I lived with my older brother and his wife in Gulfport, Mississippi, from when I was seven until I was fourteen years old, but then my brother got stationed on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Bahrain, and I got sent out to Albuquerque to live with my grandpa. My grandpa was weird and scary; he hardly ever said a word, just spat and grunted. He looked like a tiny viking — barely five feet tall, with beady eyes and an enormous, ragged silver beard with yellow stains. Three or four days a week he worked at the McDonald’s at Central and Coal while I went to school; all the other days we went to the airport and returned carts. These carts, the way it worked was folks would put a buck in the machine and unhitch one to push their luggage around in. When you returned them, you got twenty-five cents back, but most people just left them in the parking lot and drove away, so me and my grandpa would spend all day collecting them and pushing them back to the terminal, filling our pockets with the quarters that the cart machine spat out. Together we could make more than fifty bucks in a day.
There was no camaraderie between us out there in the blazing parking lot, no buddy-buddy, no whistling while we worked. I kept as far from my grandpa as I could. If he took notice of me, it was only to grumble about my laziness and long hair. My grandpa was sixty-eight years old but for some reason told everyone he was ninety, and he looked it, so they believed him. He wasn’t even really my grandpa, but he’d raised my mom and my older brother, so that’s what we called him. All he ever did besides work was read and listen to basketball on the radio and play with his cat. He loved his cat more than anything in the world. The cat was named Gilbert, and it was an old, scrawny, tiger-striped stray he’d found in the McDonald’s lot. Gilbert strutted around the house, constantly wheezing and mewling, and my grandpa followed him from room to room, carrying on the other side of the conversation. They talked about sports, the weather, the crystal-meth freaks who worked at McDonald’s with my grandpa, and sometimes they talked about me.
Gilbert was sick all the time and required special foul-smelling potions to keep him going. My grandpa mixed these on the back porch, and twice a day he had me hold Gilbert down while he squirted murky purple juice down the cat’s throat with an eyedropper. Gilbert blamed me — not my grandpa — for medicine time; whenever he saw me, he’d run from the room, or else stand there arching his back wickedly and hissing.
One morning, on our way to the airport in my grandpa’s ancient, clattering pickup truck, my grandpa cocked his head at me and growled, “We’re not doing carts today.”
“Then why are we going to the airport?” I said. “Or are we not going to the airport?”
My grandpa said, “We’re going to the airport, but we’re not doing carts.”
“OK.” I waited for him to explain. It was the middle of October. The night before, I’d figured out that I’d been in Albuquerque for exactly two months, which meant I had thirty-four months left on my sentence before my brother came home and I could move back to Mississippi. “Wait,” I said, bolting up in my seat, doing the arithmetic. “Am I going somewhere? Am I going back to Gulfport?” Maybe my brother had quit the navy, I thought, and come home to Mississippi. Or maybe my mom had gotten an early release. Or maybe my dad had even drifted back from wherever he was. My grandpa didn’t say anything, and I took his silence as a no and sat back, disappointed. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t going home, but was being shipped off somewhere else, most likely Yuma, Arizona, where my grandpa’s friend owned an emu farm. For two months I’d been telling anyone who’d listen how much Albuquerque sucked, but now the thought of leaving — being jettisoned again — lodged a lump in my throat and made my nostrils sting. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been allowed to at least get my stuff together. Was my grandpa just going to box it all up and send it on? I was furious and near tears.
Finally my grandpa gave me his viking snarl. “OK, listen. Gilbert needs surgery. That’s right. They’re telling me it’s going to be fifteen hundred dollars. At the least. That’s what they say.” We were getting near the airport. In front of us a plane shot straight skyward, catching a blinding glare from the morning sun. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” my grandpa went on. “We’re going to pull up at the baggage claim at American. You go in and pull the first two bags you see off the belt, bring them out here, and throw them in the back of the truck. Then we’ll do the same thing at Delta. And then we’ll go home. And when I say the first two bags, I mean the first two nice bags, bags that belong to folks with money. And grab ones that look like all the others, so if someone stops you, you can just say you made a mistake. Right?”
