by Andrew Smith
Power Plant No. 1 was completely wiped out by a twelve-billion-gallon wall of water in 1928. Starting at the location of the dam, and continuing all the way along the Santa Clara River bed toward the Pacific Ocean, perhaps as many as one hundred electric-company employees lost their lives.
The power plant was easily replaced, although nobody knows for certain how many irreplaceable people had been swallowed up in William Mulholland’s churning liquid knackery.
In 1928 a group of thirty or so Native American Indians had been living on one of the large ranches below the St. Francis Dam. One month before the disaster, a medicine man hunting deer in the canyon claimed to have received a vision of the catastrophe that would befall the dam. The medicine man warned the other Indians to leave the area. The Indians left the area the day before the collapse of the dam.
Imagine that.
Ten years ago, during one of the wettest winters on record, a large portion of the canyon road was washed away by the flooding of the San Francisquito Creek. The ruined highway shut down for more than a year—over half a billion miles. When a new roadway was finally opened, a stretch of the old ruined blacktop next to the rebuilt Power Plant No. 1 became a sort of parking area for the very few people who, knowing anything at all about William Mulholland’s historic failure, traveled up here to see firsthand what was left of the St. Francis Dam.
Look: Even right here in Southern California, most people had never heard of the St. Francis Dam. The majority of Southern Californians simply assumed William Mulholland must have been someone magnificent because he had such a nice road, which meandered through the wealthiest communities in Los Angeles, named for him.
People probably would have remembered the St. Francis Dam better if its collapsing failure had caused the cancelation of an Academy Awards presentation, as opposed to just killing about five hundred innocent victims.
Julia Bishop parked her Mustang off the highway, along the chain-link fence that surrounded Power Plant No. 1.
“Are you okay?” she said. “You’ve been really quiet all day.”
“Um.”
“You’re not—you know—feeling weird, are you?”
“I’m okay.”
Usually, whenever someone asked me if I felt like I was going to have a seizure, which I could tell was Julia’s underlying question, it would make me angry. But not with Julia. She could ask me anything at all and I would tell her the truth.
And the truth was that I was nervous about being alone with Julia Bishop.
Up to that point, Julia and I had spent time together at each other’s houses, but we’d never technically been on a date. In fact, the first catastrophic time we had been truly alone together, I was either lying facedown in a puddle of urine, blanked out on the floor of my living room, or standing on my upstairs landing, naked and wrapped in a bath towel with the pattern of a sea-foam green nautilus shell coiled directly in front of my penis.
No wonder I was nervous.
And even though we’d kissed that first night outside Blake Grunwald’s shitty party, I had been plagued by the thought that Julia Bishop had kissed me—and run her delicious and soothing hand up inside my shirt—only because she’d felt sorry for the poor epileptic kid who had never been kissed in all those miles of his life.
So I took a deep breath and said, “Is this a date, Julia? Because I . . . we’ve never actually been anywhere alone together on purpose, and, well, I . . .”
Julia laughed and shook her head.
“You think too much,” she said.
“Uh.”
Julia put her hand on my knee. My bare knee. I was wearing shorts.
My wardrobe choice was based more on the heat of the day than on the likelihood of sexual arousal. Bad planning.
I felt very sticky at that moment.
I wondered what it would be like to feel Julia Bishop’s hand slip up inside my shorts.
And then I blurted out, “I’m a Jew.”
That’s when Julia Bishop started to laugh for real.
“What?” she said.
“A Jew. I am a Jew.”
Julia laughed so hard, tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. I felt terrible—like I’d made her cry. And I wanted to kiss her so bad and tell her I was sorry.
I was such a calamitous whirlwind of stupidity!
So I explained to Julia about my real mother, and how, technically, it made me a Jew.
“I don’t know why I felt I had to say that,” I explained. “Sometimes I think I feel the need to clarify my origins. I’m not, like, a real Jew, but I am a Jew.”
Julia wiped her eyes.
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“Oh. Uh. Sorry.”
“Anyway, you still can’t prove to me you actually didn’t come through a Lazarus Door.”
I phrased the following as a question: “I haven’t eaten anyone?”
Julia laughed again.
In my father’s science fiction book, the one that caused such a tremendous stir, all the aliens who’d come here through Lazarus Doors took the names of angels from the Bible and from the Koran.
It made it easier to lure Christians and Muslims onto the aliens’ dinner plates, but it also upset a lot of contemporary readers here on the planet of humans and dogs.
You could imagine.
One of the characters also happened to be a boy named Finn. But it wasn’t me, my father always swore. He only named the incomer boy after me. Writers do that all the time, my father said. Thankfully, in spite of my Lazarus Door marks and heterochromatic eyes, as far as I know there was never an angel named Finn in any religion.
Julia said, “Well, I’m half-black.”
I knew that. Unlike the Jew thing, half-black was something I could see. I never asked Julia Bishop about it. What would I say, anyway?
Hey, are you half-black?
