My Chemical Mountain (11 page)

“My name is William Schumacher.” He clears his throat. “And I want to show you my skin.”

Me and Charlie look at each other. Cornpup never gives a free bump show. He lifts his shirt over his head, and I feel sick inside. I’m not prepared for how bad the bumps have gotten. There are cysts of all sizes pouring down his shoulder blades. The blood-red rash on Cornpup’s face stretches beyond his chin, down his neck and right arm. There are white spots on his spine, scars from cysts that were burnt off a long time ago. He is hideous. People gasp and turn their faces away. A newspaper photographer snaps his photo.

“Why is he just standing there?” Charlie whispers. “Why doesn’t he say something?”

I shrug. I was expecting one of Cornpup’s long sermons, rehearsed right down to the last detail, an angry blue vein popping out of his neck.

Cornpup holds up photographs of horrible things. A mouse with burnt-out eyes. Tumor-covered frogs. Dead trees with black branches. Birds born without any wings.

“It’s expensive to dispose of chemical waste in safe ways,” Cornpup says. “Mareno Chem saves money when they dump in our creek. They increase profits when they hide barrels of waste in abandoned buildings. No one wants to challenge them. Because of jobs. Watch what happens when Mareno Chem is done using us. Watch what
happens when they can’t find new hiding places for their waste. They’ll close up shop and disappear. They’ll leave us here to die.”

Dan Benecke doesn’t seem worried about anything Cornpup has said. He smiles brightly and says, “I appreciate your comments, son, and I’d like to respond if I may. Mareno Chem is the most environmentally responsible chemical company in the world. We are a leader in green innovation. We budget for safe waste disposal every year. I’ve seen the numbers. Believe it or not, I was a boy myself once, and I know how fun it can be to imagine a good scandal. But illegal dumping doesn’t make good business sense. And when you get to be my age, you’ll understand that. Now for our part, we’ve sealed our drainage pipes as a pledge to this community. We employ hundreds of great people here in Poxton. I’d like to think we’re a positive force around here.”

So that’s how he’s gonna play it. He’s gonna treat us like we’re so cute. Like we’ve got big, healthy imaginations. Like we’re too silly to be taken seriously.

“You’re a liar!” shouts Cornpup. “I saw sludge coming out of your drainage pipes last night. I have jars of red water at my house. Green water. You’re lying.” Cornpup bolts out of the auditorium. I think he might be crying. Me and Charlie run after him. We find him sitting on a generator at the edge of the schoolyard.

“You sounded good in there,” I tell him. “The free bump show was a nice touch. You’re probably gonna be in the paper.”

Cornpup smiles. “You think so?”

A stiff guy in a nice suit approaches us. He says his name is Dr. Gupta, a dermatologist and plastic surgeon from some big hospital in Buffalo. When he asks if he can speak to Mr. Schumacher in private, it takes us a minute to realize that by “Mr. Schumacher” he means Cornpup.

“Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of all of us,” Charlie insists.

But Cornpup tells us to please leave.

“What the hell?” Charlie says, all pissed off. “We sat through that stupid meeting, and now he doesn’t want us around? Unbelievable.”

As we’re walking off, I overhear Cornpup and Dr. Gupta engaged in what sounds like a conversation continued from another day. Cornpup says something about surgery and scars. Dr. Gupta says, “Your parents still need to sign the consent forms.” Then a truck without a muffler drives through the parking lot, and it’s so loud, it drowns out everything else. Now I’m real curious to know what Cornpup’s not telling us.

Me and Charlie walk to the shores of Two Mile, because we need to get our clothes muddy. We need to cut our hands open on the sharp rocks. Maybe Charlie will even swallow a mouthful of creek water, because it’s a shocking thing to do, and because he knows I’ve got more cough drops in my pocket.

I know how good it feels, gulping that sharp water, making your throat burn on purpose, never giving in to the tug of fear.

TODAY
is one of those chilly summer days you get when you live twenty minutes from the Canadian border. Me and Cornpup are sitting on my front porch, freezing our butts off. I watch him tear through today’s paper for the fiftieth time, scanning the pages for any mention of the town meeting, and of course, there is none.

“Maybe they’ll print it tomorrow,” I say, trying to make him feel better. “The reporter was there. He took pictures. Maybe he’s just making sure he’s got all the facts together or whatever.”

