As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (5 page)

I
n the light of day, the backyard had appeared. It was full of old trucks and machinery and large shapes covered by tarps. The seat in the truck was cold, but Ry was beginning to think of it as his. Sometimes, when something really out of the ordinary happens, like you get off your train and it leaves without you and you trudge for hours without food through an alien landscape, the things that happen after that can seem less strange just by comparison. Your threshold of what makes “strange” is raised way up for a while.

Del took a tin of mints from his pocket, opened it, and popped one into his mouth.

“Mint?” he asked Ry.

Ry realized he hadn’t brushed his teeth for about twenty-four hours, was suddenly aware of a furriness
inside his mouth. He wondered how foul his breath was.

“Thanks,” he said, and took one.

“Strangers offering rides and candy” didn’t occur to him. Only, I have to get a toothbrush. And toothpaste. But Del will probably let me use his toothpaste.

“Do you have a cell phone charger?” he asked Del. “My phone is completely dead.”

Rides, candy, and cell phone chargers. But Del didn’t have one.

“I don’t have a cell phone,” said Del. “But I know people who do. Or you can just use my regular phone.”

“It would be long-distance,” said Ry. “But I have some money. I could pay you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Del. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You don’t have a cell phone?” asked Ry. “Really?”

“I’m waiting to see if it’s a fad,” said Del.

T
he old truck grumbled into the gravel parking lot of the same gray-box restaurant they had been to the night before. Painted wooden letters Ry hadn’t noticed the first time, although they were two feet high and painted fluorescent orange, identified it as the New Pêche Skillet. He thought he remembered Del telling him, before he zonked out, that New Pêche, pronounced “New Pesh,” was the name of the town they were in.
Pêche
was French for “peach,” but no one knew why it was called that. There weren’t any peach trees here to speak of.

As their heels hit the ground, they were pleasantly assailed, ambushed, by the ambrosial aromas of breakfast seeping out of the building. Soon after sliding into a booth, they were joined by two people. One was a tall, rangy, cream-colored guy whose hair frizzed forth from
his scalp and his chin in a brown cloud, vaporizing into thin air at his shoulders. The other fellow was short and round and coffee colored, with a shaved head.

The hairy one shook Ry’s hand and said he was Pete. The sleeves of Pete’s T-shirt had been hacked away, taking part of the body of the shirt with them. Revealing that Pete’s armpits could keep up with his head and his chin, hair-wise. Also revealing that while Pete was lean, he was muscular. So muscular that Ry expected the handshake to be bone crushing and was grateful when he only had to wince slightly.

The short guy’s name was Arvin. His T-shirt was immaculate. It looked as if it had been ironed, and it was tucked into crisp blue jeans that were folded up at the bottoms in tall cuffs. His glasses were small gold-rimmed circles, in front of eyes that moved independently of each other so that Ry wasn’t sure which eye he should look at. Arvin’s smile was kind, easy, and radiant. He acknowledged Del’s introduction with a quick nod.

The tree image that was printed on both men’s shirts was the same as what was on the shirt Del had given Ry to wear. He gathered from their preliminary bits of conversation that they worked for Del, and that having breakfast here was how they started out their day.
Looking at his own shirt, reading upside down, he read,
THINK TWICE TREE SERVICE
. Below the tree, in smaller letters, were the words
If you really feel it’s necessary
.

Suddenly there was a hand in front of him, a beautiful hand that was connected to the arm of a young woman, who said, “I’m Beth. And you are?”

Something about her bespoke spacious skies, fruited plains, and amber waves of grain. Abundance and freshly baked bread, still warm. Maybe that part was the restaurant. Ry felt his own face grow warm. He shook her hand. It was soft, warm, and firm. He said, “Ry. My name’s Ry.”

“Hi, Ry,” said Beth. Then she told Pete to move over so she could sit down. And he did. Beth was wearing a tree service shirt also.

No one asked Ry what he was doing there. And he was the only one who picked up a menu. He studied it as the heavenly breakfast smells and the noisy breakfast clatter and conversation enveloped him, knowing he had some money in his pocket but not knowing what else he would need to spend it on. He settled on oatmeal, because it was cheap and it would make him feel full. Arvin ordered oatmeal, too. Ry wondered if it was for the same reason, or if Arvin actually wanted oatmeal.

When the food arrived, Ry stirred butter and sugar and cream and a pinch of salt into his oats. Arvin stirred ketchup into his. Ry couldn’t help staring, and Arvin laughed softly.

“Try it sometime,” he said. “It’s not that bad.”

“Mmm,” he said as he took a bite. “Mmm, mmm, mmm.”

Across the table were steaming heaps of eggs, bacon, potatoes, sausage. In trying not to look at the food he wasn’t eating, Ry found himself looking at the tattoos on Pete’s arms. There were two, one per arm.

A colorful dragon was entwined like a magnificent 2-D pet around one arm. The tip of its tail pointed at Pete’s shoulder. It breathed orange and yellow flames onto his wrist. On the other arm was a coiled snake and the words
DON’T TREAD ON ME
. Or was it—wait—there was a
t
missing. Whoever had done the tattoo had left out the second “t.” It would be an easy mistake to make, you might be doing one
t
and your mind would go on to the next letter. The words on the scroll said,
DON’T READ ON ME
.

