It was a great relief they weren’t pursuing me. I thought they likely were rushing to the place where Cade Hernandez and I had jumped into the Little Buffalo River, and how long ago was that, anyway?
Sitting there, the words and pictures came back to me.
I remembered seeing Cade on the upriver side of the sinking van as the kid and I drifted away in the current, how I’d tried to warn him not to go inside for the shadow person belted into the driver’s seat. And I remembered how that little boy scratched and kicked me, and that we ended up so far downriver before I could finally drag myself toward the shore.
Then poof! and thousands of miles later, my universe became the dog hospital.
I pulled back onto the road and sped after the parade of official vehicles. The flashing lights led me down the highway, toward the bridge.
I turned off the headlights and parked Cade’s truck on the side of the road in what was probably the exact spot where we’d abandoned the vehicle hours—all those empty miles—before. Ahead of me, the bank around the bridge was all awash in hot white spotlights. Two men in coveralls stretched a thick steel cable with a hook from the back of the wrecker down toward the brush at the edge of the river.
Near the footing of the bridge, firefighters lifted a wheeled gurney to slide it inside the open doors on the ambulance. Someone was lying on it. But it wasn’t Cade Hernandez on the stretcher; I could clearly see it was an old man.
And as I sat there watching it all, Cade Hernandez, wearing nothing but a pale blue disposable paper jumpsuit, came up around the driver’s side of the truck from somewhere in the darkness behind me.
I nearly jumped completely out of my dog-hospital blanket when he slapped the door and said, “Dude. Why did you steal my truck? Are you naked ?”
“Uh.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I was so relieved to have found my friend.
Or, he found me.
“Dude. That’s ridiculous.”
“Cade?”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
“Dude.”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“I know.”
So, clutching my dog blanket around my hips, I stepped out of the truck and limped awkwardly to the passenger side while Cade slid in behind the wheel.
Then we drove off and left the Little Buffalo River behind us.
• • •
“You are naked, aren’t you?” Cade said.
“I lost my clothes in the river,” I explained.
“That kind of gives me a boner, which is ridiculous when all you have on is a tissue-paper jumpsuit.”
So there we were, both of us driving through Oklahoma in the nighttime, and both of us essentially naked.
Cade said, “You could probably end up getting shot for driving around naked in Oklahoma.”
“Um, okay.”
“L-A-H-O-M-A!” Cade sang.
“Uh.”
After I explained what I remembered about pulling the boy and his dog from the van, and then waking up in Dr. Nathan Pauley’s dog hospital, Cade Hernandez told me this story of what happened to him while we were separated.
“Diving was a big mistake,” he began. “Never dive off a thirty-foot-high fucking bridge wearing basketball shorts.”
I jumped from the bridge, feet first.
“Because as soon as I hit the water,” Cade said, “bam! I was stripped clean out of my shorts. Totally naked, too. They went one way, I went the other. It was ridiculous. Nobody wants to get saved by a naked guy. I’m, like, ‘Hello! I’m naked, and I’m here to save you, dude.’ It was like popping through a Lazarus Door, only I didn’t have wings, and I wasn’t very horny.”
Cade Hernandez would not let go of that book.
“You pulled someone out?” I said.
Cade reached across me and grabbed a can of chewing tobacco from the glove compartment.
He inhaled with satisfaction after he packed a wad of tobacco behind his lip, then Cade spit into his water bottle.
“That grandpa dude who was strapped in the driver’s seat,” he said. “It didn’t look good. The van was tipping over, and I was pretty sure the guy was dead, but I pulled him out anyway and got him up in the weeds on the other side of the bridge. He wasn’t breathing, so I did CPR on him. It was fucking ridiculous. There I was, naked and muddy, making out with some old man I pulled out of a minivan beside what looked like a parking lot at a truck stop. I’m lucky I didn’t get arrested for being a naked fucking perv or something. I think half the state of Oklahoma saw me doing it there after I got him out of the water, and I was just, like, what the fuck happened to Finn? And why am I fucking naked and sucking on some old dude’s face while a bunch of redneck truckers are standing there on the side of the road watching me? Dude. They took pictures with their cell phones. I’m probably naked on a million fucking websites by now.”
