The coroner nodded when he saw my uniform. He asked where I’d served and was it Helmand province because he’d heard it was bad over there, and was it okay if he shook my hand? If he told me that I was a real hero for protecting our freedom? He left me alone when I stayed silent.
My brother looked like he was sleeping, except for the sheet folded over the top of his head. I thought of the girl with the goats and the boy with the explosives and how we hadn’t thought to do that, to cover what was gone, and the noise of the sawmill began in my head and stayed there when I signed the forms, when I took his wallet and his phone home in a plastic bag, when I told Dad it was done.
Alan’s girlfriend phoned a few times after the funeral. I nodded a lot while I pressed a cold beer to my forehead, and she couldn’t hear what I was thinking so she stopped calling. Life went back to something. Not normal, but something.
I still work at the mill. I eat my dinner at home so Dad can get Mom out of bed and Mom can pretend that the microwave meatloaf took all day to make. Dad still says grace and Mom still echoes him but sometimes he forgets a word while Mom smiles at her plate, and I’m no help because I got this hum in my head all the time now. I can’t eat the meat anyway; the salty blood taste makes me gag. I know Dad thinks it has something to do with Alan. It doesn’t.
If we have enough light left after dinner, we take the guns out. We don’t hunt. We set up beer cans, or old apples and potatoes; whatever we got goes on the bench and we shoot it down. There’s a comfort in the load and reload, the recoil, in the dry click of an empty chamber.
We don’t go for ice-cream. Mr Cooper’s been dead over a year now and the store sells frozen yogurt and eco-friendly cleaning products.
We lean against the fence after. The dusk settles around us. Sometimes Dad puts his arm around my shoulder and sometimes he doesn’t. There’s a rightness to the silence, a kind of peace in nothing much to say.
CRYPTODOME
MY SISTER STARTED SMOKING AT the end of March. Openly smoking that is. She’d been charming cigarettes off the boys since she’d shrugged herself into her first bra. My mother and I would watch her from the kitchen window while we washed the dinner dishes. Louette would stand under the streetlight with her kitten heels spiking the snow and her thin leather jacket left undone. The smoke rolled off her and plumed up to the moon. Her hand rose lazily to her mouth and the red ember flashed there like a hazard light. Then her hand would drift down, the sparks scattering from its fingers. That hand would still be warm when I passed her the dish towel later, and I would see her footprints in the snow the next morning, melted there amongst the fallen ash and frozen hard by the night’s cold.
“Look at her,” my mother said, “strutting around like she knows what it’s all about. Just like me at the same age, and would you look at how that turned out. Chrissakes, would you just look at her.”
And you did look at her. You stared openly in the street or the mall or the school cafeteria, for you could not take your eyes off Louette. She’d flow into a space with her hips roiling and eyes arching and dark hair glowing red where it caught the light. Her mouth would curl into a smile, and you’d feel the oxygen sucked out of your lungs. Breathless, restless, waiting for something to happen, you’d look at her. She’d stand in the centre of the room and let the air rearrange itself around her. Her voice, when it came, was deep and smoky and you’d swear you were hearing some profound secret, even if she’d only stopped to ask the time.
“Don’t you start up like her,” my mom said with her hands shoved deep in the scalding dish water, “You’re supposed to be the smart one. You still going to do that volcano?”
I nodded. The science fair was in June and the top contestant would go to the provincial finals in the city. I’d planned to set up a colour wheel and talk about light spectrums; I’d already painted the discs and spun their patterns to white in front of Louette and her boyfriend. Then the little earthquakes rattled through Washington State, shaking up the Americans just over the border and tearing a crack in their prettiest mountain. The smoke spewed straight up in a delicate stream and my science teacher passed me a book on Pompeii.
He said there could be an eruption, a real catastrophic event right here in our lifetime.
“Topical, this volcano,” he said, “A real topical topic, Marie.” His eyes glinted green as he leaned towards me, and I caught the fresh smell of his aftershave. My face burned red. Mr. Robson liked to play with words like that, liked to tease the girls with his jokes. I practiced all my best one liners for him behind the locked bathroom door, mouthing them to the mirror while the water ran.
