My Chemical Mountain

by Corina Vacco

  “He sounds like he’s crying. Doesn’t he sound like he’s crying?” Molly clasps her hands together and starts to pray so hard, I can see ugly green veins bulging from her neck. “Help us,” she says over and over again. “Make Charlie be okay. Please.”

  “Stop it,” Cornpup snaps. “Your God is a bully. Your God is sick.”

  Randy appears, wearing only boxer shorts and combat boots. He’s holding Charlie, limp and gray, in his arms. It’s the chemicals. Making me see things. Charlie’s skin isn’t really gray. Everything is fine. Molly jumps up and pulls the denim mask from Randy’s face. She touches Charlie’s cheek and jerks her hand away real quick. Her face turns phosphorus white. “You told me not to pray!” she shouts at Cornpup. “Are you happy now?”

  Cornpup shouts back at her, “You can’t blame me for this. I wasn’t even here when Charlie left the campsite with two cans of gasoline. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Shut up,” I say to both of them. “Just shut up. Charlie’s fine. He’s gonna be fine.”

  Randy is on his knees. He tries giving Charlie mouth-to-mouth, tries pumping his chest, but nothing changes. Charlie’s body is like wax. Cornpup can’t find a pulse.

  “I don’t understand,” I whisper. “He didn’t go into the fire. He didn’t get burnt. Why isn’t he okay?”

  Randy says, “Where’s the ambulance? I thought I told you to call an ambulance.”

  Cornpup says, “They’re coming, but … Randy … it might be too late. I think it’s too late.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Randy says, but his voice is shaky.

  I vomit in the bushes, again and again, until the paramedics arrive, cup an oxygen mask over Randy’s mouth, and zip Charlie into a bag.

  No. I didn’t see that. Charlie is okay. Charlie is invincible.

  I wish someone would tell Molly to stop screaming.

  The paramedics, the police, they’re all talking at once:

  “… arson … tragedy … biggest fire I’ve ever seen … lots of questions …”

  “… he was standing too close to the fumes … fried his brain … Why are you kids out here?”

  “… warehouse is gone … evacuation … lucky they all aren’t dead … blisters …”

  “… Don’t these kids have parents? … chemicals … Is this the brother? … notify the family …”

  “… don’t really know to what extent the fire is spreading … nerve damage …”

  Randy says, “Get your hands off me.… What is wrong with you people? … doctors … Why didn’t you even try to help him?”

  I have dirt in my mouth. I can feel grit in my teeth. My right thumb is twitching, and I can’t make it stop. Maybe this is my fault. I noticed the gas cans, but I didn’t empty them in the grass. I could’ve saved him.

  Flashing red lights. I pass out for a second and think of the lockbox Charlie gave me, how I wasn’t supposed to open it, except I did open it, this morning, and there was nothing inside but a small horsehair paintbrush.

  I am conscious again. I have an oxygen mask on my face. Someone puts me on a stretcher. I say, “I want to ride with Cornpup,” but they don’t know who Cornpup is.

  I think of Charlie and his matches, Charlie and his fires, Charlie who hated safety gear, Charlie who hated weakness. I picture him standing close to those final flames, the furious heat, inhaling the fumes on purpose, deep breaths, feeling like a god. He went to sleep happy, invincible as far as he knew. And he left us the way he was meant to leave us, with sirens, a yellow sky, evacuations, and a punished, ruined chemical company smoldering on the horizon.

  Charlie.

  On the way to the hospital, I fall asleep in the ambulance. I dream that the industrial yards are lifting up, morphing into the shape of a giant monster. Factories bubble like warts on the monster’s skin; dead trees grow in patches, like goblin fur; Two Mile Creek is a twisted spinal cord; Chemical Mountain is a single, all-seeing eye. The industrial monster has powerful breath, fumes that kill. We feel like people, but we’re just little mites and fleas, living on the skin of a creature that is bigger than everything else we think we know.

  CHAPTER 26

  CHANGE

  ON the night Mareno Chem shuts its doors for good, temperatures reach ninety-eight degrees, and the box fans in our windows are just making it worse, blasting hot air at our faces. Cornpup was supposed to be here at midnight. Everyone should be here by now. I sit in my driveway and lean against the garage door. With a piece of gravel, I draw uranium monster paw prints on the concrete. We have so much work to do. We have to get started real soon if we’re gonna be done by sunrise.

  I hear Cornpup before I see him. He’s using a huge remote control to direct two of his robots. My favorite robot, the one we usually keep at the creek, has hidden compartments full of battle gear. The other, uglier robot needs to be oiled. It sounds all creaky and stiff. I laugh when both robots get stuck in the bushes and Cornpup has to pull them out. I hear him say, “Goddammit all to hell,” because he has to put the newer robot’s arm back on, and he can’t get it to stay. When Cornpup and his lifelike hunks of junk finally roll up my driveway, he’s picking twigs out of their aluminum joints, and sweating off all his glow-in-the-dark face paint.

  “You got any of that left?” I ask him.

  We mess with the glow-in-the-dark paint for about ten minutes. I smear tribal lines on my face, warrior-style. Cornpup paints the robots’ faces to look all girly, with hilarious neon green eyeliner and lipstick.

