My Chemical Mountain (2 page)

“Your old man’s gonna kill you when he finds out you destroyed the four-wheeler. You can crash on my floor tonight if you want.”

“He won’t find out. I’ve got it covered,” Charlie says, spitting blood into a puddle. “Anyway, my mom went shopping after work. We’ve got blueberry waffles in the freezer.”

Later, maybe tomorrow, Cornpup will yell at us for not dragging the four-wheeler home. He will walk all the way to Chemical Mountain to examine the twisted machine. He’ll fill a giant duffel bag with things that mean nothing to Charlie and me: hinges, strut springs, cables and belts, rotary valve parts, and a motor mount. It’ll take him weeks, and it won’t be pretty—bodywork is needed, and a new paint job—but he’ll get the four-wheeler running again, its motor purring like new. I give him credit for seeing potential where I see only a hopeless mess. I wish he knew how to bring people back to life.

It’s not fair that my dad, a man who wouldn’t even plug in a table saw without safety gloves, is dead. He was a drummer and football player. He followed the rules. He picked up some overtime hours at the chemical processing plant, just wanted some extra cash, and now they say the accident was his fault. Being good didn’t get him
anywhere. Playing it safe didn’t earn him extra points. He could’ve been a skydiver or a junkie or a stuntman. It wouldn’t’ve mattered.

Charlie says it’s hard for kids to die, that it’s almost
impossible
, but I saw Joe Farley the day he puked all over the Pelliteros’ sidewalk. He’d gone swimming in Two Mile Creek when the water smelled like melted plastic, and anyone with half a brain knows that the colored water is fine, that it’s the smelly water you have to stay away from. His eyes were all bloodshot. I asked him if he was okay, and he said I should “piss off.” Later that day he fell from the window of the abandoned rubber factory on Grant Street. I’ve been in the building with Charlie a million times, but
we
were always smart enough to kick open the warehouse doors. We would never go up the fire escape and in through the windows, because there’s no way to climb down the fifty-foot walls once you’re inside. You have to jump to an old catwalk and catch a ladder that way, which is probably how the Farley kid fell. It’s not an easy jump to make. Only Charlie has done it, and even he says,
Never again
.

Before I hoist myself through my bedroom window, Charlie says, “Mareno Chem reopened their drainage pipes. They’re dumping in the creek again.”

“Cornpup’s gonna be so pissed,” I say. And we both laugh.

Dumping.

To me it’s maintenance, like taking out the garbage or getting a haircut. No big deal. To Charlie it’s what keeps us real; it’s what separates us from the hybrid car–driving wimps who couldn’t hold on to a football if their hands were covered in epoxy.

But a few months ago, Cornpup started to really freak out. He said our creek was all poisoned or whatever. He took horsehair blankets and insulation from his attic and clogged up Mareno Chem’s drainage pipes while me and Charlie played football on the muddy shore. We told him his plug wouldn’t hold, but he wasn’t trying to stop the sludge forever. He was just sending a message. “I don’t
want them to think we’re stupid, that we don’t notice what’s been going on,” he told us. Then Charlie threw the football hard, and sure as shit, it bounced off Cornpup’s hands and into the water. It was hilarious.

There is another rip of thunder, then a flash of lightning so close and bright, we both stop laughing. Charlie lifts the welder’s goggles from his face. “Oh, one more thing. I think I know where they’re hiding the Phenzorbiflux.”

He says he’ll show me where. Tomorrow night. He says some other stuff too. But I can’t hear him anymore. The monster is back inside my head, pounding on my skull. I can feel a bad migraine coming on. Sometimes I wonder about my anger, how long it can be controlled.

THE
day after a lightning storm, I sometimes get headaches, like the ones we all got the year our school was closed down because noxious gasses were coming up through the basement vents. My shoulder is still sore from the crash at Chemical Mountain, but if Charlie’s telling the truth, if he really found the Phenzorbiflux barrels, there’s
no way
I’m staying home tonight.

Mom picked up an early Saturday shift at the plant. She left me a note on the table—
Stay away from the creek
—which makes me laugh, because she has no right to tell me that. Two Mile Creek is the heartbeat of our whole summer. It’s where we find tumor-covered snakes and two-headed robins. It’s where Charlie invented water football and you have to jump into a huge pile of rusted metal to get a touchdown. When Cornpup built a crazy-fast boat out of
aluminum siding, a busted carousel horse, and a junk motor that runs on chicken grease, Two Mile Creek was where we first took it for a spin.

