Unforgettable (6 page)

The Ragged Edge of the Universe

Even though I'm a firm believer in the truth, I can rationalize as well as the next guy. Mom said she wanted me to get involved in after-school activities. And okay, she probably didn't have this in mind. But Halle's eyes, the color of dark honey, definitely have something to do with my saying yes to a protest rally. I'd say yes to just about anything she asked me. And I get to spend more time with her. I get to be with her outside of school.

I know it doesn't mean she likes me. But she wouldn't have asked me if she thought I was a loser. Or would she? Is this her new-kid pity duty?

My only problem is how I'll answer Mom's questions without lying when I get home. That's another rationalization, one I'll think about later.

We meet in the parking lot after school, near a black rusted-out van with more metal showing than paint. But what makes the van stand out in the sea of cars are the environmental bumper stickers plastered around the sides:
GO GREEN
,
SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT
;
KEEP THE PLANET CLEAN
,
IT'S NOT URANUS
;
REDUCE
,
REUSE
,
RECYCLE
. There are funny ones, too:
IF BARBIE IS SO POPULAR
,
WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BUY HER FRIENDS?
and
MY OTHER CAR IS A PIECE OF SHIT
. A slew of Vikings decals fill the spots between the stickers, giving a purple haze to the black metallic spaces that are left open.

I arrive at 2:43. Halle introduces me to the group. I file away their descriptions in my mind: Gina, who has dark hair and pale skin and is in my study hall; and Roxie, who's built like a linebacker, with a pretty face, long blond hair, and a butterfly tattoo on her upper arm. The driver of the van is an upperclassman.

“This is Eddie,” Halle says. “Our fearless leader.”

Eddie smirks. “That's because I'm the only one with a driver's license.” His long black hair sweeps down past his shoulders. He has dark, intense eyes, and a T-shirt with a turtle on it. I think about commenting but decide against it. I don't know how sensitive this guy is and he has thirty pounds on me. He can definitely whip my ass.

I hold out my hand. Eddie just nods. “Welcome to the Environmental Club. You ever been arrested?”

I let out a short gasp.

Eddie's face breaks into a wide grin. “Had you going, didn't I?”

Halle nudges me into the van. “You really look worried, New Kid. You have a police record or something?”

How'd she know? “I have a mom who'd freak out if I got arrested.” But I'm way more worried about a paper trail for Dink to follow. Worse than that would be my picture splattered across CNN.

“Don't worry. We're law-abiding, peaceful protesters.”

“And we're related to people who work in the mines and processing plants,” Gina adds. She sits next to Eddie in the front. He puts his arm around her. Halle sits in the far back with Roxie, which leaves me alone in the middle seat.

Handmade posters and flyers litter the floor, along with empty soda cans and wrappers. Eddie has eaten at every fast food chain in town and most of it is ground into the dirty gray carpet.

“You're protesting where your families work?”

“It's okay,” Halle says. “Our parents can't get fired just because of their activist-minded children.”

I briefly wonder if there's any inherent danger of Mom losing her job at the Tin Cup, but if they aren't worried about their parents, then I shouldn't be, either.

Eddie makes a wide turn and the contents of the floor shift left. “But people don't support us,” he says. “The Wellington Mine Company employs ninety percent of the people who live here. The town would disappear without it.”

“So why protest?”

Roxie's soft voice drifts from behind me. “Because I want my parents to be safe. They breathe in taconite powder every day at work.” She sounds like dandelion fluff.

“What kind of music you like, Baxter?”

“I'm good with whatever,” I reply. I don't listen to music because it gets tied in to the memory of when I heard it, each and every time.

“For the new guy, here's an Iron Range song. It's the only song I like from my parents' generation.” Eddie pushes a button and the sounds of “Endless Highway” fill the van. I expected heavy metal music from Eddie. His voice is a boulder.

Halle leans forward, her elbows on the back of my seat. She whispers in my ear. It tickles and I hunch my shoulders. “Bob Dylan grew up on the Range. All the old people listen to him here.”

