As Easy As Falling Off The Face Of The Earth Part 2

Even when the Wite-Out was dry, Ry saw that it didn't match. There it was, a grayer patch over a still visible j. He put on another coat. He considered typing the whole thing over, but that would definitely make too much noise.

You could still see it. Oh, well. He rolled the paper back down a few notches. Maybe Del would think he did it himself, in the middle of the night. Maybe he wouldn't even notice it.

DEL'S KITCHEN Leaving the scene of the crime, Ry rose from the chair and went into the kitchen. Brown-and-white-checkered curtains hung neatly in front of the window over the sink, where dishes soaked in cloudy water.

The counter held a variety of condiments, empty cans, and surprisingly pretty things, like a flowered china sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a little Dutch boy and girl leaning forward to kiss each other.

Ry pulled his sleeping cell phone from his pocket and woke it up. It gave forth its swirling musical greeting, friendly and rea.s.suring. But too loud in the quiet house, like a morning person when you aren't one. His thumb immediately went for the mute b.u.t.ton and he said, "Shhh!"

There was one bar of reception, one bar of battery. Two texts from Jake, who was still bored. One from Amanda: Haha, how would I know?

He called his grandfather first. Listened to the ringing, then his own recorded voice again on the voice mail. As he left his message, speaking softly, he heard his phone peeping at him, warning him that it would give up the ghost any second now. His parents' cell phone rang and rang, until the robo voice said the number was unavailable and to try again later. And the phone expired in his hand.

Ry's eyes wandered around the little room and fell on the pots and pans sitting on the stove top. Each held food remains so aged that only an archaeologist or a forensic scientist would be able to identify them. Because his mind was a. in a problem-solving mode, and b. easily distracted, he proceeded to solve the four puzzles.

The dried brown stuff looked like the dried brown stuff in the can that said "Beef Stew." The dried greenish stuff went with the stuff in the can that said "Split Pea Soup." The dried reddish-brown stuff had probably started out as spaghetti sauce. The b.u.mps in it might have been meat and onions at some point in time. Easy.

Ry leaned over to look more closely at a skillet on one of the back burners. Whatever was in it had been there long enough to acc.u.mulate dust. He didn't notice that the snoring had stopped. The sun flooded suddenly between the curtains, blinding him briefly so he didn't see Del materialize in the still shadowy margins of the room.

He had lifted the skillet into the shaft of sunlight and was considering giving it a sniff when Del spoke, and Ry's feet left the ground and the skillet left his hand and a gurgling noise came out of his throat. He landed before the skillet, which unfortunately flew off at an angle in the direction of Del's chest. Amazingly, Del put his hand right up and caught it, as if Ry had tossed him a softball.

What Del had said when he first spoke was, "I guess it's been a while since I did the dishes." At least that's what he started to say. He stopped midway when the skillet came flying toward him. What he said after he caught the skillet and looked into it was "Maybe we'd better just go out for breakfast."

STRANGERS, RIDES, AND CANDY.

In the light of day, the backyard had appeared. It was full of old trucks and machinery and large shapes covered by tarps. The seat in the truck was cold, but Ry was beginning to think of it as his. Sometimes, when something really out of the ordinary happens, like you get off your train and it leaves without you and you trudge for hours without food through an alien landscape, the things that happen after that can seem less strange just by comparison. Your threshold of what makes "strange" is raised way up for a while.

Del took a tin of mints from his pocket, opened it, and popped one into his mouth.

"Mint?" he asked Ry.

Ry realized he hadn't brushed his teeth for about twenty-four hours, was suddenly aware of a furriness inside his mouth. He wondered how foul his breath was.

"Thanks," he said, and took one.

"Strangers offering rides and candy" didn't occur to him. Only, I have to get a toothbrush. And toothpaste. But Del will probably let me use his toothpaste.

"Do you have a cell phone charger?" he asked Del. "My phone is completely dead."

Rides, candy, and cell phone chargers. But Del didn't have one.

"I don't have a cell phone," said Del. "But I know people who do. Or you can just use my regular phone."

"It would be long-distance," said Ry. "But I have some money. I could pay you."

"Doesn't matter," said Del. "Don't worry about it."

"You don't have a cell phone?" asked Ry. "Really?"

"I'm waiting to see if it's a fad," said Del.

NEW PeCHE SKILLET ("PESH") The old truck grumbled into the gravel parking lot of the same gray-box restaurant they had been to the night before. Painted wooden letters Ry hadn't noticed the first time, although they were two feet high and painted fluorescent orange, identified it as the New Peche Skillet. He thought he remembered Del telling him, before he zonked out, that New Peche, p.r.o.nounced "New Pesh," was the name of the town they were in. Peche was French for "peach," but no one knew why it was called that. There weren't any peach trees here to speak of.

