August waited briefly to see if he was done.
“We’ll have a really nice trip for you,” Seth added. “I know that’s not as good as you having it for yourself. But it’s all we can do, and we’ll do a really good job. Won’t we, Henry?”
Henry nodded once, hard.
“Okay, I’m done, August. You can do it now.”
August leaned forward until the fire made his hands uncomfortably hot. Just for a moment, he didn’t want to open his hands. But the fire was beginning to burn them. And he didn’t want to pull them away with the job left undone. He didn’t want to fail at this. So he opened his hands with a slight tossing motion.
The fire bent lightly from the wind of his motions. Then . . . nothing.
August had no idea how long he stared at the fire, wondering what he expected it to do and why it wasn’t doing it. In truth, he didn’t know what he’d expected. Anything except nothing. He hadn’t expected everything to remain perfectly unchanged.
He looked down at his hands, which were still coated with ash. Suddenly he found it nearly impossible to breathe. His chest felt constricted, as though something was holding him too tightly. He rose to his feet feeling slightly dizzy.
“I have to go wash my hands,” he said. It came out as a half-coherent mumble.
He vaulted up the back steps and into the rig, where he closed himself into the tiny bathroom. He purposely avoided his own eyes in the mirror as he scrubbed his hands with antibiotic soap. He looked down at them as he washed and saw that they were shaking. He washed harder, hoping the pressure would keep them steady. The feeling in his chest, that constriction, was not easing. If anything, breathing was more of a struggle. When his hands were entirely clean, he splashed cold water on his face, somehow thinking that would help. It didn’t.
Still avoiding the mirror, he dried his face and hands and came out of the bathroom, needing to sit. He perched on the edge of the couch, his head in his hands. Then, feeling even sicker, he tried putting his head down between his knees.
A few seconds later he heard the screen door swing open. Woody appeared under his face and licked his nose. He straightened up as best he could.
“August!” he heard Seth say. But the word sounded far away, as if making its way to him down a long tunnel. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m okay,” he said.
“You don’t look okay.”
“I am.”
“Are you lying to me, August?”
Seth sat on the couch close to him, one thin arm draped over August’s back.
“Yes. I guess I am.”
“What’s wrong? Do you feel sick?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“What is it?”
August worked hard to pull in a deep breath. “I just . . . I don’t know, buddy. I don’t know how to say it. I wanted to get here. You know. For him. But now I’m here. And I don’t know what I expected it to fix. It didn’t fix anything. Nothing changed.”
“Henry!” Seth screamed. “You have to get in here! August’s sad! We have to help him!”
Then Seth wrapped himself around August, rising to his feet to get a better hold. August could feel the boy’s hair pressed against his face. He worked hard at holding in tears. So as not to alarm the boys. No, that was a pathetic excuse, he realized. He always worked hard at holding in tears. He would have to stop doing that. Someday. Not now.
After a moment August felt Henry’s arms wrap around his chest, and the little guy’s face pressed up hard on his shoulder.
“Don’t be sad, August,” the little mouse voice said.
August’s tears let go. And stayed for a long time. As long as they damn well pleased. Until they were fully cried out.
The boys stayed as well.
Henry held on tight with one arm, and with his other hand he stroked the back of August’s hair. Almost exactly the way he petted Woody. And he didn’t stop.
In time August straightened slightly.
“I think I’m going to be all right now,” he said.
“You sure?” Seth asked.
“At least as all right as I was before.”
“Okay,” Seth said, letting go. “I guess that’ll do.”
“You guys go back out by the fire. I bet it’s just right for marshmallows by now.”
“Okay, we’ll start one for you, August. I know just how you like ’em.”
And that was true. He did.
August stepped back into the bathroom and washed his face well in the sink. For longer than necessary. Then he looked up at his own face in the mirror. It jolted him. His eyes were swollen and red, and he looked so completely . . . ruined. He quickly looked away again. The image in the mirror made him seem so vulnerable. Well, he thought, the mirror didn’t play any part in that. He was vulnerable. He just didn’t feel quite ready to view the full extent of it. He dried his face and joined the boys by the fire.
He could still feel his hands shaking. The pressure around his chest was gone but had been replaced by a scraped-out, scoured feeling in his chest and gut. He tried to decide if it was just as bad. Or worse.
He sat cross-legged on the blanket, and Seth handed him a perfectly toasted marshmallow on the end of a stick. He bit it tentatively, but it was still too hot to eat.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” August said.
Seth leapt to his feet, dropping one of the sticks.
“Now?”
It almost made August laugh. Or cry again. It was hard to know which one fit. It was just so perfectly Seth. Always tripping over his own feet, trying to do what you wanted of him, before you even had time to say what that was.
“No, not now, Seth. At the end of the summer.”
A silence fell. Seth sat back down.
