Memory Boy (4 page)

“Okay, okay,” I replied.

The
Ali Princess
whispered along the empty, ashy streets. My mother kept looking at the dark, dusty suburbs. “This is like a war,” she murmured. “People's lives are disrupted, put on hold for a while. Then it ends and we all try to start over again.” She looked at my father; he turned to look back at her.

I hoped she was right. I hoped my parents got used to living together again. Maybe they would find out they liked it.

But first things first. “There's our turn,” I called to my father.

He steered the
Princess
up onto the entrance ramp of 494, the freeway heading northwest. Below, wind blew steadily up the vacant six-lane channel. It was time to set sail.

THE FIRST DAY AFTER THE
volcano, Mr. Litzke proceeded with our regular social-studies schedule. He wouldn't even talk about the eruption, which none of us wanted to hear more about anyway, but we thought it might throw off the oral-history project. “You'll hear enough about volcanoes in the coming days on the news and in science class.”

There was muttering.

“Please take out your oral-history guidelines. Today is an exciting day. We'll be starting our oral-history project with a field trip to Buena Vista nursing home.”

There were pained noises. Each student was required to become “buddies” with a senior at nearby Buena Vista Convalescent Home. Don't get me started on corny names in the Midwest that use Spanish words to sound cool; my Language Loser Award is a motel named Casa del Toro, which as best as I can figure means “House of Bull.”

Anyway, teachers loved oral history and similar kinds of “outreach” projects. Cleaning up parks and riverbanks, building Habitat for Humanity houses (which I looked forward to next year)—anything to get us out of the classroom so they didn't have to do any actual teaching. Anything to put us kids on display so the Scrooges of the community would vote Yes on the next school bond issue. Anything to show parents that the teachers weren't slackers who handed out worksheets and then kicked back to read the newspaper.

Like Mr. Litzke. Not far from retirement (his hair had retired long ago), he spent most of each class period rattling the newspaper and then asking us pop questions about current events. I got on his bad side one day when he thought I was volunteering an answer.

“Yes, Miles? You know about the NRA's position on handguns?” He seemed surprised and pleased that I had raised my hand.

“No. And how the hell would I? We never get to see the newspaper because you read it all day.”

I got detention and a note home, and it was downhill from there. Now, every chance he got, Mr. Litzke stuck it to me.

On this warm February day we bused over to Buena Vista (who would trust ninth graders to walk three blocks?). Outside the home a few old-timers were parked in wheelchairs facing the sun. Some had nodded off. Others sat slumped with their heads slacked to one side or their mouths open. “Not to worry,” Mr. Litzke said as we unloaded. He gave me a particularly smug look. “You'll be assigned to someone who can still talk and think and tell all sorts of wonderful stories.”

“Stories like how it feels to wear diapers again?” I muttered as we neared the front doors. Under one of the wheelchairs was a shiny little puddle of pee.

Inside, the place had gleaming white long hallways with square corners and curved mirrors above them to prevent wheelchair collisions. The whole place smelled funny, kind of like sourdough bread. Residents moved along in their walkers or wheelchairs; rubber tips and wheels squeaked on the bright floor. They didn't look around much. It was like their brains had been sanitized by breathing fumes from too many antiseptics and cleaning fluids. But the geezers all seemed to be heading down the hall in one direction.

Mr. Litzke met with the administrator, then began to call out our names. An attendant, a male-nurse type guy in white pants, white tennis shoes, and thin ponytail, passed out name tags. Mine read Hans Kurz.

“Han Solo?” Nathan Schmidt whispered to me.

The administrator, a middle-aged guy in a skinny tie, said, “Welcome to Buena Vista. Each of you now has the name of your new friend. They're all assembled in the Rec Room, waiting for you, so why don't we head down there too?”

In the Rec Room the old-timers were lined up in wheelchairs, or else leaned on walkers, or else slumped in folding chairs. They each wore a large name tag with a first name and last initial of someone in our class.

“Please step forward and introduce yourself,” Mr. Litzke called.

We reluctantly began to move up and down the row of geezers. Soon everybody found his or her “buddy.” Everybody except me. I looked around. While I didn't particularly want a “buddy,” neither did I want to be standing there like a loser. Everyone stared at me.

“Ha, ha, Miles!” Nathan whispered.

The administrator checked his clipboard, then turned to the male nurse in white pants and white tennis shoes. “Where's Mr. Kurz?”

The nurse grinned slightly. “Wouldn't come. Says he hates kids.”

Everybody in the class laughed. At me. I wasn't bothered in the least. I thought the nurse was cool—possibly an adult troublemaker. And I thought I might even like Mr. Kurz. Anybody who hated ninth graders couldn't be all bad.

“So what's your name, kid?” the male nurse said as we walked down the hall toward Mr. Kurz's room.

“Miles. Miles Newell.”

“Miles, this is your lucky day.” He chuckled.

We stopped at door 29A and tried to push it open. It was barricaded from the inside.

The nurse rapped sharply, then put his ear to the wood. “Mr. Kurz?”

“Go away!” came a raspy voice.

“Mr. Kurz? Hans? Move away from the door, please.”

“I am away from the door, damnit. I'm trying to watch the news.”

“But you must have accidentally put something against the door. It feels blocked.” The nurse winked at me.

“Hee, hee!” came a hoarse laugh.

“Got a visitor for you,” said the male nurse. “A friend wants to see you.”

There was silence.

I made pantomime motions that I really didn't need to see him. That I was running late, had a taxicab, a plane to catch, those sorts of motions.

“You can't fool me,” Mr. Kurz said. “I never had any friends. I always lived alone.”

“It's never too late to make a friend,” the nurse said, all the while pushing against the door, and beginning to make some progress.

