“You should. It’s about a handsome young man who does horrible things. But those things don’t show up on his face like they do for most people. Instead, they show up on a portrait he has hanging in his house.”
“Cool.”
“Well, more like creepy,” she pointed out. “That’s like heroin addicts. You know? They’re the best-looking drug users by far. Heroin actually preserves the outside of their bodies. But of course they’re rotting inside. Like Dorian Gray.”
“You seem to know a lot about drugs.”
“Well, it is the family business. Now, at the other extreme, you have the meth addicts.”
“Are they the worst-looking?”
“For sure. Their teeth fall out. Their hair falls out. Their skin erupts. It’s horrible, and it all happens very quickly.”
“So if you had to date an addict, it’d be a heroin user?”
She looked at me curiously. “I sure wouldn’t date a meth user. Their sex drive is down to zero.” She smiled mysteriously. “Your sex drive isn’t down to zero, is it, Tom?”
I froze. My hands started to tremble, but I clenched my fists to cover that. “No. No, I’m above zero.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why haven’t you asked me out yet?”
“Uh …”
“This would be the perfect opportunity. I mean, if you’re interested.”
“Uh, yeah, I’m interested. I just don’t know how that would work,” I explained. “I mean, I don’t drive.”
“Oh. Well… what about meeting somewhere? Like a mall? We could meet at the food court. You could buy me a smoothie.”
“Uh, we don’t really have a mall around here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Okay, then.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll have to invite you to my house. We’re having a Halloween party on Friday night. My dad is really into Halloween. We always have a big, wild party.”
“I’d still have a problem getting there.”
Wendy was starting to lose patience. “Come on. You must know someone who drives.” She turned herself all the way around, like her stepmother had done, and pointed to Arthur. “How about him? Your cousin. Does he drive?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he live near you?”
“Sort of. He lives in Caldera.”
Wendy blinked. I could tell she didn’t know what that meant. I asked, “Have you heard about Caldera?”
“No.”
I looked back at Arthur and then up at Jimmy. “It’s famous around here.”
“Yeah? Why?”
I lowered my voice. “Well, because it’s on fire. Seriously.”
She looked interested.
“Caldera used to be a strip mine,” I explained. “Then it became a landfill dump. But instead of compressing the trash, they burned it. Big mistake. The trash was sitting on top of a vein of anthracite coal, which caught fire and started to burn. For years.
“People started noticing that their basements were feeling hotter, and smelling like sulfur. Just about everybody cleared out of there. The U.S. government condemned the houses and sent in the Army Corps of Engineers. They put most of the fire out, we think. It still flares up sometimes.”
Wendy pointed surreptitiously to Jimmy. “But those guys still live there?”
“Yup.”
Wendy shook her head at the weirdness of that fact. She muttered, “People make such strange choices.” Then she didn’t say anything else. After a minute, she opened her book and started to read. I passed the time thinking up interesting things to say when we started talking again. But she just kept on reading.
We finally exited the turnpike and began to drive down old country roads. We passed a scrapyard with more wrecked cars than I’d ever seen in my life. There must have been a thousand of them.
We turned left and bumped along a narrow gravel road. As soon as we crested the hill, I saw a brown car ahead—an older sedan, sitting on a muddy lot. A woman got out of the car, opened an umbrella, and walked over to us. She introduced herself. “Good afternoon. I am a local volunteer for the crash site.”
A light rain started to fall as she launched into a prepared speech.
“United flight ninety-three came in from the north. The workers over there in the scrapyard were the last ones to see it. It flew in just forty feet over their heads, upside down, with its jet engines screaming. The plane held seven crew members and thirty-seven passengers, including four hijackers. Most of you know by now what happened.
“The four hijackers had seized control of United ninety-three approximately thirty minutes after takeoff. The passengers and crew were able to make secret calls from the plane. They learned from their loved ones that other planes were being used as bombs in a coordinated assault against our country. So they decided to take the plane back. They charged the cockpit and overwhelmed the hijackers. They lost their lives when the plane crashed, right over there. But their brave actions prevented another devastating attack, probably against the United States Capitol. Both houses of Congress were in session in the Capitol that morning. Our entire representative democracy was gathered there.
“And think about this: Do you know how those passengers decided what to do? They took a vote! Like in a democracy. And the vote was to take the plane back and stop whatever evil plan was unfolding.”
The woman seemed genuinely moved by the story, even though she must have told it a hundred times.
“So people started coming out here to say thank you any way they could—by laying a wreath, or saying a prayer, or just bearing witness.”
The woman pointed to the exact spot where the plane had crashed. It was raining pretty hard now. We could barely make out a field in the distance.
Suddenly Jimmy growled, “I can’t see it. I can’t see anything!”
He yanked his door open and tumbled out. He bent into the rain and started walking toward the crash site. Our hostess’s umbrella was now flapping in the wind, and she was getting soaked. She told Catherine Lyle, “He’s not allowed to go out there! No one is.”
Catherine turned on the wipers. We all watched Jimmy push on to the edge of the field. Catherine asked, “Should I go after him?”
Before the woman could answer, though, Jimmy stopped.
He fell to the ground, on his knees, in the driving rain. He leaned forward slowly, until his outstretched palms and then his face were pressed against the ground. I believe he was praying.
The woman said, “As long as he doesn’t go any farther, I guess it’s all right. If he does, though, I’ll have to call the police.” She turned her umbrella so that it covered her head, and she worked her way back to the car.
Jimmy did not go any farther. After about five minutes, he got up, clapped some of the mud off his hands and knees, and returned to the van. He opened the door, letting a cold squall of rain blow in. He flopped back onto his seat, soaking wet. His face and the front of his jacket were streaked with mud.
Catherine asked us, “Does anybody have a towel?”
I thought,
She called, “Is there one in the back, Arthur?”
Arthur twisted himself so he could see. “No. There’s no towel back here. There’s a toolbox, and some kind of lantern-flashlight thing.”
She asked, “Mr. Giles, do you want me to stop somewhere and get you a towel?”
Jimmy shook his head no very slowly, like he was in a trance.
Catherine Lyle said, “I’ll turn the heat on high.” She turned it on full blast. Then she executed a sloppy K-turn and we started back along the gravel road, leaving the volunteer behind us in her car.
