By twenty minutes past eight, I was setting places on the pink-clothed cafeteria tables and Louette was slicing strawberries into a bowl. Mr Robson was supervising the kids and staff that year. He hummed as he propped test-tubes of coloured water and carnations at each table, and neither he nor Louette looked at one another. The students bustled back and forth with trays of cold cuts and baking powder biscuits, Louette licked her fingers and the kitchen staff gossiped while they worked.
At eight thirty there was a displacement of air. Nothing more than that, no explosion or sonic boom or blast of smoke, just a sudden quiet that made me set down my stack of plates and look up.
Stan stood in the cafeteria doorway with a shotgun hanging from his hands. His eyes bulged and glared in his swollen face, like they were about to pop from some force within, and he was panting. The silence echoed through the room, bouncing off the twelve-grader clutching her throat to the hockey captain in mid-cower to the kitchen worker staring over her pot of steaming water. Louette held out her hands and they were stained red from the strawberries, but Stan was not looking at her. He raised the gun.
Mr Robson stared back. He was holding a test tube and I saw how the carnations trembled in their crimson water. I saw how the colour had seeped into their delicate folds, tracing the red there like veins, and I swallowed hard.
“It was nothing,” he said, “Nothing. It meant nothing to me.”
Several things happened all at once then. Stan moved faster than I would have ever thought possible, breaking from doorway and towards Mr Robson with steps like stumbling boulders, the shotgun wedged to his shoulder. No no no said someone and please said another and there was the gurgling cough of the hockey captain retching. The kitchen worker dropped her pot of hot water and it splashed and steamed and Mr Robson cried out. Stan moved fast but Louette moved faster, lifting the bowl of strawberries high and throwing it full force into Stan’s face.
Eight thirty two. I remember how my eyes spun from bleeding carnations to blank dinner plates to the ticking clock face, instinctively thinking to record the time. I watched the second hand tremble and freeze and take an eon to click forward.
Stan wheeled back and smacked against the wall, sliding down it almost gracefully. The bowl bounced beside him and the mashed berries and red juice dripped from his cheek, spreading across cafeteria floor. His face crumpled and collapsed and he began to weep. The shotgun hung balanced across his skewed knees for a moment before it clattered to the tiles. Someone moaned, then there was absolute silence.
Louette stood facing Stan with her hair come undone and her sweater pulled off one shoulder. We looked at her, we stared until her image wavered and blurred and burnt itself into our eyes. Louette stood still while the air around her roiled and sparked, and we could not take our eyes off her.
“The ring,” someone whispered, “She’s not wearing his ring.”
My eyes slid from Louette’s bare finger to the glint of gold lying next to strawberrystained knife, and my hand went out before I could stop it, cupped around the ring and held it inside my fist. The ring, his ring; the whisper went around the room like a wave and I knew I’d kept something safe.
“Pathetic,” said Louette then. I saw how her eyes swerved to Mr Robson and stayed there, I saw how Mr Robson looked away. Louette laughed, short and sharp and caustic as ground glass. She turned on her heel and walked out.
I found her outside dragging deep on a cigarette.
“I should quit this shit,” she said, “I don’t even like the taste.”
We missed the eruption of St. Helen’s that day. At eight thirty two a.m., a five point one earthquake sheared off the side of the mountain and sent it hurtling down river valley at one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. The resulting landslide displaced the contents of an entire lake, splashing its water six hundred feet up and hillside and toppling the surrounding forest. The magma boiling inside the cryptodome for so long found itself exposed to the air, and it reacted instantly, exploding massive amounts of rock debris, volcanic gas, ash and pumice. The landslide was quick, but the magma was quicker; it overtook the slide at speeds of six hundred and eighty miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier. It vapourised everything in an eight mile radius and its superheated clouds blasted the foliage off trees many miles beyond that. Fifty seven people were killed, most of them asphyxiated. Some were burnt. Some were buried.
We missed the eruption, but they had started showing the footage on the television by the time we got home from the police station. The smoke billowed a dirty gray and I handed Louette her ring. Her fist closed around it but she did not put it back onto her finger. We watched the ash spew and Louette let me hold her hand. It was small and cold in mine.
