Californium (12 page)

It'd be pretty quiet until Uncle Ryan got to the restaurant. Then he'd order a beer real loud and pretend to complain about the food. “Have you felt this bread? Mickey Mantle never owned a bat this hard.”

The waiter would act sorry and try to grab the bread basket.

“Hold on,” Uncle Ryan would say. “Just get me another beer and I'll soften it up. Packy, you want another beer?” He wouldn't wait for my dad's answer, which always cracked me and Brendan up, seeing Dad get bossed around by his little brother. “Two more pints.”

Dad laughed every time, and if he started making jokes too, we knew Mom was driving us home.

Toward the end of dinner, when Uncle Ryan went off to the bathroom, Aunt Mary would get me to go through the pockets
of his army jacket for his keys. Sometimes, Dad told me to do it before Aunt Mary did. That was the only time Uncle Ryan ever got mad. “I can drive,” he'd say. “How do you think I get home from work every day?”

“It's a wonder,” Aunt Mary always said, and suddenly Mom would be all over me and Brendan and Colleen: “Hug your aunt and uncle good-bye.”

In California, no one comes over after church. My dad makes a huge brunch for everyone: bacon, eggs, sausage, potatoes, toast, tea, coffee, juice, and blood pudding sometimes too. The real stuff. He used to get so happy making everything because when he was a kid, the oldest boy still living at home made the Sunday brunch. “My dad taught me,” he'd remind me and Brendan, “and then I taught your uncle Ryan before your mother and I got married.” “We know,” we'd say, and then he'd tell us more stuff we already knew, how someday I'd learn too and then it would be my job to teach Brendan. He'd get all happy when he said that stuff, like it was going to be better than going to Disney World. But now he just gets it done like it's one more chore, like it's no different from our Sunday dinners, which are always ham and cabbage, or corned beef and cabbage, anything and cabbage, or mystery stew and soda bread. Basically, every flavor of boring you can imagine.

.

Keith's at the door before I'm done with brunch, so I stuff some bacon in my mouth and say I'm full. I grab my backpack and throw my jacket on. The new pins make it look more punk, more
like I'm in a band, and once we're outside I thrash my hair around with my fingers until Keith says it looks like an explosion. That's when it's perfect, when you can't tell how it got the way it is or where it's going. Treat's out on the driveway with the Bug as we come down his street. He puts his finger up to his mouth when we get close and waves us into the Two-Car Studio. “Lyle and Margaret are getting in touch with the earth,” he whispers. Me and Keith look at each other and Treat says, “They're meditating.” He smiles like we're supposed to laugh, then shushes us when we start to.

The car cover's spread out on the floor with little black dots of permanent marker outlining the >I< logo. We start scratching away with markers, coloring it in, and every once in a while we hear chanting or a chime, like some tiny version of the bell they ring at mass.

We're starting in on the
Nixon
part when Mr. and Mrs. Dumovitch open the door from the house. They're wearing sweatpants and sandals and these shirts that look like they're made out of potato sacks.

“Looks good so far, guys.”

Me and Keith harmonize for the only time ever. “Thanks, Mr. Dumovitch.”

Treat's mom asks if we're going to do everything in black.

“Do we have any red?” Treat asks.

“I don't know,” she says. “Did you look?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?” she razzes him.

“Well, I was trying to be quiet, Margaret.”

“All right,” Treat's dad says. “Let's just calm down.” He takes a good look at the car cover. “Where did this come from?”

“It's a gift from Keith's dad,” Treat says. “He supports us having a band.”

Mr. Dumovitch takes the rubber band out of his ponytail and fluffs his hair out. With his beard and long hair and potato-sack shirt, he looks like Jesus. “What's going on, Treat?”

“Nothing. We're just trying to make a difference, and it isn't easy.”

It's quiet until Treat's mom is back with a red marker. She hands it to me and says, “Uh-oh, are we having a moment?”

Treat won't look up. “No.”

“Treat,” Mr. Dumovitch says. “Just talk straight. Remember what Dr. Andy says?”

Mrs. Dumovitch says, “Talk to us, sweetie.”

Treat keeps scratching away at the car cover, harder and faster, giving me chills the way it squeaks. “We don't have all our instruments for the band,” I say. “We had a plan to get some, only it didn't go like we thought.”

Mr. Dumovitch strokes his beard like he's thinking. “What do you need?”

Treat looks up. “A bass, amp, drums, microphones, distortion pedals. Just everything.”

