Gene burst in the front door. “Guess what,” he said.
“You colored them in?”
“I solved the mystery.”
“Where are the posters, Gene?”
“It wasn’t a poison gas that killed the people at Lake Nyos,” Gene said.
“It has to be. That’s our project.”
“It was carbon dioxide.”
“Carbon dioxide is already in the air, Gene. It doesn’t kill you.”
“It does,” Gene said, “if it’s the only thing in the air. The lake, down deep, was carbonated like soda pop. Then it turned over. All the carbon dioxide escaped at once, and since it’s heavier than air, it ran along the ground. Everything that breathed oxygen suffocated. That’s why there was no evidence. It didn’t smell like rotten eggs. It didn’t get gunk on everything. The plants weren’t affected. They like carbon dioxide.”
Enrique gave himself a moment. Such a long, sputtering string of words was rare and embarrassing from Gene, as if he had vomited. This new information was exciting, but Enrique wouldn’t admit it. It was far too late for changes and additions. He inhaled, then, realizing that what was about to come out was a whimper, checked himself, stood up straight, and deepened his voice. “You didn’t color the posters, did you?”
Gene bunched up his face and looked at his feet.
“We were supposed to be a team, Gene. I let you decide the project, when we could have done something a whole lot easier, and you know what you’ve done since then? Nothing but waste my time.”
“I made a poster,” Gene said.
“And you did a crappy job. Do you even want to be in the science fair, Gene? Do you even want to go there tomorrow?”
Gene now looked up at Enrique and said, with complete innocence, as if his answer might be of help, “No.”
Enrique stomped his foot. “Good, then! I don’t want you there either! This is my project! You can just stay home for all I care!”
Gene turned and quickly walked out.
Enrique followed him. “Give me my posters!” he yelled.
Gene stomped up the stairs and into his trailer and, a second later, returned with the posters, which he threw into the grass.
“My brother’s right,” Enrique said. “You are retarded!”
“I am not retarded,” Gene said.
Enrique picked up the posters and went back to his house, leaving Gene on that tiny aluminum box they called a porch breathing loudly, his arms folded tight.
Far too upset to color the posters, let alone practice his presentation, Enrique went straight to bed. He would rise early, finish, then go get Mr. and Mrs. Smiley, who lived at the far end of Robin Lane. They had a pickup truck with a shell and had promised to take Enrique and his project to and from the science fair if he fed their cats while they were in Wyoming over Thanksgiving. But then Enrique lay awake for a long time, thinking what an awful night this was, and how very wronged he had been.
For Lina, on the other hand, it had been a good night. She had sat with a group of mothers from church eating popcorn and gossiping, and Jay, who usually spent most of the game on the sidelines—basketball was his sport—had prevented a touchdown with a good tackle, at which point Lina had stood up and cheered and called his name. Still, Eula High had lost.
Now Lina walked into the house and saw the little sign. It seemed Enrique had gone to bed, so she untied one end of the string, turned on a light, and looked the model over. All of a sudden, it looked really good.
Her next thoughts came in rapid succession. How had Enrique afforded those little houses? They were Chuck’s train accessories. Had Enrique stolen them? No, of course not, Chuck had given them to him.
What was Chuck up to?
Fearful, suddenly, that Enrique would find her snooping, Lina turned out the light and retied the string. She slipped down the hallway quietly, like a thief in her own house. It was only when she was safe in her room that the rage took over. Chuck had crossed a line now. This was it. No more.
Connie came home too and sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, allowing the wonderful mood of the evening to wash over her. “You are a blessing to me, Connie,” Bill had said when she dropped him off at the parsonage. He had paused, as if there was more he wanted to say. Connie couldn’t meet his eyes, so her gaze fell to his neck and then rested in the little notch of his sternum, which was framed by the collar of his oxford shirt, which, in turn, was framed by the V of his sweater. She could see by the dim interior car light that this notch was covered by a light coat of short blond hairs and traversed by a thin gold chain.
