The Porcupine of Truth Read online

  “What happened?” she asks, sitting him down on the bed.

  “I was telling him about something I found. It’s from his dad,” I say. “There’s more —”

  She doesn’t look up at me. “This isn’t a good time to upset him,” she says. “Go downstairs.”

  “But —”

  “DOWNSTAIRS,” she barks. It’s as angry as she’s ever been with me.

  My blood freezes. I walk, numb, through the kitchen to the basement stairs. I descend. I count to 255 by fifteens. It does nothing for me.

  When I see Aisha, I try to breathe normally. I feel underwater. I sit back down next to her.

  “What’d he say?” she asks.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I go to pull it out, but the case gets stuck against the fabric. I pull harder, and it won’t come out, and then I’m tugging with all my might, and it just won’t budge. When I give up and remove my hand, the phone slips out of my pocket and onto the floor. I stomp on it. I slam my foot down, again and again, and I keep slamming my foot down until my phone is in pieces, strewn across the basement carpet.

  Aisha is expressionless. Just sort of there. This is a dealbreaker. She thinks I’m totally messed up, and she’s going to walk away, out of my life, and I’ll never see her again. Which is perfect, because finally I have a friend. Someone who kind of gets me. It’s been a long time, as in forever, and now she’s here, and soon she’ll be gone, because that’s what happens when people get close to you. And I’m so frustrated that I walk into the bathroom and slam the door behind me.

  The tub is still a little wet from this morning’s showers, but I don’t care. I sit down in the cold puddle, lean back, and close my eyes.

  I just kind of disappear into my brain for a while and allow the world to go away. It’s what I do sometimes back home in New York. Sometimes it’s better to be nowhere than somewhere. So that’s where I go. Not mad, not sad. Just nowhere, nothing. I go there for a while.

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes, Aisha is sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor, looking at me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out. More importantly, a hot girl has been watching me sleep. I check my breath to make sure it’s not terrible, then I rub my eyes and sit up.

  “Sorry,” I say, about nothing in particular. Or maybe everything.

  She shrugs it off, digs into her pocket, and pulls out my phone. She has Scotch-taped the pieces together. It’s clearly never going to work again, but it feels like the kindest possible thing for her to have done while I slept.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking it from her. “It’s perfect.” I pretend to make a call on it. “Hey, Dad? Great to hear from you! I miss you too. I always love our conversations. You aren’t the shittiest father on the planet at all!”

  “Hey, at least he didn’t kick you out,” she says.

  I nod a few times. “Yep, he’s a gem.” I pick up the phone again. “Hi Mom! Thanks for making me feel like it was my fault that my dad turned blue!”

  Aisha reaches out and touches my forearm. “I saw your mom upstairs and filled her in a little. She felt bad. She said he was having a tough day before all that. You just talked to him at a bad time.”

  I nod and nod. I don’t know what to say.

  “So are we gonna look at more of your grandpa’s stuff?”

  I don’t have to be asked twice. I start to climb out of the tub.

  “But first,” she says. She reaches into her pocket and hands me a smartphone. It looks new. “I thought you might need another one without all the tape on it,” she says.

  I look at her and then look back at the phone. “You got this for me?”

  She nods. “Consider it the least I could do. You’re putting me up and all.”

  I shake my head. I have never had a friend who would do something like this for me. Surprise me with a gift. “You don’t have the money to waste on this,” I say.

  “It was fifty bucks at Best Buy, and your mom went halvsies with me. She told me you’re on Verizon. She gave me your password. I already activated it with your number.”

  I feel this tightness in my throat and I have to avoid her eyes and look at the floor. “I’ll pay you back,” I finally say, still studying the carpet beneath my feet.

  “Forget about it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and I remind myself to thank my mom too. That was pretty surprising, and pretty darn nice.

  We walk out of the bathroom and go through the rest of my grandfather’s box. I find a spiral notebook with a mustard-yellow cover. Some of the pages are yellowed and water-stained. I open it to the first page.

