All This Life

He guesses this conversation is something of a birthday present. Sara disappeared all those years ago after he got hurt. She was friendly to him, but no more camping in the backyard. So even if he felt dumb doling out his monosyllables, he was not only aiding someone he cared deeply about but he got a few minutes in her presence. Sara might have only been five feet tall, but she had a big personality. Rodney could be shy, obtuse, even before his accident, and Sara helped him with this. It was like their first kiss. It was Sara who finally came right out and said it.

If he could lean in and kiss her now on the porch, he would.

“What’s going on?” says Sara.

“Burn. Car.”

“Did you say burn my car?”

Balloon Boy nods.

“You mean Larry and Felix are going to burn my car?” Sara asks.

He nods again.

Sara calls in the house to Hank, “They’re going to light my car on fire!”

“Those jag-offs never learn!” says Hank.

“Anything else, Rodney?”

“Hurt. Hank.”

“And they’re going to kick your ass!” she calls to her brother.

“I’m more worried about slipping in the shower,” he says.

“They’re coming here soon, Rodney?”

He nods again.

“They’re coming soon, Hank! Let’s get out of here. We don’t want any trouble, neither does your PO.”

“You go ahead,” Hank says. “They wanna rumble, me and Bernard are willing to oblige them!”

Sara rolls her eyes at Rodney. “Some families we’ve got, huh?”

Balloon Boy shrugs.

Sara and Rodney stand there for a few seconds, smiling at each other.

If he had his pad and pen, he’d write a short note to her: Do you remember me? Can’t you see I’m still in here?

“Birth. Day,” Balloon Boy says.

“It’s your birthday?” Sara asks.

More nodding.

“Well, if they want to stay here and kill each other, maybe me and you can go for a drive, just us,” Sara says. “What do you think of that?”

Rodney doesn’t nod this time, but tilts his head a little to the side, in awe, taking in every inch of her.

“You’ll have to check my blind spots,” she says. “Thanks to your uncle, I’m down a mirror.”

IN THE CAR, Sara’s speakers crank the same music Rodney had heard right before Uncle Felix kicked her car, a rapper once again going crazy over heavy metal riffs. Rodney likes hip-hop, mostly the old stuff. Tribe Called Quest. Wu-Tang Clan. Pharcyde. De La Soul. Anything with a beat that stays out of the way and lets the MC reign. Listening to tracks like that, Balloon Boy is able to hear the rhymes colliding off of one another, a pileup of fast and loose syllables sizzling from mouths. He’s never been much into the whole chainsaw guitar sound of metal, but this he likes. It’s aggressive and angry and crunchy, yet the singer is front and center, not drowned out by the fuzz. He’s like a surfer riding the livid riff, staying on top of it, using the music’s velocity to accentuate his cadences and all his rhymes are easy to make out. He’s a beast. A barker. He’s super-pissed and he wants you to know why.

That would be a great birthday gift: a day, an hour, hell, even five minutes in which Rodney can call out like that.

He points to the stereo.

“Sorry,” says Sara, turning the volume down.

“No.” Balloon Boy brings it back to its original level, which makes Sara smile.

“You like it?” she says.

He nods, listening to the singer rap something so deft, so on the beat that the syncopation makes Rodney bob his head.

“You’ve got good taste,” Sara says.

Balloon Boy nods, not wanting to congest the car with any of his sounds.

“Where should we go?” asks Sara.

But she doesn’t wait for him to say anything, not that Rodney was going to, only two or three seconds passing before Sara says, “Can I show you my favorite spot? You’ll love the view.”

The word view makes Rodney think about being on the balloon, think about the glory of all the open space he was able to see.

It’s about three in the afternoon, Sara’s AC working hard. They drive through what would be called downtown Traurig. It’s only five square blocks, the population of the Nevada town around 2,000. There was a time in the 1970s when people thought that Reno was going to have a population boom, become something closer to Vegas, and so these towns in the outskirts, say within fifty miles, were thought to be up and coming. They pocked the desert and the dominant thought was that they’d all soon be connected, updated, the chain stores moving in and giving it that American cookie-cutter feel.