Treat's mom puts her arm around his dad. “My brother has a bass.”

“That's right,” Mr. D says, and they both smile. “Remember how he'd leave it in his living room for Carol to see when they were dating?”

Mrs. D rolls her eyes. “Oh yeah,” she says and does her fingers like she's quoting herself, “his ‘jazz quartet.'”

“Too bad the band broke up before Carol had a chance to see them,” Mr. D says, and Mrs. D covers her mouth like it's so funny she can barely stand it.

“Treat,” Mr. D says, “I'll call Uncle Arvil about his bass. Will that help?”

Treat stays hunkered down with the marker in his hand. No answer.

“You boys must be getting hungry,” Mrs. D says. “I'll have some fresh hummus ready in a bit.”

Me and Keith thank her, and Mr. and Mrs. D go back in the house.

With Treat not talking anymore, me and Keith start quizzing each other on the periodic table: “What's
Ar
?” I say.

“Arkansas?”

“On the periodic table?”

Keith grins. “An element.”

I laugh because I really don't know the answer. “We really need to study.”

“We will.”

“You have to promise,” I say. “It'll look pretty bad if we spend all this time”—and I do my fingers like Mrs. D—“‘studying' and flunk the test.”

Treat stays quiet squeaking away at the car cover until the hummus is ready and we go inside. The pita bread is soft, the hummus smooth, and with so many good flavors my whole mouth has to work to make sense of it all. There's olives and peppers and other
stuff too, everything so much better than anything that's waiting for me at home. Mrs. D says to eat all we want, and I do, too much.

When I get home later, the smell of the corned beef about kills me. And no matter how annoyed my dad looks, I can barely touch anything on my plate.

T
reat wasn't in English this morning, which is kind of weird considering he wasn't sick or anything yesterday. Maybe kind of mad for no real reason, but not sick. It's probably good, though, because at lunch Edie and Cherise find me and Keith in the Bog and we all eat together for the first time. Edie eats normal stuff, a sandwich and chips and some little carrots. Cherise's food looks like one of those plates your aunt puts on the coffee table at Thanksgiving: crackers, cheese, broccoli, and celery. She says she's a vegetarian and me and Keith look at her, like,
Why?
She starts talking about slaughterhouses and saturated fat, artificial colors and sweeteners, red dye number five and food additives. Keith's munching down his Fritos and says, “What about the napalm they use to keep the bugs off that celery?” That really gets Cherise fired up, and she says more in an hour than she's said all year.

Edie asks if we heard about the awesome show DikNixon played at the old train station in Fullerton on Saturday. Me and
Keith have no idea what she's talking about. “I heard it,” she says and does this quick, sly smile. “I said it to myself, heard it, and then told everyone in first period what I'd heard.” She smiles again and I could hug her for making us sound so cool.

Cherise says she heard about it too and told everyone in her third-period class and someone there said they'd heard about it in World History and now they can't wait until DikNixon comes here.

That makes me happy too. Not hug-happy with Cherise, but race-to-Treat's-house-right-after-school-happy. Which me and Keith do.

Mr. Dumovitch meets us at the front door and says Treat will see us later in the week. He doesn't say why or anything, only that Treat won't be back at school until Wednesday or Thursday.

“You think Treat's okay?” I ask Keith as soon as we're heading back up the hill and I know Mr. Dumovitch can't hear us even if he's standing next to the Bug on the driveway.

“He's probably dyeing his hair purple,” Keith says, “and doesn't want us to see it until it's just the right shade of weird.”

At the top of the hill, Keith says he'd better just go home; he's got some catching up to do in Algebra. I tell him that sounds better than the bar project I have to work on. Keith looks at me like I'm speaking Russian so I explain what the project is and how embarrassing it is that it's for Astrid's dad.

Keith slaps his own head. “You know how lucky you are? Her house?” He stops walking. His face has gone serious, no smirk, just eyes rounding and tight lips as he waits for me to stop, step back, and hear something big, like maybe he knows where Jimmy
Hoffa is buried big, or who really shot JFK big. “You should steal a pair of her panties.”

“Are you insane?” I start walking.

“No, listen.” He steps up next to me. “College guys do it all the time. A panty raid.”

“But I'm not a college guy, you perv.”

We stop and wait for a break in the traffic at Yorba Linda Boulevard. Keith has me trapped, so I have to hear him out. “It's not a perv thing. You just steal the panties, slip them into a folder, write
Top Secret
across it, and then bring them to her at school. Tell her some guys in the locker room were trying to sell them and you went crazy with rage.”