The eruption sent an ash column twelve miles up and the air currents swirled it down again, covering thousands of miles in a caustic blanket and blacking out the noonday sun. The mudslides grated across bridges and the acid rain burnt the evergreen paint off the Washington state road signs. The ash flew across the border and we watched our clear blue sky darken by degrees. There was a fine grey dust covering the tops of the cars by the next morning. No one went to school, even though it was a Monday.
The police let Stan go after a few days of questioning. His father paid the fines and the police handed him back his gun. Stan was expelled from school and forbidden from graduating that year. None of us saw him for weeks and the rumours swirled and spread, dirtying the mouth with their taste. Some of that gossip grazed Louette, but she brushed it off like she didn’t care.
My volcano journal lay unopened and I stopped going to science class. A garbage bag showed up on our doorstep the week before the science fair, with a note attached. I took the paper-mache volcano out of the black plastic, and threw the note away with the bag.
I was not surprised to see the science fair hall steaming with homemade volcanoes, all in various states of frothy eruption. The room filled with the bitter stench of vinegar while the kid with the colour wheel spun his plates to white. The judge pinned a blue ribbon to his stall and I was not surprised by this either.
The ash fell down and got swept up, and eventually dispersed to farther places. It was decided that Louette carried no blame for what happened; a relationship outgrown, an engagement ring handed back and a young man left broken-hearted. It was only natural, for Louette was beautiful. And working surprisingly hard at her studies these days. Hadn’t she been getting extra help with her biology before the volcano blew? Louette walked the corridors with her hips roiling and her head held high, and the younger girls began showing up to school with dishevelled hair and their sweaters hanging off their shoulders. Louette brushed that off too and circled job vacancies at the back of the city newspapers.
Mount St. Helens erupted a few more times throughout the summer and fall, and the ash circled the globe, turning up as far away as Helsinki. We all got used to the taste of it at the back of our throats. It snowed black that winter and Stan drove to the lake with his father’s shotgun lying on the passenger seat of his Camaro. Mr. Robson spoke on behalf of the school at the funeral. He didn’t mention the volcano; he talked about flowers in the field instead. I saw the crimson veins of carnations, the blood-red water, and had to choke back the bile. Louette called to say she’d seen the snow on the news and was it really as black as that? She was working as a medical receptionist in a wealthier part of Vancouver by then, and dating a doctor.
Mount St. Helens settled, the lilies pushed through the ash piles and the sparrows perched on fledgling saplings. The years passed and I went away to university, while my sister grew tired of dating and married a cardiologist. He made her quit smoking when she turned forty. Now I work in seismic research and plot data on tidy graphs, and when I emerge blinking from the departmental basement, I have the sense of keeping something safe.
Mount St. Helens still vents steam and ash once in a while, and Louette phones me every time. “Turn on the TV,” she’ll say, “you don’t want to miss it.�
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I can hear the restlessness in her voice, that sense of breathy excitement that still draws people to her. I know how her hands will hum with heat while her fingers flutter and tap, searching for a long ago cigarette to light and suck to a red hot ember. My sister talks of her pretty children while I tell her about my research and we never say how, on a certain kind of spring morning, we wake with the taste of ash in our mouths.
PURPLE MARTIN
YEAH, I KNOW. I KNOW I’m not supposed to drive cuz I’m thirteen and three years away from being legit, I know it goddamn well. But some things go beyond legit. Some things just gotta be done and to hell with how it’s supposed to be.
So this is how I come to roll the old Chevy out of the barn after Mom and Dad leave to make the hospital arrangements. This is why I stand with the keys in my hand, looking at the sunlight glinting off the chrome. It’s August, and the swallows are going hellbent for leather, turning and flashing above my head. If I had my BB gun I’d knock them right out of the sky. It’s August, and my eyes burn and my armpits smell as sharp as a roadkill skunk.
We’re supposed to be barefoot and skinny-dipping in the lake, but we’re not. Not this year.
