“Invite him in, Carl,” said Janet.
“I did. He seems a little shy.”
Jay rose and went to the door. Enrique was breathing hard, each exhale a jet of steam like one from a teakettle. His face was mottled and his spherical nose-tip and round cheeks shone as if they were frozen solid. The elastic cuffs of his dirty, rainbow-striped ski jacket were pulled over his hands. The bike lay on its side on the lawn. Had Enrique ridden all the way here?
“Dad’s at the house.” With a boxer’s hook, Enrique wiped his nose. “Mom said she would make him leave, but she didn’t. He’s driving me crazy.”
Jay dug in his pocket. “Put your bike in the trunk. I’ll be out in a minute.”
Enrique’s hand emerged from the sleeve to take the keys. Was it that easy?
Enrique didn’t know that, after a stifling week, Jay was ready for a fight. “I’m going to spend some time at Lina’s,” Jay announced to the group. They all gave kind nods and sighs of approval, and Jay knew with utter certainty that he would not be missed.
The boys sped home, and Jay jogged up the walkway and entered the house the way he did the basketball court from the bench. The old man looked up from the sofa and started. “Jesús,” he said, and began to lift his marionette-arms for a hug. Lina, who had returned from church, stood frozen in the kitchen holding a vibrant green head of lettuce.
“Can I have your keys?” Jay said to his father.
The man gave Jay a confused look and didn’t move.
Jay picked up the ashtray. “You can’t smoke here,” he said. He kicked open the screen door and tossed the ashtray out onto the ground. “Keys?” He held out his hand.
Jorge bowed his head and rocked to his side. He reached into his back pocket and took out the keys. Jay snatched them from him, went outside, and started the car. Then he gathered from his room what he could find of the man’s things—flannel shirts and long underwear, all of which gave off a spicy smell like smoked ham. He tossed it all onto the front seat of the Plymouth.
“You’re all packed and ready,” he said. “Your car’s warmed up. It’s time to go.”
The old man did what he had that first day. The features of his face, which was bowed a little toward the coffee table, froze. He opened his mouth and gasped. Only Enrique knew that he was crying. Jay came and crouched next to him. Lina, still in the kitchen holding the lettuce, couldn’t hear what Jay said, but Enrique could: “Listen, you old fuck. I will hurt you if you don’t leave. Understand?”
The old man breathed again. Slowly he extended his arm and dropped his hand over the cigarette pack the way the crane at the arcade clutched stuffed animals. He rose and limped out the door. Jay closed it behind him.
“He might have a shotgun in his trunk!” Enrique said suddenly.
A jolt of laughter shook Jay’s body.
“What!”
“The look on your face,” Jay said.
Lina came and sat in the recliner. She no longer trusted the knife in her shaking hand.
The Plymouth slowly crawled past the doublewide toward the entrance of the trailer park.
When Lina finally built up the nerve to look at Jay, she saw that he had been watching her with something like warmth in his eyes. He looked away before he spoke: “I told Enrique”—he cleared his throat—“to say sorry. I’m sorry.”
“He tol’ me.”
The three sat gazing at different spots on the floor. Then Lina sat up and said, “Do they deliver pizza on Christmas?”
Before bed that night, Jay found, in the corners of his room, a half-full carton of cigarettes, a balled-up pair of socks, and a tar-stained pair of coveralls. He took them all outside and dropped them into a pile next to the porch. Days later, the pile was still there, frozen to the ground, except for the cigarettes. A neighbor had taken those.
Chapter 18
The day before the Idaho State Science Fair, Lina insisted that Enrique come to confession. “We haven’t been to church in two weeks,” she said shrilly.
Enrique was slumped in front of the TV. “Who cares, Ma? We’ll go on Sunday.”
“Who cares? God cares!” Lina barked, half-playfully. She turned off the TV. “Let’s go. We’ll pray you win the science fair.”
Enrique released a frustrated groan. “I don’t care about the science fair,” he said, rising.
“Of course you do!”
