My Chemical Mountain (6 page)

Except there was a silver Lexus in the parking lot.

Charlie saw three men arguing. He knew all their faces.

The mayor’s deputy was shouting, “Vandals destroyed seven
trucks on your shift!
Seven trucks!
Do you know what that means? It means you’re finished here.”

Jack Thompson, the security guard who came so close to catching us at the mill, said, “Please. I’ll do anything. I really need this job.”

The Mareno Chem executive with the silver Lexus balled up Dad’s jacket and whipped it into his backseat. “I’ll find out who this belongs to. And we’ll make sure this little problem goes away.”

That’s when Charlie took off running.

We all have questions.

Goat says, “Are you talking about the jacket with the drum set on the back?
That
jacket? You wore it to the mill? You
left it
there?”

Cornpup says, “So let me get this straight. The mayor’s deputy knows about the dumping?”

Randy says, “They’re gonna trace that jacket back to Jason so quick, it’s not even funny. What were you idiots thinking?”

I feel my throat dry up like I just swallowed a handful of dirt. “The security guard who got fired … is he Kevin Thompson’s dad?”

No wonder he wants to kill me.
Bang
. I shut my eyes and imagine a dead swan floating in the creek.

Charlie says, “I was wondering when you were gonna figure that out.”

Goat is quiet for a long time. “Okay. I’ll let Jason into the building for fifteen minutes.”

Charlie wants to know why we can’t all go in. Goat tells him it’s because the three of us are a disaster waiting to happen.

Charlie blows smoke in Goat’s face. “Fine. When?”

“Monday night at nine,” Goat says to me. “If you’re a minute late, I’m gone.”

The pressure is officially on. I want the jacket back, yes, but I
don’t want to go into the Mareno Chem building alone, after hours, after what we did.

Cornpup grabs his duffel bag and stands. The truck bed bounces at the shift in weight. “I have to go,” he says. “I have to get to the pawnshop before it closes.”

“What’ve you got in there?” Randy asks.

“None of your business,” says Cornpup.

I think Charlie wants to stay. So do I. Randy has been so moody and distant lately. He’s always out drag racing with Goat. Or he’s playing his guitar with his bedroom door locked. Or he’s at some girl’s house. When we finally get a chance to hang with him, it’s hard to walk away.

I climb onto my bike and hear Goat say, “Wearing a dead man’s custom leather jacket to the industrial yards. Unbelievable.”

I look back, expecting to see a smile on Randy’s face, expecting them both to be mocking us as we pedal off. Instead, I see Randy shove Goat hard against the cab of the truck. “Why do you always have to be such an asshole?” he says.

I wonder if it’s possible that Randy will someday dump his dead-beat friend, drop the attitude, and come back to us.

WE
follow an access road until it dead-ends. We cut through a dried-up pond. We pass a baseball diamond that has all its benches and bleachers ripped up. Our town has one main drag, with a hair salon, a pool hall, a liquor store, and two family restaurants. There’s also a pretty cool pawnshop, which is where we’re headed now.

“You’re such a hustler,” Charlie says to Cornpup. “Always selling something.”

Today the pawnshop guy takes one look at Cornpup’s duffel bag and rolls his eyes. “I’m closing in two minutes.”

There are so many things I want in this store—a Fender guitar, speakers and amps, a rotisserie oven, a blue lava lamp, and a watch that tells you what time it is in four different countries.

“I brought some good stuff this time,” Cornpup says. “Check it out.”

Pawnshop Guy squints through his glasses. “I’ll give you a couple bucks for these cell phones. I’ll buy the tools off you too. But that’s it. I don’t want that space heater. I’ve got plenty of space heaters.”

“Fine. Whatever,” says Cornpup. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“As long as you’re quick about it. I have to be at the bowling alley in twenty minutes.” Pawnshop Guy is eating slices of bologna straight from the package without any bread.

Dad used to bowl in a league. His bowling ball was black with swirls of green, like a giant marble. The night he died, Mom sat in a kitchen chair with that ball on her lap for hours, until I told her to stop it because she was scaring me.

“Hey.” Pawnshop Guy frowns at us. “Where does your weird little friend get all these electronics? Is he a thief? Tell me the truth.”

“He knows how to fix other people’s junk,” says Charlie. “He’s like a half-insane engineer.”

