The Water Museum (15 page)

Charlie pulled a
Doctor Who
magazine out of his backpack, and the boys bent to it.

Billy popped a lemon drop in his mouth.

The sky was saffron.

“Museums suck,” said Billy.

The bus rattled along between tan fields.

“Right?” said Charlie.

“History,” said Higgins. “Shit like that.”

“What I'm sayin',” Billy said, watching the back of Sammy's head.

“Suckage,” said Charlie.

“Suckola,” Higgins said.

“Sucks the big one,” Billy said.

“That's what she said,” Charlie said.

They all giggled like Sammy and Peanut.

The outskirts of town. Billy, in spite of himself, crowded the windows. They never saw the city for real, just in movies. Trees. Nice.

There was a car dealership. Empty. Weeds poked up through cracks they had made in the asphalt.

“Dude,” said Billy. “Freakin' drought, and it's all freakin' weeds. Freakin' weeds, like, never stop growin'. Whyn't we just farm weeds?”

Higgins was asleep; Charlie was back with
Doctor Who.

Billy rested his head against the glass and felt his mind fly out into all the windows and doors. Felt himself move in and out of the alleyways. Like a great sideways yo-yo in a dream. Like he could walk into a thousand life stories. Like he could think up a whole new world. Like he could go out of himself and keep going and find a house on a beach with ten million miles of ocean in front and sweet cold fog and afternoon rainstorms and Sammy there beside him. This thought both comforted and stung him and made him happy and made him want to cry. How did Pops ever tell Mom he wanted to be her boyfriend? How did you do that? And—second base! Bras? How could a guy ever get up the guts to ask? How did a kiss happen, anyway?

The bus pulled into the museum parking lot and farted its air brakes and Mom stood and the doors opened.

Another sign said
PILGRIM, REFRESH YOURSELF
. Some kind of old covered wagon and a plaster ox out in front. Cornball.

The kids disembarked. Grab-ass ensued; impromptu tag, running around like idiots. “I swear,” Mom said, “dealing with you all is like herding chickens.”

The boys feigned disinterest in the hologram of a huge fountain in the entryway. But the girls oohed and ahhed over it—the way the fake water was projected on a cloud of steam and seemed to gush and flow and then change colors.

“Water don't turn yellow,” Higgins announced.

Then the boys started snickering.

“If it does, don't drink it,” Charlie said.

As an added feature, each child received a minuscule spritz of cold water in the face, and they shrieked with delight, but were firmly denied a repeat.

They entered through a projected waterfall, a cheesy video loop playing on more steam.

Mom had once seen that effect at Disneyland on the Pirates ride.

They walked on video tiles, and each step made ripples in the fake blue water beneath them. Fat goldfish-looking things swam away from the electric ripples. The boys made big faux splashes by jumping up and down until the digital fish swam out of sight beyond the edges of the floor.

They wandered through the galleries: 3D film loops of Niagara Falls. Higgins didn't believe it.

“That crap's from the Avatar movies,” he said, tossing his glasses in the big blue box.

But Billy stood as one hypnotized. He was astounded by the sight of that water. Who imagined wild water was white? And so much of it the earth used to simply throw it away. Still, he was more awed by the sound of it than the sight of it. The sheer noise.

Farther in, they witnessed seashore videos: the announcer droned, “Behold the song of the sea.” The sound of crashing waves. Vents pumped saltwater scents at the kids. Gulls cried.

The moms were smiling, but the kids felt creepy, watching all this water. It felt bad. Billy picked up a conch shell and put it to his ear.

“You'll hear the sea,” Mom promised.

Just sounded like the inside of a shell to him.

A friendly docent appeared in a sky-blue suit.

“You supposed to look like water?” Higgins said.

Kids laughed.

Billy looked for Sammy, caught her eye. She wasn't smiling either. She stared at him for a long time before they both looked away, blushing.