Cornpup shakes his head. “No, if they were really gonna run it, they would’ve done it by now. They’re burying the story, like always.”

Charlie rolls up on his bike. His ear is heavily bandaged. He’s got blacktop skids all up and down his jeans. “I don’t want to talk about my ear,” he says. “Don’t even bring it up.”

I notice something wiggling around inside his zipped backpack.

Cornpup is annoyed. “Would it kill you to show up on time? Gramps is on a tight schedule.”

We know all about the tight schedule. Pills and a liverwurst sandwich at noon. Nap at one. Forty-five minutes on the toilet at two-thirty. And a mug of warm PBR when the Mets game is on. I hope I never get old.

“How’d your mom do at the farmers’ market?” Charlie asks me.

“She didn’t buy any vegetables. Or fruit. But she bought three pies. She kept going back for free samples of banana bread till the muffin man told her to move along.” I try to make this sound funny, and it is kind of funny—Charlie and Cornpup both laugh—but I feel a little sad.

I don’t know why I keep thinking Mom will snap out of her fat-lady phase. I don’t know why I keep getting my hopes up.

I watch Charlie’s backpack with a vague sense of curiosity. I’m sure I’ll find out what’s in it soon enough, but the annoying thing is waiting until he’s ready to tell us. Charlie won’t do anything before he’s ready.

We walk past an abandoned plot of land, which has become an unofficial dumping site for ceramic stuff: broken tiles, toilets and bathtubs, fake fireplace logs, and flowerpots. We pass a water treatment plant, a custard shop that will close in the fall, and a warehouse that was once a furniture store. Me and Charlie are trudging along lazily. I kick dandelions like they’re soccer balls, leaving behind a trail of decapitated yellow flowers. Charlie rolls several rocks around in his hand, and I can tell he’s thinking hard about something. Cornpup is in a major hurry. He’s already a couple blocks ahead of us.

I can’t stand it anymore. I ask Charlie what’s in the backpack.

He stares at one of his rocks, which is really a small chunk of asphalt. “Something.”

“Let me see.”

“First you have to promise to keep it.”

“I’m not promising you anything.” To Charlie, promises are permanent, like DNA or a scar. If I promised to cut off one of my fingers, he’d bring the knife.

He unzips his backpack. I see a paw. I see a black tail. “Some guy was selling dogs out on the 990. Labs, purebred, about three months old. My mom’s stupid. She doesn’t think.”

I lift the puppy into my arms. It’s a boy dog. He chews my hand playfully. I like dark animals—ravens, panthers, bats, water moccasins—because they match the darkness inside me. But I don’t know how to feel about a black dog with a pink tongue and a wagging tail. He’s dark and very happy all at once.

Charlie doesn’t take his eyes off the dog. “When she got home, she realized you can’t raise animals in a house like ours. You can’t give my old man something fresh to kick around, some new life to ruin. She tried to return him, but the trailer was gone. The guy took off.”

I think about the time Dad bet me five dollars I couldn’t catch a chipmunk. I caught a whole boxful, thinking he’d meant five dollars per chipmunk. I wanted to keep them, but Mom said, “Give me a break.” I have a feeling she’ll be equally annoyed by a puppy.

Charlie touches the dog’s face with the kind of tenderness you never see from him.

“Cornpup is too uptight. He doesn’t know how to take care of anything but himself. I
need
you to take this dog. I need you to figure out a way to keep him.”

Me and my friends, we laugh when we’re getting into trouble, when someone farts, when someone slips and falls. But I don’t think we really laugh because we’re happy. This little dog wags its tail, slobbers on me, licks my face like I’m made of rawhide, and suddenly I’m happy.

“You’ll take him?” Charlie asks me.

We walk a little faster, but catching up with Cornpup is no longer an option. He’s an angry speck on the horizon.

“My mom doesn’t like dogs.”

“Don’t be stupid. Everybody likes dogs.”

We pass a house I’ve been obsessed with for years. A great horned owl once tried to snatch a baby from the backyard. The baby had deep, infected talon wounds in its skin, but it survived the attack. I sometimes wonder if over the years that kid liked having those unusual scars. I wish I had a crazy feature like that.

Charlie’s eyes are a little watery. It’s like he’s losing a football game on account of a bad call. He feels cheated, because this dog is rightfully his. And he is jealous of me. In his mind, a dead father is probably better than a drunk one with a leather belt.

