I’m like, “I don’t think I’m dead.” But right now I can’t exactly be sure of anything. “Where the hell am I?”
“You’re in the middle of the yard,” she says. “Do you know someone who lives here?”
I sit up and look at the house—an ugly little pink brick one with a window air-conditioner unit. “No, I never saw it before.”
“Were you in a wreck or something?”
“Not that I know of. Why? Where’s my car?”
“Is it one of those?” She points toward the street, where two cars are parked along the curb on our side and a junky white pickup is parked on the other side. The pickup’s engine is idling so I guess it must be hers.
“No, I drive a Mitsubishi,” I say. “Jesus, I must have gone to sleep.” I look around, trying to gather my wits a little. A scraggly elm tree hangs over us and you can just see the moon through the branches. There’s a rickety lawn chair stationed in the middle of the yard, and two beer cans lie in the grass a couple of feet away. I vaguely remember sitting in that lawn chair at some point, but I don’t remember how I got there.
“So,” she asks. “You don’t know where you left your car?”
“Let me think for a second,” I say, but my head’s not really up for thinking. “No, it’s no good. I don’t remember where it is. Maybe I parked it at home and just went out for a walk.”
She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think you live in this neighborhood, Sutter.”
That surprises the hell out of me right there. “How did you know my name? Were we talking a while ago or something?”
“We go to the same high school,” she says, but she doesn’t say it like I’m an idiot. She has a kind voice, kind eyes. She looks at me like I’m a bird she found with a broken wing.
“Do we have a class together at school?” I ask.
“Not this year. We did when we were sophomores. You wouldn’t remember me.”
Her name turns out to be Aimee Finecky, and she’s right, I don’t remember her, even though I pretend to. According to her, it’s five a.m. and the reason she happens to be out at this time is because she’s throwing her paper route.
“It’s really me and my mom’s paper route,” she explains, “but Mom and her boyfriend went to the Indian casino over by Shawnee last night, and I guess it got so late they decided to stay in a motel or something. That happens sometimes.”
The paper route gives me an idea. Since she’s driving around anyway, maybe she could haul me along with her. Surely my car is somewhere close by. In the condition I was in, I probably didn’t walk too far before sitting down for a rest.
This sounds el fabuloso to her. After all, usually her mother drives the truck and she heaves the papers out the window. If I can get the right throwing motion down, she figures I’ll be a real ace paperboy.
The back of the junky white pickup contains three bundles of unfolded newspapers and the cab is piled high with folded ones, crisp as new ears of corn. “How big is this paper route of yours?” I ask as we pull away from the curb.
“Practically this whole side of town,” she says, and I’m like, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know newspaper throwing was such big business. You must reel in a lot of cash.”
“My mom does. She gives me an allowance out of it.”
“That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Of course not. If you do half the work, you ought to be fifty-fifty partners. Maybe more, since you have to do all the work when she goes out blowing her money at the Indian casino.”
“That’s all right,” she says. “She pays most of the bills.”
“Most of them?”
“Sometimes I have to chip in.”
“She sure saw you coming.”
Down the street we drive, moving at senior-citizen speed since she has to tell me which houses to deliver to. I take to the throwing part right away, though—it’s a sideways motion from the chest out, kind of like throwing a Frisbee. Before we make a whole block, I’m already pitching way into the yards, almost to the porches. I’m a natural.
My head’s still a little woozy, but gradually, it’s clearing up, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Thoughts of what Mom and Geech will have to say about me staying out all night start to trickle in. It’s not hard to predict—Geech is bound to come with the good old military school threat. He must have that recorded on a chip and installed in his robot head.
Mom, she’ll go into her routine about what the neighbors would think if they saw me traipsing in at such-and-such time in the morning. What I want to know is why should she care? She doesn’t even like the neighbors. But that doesn’t matter. She worries more about what people think than anyone else in the universe. I’m always embarrassing her somehow. I guess I must have inherited that trait from Dad.
But I don’t know why I should have to explain anything to anybody. Why shouldn’t I be doing exactly what I’m doing? It’s superb to be out in the early, early morning before the sun comes up. There’s this sense of being super-alive. You’re in on a secret that all the dull, sleeping people don’t know about. Unlike them, you’re alert and aware of existing right here in this precise moment between what happened and what’s going to happen. I’m sure my dad’s been here. Mom might have been once. But Geech? Robots don’t have any idea of what it’s like to be really alive, and they never will.