Eddie drives slowly, or maybe the van isn't capable of going any faster than thirty miles an hour. He turns and pulls up to a drive-through lane. Fumes from the exhaust leak in the windows. I hold my breath.

Eddie leans out the window. “Who wants a burger?”

Everyone yells their order at the same time. I end up with a burger and Coke I didn't order, but I pay for and eat it anyway.

Halle orders fries. “I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not that strict. I don't mind a little meat grease in my fries.”

We drive past a lake and head north of town. It's 3:30. I know I'm supposed to be at home waiting for the cable guy, and I can't say what every other teen says when he blows off something his mom told him to do. I can't say I forgot.

When I was little, Mom accidentally closed the car door on my pinkie. Just thinking about it makes my eyes water and my finger throb. I used to think that's how everyone's memory worked, that you're trapped in those memories, and every hurtful experience and bad choice is with you forever.

So I'm worried that I'm making a bad choice now; ditching the cable guy to ride in a beat-up van and protest in front of a taconite plant. We drive past scattered buildings and farms, and soon those fade away, too. Steep banks give way to pine trees, small lakes, and wide canyons filled with gray-and-red rock, all of it man-made. A line from
Gatsby
plays in my head about the Midwest being the ragged edge of the universe. If that's true, then the Iron Range is the pit at the bottom of that edge.

There's a feeling of desolation and destruction out here. Halle calls it the rape of the land. The buildings of Wellington Mines rise up from a cloud of red dust in the distance like a lost city. A huge lost city. Warehouse-sized buildings and trucks that dwarf Eddie's van are surrounded by tall chain-link fences. I feel as though we've entered another world.

Eddie parks the van in weeds next to the road just outside the entrance.

“Aren't we going inside?” I ask.

Eddie shakes his head and reaches back for one of the homemade signs. “Not allowed inside the fence. But we'll catch the four o'clock shift change.”

Everyone grabs a sign and tumbles out of the van. I pick up what's left: a bent piece of yellow cardboard with a paint stick fastened to the bottom. It has black printed letters on it that read,
TACONITE KILLS!

“I'm getting better signs made,” Halle says. “Professional quality. Ones that will blow them away.”

Her sign is white with computer-printed letters on it:
KEEP OUR WORKERS SAFE.

“And better slogans. Catchier phrases.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I ask.

“Would you believe this is just our second demonstration? We formed the club in junior high at the end of last year. It was just Gina and Roxie and me. This year we tried it at the high school. Seven kids showed up at our first meeting, but two left and never returned. And then my ex quit as soon as we stopped dating. So now it's just the four of us, five counting you, if we don't scare you away. Gina says we should change our name to the ‘Mental Club.' ”

“Is this what you usually do at your meetings?”

She smiles at me like I'm a little kid. “ 'Course not. We usually scale corporate smokestacks to hang our protest banners and row out in rubber rafts to save baby seals.”

A few seconds pass before I respond. “Oh. That was a joke.”

“So you could at least pretend to laugh!”

“I would have, but …”

“What?”

“I almost believed you.”

She laughs. The daffodils shimmer in her voice, as though someone plucked them and is twirling them around a finger. “My reputation precedes me.”

“I've heard rumors,” I confess.

Halle turns and shouts behind her as she's walking. “They're not rumors, New Kid. Completely true.”

Halle has on a red short-sleeved jacket over a black skirt, and short black boots that show off her long legs. She looks out of place with the rest of us, who wear jeans and T-shirts. She looks out of place on a dusty road in front of a factory. She should be in a fashion magazine.

A memory of Halle pops into my head. It was the first time we learned about endangered species.

On September 18, our kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Skrove, read us a story about California condors and told us how they soar on wind currents instead of flapping their wings, about how they were sacred to the Native Americans, and how at one point there were less than twenty-five of them left in the wild. Then we colored pictures of condors and a week later we saw one at the zoo during a class field trip. Halle colored her condor a bright yellow, but the one at the zoo was black and white with a pinkish head.