“Why can’t we just do carts?” I said, though I was thrilled to be part of a heist like this, and giddy with relief that I wasn’t headed for Yuma to tend emus. Still I told my grandpa we could return enough carts to get the money together, no problem; we could do carts every day; I could miss a few weeks of school.
“Gilbert doesn’t have a few weeks,” my grandpa snapped at me. “We need this now!” He merged into the lanes for arriving flights and fixed me with a look of grizzled menace. “Nice bags,” he said. He spat out the window, then looked back. “Heavy bags. And nice.”
An hour later we pulled up in the alley behind our house and dragged the airport haul inside to my grandpa’s hot attic bedroom — four big suitcases plus a little green backpack. My grandpa was especially pleased about the backpack. “Why would someone check a backpack?” he said. “That’s the lucky charm. That’s our ace in the hole. We’re saving that one for last.”
We hoisted the first suitcase up onto his bed, and my grandpa fought with the shiny clasps for a moment, then disappeared from the room and came back with his ten-inch hunting blade. He stabbed the suitcase once, drew the knife out, stabbed it again, and sawed from the second puncture back to the first. Together we tore the case open and dumped its contents out on the bed: sweat shirts, sweat pants, socks, women’s underwear, a red umbrella, a tennis racket, a couple of skirts and dresses, a couple of pairs of shorts, a few pairs of jeans, and a little plastic case that held makeup and toiletries. “Fuck,” said my grandpa. With his forearm he rubbed the sweat around on his face. “Come on,” he said. “Bring another one over.”
The next suitcase was filled with men’s suits and business papers. We tried the pockets of every suit jacket and every pair of slacks but found only business cards, pens, and paper clips. The third suitcase was lighter than the first two, which gave me hope that it might have something besides clothes, but all it held was about thirty cardboard tubes; inside each tube were architectural blueprints for what appeared to be an enormous mall. Gilbert stalked into the room, crowing loudly. “I know,” said my grandpa. “You’re telling me.”
He brought the last suitcase over to the bed and squatted on top of it, the same way I’d hold Gilbert down when we gave him his medicine. As my grandpa plunged his knife through the bag’s black nylon skin and ripped into its contents, I wondered if he had ever killed a man before, and I decided that, yes, he almost certainly had, but it had probably been during World War II, when he was in the army, fighting the Germans in Africa. This revelation filled me with both greater fear of him and greater respect.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” my grandpa cried suddenly. He raised a black Nikon camera high in the air like the head of an enemy soldier. Then he added, a bit more composed, “There’s a whole bunch of lenses, too.” I jumped up on the bed and helped him dig. There were two smaller cameras and some camera equipment: flashbulbs, film, two tripods of different sizes. In the little zippered pocket of a pouch filled with batteries, I discovered a wad of cash — ones, fives, tens, and twenties. My grandpa snatched the money out of my hand and counted it up. “Three hundred and thirty-three bucks,” he said. “And I’ll probably get a thousand for the cameras, and I can get a couple hundred bucks for some of these suits.” He stuffed the cash in the breast pocket of his shirt and gave me a black-toothed smile. “You did good.” His eyes shifted. “Hey,” he said, “what’s in that backpack?”
I scooped it off the floor and tugged it open. Inside were a couple of lined notebooks filled with writing, a sketch pad, a beat-up copy of Guitar World magazine, and a Walkman with a few loose cassette tapes. “This might be worth a few dollars,” I said.
“Tell you what,” said my grandpa, “you keep that stuff. You did OK today.” He grunted and pivoted and clomped out of the room and down the stairs, Gilbert at his heels, wailing. I closed up the backpack and slipped it over my shoulders like it was mine. For a long time I stood there, looking over the carnage of the four suitcases strewn across the bed and the floor. I heard the radio in the kitchen crackle to life — a noontime sports call-in show — and the tiny, clanking noises of my grandpa preparing Gilbert a meal. Then the heat seemed to suck all sound out of the room. A powerful stillness descended. I became gently aware of my breath, and of the beat of my heart. The light through the drapes was red and soft and made the walls shimmer. The quarters piled on my grandpa’s nightstand and card table and dresser and on the floor all hummed with a dull shine. I touched my face and found that I was crying. With my forefinger, I brought a tear to my tongue and tasted it — sweet, salty, like a hot raindrop. That was the first time I’d ever done that; now I always taste my tears.