Two Mile Creek is
ours
.

I lie on the couch and watch
Rocky III
, the good one, where he loses to Clubber Lang, and then I cook some tomato soup with cut-up hot dogs. My headache goes away once I have food in my stomach. I’m bored, though. There’s nothing else good on TV.

I walk to the creek because I want to see if the water is still the color of antifreeze, and because I want to sculpt creatures out of heavy mud and pieces of broken glass, and because Mom is stupid if she thinks she can keep me away from Two Mile with a note.

The humidity today is almost unbearable. My thirsty pores drink in the steamy chemical fumes that blow in off Lake Erie. At the edge of the industrial park, I scale a chain-link fence. I walk along a footpath of garbage, plastic mostly—huge, crushed-up tubs that smell like gasoline. When I finally reach the creek, my head is foggy. I swear I can almost hear how this place must’ve sounded a hundred years ago, when all the factory machines were humming, before everything got shut down.

There’s an orange film on the creek. I drag a stick through the water, breaking up the color as I walk, but the suds come together again real quick, like a wound healing. Colored water is so much cooler than regular old murky creek water, but there are people—like Mom and Cornpup—who say it’s toxic. They want the creek fenced off. Me and Charlie, we’ll fight them every step of the way.

I hang at the creek for about an hour, wading in the water, fishing out golf balls, carving images in the mud with a long piece of glass, until I see a guy in a yellow plastic suit collecting water samples in long glass tubes. I nod at him, just being friendly or whatever, and he says, “Get out of the frickin’ water. What are you, crazy?” which is totally uncalled for. Then he leaves.

I’m about to walk home, when Charlie shows up. No bruises on his face, which means he didn’t get blamed for the four-wheeler. “Your shoes are garbage,” he says.

Like I don’t know this. I’ve been taping them up for months.

Charlie climbs a dead tree, swings from the highest branch, and does a cannonball into the orange, fizzy water. I’m already up the tree when he surfaces for air. I crawl out to the end of a branch, swing by my hands for a minute, and then let go. I try doing a somersault in the air, but I don’t have enough momentum, so instead I do a belly flop that hurts. Charlie laughs at me. I go under and drink in a mouthful of water to spit into his face. He spits back at me. We go back and forth for a while, like water dragons battling it out. My throat is burning. His eyes are bloodshot.

The afternoon sun turns the water a darker color, almost tomato-red. I’m ready to do something else.

“So what’s up with you and Valerie?” Charlie asks me.

“Nothing.”

“Bull.”

“She called. I wasn’t home. That’s it.” But that’s not it. I like her. A lot.

We use empty glass jars to dig for Cornpup’s robots, but we don’t find them. Cornpup is real paranoid when it comes to his inventions. He has a secret map of hiding spots. What we do find is his metal detector wrapped in a blue tarp. Charlie uses it to look for machine parts buried deep in the ground like bones. I fill the glass jars with some deformed tadpoles and weird insects, stuff Cornpup can use for the Freak Museum.

“Kind of looks like a purple spider.” I show Charlie the rash that’s forming on my forearm.

“Mine are better,” Charlie says. He’s got snakelike scales on both ankles.

We head back for food. Charlie has a corroded battery tucked
under his arm. He loves corroded stuff. Before we part ways, he says, “We’re going out to the yards at midnight. I’ll come get you. Be ready.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll be ready.”

Mom’s home when I get back. She’s already wolfed down a frozen pizza, didn’t even leave me one slice. On the table there’s a stack of opened mail, mostly bills. I’m drawn to a letter that’s printed on Army Corps of Engineers letterhead. I skim it, my eyes snagging on certain words:

“Why do you have this?” I say.

Mom points a fat finger at me. “Two Mile Creek is a mess. They say it might not be possible to clean up all the poison. They’re talking about fencing it off. I think it’s a good idea.”

I’m so mad, I want to punch something. “What about me? What about my summer? They’re taking everything away from us.”

It’s like I can’t hold on to anything.

I picture a bunch of sweaty construction workers digging holes, installing aluminum fence posts, puncturing our tunnels, confiscating our fireworks and crowbars, destroying Cornpup’s robots and throwing away the busted metal pieces.

