Take Me With You Page 30

  “Backed him right down.”

  “That Henry? In there?”

  “Hey!” Henry yelled out.

  “Jeez. And I missed it.” He gathered up the tools he had kicked and put them back in order.

  “Don’t you want to eat something first, Seth? Aren’t you starving?”

  Seth stopped moving, as if to consider that at length. “I’m kind of starving. Even though I had a little cash to eat from the vending machine. But right now nothing’s more important to me than getting this rig back in one piece and getting back on the road.”

  A little past noon they drove into Red’s Automotive and parked out front.

  Seth said, “If he’s still gone with my license and my credit card, I’m going to want to hurt someone.”

  Then he walked around to the back of the rig and pulled the tool chest out from behind the door. Lugged it into the shop.

  August took his canes, lowered himself, and followed.

  “You’re going in, August?” Seth asked. “You don’t have to go in.”

  “I want to have a talk with this guy,” August said.

  Red was a gray-haired man with fair, damaged skin, who August figured must have been red-haired in his youth. He held an unlit cigarette with pursed lips. He looked up at Seth as if with some kind of preset contempt.

  “You sold me the wrong pump,” Seth said. “It cost me a day.”

  The man did not answer. Instead he walked around the counter, squatted by the old tool chest, opened it, and began plowing through it.

  “It’s all there,” Seth said.

  “Including a thing or two that never belonged to me,” Red said, and handed Seth his cell phone.

  Then he walked back behind the counter and hit a button on the cash register. It opened with a bing sound. He reached in and pulled out Seth’s driver’s license and credit card. Slid them across the counter. Seth stuffed them into his pocket, seething but silent. He started for the door. August did not.

  Red looked up at August, and August held his gaze steadily.

  “Something else I can do for you?”

  “I have a bone to pick with you. You charged my friend a hundred bucks to use some dirty, rusty old tools. Then you sold him the wrong part. So he had to hitchhike all the way back to your shop for the right one. Which you didn’t have in stock. So he was stuck overnight. But you had his credit card. He couldn’t buy decent food or get a room. Your employee didn’t even have the courtesy to let him sleep indoors. He couldn’t even make a phone call to tell me he was okay.”

  Red’s face was dispassionate. Unmoved. “Card was in the register.”

  “Which the only employee on the premises didn’t know. So we’ve all had a nightmare of a day and a half thanks to your carelessness. And in return for that nightmare, which you could’ve prevented, you want to charge him a hundred dollars for nothing.”

  Red stared into his face for a long moment, hands on his hips, cigarette bouncing from his tight lips. “That’s what we agreed on.”

  “Don’t you think an unstated part of the agreement is that you’d sell him the correct part, and that his card would be available to him when he showed up needing it?”

  “I got work to do, mister. Your boy ought to be able to talk for himself.”

  “I think he’s afraid to, because he’s so mad. I think he’s afraid he couldn’t be civil. I think we’ll just stay while you consider your responsibility to this situation.”

  Red sighed. Pointed to a sign on the wall behind the counter. It reserved his right to refuse service to anyone.

  “I can ask you to leave.”

  “Fine. We’ll leave. Good idea. We’ll just park on the street out front for a while. With a big sign on the side of the rig, telling passersby what we think of Red’s Automotive.”

  Red rubbed his face for a long moment. Then he leveled Seth with his flat stare. “I knew the minute I laid eyes on you you’d be nothing but a pain in my ass.”

  He opened the cash register drawer again with another bing, counted out five twenties, and threw them over the counter, where they fluttered apart onto the linoleum floor. Then he headed toward the door into the shop. Stopped. Said, “I drove him all the way back to where you were broke down.”

  “That’s true,” August said.

  He picked up one of the twenties and set it back on the counter. Red shook his head and disappeared into the shop.

  Seth looked at August, his tight face softening and changing, one corner of his mouth twitching up. Then he bent down and picked up the rest of the cash.

  They walked back to the motor home, and August climbed in, ready to get back on the road again. All three of them.

  Seth climbed into the driver’s seat and smiled broadly for the first time in days. “That was pretty cool, August.”

  “What’d he do?” Henry asked.

  “Got me most of my money back. It wasn’t easy, either. He really told that guy off but good.”

  “I learned that from Henry,” August said.

  Seth started the rig and pulled back out onto the highway. Back on the road. At last.

  “Still can’t believe Henry told off our dad,” he said.

  “Hey!” Henry said. “Don’t talk about me like I never do anything good.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. At all. You do lots of good things. Just . . . not usually . . . you know. Out loud.”

  Chapter Ten:

  FALLING

  August woke from a nap on the couch to find the rig stopped. Which it hadn’t been for quite some time. He’d gone ahead and taken a horizontal nap without his seat belt, because the boys seemed disinclined to even pause. He sat up and blinked, noticing that the privacy curtain was up between him and the boys in the cab. And the blinds were pulled down. August figured they’d done that so he could sleep.

  Henry ducked under the curtain just as August began to raise the blinds to see where they were.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Henry said, and reached over and lowered the blinds again.