Much later, after the sun had gone down and left the city smoldering, I walked out of the house and headed down Central Avenue a ways toward the McDonald’s where my grandpa worked; my grandpa was home asleep, but sometimes his boss gave me hamburgers at the end of the night. I was wearing my new Walkman and listening to the tape that had been inside — a series of low, melancholy trance beats. The world around me crashed and surged in time with the music. I glided past all the pawnshops and gun shops and residential motels, action in each tiny parking lot. A hundred and five degrees, hookers out hooking in twos and threes, a stream of red brake lights in the near lane as dudes slowed to check them out — passenger-side windows open, one hand on the wheel, faces hidden. Lowriders rumbled with bass; kids shouted giddy threats from car to car in Spanish; lights slipped red to green; engines buzzed like chain saws. Every half block white men like dead stalks — every last drop of moisture squeezed from them — poked skinny arms from the sleeves of their jackets to grab at my new green backpack and ask me for change. I wondered if one of these men was my dad, if he’d choose this night to appear. Long hair, matted beards, camo fatigues, logoless mesh baseball caps, purpled eyes, scars, black scabs and wicked burns, brown teeth, missing teeth — each face rocked me like one of the barroom-brawl punches or collisions with motorcycle handlebars that had caused all that damage to them in the first place. This had to be the saddest stretch of road in all of America. It was as if the country was deeply tilted, and Albuquerque was at the bottom corner; in time, the most lonely and desperate of drifters would always drift here.
At the McDonald’s I sat on the weedy cement in the back of the parking lot and listened to the Walkman and watched cars whirl through the drive-thru. The contents of the backpack called to me; I dumped the stuff out, shuffled through the cassette tapes for a minute, then started flipping through the composition notebooks. They were covered with punk-rock stickers and turned out to be a pair of journals that belonged, according to the return-address labels stuck inside the covers, to a girl named Maggie Smith. With blue and black ballpoint pens, she’d filled page after page in wild cursive scrawl. The very first sentence I read pulled me right in: “Well, that stupid fucker died today.” It went on from there. “I was in the room with him and he died right there in front of me. He was alive and then he was dead. Not like he was moving much anyway, but when he died he was just gone, and I was there in the room with a fucking dead body. My dad’s dead body. I sat there for about twenty minutes. Then I called for the nurse.”
I did what I always did when I picked up a book: skipped to the last page. The entry was from early that morning. She was talking about getting packed up, heading back to Albuquerque from wherever she’d been. “If there’s one thing that’s bound to improve my mood and my outlook on life,” she wrote, “it’s being stuck on fucking airplanes for ten fucking hours. Well, at least I’ll be home and can get fucked up. And I can finally sleep in my own bed again. Or Noah’s, if he still remembers I exist.”
Before I flipped back to begin again at page one, I fished another tape from the little pile and popped it in. This one was labeled with a marker shitty opera. But it wasn’t shitty at all; it was beautiful. A man sang. I cranked up the volume and drowned out the sounds of rattling exhausts and the drive-thru speaker.
Maggie’s journals only covered a span of a few weeks. She’d written incessantly — ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty pages a day, two full notebooks. Reading them was like being dunked right inside her head. She’d gone to Maine for a month because her dad had cancer and she wanted to be with him during his final days, even though she hardly knew him in the first place. But what had seemed like a shot at becoming friends, getting to know each other a little bit, had become a disaster. The whole time she was there up until he died, her dad had been unrelentingly nasty — not grumpy and sour, like my grandpa, but outright vicious and cruel. “You know, you’re even uglier than your mother was” — that’s the type of shit he’d actually say to her, which Maggie a few minutes later would record into her journal. It sounded like about the most excruciating, punishing stretch of time I could ever imagine; I could understand how keeping her journal always close at hand had brought some relief.
