“They’re out of ink,” he whispered.
“Can’t sign without one.”
“I don’t need your signature anymore.”
“You’re not under arrest. Jenny wants me to call the state police, but I’m the one told you to come.”
“As if I care,” Hunter managed to say. He no longer wanted to stifle his screams. To do so dishonored his mother. Still, that was the effect of Buck’s lines: he breathed more slowly again, peering into the future at the end product of rage. Buck, already a sad sack, now KO’d into suicide by this kid he might have loved if given a chance. Whom he hadn’t meant to hurt — and so forth in a maelstrom of empathy run amok.
“Speaking of calls,” he said, “I should alert Cody’s folks.”
“There’s a phone at the entrance kiosk. Anyone asks, say Buck Flynn sent you.”
Hunter climbed in the van. “Be right back,” he said, disgusted by how he’d suppressed his emotions. Throttling even apt rage was what made him a pussy. He drove away. He bypassed the shut park gate without stopping. After a while he passed a Western Sizzler that stood alone on that red plain. There was a pay phone. He sped up, took off his seatbelt. “I’m an atheist,” he said aloud as a tractor-trailer rushed toward him, straddling the yellow line and shaking the van in its rough wake.
Someone braver would have to call Cody’s folks, he was thinking when he spotted a shirtless cyclist coasting toward him down the center line. A jersey, red like Cody’s and rippling in the wind, hung out of that rider’s shorts.
Hardly had Hunter stopped the van before he was rushing out onto the empty highway, catching a bewildered Cody in his arms.
“Dude, chill out,” Cody said.
“You’re alive,” Hunter choked.
“Yeah, shit was sick. I almost died so many times. Are you. .?” He didn’t need to say crying, now that the answer was obvious.
“I waited forever.”
“Must have made a wrong turn; I’m the one who waited.”
“There weren’t turns.”
Cody opened the hatchback door to load his bike. “What the hell?” he said.
“They confiscated my wheel. They’re looking for us now.”
“Rangers? No way. That’s awesome.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“Yeah, you wish. Ready to go?”
“Go where?” He was weeping openly now under that endless sky. He could see forever, and there was nowhere he wanted to go besides home.
“What time did you reach the river?”
“I didn’t notice,” he lied.
“Bullshit. I was 8:21 and ten seconds.”
“You probably beat me,” Hunter said — another lie. Not that it mattered if they’d descended different routes, but he recalled touching the water at 8:18.
“Damn straight,” Cody said, launching into an account of the hairy turns and narrow ledges. Hunter winced to hear of every skid, as if the telling put him in danger again. “How about you? You crash?”
“Only when you hit me.”
“We’ll be cult heroes. We’ll name our RV Cult Hero.”
“You be the hero. I need to focus on my mom.”
“Let’s try not to be retarded, okay?”
“I think something’s really wrong with her.”
“Yeah, Death Wish, it’s called her brain?”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Hunter blurted, suddenly needing his friend to speak sincerely too. To be reverent for a moment, like at sunrise; to ease up so Hunter could admit it all felt like a magic trick, this crimson desert whose deadly cliffs he’d navigated by force of will. He’d stopped trusting in reality. There was no helicopter. If it were out searching, wouldn’t they be hurrying up the highway, deeper into the red dream of earth? He yearned to come clean, and then for Cody to admit he believed in something too. Whatever that thing was, it had held Cody in its stead down the canyon, or Cody had perished and been resurrected by Hunter’s wishes — but Cody said only, “Guess I’ll emancipate myself from my own parents. Christ.”
They didn’t stop being friends. Hunter just spent more and more time by himself, riding Squaw’s Leap alone at night, racing downhill by moonlight and imagining himself not as a bike champion but as someone girls could enjoy being with. He was toned from riding; Buck had liked him. Thinking the acute empathy that had crippled him in Arizona might work to his advantage, he tried to cultivate a look of innocent serenity so that girls would take him for a Buddhist or an abuse victim. He even got a little turned on to think of himself this way, or at least he did until his mother grew sicker, with abdominal pain that the practitioner blamed on malicious animal magnetism.
It was good he hadn’t gone through with the emancipation, Hunter realized after Emily ran out of money and Joseph stopped coming around. He dropped out of races to stay home with her. He refused interviews that Cody granted. The cult hero prediction was coming to pass; everyone from Bike to local rags in the mountain towns wrote up their adventure. All the publicity seemed to improve Cody’s riding. He placed at the nationals and got sponsored by Trek and Powerade. The following month he called Hunter to say, “My name’s in this issue twice. Yours, once.”
“Congratulations, Cody.”
“Congratulations and. .?”
“I’m happy for you.”
“No, get jealous or something.”
“But I’m not,” said Hunter, wishing it were a lie, wishing he still cared to compete.
“Try not being jealous when my emancipation goes through.”
“I’ll be glad for you if it’s what you want.”
“Fuck you in the pussy, Death Wish.”
There was one thing Hunter did envy of Cody’s: his healthy family. Cody’s parents might live fifty more years. Unless she switched religions, Emily didn’t have much longer. It wasn’t hard to guess what was wrong. Yellow eyes, itchy palms, no appetite. He wanted to shout at her as angrily as he could have screamed at Buck. Tell her she was a moron to give up for nothing; cry out that she was stealing herself from him. Was it because she was a coward about doctors? Or was she only scared that Matter wasn’t Error, and there would be no God, no heaven, no illusion, nothing but herself and Hunter, watching TV in their split-level by the Yosemite Freeway? He wished to berate her until she gave in to his greater will. She nibbled at food he prepared for her. One day near the end, she held his hands and said, “Sorry I’m keeping you from your races,” and he mumbled, “I’m sorry too.” Two seconds hadn’t passed before he was rebuking himself again. Sorry for what? Sacrificing himself? Wishing his way toward this circumstance? He had chosen it; somewhere north of Flagstaff his beliefs had taken a wrong turn and here he was, but she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes had shut. I’ve been emancipated, he thought, although technically speaking she lived on until he reached the age of majority.
THE GNAT LINE
1.
THE NEW LAW, WHICH BARRED registered offenders from living within one-fifth of a mile from a school, church, or other place where children might congregate, had drawn circles onto the Georgia map in the tens of thousands. In the mountains and cotton country the circles stood alone, but Atlanta’s overlapped in cascades and formed tiny islands shaped like boomerangs, narrowed to inches or confined to commuter lots and the inner lanes of I-75. The nearest viable parcel lay north of Acworth, where the terrain grew steeper and a power cut climbed up a bluff from Lake Allatoona. There, among tents in a hilltop copse, lived five rapists, one attempted rapist, and a man convicted of indecent exposure. All were white. The youngest was twenty-five, the oldest fifty-four. On Mondays a truck delivered water coolers to an office park down Glade Road; Gus, the first settler, would steal a few to hang from trees as showers. He drove a MARTA bus, and Bruce edited at CNN. Jeremy worked at the World of Coke. Patrick clerked at the Flying J station. Travis mopped floors at Boeing. Allen sold cars. As for the exhibitionist, he had been a personal injury lawyer.