Jumping Off the Planet Read online

  "Okay, Stinky!" I said. "Look at me."

  It worked; I got his attention. "Don't call me that!" he cried angrily.

  "All right, but you have to look at me. I'm going to lower my belt. Don't reach for it until I tell you, okay? Because you're only going to get one chance. I'm coming down now—"

  Still holding onto the end of Douglas's belt, I edged downward, just a little bit at first—I felt myself start to slide—and Douglas caught the slack instantly. Some rocks and pebbles rolled away around me. But I didn't follow them. I might live through this after all. "A little bit more, Doug. I'm almost there." I looped my belt around my other wrist, like Douglas had done, and lowered it to Stinky. It almost reached. I stretched as far as I could.

  "Okay, kiddo," I said. "On three—"

  "I can't do it!" he whined. "I can't!"

  "Yes, you can," said Douglas. "Just listen to me—"

  That wasn't going to work, Stinky never listened to anyone, "No, Doug, Stinky's right. He can't reach it. Stinky's just a little baby. He can't do anything—"

  It worked. Before I'd finished the sentence, Stinky had swung and grabbed the end of my belt and nearly yanked me off the wall of the crater, he grabbed so hard. Without thinking, I pulled back in response, and Doug pulled on me, and Dad was there pulling on Doug, and somehow we all ended up back on the path, Doug against Dad with Dad holding him tight, and me against Doug with Doug holding me, and Stinky in my arms, hanging onto me like a human death-grip. The four of us just stayed like that for the longest time, all of us trying to catch our breaths at once.

  I kept my eyes closed. Because when I opened them, all there was to see was how deep the crater was and how high we were—and all that empty space made me want to throw up more than ever now.

  Eventually we untangled ourselves—very carefully. It would have been real stupid to fall down the hole now. Dad looked gray and shaken, but he waved me off when I asked if he was all right. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he looked like he didn't know what—finally he just waved his hand as if to erase everything and pointed back up the path.

  Douglas took Stinky by the hand to follow him—and of course, Stinky tried to pull away. "Let me go!" he whined. "I gotta go to the bathroom! I gotta pee!" That was what he always said when he didn't want to cooperate. And it usually worked, because what if he was telling the truth?

  But right now—Weird wasn't letting go.

  "Go ahead," I said, coming up to block his other side. He wasn't running away again.

  "Where?" he demanded.

  "I dunno," I said in that really bland, passive-aggressive voice I'd learned to use on him. "Do you see a bathroom around here?"

  He looked around. We were a quarter of the way down the wall of the biggest hole in the world, and we could see forever in all directions. There were no bathrooms, no water faucets, no elevators, no nothing. Stinky started crying, "But I gotta pee!"

  "Well, then, just pee!"

  "Where?"

  "Here!"

  "But everybody'll see!"

  "There's no one to see! And besides we're so far away from everything, no one could see anything anyway. Just go!"

  "I can't!"

  "Then hold it till we get back to the top!"

  "I can't! It's too far!"

  "We told you not to come running down."

  "But I gotta go!"

  "Then go here!"

  "I can't!"

  The kid was paralyzed. No matter what anyone said, all he could say was "I can't!" So I said, "Well then, just pee in your pants and stop whining!"

  So he did.

  Now he was wet, uncomfortable, and smelled bad. But this wasn't as bad as when he threw up in the cooler and spoiled everyone's lunch, and at least now that we'd gotten Stinky's first accident out of the way, we could get on with the fun part of the trip. Ha ha.

  By this time Dad had realized we weren't following. When he got back down to us, Weird was yelling at Stinky, "Why did you pee in your pants?" and Stinky was crying full blast that I'd told him to.

  That's when Dad did something strange. Stranger than usual. He didn't say anything at all. He stopped where he was and sat down. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and he just sat and stared and looked sullen in that way he gets when he's thinking real hard about something—like a bad decision. I was sure he was thinking about turning around and taking us all back to El Paso.