Cade spit.
“But you saved the guy’s life.”
“So, yeah. We are both naked heroes, dude.”
“Maybe you should find a spot to pull off so we can get some clothes on.”
Cade spit again and said, “And the worst part was, just when the guy was ready to kick in and breathe on his own, the dude puked right into my mouth.”
I was horrified and repulsed.
And Cade Hernandez said, “I wanted to punch the fucker so bad after that. If this was California, my life would be ruined. Well, probably your life would. I told everyone my name was Finn Easton, from Burnt Mill Creek, California.”
Cade Hernandez had become me, and I had become Cade Hernandez.
“That kind of gives me a boner,” I said.
Cade spit. “Dude, you’re a fucking idiot.”
“The guy at the dog hospital looked in your wallet and saw your license, so he thought I was you.”
“Hmmm. I bet he saw that I have a couple of those colored condoms in my wallet too. Or, should I say you do? I bet dudes in Oklahoma never seen colored condoms.”
I shook my head. In his wallet? I would never keep condoms in my wallet. Some guys never learn.
“What does someone else’s throwup taste like?”
“It wasn’t as bad as you’d think,” Cade said.
• • •
We put on dry clothes standing beside Cade’s truck in an empty camping area at a place called Bernice State Park.
I was very happy to get rid of my dog blanket. It made me itch.
Cade Hernandez simply ripped his way out of his rescue outfit.
“Dude. Paper clothes are ridiculous. Why would anyone invent something as dumb as paper clothes? You can see right through them. The cop who gave me this thing said they use it whenever they arrest naked people, like it’s something they do all the time in Oklahoma.”
“Someone ought to keep statistics on that,” I said.
“Dude. What do you think your dad will do if the cops track you down and tell him they found you naked on the side of a river in Oklahoma doing CPR on some old fucker who puked in your mouth?”
Look: To be honest, the thought had not occurred to me.
I stepped into some clean State of California underwear and pulled on another pair of Burnt Mill Creek Pioneers basketball shorts. Neither of us had brought along a very diverse wardrobe.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I imagine your mom and dad will have something to say after they hear about how you passed out saving a little boy and woke up naked in a dog hospital too. I think this thing gave me fleas.”
I scratched myself.
Cade said, “I guess getting someone else’s puke in your mouth is just as bad as getting a strange dog’s fleas on your balls.”
• • •
We spent the night at Bernice State Park stretched out atop our sleeping bags in the mess of Cade’s camper shell. There were no other humans visible in the campground; and we’d both had all the interaction with people from Oklahoma we could tolerate for one day.
/> For some reason, having sleeping bags unrolled and camping out inside a truck bed—which was smaller than the king-size bed we’d shared at the E-Z Rest motel the night before—canceled out the instinct-driven construction of a Berlin Wall, which was kind of ridiculous, because Cade Hernandez and I were so cramped together inside his camper that we actually touched each other.
I suppose that adolescent sexual confusion—a gift from the greatest generation, the boys who beat the Nazis and grew up listening to radio drama—has a way of knackering into sexual certainty when guys are trying to get some sleep inside pickup trucks. And as Cade Hernandez and I lay there eating Oreo cookies in the quiet black nothingness of an Oklahoma midnight, our own blank-screen radio theater played out as something like this:
A Detour in the Year We Grew Up
CADE: I need to tell you, Finn—we’re about twenty miles past Dunston University.
FINN: That’s one second at Earth speed. No big deal, I guess.
CADE: So. I was thinking about a lot of shit today. I’m not so sure I want to visit Dunston University tomorrow, I mean, after what happened to us today. I feel like it was kind of a sign, telling us that we should take a little detour. Or a big one.
