My Chemical Mountain

by Corina Vacco

  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:

  … Two Mile Creek … discharge pipes … immediate threat … Mareno Chem … highly toxic azo dyes … not to panic … surrounding areas … assessing the risk … not for recreational use …

  “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.

  CHAPTER 3

  SNEAKING OUT

  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.”

  “Look what I did to my hand,” Charlie says. His straight blond hair is ratted from the wind.

  Cornpup is here too. He sets a paper bag on my floor. I wonder what’s in it. “You look like a death row inmate,” I tell him.

  “Shut up. I like my hair short.”

  We haven’t been out to the abandoned factories since November, not all three of us, anyway. Charlie is always outside, until his lips crack from the wind, and I can be indoors or out, it doesn’t matter, but as soon as the temperature drops below fifty, Cornpup sits on the floor vent in his living room, cranks the heat up to a million degrees, and reads stacks of books from the library. We barely see him between January and May. His health is bad, that’s why. The skin on his arms is thin, like sausage casing. The nodules on his back have a limited blood supply, and when he’s really cold, they turn a waxy white color that makes me think of navy beans from a can.

  Charlie says, “We found a way into the grain mill. The Mareno Chem trucks are parked inside.”

  They cased the mill without me. No wonder they took so long to get here.

  “We didn’t go in yet,” Charlie adds. “We came back to get you first.” When he smiles, he raises his hand to cover his teeth. He’ll have to do that for the rest of his life, probably. Last summer, when he was riding on the back of his brother’s motorcycle, they got into an accident on Military Road. Randy had road rash all down his back, but he healed quickly, with no scars. Charlie was the one who had lasting damage. He banged his skull on the pavement and lost two of his teeth. His parents still don’t know because he always covers his mouth when he chews or smiles. After the accident, when the rubber skid marks were still fresh, we rode our bikes out to the scene. Charlie wanted to find his teeth. He was gonna make them into a necklace or something. I found a tiger’s-eye agate, and he found a long piece of dried snakeskin, but we didn’t find the teeth.

  “It stinks bad outside. Worse than when the asphalt plant caught fire,” says Cornpup. Before he closes the door, I catch a glimpse of the gray and orange night sky, summer fog mixed with vomiting smokestacks. Past the Kuperskis’ house, beyond our school and the ball field, I see a seventy-foot wall of black—Chemical Mountain, with its monster slopes, a hundred boarded-up factories in its valleys.

  Charlie’s hand is dripping blood all over the floor. “Can I get a pop?” he asks me. “I’m dying of thirst.” He always uses that word, dying.

  “We gotta wrap your hand first,” I tell him. “You’re getting blood everywhere.”

  We clamber into the bathroom. Charlie rummages through our medicine cabinet. He says, “How can you not have Band-Aids? Everyone has Band-Aids.” Then he pours rubbing alcohol onto his cut and hisses at the pain. He wraps his hand in gauze and tape till it looks like the sneakers I just rigged. He has messed everything up. Cough syrup, dental floss, and lozenges litter the sink. I see one of Dad’s old pill bottles—it’s unbearable, the places in this house where I can still find pieces of him. I stand here, almost two years after his death, with a sick sadness in my gut, an aching, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel all right again.

  Cornpup doesn’t want to carry his paper bag all the way to the grain mill. He says, “Hey, do you have a backpack I can borrow?”

  I say no, which isn’t the truth. I have one under my bed, but it’s filled with railroad spikes.

  “Did Charlie tell you he’s going to climb the grain elevator?” Cornpup asks me. “He wants to fall and splatter on the floor like that Joe Farley kid.”

  Charlie makes a face. “The thing about Farley is that he wasn’t strong enough to grab the catwalk. I don’t have that problem.”

  We watch Charlie roll up his pants legs. Randy’s jeans are still too long for him. I feel jealous, because I notice that Randy has drawn pictures of scorpions above the knees, black ink on denim, and Charlie doesn’t even know how cool that is. He always gets to borrow Randy’s stuff: steel-toed boots, a wallet with a chain, his silver rattlesnake ring. I should have an older brother. I would appreciate it more.

  Once, when I was sitting on the Pelliteros’ porch waiting for Charlie to get home, Randy had his acoustic guitar and he taught me a song. I didn’t want to leave that porch step, but when the mosquitoes got bad, I went home and drew a set of guitar frets in my sketchbook. I practiced that chord progression for hours, my fingers pressed to the paper.

  Tonight, it’s my turn. I’m gonna wear something no one else gets to wear. I go to the closet where Mom stored all Dad’s favorite belongings—his drumsticks and his autographed Sabres tickets and his Las Vegas beer mug. Charlie helps me pull the fattest box down from a shelf. I slice through the packing tape with a pizza cutter.