For the most part, though, Maggie didn’t write about her dad. She wrote about Noah, her on-again, off-again boyfriend. She fantasized about sex with him — the details were so raw, I started getting turned on right there in the parking lot. She wrote about Noah’s hands, his arms, his chest. She dreamed of vacations they could take together. Then, in nearly the same breath, she’d write about what an asshole he was and how much she hated him, and plot ways to destroy him. She didn’t seem confused, just equally intense in her love and her anger.
I’d never been so riveted. Every page I read, I felt Maggie press closer and closer to me. Maybe it was the music — her tapes — mixed with all the lowriders’ blue fumes, or maybe it was the simmering haze of Albuquerque at night, just being there in this desert city so far from everything I knew, but I felt dizzy and hollow. Maggie’s every thought, every one of her tiny hopes and fears and sadnesses, ripped at me and consumed me. I felt gripped with a wild, desperate longing to be next to her, to hold her in my arms, to listen to shitty opera together in her warm and calm bed. I wanted to reveal myself to her as clearly and honestly and crushingly as she was revealing herself to me, page after page after page.
It occurred to me that she’d been delivered to me, that the universe had guided us together. At the airport there’d been a hundred little bags I could have snatched off the conveyor — what force had compelled me to choose hers? I’d never been superstitious, but I felt a wave of gratitude toward whatever spirits were behind this. Was she sixteen years old? Was she twenty-four? It was hard to know. Nothing in her journals pinned it down. My only clues to her daily life were that she worked at a veterinary clinic answering phones and mopping up urine, and that she had a car. I guessed she was seventeen. I didn’t even know what she looked like, but I didn’t care; I was achingly in love.
I finished reading the journals and turned right back to the beginning and read them all the way through again, then switched tapes in the Walkman and read the journals a third time through. I paged carefully through her sketchbook — filled mostly with intricate drawings of spiders — and even read her Guitar World magazine cover to cover. Just as I was about to open the journals again, someone yanked the headphones off me; it was like being jarred out of a dream. My grandpa’s boss — a young black guy named Calvin — squinted down at me; behind him, the McDonald’s was dark. “Hey, Anthony,” he said. “Didn’t know you was out here, kid. We done threw all the burgers away.” He shook his head. “I got some McNuggets. You want some McNuggets?” A black Cadillac bumped into the empty lot. “Come on,” Calvin said, reaching out his hand. “Get up. My brother and me, we’ll give you a ride home.”
Over the next few days I slipped into a kind of Maggie fever. Cool, vivid visions of the future came to me: Driving with her through the desert at sundown, then sleeping next to her in the back of a truck, a billion stars overhead; the truck itself seemed to click and sigh. Looking at rabbits in cages at a county fair; they pressed wet noses to our fingers through the wire. Floating for a long afternoon down a lush Texas river on blow-up rafts. Sipping orange juice at a sad midnight diner outside of Baton Rouge. And early one morning we watched from the runway as a small navy plane touched down and came to a stop and a door popped open and stairs folded down and my brother’s unit filed down the steps, one at a time. “Is that him?” she said after each of them appeared. “Is that him? Is that him? How about this guy — is this one him?” These crisp scenes were what was real to me; the rest of the world faded into an underwater dream. Dimly I was aware of pushing carts around the baking-hot airport lots, sitting in algebra class, holding Gilbert down while my grandpa gave him his poison, but I wasn’t there at all; I was with Maggie.
I’d discovered that the tape labeled shitty shit contained her own tentative fumblings on the guitar. She’d play a couple of lines from a Beatles or a Paul Simon tune and then get tripped up and say, barely audibly, “Oh, shit,” and start over again. I felt closest to her when I listened to this tape; soon I stopped listening to the others. I got to know all the moments where she talked to herself. At one point she said, “I suck at this”; at another point she said, “This is hopeless”; and near the end of the tape she said, in a moment of sudden triumph, “That only half sucked!” I lay in bed for hours with her Walkman on, listening to shitty shit and touching the pages of her journals, feeling the ridges her pens had dug. Every time I looked at her name on the return-address labels, a bolt of nervousness flapped from my belly up through my lungs — I knew I was going to have to make contact with her, and the thought of that was terrifying.