“Anyway, he’s pretty quiet,” Charlie says. “Hide him in your room. I’ll get you a bowl. I’ll get you a bag of food. And here’s his leash.”

“What’s his name?”

Charlie throws a smooth gray rock at a parked truck. Everything is his to ding and dent. He says, “Name him whatever you want. I don’t care.”

I think of some names, but they don’t seem right. I consider
Max
and
Wolverine
and
Spider
and
Dracula
. I consider
Midnight
and
Diablo
and
Raven
. It’s easy to come up with a million names and narrow it down to twenty. The hard part is picking just one.

Charlie glances at the plastic bag tied to my belt loop. “Let me get one of those tomatoes,” he says. “I’m dying of hunger.”

At the farmers’ market I used my own money to buy a bag of cherry tomatoes. A pretty farm girl talked me into it. “They’re the best in town,” she said. “Firm and a little bit sweet.” The last time I had a cherry tomato, I picked it from Dad’s garden behind the garage. His peppers were underdeveloped, his asparagus stalks were
too thin, and his tomatoes were squishy. I don’t like eating squishy things. I don’t like juices dripping down my hands. If a peach isn’t kind of crunchy, I won’t eat it. I like bananas when they’re still a little bit green.

On the way back from the farmers’ market, I asked Mom if she wanted a tomato, and she said, “Get back to me when you have a bottle of ranch dressing.”

“But they’re good without anything on them,” I told her. “They’re not like Dad’s.”

She turned up the radio and said, “Stop talking about tomatoes. You’re giving me a headache.”

Me and Cornpup ate most of the tomatoes ourselves. We wiped them clean on our shirts. We popped the green stems off with our teeth. I thought about how Dad would’ve wanted to slice them and serve them with fresh mozzarella and basil. His garden is all dead now. Me and Mom didn’t really know how to take care of it.

Mom is gonna kill me if I bring this dog home.

I watch Charlie inhale the rest of my tomatoes. He has an iron gut, I think, because he only has to chew things once or twice before swallowing. I have to chew a lot, or else I get gas.

I put my puppy on the ground so he can bounce around and smell things. “His paws are huge,” I say. “He’s gonna be a monster.”

Charlie tells me Randy and Goat got into a huge fight last night. He tells me Goat got all scared and took off running. The friendship is over. I wonder if this means Randy will act normal again.

I remember the last time I got to hang out with Randy, just me and him, before Goat was even a blip on our radar screen. Mom had fallen asleep at the wheel on her way home from a double shift at the factory. She’d driven Dad’s Cutlass into a snowy ditch.

Of course, it wasn’t really Dad’s car anymore.

When I picked up the phone, I heard her voice, all scared and slobbery. “I almost died tonight. Now the car is stuck.”

I was reeling. If it is possible to hate your mom but love her and need her at the same time, then that’s what I was feeling. The thought of her getting wiped away forever on a random winter night filled me with raw fear. Charlie was sprawled out on my couch with no intention of getting up. He was finishing off an entire box of Triscuits. “Call Randy. He’ll drive you out there,” he said without taking his eyes off the TV.

Riding on the back of Randy’s motorcycle wasn’t what I thought it would be. He made me wear a helmet. He took the icy curves real slow. Mom was shaking when we got there.

“I almost hit that tree,” she said, pointing.

Randy flashed his Pellitero smile, calm and confident. “You’re fine. You’re alive. We don’t need to know all the stuff that didn’t happen.”

I let Mom hug me while Randy got the car up onto the road. “I thought we were gonna need a tow, but I guess not,” he said. “Are you okay to drive home?”

Mom joked, “I’m wide awake now.”

“Then we’re going to make one stop before we swing by your place,” Randy told her.

We followed Mom’s car till she turned off 290. Then we drove to Wendell’s Diner, where Randy bought me a huge piece of pecan pie with ice cream on it. I didn’t want pecan pie, because I like apple, but he kept saying, “You gotta try it. Seriously, just try it,” so I did.

Molly McVie was our waitress. She was supposed to have died five years before, leukemia or something, but she miraculously recovered. I remember thinking she was the prettiest girl in Poxton. I remember thinking that’s why she got to live, because the grim reaper fell in love.

“I’m gonna marry her someday,” Randy told me.

I believed him. The Pelliteros always get what they want. They
set their eyes on a girl or a touchdown, and everybody else might as well quit.