  "Now look what you've done—" I began to say to Stinky, but Weird swatted me hard across the chest with the back of his hand and told me to shut up, which actually startled me into silence, because Weird almost never touches anyone, let alone me.

  "What's he doing?" Stinky asked.

  Weird shook his head and grunted. "I dunno." He sounded kinda faraway when he said it. That's when I figured out that something was going on, but nobody had told me yet. Whatever Weird knew, he wasn't saying.

  "Are you all right?" Weird asked.

  Dad took a deep breath. "I was thinking about the moon." He pointed out at the big emptiness below us. "On the moon, there are craters this size everywhere. And bigger ones too. There's nothing special about a crater on the moon. Could you imagine living every day of your life in a place like this?"

  Weird didn't answer. Neither did I. How do you answer a question like that? We just looked at each other.

  Dad took another breath. "Y'know, people say that kids are the hope of the future—that a baby is the human race's way of insisting that the universe give us another chance. But I don't know. Sometimes it feels like a baby is just another chance to screw things up even worse than before. There's so much you kids don't understand, and I wish I could explain it to you, but I can't, because I'm not sure I understand it myself. And I can't ask you to forgive us because ... well, I don't have the excuse that we did our best, because I know we didn't."

  I'd never heard Dad talk like this before and it sort of scared me. It was kind of like one of those movies where someone knows he's going to die soon and is trying to get all his good-byes said in two minutes. And everybody else is supposed to forgive him for being a jerk. I don't know why they always forgive each other. I wouldn't.

  But whatever Dad was talking about, I didn't think he was dying. Instead, he started talking about the world and the mess it was in and all that kind of stuff. Corporate warfare. Chocolate dollars. Sugar dollars. Beef dollars. Oil dollars. Plastic dollars. Kilocalorie dollars. Silicon dollars. Cyberdollars. All of them spreading into new territories, like so many economic disease vectors, leaving a trail of infected and collapsing economies behind them. Governments unable to control their own economies because international corporatism had made all borders irrelevant. Money flowed like water seeking its level. Where it got too hot, steam rose—where it got cold again, rain fell. The economic weather was turning into a tropical storm and circling to become a global hurricane of dollars funneling around and around. According to Dad.

  I couldn't see exactly how or why it would affect us, but he said it was "tear-down time." Every so often, people just get tired and frustrated with building—every twenty or thirty years or so, they start tearing down what the last generation built, even if it still works, just to tear something down and rebuild it. So the money was circling like flies, unwilling to land anywhere. Only this time, it wasn't landing. It was going away. That was why we didn't have the money for the reclamation projects or the recycling we needed and why everything was getting worse.

  "This planet is no place to raise a family," he said bitterly. "It's just a matter of time until the whole planet turns into Calcutta." That part I understood. There were plagues in Calcutta. All over India. And Rome too. Black Peritonitis. African Measles. Europe was shutting itself down in panic, and brushfire wars had broken out all up and down the eastern half of Asia. Fifth World revolutions. Wars and plagues. Craziness everywhere. The planet didn't have the resources to manage itself anymore. Like the guy on TV said, "The machinery is breaking down fa
ster than we can fix it."

  "The problem is, we're all in it together, whether we want to be or not," Dad said. "More and more I look around at the way things are going, and I don't want to be part of it anymore. When I was your age, Charles, everything seemed so simple and easy. You don't know how easy it is to be a kid—"

  "Yeah, right."

  "—but then I grew up and everything got complex, and I just wish I could figure out how to get back to what's really important. You don't understand any of this, do you? And you won't, not until you turn forty." He sighed. "But wouldn't you just like to get up and go away sometime? Someplace new, where you can start fresh?"

  Well, yeah. But there isn't any such place. It's all people, everywhere. So it's silly to dream of it. The best you can do is go up in the hills once in a while and listen to your music alone. But I didn't say any of this aloud. Why bother? In three and a half weeks, we'd be back in the war zone with Mom again.