My grandpa hadn’t been able to sell the cameras from the stolen suitcases for as much as he’d figured. When he wasn’t at McDonald’s or with me doing carts, he wandered around the house batting at flies with his hunting blade and talking about robbing a pimp. He could see that something had changed in me. He thought I was on meth. One morning he pinned me down and started chopping off all my hair. I kicked and screamed and flailed my arms, knocking stacks of quarters everywhere. My grandpa pulled his blade back. He couldn’t understand why I cared so much.
“Maggie likes my hair long,” I said.
“Who’s Maggie?” he asked, softening.
“My girlfriend.” I knew it was a little crazy, but saying it out loud almost made it feel true.
“Oh.” My grandpa bit his lip and thought about that for a minute, still kneeling on top of me. “OK, then,” he said, “let me just even it out.” He went back to hacking at my hair, and I tuned out, so that I was with Maggie again. Now we were at a drive-in movie, tossing popcorn up, trying to land it in each other’s mouths. Light from the screen played across her hair and her face. Movie voices boomed from a little speaker mounted on her window. Maggie laughed, then drew back in her seat for a moment, and her eyes, wide and whirling, gathered me in.
Late that night — after doing carts with the Walkman on, giving Gilbert his purple juice, and lying in bed reading Maggie’s journals for hours — I tiptoed up to my grandpa’s bedroom while he was asleep and snagged the keys to his truck off the floor. I rolled the truck in stealth halfway down the block before cranking the engine and rattling down Central. I stopped at McDonald’s. Calvin was at the drive-thru window; he had on a silver football helmet and jersey. It was Halloween. He squinted at me. “Is that your costume? You look like you done got chewed up and spit out. Who gave you that haircut — Stevie Wonder? Hey, your grandpa know you got his truck? Look, we been closed for an hour. I ain’t got no burgers for you. Want some chicken McNuggets?”
“Sure.”
“Going to a party or something?”
“I’m going to my girlfriend’s house.” As I said it, I realized that this was it — I was really going to Maggie’s house — and a jolt went through me, but then I felt extremely calm. Calvin passed me a little ten-piece box of chicken McNuggets, and I pulled away.
It was two in the morning. Everywhere half-costumed revelers crept home. Ghosts and a samurai warrior waited at a bus stop; three witches crowded around an ATM; Batman and Bill Clinton tussled in the middle of the road. The drive to Maggie’s street took less than fifteen minutes. I’d expected a house, but her address matched a wide, crumbling, three-story apartment building. I parked and got nervous again. What would I say to her? Where could I start? I felt sick. I grabbed the green backpack and climbed out of the truck and stood in the street for ten long seconds, then climbed back in and sprawled across the seat, near tears. Finally I gathered myself. I remembered something I had to do: I unzipped the backpack and took shitty shit out of the Walkman and put Maggie’s trance mix back in, just like it had been when I got it. She wouldn’t have to know I’d listened to her tapes or read her journals, though one day I was sure I would tell her.
The apartment building had the look of a halfway house where I’d once visited my mom: a thick main gate of wire mesh with a mess of barbed wire rolled at the top, all for nothing, since someone had propped the gate open an inch with a pizza box. The entranceway led to a little gravel-filled courtyard with eight apartment doors, each numbered with its own reflective sticker. But Maggie’s address label hadn’t listed an apartment number. Cinders shifted in my chest; every sound made me jump. Back inside the entranceway I found the mailboxes for the whole building. A few of them listed names, a few of them didn’t, and there was no Smith. There was no way to know — she probably lived with her mom or another relative who didn’t even share her last name. I felt hopeless and clutched at my butchered hair.
Someone crashed through the gate behind me, and I cried out in surprise — it was an old, drunk Navajo woman. I asked her if she knew where Maggie Smith lived. I said the name a few times, and soon she was repeating after me, “Maggie Smith, Maggie Smith, Maggie Smith,” but she had no idea what she was saying. She kept banging into walls and falling down. I helped her up. She barged across the courtyard and started hammering on doors, crying out now, “Maggie Smith, Maggie Smith!” She understood I was looking for someone. Doors opened and slammed shut. The old woman careened back and forth across the dirt.
