Everybody Sees the Ants (17 page)

I realize now that maybe this whole Arizona trip was so I could bond with a man. Maybe one of the school “experts” told Mom this was a good idea. Or maybe Mom thought it up herself, or maybe Dave doesn’t really think I’m cool but is just saying it because he’s been given a job. The job is to make Lucky Linderman normal. Or make sure he’s not going to really kill himself. Or get him to smile. By the time I get into the bathroom for a pee and a glimpse at my scab, I’m paranoid as hell that they’ve brought me to the Grand Canyon for some weird manhood ritual.

An hour after lunch, Dave and I walk into the canyon on Bright Angel Trail. The path is steep but not too bad. The
brochure says this hike should take four hours. I’ve decided to forget about my paranoia for the afternoon.

Until Dave starts talking while we’re resting on a rock halfway down.

“Wanna tell me where you were the other night?” Dave asks.

“Huh?”

“When you disappeared.”

I don’t say anything.

“I know you didn’t fall asleep in the park, man.”

“I did,” I say. “Seriously.”

“Dude. Come on.”

I sigh. How the hell am I going to explain the vagina thing to Uncle Dave?

“I met this girl and we went for a long walk,” I say. “Don’t tell them, though.”

He slaps me on the back so hard I think I might go flying over the edge of the rock we’re sitting on. “A girl!” he says.

“Not—uh—a girlfriend or anything. Just a
friend
girl. And her friends.”

“And her
friends
?”

“Yeah.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Give a kid some weights, and next thing, the girls are crawling on him.”

“It’s not like that,” I say.

“You just don’t understand girls yet.”

“No, seriously. It’s nothing like that.”

He nods and says, “It’s not that I don’t believe you. I just know women.”

I stand up and decide I’d rather walk more than talk about this. I don’t appreciate that he’s turned my secret into a big bragging point. It wasn’t one. I’m at the Grand Canyon. I want to see it, not sit here and talk about stupid stuff with yet another person over thirty who doesn’t get it.

We get to the mile-and-a-half rest area in about two hours. There’s a bunch of tourists packed inside a small open-sided shelter, enjoying the shade. After we get a drink, we turn around and start back toward the trail, and some guy says, “You going back already?” He then explains that if we keep walking, in just a few short minutes we’ll get the best view we ever saw, so we take him up on it.

And the view really is worth it. The sky is a deep blue and the canyon is endless. Really endless. I feel swallowed, but it feels good. I feel I’m as small as I should be. Smallness feels right somehow. Because if Nader McMillan was here, he’d be small, too.

Dave says, “Did I piss you off?”

“Nah.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Just don’t tell them where I was,” I say.

“Trust me. I won’t.”

“Good.”

“Can I ask you a dumb question?” he says.

I nod.

“I keep hearing you came out here to see us because you were thinking about killing yourself. That true?”

I don’t like the way he worded that.
I
didn’t come out to
see
anyone. If I had it my way, I’d be playing gin with Lara Jones right now.

We sit on a shady spot of dirt, and he passes me the canteen we’re sharing. “I don’t mean to pry. I just want to know what’s going on, you know?” he adds.

“I wasn’t thinking about killing myself. I was joking about it. I got caught, and they’re acting like I’m fucking crazy now.”

“Joking?”

I tell him the whole questionnaire story and how the school overreacted and how I got questionnaires all the way up to the end of school in my locker. I told him about how no one gave a shit about what was really going on at the school—just about stupid made-up shit like this.

“So school hasn’t changed much since I was there, I guess.”

“Still sucks.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Well, it’s good to know you weren’t really considering it. I mean, that’s a pretty final answer to any problem.”

“Yeah, right?”

“You know you can call me if you need to talk about that other thing, too, right?” he says. “Or if you want to ask anything about your secret girlfriends.” He laughs and I do, too, just to make him feel okay about having to say all that crap.

As we make our final ascent, I suddenly love Arizona. I love that Mom thought it was a good idea to just pick up and leave. I love Dave, who is turning out to be the father I never
had, and I even love Jodi, although she’s kinda crazy. I don’t miss the Freddy pool or Lara or my own bed. I do not miss my father, which is a sad side effect of his being a small, fleshy creature who hides in a shell, thinking about menus all the time.

We
check out of the hotel, and then we drive around the rim for picture taking. Mom and I take turns trying to find words to describe how completely awesome the Grand Canyon is. In the end we both fail, and we go back to watching the sky.

“I can’t get over how it changes color,” she says.

It’s true. One minute the sky is orange and red. The next minute it’s purple and blue, and the next minute it’s just like regular Pennsylvania sky, but bigger. All depends how and when you look at it.

We get to a popular parking area, and there is a bunch of college kids with their college T-shirts on. We stay to the right of them, and Mom and Jodi take pictures of the views, but then the group of kids gets loud.

“Go ahead! Don’t be a pussy!”

