My Chemical Mountain (8 page)

I wolf down a burger, some chips and salsa, and a piece of pie. Charlie flings chunks of potato salad at me, because he knows I hate the smell of mayonnaise. Peggy, Mom’s line manager at the air products plant, sits down next to Theresa. They start talking about the newest rumor: Mareno Chem is developing a new product line. Pesticides. That could mean more jobs here in Poxton. Or more jobs at their Ohio facility. No one knows for sure yet.

That sounds about right. Mareno Chem took everything from me. But they keep growing, making money. Nobody cares.

Near the pool, Bryan is crying. Ellen is kneeling beside him. He shows her his elbow. I want to go talk to Valerie, but first I have to think of something good to say.

Charlie bites into a sausage. Grease spills down the front of his shirt. “Guess what’s happening one week from now?”

I make a face. “Hmmm. Let’s see. I have to get through Monday night without Goat locking me in the Mareno Chem building. And Kevin the bird slayer is now stalking me, so one week from now I’ll probably be facedown in the dirt and you’ll be picking BBs out of the back of my head with tweezers.”

Charlie laughs.

And then, like I summoned him or something, Kevin Thompson rolls up on his dirt bike.

“UN-EFFING-BELIEVABLE,”
I say as I watch Kevin and his friend Damon skip the food and make a beeline to the sunbathers.

Charlie shakes his head at me. “Val is gonna try to make you jealous. You have to play it like you don’t even notice.”

“I can’t stand this. I want to go over there.”

“That would be stupid,” says Charlie. “Trust me on this.”

Play it cool
. I interpret that to mean,
Don’t look over at Val no matter what
. That’s about as cool as I can get.

“So like I was saying.” Charlie takes another bite of sausage. “The neighborhood meeting about Two Mile is a week from today. Cornpup is hell-bent on talking. We’re gonna have to go to this thing and keep an eye on him.”

“I’d rather stab my eyes out with a hot poker. But you’re right. He’s such a big mouth.”

Mom’s line manager looks over at us. “I couldn’t help but overhear. Are you talking about that meeting they’re having about all the chemicals in the creek and whatnot?”

“Leave them alone, Peggy. They’re eating.” Theresa has a deep laugh, a smoker’s laugh.

Peggy makes a face. “The creek is a mess. That’s the honest-to-God truth. It can’t hurt to have someone clean it up.”

“They’re not gonna
clean it up
,” says Charlie. “They’re gonna fence it off.”

Theresa snorts. “Don’t tell my girls that. They swim in that creek all summer long. A fence is just about the worst thing you could do to them.”

Peggy folds and unfolds her hands. She is a hard-core factory worker: no painted nails, no rings on her fingers, just calluses and scars. She says, “As much as I hate to think it, I feel like there’s something real bad in that creek. I just get a terrible feeling in my stomach.”

“Subject change,” says Theresa. “Jason, honey. How are you doing? How’s your mom doing?” This is one of those questions that sound as light as air, except I know better. She really means to ask,
How are you doing? How’s your mom doing? Because your dad is
dead
now, so you can’t be doing too well
.

I look down at my burger.

“Rich was, wow, just a wonderful man, a good friend. I sure do miss him.”

“You’re part of the reason he’s gone,” I say in a cold voice.

Theresa looks genuinely confused. “What do you mean, honey?”

I focus my eyes on a fly that’s buzzing around Charlie’s plate. Anger is churning inside me, gathering momentum like some
horrible, unmanned machine. I want to throw my plate at Peggy’s face. I want to smear potato salad in Theresa’s hair.

“Don’t get him started on this,” Charlie says. “He doesn’t want to talk about this.”

Peggy places a rough hand on my shoulder. “I think I know why you’re upset. Your dad believed they were forcing him to process Phenzorbiflux under another name. He believed they were tampering with his safety gear. But it just wasn’t true.”

“Stop it.” My hand slams down on the card table. Charlie’s soda spills everywhere. “Just stop talking.”