“Mr Robson’s hot,” said Louette, her eyes half-lidded and her hand twisting her hair, “Don’t you think so, Marie? Much too old for you, though.” She laughed and reached for her cigarettes.
Smoking wasn’t the only thing Louette had started. My mother would tell us to go to bed at a decent hour, then kiss us on our foreheads and swat at our butts before leaving for her shift at the truck stop cafe. The door would slam behind her. I’d pack my homework away at ten and prop myself up on pillow to watch Louette press the glossy red to her lips and mist her hair with drugstore scent. Then I’d hear the front door open and shut before I drifted off to sleep. Once, sometime after midnight, I woke to Louette’s muffled curses while a trail of stale smoke and tinny beer wafted through our bedroom. The white of her boyfriend’s hockey jacket bobbed and glowed where it caught the light.
“What’s it like?” I whispered while she undressed in the dark. The hockey jacket hit the floor with a thunk.
“Who knows?” she said with her smoky laugh, “He says we should wait until we’re married. Which means we park by the lake and look at the water for a while. Then we do everything but and I tell him to stop when he wants more.” She laughed again, but I could hear something red hot churning under her words.
Louette had been going out with Stan for two years. Stan played goalie for the Laketown Flames and the pucks slid off him like rain off a mountain side. He was serious about Louette and had given her a ring. It wasn’t a diamond. Engaged to be engaged, Louette announced to everyone while drifting the cubic zirconia in front of their faces. The diamond would come later she said, once Stan had graduated high school and was working full time in his dad’s auto repair shop. Stan would look at Louette while she talked, his face craggy and solid, his big hand clamped to her shoulder.
Stan had helped me paint the colour discs for my science project, back when I was still doing light spectrums. Hockey season had ended and he had some free time. He’d sat with his knees wedged underneath the kitchen table and his elbows spread square, and apply delicate strokes of colour to cardboard. I could do three wheels to his one. He never tired of sticking the discs on the motorised nail and watching the colours spin to oblivion.
“Weird,” he’d said, “how the parts are so clear one minute. Green, red, blue: right there in front of you. Then you turn it and everything gets mixed up into nothing. Pure white. Like a face full of ice after a totally gruesome body check.” It had taken him a while to adjust when I’d changed my topic. “Volcanoes?” he’d asked, “That’s like smoke and danger, total destruction. Yeah I guess I can see why you’d want that. But this colour wheel, now it’s just a real amazing thing, isn’t it?” I’d let him paint a few more discs before I brought out the plans for the volcano.
Once he’d gotten used to the idea, Stan was the ideal partner. He cut and attached chicken wire while I mixed paste and tore strips of newspaper. He shaped the cone of the volcano and built up the layers. He advised on structure and dry times. He stuck little trees from his train set at the base of the volcano and added a tin foil lake, then plonked a plastic deer on the hillside. “For drama,” he said, “When that volcano blows, it’s gonna take out some lives. Gonna do some serious carnage.” Louette wound herself around him then and whispered in his ear. I knew she was asking him if they could drive out to the lake. She was in a good mood today, all bu
bble and froth after a week of sullen silence. Stan smiled at me and unstuck his knees from under the table. His Camaro started up in a series of shotgun blasts while I was left scraping cold paste from newspaper.
Winter turned to spring. The snowdrifts yellowed and softened and the first of the pussy willows burst into cloud. The sky rippled between clear blue and swollen gray, and meltwater trickled off the roof and froze into spikes on the colder nights. Louette stormed around with her face drawn tight and her fingers itching towards her pack of cigarettes. She went out in bare arms and stood under street light with her skin radiating heat.
I plucked up my nerve and asked Mr Robson for advice on my topical topic. He told me to keep a journal, to watch the news and read the papers. Mount St. Helens was making headlines. March 27th . . . copied . . . There is a swarm of earthquakes, one of them registering five point one on the Richter scale and carving out a crater before bringing an avalanche. Then comes an ash column, sent seven thousand feet into the air and falling within a twelve mile radius. March 29th: a second crater appears. There is visible flame, and static electricity sends out lightning bolts two miles long. April 5th: there are at least five earthquakes a day and the governor declares a state of emergency.
