The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Read online

  There were holes in his story. I couldn’t say exactly what they were, but there were definitely holes. And yet, he did have that money, and it was a lot of money. That made me think at least that part of the story was true, him stealing from the drug dealer. Which meant that drug dealer probably knew by now that I took off with Jake in Mr. Harkin’s Mustang. If I went back, he was definitely going to come looking for me. He would want to know where the money was, and he wouldn’t be nice about it. Those types of people don’t just go away when you politely tell them you don’t know.

  So what choice did I have? I had to go with Jake, at least until he sent the money back. And if we were going in that direction, then I might as well see Dad and give him the portrait. Maybe Jake would end up getting his life going in a new direction too. He may have broken my Game Boy, but he had ended up with a much more rotten life than me, and that was saying something.

  “One last getaway,” I said. “All right, I’ll go. But you have to promise to mail the money back, no matter what. Even if your uncle slams the door in your face, you have to send it back.”

  He sighed. “All right, fine.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise, I promise!” He raised his hand, his face solemn. “Scout’s honor, I’ll send it back, no matter what.”

  “Were you ever in the Scouts?”

  He looked sheepish. “Well . . .”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Hey, I can still promise like a Boy Scout, can’t I?”

  It was the kind of dumb thing you had to laugh at, even if you were standing on a deserted road in the middle of the night, a long way from home.

  chapter ten

  Twenty minutes later, we were stretching out on our own double beds in a room that smelled like it had once been underwater, each of us wolfing down a cheeseburger and fries we had bought from the Burger King next door. There was a moment of panic when the hotel clerk had asked for some identification, but then Jake whipped out some fake I.D. and the guy didn’t bat an eyelash, just took Jake’s deposit money and gave him the keys. I was amazed Jake had fake I.D., but I knew I should have expected it.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until we went to our room and I caught a whiff of the grilling burgers on the night’s breeze. Jake must have realized the same thing, because he headed for the restaurant without me even asking.

  The carpet in the hotel room was the color of rust, and it was so thin it looked like paint. The chairs and table must have been around since the fifties, and they’d been heavily used in all that time. The steady drip from the faucet in the bathroom would most likely drive me insane during the night. But all in all, it was better than sleeping under a bridge. Even the wet, moldy smell wasn’t so bad once we were eating. On the little television, we watched an old Clint Eastwood Western, which was the only decent thing on.

  The digital clock between the two beds read 11:38. It was hard to believe that everything that had happened so far had happened in under ten hours. It seemed like a lifetime’s worth of stuff. Maybe ten lifetimes’ worth of stuff.

  “So,” Jake said through a mouthful of cheeseburger, “you know what you’re going to say to your dad when you see him?”

  “Not really,” I said, using a napkin to wipe some stray ketchup off my chin.

  “You gonna ask him if you can live with him?”

  “Huh?”

  He shoved some fries into his mouth. When he spoke, it was mostly garbled. “Lib wid ’im,” he said.

  “Why would I want to live with him?”

  He swallowed. The lump was big enough that I could actually see his throat move. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought maybe that was why you wanted to give him the portrait.”

  “I don’t want to live with him,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I just wanted to give him the picture.”

  “All right.”

  We lapsed into silence. It was true that I was going to have to say something to Dad. I really had no idea what that was going to be. Except for the phone calls on my birthday and on Christmas, when we mostly followed the same script (“How are you, son?” “Fine, Dad.” “Good, good, glad to hear it, how are your grades?” “Good, Dad.”), we hadn’t had a real conversation since my cat Streak had gotten hit by a car when I was ten. And that had been only because Mom had forced him to talk to me about life and death and what it all means, which were the exact words I had overheard her say to him when he had come home from work. “Dear, you need to talk to your son about life and death and what it all means.”

  I don’t remember what he had said, but I do remember the conversation had lasted about thirty seconds. He’d said he had a few important phone calls to make (how important could they be, when you’re a dentist?), but I had later found him with a beer in hand in front of the television in the basement, watching the Oakland A’s take on the Texas Rangers.

  It was making me nervous, trying to think of what to say to him. I just wanted to see what he did when I handed him the picture. As far as I knew, he didn’t even know I could draw.

  We finished our dinner, and it wasn’t long before my eyelids started to feel heavy. It turned out I didn’t have to worry much about brushing my teeth or sleeping without pajamas, because when I woke again, the room was dark and Jake was snoring. My neck was sore, and my stomach felt like there were rocks in it. I shuffled to the bathroom and took care of business, still barely half-awake. My head felt stuffy.

  When I came out of the bathroom, before I flicked off the bathroom light, I saw that Jake was under the covers, his jacket and jeans on the floor next to the bed. Which meant he was down to his underwear. I wasn’t all that comfortable taking off my clothes around anyone, even somebody who was sleeping, so I got under the covers first, then took off my pants, folded them, and carefully placed them on the floor where I could get to them quickly.