“You’re a blessing to me, too, Bill,” she had said, then, shocked by the intimacy of her own words, added, “You’ve touched many lives in these churches we’ve visited.” She wished now she hadn’t panicked, but let her initial response stand. She felt the business with the upside-down slide was now over.
Enrique heard his mother come home, he heard Mrs. Anderson’s car pull up, and then, much later, he heard Jay go through the house to his room—and felt it, too, as Jay’s heavy steps caused the house to shudder on its stilts. He thought of ways that his mother and Jay had wronged him. The house fell silent, and still Enrique seethed.
I’ve got to go to sleep, he thought, or else I’ll do bad tomorrow morning. So he curled up and imagined, as he often did when he was too upset to sleep, that he was sealed up in an egg made of a strong, transparent material that protected him completely from the surroundings. He could go anywhere in this egg. Sometimes he floated through the night sky into outer space, other times he settled onto the cold ocean floor. This time, though, he glided through the warm surface water of the Indian Ocean while great whales rose from the depths. One nudged him aside with its massive, blunt nose, sending him spinning away until his egg rolled up the side of another, great and flat as the wall of a barn. He reached the whale’s tail, which gently flicked him up and away toward the moon, jiggling at the water’s surface.
SOME PEOPLE TRIED to describe Eula’s relationship with Chandler, which lay fifteen miles away in the direction opposite Boise, as familial: Chandler was Eula’s big brother or little sister or lazy cousin or wicked stepmother. But none of those worked, as Eulans couldn’t quite assign a human character to Chandler. Going there felt like being sent to the office. Although smaller than Eula, Chandler was the county seat, so all the buildings to which Eulans were beckoned for unpleasant business—to renew their licenses, to argue tickets, to bail out brothers—were there. While going to Boise meant glamour, going to McCall meant leisure, going to Blackfoot meant insanity, going to Salt Lake meant matrimony, and going to Portland meant abortion, going to Chandler meant many things—drudgery at best, incarceration at worst. So the road to Chandler still bore the residue of those bothersome visits, even when one was going there for something more pleasant, say, to visit one of Chandler’s two attractions: the Oregon Trail Museum (located in Chandler although a seldom and, some said, only mistakenly used branch of the Oregon Trail had passed through), and the rodeo grounds. Chandler’s rodeo, the River Valley Round-up, was on the national circuit and drew crowds every July, their pickup trucks, livestock trailers, and RVs filling campgrounds and motel parking lots as far away as Boise. It was Chandler’s true claim to fame and the only thing Eula envied it.
The rodeo grounds, which were also used for the county fair every August, were vast and well-maintained, featuring lawns, stables, an outdoor stadium, and a field house. In the fall and winter this field house was used by the City of Chandler for its own events and rented out for functions—car shows, swap meets, and a Mexican dance every Saturday night.
The day before the Snake River District Science Fair, the field house had been used for the Rabbit Show, where breeders from around the state met to buy and sell rabbits and trade tips and recipes. The scent of rabbit—a musty combination of sawdust, mold, and urine—still hung in the air when Enrique arrived on Saturday morning. Anyone allergic to cats was doubly allergic to rabbi
ts, or so claimed the Chandler High science teacher, who guided Enrique and Mr. Smiley to the assigned space. “Just set it down on the table, hon, it’s yours to use,” she said. Then she blew her nose with a honk. Her watery eyes were as red as a rabbit’s. Enrique and Mr. Smiley carefully eased the model onto the table. “I’ll be outside if you have any questions,” the teacher said.
“Well, I’ll see you at two, Enrique. Best of luck to ya,” said Mr. Smiley. And Enrique was alone, apparently the first student to arrive. A couple of men were setting up tables, and a woman in a white apron and hairnet was putting out coffee and doughnuts. A quick look around his row revealed Miriam’s name written on a card taped to a neighboring table, and a pile of rabbit droppings, small and spherical as peas, under his. He scooped these up into a piece of newspaper and considered switching Miriam to a table farther away. Then he thought better of it; there might be some confusion when Miriam arrived, she’d find out what he had done, and he’d seem the fool or, worse, the coward.