  I crack a smile. These are puns I could have come up with, definitely. And something about seeing his edits makes me feel like I’m watching his brain work, that he is alive and with me. I say, “Listen to this,” and I read the page to Aisha.

  She snorts a few times. The dead giveaway one makes her laugh.

  “There’s like pages and pages of this stuff,” I say, thumbing through the notebook.

  “Save it,” she says.

  “For when?”

  “When I’m not around? I dunno.”

  I read another page or two to myself. One page is titled “Little-Known Bible Verses,” and the first one listed is “The Parboil of the Evil Farmer.” The second starts, “In the beginning, God created light bulbs. Wait. That was General Electric.”

  While I don’t know much about the Bible, it seems wacky funny. I like wacky funny. And as much as I know my grandfather left his family and was a drunk and is mostly responsible for my dad being the way he is, I feel like the person who wrote these might actually understand me.

  “I think I want to find him,” I say.

  “You think we could?” Aisha asks, and I like that she uses the word we.

  I pull out my laptop and Google the name Russ Smith, and I find out that there’s a college basketball star with that name. I try Russell, and I get a Wikipedia page devoted to all the famous people with that name. There are eleven. I am about to click on one who is a writer when I realize what I’m doing. Yeah. He’s probably not famous. Not a lot of people disappear and escape detection for thirty years by becoming famous.

  I do a census search, and there are 6,713 Russell Smiths. I narrow it to Montana and suddenly there are only thirty-five, and my heart jumps. Then I look closer, and I see that the census search results stop at 1940.

  “Dang,” I say.

  Surely someone must have done this. My dad must have searched for his own dad online, right? But how the hell can I be sure of that? He’s a drunk. It’s hard to predict what he’s done in his life or on Google. I have no idea.

  I soldier on to ancestry.com. I put in Russ’s name, choose a birth date of 1940, and set the parameters to plus or minus ten years. I figure if my dad was born in the 1960s, that’s about right for my grandfather. I specify Billings, Montana.

  A bunch of newspaper articles come up with what appear to be baseball box scores with the name Russell in it. Not helpful. This search is futile.

  “What about those references in the letter to the pastor?” Aisha asks. She’s busy going through the box.

  “Oh yeah.” I pull the letter out of my pocket and scan it. I type KSREF into Google and study the results. “Kenya Sugar Research Foundation. Yeah. Unless he moved to Africa or was looking to become a soccer referee in Kansas, that’s not so helpful.”

  I type in “world’s most dangerous and expensive grid.” All sorts of stuff about clean energy and airports come up. I sigh deeply. “Meh. I think we’re back to step one.”

  “Who were those people in the letter? From Wyoming?” she asks.

  “Thermopolis. Thomas and Laurelei. He also says something about ‘Leff.’ Maybe that’s the last name?”

  She grabs my laptop from me and goes to whitepages.com, where she types “thomas and laurelei leff thermopolis wyoming.” As the cursor spins, I think about whether we should ask the pastor again. He must know something. But he didn’t tell us before, and n
ow we’ve stolen stuff from him. It won’t take him long to figure that out.

  Up pops an entry for Laurelei V. Leff, age sixty-five to seventy. There’s an address in Thermopolis, but no phone number. Aisha elbows me and she pulls up Google Maps and types in the address. The location appears on-screen, and Aisha asks for directions, putting Billings in as the origin. It’s 190 miles away, and it would take a little over three hours to drive there.

  I realize what’s happening, and it fills me with shivers. “We don’t have to,” I say, but I don’t really mean it.

  “Of course we do,” she says. “You want to find your grandfather. We have one lead. I got wheels, you got a credit card. We can leave in the morning and be back by dinner.”

  I think about the credit card part. I mean, it all comes down to what’s a “reasonable” expense. Coffee is reasonable. A movie. But a trip to Wyoming? Is this reasonable? It’s tough to say. The whole thing is so unreasonable it’s hard to find a lot of reason.

