BEN GLANCED BACK AT JAKE in his car seat, unnerved by the precision of DNA: Shevaunne’s eyes and forehead. But the jaw line of some unknown junkie fuckwit.
“I’ve got a surprise for us,” he said.
Jake beamed. “Walmart?”
Walmart. Strawberry. The total of Jake’s vocalizations. Ben wondered if it meant anything—these two words held some clue. They were positive, glimmers of light. “Better than Walmart, way, way better.”
Ben parked outside the museum in the cool, spreading shade of a spreading maple. A bright banner read:
What’s Up Down Under! A roving exhibit of the unique flora and fauna of Australia.
Ben couldn’t remember what he and Frank had seen at the museum, only that there had been wonders, pink flamingos and a polar bear, the world’s biggest butterfly, a giant tapeworm in a bottle: the first inkling they’d had of the world beyond the Kingdom. They had raced from exhibit to exhibit, pressing their greedy faces against the glass. There was somewhere else, they’d finally understood. If you drove south on I-93, you didn’t just get to Boston, you could keep going to the Amazon or Tibet or Alice Springs.
Their plan for Australia began there and then, aged 13, amid the colonial plunder of taxidermied animals and bats in formaldehyde, it grew up around them, a wild, exotic plant fed in equal measure by their despair and their hope. Frank had found a book in the library, A Pictorial History of Australia. They’d sat on the cabin’s porch and turned the pages, smudging the images with their sweaty adolescent fingers and beheld the opposite of everything, the opposite landscape, opposite colors, opposite side of the world. The people looked tanned and open and happy, the sea, the bleached and eternal outback, the red earth. There was a huge desert area called the Nullabor Plain, which sounded at first like a native name, like those on the map, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong, Ulladulla; but Frank read the caption, it was Latin for No Trees, null arbor. The Plain of No Trees. Imagine—they had imagined—driving for three days, straight, and not seeing a tree or a person, only the sky and the horizon, stars and earth and the sounds of the planet: wind, insects, your own breathing.
They worked out they’d need five grand each, a small fortune, but attainable if they worked two jobs over the summers. Visas, airfares, and they’d need to buy a car when they got there, have enough money to drive around until they found the right place. They’d burn their passports, blend in. “G’day! G’day, mate!”
“We could kidnap rich people,” Frank had said. They’d laughed.
“Yeah, and bring them to the cabin.” Ben added. Because, maybe.
“We wouldn’t even ask for a million. Just, like 50 grand.”
“And we’d be nice to them. We wouldn’t hurt them.” Frank’s eyes had glowed. “Flatlanders pay serious money to stay in cabins like ours. They might even like us and just give us the money.”
Ben felt Jake’s hot hand buried in his. He always left it to Jake to give him his hand first, so that it felt like a choice—Jake seeking the physical connection. Thus, hand-in-hand, they toured the exhibits. Jake loved the interactive video on the outback. “Kangaroo,” he said.
Kneeling down, Ben put his arm around Jake. “Would you like to go there?”
Jake nodded.
“We could see the kangaroos and the koalas.”
“Kooka—”
“The kookaburra bird.”
Ben looked at the boy; Jake was expecting him to pull it all back, to sneer, Stupid, dumb kid. The years it would take before Jake’s first reaction was something other than a flinch.
So he cupped Jake’s face with his large hands: “We’re going to Australia, you and me, I promise.”