My mother returned early from her shift one night . . . her ulcer was acting up again . . . and caught Louette sneaking in through the back door. “Chrissakes, girl,” she said with one hand on the kitchen counter and the other clutching her gut. “Why should he pay for milk when he can get the cow for free?”
Louette stared at her with her black eyes smoking and her cheeks flushed scarlet, but said nothing.
My mother filled a glass with water and dropped two tablets into it. They fizzed and frothed and we all watched. “You’re on the narrow road to not much,” she said as she shuffled to her bedroom. “Believe me girl, I know.”
Louette mouthed the words at me, threw her hands in the air and wiggled her boobs and hips for emphasis.
It was hard to resist her when she was like this. I laughed and we shimmied around the kitchen, Louette sing-songing under her breath: the narrow road, the narrow road to not much.
But Louette was grounded for the entire month of April and I was made her guardian. She made a point of smoking inside and leaving her butts in the plant pots. Stan came over to apologise to my mother. He stood in the kitchen with his big hands hanging and his face wobbling, and waited until my mother told him to go away. Louette brought her biology text book home from school and sat cross-legged on her bed, drawing cycles and spirals on blank paper. Photosynthesis, she wrote, and made the dot on the letter i into smiling sun. I told her it looked dumb and she told me to mind my own business. She helped me paint my volcano, dipping a brush into red and dragging it down the side of the mountain. “You ever think about this place?” she said. “About where we live?”
“It’s okay,” I said, concentrating on gluing down the trees.
“We live in a goddamn trailer park,” said Louette, “You and me? We’re trailer trash.
We live in a shitty trailer park in the shittiest part of a shithole town. This is not okay.”
The volcano sat between us, glistening with paint, and I could see how the newsprint had smudged gray underneath, how the entire structure looked shabby and cheap despite our work.
“I’m going to get out of here,” said Louette softly. She pinched the paintbrush between her fingers and its end glowed ember red.
Louette helped me wrap the volcano in a black plastic garbage bag and carry it to school. We delivered it to the science room and Mr Robson stood up when we came in. “Louette,” he said, “How’s the dark cycle going?” Louette smiled as he lifted the bag off us, and his green gaze wavered from her eyes to her lips. I stood silent while they talked of biphosphate and glyceraldehyde and glucose, and who Louette liked to hang out with and what music she liked to listen to. I could feel the lip gloss I’d put on earlier sticking to my mouth like glue.
April 21st . . . I wrote in my journal that night . . . Mount St. Helens continues to cause concern. Scientists have noticed harmonic tremors on their instruments. They think the magma under the mountain is on the move.
Stan was finally allowed to visit. The Camaro pulled up with its engine blatting and my mother called down the hall. Louette sat perfectly still with her eyes gone dark. Stan’s voice stammered at the door and Louette gave me a small tight smile before she grabbed her cigarettes and sauntered away. She didn’t glance in the mirror before she went; her lips were left unglossed and her hair hung lifeless.
Stan seemed as rock solid as always on the surface, but I saw the changes. He sat at our kitchen table and tried to talk to me. I poured him a cola and waited. “Something’s changed,” he said, watching the bubbles fizz and rise, “Louette’s all different.” His face worked then, his mouth twisted and his forehead bulged and I was terrified he might burst into tears.
“It’s just school,” I said quickly with my mind casting around for details. “Final exams and all, you know? Especially biology. She can never remember the difference between light and dark reactions. Mr Robson is helping her.”