“I can’t stay with you boys at your place. I have to get back to work. So the only thing we can do is take you guys back home to San Diego with me. It’s going to be hard, because you’ll have to be in a new school, but just for a few months. Just until Christmas vacation. And that’s another thing. I can’t drive you home until Christmas break. I just have too much to do on the weekends. And that’s more than two weeks later than your dad gets out of jail. If he wants to come get you sooner, that’s fine. But that’s the soonest I can get away to take you home.”
Silence. As if the boys thought there might be more.
“That okay with you guys?”
“Okay? August, that’s great!”
“It’s going to be hard. Change to a new school and then change right back again. And you’ll have to take the bus to school. Either that or I’ll have to drop you there almost an hour early.”
“That’s not hard, August, that’s great.”
“You sure?”
“Are you kidding?”
August heard a light sniffle and looked over at Henry just in time to see him wipe his nose on his sleeve.
“If it’s so great, why is Henry crying?”
“He does that sometimes when he’s happy. Well, not happy exactly. When he thought he was in trouble and then it turns out he’s safe. When he feels . . . what’s the word?”
“Relieved?”
“Yeah,” Seth said. “That.”
August ate his marshmallow, and they sat in silence for a time, staring at the embers of the slowly dying fire. In time Henry’s sniffles subsided.
“Know what’s nice?” Seth asked.
August didn’t know. But he assumed it had something to do with avoiding a county facility for children.
“No, what?”
“Now it’s like a little bit of Phillip is in the smoke. I’m watching this smoke, and it’s going up to the stars, and part of it is him. I just thought that was nice.”
“That is nice,” August said.
“So something did change. At least a little bit, anyway.”
“I think you’re right about that,” August said.
Chapter Eleven:
IN A BARREL
; August woke them early the next morning. Barely dawn. So they could see a few of the sights before the bulk of the crowds massed in.
As they drove the empty road between Madison Campground and Old Faithful, they had just enough light to see geothermal steam rising in the distance on both sides of the road. A spooky moon hung over a low stand of mountains, half-obscured in the mist.
“Whoa!” Seth cried, and Henry craned his neck to see. “Why does it do that, August?”
“You knew there were geothermal features at Yellowstone.”
“Huh?”
“You knew there were geysers at least.”
“Are geysers geothermal?”
“Yes. They are.”
They pulled into a parking lot next to a network of boardwalks that wove through boiling mudpots, hot springs, fumaroles, and beside a small geyser. They were the third vehicle to park, but the owners of the other two vehicles were nowhere to be seen.
“Can Woody come?” Seth asked.
“No. Sorry. No dogs on any of the boardwalks or trails in the park. It’s not a very dog-friendly place.”
“Sorry, Woody,” Henry said, and August watched in the rearview mirror as Woody laid his ears down.
They stepped out into the barely light morning. The very ground under the boardwalks steamed, running with hot liquid from under the surface. The trees looked as though they’d just survived a volcano.
“Whoa,” Seth said again, and Henry grabbed at August’s hand. “It’s kind of cool. But not exactly pretty. It sort of looks like one of those movies about the end of the world. Like we’re the only ones who survived.”
“I guess so,” August said. “I’ve seen a lot of pictures of Yellowstone. There’s definitely beauty here. But these dense geothermal areas are a little spooky.”
They stopped near a paintpot and stared. Its middle was a deep pool of clear emerald blue, stained iron red at the eroded road-map edges. The rising steam nearly obscured their view, so they stared longer, waiting for the occasional breeze to bend the steam and help them see. Henry gripped August’s hand tighter.
“I should’ve paid better attention in science class,” Seth breathed, his voice weighted with wonder.
Everybody should pay better attention in science class, August thought. He was so tired of teaching something that nobody seemed to care much about.
“You knew there was heat inside the Earth,” August said.
“I did?”
“I assume you did. You know about volcanoes, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. But this is not lava.”
“No, but it’s all part of that same superheated system.”
“I had no idea all this was going on under the earth. I’ll never look at the ground the same way again. It’s like the planet is alive.”
“The planet is alive. No ‘like’ about it.”
“I always thought living stuff grew out of it, but . . . will you tell us why it does all this, August?”
August felt the deep sigh rise up in his chest, then heard it exit through his nostrils again. “I’m sure it explains all about it in the brochure,” he said.
Seth shot him a wounded look but said nothing.
They walked on, around a bend in the boardwalk where a small geyser was spitting water a few feet into the air, almost hard to distinguish from the rolls and coils of steam in the barely dawn. Two couples with a camera on a tripod were cheering the geyser on. Without discussion they walked on, wanting to be where there were no other people again. It would be their last chance for the day. The crowds would wake up soon.
“But you’re a science teacher,” Seth breathed, heavy with complaint. “And every time I ask you about science, you tell me to look at the brochure.”
