The boys duckwalk up the slope and, just this side of the ridge, go belly down on shards of sand rock, bunchgrass, and hard dirt. They scrabble forward a few more feet, then hold.
A cloudless sky. The afternoon sun shines high and hot. Scrawny pines throw weak shadows. Grasshoppers whir and click. There is no wind. The boys look at one another, and each sees the fire in his own eyes perfectly reflected. They grip tighter the textured stocks of their plastic machine guns: a black Uzi and a jungle-green M16.
The bigger boy, Bruce—thin brown hair cut so short you can see the pink of his scalp, shoulders and arms muscling up as he careens toward thirteen—sets his jaw and nods. The other is a year younger, half a head shorter, and still boyishly chubby. His name is Nathan, but everyone calls him Crumb, as in: what’s left, the crumbs, the last one picked for recess basketball and gym-class kickball and just about everything else. Crumb gestures to the left, down a dry creek bed. Bruce understands: That’s the way they need to go to stay hidden from the enemy—who used to be the Viet Cong or vaguely Eastern European terrorist types but since a year ago are always al-Qaeda or Taliban. The enemy have captured Bruce’s little half-sister, Susie, and are holding her for ransom in a room wired to explode in—Crumb checks his imaginary tactical watch—five minutes.
Now! Crumb mouths silently. Go!
Bruce is up and running over the ridge and down into the dry wash. He angles from tree to tree and leaps cleanly over knots of yucca and prickly pear cactus. Crumb follows, attempting to do the same, though his leaps are less graceful, his footfalls loud and loose. Bruce sneaks around the corner and knocks the guard out—whack!—with the butt end of his M16. Crumb comes huffing up behind him, his glasses fogging, plastic Uzi held above his head as he heaves and blows and tries to catch his breath. “You’ll have to shoot the lock out,” he says.
“But they’ll hear,” Bruce says through clenched teeth.
“No choice. We have to get Susie, then fight our way out. Hurry!”
For a split second Bruce squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t like this, is worried about what might happen—if Susie could be harmed, if there’ll be too many Taliban—but he knows Crumb is right. Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.
Bruce’s eyes snap open. He turns, fires his M16—his tongue making a sustained popping sound—and as the door to the cell swings open, the enemy descends.
Bruce’s stepdad and all the farmhands are busy with the wheat harvest, so when his family sits down to supper it’s just Bruce, Crumb, Susie, Bruce’s older brother Steve, and Bruce’s mom at the oval table in the double-wide’s dining area. Their house is a newer model and has features—“accents,” Bruce’s mom calls them—that you don’t see on the older manufactured homes, such as the big, peaked, four-paned window that looks out over the dirt yard and the sand-rock ridge Bruce and Crumb came running down an hour ago.
Crumb makes sure to comment on how good dinner smells and to ask Bruce’s mom about her day, but his first two hot dogs still more or less disappear. He fidgets with his napkin and tries to wait an appropriate amount of time before helping himself to a third. When he does, he zips mustard and ketchup up and down the bun, ladles baked beans directly onto the dog, and then crumbles a fistful of potato chips over everything. His mom is a vegetarian, so Crumb only ever gets to eat hot dogs when he stays at Bruce’s house. After loading his plate, Crumb considers a moment, then takes a serving of cucumber slices on the side. Bruce’s mom—Tammy, as she is always telling Crumb to call her—smiles wide.
“See, boys,” she says to Bruce and Steve, “Nathan likes the cucumber slices. They’re good for you. Try some!”
Tammy is fifteen years younger than Crumb’s mom and the most beautiful woman Crumb has ever seen. Her curly red-brown hair hangs to the middle of her back. She wears lip gloss and silver rings and bracelets, and her breasts lift and stretch her tight, V-necked T-shirts in astonishing ways. (The one she’s wearing today reads, in puffy, cursive letters, Cowgirl up!) Crumb would rather look at Tammy than at any of the women in the magazines Steve keeps in a ratty duffel beneath his bed. With their jutting hips and dark nipples and shocking Vs of hair, those magazine women terrify Crumb, though he gamely flips through the pages and even whistles now and again in front of Bruce.