“I feel like I hemorrhage money to that boy. What does he do with it all?”

“Donates it to a museum.” I’m not lying. Cornpup dumps a lot of cash into our Freak Museum—colored lights, labels for each exhibit, formaldehyde, and hardware for the growing shelves. It gets expensive.

Pawnshop Guy says, “Museum, my ass.”

Cornpup appears two seconds later with a wet piece of paper in his hands. “I just found this in the garbage. The Army Corps of Engineers is hosting a meeting about Two Mile Creek next week. Contamination. Anybody from the neighborhood can go. You know what that means?”

“It means we’ll have to jump a stupid fence every time we want to go swimming next summer,” Charlie says in a bored voice.

“I already know about the meeting,” I tell them. “My mom got a letter in the mail.”

Pawnshop Guy gives Cornpup a small wad of cash. Then we head outside.

Cornpup has a serious look on his face. “They’re taking public comments. We can tell them about Phenzorbiflux.”

“Comments are weak,” says Charlie. “If you want to bring down the biggest chemical company in the world, it’s gonna take more than
comments
.”

I have to agree. “Plus, they use psychological warfare. Every time someone speaks out against them, they lay off a bunch of people and threaten to shut down the Poxton plant. Then the whole town turns on you. Bring up Phenzorbiflux and twenty-five jobs disappear, guaranteed.”

“They make everyone feel afraid,” says Cornpup. “That’s their one power over us. But what if we refuse to feel the fear? Then they’re powerless.”

“It’s not fear,” says Charlie. “It’s using your head. It’s survival. You don’t work at Mareno Chem. And your parents don’t work at Mareno Chem. Some of us need those paychecks.”

“Then why do we keep looking for the barrels?” says Cornpup. “What’s the point of finding Phenzorbiflux if we can’t tell anyone?”

“The point,” I tell him, “is to find the Phenzorbiflux before
you
open your big mouth. If we stir up trouble now, and people lose their jobs, and we’ve got no proof to back us up, then what? Then we’ve blown our big chance. If you talk at this meeting, you gotta promise me you’ll focus on the smaller chemical companies who’ve been dumping in the creek. Don’t bring up Mareno Chem at all.”

Cornpup considers this, but he won’t look at me, and I can tell he’s pissed.

Charlie says, “Here’s the deal. We’ll keep looking for the missing Phenzorbiflux, because it’s fun. And we’ll go to this stupid meeting, because we can’t trust Cornpup to keep his mouth shut otherwise.
But when it comes time to really punish Mareno Chem, we’re gonna do something big. No more talk.”

I feel a surge of adrenaline. I wish I knew what Charlie had in mind.

Cornpup is in a pissy mood now. He trudges behind us, whining about how we shouldn’t go to the creek today because the smell is too strong.

“He can go sweat to death, for all I care,” says Charlie. “It’s crazy hot out. I’m going swimming.”

It’s not like we don’t get it, about the creek being gross and dangerous or whatever. We know bubbling gray water with marble swirls of black sludge ain’t exactly pure, but New York City is a major terrorist target, and nobody moves away on account of that. Hell, there were people who wouldn’t even
temporarily
leave New Orleans when Katrina was a couple of miles offshore.

We’ve got our home, a place that’s ours, things we love doing, and we just roll with it. Charlie says it’s really unhealthy to live in constant fear. He says you can live forever if you laugh and take a lot of risks.

On the way to the industrial yards, we pass Kevin Thompson’s house. His garage is open and his bike is gone, but I still glance up at his roof to see if he’s perched there with his guns.

“I’m just so pissed off,” I say. “It’s not even my fault he wants to kill me. If his dad was a great security guard, they wouldn’t’ve fired him for what we did at the grain mill. He was probably already on thin ice for something else.”

“Yeah, the two of you are gonna be enemies for a while.” Charlie swipes a football from someone’s front lawn. He jogs back to us with a huge smile on his face. “I heard he wants to hook up with Valerie, so if you go out with her, it’s like a double whammy. You think he hates you now, just wait.”

“I’m lifting weights in your garage tonight,” I say. “When he kills me, I want my gravestone to say I fought back.”