  “I’m not allowed to look out?”

  “Not for another twelve hours or so. Think of it like we’re taking you there blindfolded. Only we thought this would be more comfortable for you.”

  Seth ducked under the curtain and sat at the dinette table. Henry began to root around in the fridge and set food out on the counter.

  August rubbed his eyes. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Seth laughed. “Jeez, August. If we wanted you to know that, we’d let you look out the window.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant. I mean, is this a campsite? Are we here for the night?”

  “Nope. We’re making time. We’re driving straight through. We want to get there before anything else can go wrong. This is just a highway rest stop. We’re just stopping for something to eat and then we’re back on the road.”

  When August next woke up, he was in his fully made bed. Henry had made it up for him so he could sleep normally while the boys took turns driving through the night.

  He sat up just as the rig came to a full stop. He looked at his watch. It was not yet 5 a.m. He could hear a sound, but it was a sound he could not identify. A heavy roar, like big machinery, but not quite like that. Like a plane landing close by, but not exactly. He sat listening, but it never changed, never shifted. Never got closer or farther away.

  The boys ducked under the privacy curtain one after the other.

  “Get dressed,” Henry said, his voice barely containing tightly reined excitement. “We’re here.”

  “What’s the sound?”

  “Get dressed and you’ll see.”

  August levered to his feet and rummaged through the overhead cupboards. He pulled on a pair of jeans, then a fleece jacket right over his pajama top. Henry handed him his sheepskin boots and he sat to put them on.

  “You have to close your eyes,” Seth said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Work with us here, August.”

&
nbsp; So August closed his eyes. The back door opened, letting in a more direct version of the roaring sound. There was so much power in that sound. It almost frightened August to approach it with his eyes closed. But he had the boys along. He trusted the boys.

  He walked to the open door, leaning on walls and counters, and felt the predawn morning sharp and cool. Surprisingly damp.

  They helped him down the back steps. Then August felt a cane placed under each of his hands.

  “No peeking,” Seth said. Then, to Henry, “Go get the—”

  “I know,” Henry said. “Just go.”

  Seth guided August with both his hands on August’s left arm. They walked together toward the sound.

  “I’m feeling mist hitting my face,” August said. “So now I’m thinking water. Somehow that sound is water. I’m guessing a waterfall, but I never heard a waterfall sound like that.”

  “Maybe we’re at Victoria Falls in Africa. Or Iguazu Falls in South America.”

  “Or Niagara Falls,” August said, feeling an almost painful crush of reaction in his chest. Of course, he thought. Why hadn’t I guessed it? But how could he possibly have imagined that these two crazy young guys would cross the entire United States diagonally just for him? And his late son? How could he have thought that?

  “Now why would you think Niagara and not Victoria or Iguazu?”

  “Because I think I would have noticed if we crossed the Panama Canal. Even with the curtains drawn. Same with the Atlantic Ocean.”

  Henry caught up and placed one protective hand on August’s other arm. And they walked, shivering slightly in the cool mist.

  “Okay,” Henry said. “Open your eyes.”

  August opened his eyes. In front of him was a four-rung metal railing forming a curved point at the edge of what August could only assume were the American falls. Since no one had brought a passport. Just beyond the railing, the Niagara River spilled over the edge, with a roar and a roiling mist, in the half darkness before dawn. There seemed to be some light on the water, but August couldn’t tell if it was purposely trained there, or the light came from the shops and towers and hotels he could see in the distance across the river. These weren’t colored lights, like the ones he’d heard about trained on the falls at night, and he was glad of that. The falls just seemed to glow. He looked to the sky to see they had moved into civil twilight, the sky barely shining with morning, but he wasn’t sure if that could be enough.

  He was surprised there wasn’t a bigger crowd around, even at this hour. Especially in this one perfect spot where you could stand at the railing at the very lip of one part of the falls. Watch the river crest the falls just below you.

  He saw several couples and a small group, but only as spots in the distance. He saw many cars parked, and one making its way into a parking lot, but not very close by. Surprising though it seemed to August, especially in the summer, they were effectively alone.

  “You guys are crazy, you know that? I hope you know I mean it in a good way, but . . . this is the entire opposite end of the country from where we started.”

  “So?” Henry said. “If you like it, it’s worth it.”

  “I like it. I like it a lot.”

  “Here. You do the honors, August.”

  August looked down to see Henry holding something that, in the partly dark morning, looked like a miniature barrel. A wooden barrel, but less than a foot tall. But banded with metal, like a real barrel.

  “Where on earth did you get a little barrel like that?”

  “Seth bought it online. We’ve had it with us the whole time. It was in a hiding place, though. Here.”

  Henry grasped a metal handle and pulled hard, and the lid came off the barrel. Then Seth pulled the plastic bag of Phillip’s ashes out of his pocket and handed them to August. August noticed his hands were shaking slightly but couldn’t quite put his finger on which among his current tangle of thoughts and emotions might have caused that. Still, he managed to open the zipper lock on the bag and pour the ashes into the barrel. Henry took the barrel back and wedged the lid carefully in place.