As their heels. .h.i.t the ground, they were pleasantly a.s.sailed, ambushed, by the ambrosial aromas of breakfast seeping out of the building. Soon after sliding into a booth, they were joined by two people. One was a tall, rangy, cream-colored guy whose hair frizzed forth from his scalp and his chin in a brown cloud, vaporizing into thin air at his shoulders. The other fellow was short and round and coffee colored, with a shaved head.

The hairy one shook Ry's hand and said he was Pete. The sleeves of Pete's T-s.h.i.+rt had been hacked away, taking part of the body of the s.h.i.+rt with them. Revealing that Pete's armpits could keep up with his head and his chin, hair-wise. Also revealing that while Pete was lean, he was muscular. So muscular that Ry expected the handshake to be bone crus.h.i.+ng and was grateful when he only had to wince slightly.

The short guy's name was Arvin. His T-s.h.i.+rt was immaculate. It looked as if it had been ironed, and it was tucked into crisp blue jeans that were folded up at the bottoms in tall cuffs. His gla.s.ses were small gold-rimmed circles, in front of eyes that moved independently of each other so that Ry wasn't sure which eye he should look at. Arvin's smile was kind, easy, and radiant. He acknowledged Del's introduction with a quick nod.

The tree image that was printed on both men's s.h.i.+rts was the same as what was on the s.h.i.+rt Del had given Ry to wear. He gathered from their preliminary bits of conversation that they worked for Del, and that having breakfast here was how they started out their day. Looking at his own s.h.i.+rt, reading upside down, he read, THINK TWICE TREE SERVICE. Below the tree, in smaller letters, were the words If you really feel it's necessary.

Suddenly there was a hand in front of him, a beautiful hand that was connected to the arm of a young woman, who said, "I'm Beth. And you are?"

Something about her bespoke s.p.a.cious skies, fruited plains, and amber waves of grain. Abundance and freshly baked bread, still warm. Maybe that part was the restaurant. Ry felt his own face grow warm. He shook her hand. It was soft, warm, and firm. He said, "Ry. My name's Ry."

"Hi, Ry," said Beth. Then she told Pete to move over so she could sit down. And he did. Beth was wearing a tree service s.h.i.+rt also.

No one asked Ry what he was doing there. And he was the only one who picked up a menu. He studied it as the heavenly breakfast smells and the noisy breakfast clatter and conversation enveloped him, knowing he had some money in his pocket but not knowing what else he would need to spend it on. He settled on oatmeal, because it was cheap and it would make him feel full. Arvin ordered oatmeal, too. Ry wondered if it was for the same reason, or if Arvin actually wanted oatmeal.

When the food arrived, Ry stirred b.u.t.ter and sugar and cream and a pinch of salt into his oats. Arvin stirred ketchup into his. Ry couldn't help staring, and Arvin laughed softly.

"Try it sometime," he said. "It's not that bad."

"Mmm," he said as he took a bite. "Mmm, mmm, mmm."

Across the table were steaming heaps of eggs, bacon, potatoes, sausage. In trying not to look at the food he wasn't eating, Ry found himself looking at the tattoos on Pete's arms. There were two, one per arm.

A colorful dragon was entwined like a magnificent 2-D pet around one arm. The tip of its tail pointed at Pete's shoulder. It breathed orange and yellow flames onto his wrist. On the other arm was a coiled snake and the words DON'T TREAD ON ME. Or was it-wait-there was a t missing. Whoever had done the tattoo had left out the second "t." It would be an easy mistake to make, you might be doing one t and your mind would go on to the next letter. The words on the scroll said, DON'T READ ON ME.

IN A RELATED STORY: THE PREVIOUS MORNING IN WISCONSIN.

Ry's grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit of earth and a thick wall of trees, still black with night. As he sipped, the first rays of the sun found tiny gaps to poke through. Tomorrow he would pour the pot of coffee into a thermos to bring out onto the porch so he didn't have to go back inside.

He went into the kitchen and Olie, the black dog, went into his downward-dog yoga position, wagging his tail. Peg, the red one (or was it the other way around?), tap-danced into the room and then in a circle.

"Oh, yes, right," said Lloyd. "Well, let's go then. I don't know how you make it all night. I certainly couldn't."

He took the leashes from their hooks and, after some fumbling, clipped them to the dogs' collars, and they headed out the door. The street was quiet. The air was cool but warming, the sky clear as it lightened. Lloyd realized he had forgotten the plastic p.o.o.p bags and hoped the dogs would hold out until the woods at the end of the street. He was out of practice at this job. It had been a while since he had a dog himself. If this house-sitting pet-care stint worked out, though, he might get one.