“I'm ninety years old. I don't need any friends,” rasped the voice.

The nurse pulled me in after him.

A very old man with a leathery face sat in bed with a sheet pulled up to his waist. He was fully dressed, including a heavy wool plaid shirt; and we could see the outlines of boots on his feet. But I couldn't take my eyes off his eyebrows; they were as thick as squirrel tails. White hairs stuck out all over the place. I had never seen eyebrows that bushy.

“What I need is some peace and quiet,” the old man growled. His eyes went back to the overhead television.

“Mr. Kurz,” the nurse said, “meet Miles Newell. Miles, Mr. Kurz.”

Mr. Kurz glanced at me briefly, then turned back to the screen.

“Congratulations,” the nurse said to me on his way out. “You guys are now officially ‘buddies.'” The door latched behind him.

I sat there as Mr. Kurz watched volcano coverage. I yawned. Several minutes passed. Suddenly the old man began to laugh, a hoarse, wheezing laugh that went on and on.

“Excuse me? Sir?” I finally asked.

He hawked into a paper cup, then turned to me. “Hard times gonna come again, boy.”

“Hard times?” I asked.

He nodded. “Like the Great Depression, only worse. This time it will be dog eat dog. Root hog or die.”

I thought of Dara Jamison.

“And you know why, kid?” His blue eyes bored into mine.

“Ah, no sir.”

He wheezed out another long laugh. “Because people don't know how to do anything anymore. Oh, they're good with computers and all those electronic gadgets. But they forgot the old ways.”

“The old ways?”

“How to make it on your own if you have to. How to find food, stay warm, live off the land,” he rasped. “Let them eat their e-mail. Let them burn their computers to stay warm at night—then they'll find out. Don't you see?” He laughed so hard, he hunched over in a coughing fit.

“I see,” I answered. I saw that Mr. Litzke had really stuck it to me this time.

WITH THE
ALI PRINCESS
PAUSED
at the top of the freeway, we looked back at the city. To the east was the faint, gloomy outline of downtown Minneapolis. The skyscrapers were dark giant statues carved in iron. Below, the carless freeway was an empty river with a windswept concrete floor.

“I need you to run the sail,” I said to my father. I glanced at my mother.

My father kept looking at the ghostly city skyline. I wondered if he was thinking of jazz concerts he had played; of the other musicians in the Shawnee Kingston band. Sometimes I thought they were his real family.

“Me?” he said suddenly.

“Sure,” I answered.

He shrugged. “I'll give it a try.”

Nat was silent; she watched him. He crawled to the rear of the
Princess
and looked at the ropes, the fabric rolled around the boom. “How does this thing work?” he asked.

“Just like a sailboat. Same as the old
Tonka Miss
—only with wheels.”

“No sweat.” As he loosened the tie-down cords, he automatically turned his face to catch the breeze, test its angle. That was a good sign.

I went up front and took the handlebars; I would steer us.

“Ready?” he asked.

I gave him a thumbs-up.

“Now departing, pier seven,” I called. Nobody laughed.

My father used to be a good sailor. In one motion he ran up the fabric—its little rings jangled against the cable—and swung the boom sideways. Fabric caught the wind with a sharp
ca-shuck!
sound. Air punched open the sail.

The
Princess
lurched forward. “Whoa!” my father exclaimed. He struggled against the rope.

Momentarily the
Princess
heaved up on her front tire.

“Spill some air!” I shouted.

My father dumped half the wind just before we tipped. Then the
Princess
righted herself with a jolt and swept down the ramp into the concrete valley. Everybody screamed as if we were on a roller coaster at the state fair. Within seconds we were going close to thirty miles per hour. I clutched the handlebars like death, but the
Princess
ran straight and true—just like I knew she would. Once onto the freeway, I let out a breath.

My father, wedged in the left rear bay, worked the boom from a single rope around his forearm. The wind was perfect. He leaned outward partway to counterbalance the wind, and for an instant I flashed back to the good old days, before the ash. My father had a real job then—he was a high school music teacher—and was home weekends like other dads.

We would sail all day on Lake Minnetonka, from island to island, angling around bays, tacking back and forth. When I was really small, about four or five years old, it hit me one day that we had sailed clear across the lake with a strong wind straight against us. I thought this was a miracle—that my father could sail against the wind by going sideways. And it was clear to me then that dads were for just that: miracles. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

“Miles! Look out!” my mother called. She pointed suddenly at an upcoming freeway overpass. “The mast—it's not going to clear the—”

“Overpass?” I finished, as we sped underneath. I didn't even look up; I had done my road research. I knew every bridge and its height from here to Birch Bay. “Standard freeway construction. A foot to spare and then some,” I called out. We skimmed along leaving a silent, tumbling wake of pumice-like waves on moonlit water.

“Wow,” Sarah said to me. She couldn't help herself; she was actually impressed.

Here and there along the vacant freeway, abandoned cars lay like roadkill. Wheels and hoods were ripped off; doors were gone, eaten away by scavengers. Beyond the skeleton hulks of cars, under the bridges and in the shrubbery on the side slopes of the banks, were tiny red eyes of campfires. They were not big blazes, but more like embers—little secret fires among the bushes where the dark shapes of homeless people lay.

Homeless people: That was us—but not quite. At least we had someplace safe to go to.

Directly ahead, at pavement level, two men leaned against a concrete bridge column and passed a bottle. One of them took a long drink under his dust rag, his eyes closed as we sailed past. The other one jerked backward in surprise as we whooshed by; he began to wave an arm and point after us and jabber at his companion, but by the time the other man looked, we were long gone. Like frosty breath on a winter night.