The Flying Troutmans Read Online Free PDF Page A

the way he breathed when we made love and the way he hopped around when he was happy and the stuff he said about my eyes and my hips and the small of my back, and what the hell can an ashram offer that I can’t? I mean besides silence and solitude and spiritual revitalization. I tried to float again. I could hear Thebes and her friend rehearsing When I Go Mad, a horror play about an insane mother that they were planning to put on for the neighbour kids. They used British accents. Thebes was the insane mother. Here’s a snippet.

    Thebes: Good night, dahling, I’m off to the bar. Friend: New, new, Mutha, please sing to me first. Thebes: Oooookay, I shall siiiiing to you, yeeees, of course, but while I sing you must close your eyes.

    Then there’s the murder attempt and the screaming part, which they were having a really hard time getting through without laughing. They were already on take thirty-five or something.
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    I got up and knocked on Thebes’s door. There were Groovy Girls stickers all over the door and goofy photos of her and her friends.
    Bonjourno! Thebes said. C’mon in. Take five, Abbey, she said to her friend. Thebes was wearing this glittery silversash that she had ripped off a fake Christmas present when they were in Mexico one year, and her friend was wearing one of Thebes’s old Winnie-the-Pooh nightgowns over her jeans. They were flushed and out of breath from all that psychotic killing and bar-hopping.
    When does Logan usually get home? I asked her.
    Eleven is his curfew during the week, but he ignores it, she said. She was reapplying her lipstick, using a CD as a mirror. Abbey was curled up in the fetal position on the bed. Archie comics were everywhere, walls of them, and a big hardcover called A Criminal History of Mankind propped the window open.
    When he gets home, we’re gonna talk about this whole deal, I said.
    Thebes was warming to the idea of looking for Cherkis. She thought he was a poet but she didn’t know exactly. She remembered seeing him when she was three or four, after her operation when the piece of scalpel broke off in her brain.
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    I went into Logan’s room for a look around. There were books and CDs all over the floor and band posters covering the walls. I stared back at the naked guy in the Pixies poster giving the thumbs-down to the world. On the wall by his bed Logan had written a poem or a mission statement or a prayer or something in very tiny letters that slanted down, down, and farther down, until one line obliterated the next.

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    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    You’re not stylish or cool
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people
    Be nicer to people

 
    three
    THAT NIGHT LOGAN CAME HOME DRUNK. I heard him fall down in the kitchen. I went in and switched on the light and he said, Oh man, dude, that is a seriously diaphanous nightgown you’ve got on. I switched the light off again and knelt down beside his head. C’mon, let’s get you up to bed. He wanted to stay there.
    What’s that smell? he asked.
    Cascade, I said. C’mon, let’s go. He pawed at the box of Cascade and spilled it all over the floor and himself.
    Shit, he said. Thebes came downstairs rubbing her eyes, still covered in candy necklace crap, and asked us what was up.
    We’re at the beach, said Logan. Check out the sand. He moved his fingers around in the Cascade crystals.
    Logan’s hammered, I said. Help me get him up to bed. She grabbed one of his feet and began to drag him across the kitchen floor and down the hall.
    Okay, okay, don’t, don’t, he said. I’ll walk. He rambled on about renaming the thumb. We should totally rename the thumb, just the three of us, tonight!
    What do you want to call it? asked Thebes.
    Renée! said Logan. No, Shenée! Yeah…
    We helped him up the stairs and pushed him