Tammy reaches over and touches Crumb on the shoulder, her fingers lingering a moment, and heat floods down Crumb’s torso and settles and swirls madly in his belly. He stifles a belch. Maybe he shouldn’t have eaten that last hot dog. He definitely shouldn’t have had that big ladle of baked beans on top. Or maybe he should have just eaten slower? No matter what he should or shouldn’t have done, Crumb can’t excuse himself to the bathroom now, because Susie has started to speak, and when Susie talks, everyone stops to listen.
Last winter, while playing four square at recess, Susie collapsed on the elementary school blacktop. After a life-flight helicopter ride to Billings and then another to Denver, followed by multiple surgeries, she came out of the coma, but she’s never been the same. Her hands shake all the time, and the left half of her face hangs like an old coat in the back of the closet, the eye a loose button. There is a soft parallelogram of bare skin above her ear where they had to cut out a section of skull to drain the blood drowning her brain. Even months later no hair has grown back there, though the rest of her head is covered in dishwater hanks. She’s had to relearn how to walk, can’t read at all anymore.
Before Susie’s collapse—A tragedy, everyone says. Such a pretty girl, and her whole life ahead of her. Doesn’t seem fair. A good thing they’ve got a little money—she was the first girl ever to have a crush on Crumb, and even if she was Bruce’s half-sister and still in elementary school, he would sometimes lie in bed at night and count up the years to confirm that, yes, by the time he was a junior and Bruce was a senior, Susie would be a freshman. So she could be his girlfriend then. In Crumb’s mind she’d look like a younger Tammy, and it wouldn’t be weird or anything, because they were all friends. Susie had been brash and athletic like Bruce, the fastest in her class, even faster than the boys, and she often played with them when Crumb stayed overnight. She would thrill to the stories Crumb invented, the drama and danger. Before Susie came back from the hospital, Crumb used to imagine the three of them together, forever.
The more Susie talks, the more her head shakes back and forth, faster and faster, her swollen face jiggling, left eye nearly closing. Susie has fits sometimes and will scream and scream. It’s not always clear what has set her off.
Tammy reaches out and tries to still her daughter. “Slow down, honey. Breathe. We’re all listening. We’re right here.”
And they are, even Steve, all of them leaning in. Crumb’s guts are flip-flopping and rumbling, and he can’t concentrate, can’t track even a little bit of what Susie is saying, but he can tell it has something to do with him because Susie keeps pointing a bent, trembling finger in his direction. Even after all that’s happened, her crush on Crumb has only intensified.
Finally Susie finishes, and Tammy chuckles. Steve’s permanent scowl loosens. Bruce helps Susie with her napkin, then tucks back into the lake of baked beans on his plate. Crumb is up and shuffling backward a few steps, excusing himself before turning and hustling toward the bathroom.
The moon lifts over the ridge and slicks the small window of the Airstream trailer with light. Bruce leans against the wall, fingers laced behind his head. Crumb, sitting crisscross applesauce, puts his hands behind his head and leans against the camper wall as well.
Bruce doesn’t mind that Crumb is copying him. Crumb is always copying him. Bruce tries to show his friend how to act so he doesn’t act so weird. Bruce has the record for the most cartons of chocolate milk chugged in a single lunch period. He’s the only seventh grader who starts on the junior high basketball team, and Lisa Ryan keeps passing him notes in history. So Bruce can be a friend to Crumb, and no one will question it. He likes helping Crumb. He likes helping his sister too. He just likes helping people, period. It might be his favorite thing. When he gets older, he hopes to find a job that will let him help people, but he’s not sure what that might be. His dad—who is also Steve’s dad—is still trying to be a rodeo star, which is a dumb, selfish thing to do. And Bruce definitely doesn’t want to be a wheat farmer like his stepdad, Doug. Doug makes a lot of money—or, at least, he makes a lot compared to Bruce’s real dad and all the hardscrabble farmers and ranchers in the valley. Still, Doug’s always in a huff about seed prices or too much rain or too little rain or the idiocy of the hired men. He’s always complaining about the government.
