice,” my dad countered.

He probably had a point.

I nodded. Mom and Dad exchanged concerned and mature glances.

Cade Hernandez was going to be my babysitter.

Nadia, my sister, was on school break, and I had to stay home, since my school year was not over yet. But my parents allowed Cade to live there with me during that time, despite Dad's reservations about my friend. They knew Cade could keep an eye on their epileptic boy, but I thought it was all part of the master plan to ensure Finn Easton's atoms would never escape the state of California.

Dad had to go to New York for work.

• • •

I had bunk beds in my room.

I believe the idea behind them had something to do with an expectation that I was to conjure some kind of invisible little brother, a playmate, because I never understood why Tracy—Mom—stubbornly clung to the aesthetic notion that boy plus bedroom equaled bunk beds, while my sister's room was designed like a perfumed pillow palace.

Nadia was the princess of San Francisquito Canyon.

Cade was asleep in the lower bunk when I woke up on Saturday morning. I never slept in the bottom bed because it made me feel like frozen food—all closed in and boxed away in the dark.

Cade was pressing a pillow across his head with the bend of his arm.

Cade Hernandez was an expert sleeper.

I pulled a T-shirt on over my bare chest and went downstairs. The sun was not up past the rim of the canyon behind our house, but it was already sweltering hot. Most of the time, wearing shirts was a habit of mine.

I didn't like it when anyone paid too much attention to the emoticon scars on my back.

My father and I drank coffee together outside on our patio every Saturday morning, even during winter storms.

It was what we did.

A cup of coffee with my dad usually lasted about forty thousand miles, maybe fewer this Saturday since Mom was hurriedly finishing the family's New York packing job.

Dad stared and stared at me.

It wasn't the way Cade Hernandez stared. There was no messing-with-you intent from my father. I knew what it was.

Dad was afraid that, like my
real
mother, one day I would be gone.

Poof!

“Laika stinks,” he said.

My dog sat up in front of my bare feet, beneath the metal table where Dad and I drank our Saturday coffee.

I sipped and nodded. “I shall prepare the tub of horror.”

Laika, knowing the phrase, clenched herself into a tightened armadillo.

Laika's tub of horror was a plastic toddler's wading pool, blue, and decorated with a frieze of press-formed dolphins,
starfish, and bubbles dancing around its outer wall.

Such horror.

Dad leaned toward me and said, “It looks like it's about time you started shaving.”

For some reason,
that
was embarrassing. I could talk in specific detail with the bullfighter about how condoms are used, but the minute my father started noticing the effects of puberty on me I began to choke and sweat.

I felt myself turning red.

“Shaving
what
?” I said.

Dad tilted his head. “I can see something.”

“Maybe I need to wash my face.”

I was one-point-seven million miles away, two months, from my seventeenth birthday, and if I weren't so tall, I could probably pass for a sixth-grader.

Dad relaxed. Then he recited his laundry list of instructions: where he'd left the contact information for his hotel, where I could find money if I needed it, not to forget to charge my phone and have it with me at all times, that trash day was Wednesday, and not to get into Cade Hernandez's truck if Cade was drinking alcohol.

“We don't drink, Dad.”

That was almost fifty percent of the truth.

Well, not really so much as that.

“Finn. I was sixteen once too.”

“That was about fourteen billion miles back that way,” I argued.

Distance was more important than time to my father, too. That was why he was so afraid that I would go away someday.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I agreed.

Then I said this: “Dad, I've been bothered about something somebody said to me a few days ago.”

“Something somebody said,” my father repeated, making sure to stress each “some.”

Dad did not appreciate the vagueness of teenage communication.

“It was a girl.”

“A girl?” Dad was positively enthusiastic.

“A carrier of twin
X
chromosomes,” I affirmed.

“Well?”

I took another sip from my coffee and said, “She said this: ‘I'm not flirting with you, you know.' ”

My father nodded thoughtfully.

“What does that even mean, Dad?” I asked.

“She was flirting with you, Finn. Definitely.”

“That's what I thought too.”

I loved my father more than anything.

• • •

Cade was just coming out of the bedroom when I got upstairs.

He rubbed his eyes and yawned while he clutched one hand over his crotch. Cade went into the bathroom and peed loudly. I'd noticed the protrusion below his lip that meant he was already chewing tobacco too.

Breakfast of champions.

And from inside my bathroom, Cade announced, “Peeing with a boner is so fucking ridiculous, man.”

“Wow,” I said. “Just . . . wow.”

I shook my head.

“Really,” Cade said.

He pulled the door open, then turned and dropped a stringy brown glob of spit into the unflushed toilet.

I pointed at my friend's mouth. “Dude. You'll have to get rid of that shit. My parents are still here.”

Cade said, “Oh.”

He extracted a black wad of tobacco from his lower lip and—
splash!
—dropped it into his stew of piss and saliva in the toilet.

Then Cade looked at me with a serious eye and said, “And, Finn: Don't try to tell me you didn't know that peeing with a boner is a painful fucking nightmare.”

I shook my head.

Cade flushed the toilet.

He said, “It's ridiculous. I should ask Mr. Nossik about it.”

Cade Hernandez was going to kill that man.

• • •

After the Jeep was packed, we stood barefoot in the driveway and said our good-byes.

Mom and Nadia kissed me. They waved and smiled at Cade. I believed they both actually
wanted
to kiss Cade Hernandez, because all girls seemed to want to kiss him, but that would have been far too much for my father to handle.