FINN: I never really cared about visiting Dunston in the first place. I just wanted to hang out with you. And I wanted to get away from my house. I wanted to see if I could get out of the book.
CADE: Do you think you did it?
FINN: Well, for a little while today I was Cade Hernandez and you were Finn Easton.
CADE: I didn’t feel like eating anyone, though. But I could go for some grits.
FINN: I’m hungry too.
CADE: Well, don’t fucking look at me, incomer. Have another Oreo.
FINN: What do you think, then?
CADE: Think about what? (There is a long pause when Finn does not answer.) I’ll tell you what I think: I’ve been thinking about this year, and next year too—all those miles, according to you. It was a damn good year—and that’s not in any fucking book that was written out ahead of time. Monica Fassbinder. Playing baseball. Fucking with the BEST Test. Hanging out with you and Julia. Puking in Blake Grunwald’s bed. Being here with my best friend eating Oreos for dinner, wherever the hell we are. Free underwear and shampoo from Governor Oldfucker.
FINN: They put dead things in shampoo.
CADE: Oh, yeah, and Mr. Nossik, too.
FINN: A ticking Nazi time bomb.
CADE: Yeah.
FINN: It was a good year, Cade.
CADE: Coming up on our last year, then who knows? It’s not like it’s been written down for you, dude. You could give your dad a break sometimes. You’re not really stuck in anything, and we could prove it by not going to Dunston tomorrow. Take a detour.
FINN: Maybe.
CADE: And tell your dad to write another book. I need to know if you ever get laid or eat someone.
FINN: No. (Pauses) So you think a detour to go where?
CADE: Well. I was looking at the map, and I figure we’re maybe about eight or nine hours away from Chicago.
FINN: In eight or nine hours, we will be more than half a million miles away from exactly this spot, no matter which way we go. We might as well be sitting in Chicago right now.
CADE: Dude.
FINN: What?
CADE: Don’t you want to see her?
FINN: More than anything else I can think of.
CADE: Promise not to eat me?
FINN: You’re a shithead.
CADE: Let’s go to Chicago tomorrow.
FINN: You’re the best human on this planet, Cade.
CADE: Swear to God you won’t eat me?
The End
And just before we both shut up and fell asleep, Cade reached over and poked his index finger into my sternum and said, “A centipede with ninety-six amputations.”
I wasn’t wearing a shirt.
THE LAZARUS DOOR
In the State of California, things got crazy that night.
A man who identified himself as “Doctor” Nathan Pauley phoned Cade Hernandez’s parents in Burnt Mill Creek and told them a ridiculous story about finding their naked and unconscious son beside a rain-swollen river in northeastern Oklahoma. He explained that Cade Hernandez—their son, me—selflessly dove (although I actually jumped ) into the river in order to save the life of a trapped drowning boy and his little dog.
Their son was a hero!
Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez just kept asking the same question, which was this: Was he sure it was Cade he found?
So Nathan Pauley, D.V.M., said that he’d seen Cade Hernandez’s California driver’s license, and even copied down the plates on Cade’s pickup. And he also told them that later their son acted aggressively and threatened him and then drove away—naked—before he or the sheriff’s office could figure out what had happened at the river. Then Nathan Pauley asked Cade’s parents about their son’s heterochromatic eyes and the “Lazarus Door” scar along his spine, and where the family actually came from.
Argentina, they answered politely.
It was ridiculous.
Look: Cade’s parents did not speak telephone-English-with-a-crazy-guy-in-Oklahoma very well, but they had read the Spanish-language version of my father’s novel, and they had also known me for billions of miles—ever since Cade Hernandez and I became friends. So Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez knew pretty much everything there was to know about the epileptic boy. And they realized Nathan Pauley had mistaken me—Finn Easton, the human—for their son—Cade Hernandez, another human—whom the “doctor” assumed was a fallen angel–cannibal alien here to destroy mankind.