Then I heard, from somewhere above, a little voice: “Hi, I’m Maggie.” The world fell into a hush. I looked up but couldn’t see anything except dark windows and the purple night sky. “Here. I’m here,” she said. The voice was unmistakably hers.
“I can’t see you,” I called. The old woman, deed done, lurched back across the courtyard and out the front gate. “Hey,” I said into the deep silence, “I’ve got something that belongs to you. Your stuff.”
“Is that my backpack?”
“My grandpa made me take it. To save Gilbert.”
“Who’s Gilbert?”
“His cat.” I hadn’t intended to confess everything all at once, but I felt I knew Maggie, and I had nothing to hide from her.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, why don’t you come inside for a minute. Wait, I’ll come down.”
I turned slow circles in the night, raked with chills, unsure which door would open. I thought of bolting off. Then I began to savor the moment, this tiny half-beat interlude before Maggie and I came face to face. It was like being perched at a swing’s highest backward point, waiting to rush the air.
A door squeaked open behind me. Halfway in and halfway out stood a middle-aged woman.
“Is that — is this — does Maggie live here?” I said.
She leaned a little farther out into the light and peered at me and nodded. Her face was open and moonlike.
“Oh, well, I have her backpack. Could I give it to her? She was just talking to me out the window.”
“I’m Maggie,” the woman said.
I looked up again. She stepped out of her door and craned her neck back to follow my gaze toward the high window. The sky rippled, and the stars clustered in. I felt light. I felt far away from everything. “Well, come on in,” she said.
I followed her inside. The apartment air tasted of damp earth and cigarette smoke. We went down a long, dark hallway into a little room with two couches and two TVs stacked totem-pole-style with the sound off. On one a weatherman waved his hand; on the other, a black-and-white Frankenstein staggered down a hillside while lightning flashed and wild rain whipped around him. The woman kicked one of the couches, and the cushions seemed to sit up and arrange themselves into the shape of a man. He had a mask of orange face paint, and his hair was dyed green. “Noah,” the woman said, “you got to wake up for this.” She disappeared and came back with a glass of water. “Here,” she said, “have a seat and drink this and tell me how you ended up with my backpack. I was so mad that they’d made me check it. I thought it was gone forever.”
My heart jangled; I felt immersed in flame. I started into the story — telling her about Gilbert and how he was sick and all — and then the fever sacked me and the world seemed to turn inside out. In my mind it was three months later and I was collecting carts with my grandpa in the curling heat, my pants heavy with quarters. I was listening to Maggie’s shitty shit tape with her playing the guitar. But I was also still there, talking to that woman in the den. Everything had become layered, like two different movies playing on the same TV. It was all real and it was all happening at the same time. More layers spooled out: I was climbing into my grandpa’s truck an hour later, and the old Navajo woman was asleep across the front seat. Then I was back in the den, asking the woman for another glass of water. She brought her guitar out and was playing it for me and Noah, tapping a beat on its body, and singing tunelessly, “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away. . . . Oops. I fucked that up.” It really was Maggie; I could tell from her voice. I asked how old she was; she said she was thirty-six. I asked the woman — Maggie — if I could keep one of her tapes. I lied and said I wanted the opera tape, then reached into the backpack and drew the shitty shit tape out and wedged it in my back pocket.
“What else can I do to thank you?” said Maggie. I was done with my story; the fever had cooled; we were in the den with the two TVs, but at some point she’d shut them off. “What would you most want? Anything. Just tell me, out of curiosity.”
“But I stole your bag,” I protested. “I’m just giving it back.”
“He did steal your bag,” Noah agreed sleepily, his lids hanging low.
“And you gave me a tape,” I added. “That’s a lot.”
“Yup, baby,” said Noah, “you did give him the tape.”
The woman stared at me with owl eyes.