  “You want to do this all three of us together?” Seth asked. “You want us to all sort of hold it at once and . . . you know . . . one, two, three . . . let go?”

  “I think we should walk farther up the river,” Henry said. “That way he gets a longer ride. I mean, it’s not just about going over the falls. Right? It’s about racing along the river knowing you’re about to go over the falls. That’s the adventurous part.”

  “I’d love to see it actually go over the edge, though,” August said.

  Though he knew he might not. It might be too dark. The barrel might disappear under the water, held down by the strong current, and that might be the end of that. Once they let go of the barrel, they might never see it again. They might have to take it purely on faith that it had gone over.

  Which shouldn’t be hard, August thought. Once something is in that raging river, where on earth could it go but over? Including objects—and even ships and people—much larger than this wooden toy.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If you’re willing to split up, you guys go a few yards up the river and drop it in. And I’ll stand right here and see if I can watch it go over.”

  “Maybe we should wait till it’s lighter,” Seth said.

  “I don’t know. It’s awfully nice with nobody out here but us. I don’t know how we got so lucky, and I don’t imagine our luck’ll hold long.”

  The boys looked at each other and nodded.

  August watched them as they set up, maybe fifty yards away. It wasn’t completely dark, he realized. The sky was getting light. It was hard to know how much was the coming dawn, how much was the ambient light of so much civilization. Or lights trained on the water. If indeed lights were trained on the water. But it was light enough for August to see as much as he needed to see.

  He watched them lean their upper bodies over the rail, and they both had the barrel. They each had one hand on it. They were working together. Then August saw just a speck of it as it flew. Just saw it as a spot in the air. It rose up in an arc and seemed to slow. Or even to hang there. Just for a split second. Then it was gone.

  The boys took off. August watched them running in his direction, stretching out. Sprinting. Peering over the rail as they ran.

  “I can’t see it!” Henry screamed. “It’s too dark to see it!”

  “There it is!” Seth shouted. “I think.”

  But a second or two later, the barrel outpaced them. August could tell by the direction of their gaze. Ahead. The barrel was getting farther ahead.

  A second after that, August spotted it. The current hadn’t pulled it under. Apparently it didn’t have enough mass for that. It was too light. Too buoyant.

  August saw it shoot by.

  It shot off the edge, projected farther out than the water, and seemed to hang there by itself for just a split second. Like the cartoon coyote who hangs in the air, then perceives his situation, then accepts the inevitability of gravity, then falls. Or maybe August’s mind played a trick on him, or time played a trick on August’s mind. Maybe in that split second time was something just the slightest bit different than it had been before or would be again.

  See? he thought to Phillip in the silence of his brain. We didn’t forget about you.

  The barrel fell, quickly disappearing into the dimness and the mist.

  As it did, the boys arrived, puffing. August dropped his canes, which clattered on the concrete walkway. He fell forward onto the boys, and they caught him. He held them a moment, and they held him, without any of the three of them seeming to know exactly how the moment had come to be or what it meant.

  “You okay, August?” Seth asked.

  August wanted to answer, but the words felt stuck in his chest. Then in his throat. He worked at knocking them loose, even though he didn’t know exactly what words they would turn out to be.

  “You guys just mean so damn much to me,”
he said.

  And they stood tangled up a moment longer. Then August felt embarrassed and straightened himself and reached for his canes, which Henry dove for and handed to him.

  “That’s enough of that,” August said. “Sorry to get all mooshy on you.”

  “It’s okay, August,” Seth said.

  “We don’t mind,” Henry said. “We like it when you get mooshy.”

  They stood leaning on the rail for a long time, listening to the falls roar, watching the scene get lighter, watching millions of gallons of water careen over the edge.

  “We didn’t see it go over,” Henry said.

  “I saw it go over,” August said.

  “Well, that’s good,” Seth said. “That’s what’s most important.”

  “What did it look like?” Henry asked.

  “It’s hard to describe. But it was really something. It was worth the price of admission.”

  “Worth driving diagonally across the whole country for?”

  “If you guys were willing to do it, then . . . hell yeah.”

  They stared in silence for a while longer. August heard a few more cars going by behind them. Knew this very busy tourist destination was waking up. Getting going for the morning. He wondered if the boys had timed their arrival for the maximum chance of having the rail to themselves. Or if that had been a happy accident.

  “I’m sorry I got so emotional with you guys,” he said again.

  “August, jeez,” Seth said, “will you stop?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “Way to apologize for caring.”

  “Yeah, okay. I see your point.”

  Another moment of silence, broken by the arrival of the first tour bus of the morning, parking and unloading its passengers in a lot somewhere behind them. August never looked around. Never took his eyes off all that mesmerizing water.

  “So, now we made the big destination. Now what?”

  Seth said, “Now we practice that ‘be’ mode. Because we’ve got a lot of summer left. Now we go back a lot more slowly than we got here.”

  “But we’re going to stay at the falls awhile, though. Right? Now that we came all this way?”

  “Long as you want, August. When you get enough Niagara Falls, you just say the word.”