After all, who wouldn’t think that?
Fifteen minutes, or eighteen thousand miles, later, a man named Billy Gruber from the Craig County, Oklahoma, sheriff’s department phoned my parents—Mike and Tracy Easton—in an attempt to track down their son. Deputy Billy Gruber told them an equally ridiculous story about something I had never done, which included being found naked in the mud below a bridge on the Little Buffalo River while performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on an elderly man who had nearly drowned when he accidentally drove himself, his grandson, and their wire-haired terrier dog in a minivan loaded with groceries directly into the deep and muddy river.
Finn Easton was a hero too!
Billy Gruber went on to tell my parents that apparently their son—who was actually Cade Hernandez and not me—had disappeared from the accident scene that night wearing nothing but a paper jailhouse jumpsuit, and that he had either been abducted or perhaps hitched a ride with a friendly trucker, and did they have any idea where their son, Finn Easton, might be heading?
“Um, Dunston University?” my dad said.
And, by the way, Deputy Billy Gruber added, had my parents ever read a book called The Lazarus Door? Because there was something awfully unsettling about another boy who’d been pulled naked from the Little Buffalo River too, and their son, Finn—who was actually Cade Hernandez and not me—might be in danger of being eaten.
My mother and father kept asking Deputy Billy Gruber the same question, which also was this: Was he sure it was their son he was talking about?
And six thousand miles, or five minutes, later, looking like confused and frightened ghosts from the flood, Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez showed up at the front door of my parents’ home in San Francisquito Canyon, the site of the worst accident in the history of self-taught civil engineering.
It was a ridiculous night.
• • •
“Um, hello? Dad?”
“Finn? Where the hell are you? What’s going on? Do you realize the shit we’ve been going through all night? Are you okay?”
“Um.”
Five questions.
I had no idea where the jumping-in point to the story of the past one-point-seven million miles would be, but as I stood there in my shorts and T-shirt, outside on a street in the early afternoon with my face pressed up against a smudged black handset connected to a t
elephone we actually had to put coins in to operate, which, I thought, most likely contained a knackering universe of pathogens unto itself, I finally realized something.
What I realized was this: I was in my own story now, and I had the power to tell it—or not tell it—to my father.
“Normal,” I said. “I am in a city called Normal, which is in the middle of Illinois, Dad.”
Who’d have ever thought I’d have to go to Illinois to be in Normal?
“What are you doing there?”
“Um, I am talking on a phone that you have to put quarters in to make it work, like one of those vibrating helicopter rides for toddlers in front of supermarkets. And then Cade and I are going to drive up to see Julia Bishop, Dad.”
I heard my dad sigh. Through the earpiece it sounded like fine-grain sandpaper brushing on whitewood.
“Are you both okay?”
“Yes. We’re fine.”
I continued. “We saw an accident where a van drove into a river. Cade and I pulled the people out of the water. That’s what happened yesterday, and now we’re here, in Normal.”
Dad said, “Cade’s parents got a crazy phone call from some doctor in Oklahoma.”
“Nathan Pauley. He’s a dog doctor.”
“And a sheriff’s deputy called us last night. We couldn’t figure out who anyone was talking about.”
“They thought I was Cade and Cade was me,” I said. “Dad? They actually thought we were really from the book.”
“I know.”
“People are stupid.”
Then my dad said, “I’m sorry for all this shit, Finn. It’s all been my fault. Maybe I should write all those assholes another book.”
“Just keep me out of it,” I said. “But Cade said you could put him in it, and you could even kill him if you want.”
Dad laughed. “Cade Hernandez did not actually read the book.”
“Yes,” I said. “He did. The ending pissed him off.”
I had never felt so free of my father’s book in my entire life. And that was precisely when I totally figured out how I—Finn Easton—could never have been trapped in my dad’s novel in the first place.