I slide in behind the Chevy’s wheel. Yeah, I’m not supposed to drive but I know how, I been practising with Dad since I was ten. The engine grinds when I crank her up and I don’t think she’s gonna catch but then she does, and I sit for a while with my hands sweating on the wheel. When I turn off the ignition, the silence hangs hot and heavy. I go and get Marty.
He’s awake. Mom’s left the curtain open a little, and the sun comes in on a lightsaber beam over the Star Wars action figures lined up on the windowsill, the ones I gave Marty but he hardly plays with anymore. It’s August, and he’s still under a double layer of blankets. His room stinks of stale wool and something worse.
He’s got his head turned to one side and his eyes half-closed in that way he has now, but his gaze swivels when I grab his foot through the covers and give it a good shake.
“Sheeit, Marty,” I say, “glorious goddamn day and you snoozing it away. Sheeit.”
And Marty smiles, cuz he likes it when I swear like one of the hay crew on a smoke break, when I draw the word out between my teeth and roll it around my mouth, like we got all the time in the world.
He’s six, same as I was when he was born. Six, and summer should be all blue sky and long day and no goddamn idea of anything else.
“Hey Marty,” I say, “you wanna go to the lake?”
He watches me like he’s trying to see if I’m jerking him around but then he nods. I help him to the toilet, telling him to do a pee before we go and he tries but not much comes out. I dig out his sneakers from last summer and they still fit. I try not to think about that while I tie the laces for him cuz he’s never learned how. Forever tripping over his trailing feet and falling on his baby soft ass and, yeah, me laughing cuz it was funny the retarded look he got the second before his face crumpled.
“Ooh,” I’d say, flapping my hands like a spastic, “Marty’s a special boy.”
But now he can hardly walk so I piggyback him down the stairs and out the door, and prop him up in the passenger seat of the Chevy. I’m not totally shit-for-brains; I bring his hat and a blanket no matter the heat, and I click his seatbelt closed and yank it twice just to make sure.
Marty watches me with his eyes squinted up against the sun. He’s breathing hard through his mouth, whistling a little bit. His breath stinks. His gums bleed and he won’t let Mom brush his teeth anymore, not even with a cotton bud, and Dad says leave him alone cuz it’s not gonna matter about his baby teeth now is it?
There’s a pack of Strawberry Bubblicious wedged between the dashboard and the windshield. One square left and it’s gone soft and sticky, but I peel off the pink paper and give it to Marty telling him to chew and don’t swallow or he’s gonna be blowing bubbles out his ass every time he farts and that’s a fact.
So I turn the key and crank her into gear and the tires crunch over gravel. I take the driveway nice and easy before wheeling onto the main road. The swallows turn and flash in front of the windshield, and their shadows make Marty blink. I can’t look at them too hard; I’m concentrating on keeping the silver wing point on the hood lined up with the road, and scanning the distance for anything coming. But there’s nothing except the damn swallows.
Marty spits out his gum, saying he doesn’t want it anymore and he’s thirsty. I tell him to wait for the lake.
I remembered about the dehydration. I got Dad’s old army bag packed with essentials and it sits between us. Two cans from the pop shop, Purple Berry Blitz for Marty and a root beer for me, but I don’t know if he’ll drink it cuz even his favourite things make him puke now. And I got the bird book cuz I remember Marty likes the pictures, especially the woodpecker with its cartoon-red cone head and crazy eye. Yeah, Marty would laugh at the tock tock tock of the bird slamming its head against a tree, and he’d throw himself at me with his hand a jabbing beak and his mouth sputtering and spitting until even Mom told him to stop. And I took it too far as usual.
“Hey Marty,” I’d say, “you like peckers, right?”
Right. His eyes wide and trusting and hanging on me.
“Guess that makes you a pecker-head, eh? Say it, Marty, say ‘I’m a pecker-head’.”
And he would, sputtering peckerhead peckerhead and putting on a real show cuz he likes it when I laugh and he’s too little and dumb to know anything else.