The asphalt crumbled off into dirt, and he followed the dogs' bouncing b.u.t.ts up the path. They reminded you that it was fun to be alive. They investigated everything; they liked to move. And they could spend a lot of time sleeping. That would work out well for him, too.

Birds chattered in the treetops. Lloyd tried to imagine what a path looked like to a dog. The woods were so open here, they could have trotted in any direction they wanted to. He decided it had to do with smells; they were following the scent of previous walkers, human and canine.

A squishy crunch led him to find that he had exterminated a snail. He began to look more at where he was putting his feet. In this way he soon saw a lovely little toad, which he was very happy not to have stepped on. As well as the excreted or regurgitated version of a small furry animal. Who was responsible for that, he wondered. After that, he only looked down enough not to step on something. Or someone.

A pair of black squirrels raced fearlessly along the most tenuous, slender limb and leaped, one after the other, from that limb to an equally untrustworthy-looking limb on a neighboring tree. Did they ever miss? If he were a squirrel, he might just scamper along the ground and then crawl into his cozy nest. He had heard on the radio that squirrels could live to be twenty-five years old. While rats lived only to the age of three. Twenty-five years seemed like a long time to be a squirrel.

The dogs stopped in their tracks. Following their gaze, Lloyd saw that a doe, equally as still, gazed back. For a magical instant, the four creatures observed one another. Then the doe bounded off in that how-does-such-a-large-animal-move-so-fast-and-yet-so-silently-and-with-such-grace kind of way, and the dogs took after her raised white flag, s...o...b..ring panting buffoons cras.h.i.+ng through the undergrowth. Lloyd saw it coming. He clicked down on the b.u.t.tons of the retractable leashes and braced himself, but he was dragged along like a water-skier. He laughed as he tried to slow the dogs down, hopping over fallen branches and ducking under low-hanging ones, picking his feet up and putting them down more rapidly than he had done lately.

It didn't take long for the doe to outwit the dogs. She evaporated, and they sniffed the air in all directions. Then, forgetting her, they turned their noses to other fascinating scents in the nearby gra.s.ses. Lloyd was still smiling as he watched them and waited for his breathing and his heart to settle back to normal. Maybe if he got a dog, it should be an older dog. A slower dog. One with a touch of arthritis.

They had bolted into a clearing. A pile of melon-sized rocks suggested that someone had once prepared the field for planting, but now it had the air of a long-forgotten place. Lloyd remembered that he had left the coffeemaker on. He had a hankering for that second cup. He clicked his tongue to tell the dogs it was time to go. They pranced back and forth ahead of him, heading back toward the trees.

And then, without warning, the earth fell away, far away, from beneath his feet, and he plummeted after it. The earth fell eight feet down before it stopped falling, and so did Lloyd. When he stopped moving, he was lying in the bottom of a sinkhole twenty feet across. The dogs looked down at him from the rim.

Here's what had happened: The bedrock below the soil and glacial deposits he was standing on was limestone, with fissures and layers that water could seep through. As the water seeped, it dissolved more and more of the limestone until it was more air and water than solid. Eventually, i.e., at that very moment, there just wasn't enough rock to hold up the dirt anymore. So the dirt collapsed.

It was unlikely that Lloyd would happen to be standing exactly there when the dirt collapsed, but there he was. It could have been worse. It could have been a twenty-foot-deep sinkhole.

"Go get Timmy," said Lloyd to the dogs. "No, wait-I'm Timmy. Go tell June Lockhart that I've been swallowed up by the earth. She'll know what to do."

He was making a joke about a television show in the early 1960s in which a boy named Timmy was rescued every week by his collie, whose name was La.s.sie. The dogs didn't know about this program, and they lay down and waited. At first with their ears perked up. When they saw that Lloyd had closed his eyes, they took naps, too.

Lloyd closed his eyes because as he fell, his head had landed on a rock. The field was a pocket of glacial till, and it was about 80 percent rocks. Most of the back side of his body had also met up with rocks. But it was the meeting of a rock with his head that caused him to close his eyes. He slipped into unconsciousness, and he stayed that way for several hours. The dogs waited patiently.

ANOTHER SEPARATE, RELATED STORY: SIESTA.

Other than the rivulets of molten lava burping up out of occasional fissures in its crater, and the steam that rose from them, the volcano had been dormant for such a long time that tall trees grew on its steep slopes.

A few locals earned a living by leading tourists up winding paths that were almost unfindable in the undergrowth, climbing over the waist-high, even shoulder-high, banyan tree roots to the top.

When they got up there, they could look around panoramically. To the north and south, a few other tiny islands emerged from the water. To the west was the Caribbean. And to the east was the Atlantic Ocean, with nothing at all emerging from it for more than three thousand miles, only ocean until the coast of Africa, unless you were lucky enough in your swim or boat ride to hit the Cape Verde Islands, almost to Africa anyway, and here you were on this teeny-tiny island, and what if you fell off? Especially on the Atlantic Ocean side?