Enrique let Lina’s answer stand, but, as they drove to church, he was surprised to conclude that, no, he didn’t really care. In the redesign of the project, all the danger and intrigue had bled out. Now it was kids’ stuff. The experiments Enrique had done on his teachers, his father, Abby, and Lina were far more fascinating. The dullest situation could become a thrill with the addition of just a little lie.
While Lina entered confession, Enrique pretended to pray, but really he was hatching a plan. A year ago, when Enrique had resigned as first altar boy, Father Moore had told Lina to watch him closely, in case he started having “adolescent difficulties.” (Lina had let this slip during one of their bedtime talks, and they had both chuckled guiltily about it.) What could Father Moore have meant?
Lina tapped Enrique’s shoulder. It was his turn.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” Enrique said, once situated in the dark confessional, which smelled vaguely of wet wool. “It’s been a couple months since my last confession.”
“Yes, my child,” came Father Moore’s weary voice. “It is good that you have come.”
Enrique let a few seconds pass, then he said, “I let some of the older boys at school touch me.”
After a stunned pause, Father Moore cleared his throat and said, “Touch you?”
“Yes, in the locker room. They wanted to touch me . . . down there . . . and I let them.”
“Did they force you, or intimidate you?”
“No, I let them.”
“This is a very serious sin, my child. You must never do it again.”
That someone believed this fantasy had taken place doubled its potency, and Enrique began to be aroused, there, in the confessional. “I’ll try not to.”
“There’ll be no trying. We are told that this behavior is an abomination to God. You must never, ever do it again.”
Enrique had never heard Father Moore so flustered. “Okay.”
“Do you know the Act of Contrition?”
“Yes.”
“Recite it for me now.”
“O my God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins,” Enrique began. He had always disliked the Act of Contrition. He didn’t understand how his sins had crucified Jesus. Hadn’t the Roman soldiers dressed in leather skirts done that?
When he finished, Father Moore said, “Now, I want you to repeat that when impure thoughts occur to you, my child, until they go away. And if these boys approach you again, go tell an adult. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Father Moore hesitated and took a frustrated sigh before he said, “You are absolved.”
Enrique left the confessional with his heart pounding in his ears. He adjusted his pants to hide his erection. How would Father Moore look at him from now on?
The next morning, while Enrique rode to Boise with Miriam and Penny, Lina went to the Sheltons’. As usual, most of her employers had rescheduled over the holidays, so she would have to work a few Saturdays in January to catch up. She would work fast, though, and make it to Boise before the judging started.
Lina sprayed a shimmering blue coat of Windex onto the Sheltons’ sliding glass door and, before it had a chance to collect and drip onto the carpet, wiped great frothy circles into it. Beyond the glass lay the icy planks of the deck, and the swimming pool, covered for the winter. This house was a great accordion of additions upon additions wrapped around this deck. It was hard to find the light switches, and when you did, they usually turned on a light in the next room that you didn’t need.
It had been summer, Lina recalled, the first time she had cleaned the Sheltons’. After show
ing her the house, Mrs. Shelton had opened this sliding glass door and led her outside. “. . . And this is the pool. You can use the net to fish out the junk.”
Lina stopped her. “Sorry, Mrs. Shelton, I only clean inside.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Shelton said. She stiffened her spine and led Lina back in.
Cleaning swimming pools! Lina had to draw the line somewhere, or else they’d have her feeding the sheep and burning leaves.
Grains of ice, too small to call snowflakes, fell through the air, collected on the swimming-pool cover, then blew off into the yellow lawn. It hadn’t yet snowed this winter, and this was no real indication that it would.
Lina remembered taking Enrique to the public pool when he was little. She enjoyed carrying him around, taking those long underwater steps, pushing off and floating before landing again, like an astronaut on the moon. She tried to convince Enrique to put his face in the water, as she had heard this was the first step toward learning how to swim. Again and again, he gasped, held his breath in puffed-out cheeks for some seconds, then exhaled through his nose. “That’s right, mijo. Now do it in the water.” But he wouldn’t. “You can do it, mi vida! You’re brave!” The expression on his sun-browned face—excitement, pride, fear, a hundred emotions at once, all while his cheeks remained inflated—made Lina laugh. Enrique responded by changing the task at hand. His goal now was to keep her laughing by making funny faces. She must have done something right for God to have given her such a boy.