“Like I saved her reputation.”

Keith nods, tight-lipped. Still no grin. “Exactly.”

The blur of cars passes and I give Keith a smack on the back of the head. “You're a total perv.” Then I'm off, across five lanes of traffic, Keith right behind me, yelling, “The Wall! We must make it over the Wall!”

.

After dinner, my dad needs me to dig a metal filing out of his right thumb before we go to work on the bar project. It's on the bottom side, the bendy part below the knuckle where everything is tighter and even the slightest touch of the needle has him wincing. I'm being careful but he's jumpier than usual and we're getting nowhere. Suddenly, so fast it even surprises me, I dig in deep with the needle, pushing the metal just enough to get the tip of it with the tweezers. A groan and gust of air comes flying out of my
dad like somebody punched him in the stomach. There's a lot of blood too, but it doesn't bother me. I've got that jagged little dagger in the tweezers and hold it up for him to see. His eyes are glasses of water about to spill, and he looks more tired than relieved, but that doesn't bother me either. I just think,
Good.

In the garage, on the wall over the workbench, is a piece of notebook paper with the bar drawn in top and side views. It looks like a simple
L
from the top. The side views are complicated, though, with shelves and cabinets and a little sink. We measure and cut more wood the whole time, me doing the measuring and my dad doing the cutting. We're listening to an oldies radio station. Every time the saw stops screaming there's another “Teen Angel” or “Johnny Angel” or “Teenager in Love” whining about his poor, desperate life. Finally, I say I need to go take a shower so I'm ready for school tomorrow and my dad says that's fine, he'll finish up a few things and see me inside, but I don't see him inside. He's still going at it when I crawl into bed a couple hours later.

.

Tuesday morning, me and Keith get obliterated by our first periodic table quiz. There was simple stuff like the definitions of atomic weight and numbers, protons and electrons, neutrons, and what it means when things bond, and I think I did okay there. But there was also an actual table with some parts left blank and we were supposed to fill that in, and, well, now I really know what it means when people say they blanked out.

So it's kind of a relief to be back in the garage with my dad on Tuesday night, measuring and drilling little holes in the
wood for the screws. He spent last night framing the spot in the counter where the sink will go and cutting all the cabinet doors to the right sizes. Now we just need to sand everything. Big surfaces with the power sander and a sanding board, corners and edges with little square sheets that get so hot they burn through and scald my fingers. We're hardly talking because my dad is clueless about baseball right now and there's no way I'm telling him anything about Astrid or DikNixon. Still, it's not too bad until he starts talking about work. He's making parts with the lathe for some satellite and he's kind of excited about it. Keith's dad works on the heat tiles that go on the space shuttles
,
which is better, only he doesn't make the parts; he designs them. Somebody else makes them, somebody like my dad. I go from feeling bored to feeling embarrassed for my dad. Then I'm annoyed that songs like “Return to Sender” say the totally opposite thing of songs like “Please Mr. Postman.” How can anybody like this stuff? It's all so sad.

.

Treat's not at school Wednesday so I beg Keith to come by my house after dinner, and he does. He works in the garage with us for maybe half an hour, including the breaks he takes every couple minutes to let the sandpaper cool down. Then Keith dusts his hands off and says he's got a lot of homework.

My dad thanks him for his work and I walk him to the driveway. Keith's got good news: He told his mom how much Mr. Dumovitch was doing for us and she got all over his dad about it. Now his dad is taking him out this weekend to buy things for the band.

“Your dad didn't see right through that?”

“Probably,” Keith says, “but he's not in charge.”

Keith heads up the sidewalk and my dad steps out of the garage. We watch him walk all the way out of the cul-de-sac and across the street to his house. “That Keith's a good kid,” my dad says.

“Yeah,” I say. “He's a teen angel.”

I don't mean it as a joke for my dad but he laughs, the first time in a long time, so I go with it, fake a laugh of my own, then ask if maybe we can change the radio station for a little while.

At first my dad tries humming along with Adam and the Ants and Madness. Then the Dead Kennedys come on. “Is that guy saying, ‘Holiday in Cambodia'?” my dad says. He walks over to the radio and leans in like maybe that'll make him understand. “Who are these guys?”

I stare at the dials like somebody just asked me to multiply the atomic weight of hydrogen by the atomic weight of helium. There's no way I'm going to say the word
Dead
and then
Kennedys,
not one right after the other, not even in the same sentence, probably not in the same day. “It's just a punk band.”

