There were two hours, 120 minutes, before the flight left. We still had about $400 in Moroccan bills.
"We have to leave," I said. "We can't fly with this."
"We told them we wouldn't leave."
We left.
We drove to the resort walls. Not far from the airport was a string of hotels, with long driveways and gates of iron, and we sped to one, called Temptation, and parked across the road from its grand pink-flowered entrance. The resort was walled in on all sides, parapets of twelve fuschia feet, and just beyond the walls, on the right side, a small shanty community stood, in the shadow of the barriers and the small overhead trees.
"You go," I said.
"How much?"
I gave him what I had, saving a few sample bills for Mo and Thor. Hand approached the closest structure, a yellow box of wood and sheetrock, big enough for two people, no bigger than a large camping tent. He was – moron – still carrying his soda. His sunglasses, mended with eight adhesive postage stamps, were atop his skull, staring at the sun. He peeked around the doorway. A woman stepped out, wiping her hands on something like a dishrag, red and heavy with water.
Hand waved. She nodded to him and looked immediately to me. I waved. She nodded again, this time to me.
His left hand holding his soda, Hand dug into his right pocket to retrieve the bills. The woman looked at me again. I smiled apologetically, but with an expression that said Just you wait.
Something was stuck. Now Hand was reaching to the pocket with two hands. He'd wedged the soda between his arm and torso, and when he finally pulled the bills free, the soda jumped and spilled, in a small geyser of brown liquid, a foot upward and three feet down, onto the woman's legs and bare feet.
I turned around. I couldn't watch. I walked a few steps toward the car, wanting nothing to do with Hand. What kind of person brings his soda? You're giving $300 to people in a shack and you bring your soda? Nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we'd envisioned. Maybe we couldn't help but make a mess everywhere we went -
I had to see what was happening. I turned around again. Now Hand was on his knees. The woman was holding the money but Hand was using the woman's dishrag on her legs and feet. He was dabbing and wiping, quickly but gently, and she was watching him, astounded and unmoving. He stroked the rag down her left calf, washed her right knee, rubbed her right dusty foot and then her left. Then he did it all again. It was unwatchable.
She touched his head, asking him to stop, to stand, and after giving her legs one more good look, he stood.
Hand's garage, with fresh shingles still the color of stripped pine, was sturdy but not too high. My own was low enough but full of holes; Tommy and his friends, years before, had tried to build an addition, on the roof, with plywood and tar paper, and things had gone south when they realized the beams had termites and couldn't hold even their own weight. Hand's garage, though, was strong and sloped downward and it was his we'd planned to jump from. The idea was simple, and was logical for three boys who wanted to be stuntmen: we had to jump from a garage roof to a moving truck below.
We were thirteen and Hand's dad had a blue pickup he backed into the garage every night because he liked the rush – he called it a rush; it was the first time I'd heard the word used that way – of being in the truck, facing forward, receiving the sun, when the garage door rose and he could bolt out onto the highway without looking back. He was a strange man but his enthusiasms had come down through Hand, obvious and undiminished.
One morning before school Hand, Jack and I waited. We'd put blankets in the truck bed the night before, dark ones to match the truck's blue, cobalt and metallic, so Hand's dad wouldn't notice in the dim garage light. We were ready but Jack didn't want to jump. He wanted to watch us jump. He'd planned to be a stunt-man, too – he claimed he did when we asked him; we'd asked him pointedly, to make sure, after he declined to try out our homemade grappling hooks and roused suspicion – but though his commitment seemed real enough, he didn't want to do this jump.
"Pussy," we said.
"Fine," he said.
But he didn't see the point. Why not wait till we're older, when we'll get trained by actual certified stuntmen? What? we asked. He thought he was making sense but we were stunned. Certified? Stuntmen? We argued him into submission. We wouldn't get that chance, we insisted, we wouldn't get the chance to even try out to be stuntmen, unless we could prove we had what it takes. Fine, he said, and promised to jump when we jumped.
The garage door rumbled open below us, and we saw the roof of the pickup slowly emerge and collect the light of the rising sun, still cool and blue. We hadn't prepared the timing. We hadn't prepared a signal and hadn't planned to count -
Jack jumped. We watched his back descend toward the steel of the truck, watched him land on his feet, then tumble forward onto hands and knees, then roll onto his back. The truck wasn't moving. Hand's dad had stopped immediately – 120 pounds had landed in his bed – and was opening the door as Jack, on his back, on the blankets we'd laid down, looked up and saw us both, mouths agape, still on the roof. He didn't seem surprised.
Dear Mo, Dear Thor,
We've been in Morocco for two days, I think, and I just want to plant the idea in your head now: You know nothing until you're there. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. You know nothing of another person, nothing of another place. Nothing nothing nothing. With this knowledge -- that you know nothing but what you see -- things get more complicated. People want it easy, so they guess. And guessing is when the shi
"Can we go now? We should go."
"Hold on," I said. I was determined to get this postcard out. We were parked near the airport.
"Did you just say shit in a postcard? You can't do that. They'll confiscate it."
"Who?"
"The censors! Moroccans won't put up with that. Who's it to?"
"The – Forget it."
I folded the postcard in half and started another one.
Mo. Thor.
I'm writing to you just before Hand (you remember him. At the batting cages, he threw the ball that hit Mo in the stomach) will jump from a moving car (ours) to a moving horse-drawn cart. Wait until you're older to try something like this -- a lot older, I think -- but then don't wait much longer. I can't believe we waited so long ourselves. This will be great. I'll finish the postcard when we're done.
Today we would do it.
"Okay," he said.
Hand would jump from our rental car to the back of the cart, while we were moving, and then give the driver the money we had remaining. We would pull our car alongside, doing maybe 15 mph, and Hand would jump from his window onto the cart, a big enough target, as big as the bed of a large pickup truck. Easy.
"Maybe too easy," Hand said.
We drove up and down the airport road seven times, trying to time it with a series of different carts. Here's one:
They were all perfectly shaped and traveling slowly enough, but every time we were close, something went awry. A cop behind us or coming from the opposite way; a man on a scooter pulling up and asking if we needed directions; another man on a scooter offering hashish. Kids on bikes looking too curious. The road was too crowded. Where were they all going? They were like extras, paid to drive to and fro -
Hand was sitting on the door, his torso out the window.
"This won't work," he said, ducking his head into the car.
He got back inside. I asked why it wouldn't work.
"Torque," he said.
I pulled over. I stared forward. I wasn't going to ask him what torque had to do with jumping on a horse-drawn cart.