“Maybe he should walk out. He can take care of himself.”
“Of course he can,” Isa said. “But this setup is good for everybody.”
I felt like a kid, the way they were talking as if I weren’t there.
“Listen to me, Kevin,” Patrick said loudly and slowly. I figured he was looking at me, glancing over his shoulder or in the rearview mirror; I was sitting in the middle of the backseat. I took off my dark glasses and faced straight ahead so he could see where the sweeper wire had etched an S across my crumpled eyebrow, down through my eyelid, and into my cheek. I’d never excelled at pressing myself on others, but over the past year, as Patrick had become more controlling, I’d found an approach that allowed me to hold my own: I would remind him one way or another that I’d already been cut to the core and survived.
“Parents or no parents,” he said, “money or no money. If I find you’re writing about me, that thing’s going out the window. Or you’re going out the window, and I’ll sell it.”
“It’s not about you,” Devon said.
Patrick swerved onto the shoulder, throwing us all to the left and then forward into our seatbelts as he braked and Betsy kicked rocks and dust into the dry heat of California’s summer. The car slid to a stop and everybody was breathing hard and a cloud of dust enveloped us and whirled in through the windows, smelling like tires and sweat and asphalt, making me sneeze once, then again, into my hand to keep the mucus off my four-thousand-dollar chronicler. Patrick twisted in his seat—the vinyl creaking—and spoke across me into Devon’s face, cars whizzing past us on the freeway: “How the hell would you know?” He waited a full half minute to let that sink in, Devon fidgeting beside me, knowing better than to mutter a word, the dust settling as an acrid taste in my mouth. Ray sat as still as stone on my left. “You think I’m an idiot doesn’t know you and him sat up all last night figuring out how to download between that thing and his laptop? Blind man can’t write on his own.”
My jaw clenched. My breathing stopped. “Fuck you!” I wanted to say. I wanted to reach over the seat and grip him by the throat. But I suppressed all that. I kept my vow; I remained quiet. I would not let him get to me. Not already.
“You listen good, Devon,” Patrick said. “Not everything’s on the up-and-up. Somebody with your record ought to know not to write stuff down. Don’t give them anything to pin on you. Don’t show your tracks. Tell it by word of mouth. With your history and the color of your skin, you better learn that and learn it well. You’ll know soon enough how fast you can lose what you’ve got.”
What a paranoid son of a bitch, I thought. I forced myself to breathe.
“And you listen, Kevin.” He spoke so close I could smell his sour face and the dank coffee from his gums. “You’ll have to get your own ride in the middle of the damn desert if I find you’ve got a hand in writing about me.” He turned away, sitting squarely in his seat. “And put your glasses on. It’s not right to have to look at a man without an eyeball.”
I faced straight ahead at the rearview mirror, defying him to look. And I thought, I’m going to focus the damn articles on him. Just to spite him.
Isa got us back on the highway with her effervescent and disabling goodwill. She reached back between the seats, tapping on the note-taker with her finger: my cue to slip it into my backpack.
Looking back, I don’t mind so much that Patrick insulted me. But I’m still pissed at myself—my blood boils—for not standing up for Devon right there. Maybe I could have brought things to a head a lot earlier.
All across the desert, Betsy’s air conditioning kept shutting off, roasting us, and then coming back on, only to bake us again later. The radio had been torn out by a thief the year before, leaving a hole in the dash. Without music, there was no escape. Searing winds blew the car around and shifted the casket on top. Twice, one of the towels above flapped and fluttered; Patrick cursed, pulled off the freeway into the shade of a gas station, and fiddled with the ropes, which were stretching in the heat. Each time we stopped, we would pile out and dawdle at the back of the minimart in the coolness of open refrigerators until the clerk told us to buy a soda or close the damn doors. I loved my huaraches and shorts and couldn’t imagine wearing jeans and boots.
When I was six years old, after I got out of the hospital and my body started to heal, I wore Western boots and a hat because I loved being a cowboy, not to protect my toes and head. I had visual memory then, of course, and I was intrepid in our neighborhood. I used a hockey stick to get around, dragging it against fences and along the ground like any kid would. I didn’t care if I banged my shins. The houses were packed pretty tightly. It was second nature for me to learn the dips and ledges in sidewalks, the location of a tree trunk or a bush near a friend’s yard, the contours and length of his driveway, and whether it was two or three steps up to the door. I knew all that before I knew anything about sweeping with a cane. “Hey, cowboy!” Dad would call out. The cowboy with the hockey stick, that was me.
When I started school, a year late because of the accident, Dad wanted me to go to Cameron Elementary like other kids; he didn’t want me surrounded by blind children in a special school. That summer before my first school year, Mom and Dad would argue after I was supposed to be asleep, but sometimes I would lurk in the hallway, listening.
“He gets around fine!” I remember Dad saying. “He might as well get his licks now.”
“You don’t see him all day, by himself.”
“You watch,” Dad said. “He’ll come back helpless and feeling like a misfit.”
A few days after my seventh birthday, Mom drove me three hours south to a school for the deaf and blind, and I hated it before I got there.
For a bunkmate, I was paired with Matthew, an eight-year-old who could see billowing clouds of color in a world that moved: to him, our bunk bed keeled like a boat, parked cars loomed from fog, people floated like ghosts. I got the top bunk because he was afraid to go up there. On the first night, he cried, missing his mother, so I climbed down and got into bed with him, comforting him, allowing us both to sleep. The next morning, he pushed me aside in the bathroom. “You can’t see as well as I can,” he said.
I convinced myself that I hated blind people. In the second week, my dessert started to disappear off my tray as I was eating. After a few days, I learned to put my cookie or brownie in my pocket as soon as I got it. And by the end of the third week, I learned the shuffle of his step and would slap his hand as soon as he came around. “You’re getting smarter,” he said. “My name’s Charlie. When I was new, a kid did that to me. Taught me how to listen.”
Charlie was a couple years older than I was. He could see splinters and shards of objects in the corners of his eyes, and he helped teach me the real way to cane, sweeping back and forth: don’t tap, touch. It was easy for me to coordinate my feet with the sweeping. I already knew how to listen for the echoes of my own footsteps on walls and overhanging roofs; that was another benefit to cowboy boots, the hard heels and soles. One day, as we were walking along the periphery of the school grounds, he offered to take me around the block.
I paused, of course—going across the street was against the rules.
“Get out of Braille Jail as often as you can,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll always be blind.” He pushed the button at the traffic signal, and when the tune came on, we walked slowly across, our canes outstretched. My heart was in my throat, but I learned to relax. He explained how he created a tactile map inside his head every time he went anywhere. “Only it’s not a map,” he said. “It’s life size. And you fill it in with sounds and touches as you go, so you can always get home. Feel this: that street curb. That’s when you turn right. Feel the wind? It’s coming from behind. Hear that car going by? That means we’re heading along the sidewalk fine.” We turned at another street. “Now the sun’s on your face.”
We were almost back to the crosswalk when bicycles clattered from behind and skidded in front, stopping us. Maybe two