A panicked expression washes over Peggy’s face. “I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know that we don’t blame him. We know he was just confused.…”

Tears burn my eyes. Dad knew how to build bookshelves. He made minestrone soup from scratch. He was a drummer. He grew tomatoes in our backyard. He saved an injured hawk once. He wanted to take my mom to Vegas. And he liked watching shows about sharks. He had a football signed by the entire Bills team. He had a Minotaur tattooed on his right shoulder blade. He wasn’t
confused
. I will not let people talk about him over soggy paper plates and baked beans. I will stand up and scream if they don’t shut their pieholes.

“I’m out of here.” I storm out of the Kuperskis’ backyard, not caring if Valerie is watching, and not worrying about Kevin and his guns. I don’t stop until I reach the middle of our street, which right now feels like a safe zone.

Charlie is right behind me.

“Go away.” The last thing I need is for Charlie to see me cry.

“Jason, they’re idiots. Your dad wouldn’t want you missing this cookout because of them. He’d want me to drag you back to the table so you can see what I’m about to do.”

The tone of Charlie’s voice surprises me. No cockiness, no
sarcasm. He knows there’s a tear falling down my cheek, and he doesn’t even care. I wipe my nose with my thumb.

“What are you about to do?” I feel an unexpected smile forming at the corners of my mouth.

Charlie runs back to the cookout. I follow him. A really old Springsteen song blasts from a speaker on the deck. Adults are buzzed. Little kids are playing. Charlie grabs two water balloons from Bryan’s basket and whips one of them at me with his pitching arm. The water balloon hits me hard in the chest. My T-shirt is drenched.

So he wants to have a water balloon fight? No problem
.

I run to the basket and grab some balloons to throw back at him. I also grab Bryan’s squirt gun and tuck it into the back of my swim trunks. I don’t have a strong throwing arm, but I’ll wait until that one perfect second, when Charlie gets distracted. I’ll launch my balloons at close range, pelting him so hard he’ll have red marks on his back.

I hear shrieking. Commotion. I turn around.

There are pieces of a busted pink balloon in Theresa’s hair. Her white tank top is soaked. You can totally see her bra. Peggy’s chunky eye makeup is running down her face like motor oil.

“You little scumbag!” she shouts at Charlie. “What is your problem?”

Charlie shrugs. “Sorry, lady. I guess my hand slipped.”

But he is a precision pitcher. A quarterback. When he throws something, he hits his target. He doesn’t slip. Ever.

The Kuperskis shake their heads. The way people glare at Charlie, it makes me feel like I got punched in the stomach. Even Mom, with a cookie in her hand, is scowling. Val and Jill stare at us, wide-eyed. Kevin and Damon are smirking. I know what they’re all thinking:
Of course he ruined the party. A bad seed from a bad family; it’s to be expected
. But all these good people from good families,
they turned their backs on Dad when he needed them most. They chose factory jobs over a dear friend. Charlie would never sell out like that.

“Look at them,” he says. “The same people who are all mad right now are gonna be cheering for me when I’m playing linebacker this fall. That’s the thing with a mob mentality. These people get happy together, and they get mad together, and if you pull one person out of the crowd, that person won’t know what the hell is going on.”

Gloria brings Peggy and Theresa a towel.

It’s crazy how a small taste of revenge makes me feel so happy. It’s like the whole crying thing never happened. If I could just somehow punish Mareno Chem for what they did to us, I bet I’d never feel depressed ever again.

When we leave the cookout, Val and Jill look crushed. I think they expected us to go over and talk to them, but we don’t have to do what they expect. Out of the corner of my eye I see Kevin watching me so close it’s like he’s peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle, but I don’t even care. We stop at Cornpup’s house and throw loose pieces of asphalt at his window, and when he doesn’t look out at us from behind his plastic blinds, we just laugh and say he must still be pooping the bed. Then Goat drives by with Randy and two girls in his car. He flips us off, and Randy laughs.

“What was that all about?” I say.

“Who knows.”

Before walking up his driveway, Charlie stops and does something I’ve never seen him do before. He picks litter up off the street. A crushed soda can, a Snickers wrapper, an empty pack of Camels. Without uttering a single word, he tosses it all into his garbage can and closes the lid.

“I’m still hungry,” he says, pulling his garage door up just high enough to slip through. “I’m gonna go boil some hot dogs.” He
disappears into the darkness, and I hear him kick something metal, an oil pan maybe.