A couple of months ago Doug and Steve got into a big fight about what Steve called Doug’s “willful blindness and hypocrisy”: Doug says he hates the government, but he still takes government money via the Conservation Reserve Program and price supports and guaranteed loans and who knows what all else. Steve spends a lot of time on the internet. He even goes to school on the internet; the modem gives a pop-pop-pop and shriek as he logs on to get his lessons. Steve is weird. Even weirder than Crumb. And Bruce and Steve don’t have a bedroom in the house anymore, not since the big fight. The very next day Doug hauled this old Airstream trailer into the yard and set it up on cinder blocks. He wouldn’t have such sass in the house, he said. Besides, they needed the boys’ room for Susie’s medical stuff and physical-therapy machines. Doug hooked a garden hose and extension cord up to the Airstream while Bruce’s mom watched from the back step. She’d had Steve when she was sixteen, then Bruce two years later. She was a kid, then a mom, and now a wheat farmer’s wife. She didn’t say anything. Bruce didn’t blame her.
Steve has what passes for the trailer’s bedroom now—two bunks and a thin shelf of drawers on one end—and Bruce sleeps on the other end, on the little table that folds out into a pallet. He and Crumb are both sleeping there tonight. The moon lifts higher in the sky. Crumb makes a gun with his finger and thumb and shoots the moon. Pew-pew. Or maybe he’s shooting at the dark pines on the ridge, the enemy hiding in the trees. Bruce isn’t sure.
“What’s a job that helps people?” he asks Crumb. “That, you know, is just for helping?”
“Well, let’s consider that a moment.” Crumb purses his lips and strokes his chin. Crumb is always doing things like that: stroking his chin, using big words, cackling when he knows something you don’t—like the evil genius in a Disney movie. “How about a doctor? They have to take the Hippocratic oath. It’s all about helping. ‘First,’” Crumb intones, “‘do no harm.’”
Bruce thinks back to the fluorescent lights and blinking machines and bouquets of tubing enveloping his broken sister, the white-coated men saying things he didn’t understand. He shakes his head.
Crumb puts his elbows on his knees, his belly soft beneath the oversize Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt he wears for bed every night. “Maybe a guidance counselor, like Ms. Tecca?”
Bruce snorts. “All Ms. Tecca ever does is give you worksheets about your feelings. She sent me a whole book of worksheets when Susie was in the hospital. I was so bored I even did some.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Like, ‘Imagine your feelings are a picture. What’s the picture inside you right now? Draw that picture here.’ And then they give you a big square to draw it in and a place to put a title.”
“What’d you draw?”
On the far end of the camper Steve’s light goes out. The night is still, and Bruce runs a hand back and forth over his buzz cut. “A room, sort of like one from our games—a locked room wired to explode.”
“Wow. Was it in a bunker or something? Were there a bunch of terrorists guarding it?”
“No. It was out in a field. A big, empty field. No one around. No one inside. But it was gonna blow.”
Crumb folds his hands beneath his chin and nods. “Cool. Very cool. I would’ve drawn something good inside though, like gold bars or a hundred Subway sandwiches or a new Nintendo, and you and me up on the hill about to run down and crack the lock and defuse the bombs and get the good stuff.”
“It’s not supposed to be a story you’re making up. It’s what’s inside you.”
“That is what’s inside me. Well, actually, what’s inside me are three hot dogs and a bunch of baked beans and potato chips, but I probably still have room for a couple of meatball subs!”
Bruce launches himself at Crumb and pins him to the bed in seconds. He rat-a-tat-tats his knuckles on Crumb’s chest until Crumb is laughing and screaming that he’s about to piss his pants.
Bruce lets him up, and Crumb falls out of bed, dries his eyes, and stumbles outside to pee. Bruce shakes his head and situates the pillows and blankets. As the heavy metal music Steve listens to all night long begins to saw across the dark, Crumb bustles back in, lifts the blankets, and squeezes in beside Bruce. He asks Bruce again about his picture: What did he title it? Bruce brushes him off, but Crumb doesn’t seem to mind. That’s another good thing about Crumb. He takes things in stride. Crumb pulls the blankets up to his chin and jabbers on for a time about fighter jets and astrophysics and ancient mythology—and then, like that, he’s sound asleep.
