Northward to the Moon (6 page)

We are back in the car driving south.

“And another thing,” says Ned, “Jim says John was heading north briefly before returning to Vegas.
NORTH!
What the heck is north of B.C.? Tundra? Ice floes? He was heading toward an ice floe, taking time off to drop a bag of money in the woods? Does that sound on the up-and-up to you? Does that even remotely make sense? And how the heck would he even find the Carriers?”

“You
found them,” I say.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t
looking
for them,” says Ned.

“So, it must be even easier to find them if you are,” I insist. “What I can’t figure out is why he thought you would be there again. I mean, he knew you left years ago.”

“Unless he wasn’t really looking for me, he was
looking for a remote safe place to drop a bag of money.”

“If all you want is somewhere to hide something then there’s got to be more convenient remote places than northern B.C. If you don’t think John is capable of larceny then there must be another explanation,” says my mother.

“I don’t know. People change. People grow old, people die, people get scared, people go away, people have kids, people don’t. All kinds of things change them.”

“Maybe he was going on vacation,” says my mother.

“What kind of vacation?” says Ned in skeptical tones.

My mother thinks for a moment. “A cruise!”

“A cruise?”

“People go on those Alaskan cruises. I think they leave from British Columbia.”

“On the coast. He wasn’t on the coast.”

“Maybe he was making his way to the coast.”

But Ned goes on as if he hasn’t listened to a word she’s said. “Well, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to
think
about this. I don’t know what I’m
supposed to
do
with it. This is a lot of money! And I’ll tell you another thing, I want nothing to do with it. It’s going back to John.”

“Are we going to have to go
somewhere else
to find your brother before we can go home?” asks Maya in very cranky tones.

“I don’t know,” says Ned.

My mother turns to address Maya, who is turning around to face her. “We’re going to do whatever we have to, Maya. We’re a family now and Ned’s family is our family too.”

My mother is keeping this chirpy and cheerful but I see something in her eyes. Some foreboding. Some glimmer that we are heading south and it will be a long time before fate takes us east and back home.

N
obody really likes Nevada.

We have had a long trip down through Washington and Oregon. Through many different landscapes that didn’t quite jibe with the Outlaw Adventures, as I have come to think of them. But when we hit Nevada we hit the Wild West. Now we are talking. There are
tumbleweeds
. It is a horrible place, really. Perfect!

At a gas station outside of some small town, while my mother and Maya use the restroom and Hershel and Max pick out a chocolate bar, I say to Ned, “We’re real outlaws now, with a bag of ill-gotten gains in a vast forlorn dangerous deadly snake-ridden moonscape. Isn’t this cool?”

“Not so cool, Bibles, not so cool,” he says. He is already peeling the paper off a Nestlé Crunch bar. The candy bar decision is never a long debate for Ned. He just grabs the first one he sees. I think this is very telling but I’m not sure exactly what it tells.

“How do you pick a candy bar so fast?” I ask, thinking out loud. “It takes me forever to decide whether I want a Snickers or a PayDay.”

“First off, never get the PayDay,” says Ned.

The thing about having two adults in the family now is that you get a whole other frame of reference. My mother would never be able to pontificate on candy bar selection.

“I like nuts,” I say.

“Yes. But nuts are optional, unlike chocolate. What is the point of a chocolate bar without chocolate?” asks Ned.

“We could buy a lot of candy bars with our outlaw money.” I keep hoping to rekindle his excitement. Ever since we left the Carriers he has looked haunted more than wild and free and roguish.

“This is a bag of
real
money, Jane,” he says. “I don’t want to play games with this. I certainly don’t
want to spend it all on chocolate bars. I just want to return it and go back to Massachusetts like we promised your mom, okay?”

Suddenly the guy behind the cash register looks real interested.

“Pick a candy bar, Jane!” says Ned.

I startle. He usually doesn’t call me Jane unless he’s irritated with me. So I grab a Three Musketeers, which I don’t even like, which goes to show that his technique of snatching the first one at hand doesn’t work for everyone, and he pays for all four candy bars and hustles us outside.

I peer at him questioningly and he relents. “Look, I just wish I knew more about this money. You understand I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family for twenty years? I don’t even know where they are anymore. And now I find myself carrying money that came from who knows where. And why was John going north of northern B.C.? The whole thing makes no sense.”

“But I like it,” I say. “It’s an adventure. It’s an
outlaw
adventure.”

“Well, it makes
me
nervous,” says Ned.

“Does it make Mom nervous?” I ask.

“Sometimes I think nothing makes your mother
nervous,” says Ned, and just then my mother and Maya come out of the washroom. They see us eating candy bars and go inside to get a couple for themselves with Ned’s toes tapping.

“You sure are fidgety,” I say.

“Did you see that cashier’s ears perk up when you mentioned a bag of money?”

“Oh, you’re just being paranoid,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he says in an unconvinced voice, and gets the boys into the car and buckled in so we can set off the second my mother and Maya return.

“I think you ought to try deep breathing,” I say when we are rolling along again. “Although don’t do it too obviously or no one will take you seriously as an outlaw.”

“Why should Ned try deep breathing?” asks my mother.

“Jane thinks I’m too nervous,” says Ned.

“Oh well, I suppose we’re all a little nervous …,“ says my mother vaguely. She is leafing through the Nevada guidebook she bought at the gas station. Now she looks up and points out the window into the scrubby desert. “Look at that! Wild burros!” She finds the section about them and reads it. Hershel and Max are leaping up and down in their
seats even though my mother is the only one who saw the burros because we are whizzing by so fast.