  We are interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs, then the back door opening. A strange voice says, “So you’ll give him the morphine rectally when needed?”

  My mother says, “Yes.”

  I give Aisha an embarrassed look, but she doesn’t react to it.

  “He’s in a lot of pain,” the man’s voice says. “That’s typical and to be expected. When these things progress …”

  “And it’s progressing?” Mom says.

  “Sadly, it appears that way.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  The man clears his throat. “Maybe a few months.”

  “Well, thank you,” my mother says.

  “Call if you need anything,” the man says, and we hear the door shut.

  Aisha and I look at each other. There are footsteps on the stairs. My mother is paying her first visit to our lair. She rounds the corner, a brave smile on her face. She doesn’t look like my mom, the practiced, controlled woman I know. She looks like she’s trying to be someone else.

  “I assume you heard that.” Her voice is softer than usual. This is her in crisis mode.

  I nod and keep my head down.

  She addresses Aisha. “I’m sure it’s odd to be here for all this family drama.”

  Aisha shrugs her shoulders. “I wish I could help.”

  My mother says, “Did you give him the phone?”

  Aisha nods.

  “Thanks, by the way,” I say to my mom. “Really.”

  She nods, and then addresses Aisha again. “I feel very glad to know you’re here with Carson. He needs the distraction.” Mom faces me. “I understand that you must feel terribly sad about your father. And I want you to know I feel that too. And it’s okay to feel that.”

  I nod, and the chilly, empty feeling in my gut returns.

  “I don’t know exactly what it is you’ve found down here, kids, but I have to ask you to not bother your father with that right now. What he needs is to rest.”

  I nod again.

  “It must be very hard for you to understand what this is all about. Aisha told me you found some information that might mean your grandfather is still alive. What you need to understand is that even if that’s true, he walked out on your father. Even if you found him, your father does not have the strength for some kind of reconciliation. He doesn’t want that. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  I nod a third time.

  “Can you say something, Carson?”

  “I get it,” I say.

  She smiles. “Good. And I do understand that what you were doing was done from the goodness of your heart. What I want to say to you is that you’re a beautiful young man, and the impulse to help is exactly what I’d expect from you. Just not in this way, perhaps.”

  “Gotcha.”

  My mother heads upstairs, and Aisha and I sit on the bed in silence for a bit. I’m trying to put it all together. My grandfather is still alive. My father is dying, and he doesn’t know his dad is still alive. My father doesn’t want to know. And he’s got maybe months left in his life.

  “I just want to know where he is for me, you know?” I say finally. “He’s my grandfather.”

  “Yup. Me too, now that I’m like your honorary sister.”

  “Yeah, congratulations on that,” I say ruefully.

  “Hey, I like your family,” she says.

  I’ll have to think about that one for a bit. Like a long bit, probably.

  I spend a few more hours poring over the contents of the box. I open every letter. They are all illegible, soggy, faded, blurred. I stare at the unreadable words and try to will them to be as they were before the flood. It’s mostly useless, this box we’ve found. It’s a pulsing beacon in the dark recesses of our basement, pulling us toward a mystery that may never be solved.

  SLEEPING IS IMPOSSIBLE, what with the box, and the fact that my neighbor might know by now that he’s been robbed, and that the robbers are next door, and if he knows this, he must know that we have in our possession all sorts of clues he doesn’t want us to have. And then there’s my dry mouth, and I want a glass of water, and I curse myself again for not getting one before I went to bed, because, of course, the sink window is visible from his attic. And I don’t think I can take that. Seeing the pastor again, ever.

  I turn on the flashlight app on my phone and grab my grandfather’s journal. The weathered pages crinkle as I turn them, and I try not to wake up Aisha. The notebook is a weird combination of jokes, ideas, and diary entries.

  I lie down again, and I open the journal wide and place it face down on my chest. This was two years before he left. Why was my grandfather so tired of his brain? What was so wrong? And did he run away? It’s all so hard to understand. Who is this person who jokes like me and wants to escape just like I do sometimes? I pick the journal back up, flip ahead a few more pages, and he’s written a scene.