Enrique and Miriam hadn’t spoken since the day he called her fish project stupid. They still sat next to each other in Miss Holly’s English class, but in stony silence. Miss Holly was their favorite. Once, after Enrique and Miriam collaborated on a dramatic reading of Maya Angelou, she had called them her “dynamic duo.” Still in her late twenties, she was the only teacher who made attempts at fashion, by crimping her hair on some days and putting it up with plastic clips on others. Her efforts to add emphasis to her broad, blank face resembled punctuation marks: blue bars over the eyes, an oversized beauty mark. She had a funny way of folding her hands when someone said something stupid that made the class laugh. A few days ago, Enrique had caught Miss Holly giving her dynamic duo a sad sigh from the back of the room. This affected him more than anything else, because Miss Holly’s versions of things seemed grander than reality, like the novels she taught. The alliance between him and Miriam had been more powerful and the current rift wider and more permanent than their real versions. He liked Miss Holly’s better.
As Enrique set up his display, other kids began to arrive and do the same, and parents and teachers began to congregate around the doughnut table. When he finished, he went on a little tour up and down the rows, checking out his competition. Most of the kids were from the smaller outlying towns, and most of their projects seemed to have been adapted from 4-H presentations—“The Life of the Sugar Beet” and “Pasteurization: What Is It?”—while a few were retellings of current events: “Can Chernobyl’s Radiation Reach Us?”
He returned to his project to explain it to visitors and wait for the judging to begin. A few parents meandered past with doughnuts cupped in napkins and gave him friendly nods, but none asked him questions.
Lina arrived, carrying a bucket. “The man was so nice,” she said. “He lent us tongs. He says you gotta use them, so you don’ get burned. It’s so cold that it burns your skin!”
“Wow!” Enrique said. He hid the bucket behind the table—he didn’t want anyone to know about the dry ice until the moment he put it in the bowl—and went to take off the lid.
“Careful, mijo, use these.” Lina held out a pair of thick, white rubber gloves. They looked like Mickey Mouse hands.
“Neat!” Enrique said. He put on the gloves, removed the lid, and gazed down through the steam at a cube wrapped in newspaper. With the tongs, he peeled the newspaper away.
An hour later, the rows were crowded with projects. The judges began going from table to table at the opposite end of the field house, which led Enrique to believe he would be near the last. This might be an advantage. And still, Miriam hadn’t arrived. He hoped she had decided to drop out.
Lina ate doughnuts and asked question after question but, Enrique noticed, didn’t ask about Mr. Hall’s gifts. “This is so exciting, baby. What is this newspaper stuff called again?”
“Papier-mâché. Same as a piñata.”
“Of course.”
“Ma, don’t get crumbs in the model.” Her presence was making him nervous just when he needed to relax. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go follow the judges and see the other projects. I can’t do it myself. Then you can tell me how they are.”
“Good idea.”
Finally, Miriam arrived, carrying three large planks under her arm. She wore a homemade dress with belled sleeves like those of a choir robe. She dumped the planks on the table, then lifted her arm to brush sawdust from the satiny fabric.
To ignore her would be too weird, so Enrique gave her a quick “Hi.”
“Hello,” Miriam snapped. She gave herself a final brush-off and began to bustle around her area. The planks turned out to be a hinged wooden triptych, which she opened enough to stand on the table but not so much as to reveal its contents. Enrique filled the metal bowl in his model with water and removed some cobwebby strands the glue gun had left in the trees. Miriam’s space looked very empty next to Enrique’s; he would have felt sorry for her and might have even said something nice if she hadn’t been acting all secretive.
Then there were no more preparations to make. Enrique knew the presentation by heart. He sat down, straightened his clip-on tie, smoothed his greased-down hair, and waited.
After what seemed like ages, the judges rounded the corner at the end of the row, holding clipboards like shields over their hearts. Enrique stood.