And what did it matter? I supposed that was what Julia Bishop laughed about—the thought of her walking up to me and asking, Hey, Finn, by any chance are you a Jew?
Besides all that, Julia’s aunt and uncle—the people she lived with across the canyon—were black.
There was no question of that.
So I said, “Um. I kind of knew that.”
“Just wanted to clarify my origins,” Julia said. “My mother is a black woman. My father owns a restaurant. I have never eaten anyone either. Can I tell you something?”
She still had her hand on my knee. It felt wonderfully terrifying.
I said, “If it’s about my legs, I don’t shave them. That’s just how they are.”
Julia laughed.
“It’s not about you shaving your legs.”
“Is it about food?”
I was so nervous, it felt like my heart was playing xylophone against my rib cage.
“No. It’s about why I came here. The real reason.”
Outside of that first awkward attempt on the night of the perigee moon to discover Julia Bishop’s past, we had never really talked about the reason behind her relocation to California.
“Only if you want to,” I said.
Julia stared directly into the eye of her steering wheel.
“Charlie—that’s the guy I used to go out with back home—he raped me. That’s why my parents wanted me to get away from the old school. All the kids, you know?”
Every atom of air fled from my lungs.
What can you say when someone you’re in love with tells you something like that?
I mean, it’s easy enough to laugh when you put your hand on a guy’s bare knee and he stupidly blurts out, “I’m a Jew! I don’t shave my legs!” because he’s so confused, he doesn’t know what else to say, but what can you say to something like that?
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
I turned away from her and stared out the side window. It wasn’t fair. Nothing ever is.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“I’ll be okay,�
� Julia said.
Twenty miles.
And Julia said, “I’m sorry if it bothers you. I mean me telling you and all. You’re the first real person I ever told.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure I am a real person, Julia.”
Julia smiled with her lips closed and shook her head.
“If I could push the world back all those miles with my bare hands and make it change direction, I would do that, Julia.”
“Then I would never have gone out walking in the moonlight and found you.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
Julia patted my leg.
She leaned over and kissed me on the side of my head.
I felt terrible.
She said, “Let’s go see that stupid dam.”
“Watch out for ghosts.”
“Ghosts are terrified of Jews and half-black girls from Chicago.”
“You’re messing with me.”
STICKY ATOMS
Charlie Mahan was seventeen years old when he was sent to prison for what he did to Julia Bishop.
He went to grown-up prison, which is where seventeen-year-old boys who do grown-up things get sent.
Some of the inmates at Pontiac Correctional Center called Charlie Mahan Wolfie, because they thought his eyes looked like the Wolfman’s.
Charlie Mahan never said one word the entire time he was incarcerated, which caused most of the other men in Pontiac to call him Dummy. Charlie Mahan wrote poetry.
When I hear the word “Pontiac,” I think of muscle cars. When I hear the word “correction,” I think everything’s going to be fine.
Charlie Mahan was beaten to death three months after arriving at Pontiac Correctional Center.
Atoms will be freed.
• • •
Standing beside one of the pyramidal mounds of pink concrete that had been left behind when twelve billion gallons of water atoms remodeled the St. Francis Dam made me realize just how massive William Mulholland’s self-taught failure was.
Julia and I could look up at the canyon rims on either side of us and imagine the towering monolithic face of a one-hundred-fifty-foot-tall death trap that stretched across the sky from west to east.
There were no other human beings here at all; just us and the ghosts.
“If nobody knew this had been part of a dam, you’d just think there were some weird-ass pink boulders here in the canyon,” Julia said.
“I read that there had been really tall sycamore trees down here along the creek, and they all ended up in Ventura County, or floating in the Pacific Ocean like broken matchsticks,” I said.
There were almost no sycamore trees left in the canyon now, only the fast-growing cottonwoods that sprouted like weeds and formed a thick belt of green to mark the course of what little moisture remained beneath the dry earth at this sweltering time of year.
“It’s hot,” I said.
Julia said, “Take your shirt off.”
“Okay.”
I wasn’t afraid of anything around Julia Bishop. Off came my T-shirt. The slight breeze felt so cool blowing through the wet hair in my armpits.
“Lazarus Door,” Julia said. “You are a fallen angel.”
“Cade makes up disgusting names for it,” I said.
“I know.”
“It’s only a joke,” I explained. “I love Cade. I think he’s the funniest kid I know too.”
“His parents must be on meds,” Julia said.
“Um.”
Julia and I walked north along the creekbed to a place beyond where William Mulholland’s dam had been. We sat down on the rocks in the shade along the dry creek and ate a lunch she’d prepared for us: peanut butter sandwiches and sliced apples.
“People driving through here at night claim to see ghosts, especially at those turns below the power plant,” I said.
“Have you ever seen one?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I answered. “At least, not the way that people who do believe in ghosts account for them. I think ghosts are just leftover sticky atoms—stubborn ones that do not want to stop holding on to one another.”
“Oh,” Julia said.