The whole walk back to my house, Val is on my mind. It’s like all of a sudden I can’t wait another second to read her note. At my front door, I realize I don’t have my key, so I have to climb through the basement window, which I’ve done a hundred times. From there, I race up the stairs and into my room, where the jeans I was wearing last night are balled up on a pile of dirty clothes and stuff.

Val’s folded note smells like vanilla. I open it, and read.

She probably expected me to call her last night, probably thinks I blew her off, plus I never even talked to her today at the picnic. Now Kevin’s trying to move in on her, which sucks, but I can’t go back to the Kuperskis’ now or I’ll look stupid, or at least, that’s what Charlie would say. If he were here right now, he’d tell me to watch TV for a while, and eat a hot dog, and let Val come to me, so that’s what I do. I’m trying real hard not to think about Monday night. I’m trying real hard not to imagine myself alone inside Mareno Chem. But I’m scared.

IT
turns out that a sudden disappearance can make a girl want you more. Val calls me when she gets home from the picnic. I’m passed out on the couch, all tired from eating too much on a hot day, so I don’t even hear the phone ring. She leaves a message on our machine. I call her back much later, when it’s dark out.

“Can you sneak out tonight?” I ask her, energized from my nap, and heart triple-beating at the sound of her voice.

She laughs, probably because I don’t mess around with a lot of small talk. “Why? Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. Just meet me by the old asphalt plant at midnight.”

She says she’ll be there. She even says she’ll bring some food. I feel an adrenaline rush—not like what I feel when I crash my dirt bike. This is something different. This is something better. I stand
in front of my mirror. I mess with my hair for a second. Then I flex my arm muscles. Working out in Charlie’s garage hasn’t made a huge difference, but my triceps look decent.

A few days ago, at Quick Mart, I caught my reflection in the glass door of a hot dog oven. I kept lifting up my T-shirt and checking out my abs. Then I stood on the edge of the curb and did three sets of calf lifts. Cornpup seemed to be off in his own world, babbling on and on about uranium sludge and whatnot. I didn’t think he was paying any attention to me, but I was wrong.

“Why do you care so much about how you look all of a sudden?” he asked me. “You never used to be like that.”

“I just want to be strong, is all,” I told him. But he wouldn’t understand. He could be the strongest guy in Poxton, and he still wouldn’t get a girl. Not with his face looking like it does.

It’s windy tonight. I stand under a busted streetlight at the edge of the industrial yards. I have on a black sweatshirt and my best jeans. I can’t stop moving, jumping in place, kicking little chunks of asphalt. I look in the direction of Val’s street, but it’s so dark, she could be ten feet away and I wouldn’t be able to see her. I turn toward the creek. Tonight the water is alien-green, softly glowing—it couldn’t be more perfect. I wish I’d told Val to bring her swimsuit.

“Hey, you.” Val sneaks up behind me and puts her arms around my shoulders. “I brought sandwiches and a big bag of corn chips. I forgot something to drink, though.”

The last thing on my mind is food.

We climb through a torn section of the chain-link fence. Val snags the knee of her pink exercise pants, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. We walk to the creek and sit quietly at the water’s edge.

“The water is so pretty tonight,” she says. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

I turn on my flashlight and hand it to her. “Hold this for a second. I’ll be right back.”

Digging with my hands is not an option. I don’t want Val to think I’m an animal. I find a fat PVC pipe under some cracked sheets of Plexiglas. I use the pipe to scoop away wet earth until I strike solid wood paneling. It’s the doorway to a secret tunnel that leads to more secret tunnels. Charlie and Cornpup would kill me for this.

Val takes one look at what I’m doing and says, “I’m not going in there.”

“Why not?”

“It could collapse on us.”

“No, wait, look.” I point the flashlight at a row of wood joists. “We reinforced all of this. It’s totally safe.”

Val smiles mischievously. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve been through these tunnels a hundred times.”

Some girls would be too weak for this. Some girls wouldn’t want to get their clothes dirty. Val is breathing fast, and I can tell she’s freaking out, but she climbs into the tunnel with me, and now I like her even more. We crawl through the damp earth for about ten minutes before hitting the jackpot.

“It’s an old bomb shelter. From the cold war.” I am not totally sure about this, but it
seems
like an old bomb shelter. There’s a nuclear symbol on one of the walls.