100 Sideways Miles (3 page)

Cade Hernandez's parents were immigrants from Argentina. He made up wild stories about being the great-grandson of an escaped Nazi-breeding-camp doctor.

I think the stories were probably true, given the color of Cade's hair, his blue eyes, and the paleness of his skin. It probably was also a compelling reason behind Cade's messing with Mr. Nossik in class that morning of the Nazi display.

Cade Hernandez and I had been friends since I was ten years old. That's a lot of miles traveled together—about six billion.
We met in elementary school. Cade Hernandez was my first real friend. His family lived in Burnt Mill Creek, and when I enrolled in grade five, my family, which consisted at that time of my father and pregnant stepmother, had just moved to San Francisquito Canyon.

It wasn't until the summer before eighth grade that I told Cade Hernandez about the dead horse in the sky. I believe he naturally assumed Tracy, my stepmother, was my actual mother. After all, I called her Mom.

That was the day Cade leaned over toward me, so close our shoulders touched, and he said, “Holy shit, Finn. Your eyes are different colors.”

I said, “They call that heterochromatism.”

“Fucking cool.”

At that time I also said to him, “Not only that, but I am a Jew.”

I remember the day perfectly. We sat in the hot tub beside my backyard swimming pool. It was summer vacation. I had had a particularly bad seizure the day before. I'd pissed myself. Cade didn't know about it, but sometimes, afterward, I felt like I wanted to die. Sitting there in just a bathing suit, not really thinking about anything, Cade became curious about the emoticon scar along my spine. So I told him my back had been broken when a dead horse fell out of the sky and killed my mother.

I told him about knackeries, and about being a Jew.

Cade answered, “What the hell does
that
mean?”

“Well,” I said, “my real mother was a Jew. That makes me a Jew.”

“What goes along with being a Jew?” Cade asked me. “Secret handshakes?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I'm not a real Jew or anything. I don't even believe in God to begin with.”

“You're going to all kinds of hell, Finn,” Cade said.

“No. I'm pretty sure my atoms will just be scattered out there like everyone else's.”

“That's scary,” Cade said.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you, in case you decide to hate me for being a Jew,” I said.

I had been wondering about this ever since Cade told me the stories about his Nazi-breeding-camp great-grandfather.

“You're fucking dumb,” Cade said.

That was how eighth-grade boys told each other everything was
okay
.

And then Cade Hernandez said, “The tracks left in the snow by a horse with a ridiculously big hard-on.”

I said, “What?”

“That's what that shit on your back looks like, Finn. If a horse with a really big boner left tracks in snow, 'cause you're so fucking white. It's fucking awesome.”

So, on Mr. Nossik's Nazi Day, we had lunch at Flat Face Pizza. Cade and I ate there at least twice a week because the food was free for us.

Cade Hernandez worked in the kitchen and delivered pizza for Flat Face Pizza. The sign above the business, which was one
of the dozen or so boxes of storefronts along Old Mill Boulevard, was an enormous, perfectly round pizza with a grinning face painted on it.

Clever.

It looked like it had been done by a six-year-old.

• • •

Cade Hernandez's nickname was Win-Win.

He got that nickname at the start of our junior year at Burnt Mill Creek. A senior girl, an exchange student from Germany named Monica Fassbinder, had a peculiar attraction to Cade Hernandez. Monica Fassbinder would pay Cade five dollars every time he'd allow her to give him a hand job at school, in the shed where the night custodian parked his electric golf cart.

Cade Hernandez used the money he earned to buy cans of chewing tobacco, and we joked that Monica Fassbinder's obsession with giving Cade hand jobs was a win-win proposition as long as they never got caught.

They never did get caught, and that was where the nickname came from.

Cade was always in a good mood.

Cade Hernandez always had plenty of tobacco, too. Win-Win Hernandez earned a steady income of about thirty dollars a week from Monica's hand jobs.

Monica Fassbinder caused Cade Hernandez to free a lot of his atoms in the night-custodian's shed.

My father bristles around Cade, avoids him as much as possible. But I think Cade has magical spell-casting beams or something that he can fire from his eyes, because I'd never seen
a girl—my stepmother and sister included—who didn't think Cade Hernandez was endlessly adorable, even if he did things such as openly announce the frequency and stubbornness of his erections.

Some guys have all the luck.

Win. Win.

• • •

When we finished our pizza, Cade asked me, “How much is five euros in dollars?”

“Um.”

I tried to ignore his question. I sucked Coke through a barber-striped plastic straw and stared out the windshield of Cade's truck.

“I'm serious,” he continued. “Monica gave me five euros today. We did it right before lunch. I just want to make sure she's not taking advantage of me.”

I nearly choked on my soda.

Nobody would want a girl like Monica Fassbinder to take advantage of poor Cade Hernandez.

“You can't spend euros at a 7-Eleven,” I countered.

Every day, we'd stop at 7-Eleven before heading back to school for seventh-period baseball. Even though the season was over for us, we still had to show up to practice.

Also, nobody wants a truancy ticket for skipping a class that you don't have to go to.

“Well
duh
, Finn. I know that,” Cade said.

“Um. Five euros is a pay raise for you, Cade.”

Cade Hernandez nodded and grinned. “Oh yeah, baby.”

I was simultaneously embarrassed and deeply envious of my
friend. I had never even held a girl's hand before, and suddenly I was a twenty-miles-per-second angry hornet's nest of hormones, unable to think of anything else except how I might be able to finally orchestrate an opportunity to at least talk to a girl before the earth moved another foot, another inch, through space.

Like that was ever going to happen.

During baseball practice that day, we played Ultimate Frisbee.

Ultimate Frisbee is kind of like football. The baseball team can get pretty rough. It's all good fun. One time, at the end of our sophomore season, I gave Blake Grunwald a bloody nose playing Ultimate Frisbee.

Blake Grunwald was a grade ahead of me and played backup catcher.

Blake Grunwald still hated me.

It was perhaps a hundred fifty million miles back, in February, I got into a fight with Blake Grunwald. Blake held on to his Ultimate Frisbee nosebleed grudge until he couldn't stand it any longer. I had never been in a real fight in my life, so it did not go very well.

Blake Grunwald freed some of my atoms.

I never said anything about it to my parents. What could they do? Boys are going to fight, no matter what.

Life goes on.

Twenty miles per second.

So, that day after lunch, Cade and I were on the “skins” team.
I usually tried to wear shirts outside because I didn't like it when people paid any attention to the emoticon scars on my back. It was different with the team, though.

Teams are like that, right?

I do not like emoticons at all. Emoticons are combinations of punctuation marks people frequently use when they don't really know how to express themselves with real words.

My emoticons are puncture-ation marks from the time a dead horse fell out of the sky onto me and my mother.

What emotion would those things express?

If I had to say what my marks meant, it would be this:
Straight-faced guy looks at his reflection in a still pond. He is not at all impressed.

Cade Hernandez said, “What flounders look like when they fuck.”

“Uh. Good one.”

Cade had this game he played. Whenever I had my shirt off, he would make up some random comment about his artistic interpretation for the meaning of the scars on my back. He came up with something new every day. Like Coach Ritchey's tooth, Cade's titles for the emoticon marks on my back became a much-anticipated locker-room ritual at Burnt Mill Creek High School.

Cade Hernandez's impressions most often had something to do with sex.

Today, it was flounders.