August sighed again. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I do this all year. I get kind of burned out.” Well, he thought. I don’t get burned out. I got burned out years ago and still haven’t come back from it.
“But you don’t even seem like you like science.”
“I used to,” he said.
“But now you don’t.”
“I guess I’m just kind of tired of what I do.”
They rounded the boardwalk back toward the parking lot. Dark birds perched in the tree skeletons, then flew away.
“Do you like teaching kids?”
“Well, they’re not exactly kids. It’s high school. They’re more like jaded teenagers.”
“But do you like them?”
August walked a few more steps, wondering if he should lie. “I used to.”
“Well, what do you like now?” Seth asked, sounding exasperated.
August thought for a long moment, hoping for a more noble answer. Then he told the truth.
“Summer,” he said.
They sat on a stretch of bare, backless bench, watching the rising steam of Old Faithful. Waiting for the geyser to blow. A few dozen people waited with them, but there was a lot of bench so no sense of being packed too tightly.
“I wish we had something to do while we were waiting,” Seth said.
August filled his lungs in preparation for a sigh, then decided he did that sighing thing far too much.
“Quick science lesson?” he asked.
“Yeah!” both boys shouted at once.
They looked up at him with eager faces. August wondered if his job would be different if kids looked up at him with eager faces. And if even these two kids would have been the slightest bit eager for a science lesson if they had been in school.
Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it’s not the kids’ fault. Maybe we made the first mistake.
“I’ll start with geysers,” he said. “They’re a lot like the hot springs we saw before, but less open. They have very narrow openings. So the heat can’t rise and escape very well. It gets bottled up. And there’s pressure created by the rock and water sitting on top of all this heat. So these bubbles form and stay trapped until they’re so big and powerful that they actually lift the water above them. Kind of a splash thing. And that lets pressure off the system, so you get this violent boiling. And the extra steam it creates forces the water up and out of this narrow opening.”
Then he went on to explain the terraces and mudpots and paintpots, half aware that the people on either side of him had gone silent and were leaning in a bit to listen. Right before he wrapped up the lesson, he felt a faint memory of what he had once liked about science. And, in the faces of the boys, what he had liked about teaching kids.
But the thought was interrupted by Old Faithful, as had been destined. Everyone shouted and cheered, and then August was just another person glad to see the eruption, glad it did what it consistently did. In that moment it didn’t matter that he knew more about the geological process than those around him. Everybody likes a good geyser.
As both the crowd and the geyser were winding down, Seth asked, “If Phillip were here, would he have wanted a lesson in science?”
“He wouldn’t have needed one,” August said. “He knew almost as much about it as I did. He was a science whiz. Almost a science nerd, though I don’t mean that in a bad way.”
They all three stood and began the long walk across the network of big parking lots to the motor home.
“He liked it because you liked it,” Seth said. It didn’t sound like a question.
“Maybe. Or maybe it runs in the family.” Henry glanced up at August, almost as though he had an opinion. If so, he never shared it. “No, I think you’re right. I think he liked it because he looked up to me. And because it was something we could be interested in together. Something we could share.”
“Huh,” Seth said. “So I bet you liked science a lot better before he died.”
August never answered.
>
“August! Buffaloes!”
August instinctively pressed his foot on the brake, glancing in the rearview mirror to see how closely the car behind them was following. He swerved onto a pullout, and so did most of the cars on that stretch of park road. As many as could fit. The rest just came to an illegal stop in the roadway.
“Bison, actually,” August said, stepping on the parking brake.
“What’s the difference?”
“You’re not the first to confuse the two. But there’s a difference.”
August stared out Seth’s open passenger window. The animals grazed in a vast green field, a stand of mountains a sharp contrast behind. The sky was perfectly cloudless, a color almost navy blue at the edges. A narrow river snaked through the field. The animals looked a bit silly from this close vantage point, their shoulders and necks massive, shedding the last scraps of ragged winter coat, their hips tiny, as if the two ends of the animals had been put together in an accidental mismatch. August briefly wondered how it felt for a female bison to give birth.
He glanced over his shoulder at Henry, who had taken off his seat belt and was kneeling on the couch, looking out the window. Woody stood just to his right, paws up on the back of the couch, growling at the bison low in his throat. When August looked back, Seth had picked up August’s camera and was clicking off shots, the zoom fully extended.
“I can see them real good through your camera, August.” Then, about twelve clicks later, “Can I get out and go closer to ’em?”
“No! No way, Seth. They can be dangerous. They’re huge animals. You don’t want to approach them.”
“Oh. Too bad. I guess I just have to settle for the zoom.”
He clicked off about ten more shots, then set the camera in his lap and just stared for a time.
August watched the side of the boy’s face. It looked placid. Ecstatic almost. But strangely calm. For Seth.
Take Me With You Page 12