  I knew Dad wanted me to say something, but I'd stopped doing that a long time ago. There was no cookie there. When he realized I was simply waiting for him to do something, he stood up and brushed the dirt from his pants. "Well, come on, let's get going." He pointed toward the rim of the crater and we all started hiking upward. It was a difficult climb, not because it was too steep—it was just hard because it was all up.

  Stinky whined the whole way that it was too hard and kept demanding that someone carry him, but no one wanted to touch him because he smelled so bad. I said, "You shoulda thought of that before you started running down." Then Weird made one of his pseudo-profound observations about how it's easier to cooperate with gravity than fight it, like this meant something, so I called him a techno-geek, and he said, "Yeah, so?"

  Dad started to say something about that, one of those comfort-lies that grownups tell, but Weird interrupted him. "No, Dad—everybody's a geek about something. I am a techno-geek. You're a music-geek. And Charles is a nastiness-geek because he doesn't have anything else to be geeky for."

  It was the longest paragraph I'd ever heard out of Weird that didn't have the word gigabyte in it. I didn't have the breath left to tell him what he was full of. I just grunted, "Devour my richard," which is the polite way of saying it. "And Stinky's a pee-geek," I added, just a little louder.

  "Daddy—" Stinky wailed.

  "Well, it's your own damn fault! Dad told you not to go running down! Now we've all got to hike back up—"

  At this point, Dad should have been screaming at all of us to shut up. Instead, he stopped. He squatted down in front of Stinky to look at him eye-to-eye. "There's a lesson here," he said.

  "Huh?" Stinky rubbed his eyes.

  "Do you know what it is?" Dad asked.

  Stinky shook his head slowly.

  "Two things. First—never go anywhere unless you know how you're going to get back. Look down. Suppose we had let you go all the way down to the bottom. Do you think you could climb all the way back up to the top? Look how much trouble you're having going just this short way."

  "It's not a short way!" Stinky wailed. "It's a long way."

  Dad ignored him. "And the second lesson—go to the bathroom before you go anywhere. Either that or learn to poop in the bushes."

  "I wanna go home," Stinky said flatly. "I wanna go home now."

  Dad responded with that grunt of resignation he does so well, whenever he realizes that whichever one of us he's talking to isn't really listening. Without saying another word, he straightened and started back up the crater wall. If he was angry, it was a kind of anger I'd never seen before. He didn't show any emotion at all. I looked at Weird, but he was pushing Stinky up the slope and no one was looking at me and I wondered why I had bothered to come at all. Here we were, standing inside the biggest hole in the world where a ton of rock had fallen out of the sky and blasted a hole so deep you could put a roof on it and have a stadium large enough for the Godzilla Bowl—and the only important lesson to be learned from our visit was that you should go to the bathroom before you went anywhere. Sheesh.

  We finally got to the top and Weird took Stinky into the bathroom and got him cleaned up and into some fresh clothes, while Dad and I sat on a bench and sipped sodas and waited. Dad didn't say anything. He was still off somewhere else. On the moon, I guess.

  "We're really screwed up, aren't we?"

  Dad looked up. "Eh?"

  "Us," I said. "Weird and Stinky and me. We're not exactly the Happy Family." He looked at me blankly. "The Happy Family, like on TV? You know? George and June and all the little Happys."

  Dad got it then. "Nobody is the Happy family," he said. "Not even the Happys. It's all pretend."

  "Yeah, but we can't even pretend to be happy. We're really screwed." I don't know why I said the next part, it just fell out of my mouth. "I don't blame you for hating us."

  Dad looked startled. "I don't hate you," he said. "I love you, Charles. More than you realize. All of you. And—" this was where his voice got funny "—I don't think you're screwed up. None of you. I think you're terrific kids. I wish I could spend more time with you."

  "Yeah, like this—" I waved my hand in the direction of the crater "—is a lot of fun."

  "For me, it is. I'm sorry you're not having a good time."

  "I'm having an okay time," I admitted. The crater had been interesting enough. Because it was so big. Living in Tube-Town, you never really got an idea of the size of anything.

  Dad sighed. "I really do wish I could live with you and be a real father. All the time. Maybe it would be better for all of us."