My dad clicks off the radio. “You got that right. Bunch of punks.”

“It's just music.”

My dad's shaking his head. “That's not music, Reece. I've seen these guys on the news with their army boots and hair standing up every which way. They scream just like that,” he says, flicking his thumb at the radio, “and get everyone in the room crazy, running into each other. It's not normal.”

I want to explain how it's antiwar and anti-imperialism and
really a good thing. That's what Treat says. But I can't imagine my dad seeing it that way, so we work a little longer in the quiet until we call it a night. My dad says it should all be dry and ready to install on Saturday, which means I've got to start figuring out some work clothes that don't make me look like a plumber or something.

.

Treat's back in English on Thursday, only he's at the front of the room until the bell rings, busy getting all the handouts and homework he missed. After class, he pats me on the Packy patch, says, “See you at lunch,” and barrels out the door.

Edie and Cherise are in the cafeteria, the first time all week we don't see them in the Bog, and me and Keith are already sitting on the edge of the planter and eating by the time Treat gets to us.

“Hey,” Keith blurts out with his mouth full of chips. “Where you been?”

Treat steps up in front of us, a little out of breath. “Nowhere.” He pulls a couple cassette tapes out of his lunch bag and hands one to me and one to Keith:
The Nixon Tapes.

“Get to know this stuff,” he says. “Then write some songs for Monday.”

“Is that what you've been doing?” Keith says. “Writing songs?”

Treat starts pulling food out of his bag. “Something like that.”

“Maybe we should get together today,” Keith says and Treat shakes his head. “Then what about Friday?”

“I've got plans.” Treat takes a big bite of a sandwich with the thinnest, grainiest-looking bread you've ever seen.

Keith leans forward and looks at Treat. “I thought the band was our plan.”

Treat stares Keith down without saying anything, his eyes bulging and jaw flexing while he chews.

“We'll get on it,” I say and change the subject to
Guess who got in a fight with what's his name and do you know about the book report we have to do?

I leave the tape in my pocket the rest of the day. The last thing I need is van Doren knocking it out of my hand with a book while I'm trying to put it in my locker and then the interrogation:
Is this DikNixon? Wait, are you DikNixon? What a joke.
But none of that happens. Right after school, he drops a pair of sweaty tube socks on me. Then he says, “I'm sorry.” When I hand them up, he fires a fastball into the closest trash can. “What's the point?” he says and spins back to his locker. “Can somebody tell me? What's the point?”

Since he asked twice I figure I'm supposed to answer. “I don't know.”

“Who does?” he says and slams the locker shut and starts walking away. “It's all bullshit. Complete bullshit.”

.

Mr. Krueger has the periodic table quizzes in his hand Friday morning. “I had these ready to go yesterday,” he says. “I've just been thinking about what to say.” He peels one off the top. “According to one of you, and I'm sure a few of you agree, the definition of a proton is as follows: ‘An explosive particle used often in the manufacturing of missiles.'” He leans on the podium. “I like
Star Trek
too. I
know what a proton torpedo is. But if I had one, I'd shoot this person with it.” We all laugh, because who else bawls you out like that?

Keith looks over at me like he got caught eating dessert before dinner, and Mr. Krueger keeps going. “I know my quizzes aren't easy, people. They're not supposed to be.” He shakes his head, then nods, and it's hard to tell if he's agreeing with himself or saying no or just dizzy with all the information flying around in his head. “I could give you multiple choice and some of you would do well guessing, but science isn't multiple choice. The answers don't always present themselves.” He slides the quiz he talked about into the middle of the stack. “I gave partial credit to ‘Mr. Explosive Particle.' He has no idea what he's talking about, but he at least attacked the problem with creativity rather than leaving it blank. Better to try and fail than never try at all.” He begins handing the quizzes back. “I won't be this generous next time. Charity is a rare and wonderful gift; don't come to depend on it.”

My fourteen out of twenty on the quiz seems pretty good until I do the math. It's a C–. Keith, or “Mr. Explosive Particle,” got a D. Instead of laughing it off, though, he gets serious after class. His dad said that once he sinks some cash into this band project, none of it better come between Keith and good grades. Keith says he needs the band, so now he needs the grades too. Right now, I don't know if my parents would even notice my grades, but I definitely need the band. And who knows what Treat needs. Hopefully the band too.