  I lay there for a while, the bedspread tucked up to my chin, and stared at the ceiling in the dark. The room now smelled like greasy fries. The light from the parking lot rimmed the curtains. After a while my eyes adjusted, allowing me to see everything in the room. I thought about Mom. I wondered if she was asleep, or if she was just sitting by the phone, waiting for me to call. That killed me, thinking about her, so I started counting goats jumping over a log. I’m not much of a sheep guy, so it’s always goats for me. Since Dad had left, I’d had a lot of trouble sleeping, so I’d probably counted a million goats.

  I was up to two hundred goats when I heard someone crying. It was soft and muffled. At first I thought it might be Jake. But the longer I listened, the more I realized it was coming from right behind me, through the wall. It would stop for a while, then start again. I tried to ignore it, but it’s pretty much impossible to sleep when there’s someone crying near you.

  “Z’at you?” Jake said. His voice was slurred.

  “No,” I said. “It’s somebody in the next room.”

  He was silent a moment. “Sounds like a girl. I wonder what she’s upset about.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I heard him roll over in his bed. The person crying stopped long enough that I thought maybe she was done, then she started again.

  “Think we should go see what’s wrong?” Jake asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “She might want someone to talk to.”

  “I just—I just don’t think we should bother her.”

  She went on crying. It was a really pitiful sound. I remembered Mom making that sound a long time ago, right after Dad had left. I remembered hearing it late at night, all the way down the hall. Even when I’d covered my ears, I still couldn’t block it.

  I heard a rustle of blankets, then pants being zipped. I saw Jake’s shadowy outline on the edge of the bed.

  “What’re you doing?” I said.

  “Going over there,” Jake said.

  He slipped on shoes and put on his jacket. I turned on the bedside lamp, squinting as my ey
es adjusted. Jake was already at the door.

  “I really don’t think you should do this,” I said.

  “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Jake—”

  He was already out the door. I sat there, feeling pissed, not knowing if I should try to fall sleep or just wait until he came back. Through the wall, I heard Jake’s knock, and the crying stopped. I sat up on my knees and put my ear against the wall, cupping it with my hands. The wall felt cool against my ear. The knock came again. I heard a girl’s voice, but I couldn’t understand her. I heard Jake saying something, but I couldn’t understand him, either. Then I heard what sounded like her door unlocking. She talked. He talked. Then there was silence.

  It made me crazy wondering what was going on over there. Then I heard a click behind me, and I turned just as Jake and a short dark-skinned girl entered the room.

  “Uh . . . ,” Jake said.

  I realized I was kneeling there in my tighty-whities. I dropped like a rock, jerking the covers up to my waist. “Hi,” I said in a small voice.

  “This is Charlie,” Jake said. “Charlie, this is Anju. I told her she could hang with us for a while.”

  Anju gave me a weak smile. She had a foreign look, maybe Indian or Pakistani or Filipino. The skin under her eyes was streaked with mascara. She was so tiny, and so thin, that standing there, wringing her hands, she made me think of a lost little four-year-old. She could have been sixteen or twenty-six; it was hard to tell. Her hair had the unnatural red tint of someone who dyed it, and it was tied back in a ponytail except for a loose strand that curled down to her lips. They were small, pouty lips, with red lipstick a few shades too bright. She wore a rumpled red sweatshirt, unzipped, and underneath a red T-shirt with some kind of dragon design. Her green capri pants came down to the middle of her calves, and her red sandals made me think of the kind that Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. I saw that her toenails were painted the same bright shade of red.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “I’m—I’m sorry about the noise.” She had a very slight accent.

  Jake made a pfff sound. “Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you take a load off for a while. Charlie there was getting lonely.”

  “I really don’t want to bother you,” she said. One of her front teeth slightly overlapped the other one.

  “I told you,” Jake said, “you’re not bothering us. Isn’t that right, Charlie? We were just up anyway.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Jake motioned to one of the orange bucket chairs facing the beds. “Go for it,” he said. “Please. I’d be crushed if you didn’t.” He placed his hand over his heart.

  She let out a little giggle. “Okay,” she said. “Just for a few minutes.”

  “You want any water or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Beer?”

  She giggled again, settling into the chair. When she smiled, she did it with her lips closed, and when she laughed, she covered her mouth with her hands. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Me? I’m only eleven. But Charlie there’s pushing forty.”

  “Well, you both look like you should be in high school.”

  Jake lunged onto the bed. He propped up a pillow, then turned around to face her. “Just graduated, actually. We’re doing a little trip to celebrate. So what brings you to Bend?”

  “Oh,” she said, shrugging.

  She stared at the floor, tapping one of her feet. The look on her face, it was like she’d just heard her best friend died. There was an uncomfortable silence and I tried to think of something to say. Nothing came to me. I was still a little irritated that Jake had invited her over at all. Why did we have to get involved in her life? We didn’t know her.

  “I bet it’s to join the circus,” Jake said.

  She looked up, confused. “What?”

  “Trapeze artist, right?” he said, smiling.

  “No,” she said, laughing.

  “Lion tamer? You definitely look like a lion tamer.”

  She shook her head. When she was laughing or smiling, her whole face changed. She still wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was pretty. It made me think of Kari, too, how she seemed pretty when she smiled.