Bruce lifts himself up to turn out the light but pauses and studies his sleeping friend a moment. Slack mouth, soft cheeks, head almost comically round. He doesn’t even know he needs help.
Crumb wakes up hot and groggy, light spilling in the window. He runs his hand over the tangle of blankets beside him. Where’s Bruce?
He needs to pee again. He shouldn’t have drunk so many glasses of chocolate milk at dinner. Crumb fumbles to put on his glasses, pulls his nightshirt down as far as it will go—to hide his green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle undies—and hustles out. The harsh, dry light of mid-morning blinds him a moment, and spots and washes of fantastic color swirl over the drab landscape. He blinks his eyes clear, glances at the main house to make sure no one is looking, and lets himself go all over a fence post.
Back in the trailer, Crumb dresses in the shorts and T-shirt his mother packed for him. He leaves his nightshirt out—it’s Labor Day weekend, and they’ve got a rare two-night sleepover—and stuffs yesterday’s dirty clothes into his backpack. He cleans his glasses with the hem of his shirt and goes to comb his hair—he thinks he has nice hair, at least—but the mirror that usually hangs above the sink is gone. Crumb opens cupboard doors, turns around in the tight trailer.
“I took it out a couple of weeks ago.” Steve leans down from the top bunk, his stringy black hair framing his face like dingy curtains. He’s not wearing a shirt and is even paler than Crumb. His long arm waggles over the edge of the bed like a cooked noodle. “Mirrors encourage vanity.”
“Ah,” Crumb says, “yes, vanity. Best to guard against it.”
“Bruce told me to tell you,” Steve says, his noodly arm slithering back up into the bunk, “he’ll see you at lunch.”
Crumb can only make out a thin, bare shoulder now, the white of Steve’s forehead, the mess of black hair. “OK, thanks. But, uh, where’d he go?”
“To work. With Doug. Out in the fields to toil like the common laborers they are.”
“He didn’t want me to come?”
Steve rolls onto his side again, brushes his hair out of his eyes. “You and me,” Steve says, “we’re built for other things.”
Up and down the long, hot length of the field, Bruce walks the ragged line of straw bales. If one has fallen the wrong way, he turns it onto its cut side, so it won’t jam the stacker that Doug drives behind him. The stacker jaws up bale after bale, and when it’s full, Doug turns out of the field, drives down the dirt road to the hay shed, and empties the big yellow block of straw bales, slowly building a great stack. It’s Sunday, and all the hired men have the day off. The real work of the harvest is paused until tomorrow. “It’s time to stack straw,” Doug said to Bruce this morning, waking him.
This is the third field they’ve done. Bruce doesn’t know how many more fields Doug has in mind. They don’t use the straw on the wheat farm, but Doug says he does a fair business selling it to sheep ranchers here in the valley and to hobby farmers up around Billings. Doug is all about business, all about counting every dollar and cent. But this work doesn’t make any sense to Bruce. They’re not winning a game or breaking a record or helping anybody or even being a friend to somebody. He wishes Doug would’ve let him bring Crumb. Crumb doesn’t have much practice being around grown men though. Crumb’s father died in a car accident when he was in second grade. Bruce remembers only bits and pieces of the funeral reception. There were about two dozen kinds of pie, and, after they ate, all the kids went outside to play football. Bruce made sure he was on Crumb’s team and that Crumb’s team won.
If Crumb were with him now, he would at least have made turning bales fun, invented some story for them, the bales becoming bombs or boats or something interesting. Bruce doesn’t know how to do that. Sometimes he’ll try to make up a story, but there are just too many choices, and he inevitably gets stuck. Is the stacker a Humvee, a Taliban tank, a mobile-operations base? And where are the bad guys holding Susie? In the machine shed? In the next field? If she’s over there, Bruce can’t get to her, because he has to keep walking up and down the line of bales, so Susie will never be rescued, and it will all fall apart. Crumb would have it figured out. Early this morning, when Bruce asked if he could bring his friend, Doug took one look at the kid—sound asleep with his mouth half open, nightshirt twisted up around his belly button—and shook his head. “He’d only slow us down.”