Mr Robson was helping both of us. He handed me a tin of baking soda and a little glass flask of vinegar and told me to mix the two together. The foam frothed over test-tube edge and Louette laughed in throaty surprise. “An acid and base reaction,” said Mr Robson, “Pure chemistry when those two meet, and the results are explosive.” His green eyes glinted as they slid from me to Louette. I sat at the high laboratory table and experimented with proportions of bicarbonate and vinegar and red food colouring, recording my observations in my volcano journal. The mixture needed to erupt perfectly on the day of science fair; it would have to bubble up the test-tube hidden in the paper-mache dome and pour down the sides, suggesting fiery magma to my awestruck audience. I watched Mr Robson lean over Louette and guide her pencil around his drawing of the Kreb’s cycle, and I remembered how he smelled up close, as fresh and mossy as the forest after rain. Louette turned towards him and her eyes widened a little, and I thought she’d probably just noticed the same thing.
April 30th. The United States Geological Survey reports that one side of the mountain is bulging. This is from the pressure of the magma building inside. 270 feet of rock shifted now, and more pushed out every day.
May came and Louette’s detainment lifted. Stan showed up at the door with a big loose grin and his car keys jangling, telling us how pretty the lake looked with sun on it. Louette told him she was studying. I watched his face change shape, the muscles underneath his skin shifting and setting to stoic silence.
“Later, maybe?” she whispered, and his face softened.
I was woken again in the early hours by the bedroom door creaking open. It was too warm now for the hockey jacket, but Louette’s skin glowed white where she’d bared it. She sat on the edge of her bed, just sat there silent and still, and I turned towards her. The usual smoky vapour drifted from her but something had changed; she smelled of some other thing both sweet and sharp. I thought of leaves unfurling and mossy rock and fallen rain, I sensed the colour green twisting through the dark and winding tight around my guts.
“Go back to sleep,” Louette whispered, “You’re dreaming this.”
May 7th. The eruptions have started again. They are small. You can’t see the magma boiling away underneath the solid rock. This is called a cryptodome. Crypto means hidden.
Mount St. Helens was in the news regularly now. It had become a familiar face, and it showed up in the comic strips smiling and blowing puffy clouds into blue sky. The tourists ate hot dogs and pointed their cameras at the ash plume, the cabin owners snuck into the danger zone and came out with porch chairs and bed frames piled into the backs of their pickup trucks. The geologists squinted at the cameras and spoke about the rate of intrusion and the resulting instability, and shrugged when the reporters asked when. The volcanologists threw their hands around and thrust jagged seismic graphs at the newspapers.
“Yeah it looks calm but what’s happening underneath is the important thing. And, whoo boy, this could be big,” said one. “The entire north face could slide, and if that happens we’ll have a full scale catastrophe on our hands.”
Louette seemed to sleepwalk through those days, slow and barely there, like some of her fire had gone out. She mumbled and drifted around the place, half dressed and half awake and always with a cigarette dangling. It often smouldered forgotten but she seemed to need the weight of it there in her hand. Night would come and something would spark in her eyes, and I got used to the empty bed on her side of the room.
Stan dropped by on the Friday before it happened. I was home alone. Louette had cornered me in the school corridor and said she would be late, that she wanted to finish off something at school.
“Where is she?” Stan asked. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms hanging empty and his chest caving inwards, but his face looked swollen, ready to burst. I could feel that awful tightness on my own face when I answered.
“With Mr Robson,” I said, as if it were nothing. I heard the Camaro spin away, throwing gravel like a fistful of rage, and I had to sit down for the shaking in my knees.
Saturday was quiet. Mount St. Helens had ceased all visible activity and the news was filled with Cuban refugees and race riots and the number 1 hit single by a sharp-cheeked blonde, who looked a lot like Louette without the darkness. In the calm, the tourists had gone home and the cabin owners were officially allowed to collect their belongings. Louette drifted through the rooms, picking up things and putting them down again.
“Stan?” she said when I asked, “No. I saw the Camaro in the student lot, but I never saw Stan. I should call him, I guess.” She looked at the phone and picked up her cigarettes instead.
Sunday May 18th was Mother’s Day. Louette and I were up early; I’d volunteered at the Strawberry Brunch held in the school cafeteria every year, and Louette had decided to come along. Our mother slipped in at seven just as she always did after a night shift, and told us she’d see us there after a few hours of sleep.
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