He hadn’t put his face in the water, not that day.
A thought struck Lina with such force that she had to sit down on the armrest of the Sheltons’ sofa. She had never put her face in the water! When they had gone swimming in the irrigation canal near the Hacienda, she had dog-paddled with her chin so insistently thrust up that she got a kink in her neck. Of course, she hadn’t told Enrique this. She let him believe that she had dunked her head, that every adult had, that it was part of growing up, and that he should, too. A flash of remorse at never having admitted this to Enrique was followed with relief: now she could. He wouldn’t feel deceived, he would laugh. Again, she felt lucky, but for a different reason: her funny boy was now her friend. She would tell him tonight. It had been a while since their last bedtime talk.
In Boise, Enrique, Miriam, and Penny toured the State Science Fair.
Two boys from Pocatello had invented a machine—a robot, they called it, although it looked like a car battery on wheels—to run along train tracks, searching for cracks in the rail. When it came across one, it both marked the spot with a blob of fluorescent paint and emitted a radio blip. To demonstrate, they made room in the crowd that had gathered, lay a twelve-foot rail in the aisle, and set the robot on top. One boy flipped a switch, and the machine zipped down the rail, paused halfway down to deposit a pink spot, then zipped off the end and on down the aisle. While one boy chased it down, the other pointed to a green spot on a radar screen. “Railroad officials can now easily find and patch the break.”
A team of three girls from Sandpoint—twin sisters and a cousin—had cured an algal bloom in the family pond by inventing solar-powered electrodes that floated on Styrofoam blocks. The before-and-after photos showed that the surface of the pond had turned from sickly-green foam to pristine glass mirroring the pine trees that encircled it. An accompanying video proved that the electrodes didn’t harm the fish. A school of ghostly white, mustached carp placidly nibbled on bread crumbs that floated near the electrodes.
A boy-girl team from Bonner’s Ferry proved with a colorful array of charts that their hens had produced more and bigger eggs after a noisy rooster, who cock-a-doodle-doo’ed every morning, was butchered. Egg production went up again after the team began playing classical music in the henhouse every afternoon. Their presentation, titled “Pity Not the Single Mother,” was laced with wry double entendres, and their area, which had conveniently been placed at the end of a row near the corner of the gymnasium, became a kind of lounge where people enjoyed Chopin and snacked on deviled eggs.
Enrique, Miriam, and Penny dejectedly returned to their project to wait for the judges. Penny, who had not returned to Stockton because of unnamed family problems, had contributed a large, semicircular display—a collage of newspaper headlines (“Hundreds Mysteriously Poisoned in Cameroon”), interspersed checkerboards, and paint splatters. “What Happened?” the project’s new title, was spelled in dagger-shaped letters cut from silver Mylar. This collage, Enrique now admitted sadly to himself, was the project’s strong point. The model itself looked so flimsy and childish they might as well have added Fisher-Price people and a smiling paper-plate sun.
What happened?
The judges rounded the corner, and the team quickly pulled on their lab coats, each of which had their name and a paint splatter stenciled on the pocket, and took their places: Miriam in front, Enrique behind the model with tongs poised in his gloved hand, and Penny concealed behind the collage.
“Names?” said one judge, a short man with a pointed, fox-like face, reading glasses riding low on his muzzle. ANGUS PHILLIPS, PH.D., his nametag read.
Miriam gave their names.
“Project number?”
Again, Miriam answered.
Angus Phillips folded his reading glasses and tucked them in his pocket, and he and the other judges lifted their chins with smiles of forbearance.