Bruce puts his shoulder to a bale and pushes it over, then straightens up and wipes his sweating forehead. He’s got on long sleeves and a pair of deer-hide gloves, but there’s still dirt and chaff smeared on his face, itching his wrists, even down the waist of his pants. Bruce decides he hates Doug 63 percent of the time, which isn’t terrible. He hates his real dad pretty much 100 percent of the time. He sighs and stares down the field of yellow stubble. Unsure what else to do, he keeps walking.
Where the two halves of the double-wide are stitched together is a skylight—another accent—that softens the hard noon light and fills the kitchen with a gentle brightness. Tammy bustles from the counter to the sink. She rinses her hands, then checks the recipe again and scoops shredded zucchini and carrot into the batter. She holds the big plastic bowl at her belly, just below those miraculous breasts, and mixes with a wooden spoon. Crumb watches her every move.
“I worry about Bruce,” she says.
“How come?” Crumb asks, and he takes a big swig of chocolate milk. He’d prefer to watch Tammy work in silence, but he knows to be polite.
“He took Susie’s—what happened to Susie, he took it so hard. I’ve tried to tell him he couldn’t have done anything, but he’s always been so protective of her. And when someone—I don’t remember who—called it an ‘act of God,’ Bruce didn’t like that. I explained it’s just a thing people say. It’s not that God wanted this to happen to Susie.” Tammy smiles a small, sad smile, and then goes back to mixing.
Once she’s satisfied with the batter, she sets the bowl on the counter and leans over to read the recipe again. Crumb is almost overcome by the perfect heart shape of her behind in jean shorts.
“OK,” Tammy announces, clapping her hands together. “I think we’re ready. Here, Nathan, spray the muffin pan. Yep, just like that. Good.”
Crumb shines to the praise, wielding the can of Pam like the finest, most necessary instrument, and Tammy follows along behind, dolloping muffin batter into each cup.
“These are going to be so good!” she says. “You wait and see. You’ll get the first one, for being such a big help.” Ever since Bruce’s family got back from the hospital, Tammy has insisted on one healthy thing at every meal. Crumb doesn’t mind. Zucchini muffins and cucumber slices are a step up from the vegetarian dishes his mom makes.
“You know,” Tammy says, sliding the muffin pan into the oven, “when we first got back from the hospital, he’d wake up in the night crying.”
“Who?”
“Bruce. He’d wake up and not be able to catch his breath. Just these huge hiccups and sobs. He was wetting the bed too. Doug—well, you know how Doug is. He thinks I baby Bruce too much. I think Bruce’s trouble at night might be half the reason he kicked the boys out into the Airstream.” Tammy puts the mixing bowl into the sink, piles the dirty utensils into it, squeezes in a blob of blue kitchen soap, and runs the hot water. “Has Bruce ever had a hard time sleeping when you’re here? Has he ever woken up crying?”
The classic-country station out of Miles City warbles softly from the radio atop the refrigerator. Crumb is struggling to parse all the information he’s just been given, to square it with his image of Bruce. Crying? Wetting the bed? Crumb shakes his head emphatically.
“Well, I guess you’re good for him.” Tammy takes up a brush and starts to scrub.
Not in his gut this time, but somewhere deep inside Crumb, things shift and roil.
By late afternoon Doug and Bruce are back from stacking hay bales. Doug plans to take the rest of the day off to watch football, and Susie is up from her nap. Even Steve has come in from the Airstream and showered and combed his hair. After Doug and Bruce finish washing up, everyone sits down to Sunday supper.
Along with the muffins, Tammy has baked a ham and made mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Bruce helps Susie with each dish as it comes around—she replies a shaky yes to everything, but Bruce gives her tiny servings, knowing she’ll eat only the mashed potatoes. Then he passes the dishes on to Crumb, who is sitting on the other side of Susie and telling everyone to make sure to try the muffins. “They’re amazing.” Tammy looks pleased and a little bashful.
Doug narrows his eyes at the enormous helpings Crumb serves himself. “Work up an appetite today?”
Crumb doesn’t realize Doug is talking to him until Bruce reaches around Susie and pokes him in the ribs. “Oh, yes, Mr. Lear,” Crumb says, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I mean, I guess it all just looks so good. You’re a lucky man. Your wife is a true magician in the kitchen!”