Mom shrugs. “You told me the creek has dead frogs all up and down the banks. That’s not normal. And the dyes in the water. I remember when I had to use a Brillo pad to get oily red stains off your skin after you went swimming there.”

“Me and Charlie swim there all the time, and we’re fine.”

Mom rolls her eyes. “Just stop. You
know
what I think about
Charlie. He’s a bad seed. His whole family is nothing but trash. He’ll jump the fence, and you’ll follow. I swear if that boy jumped off the Skyway, you’d be right behind him.”

Her words sting me like the phosphorus rocks we found in a corroded railcar near our old middle school. Strangers can make snap judgments about me all day long. I don’t care. But when my own mom does it, it hurts. She thinks I follow Charlie, like I’m not my own person, but I spend lots of time drawing, and Charlie would never sit still that long. I created the baddest sketchbook full of landfill monsters. And last time I checked, I’m not going out for football, even though Charlie’s been begging. Sometimes I think Mom doesn’t know me at all. I could die in a few hours, could get crushed under a steel beam. But at least I’ll have discovered something more interesting than potato chips. At least I know what it feels like to be alive.

I open the refrigerator and stare at the shelves. A jug of milk. Polish sausages. Liverwurst. American cheese. Mostaccioli. Nothing looks good.

I remember how much trouble I got in back before Cornpup scored formaldehyde for our Freak Museum. It had been my stupid idea to take all the crazy stuff we found on the shores of Two Mile and store it in my kitchen. Wingless birds in a margarine tub in the freezer. Neon-green leeches wrapped in foil and hidden in the silverware drawer. A big fish with tumors on its face in a plastic bag behind the ice maker. Mom found the dead animals a few days later, and I got double-grounded, no contact with friends for a week.

I sneer at her now. “Where’s my BLT?”

“Your what?”

“The BLT I got at Joe’s Roadhouse on Thursday night. Did you eat it?”

“I … um … I don’t think so.”

“You don’t remember if you ate my food? Are you serious?”

“I don’t want to fight with you.” She folds up the letter and shoves it into her purse with such force that her glass of soda tips over and spills everywhere. She looks like she wants to burst out crying. I almost help her wipe up the mess, but something holds me back. I’m still kind of pissed at what she said about Charlie—he’s not a bad seed; he’s loyal and funny. The real bad seed is the slimy Mareno Chem lawyer who harassed us after Dad’s funeral. And Mom was so quick to cut a deal with him: total silence in exchange for a few hundred dollars. Charlie would never sell out like that.

I never signed any papers. I never agreed to be silent. The only vow I took was in my own head. Revenge.

IT’S
after midnight and Charlie’s still not here.

Outside, one of our neighbors is stuck in the mud. I hear tires spinning. I remember a few winters ago, when Dad’s van got buried in a snowy parking lot. We threw down salt to melt the ice and poured kitty litter under the tires for traction. He told me to sit in the driver’s seat and “floor it” while he pushed. It took us thirty minutes to get unstuck. I remember thinking Dad was strong for pushing a huge van without any help. But really, pushing stuck vehicles is just a thing people do. You don’t have to be all that powerful.

I smear butter in a pan and fry up some bologna. Mom must smell the food, because she wanders into the kitchen and says, “Whatcha making?” When she thinks I’m not looking, she takes a box of ice cream sandwiches and hides it in the laundry basket under a pile of
towels. She says, “I’m going to put on a movie and fold the rest of these in my bedroom.” She touches my face.

“What?” I say.

She puts her arms around me. “I just love you.”

I’m stiff in her embrace, but she keeps holding me, and I feel myself relaxing. She is my only parent. She’s my
mom
. I don’t put my arms around her, though. I won’t hug her back.

“Good night,” she whispers.

I eat the fried bologna straight from the pan. Mom disappears into her bedroom, her little TV drowning out the sound of an ice cream box tearing open. She’s gonna eat the whole box in one sitting. Those ice cream sandwiches were supposed to be for both of us.

I sit on the couch and wrap masking tape around my sneakers until I’m certain they’ll hold. I jump a little when Charlie taps on the mudroom window with his crowbar. I open the front door and say, “Be really quiet. My mom just went to bed.”