It got sucky. Charts. Data. Laser pointers.

How the drought came upon the West first, then the South, then the Midwest. Then how the water states started to flood from too much rain. The docent called this “The Cosmic Irony.” And the oceans rose and the coasts were invaded by seawater. Then, how the water states instituted the border system, to keep the drought survivors from overrunning their lands. How they shipped water units to the heartland until the crisis was over. No shortage of sun or wind here, though, right, kids? So the drought states traded wind energy and solar energy to the national grid. Light for water, the government motto said. And: Light—it's the new harvest.

“How long's it been?” Billy asked.

“Pert near twenty years now,” the docent said with her weird anesthetized grin.

“Seventeen,” Mom said.

“Pert,” Charlie snickered.

Higgins couldn't stop laughing.

“What a hick,” he whispered. Then he asked, “Excuse me, miss. Were you born in 1860?” He and Charlie laughed and snorted. Billy moved away from them.

The docent ignored them.

“And now, children,” she said, working a remote that caused smoked-glass doors to swing open, “we go to meet water.”

They followed her through.

Creepy, man. Are you kidding? What is this, Halloween? Billy's mind was racing. It was dark in there. Crazy bug noises everywhere—he wasn't used to bugs. He didn't like it. Bouncy little lights among the trees with awful gray beards hanging down.

“What's that?” he asked Mom.

“Fireflies,” she said. She was
happy.
“Isn't it awesome?”

Mom trying out her kid-speak again.

“Awesome,” Billy said.

He pointed.

“And what's that?”

“Spanish moss.”

“Has it got spiders?”

“It's fake,” said Higgins. “Dumbass.”

Splashes in dark water. He squinted.
Water.
They were walking on a spit of fake ground in a big dark pool of water at night and there were freaky things croaking. Water was beneath them, looking poisonous in the gloom. Anything could be beneath it.

“What's that?” Billy asked the docent.

“What, hon?”

“That sound.”

“Frogs.”

One of the girls let out a tiny scream and the rest laughed.

“It jumped on me!” she cried.

“What is this place?” Billy asked.

“This would be a swamp,” the docent explained. “This was the Atchafalaya basin in Louisiana before the coast deteriorated and the wetlands were destroyed. This is what you'd see.”

“Are there alligators?” Mom asked.

“In the tanks, yes.”

“Gators!” cried Billy. He moved closer to Mom. She put her hand on his back. It was hot and clammy. He pulled away.

Higgins snapped a girl's bra strap.

Billy heard Sammy's voice.

“Miss?” she said in the gloom. “What's wrong with the air?”

“Wrong, dear?”

“Yes, ma'am. The air feels, um, heavy or something.”

“That's humidity. That's what humidity feels like.”

Silence.

“I'm
glad
we're in a drought!” Charlie offered.

They moved on through a beaver dam room and an African watering hole with wack plaster elephants and a Walden Pond diorama. “Who's that dude?” Billy said, pointing to a bearded figure in front of a tiny cabin.

Little dragonflies hung from wires and bobbed among cattails. They stared at catfish in murky tanks. The catfish stared back. It was creepy as hell.

But the worst thing of all was The Rain Parlor.

It was a round room with concentric rings of benches with a small octagonal dais in the middle. The docent climbed up three steps and smiled down at them. “It's best if you move to the center,” she said, but Billy hung back and took a bench on the outer ring. He was shaky. He felt like he had ice in his stomach. He didn't want to hear any more crap from his boys. He didn't want Mom pawing at him. He couldn't understand why she was all jazzed. He didn't like this room with its fake blue sky and its painted green fields and far little trees and its stupid little white clouds looking like sheep on the horizon. To his astonishment, Sammy Remember came and sat beside him.

They looked at each other. She smiled a little, but her face was flushed and she looked like her dog had died. She had bright pink splotches on her alabaster cheeks.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh, Billy!” she said and took his hand and put her head on his shoulder.