  “It’s much more lame,” she said. “I was just in town seeing somebody. A . . . guy.”

  “Oh,” Jake said knowingly, “I get it. A boyfriend.”

  “Yeah,” Anju said. “Well, kind of. He was. Not anymore. I thought . . . well, not anymore.” She had that sad look again.

  “You want to talk about it?” Jake said.

  She shrugged.

  “You dump him or he dump you?” Jake asked.

  “It was kind of mutual,” she said, and she continued looking at the floor while she spoke. “Well, I guess it was more him. Him dumping me. Yeah, it was mostly that.” She didn’t say anything for a long time, so long that I wondered if we were just going to sit like that for the rest of the night, the three of us listening to the faucet drip in the other room, until finally she spoke again, much more softly than before. “We broke up a couple months ago . . . back in Boise. We were going to get married this summer, and then he comes out and says he needs a little space. A little breathing room. That’s what he said. . . . And then he up and moves to Bend with another guy who got a job working at Mount Bachelor. He said it was just for a little while, just until he sorted some things out. Do a little snowboarding and clear his head . . . I thought I’d come out here and surprise him.” Her eyes had a watery film to them.

  “And?” Jake said. I couldn’t believe how blunt he was. The girl was pouring her guts out, and he was acting like he wanted the next installment from Netflix.

  She shrugged. “Her name is Ruth. She’s the one who answered the door.”

  “Oh,” Jake said. “Well, that sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Anju said.

  “Screw him,” Jake said.

  “Huh?”

  “Forget the bastard. He’s not worth it. I mean, how could he go out with a girl named Ruth, anyway? As far as names go, it’s totally lame. Right up there with Priscilla and Gertrude in lameness. She must have been a total cow.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Even if she wasn’t,” Jake went on quickly, “she’s certainly going to be a cow before long. Because anyone with a name like Ruth is going to be a cow. It’s pretty much a guarantee. You really should feel sorry for the guy. It’s all downhill from here for the rest of his life. You were the best he ever could have had, and he blew it.”

  I didn’t think there was any way to pull her back from that sad and lonely place you could see in her eyes with a lot of phony pep talk. But when she looked up, there was just a flicker of a smile on her face, not an outright smile, just a hint, and that’s when I realized that even when people know the pep talk is phony, they still want to hear it. Maybe it was easier to believe a lie when somebody else was saying it rather than you saying it to yourself.

  “She did kind of have a big nose,” she said.

  “There you go!” Jake said. “I bet it was a total honker. Like she’d knock people over if she turned around too fast.”

  “She had a body to die for though,” Anju said.

  “Hey now!” Jake said. “Remember, she’s going to be one fat mama before long. She’s going to be so fat, they’ll have to lift her out of the house with one of those cranes they use to build skyscrapers. They’ll have to buy a semi-truck just so they can haul her around in the trailer. And their kids! Their kids will be big roly-polies with big ugly noses!”

  She had been starting to brighten up, but at the mention of kids, all the cheer went right out of her. Her eyes got watery again, and her whole body sagged.

  “Not that they’ll have kids!” Jake said quickly, obviously realizing his mistake. “I mean, I doubt they’ll even be able to have sex, she’ll be so fat.” Mentioning sex made her slump even more. It was like he was delivering body blows. He went on talking even faster. “And hey, no matter h
ow bad things are, they’re not that bad. Take—take Charlie here. He’s still a virgin. How lame is that?”

  I could have died right on the spot. I didn’t even want to look at Anju, because I was afraid that she was going to be looking at me as if I was the most pathetic person in the world.

  “Wow,” she said, “that’s actually pretty cool.”

  There was no scorn in her voice. I braved a glance at her, and she didn’t have a look of pity on her face. She really did look genuinely impressed.

  “Um, thanks,” I said.

  “Too many people rush into it,” she said. “It’s not bad to just wait until it’s the right time. I kinda wished I would have waited a little.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if that had been my thinking on it all along. The only problem was, I wasn’t a virgin by choice. It had just kind of worked out that way by default. Still, I didn’t want to burst her bubble.

  “Hey, I got an idea,” Jake said. I was afraid he was going to say something else to embarrass me, but it turned out he had something else on his mind. “Charlie and I, we need to get to Denver, and Boise’s pretty much on the way, right?”

  Anju nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Well,” Jake said, “it seems like you need some cheering up, and you know, we’re happy to help. I think we’re doing a pretty good job, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Oh you do, huh?” she said.

  “Yeah. Just think how much better you’ll feel after spending more time with us. So here’s what I’m thinking: We hitch a ride with you to Boise, and you get the full benefit of our cheering up for a whole lot longer. What do you think about that? We’ll even pay for gas, how about that? What a deal.”

  You could see her turning it over in her mind. I was amazed with how Jake had turned what really was just begging for a ride into something that made us seem generous. It was complete fakery, of course, and I’m sure she could see that, but I was still impressed with how he had done it. I probably would have just come right out and said, “Please, please, give us a ride,” but his way was a lot more creative.