R
y’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit of earth and a thick wall of trees, still black with night. As he sipped, the first rays of the sun found tiny gaps to poke through. Tomorrow he would pour the pot of coffee into a thermos to bring out onto the porch so he didn’t have to go back inside.

He went into the kitchen and Olie, the black dog, went into his downward-dog yoga position, wagging his tail. Peg, the red one (or was it the other way around?), tap-danced into the room and then in a circle.

“Oh, yes, right,” said Lloyd. “Well, let’s go then. I don’t know how you make it all night. I certainly couldn’t.”

He took the leashes from their hooks and, after some
fumbling, clipped them to the dogs’ collars, and they headed out the door. The street was quiet. The air was cool but warming, the sky clear as it lightened. Lloyd realized he had forgotten the plastic poop bags and hoped the dogs would hold out until the woods at the end of the street. He was out of practice at this job. It had been a while since he had a dog himself. If this house-sitting pet-care stint worked out, though, he might get one.

The asphalt crumbled off into dirt, and he followed the dogs’ bouncing butts up the path. They reminded you that it was fun to be alive. They investigated everything; they
liked
to move. And they could spend a lot of time sleeping. That would work out well for him, too.

Birds chattered in the treetops. Lloyd tried to imagine what a path looked like to a dog. The woods were so open here, they could have trotted in any direction they wanted to. He decided it had to do with smells; they were following the scent of previous walkers, human and canine.

A squishy crunch led him to find that he had exterminated a snail. He began to look more at where he was putting his feet. In this way he soon saw a lovely little toad, which he was very happy not to have stepped on. As well as the excreted or regurgitated version of
a small furry animal. Who was responsible for that, he wondered. After that, he only looked down enough not to step on something. Or someone.

A pair of black squirrels raced fearlessly along the most tenuous, slender limb and leaped, one after the other, from that limb to an equally untrustworthy-looking limb on a neighboring tree. Did they ever miss? If he were a squirrel, he might just scamper along the ground and then crawl into his cozy nest. He had heard on the radio that squirrels could live to be twenty-five years old. While rats lived only to the age of three. Twenty-five years seemed like a long time to be a squirrel.

The dogs stopped in their tracks. Following their gaze, Lloyd saw that a doe, equally as still, gazed back. For a magical instant, the four creatures observed one another. Then the doe bounded off in that how-does-such-a-large-animal-move-so-fast-and-yet-so-silently-and-with-such-grace kind of way, and the dogs took after her raised white flag, slobbering panting buffoons crashing through the undergrowth. Lloyd saw it coming. He clicked down on the buttons of the retractable leashes and braced himself, but he was dragged along like a water-skier. He laughed as he tried to slow the dogs down, hopping over fallen branches and ducking under low-hanging ones, picking
his feet up and putting them down more rapidly than he had done lately.

It didn’t take long for the doe to outwit the dogs. She evaporated, and they sniffed the air in all directions. Then, forgetting her, they turned their noses to other fascinating scents in the nearby grasses. Lloyd was still smiling as he watched them and waited for his breathing and his heart to settle back to normal. Maybe if he got a dog, it should be an older dog. A slower dog. One with a touch of arthritis.

They had bolted into a clearing. A pile of melon-sized rocks suggested that someone had once prepared the field for planting, but now it had the air of a long-forgotten place. Lloyd remembered that he had left the coffeemaker on. He had a hankering for that second cup. He clicked his tongue to tell the dogs it was time to go. They pranced back and forth ahead of him, heading back toward the trees.

And then, without warning, the earth fell away, far away, from beneath his feet, and he plummeted after it. The earth fell eight feet down before it stopped falling, and so did Lloyd. When he stopped moving, he was lying in the bottom of a sinkhole twenty feet across. The dogs looked down at him from the rim.

Here’s what had happened: The bedrock below the soil and glacial deposits he was standing on was limestone, with fissures and layers that water could seep through. As the water seeped, it dissolved more and more of the limestone until it was more air and water than solid. Eventually, i.e., at that very moment, there just wasn’t enough rock to hold up the dirt anymore. So the dirt collapsed.

It was unlikely that Lloyd would happen to be standing exactly there when the dirt collapsed, but there he was. It could have been worse. It could have been a twenty-foot-deep sinkhole.

“Go get Timmy,” said Lloyd to the dogs. “No, wait—I’m Timmy. Go tell June Lockhart that I’ve been swallowed up by the earth. She’ll know what to do.”

He was making a joke about a television show in the early 1960s in which a boy named Timmy was rescued every week by his collie, whose name was Lassie. The dogs didn’t know about this program, and they lay down and waited. At first with their ears perked up. When they saw that Lloyd had closed his eyes, they took naps, too.

Lloyd closed his eyes because as he fell, his head had landed on a rock. The field was a pocket of glacial till, and it was about 80 percent rocks. Most of the back side
of his body had also met up with rocks. But it was the meeting of a rock with his head that caused him to close his eyes. He slipped into unconsciousness, and he stayed that way for several hours. The dogs waited patiently.