Doug grunts, inspects the basket of muffins, and passes it on without taking one.
“Did you boys finish the stacking?” Tammy looks at Bruce when she asks this, not at Doug.
Doug answers for him: “We did all of what’s been cut and baled. Six fields. Of course, we’ll have more to do next Sunday, after we finish the combining this week.” Doug saws with vigor at his ham steak, then swoops the forkful through his buttered potatoes. While he chews, he rests his big forearms on the tabletop, knife straight up in one hand, fork in the other. “Feels good, don’t it, Bruce? Doing work that matters, work that pays. American wheat farmers feed the world!” Doug swallows and saws again at his ham.
Tammy puts a hand to her husband’s broad back and rubs in circles. Crumb, mouth rolling with potatoes, grins. Susie smiles her lopsided, shaky smile. And though he hated every minute of walking those fields, Bruce rises to the general gladness and good feeling around the table. He takes a big swig of chocolate milk, wipes his lips with the back of his hand.
“Who is it you feed?” Steve asks quietly, slouched in his seat, his head barely above the back of his chair.
“The world,” Doug says, louder, as if Steve simply didn’t hear him. “We’re the breadbasket of the world here.”
Steve swipes his black hair out of his eyes, then inspects his plate. “What’s got wheat in it here? The muffins, I guess. But just Tammy and Crumb are eating those.”
“Now, hold on a dang minute,” Doug says, shifting his considerable bulk in his chair and wagging the tines of his fork at Steve. “I’m talking figuratively. You know what that means? They teach you that in your internet school?”
Steve sits up. “I’d rather talk literally, and if we do that, we have to start with the fact that most industrialized agriculture—which is, you know, what you do—doesn’t grow food so much as manufacture a commodity that ends up as a trading chip or an export or in livestock feed and makes money for the seed conglomerates and the herbicide pushers and the tobacco companies.”
Doug slaps the tabletop with the flat of his hand, hard enough that the silverware jumps and the carrot-and-zucchini muffin on the edge of Crumb’s plate falls to the floor and rolls. Doug jabs his fork in Steve’s direction. “Got yourself a bed? Food to eat? Your goddamned internet, which ain’t cheap? You know who pays for that? Me and my wheat farming. I knew it’d be all on me, but I took you in anyways, took you both in, and now here I am at Sunday supper listening to this bullshit. I’m surrounded by a bunch of goddamn idiots!”
Doug swings his fork in a wide arc, pointing the tines at all of them, even—as if the fork moves of its own accord—his own daughter. The table stills, and Susie starts to pound her ears with her hands. She stutter-slaps the sides of her head, and a hoarse, sandpapery sound unspools from the back of her throat.
Doug’s thick face sort of crumples. Steve slides low in his chair. Tammy leans across the table but can’t reach Susie. Bruce catches one of his sister’s arms, and Crumb catches the other, and they pick Susie up from her chair, hug her to them, and carry her out the door.
In the dirt yard, in the white afternoon light, Susie is still screaming that awful, wrong scream. Crumb looks to Bruce, but Bruce’s eyes are wide, wounded, undefended. Crumb imagines his friend waking up piss wet and cold and scared and crying. Before dinner, while Bruce washed and changed in the Airstream, he finally told Crumb what the title of his picture was: “God.” God, Bruce said, is an empty room inside each of us, wired to explode. No story. No reason. And all you can do, until it happens, until your own explosion goes off, is help somebody it’s already happened to.
Together the boys carry Susie up the ridge.
“They came in the night,” Crumb says, huffing with the effort. “We’re not even sure who they are, but they’re elite. They’ve already captured the base. We don’t know how many hostages. Here, this way.”
Crumb lets go of Susie and angles off toward a wall of sand rock. He puts his back to it, squats down, checks around the corner, and then motions Bruce and Susie over. “It’s clear!”
Susie has quieted. Bruce slowly stops hugging her. She wobbles but stays up, takes a couple of hesitant, uneven steps toward Crumb. Bruce is right beside her.
Across the stretch of dirt and dry grass separating them, the light sheeting down, Crumb smiles and motions again. “Hurry!” he says. “We don’t have much time.”