“Should I turn around and see if we can find them again?” asks Ned, but he looks pale and strained. His neck muscles are tight and corded.

My mother glances over at him. “Don’t bother,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll see more.”

Then everyone goes back to reading or playing games or trying to grab my feet and beautify them and it is quiet the rest of the way to Reno.

Reno is full of casinos. We come in as the light is fading and the bright casino bulbs shatter twilight.

Money is what a lot of people seem to think about in Nevada. Ned explains that people rarely win at gambling. That some win but mostly the casinos know they will always take more money than they lose. I don’t understand how this works but if it is true I feel sorry for all these gamblers who don’t seem to know this.

The first hotel we stay in in Nevada is a casino in Reno. To get to the elevator you have to pass this big dark gambling place full of mirrors and
flashing lights and slot machines. It is very disorienting. I think if people come to this place on purpose they must be trying to disappear because when you are inside it, it is as if no part of your life has ever existed. There seems no way out to your future, your past is not here, all there is is the dark present with the flashing lights and the money going clink clank clunk. John has chosen to live in Nevada. Is it just because that’s where he could make a living as a magician or does he like it? I want to ask him when we see him but I don’t know how to do it without sounding rude.

The next morning we leave Reno at the crack of dawn.

On the way down to Las Vegas we barely pass another car except when we come to small towns and sometimes not even then. We see large military installations and what I now know to be legal whorehouses because I asked Ned what all the double-wides with names like Cat House were and he explained it at the next rest stop. Maya is furious with Ned for not telling her and I want to but it would mean having to explain so much else.

Finally, when she won’t leave me alone, I just say to her, “It’s for ladies of the night, okay?”

“Oh,” she snorts. “Ladies who only come out at night. More fairy tales.” She and Mrs. Gunderson are having a good snort over that.

For no reason I can figure out this makes me furious. That she can be so contentedly wrong because she has such preconceived notions about everything.

“You know, you’d better stop having such a closed mind, Maya,” I say. “You’d better stop assuming you know everything or you’ll be ignorant your whole life.”

“Then tell me what a lady of the night is,” says Maya.

We go round and round with this all the way to Las Vegas and I wish I had kept my mouth shut. Meanwhile my mother keeps spotting burros, always with the thrill of the first time, and Hershel wants to know if the military installations are alien camps. Ned has made the mistake of telling him that this highway is called the Extraterrestrial Highway because so many UFOs are seen here. Max wants to know if there are Viking bones. Ned
says no, but probably Indian bones and wild mustang bones and maybe even extraterrestrial bones. Max says he’s only interested in Vikings.

“Outlaw bones!” suggests Ned, but it has the ring of desperation.

“Give it up,” I advise, and settle back to take a nap. These days sleep is the only privacy I get.

When we get to Las Vegas we stay in a crummy motel with a swimming pool, on the outskirts of town. My mother elects to hang out with Hershel and Maya and Max around the pool all day while Ned and I go into town and look for John the Amazing.

“This is a good adventure,” I say to Ned when we arrive downtown. “It’s like a treasure hunt. Or being detectives.”

“Um-hmm,” says Ned as we drive down the Strip. He doesn’t look as excited about it as I am. We are looking to see if we can find anything indicating where John the Amazing is working but of course we can’t. He is small potatoes, says Ned.
Who would put his name up on a billboard? We will have to park and get a newspaper.

But after we park we are ravenous. We go into one of the casino buffets for lunch. I have never seen so much food in my life. It is a football field of food. It is dark and cavernous and disorienting like the casinos but instead of taking your money they take your hunger. Instead of want want want, it is too much too much too much. Maybe it is supposed to balance out, all the food they shove into you, all the money they take out of you. Maybe they want to fill you so full of food that in a stupor you will wander upstairs and throw all your quarters into the nearest slot, unable to stagger to the next casino down the road.

We eat until we are ready to fall over, as designed, but foil their little plan by going right past the slots and into the bright light of midday.

“Now all I want to do is nap,” says Ned as we waddle out.

“Me too,” I say. “And we still haven’t found John.”

We pick up a newspaper but can’t find any ads for him so Ned suggests we walk around and check
out casinos and see if anyone has heard of him. We do this for a while but it is hot and crowded and everyone is having a good time but us, and finally it is getting close to dinner.

“I don’t have a clue what to do now,” says Ned. He sounds so dispirited and disappointed that I feel bad for him. Is he sad because he wants to get rid of this money or because he wants to see his brother? It’s hard to get a fix on how Ned feels about his family. He never talks about them.

We get into the car and start to head back to the motel but there is a traffic jam and so Ned swears in his newly minted language, “Oh shuckserooni.” However, he puts enough venom into such a horrible corny word that he makes it respectably biting.

As soon as we get to an intersection, he turns.

“What are you doing?” I ask mildly, the tires squealing as he makes the quick tight turn.

“Trying to avoid this mess,” he says. “We could be stuck here forever.”

“Do you know where you’re going?” I ask.

“No,” he barks. We are both tired, footsore and sweaty. We really need water but we thought we’d
be at the motel relatively quickly. The car has no air-conditioning and it’s blasting hot. This was not so bad on the highway with windows open, but sitting in traffic with the sun beating down and the honking and roar of idling engines, it is horrible. It is causing Ned’s brain to melt. He is making bad decisions. He keeps deciding there are even quicker shortcuts and turns this way and that until we are completely lost.

“Go to a gas station and get a map,” I say.

“Bibles, sometimes I wish you’d just sh—” he begins, when I interrupt him by shrieking. He pulls the car to a skidding halt.