Penny pushed PLAY, and the sound of buzzing insects and hooting monkeys emanated from behind the collage: Sounds of the Rainforest, a cassette they had found at the record store in the mall. Miriam began, “On August 21 seventeen hundred people died in the middle of the night . . .”
Enrique’s mind wandered. Despite the Tarzan soundtrack, the project had been tamed. Without the suggestion that it could happen anywhere but Lake Nyos, lake overturn had turned from a real threat into a ghost story from across the world, conceptual and colorless as the Twilight Zone reruns they played Saturday mornings after cartoons.
“We suggest that the gas in question was not volcanic poison but carbon dioxide,” Miriam said.
Enrique shook the soda bottle without heart and opened it at arm’s length. He let his movements convey boredom—he wanted Miriam to lose. When it came time for the dry ice, the Sounds of the Rainforest ceased with a loud click, and the haunting minor chords of the Cure began. Enrique lowered the steaming block into the bowl. When the cascade of mist ran through the village, the palm leaves curled and their paper stalks wilted.
Angus Phillips thanked them with a quick nod, then led the judges to the next table. There were no questions.
“How are we supposed to compete,” Miriam demanded over lunch, “when half of these kids are, like, millionaires?”
“I’m sure their dads built that railroad robot,” Penny said.
Enrique stayed quiet.
Three acne-faced boys in cowboy shirts approached, carrying their lunch trays.
“These seats taken?” one asked.
Miriam and Penny shook their heads.
“We stayed in a hotel last night,” one of the boys bragged as he stepped over the bench to sit.
“So?” Penny said.
“My mom was in a separate room. They showed rated-R movies on cable after midnight.”
“Porky’s Revenge!” said one of the others.
At this, Penny turned fully toward Miriam, as if to say something, but remained silent. Enrique quietly ate his lunch.
The boys’ conversation was a loosely connected series of claims, barked over each other, undaunted by Miriam and Penny’s refusal to respond:
“I’m gonna get a retainer in April. I’m only gonna wear it at night, though.”
“My sister has to have rubber bands.”
“I almost had to have headgear.”
“You know who my uncle’s best friend is, and I’m not even lying? Merle Haggard.”
At this, Penny rolled her eyes at Miriam, who smiled as she dipped a fry in ketchup. As annoyed as they pretended to be with the boys�
� presence, they didn’t tell them to get lost, or shut them out by starting a conversation with Enrique.
“You look like Cyndi Lauper,” said one boy to Penny.
“You look like Howdy Doody,” she replied.
The boy wouldn’t be deterred. “I shot a wild boar once with a cross-bow. Killed it, too.”
“You want a trophy or something?”
Enrique glanced up and saw, with relief, Lina wandering between the lunch tables, looking for him. “Ma!” he called.
Lina waved and rushed over. “Did I miss it?”
“Yeah.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “Enrique . . .” she began.
“It’s no big deal.”
“I got stuck at the Sheltons’.”
“Really, Mom, it’s okay.”
“Will you show it to me?”
Enrique quickly weighed the idea of returning to the scene of his humiliation against remaining here with these boys. “Sure, let’s go,” he said.
When they reached the project, Lina strolled around it. Neither she nor Enrique could think of anything to say.
“What is all that?” Lina finally asked, indicating Penny’s collage.
Enrique shrugged. “It’s, like, artwork.”
Lina couldn’t help herself. “I liked it better before.”
“Can we go?” Enrique said.
“Go home?”
“Yeah.”
“But you don’ know who won!”
“My stomach hurts. Really bad.”
“Are you okay? Are you going to throw up?”
“No. I just want to go home, okay?”
“Okay, mijo.”
They returned to the table, where one of the boys had taken Enrique’s space. The girls were now surrounded.
“Miriam,” Enrique said, “I’m not feeling well. My mom’s gonna take me home. Do you mind just taking the project back to your house?”
“Okay,” she said blankly. If there was more she wanted to say, she couldn’t under the gaze of these boys.
“Thanks,” Enrique said.
Enrique would next see the model months later, in Miriam’s basement, littered with her little brother’s toy cars.
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