“He looks ugly,” she said.

I thought he looked awesome. I bought a stuffed animal condor from the gift shop. Halle bought a tiger but later said she wished she had a condor, too.

“Even though he's ugly, I don't want him to extinct,” she said. “I just wish he was yellow.”

I still have my stuffed animal condor. I wonder if she still has her tiger. I follow Halle to the gate, where Eddie and the two girls are standing with the signs pointed down, waiting for traffic.

The air smells different here, like the fillings the dentist uses in teeth—hot metal. A swirl of white rises above the plant, then floats into a nearby cloud.

Roxie follows the swirl with her eyes. “Do you remember how in fifth grade we each got a package of taconite pellets during Minnesota history month? How we played marbles with them?”

Eddie laughs. “I remember that. The pellets made good slingshot ammo, too. You ever see them set off charges in the field? You could be half a mile away, watching them blast a cloud of clay and dust a hundred feet in the air, and still come home covered in dust.”

“My family was involved in mining before the taconite plants,” Halle says. “Grandpa said it was in our blood. Of course, he died because it was in his lungs.”

Gina squints up at the sun. “Would you all stop? This is
sooo
depressing. What time is it? I have to babysit my brothers at five-thirty.”

I look at my watch. “Three twenty-seven.” What will Mom say when she gets home and the cable isn't hooked up?

Gina points at my watch. “How can you tell time with that thing? It's got more dials than the cockpit of an airplane.” Funny she should say that. She sounds like a landing strip.

“My do— my friend gave it to me.” Shoot. I almost said doctor.

“Do you have to watch
all
your brothers?” Halle asks Gina.

Gina nods. “Stop over later and help me. Please, oh, please? I'll pay you half.”

“No thanks. Last time I helped you, all four of them dog-piled on top of me. Going to your house makes me happy I only have one older sister.”

“Here comes a car!” Roxie holds up her sign and the rest of us follow her lead.

The driver stares but doesn't acknowledge us as he turns off the highway and passes through the gate. It's as though we're part of the landscape; an unwanted shrub or an odd-shaped rock.

“Jerk,” Eddie yells after him.

Halle jabs Eddie with her sign. “Point of order, Mr. President. We're not here to harass people.”

“Yeah, well, I know that guy. He
is
a jerk.”

Eight more cars pass by. The reactions are all the same. We're evidently not wanted here.

“They could at least honk their horns in support,” Gina complains.

“Or nod,” Roxie says. “Or make eye contact.”

“Why would it be any different than last time?” Eddie says. “They're all idiots.”

“We knew this wasn't going to be easy,” Halle says. “But the whole point of our club is to stand up for what we believe, even if it isn't a popular opinion.”

“It takes time to convince people to do the right thing,” Roxie adds.

“It shouldn't,” Eddie replies. “People are dying in this town. Do the right thing. End of discussion.”

He steps out onto the road and stabs his sign at the next car that goes past. The driver swerves around him and honks.

“Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Notice us, you asshole!”

Gina rubs his shoulder. “Calm down, baby. We don't want to get in trouble.”

Eddie sounds so angry. What if he goes ballistic? His earlier question haunts me; we actually
could
get arrested.

But maybe he's like the sound of his voice, a large boulder that has to make a splash.

I try not to pigeonhole people. But it's confusing when a person's voice doesn't match his personality. I knew a kid at my old school who sounded like sharp needles. I couldn't stand being around him. He might have been a good kid once I got to know him, but I never gave him a chance. It irritated my ears just listening to him.

Halle steps out in front. “Let's focus here. We're making a statement, regardless of how they react. We can't expect to change the world in one day.” Listening to her is soothing and exhilarating at the same time.

We're standing in the road, not blocking traffic exactly, but definitely out there when another car drives up, a black Cadillac with tinted windows.