  "Yeah, well then why don't you?"

  "It's a long story."

  "I'm not going anywhere."

  "Your mom—" He stopped himself. He said something else instead of what he almost said. "Your mom is a good woman. She works very hard for you boys. I'd live closer to you if I could. She asked me not to. She thinks it would be ... disruptive."

  "Yeah, so? Don't you get a vote?"

  Dad shook his head. "It's too complicated to explain." He looked at me sadly. "You really are having a bad time of it, aren't you?"

  "I'll do better in my next life, okay?"

  "Charles ... " Dad began carefully, his voice as serious as I'd ever heard it. "I want to ask you something—"

  But before he could ask, Weird and Stinky came back, and Stinky started crying immediately that he wanted a soda too. And then he wanted something from the souvenir rack, and whatever Dad had wanted to ask me was forgotten while Weird and Stinky played another round of I-Wanna-No-You-Can't. Dad sighed and patted me on the shoulder. "Later, Charles." I followed him into the souvenir part of the store, where he tried unsuccessfully to steer Stinky's attention toward the cheaper toys.

  Finally, they compromised on a programmable monkey—which struck me as being sort of redundant, especially for Stinky, but maybe it would keep him quiet for a while. Dad even bought some extra memory for the monkey. He was chatting with the lady behind the counter while she rang up the sale and suddenly she offered him some old memory cards that someone else had used and returned and she couldn't resell as new, so Dad bought them at half-price. It was a lot of memory, but Dad bought it all. He even paid cash, which for him is serious. Credit dollars are a lot more flexible, even though they're not worth as much. Weird offered to install them, but Dad insisted on doing it himself. "Let me prove I'm good at something besides paying the bills," he said as he snapped them into the monkey's backside.

  Later, when we were back in the car and on the road again, with Stinky in the back happily trying to teach the monkey how to fart, I asked, "Dad, you were going to ask me something back there—?"

  "Never mind," he said. "It wasn't important."

  Only we both knew he was lying. Whatever it was.

  CROSSING THE LINE

  Mexico is hot. Hotter than Arizona. Maybe hotter than Hell. And there are these little tiny lizards, small as bugs, everywhere. They flicker across the sidewalk so fast, they look like heat ripples.

 
The surprising thing was how clean everything was. Everybody in Bunker City says that Mexico is dirty, the streets are dirty, and the people are dirty. But it isn't like that at all. Everywhere we went, everything was hot and bright and clean. Cleaner than Bunker City. Which just proved what I already knew. When people don't know what they're talking about, they make stuff up.

  And the Mexicans were friendly too. Dad's Spanish wasn't all that good, but Weird and I knew enough to get by, and where we didn't, there was usually someone else around who spoke enough English to help. So we weren't going to starve to death.

  We headed south on the new highway. Dad didn't talk much, not about where we were going. He said it was a Magical Mystery Tour, which meant that you weren't supposed to know where you were going until you got there, so the fun had to be in the going, not the arrival; but I was pretty sure Dad had a destination in mind. Every so often I'd catch him muttering about travel times and schedules, so I knew this trip wasn't as random as he kept saying.

  We stayed our first night in Mexico at a Best Inn, which is two lies in as many words, but never mind. We were on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Baja, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with dirty blue ocean to the west and scruffy brown desert to the east and some purple hills in the distance beyond that.

  After dinner, there wasn't much of anything to do except stand around watching Stinky playing on the swings with his monkey or look up at the stars. They were a lot brighter here than they were in El Paso. In fact, in El Paso, we could hardly see them at all, so it was something different to just look up at the sky and see how bright it really was. Weird saw a shooting star, and then I saw one too. Dad pointed out Orion's belt and the Big Dipper and a couple of other constellations as if they meant something. I asked him where Sirius was and Betelgeuse and some of the other places where the bright-liners went, but he didn't know. Dad said that Sirius was the North Star, so all we had to do was look north, but Weird said no, Polaris was the North Star, not Sirius.