At the creek, me and Charlie toss the football around while Cornpup digs for the eternal robot. We call it that because he never stops tweaking it, giving it little remote-controlled weapons, lengthening its legs, outfitting it with cool armor. He pulls the robot up out of the earth. He peels off the blue tarp covering and then checks to make sure no dirt got into the controls. Minutes later, the robot is walking through water, firing Nerf rockets at my head. Charlie finds our Super Soakers in one of the other tunnels. He tosses me one, and then it’s like there’s this all-out battle, me and Charlie against Cornpup’s machine. We’re in the water, drenched, our shorts pretty much falling down, and Cornpup’s onshore, bone-dry, punching commands into his controller, with this crazy look on his face, shouting, “You guys are dead!”

So me and Charlie have no choice but to make balls of creek mud and start whipping them at Cornpup’s face. It’s really the most kick-ass battle we’ve ever had. By the end, me and Charlie are all slimy and green from the water, and Cornpup is covered in mud, and our faces are burning from laughing so hard. When it starts getting dark, we split up. Cornpup stays at the creek to rebury the eternal robot. Charlie is starving and runs home to eat. I feel so grimy, I can’t even think about food. All I want to do is take a shower.

Before I go into my house, I strip off most of my clothes and abandon them in a garbage can by the street. I wring out my sneakers, dripping green water onto our porch steps. I wipe my feet clean in the grass. A long, hot shower turns out to be the perfect thing. I change into jeans and a black T-shirt. Then I call Cornpup.

“You don’t have to actually
lift
anything,” I promise him. “We aren’t gonna force you to work out. Just come hang with us.”

He tells me he got creek water in his eyes. He doesn’t feel so great. He’s going to bed.

So it ends up being just me and Charlie lifting weights in the Pelliteros’ garage. We have the radio cranked up. We’re mocking Cornpup, who’s probably all curled up in bed right now like a granny.

“Oh, Mommy, my eyes are stinging; make me some soup,” says Charlie.

“Oh, Mommy, I pooped the bed and it smells like ammonia,” I say.

“Oh, Mommy, help me get all this toxic mud out of my ears,” says Charlie.

Valerie and Jill show up out of nowhere, and I start freaking out in my head, because what if Val heard me say “pooped the bed” and doesn’t know I was pretending to be Cornpup?

I turn down Charlie’s metal music.

“You guys going to the cookout tomorrow?” Jill asks us.

Charlie drops his dumbbells. His arm muscles look ripped. “Hell yeah, we’re going.”

Valerie is sitting on a weight bench, legs crossed, staring at her hands. She looks up at me once, and I swear she likes it that I’m all sweaty with bloodshot eyes. Maybe I look dangerous.

We talk about dumb stuff for about ten minutes. Then Charlie gets restless because he wants to start lifting again, and the girls say they have to get going because they were supposed to be walking to the video store and straight back, and Jill’s parents will kill them if they find out about this little detour. Valerie hands me a folded-up piece of pink paper, and I shove it into my pocket to read later, when Charlie’s not around. Then the metal music is back on, and the girls take off.

I do push-ups till my arms give out. I do crunches till it hurts to
breathe. Charlie doesn’t get tired. He only stops because he can see I’m cashed.

We go inside to make some food, but when we enter the kitchen, there is trouble. Mr. Pellitero is drunk, staggering near the sink. Mrs. Pellitero is shouting in his face, “What are we going to do for money?” over and over again.

Randy says, “Mom, calm
down
. There are other jobs. We’ll be fine.”

Mrs. Pellitero says, “No, Randy, we aren’t gonna be fine. All the good jobs are getting shipped off to China, and your father thinks he can just screw around. Moving to another town won’t do no good. Jobs have been disappearing all over the country.”

Charlie jumps right in on the argument, veins bulging from his arms. “Mareno Chem fired you? For what? What did you do?” he shouts in his dad’s face.

Mrs. Pellitero is making the situation so much worse. She keeps saying, “Now what are we gonna do? Now what are we gonna do? Now what are we gonna do?”

I know something bad is about to happen when I see the empty bottle of Jäger on the floor. Mr. Pellitero pops his wife in the eye with one quick, precise punch that makes me want to spit in his face. Then Charlie gives me the look,
Jason, go home
, and I take off running.

MOM
is the only person I know who’d spend an entire morning talking about Polish sausage. “It’s hot out today,” she says. “And this meat was expensive. I’m not taking any chances.” She sends me to the basement in search of a cooler.

“The Kuperskis live across the street. Why can’t we just use a plastic bag full of ice?”