A Bird On Water Street (14 page)

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

6). The Burra Burra Mine collapse as seen from the Ducktown Basin Museum overlook in the 1980s. 7). The same collapse in 2004. Nature is moving back in!

7.

Chapter 20

Hannah

Things were going downhill at Piran's house too.

“I can come over,” I told Piran on the phone the next weekend. Another storm had hit, trapping us indoors. Maybe, just maybe, Hannah would be home for once.

“Nah, I'll come up there,” he replied then whispered into the receiver, “I need to get outta here.”

“Why, what's up?”

“I'll tell ya when I get there.”

We sat in my room going through old magazines, but I could tell Piran wasn't paying much attention. He kept chewing his nails and staring at the floor.

I waited for him, and kept peeking at him out the corner of my eye.

Finally he spit it out in a rush. “Hannah's pregnant.”

“What?” My stomach turned upside down.

“She broke the news last night.” He didn't look up. “She and Eli are getting married.”

“Married! But . . . but she's in high school! And . . . and he doesn't even have a job!”

“She graduates next month, and she's the same age my mom was when she married my dad,” Piran said. “But, God! Eli Munroe is going to be my brother-in-law!”

My tomato soup lunch threatened to come back up. I'd been holding out hope that Hannah would realize how wrong Eli was for her. I'd been waiting for my chance to show her how right
I
was for her. But now it didn't matter.

Married.

“They're moving into an apartment in town,” Piran said. “My parents are furious.”

Piran's face was splotchy red and slack. I don't think I'd ever seen him so upset.

“I'm real sorry, Piran,” I muttered as my heart sank down to my toes.

“Yeah.”

O

Hannah and Eli were married at the courthouse two weeks later. Only immediate family attended, so Piran told me what happened—even though I wasn't sure I wanted to hear.

“Hannah was all googly-eyed, but Eli looked like he'd swallowed a toad. He was green I tell ya—GREEN! Everybody was frownin' and grumbling like right before a fight breaks out. I thought my dad and Eli's dad were gonna come to blows, because Mr. and Mrs. Munroe blamed Hannah, of course. Like she got pregnant on purpose or somethin'. It was the most depressing wedding I've ever been to.”

Hannah and Eli didn't go on a honeymoon, just hung out in Eli's apartment—their apartment. I tried so hard not to think about it, but it kept creepin' into my brain.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the Rockets baseball team was all over the newspaper as they soaked up win after win.
If the Miners were playing, it would have been us in those papers.

My heart was as bare as Coppertown, and I didn't think I could sink any lower.

r

Chapter 21

Tadpoles

Without being wrapped up in baseball season, Piran and I didn't know what to do with ourselves.

“We could go swimmin' in the sinkhole,” Piran suggested one weekend.

“God, Piran, that's the sort of creepy thing Buster would come up with,” I complained. “You know my grandpa died in that collapse before it filled up with water. That's like swimming around on his grave. Besides, there's still equipment down there. And you can't get in anyhow.”

“Half the fence is rotted,” Piran said. “The runoff water ate up the bottom of the metal posts. I knocked one over the other day without barely pushing at all. C'mon, I dare you.”

I gave him a dirty look. “You know what happened last time I took one of your dares, Piran Quinn. I don't need no more broken bones,” I said. “How about we go check on the frog eggs up at the tailings pond?”

“We're not supposed to go there neither,” Piran reminded me.

“Nothing is gonna keep me away from those frog eggs,” I said.

On the way past the trestle bridge Piran looked at me sideways. “I have an idea,” he said. When he walked out to the center of the bridge, my jaw dropped.

“Don't worry, the train don't run no more. C'mon!” He unzipped his pants and peed into the mud below. “It seems only fittin', don't ya think?”

I nodded and walked out to join him, taking the awkwardly spaced beams step by step. That day in August came back to me in a rush and my knees grew weak.

Piran urged me on. “C'mon, Jack, you can do it.”

Soon I was by his side and doing the same thing. The bumpy landscape of Coppertown spread out in front of me as I let go with a record-breaking pee onto the exact spot where I'd broken my arm. It did feel like a good payback as I replaced the bad memory of lying in that ditch in pain with the new one of doing something goofy with my best friend.

O

The tailings pond was starting to dry up. The feeder creeks were down to a trickle and several small ponds were now completely cut off from the main pond.

“I was afraid of that,” I said. “I'll bet these are all gone by summer.”

“Hey, look!” Piran pointed at where the eggs had been. Tiny black tadpoles, no bigger than macaronis, wiggled through the water.

We stretched across the ground to get a better look.

Down low, I noticed something else—green reeds were sproutin' out of the ground all around the ponds. Some even had the beginnings of leaves on them.

I shouted with excitement. “Piran, look—weeds!”

“Oh yeah,” he replied with much less enthusiasm.

“It's nature, Piran,” I tried to explain. “After a hundred years of nothing,
nothing
, nature is comin' back to Coppertown!”

“Eh. I like Coppertown the way it is,” Piran said. “What do you want a bunch of weeds around for anyway? I'd probably just be allergic, which would make my asthma worse.”

I was speechless. How could my best friend not understand? Even so, he didn't dampen my mood. Weeds! Trees couldn't be far behind.

I smiled all the way home as I stared at the ground lookin' for more signs of life moving in. How long would it take for
everything
to turn green?

O

I told Miss Post about the tadpoles, although I didn't tell her where I'd found 'em.

“Jack, honey,” she said, “we don't have frogs in Coppertown.”

“The eggs must've come down with the flood waters or something, because they're here all right,” I said. “There's weeds growing along the banks too.”

She wasn't convinced, but found me an entire book on amphibians anyway. It went into way more detail than our school science book. I read about the stages they went through, called metamorphosis, from eggs to tadpoles to frogs, and learned that frogs actually breathe through their skin.

I can't wait to see that!

According to the book, the tadpoles still had over a month to go before they'd be bona fide frogs. Would the pond last that long for them?

I pulled out the book Miss Post got me earlier in the year on plant identification. How cool to actually have living examples to compare to the pictures in the book! I walked all over Coppertown with that book sticking out my back pocket or my nose stuck in it studying.

I didn't recognize most of the weeds popping up everywhere, but I picked out the kudzu right away. Whenever we drove outside of Coppertown, we passed miles of land swallowed up entirely by the green vines. It was pretty in its way, but a little scary too. Though I'd never thought of nature as bein' aggressive, kudzu was proof of it.