There were three judges: the mayor of Chandler, who, during his twenty-eight-year tenure, had judged countless science fairs, fiddling competitions, and rodeo-queen pageants; a female veterinarian from the Chandler Large Animal Hospital, whose muscular forearms made one picture her holding down a sheep to administer a vaccine or twisting the tangled limbs of a colt from the womb; and a chemistry professor from Boise State University, who, perhaps ironically, had worn his lab coat, and who wheezed and sneezed and padded his flushed face with a handkerchief. Between tables, the veterinarian asked the professor if he wanted to step outside to clear his lungs, but he had thanked her and forged ahead. A few minutes later, they arrived at the table where a Mexican boy with shiny cheeks and shiny hair stood before what seemed to be a Swiss village threatened by a salad bowl.
Like the presenters who preceded him, Enrique took no notice of the professor’s condition. In a voice that had only a touch of a tremor, he began:
“I’m Enrique Cortez, and my project is entitled ‘What If It Happened Here?’ On August 21 of this year over seventeen hundred people died in the middle of the night. They were villagers in the mountains of Cameroon, a country in Africa. Not only did humans die, but hundreds of cows and untold numbers of wild animals. If you direct your eyes to Poster A, you will see some newspaper headlines and photos that were published right after this tragic event. Why care what happened in a country on the other side of the world? Well, as long as this mystery goes unsolved, how do we know it won’t happen at other locations around the globe, say, at our own Lake Overlook? Many scientists believe that poisonous gases from inside the earth could have seeped into Lake Nyos through fissures—that means cracks—in the lake floor. Since the lake is very deep—seven hundred feet—the heavy layers of water could have kept the gases trapped under the lake like the lid of a bottle keeps the bubbles in soda pop.”
From under the table, Enrique pulled a liter-sized bottle of club soda and gave it a vigorous shake. He had decided to add this part of the presentation at six o’clock this morning.
“Something may have happened at Lake Nyos—a rock slide or even just a strong wind—that caused the layers to shift, allowing the gases underneath to escape.” Enrique twisted the bottle open, and it hissed and sputtered. “A bottle of pop overflows when you open it because carbon dioxide is being suddenly released. The morning after the tragedy at Lake Nyos, the lake was suddenly red and muddy and its surface level had dropped by six feet. Maybe it was gases from under the lake that came up and killed all those people. This is a theory scientists call ‘lake overturn.’ ”
A scraping noise came from Miriam’s area. She was openi
ng the triptych.
“But could lake overturn happen at Lake Overlook? There is no reason to think it couldn’t. Lake Overlook is roughly the same depth as Lake Nyos, and about three times the surface area.” Enrique, who really had no idea how deep Lake Overlook was, quickly scanned the judges’ faces for signs of disbelief. He found none. “The phenomenon of lake overturn is not yet understood, but if the amount of gas trapped under a lake is proportional to the weight of the water keeping it down, we could be in big trouble.”
Enrique put down the soda bottle and pulled on the gloves. He uncovered the bucket holding the dry ice and, using tongs, lifted out the steaming block.
“The lake in this model represents Lake Overlook, and the town represents Eula. At Lake Nyos, almost every oxygen-breathing organism in a fifteen-mile radius was killed. Given the size of Lake Overlook and its closeness to Eula . . . well, I’ll let the model explain.”
Enrique had come up with softened wording after the science club had called the project “creepy.”
He put the dry ice into the steel bowl, and the water began to bubble. A rich gray mist poured down the slope, braiding among the houses and trees, then gathering against the Plexiglas wall. The other kids began to leave their projects and gather around. The mist overflowed the box and cascaded down in tendrils to lick the floor. This was even better than Enrique had imagined.
Now came another part Enrique had added this morning: “If you direct your eyes to Poster C, you’ll see a list of poisonous gases that could be to blame. But add to this list one more: the very gas being released by the dry ice in my model, the very gas released from that soda bottle earlier, carbon dioxide. But, you might argue, carbon dioxide isn’t poisonous—it’s in every breath we breathe. Plants need it to survive. True, but, as you can see, carbon dioxide is heavier than air. If carbon dioxide escaped from Lake Nyos in a great enough volume, it would have blanketed the ground and suffocated all oxygen-breathing organisms. And, since there was no trace left afterward and the plants in the area weren’t damaged, this is what we believe happened. This harmless gas might have killed over seventeen hundred people in a matter of minutes.”
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