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to talk to my brother. But that’s impossible.” I explained that he was on an aircraft carrier — the Independence — halfway around the world. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was on the edge of tears.
Noah came alive. “That’s not impossible,” he said. “Calling him. A guy I work with, Frank Tavarez, his son’s on a battleship somewhere, like Japan or the Persian Gulf. They talk every few weeks. It’s always in the middle of the night.” He jumped to his feet. “Hold on. Frank’s maybe up right now.” He headed down the hallway into a back room, and I heard the beeps of a phone being dialed and Noah’s muffled voice: “Hey, Frank? You sleeping? . . . Sorry, man. . . . Right. . . . Yeah. . . . Hey, Frank, I got a question for you.”
Maggie and I sat across from each other for the next twenty minutes, listening to Noah’s conversations as he made one call after another; I could barely make out his words, but I was hanging on every pause and intonation. At one point Noah came back in and asked me for my brother’s full name and the name of his unit, then disappeared again down the hall. Here and there Maggie strummed her guitar for a bit and hummed, as though to gently accentuate the action in the other room. I was twitchy with nervous excitement. Every time I heard Noah dialing another number, I imagined my brother at a command post in some dark, hot room deep within his ship — the kind of red-lit chamber where people shouted things in submarine movies. I pictured a phone clanging to life in the middle of a vast circuitry board, and my brother picking it up and saying, “This is Mabry,” the same way he’d answered the phones when he’d worked at Robert’s Refrigeration & Cooling Service in Gulfport.
Finally Noah sidled back down the hall, cradling the cordless phone between his ear and his shoulder, a strange smile on his orange-painted face. “We found him!” he said. “But your brother’s actually not on the Independence. He got transferred to a base in Greece. We’re on right now with the front desk at his barracks. They’re going up to his room to get him. It’s past noon there. Guess they had a late night last night. Life of a sailor, right? Here you go.” He handed me the phone.
My heart flailed this way and that; the room rocked side to side. I pressed the phone tight to my ear and absorbed the buzzing silence. Maggie took Noah’s hand, and the two of them watched me, hopeful, open-faced. For a moment I thought of the Maggie Smith I’d expected to meet that night, the Maggie closer to my age, and I wondered if I would ever find her, and if so, how and where and when it would happen. The silence on the other end of the phone dragged on. My eyes began to water again, and I turned my head away so Maggie and Noah wouldn’t see me cry. “Is he there?” asked Maggie. “Did he pick up?”
How can I describe what that silence was made of? It was thrilling, awful, crushing. It brought every blow, every scrape, every nick, every pummeling that my heart had ever taken straight to the surface. I found myself gasping. All I wanted was to hear my brother’s voice.
The rest of it is easier to tell: An hour later, at dawn, 5:15 in the morning, I pulled the truck up in front of my grandpa’s place, Maggie and Noah beside me. Maggie wanted to look at Gilbert and see if she could figure out what was wrong with him. But there was my grandpa on the front steps, cradling the cat in his arms. Gilbert was dead. We got shovels and piled silently, all four of us, into the cab of the truck: Noah at the wheel, Maggie next to him, then me, then my grandpa at the passenger-side window, Gilbert on his lap. We took Central to I-40 to the Turquoise Highway and headed up the backside of the mountain. We parked and hiked a long, long ways up, taking turns carrying the cat. Finally we agreed on a spot and dug a hole. My grandpa, breathing heavy, spread out on his belly and lowered Gilbert in.
But that was all still to come. In Maggie’s den, the silence on the phone hissed and rumbled and crashed in my ear — it’s the silence I still hear, always in the middle of the night, when I’m walking down an empty highway, or rowing across the center of a lake, or holed up in the last, darkened Amtrak car, looking out the window at distant twinkling lights. Some call it longing; I call it silence. That night, though, on the phone, there was a clattering sound, a pause, another little clatter, and then I heard my brother’s voice, clear as a trumpet: “Hello? Hello? Anthony? Hello?”
“Maggie Fever” is excerpted from The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, by Davy Rothbart, published by Touchstone. © 2005 by Davy Rothbart. It appears here by permission of the author.