I went on. “Sticky atoms are caused by love, or sometimes by hate or fear. The knackery has a hard time breaking down love and hate into anything else.”
Julia nodded. “It makes sense. I suppose that means it’s important to love as much as possible. You know—so the hate that can’t get rendered into something else is smaller and weaker that way.”
“I believe you understand the physics of the knackery,” I said.
We held hands and walked beneath the brilliant green shade of cottonwood trees, back toward the old power plant.
• • •
There was a lonely and quiet museum entirely devoted to William Mulholland’s disaster. The museum was housed in a recycled portable classroom building parked adjacent to Power Plant No. 1.
When Julia and I were inside the museum, the worker there—an acne-faced boy who couldn’t have been much older than nineteen and dressed in the green uniform of an Angeles National Forest intern warden—assumed we had come in because we were lost or had witnessed a traffic accident in the canyon, which, he explained, were the two most common reasons why the door to the museum ever opened.
The third most common reason was for mail delivery.
Nobody ever visited the museum, because pretty much everyone on the planet had forgotten all about the St. Francis dam.
I had put my shirt back on before going inside. I didn’t want anyone to think the aliens had arrived. Besides, what if I got hungry enough to eat the apprentice-warden kid?
And I probably would have eaten the punk too. I did not appreciate the leering way the kid ogled Julia Bishop. And Julia, noticing me noticing the warden-in-training, grabbed on to my hand and squeezed.
“No, we’re not lost,” I explained. “We are actually interested in the dam.”
“What?” Warden Boy said. “There was a dam here?”
“Um.”
Then the kid burst out laughing.
Good one.
I decided to ignore the asshole from that moment on.
The museum housed a rather eclectic assortment of display items: a scale-model diorama of the predisaster dam and reservoir, handwritten letters and journal entries from survivors, a bent and mangled pressed-tin toy automobile that was unearthed in the rubble, newspaper accounts from 1928, and hundreds of photographs that included scenes of the dam’s construction, William Mulholland’s life, the aftermath of the collapse, a flattened field littered with dark mounds that turned out to all be drowned horses, and dozens of portraits of the known victims of the St. Francis disaster.
One of them, very disturbing, caught my attention and drew me in.
Here is what the photograph looked like: It was a black-and-white portrait that had obviously been taken in a photographer’s studio. There were three children in the picture—two girls standing on either side of a three-year-old boy who was seated on a very ornate enameled cast-iron bench. Behind the three hung a screen on which had been painted the image of a fog-shrouded forest of trees. The boy looked bored and confused, sitting there in short pants and shiny leather shoes with his mouth hanging slightly open. You could almost smell the odor of baby drool on him. His socks were slightly rolled at their tops, and he had on what looked like a sailor’s shirt. His name was Danny. He and his mother survived the flood caused by William Mulholland’s failure. Barefoot and injured, Danny’s mother carried him up the steep canyon wall that towered above their homestead.
The two girls, Danny’s five- and six-year-old sisters, died in the early hours of March thirteenth, 1928, along with their father, who worked at the power plant. The sisters had identical bowl-cut hairdos. All the children had perfectly straight corn-silk blond hair.
The sisters’ names were Marjorie and Mazie.
And I had seen them before.
I whispered, “Okay. No
w I am seeing ghosts.”
I didn’t want Acne Warden Kid to hear me.
Julia said, “What?”
“Those two little girls in this picture,” I said. “I saw them standing in my living room the night you found me on the floor.”
Sticky atoms.
• • •
On our drive home that afternoon, Julia and I talked about Marjorie and Mazie Curtis—the two little girls in the old photograph we’d seen at the St. Francis Dam Museum.
Julia theorized that perhaps the girls felt sad for me, that we had some kind of a kinship because of what had fallen from the sky onto us all, so they were looking out to see if I’d be okay.
“It’s hard to say. Maybe I was mistaken about them being there in my living room. I can’t account for anything I see when I start blanking out,” I said. “And you don’t feel sorry or sad for me, do you?”
“Would it be terrible if I did?” Julia asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You know, it’s okay to feel bad about things that happen to people you care about.”
“I suppose it’s what people are going to do,” I decided.
Then Julia said, “I have something for you. I’m going to give it to you on the night before your birthday. It will be a perfectly tremendous surprise.”
“Okay. I’m surprised right now,” I said.
“But you have to promise to come to my house the night before, at midnight, and stand outside my window and wait for it,” she said. “That way, it will happen just during the first minutes of your actual seventeenth birthday.”
My actual birthday, two weeks away, was about twenty-four million miles in front of Julia Bishop and me. That was a long stretch to wait while nervously wondering what she intended to give me.
My surprise began to shift toward nervousness. What could a girl like Julia Bishop possibly need me to do at midnight outside her window?
I was terrified it might have something to do with sex. I did not think I wanted to actually have sex, despite how frequently I thought I did want to have it. And Julia seemed so worldly to me, like the kind of girl who would think that sex was a perfectly reasonable gift to give a kid when he turned seventeen.