  Cornpup says, “Are you sure you want to dig through all that stuff tonight?”

  I take off my ugly sweatshirt and toss it to the floor. “This’ll take two seconds. The thing I’m looking for is real easy to find.”

  When I see Dad’s leather jacket, I feel like I breathed in a bad chemical for too long. The jacket is still shaped like him, still smells like him. He never played a gig without it, even on hot summer nights by the river when the rest of the band members wore T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off. On the back of the jacket, there’s an image of a drum set burned into the leather with a branding iron. People always wanted to know where he got a custom jacket like this, who made it for him, but he would never tell.

  “Your dad was such a ridiculously good drummer,” says Charlie. “That jacket was famous in this town.”

  I remember the night Dad’s band played at the pig roast. Everyone stopped eating during the drum solo, because they were, like, hypnotized. Dad stood up afterward, his back to the crowd, his drumsticks pointing to the sky. I wanted to be onstage with him.

  “Don’t wear that to the mill,” says Cornpup. “It’ll get dirty.”

  “Screw that,” says Charlie. “Wear it.”

  I am already wearing it. The leather hangs heavy on my arms.

  Charlie starts rummaging through the cardboard box, like this is a garage sale. He pulls out the switchblade Dad got at a gift shop in Niagara Falls.

  “Put it back,” I say.

  Charlie shakes his head. “No. We might need protection tonight. I’m serious.”

  I have a sick feeling in my stomach.

  We sneak out the back door like burglars. No coughing, no breathing, no nervous laughter.

  We don’t make a sound.

  CHAPTER 4

  TRESPASSING

  THE industrial zone covers about ten square miles, from Cornpup’s backyard to the interstate. First there is a chain-link fence, then an acre of land where plants don’t grow, then a field full of partially buried metal barrels. About a hundred factories and mills, most of them closed down and falling apart, form rings around Chemical Mountain, like moons orbiting a planet. Two Mile Creek begins at the mudflats and snakes its way through everything, even traveling underneath some of the smaller landfills, which is really cool to see. Lots of buildings got built on the shores of Two Mile Creek. There is a mile-long steel mill; there are factories that manufacture film and rubber and tools and fiberglass and tires; there is an asphalt plant that burned down, an incinerator that’s all boarded up, and a bunch of silos that look like castle towers from a distance. Mareno Chem is one of only about twenty-five buildings still in operation.

  I want to ask Cornpup what’s in the paper bag, but even more than that, I want to ask him why I should even have to ask, why he hasn’t told me. Instead I say, “I hope this frickin’ tape doesn’t fall off my shoes.”

  Hidden within the industrial zone are secret places only me and my friends know about: a trail of green puddles that never dry up; a rusty railcar full of weird, smelly rocks; and a perfect square of earth where you can dig for hours without seeing a single insect, not even a worm. My favorite thing to look at is the cluster of trees that turned black and died for no reason. When I d
raw sludge demons in my sketchbook, I usually put those trees in the background.

  There is a strange taste in the back of my throat: burnt plastic, natural gas, and a sharp chemical that makes me lose my breath for a second. My throat feels itchy. I can’t stop coughing.

  “Told you it smells bad out tonight,” says Cornpup.

  Charlie is up ahead of us, sprinting. He runs through the tall grass like he’s found some path no one else can see. Cornpup and I exchange a look. We are supposed to be going to the grain mill together. Charlie is leaving us behind.

  We are three-way best friends. We’ve known each other since we were four years old. There was a time when we all grew at exactly the same rate, and a small part of me liked the fairness in that, liked things being even. Charlie’s growth spurt was like an explosion. He was suddenly taller, with chiseled arms, a stomach hard as steel, and a noticeably deeper voice. Pretty girls started doodling his name on their book covers, dotting their i’s with little hearts. It made me want to puke. I do okay with the ladies. I’ve got really dark brown eyes, almost black, and they’re shaped like wolf eyes. It’s hard for girls to look away from me when I make eye contact. I just wish I wasn’t so skinny. At least I don’t look like Cornpup—transparent skin, purple nodules on his back, and a messed-up buzz cut. He’ll never get a girl.

  I’m running through the mud like a clumsy idiot. Cornpup is beside me, panting like a dog. “Slow down!” he shouts in his wheezy voice, but there’s no way Charlie can hear him.

  And then we see Charlie fall.

  He has tripped on a rusty piece of machinery that lay hidden beneath the mud. Or he has slipped on a sheen of spilled oil. It’s so great to see him look stupid for once.

  I shout, “That was the best thing I ever saw in my life!”

  And Cornpup shouts, “Charlie, you are such a retard!”