Whoa. Fortunately, the lights dimmed. And she started to cry—he could feel her tears soaking into his T-shirt. When it was dark enough, he put his arm around her. Then she kissed the side of his face. Followed by the horror of the rain.

Dark. Crickets. Then stars started to appear above them. And—what the hell was that? It looked like a scary movie. The docent's voice in the darkness: “The clouds obscure the moon.” And they did—these projected huge beasts rose up and blotted out the stars and the moon, settled like a threat upon them. The clouds started flickering. “And the lightning begins.”

Billy heard Mom say, “Oh!”

Bolts of light shot across the sky—much vaster and more horrifying than their little dust flashes at the farm. A bolt plunged to earth and blasted a tree apart and kicked up flames. Little speakers broadcast its crackling.

“Oh my God!” somebody yelled.

Billy heard sobbing.

When the first thunder crack boomed, they all jumped. It was so loud. It was as if God's violence had come upon them in deepest rage, dropping temples and crushing idols to the ground. Crash. And crash again. They covered their ears.

Wind started then, cold wind. The speakers made small howlings, as if electric coyotes were stalking their feet. Ghosts, perhaps. More thunder. Some kids cried as the mothers laughed and clapped.

Then came what must have been…rain.

Not real rain, of course. But the sound of it. The sizzle and the whisper and the hiss and the splash of it. The blue light along the faux horizon of the room. The projected banners and veils of rain all around them. Rain like lace curtains, rain like smoke, rain like spiderwebs and flags and wind you could see. Rain that sang to their bones, that ached inside their bellies and their hands, rain that made them thirst and cower and hide. Rain they had never felt yet knew as intimately as they knew their own skins. It was dreadful. Sammy clutched Billy as hard as anyone could, and he wept into her red hair and didn't care if she knew it or not.

Higgins cried out, “Stop it, miss! Oh, stop the rain!”

But it went on and on and on, the fake electric fields filling again with the lie of freshness, springtime, life.

They were quiet on the way home. Billy didn't let Mom turn on the radio. The Windstar hummed along in the heat. The thermometer on the dash read 80. It was long after sunset, and the western sky had a band of red and violet spread along the edges.

Both of them had their little color picture buttons on their lapels—the docent's last ghastly blessing. Mom had a picture of an icicle. His was a moose standing in an alpine bog. She had bought a CD of frogs croaking. Billy stopped her from putting it in the CD player.

“Billy?” She said.

He turned and stared out the window.

“Mom,” he finally said. “Is that really the way the world used to be?”

She glanced at him.

“Crickets,” he said. “Frogs. Clouds. Like that?”

She sighed.

“Yes, honey. Just like that.”

Five more miles.

“All that color.” He shuddered a little. “All that noise.”

“Son?”

“So cold, Mom.”

He shook his head, watching his own reflection in the window.

“But wasn't the museum wonderful?” she said.

Sammy. That word kept turning in his head. The scent of coconut red hair. The dry lip-pop on his cheek that in future years would remind him of a pigeon pecking at a grain of bread, but which now contained all hope and fear and desire and a vivid dreamed future expanding forever inside his body. He almost told her he loved her. The way her eyes lit up under the lightning.

“Mom?” he said.

“Billy?”

“How do you ask a girl for a kiss?”

She stifled a small laugh.

“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, I think you know when the time is right. Then you just do it.”

“How do you know?”

“It's like the rain. You just know it's coming.”

They drove on.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Please,” he said. “Please. Don't ever take me to that place again.”

“Why, Billy?”

He bent over and put his arms over his head and did not look up.

Mom drove on in silence, remembering how, when she was a girl, she had run along the banks of the Missouri River. It surged and sang as if water could never run out. It was summer vacation. She kissed her first boy there. The water, the water, she felt it running through her body still. She could hear it. And she rode that beautiful tide, wind lifting her hair, trying to tell him about the copper sea.