  Is this, like, the funniest thing ever? No. But I can completely imagine coming up with something like this, and writing it down, and feeling that sense of pride that you get when you make yourself laugh. I don’t know if that’s universal, but I totally get it. And so does Russ.

  How is it that two people who have never even met could be so much alike? Does sharing the same DNA make people do the same sorts of things, and where does that end, and, like, upbringing take over? How does heredity actually work?

  These thoughts swirl through my head for a while, and then, when I get so restless on the carpet that I could scream, I creep up the stairs.

  The pastor’s attic light is off, thankfully. I grab a glass and turn on the faucet and gulp down a couple glasses of water.

  A slight noise comes from my dad’s room. My heart quickens. What if he’s struggling? Does my mother have some sort of baby monitor in there so she can hear him in case he needs her?

  I softly step toward the hallway. The noise is muffled and strange, high-pitched almost. I approach the door. It sounds like he’s hyperventilating in his sleep.

  I stand there for what feels like hours, alternately trying to psych myself up to go into his room or go back downstairs. Neither works. I just stay planted until my feet feel stuck. And when I’m as close as I can get to ready, I take a deep breath, knock on the door, and walk in.

  I can see his outline faintly in the moonlight. He is on his side in his tattered blue sweatpants and white undershirt, cradling a pillow in one arm and an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle in the other.

  Goddamn alcohol. He’s dying. He’s on morphine. And somehow he still has a bottle of whiskey.

  He is rocking back and forth, forth and back, and he’s sobbing. The staccato sobs sound like they’re coming from his nose. Every time he makes a noise, it feels like somebody is choking the air out of me.

  I approach the side of his bed. “Dad,” I say softly. “Wake up, Dad.” Looking down at his body, I can see clearly that he’s dying. He’s dying. He’s sick and frail and human. All the things your dad is not supposed to be.

 
“Dad,” I whisper again. He doesn’t have many nights left, according to the doctor. And the fact that he is sobbing one of those away is too much to take. “Wake up, Dad.”

  He doesn’t wake at first, so I softly knee the mattress near his head. His eyes creep open. He looks at me, dazed, for quite a few seconds, and then his eyes get bigger.

  “Da!” he says, his face seeming to illuminate. “Daddy!”

  “No,” I say, meaning it. “No.”

  “Daddy!” he repeats. He’s smiling broadly now. It’s a bit delirious, this wide smile, and I know he’s drunk.

  “No,” I say, taking the bottle from his grasp and setting it on the floor. “I’m your son. Carson.”

  “You came for me,” he says, his unfocused eyes boring into my upper forehead. The area feels like it’s burning. “I’ve missed you so goddamn much, Da.”

  I’m frozen. There are certain scenes you’re not supposed to have to play when you’re a kid. Something inside of me is shaking, like, No, no, can’t do this, no, no, but the other part of me, the physical part that can do stuff, is tentatively sitting down on the bed, next to his head.

  He nuzzles his head against my leg until I gently lift his skull up onto my lap. I stroke his hair. It feels weird, wrong. And it also feels something else, something that’s not wrong, and that part I have to choke down because this is my dad, the joke guy. Even if he’s crying right now, I’m afraid he’ll switch it up and laugh at me if I take this too seriously.

  I stare at his profile. His chin is a stranger’s chin. I don’t know this chin. His nose is not one I know, not well. And yet also I do know it. Which is fucked up. He smells sour, like alcohol, and also like he hasn’t showered in a day, maybe two. The base smell is like me when I don’t shower. Families have scents, I guess. I was not aware of this. Is it in the DNA?

  “I’ve been good,” my dad says as I stroke his hair. His eyes are closed and he looks peaceful. “I’m glad you came back for me. I knew you’d come back.”

  “Yes,” I finally say, through gritted teeth. “I came back.”