The swallows turn and my stomach twists and I wonder why it’s him got sick not me. But nothing’s like it’s supposed to be, nothing’s legit.
Mom and Dad did what they were supposed to. They took Marty to the hospital when they found the little purple lumps on his legs just before Easter, and they told the doctor about the headaches and the bruises and the fevers. And the hospital did the legit; the tests came out and Marty went in and cried cuz he was missing the first grader’s egg hunt, and Mom cried cuz his hair fell out, and Dad and me just stood there looking stupid.
We come to the hill before the lake and I do what Dad always does while we scream laughter and Mom screams stop: I push my foot to the pedal and hold. I gun that gas ‘til we’re over the peak, ‘til we’re airborne we’re flying we’re goddamn birds, and for a moment I forget.
Then the road rears up and we come down and Marty gasps when we bump, like it hurts his bones.
“Sheeit, Marty,” I say real quick, “that was a good one. Wheee.”
And Marty whispers wheee back and smiles and it’s okay.
The lake’s not much of a lake really. A marshy oval in the neighbour’s field, where we come to swim in the early summer, before they let the cows in to graze and the shore turns to shit. Now the water’s blue and pure.
I let the Chevy roll to a stop and tell Marty to wait, I’ll help him, but he pushes against the door and slides himself out and stands with his knees knobbly bent and his blanket falling. He takes a few steps and I see his shoelace has already come undone and how the hell he’s managed that I don’t know, but he lets me pick him up and piggyback him to the lake.
I find a log and a dry belt of sand, and wrap Marty in his blanket before wedging him between my knees. I take off his hat so he can feel the summer on his skin, but then I put it back on again cuz his scalp looks so eggshell bare. The sun glazes the water all shimmer and split, and we watch the teal ducks bob and the dragonflies lift. Marty’s head leans against my knee and I get a floaty feeling like swimming, even though we’re not.
They show up in a swoop of shadow, like swallows but bigger and darker and falling faster. Their wing points turn and dive, flashing between dull black and glorious purple depending on how the light strikes.
“Hey look, Marty,” I say. He lifts his head and settles himself back against my chest.
We sit quiet with our eyes following the sharp flight. Marty wants to know if they’re woodpeckers and I tell him naw, but I have to look them up in the bird
book just the same.
“Sheeit, Marty,” I say, “Purple Martin, an Agile Aerial Acrobat. Must have named it after you, right?”
He smiles and coughs, and I remember the cans of pop in the army bag. I flip the tab off Marty’s Purple Berry Blitz and he drinks a little and it almost feels like any summer day at the lake. So we’re sitting there watching the birds and I’m thinking nothing and Marty opens his mouth and croaks out a few words.
“You say something, bud?”
“I’m gonna be a bird,” he says. “I’m gonna be a bird when I die.”
And I can’t think what to say and I’m glad he’s facing the lake and can’t see my face. Then he asks how I’ll know him. When he’s a bird.
I blink and my eyes clear and I see his foot poking out from under the blanket with its shoelaces trailing.
“I’ll know you cuz you’ll still be Marty,” I say. “Purple Martin. You’re gonna be up there feet dragging and falling over yourself, and it won’t matter shit when you’re a bird.
Yeah, I’ll know you.”
He leans against me and I can feel his shoulders wing-bone sharp. I know he’s getting cold and it’s time to go. He doesn’t want to leave so I tell him to watch and I put my thumb over his pop can and shake it up real good, until the spray arcs purple and glimmering against the sun and we laugh at the fizzy fart sound it makes.
Marty sleeps on the way back and I take the road slow cuz his head’s too knobbly to knock against the window.
Of course Mom and Dad are already home by the time I roll the Chevy up the driveway, cuz nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be and nothing’s legit. Marty wakes when I say sheeit but he smiles and it’s okay then.
Dad doesn’t say nothing. He bundles Marty out of the car and into the house while I stare at my feet, and Mom comes tearing out of the front door screaming “What the hell got into you?” while her hands flap and smack. She grabs onto my shoulders and her face crumples, like Marty’s used to when I was mean, and I hug her, even though I sting where I got slapped.
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