Then the tourists would venture into the crater and observe the glowing lava trickles and the steam, and try to remember those diagrams of volcanoes everyone had to draw in fifth grade, and wonder how dormant a volcano could be if it still had glowing lava coming out of it? Here it was, geology in real life (though geology was really everywhere; it was real life), and it was all pretty incredible, but it was also a relief to get back to the bottom and eat one of the sandwiches that the guide had packed, even if giant ants had found their way inside the bag and had to be brushed away.

Meanwhile, back up behind them, the thick heat of the tropical afternoon settled around the mountain. Twitters and chirps and squawks punctured the heavy stillness here and there, but it was siesta time.

The perky ringtone of a cell phone sang out into the cloud forest. No one was there to notice how the narrow rectangular window on its face lit up.

Five minutes after its Answer b.u.t.ton went unpressed, it emitted a musical burble.

By the second burble, a small monkey with a green cast to her fur had located the smooth silvery object. She waited for it to speak again, and it did. She touched the small b.u.mps along the edges, and it peeped and glowed at her. And it vibrated, like a bee trapped under a leaf, tickling the palm of her hand. Foot. Whatever. She squeaked, then carried it off to show her family and friends.

BETTY, BETTY, BETTY.

In the booth at the New Peche Skillet, Del and Pete were having a discussion.

"I like to fly under the radar," Pete was saying.

"So, what happened to your eye?" asked Beth. She was talking to Ry.

"I just let them know where I stand," said Del. "I don't have anything to hide." He was talking to Pete.

"I walked into something," said Ry. "A big metal cable. It was in the shadow, and it was coming straight at me. I didn't see it."

"I'm not hiding anything," said Pete. "But I'm not going to broadcast it, either."

"Ow," said Beth. "You're lucky you didn't poke your eye out. Where was this cable? What were you doing?"

Bit by bit she pried it out of him. It was surreal to be sitting in the same booth, in the same restaurant, telling the same story he had told the night before to Del. But he was awake this time. And Beth was so interested. She kept asking him questions and listening to the answers. And there were the breakfast smells and the friendly hubbub of voices and clattering dishes and clinking silverware and the sunlight pouring through the windows.... Ry found he was chattering away, and when he ran out of things to say, he realized that everyone in the booth was now listening to him.

"Are there any other people you could call, any other relatives?" Del asked. "Besides your grandfather?"

"Maybe a neighbor, someone who could go see if your grandfather's okay?" This was Beth.

"We just moved," said Ry. "I don't actually remember anybody's last name. There's a lady named Betty."

"Betty," said Pete. "Betty, Betty, Betty. Let's call Betty."

"I don't know her last name."

"I know, I was just-tell me again, what is the deal with your parents?"

"They're sailing around the Caribbean. I think they're revitalizing their marriage or something."

"That sounds nice," said Beth. "I'd like to do that. How long do they think it will take?"

"Take?" asked Ry.

"Do they have an itinerary?" asked Arvin. "Or are they just blowing in the wind, wherever love takes them, skipping over the ocean like a stone?"

"Arvin's kind of a mystic," explained Beth.

"Almost a monk, really," said Pete. "He's a Buddhist."

"It's words to songs," said Arvin. "The stuff they play on that radio station you people listen to."

"Oh, sorry," said Beth. "I thought you were being poetic."

"Not me," said Arvin. "Delwyn's the poet."

Ry didn't want to picture his parents letting love take them where it would. He wanted to picture them answering their phone and telling him what he should do.

"I think they have reservations at some of the places they want to stay," he said. "My grandpa has the list. But I think some of the time they're just going to sail around wherever. I feel like I should just go home. But it's kind of impossible. I only have, like, eighty-five dollars, and my return ticket is in my backpack, which is who knows where."

"Maybe he could work with us for a couple of days, Del," said Beth, "and earn his train fare. He looks like a strapping lad. And in the meantime," she said, turning back to Ry, "your grandpa will remember to check the answering machine, or he'll be there when you call. I bet he's next door, blabbing with Betty."

It was the sort of thing you say to make a person feel like he's doing something when all there is to do is wait. No one, except maybe Ry, who didn't know what would happen next, really expected him to work long enough to earn three hundred dollars, or whatever it would cost for a ticket. It was a distraction. But everyone went with it, waiting for the better idea to come along.

"We need to find him some shoes then," said Del. "He can't work in flip-flops."

"What size are you?" asked Pete.

"Ten," said Ry.

"Same as me," said Arvin. "Almost. I'm ten and a half."

"Do you have any extra shoes?" asked Pete.