Two guys are standing at the edge, eyeing a skinny walkway of rock that leads to a small rock platform about three feet away from the edge. It’s like one of those cartoon images—a stalagmite of rock that supports a platform where the Road Runner would stand to taunt Wile E. Coyote. The skinny path is a little rock tightrope. You can see it’s been walked on, and the platform shows signs of wear, too, as if people were really dumb or suicidal enough to go there.

“Do it!” a girl shouts from the crowd.

So the bravest/dumbest/suicidal-est kid takes the shaky walk and a little leap at the end and lands on the platform, only just stopping his momentum without falling over the edge. Aunt Jodi watches this and just about has a heart attack on the spot. She can’t stop herself from putting her hand to her heart and saying, “Jesus!”

The guy stands there and makes several goofy poses for his picture-taking friends. Now I get it. It’s a photo-op spot. As if
every freaking inch here
isn’t.

“Dude! Who’s next?” the guy says, still copping poses for pictures.

He takes a good look at the run back before he does it. Measures it with his eyes and his feet. Finally, without warning, he takes three giant steps and then leaps toward his friends and barely makes it. He lands right at the edge, and one foot slips a little into the canyon. Dave jogs over and offers a hand in case he needs help. His friends are frozen, staring. The guy gets his footing, stands up and brushes the red dirt off his hands.

“You okay?” Dave asks.

“Never been better,” the guy answers.

Macho jerk. He reminds me of Nader. Impressing his friends. Being cool.

The minute he’s safe one of his friends does the same thing—and nearly loses his balance on the skinny walkway. He does that arm-circling thing that tightrope walkers do to stay balanced. When he gets back, his other friend goes.

Jodi looks at me watching them and has a worried look in her eyes, as if I might be thinking of doing it, too, but those guys look like idiots to me. I was never someone who deserved one of Aunt Jodi’s worried looks, really.

The ants say:
Until the banana
.

I look down. I think about how one little second could change my whole life. How one false step could end everything I have. I ask myself if there was ever a time in my life that I’d do it—just jump. I think back to when I was seven, when Nader peed on my feet, and back to the time he punched me all year. Maybe then. Maybe if I was standing on the edge of the beautiful, enormous, amazing Grand Canyon right then, I’d have done it. I was little. It might have seemed a good solution. A way out. But something is different now. The world is bigger or something. My life is bigger.

The students leave in their rented Jeeps, and we’re alone by the edge of the canyon. I’m leaning into the cool fencing over this one area, looking down. Mom stands next to me and looks down, too. She says, “Can I get a picture of you?”

“Sure.”

She backs up and centers me in the viewfinder and says, “Smile.”

But I don’t.

On our drive back to Tempe, I make Mom and Dave talk a little about their mother. Mom tells a story about when Dave got suspended for hitting some guy named Alfred, and how their mom beat him out of the house with a broom and told him to sit on the porch until he grew up.

“She kept coming out to see if I’d grown up,” Dave says. “Each time she’d go back inside and tell me I needed more time. She made me sleep there, too.”

“I remember that,” Mom says.

“If you ask me, Dave still needs more time,” Jodi says, but while the others laugh, she doesn’t laugh.

We stop for dinner in Flagstaff, and by the time we get home, I’m too tired to go looking for Ginny at the playground. As I fall asleep, I imagine Uncle Dave as my father again, and I try to figure out what the opposite of a turtle is.

On the wooden chopping board are five ingredients. All high protein—a hawksbill turtle, a leatherback, a green turtle, a Vietnamese pond turtle and a Cantor’s giant soft-shelled turtle. We are in Jodi’s kitchen, at the breakfast bar, and Granddad sits on one of two stools, with his napkin on his lap. Limb report: all present.

I begin to separate the turtles from their shells and gut them while Granddad sings turtle facts to me, to the tunes of patriotic marches. First, Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever”:

“T
HAT POND TURTLE IS PRETTY MUCH EXTINCT
.

Y
OU REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE HIM OR EAT HIM
.

T
HE HAWKSBILL IS EQUALLY ENDANGERED
,

T
HANKS TO FISHERMEN WHO DON’T GIVE A SHIT
.

“T
HE LEATHERBACK IS THE NEXT-BIGGEST REPTILE

AFTER CROCODILES AND DOESN’T HAVE A HARD SHELL
.

T
HE GREEN SEA TURTLE SEEMS TO BE ABUNDANT
,

BUT IT’S NOT, AND IT NEEDS THE SAME PROTECTION
.”

Then to Sousa’s “US Field Artillery” (also known as “The Army Song”):

“T
HE MOST INTERESTING TURTLE

YOU’VE GOT HERE ON YOUR PLATE

IS THE CANTOR’S GIANT SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE
.

W
HAT OTHER CREATURE

CAN SIT COMPLETELY STILL

FOR NINETY-FIVE PERCENT OF ITS LIFE?

“H
E’S MASTER OF THE AMBUSH
,

C
ARNIVOROUS AND FAST
—

N
OT TO MENTION THAT HE’S SIX FEET LONG
.

H
E COMES TO THE SURFACE

ONLY TWICE A DAY TO BREATHE
,

AND NEVER ADMITS WHEN HE’S WRONG
.”