  “Paint something cool on my back,” Cornpup says to me. He has been walking around shirtless, wearing the same pair of cargo shorts, since his surgery almost two weeks ago. We never got our envelope of cash back after Dan Benecke stole it, but Cornpup’s parents finally gave in and bought him the detox tea and skin care products and whatever else Dr. Gupta said Cornpup needed. Now Cornpup’s skin is part smooth, part craters and scars, and he’s smiling so hard, I think his face might snap. When I look at his bony back, I remember exactly where the gray and purple rashes used to be. I remember how he used to have a mountain range of pus-filled monster cysts rising from his spine, all pale-white and chunky. Cornpup stands with his back to me, and I paint a glow-in-the-dark hawk on his skin. The hawk’s wingspan stretches all the way across Cornpup’s shoulder blades. It looks pretty cool.

  I think of the funeral, how horrible it was, the throbbing blisters on our arms, Cornpup ripping out hymnal pages; Mrs. Pellitero with snot dripping down her lips; Mr. Pellitero passed out, snoring; Valerie holding my hand like I was drowning; and Randy, who could not control his anger, putting his fist through a stained-glass window and getting blue slivers stuck in his knuckles. I got really teary-eyed when Mom showed up carrying a big piece of poster board with pictures of us as boys taped all over it. She was crying. I could tell she was sorry for how mean she’d been to Charlie, how judgmental, except sorry is just a word, a feeling. When someone dies, sorry is kind of meaningless.

  You have to do something really meaningful for the dead. It was instinct, the way we all silently agreed to send Charlie off like an Egyptian king that dreary morning. We filled the casket with stuff we thought he might somehow need—his monster mask, a silver rattlesnake ring, a jar of green creek water, his football helmet, a jackknife, bags of candy, letters sealed in envelopes, and my book of landfill mythology. Even Cornpup, who thinks the afterlife is bullshit, brought one of our dragon skeletons in a duct-taped box.

  Charlie.

  No one even knows what to call him now. He was a criminal, a vandal, an arsonist. When he destroyed Mareno Chem, he put good people out of work—machinists, systems operators, truckers, chemical technicians, assembly line workers—and it’s not like there are a bunch of replacement jobs out there. But here’s the thing: At the burial there were sick people; dying people; lines of pale, skinny, chemo-bald strangers. They brought flowers to Charlie’s grave. They whispered, “Thank you.” To them, he was a hero, somebody who fought
back, a brave kid who’d chased the poison makers away. Charlie took back our neighborhood, our creek, our territory. It’s not like people were pounding down Mareno Chem’s door with a bunch of ridiculous demands. We just wanted them to stop messing with our lives.

  In the cemetery, when a newspaper reporter asked me to comment, I wanted to say something about Dad, how Mareno Chem had stolen him from me, and how Charlie had carried out the sweetest revenge, but my throat was real dry. Cornpup spoke instead. He said, “Now the chemical companies have to listen to us. Now they can be afraid for once.”

  Me and Cornpup sit on my front porch, waiting for the others. I smell asphalt and burning sulfur in the air. Cornpup is wheezing lightly. I help him attach paint rollers to the robots’ hands with duct tape. He then uses plastic wrap to cover the robots’ exposed joints and gears, places where a stray drip of paint could do real damage.

  I think about the evacuations, how scared everyone must’ve been, with the sky all yellow and green. I think about flashing lights, sirens. The night of the fire, emergency responders divided Poxton into three rings. The innermost ring was made up of all the homes closest to the industrial yard, our entire neighborhood. I was in the hospital when the evacuations were ordered, but Mom told me it happened in stages. Residents in the first ring had to put wet washcloths over their faces and leave immediately. Residents in the second ring could stay in their homes if they closed their chimney flues and sealed their windows with masking tape. Then, as the fire raged on and fumes blanketed every home in Poxton, even the mansions in the outer ring near Buffalo were contaminated. Mom said she was trying to get to the hospital to find out if I was okay. The streets were crowded with cars, everyone trying to leave town in a panic. She said the green smoke left a chalky soreness in the back of her throat. And Viper was drooling a lot, drinking tons of water. In the last couple of weeks, Mom has hugged me more than a thousand times. She is so glad I’m alive.

  I hear music in the distance, probably a live band at Tavern on the Creek. Randy and Molly appear at the end of my driveway. They seem cheerful, which is saying a lot, considering what has happened to the Pellitero family in the past few weeks: Charlie’s death, divorce paperwork, home foreclosure. Molly has on coveralls. Randy is carrying four large cans of paint. “What the hell are those for?” he says, meaning the robots.

  “To help out,” says Cornpup.

  “They know how to paint?” Molly laughs.

  Cornpup looks at her like she’s truly stupid. “I wouldn’t exactly say they know anything. They just do repetitive motions, basic stuff.”

  Inside my garage, there are two ladders we lifted from a nearby construction site. Randy helps me carry them outside. Molly pulls a box of dusty paintbrushes and rollers out from under Dad’s workbench. None of us wants to carry my canvas bag of scrap metal, though. It’s like we’re now just remembering that we have to walk a really long way with all this stuff. Cornpup runs home to grab the shopping cart he found under a bridge at Two Mile Creek. It’s not big enough to carry everything, but it’ll help.

  When I accidentally knock over my dirt bike, Randy flinches. I prop it up quickly, but he runs over to the bike and pushes me out of the way. He touches the shiny motor I just polished a few days ago. He touches the muddy tires. “When Charlie bought this for you, I thought he was nuts. Everything he did was always so … huge.”

  It never even crossed my mind that this bike might’ve been from Charlie. Except now, looking back, it makes sense. I remember him telling me he “lost” his football camp money at the creek that year, and it seemed like a bullshit story. Charlie didn’t lose things, especially when it had to do with football.

  Charlie.

  Every time I feel like I’m moving past his death, I get thrown back into it. I wish we could all find a way to stop ripping off the scab.

  After the funeral and long before the chemical blisters had healed, we took Cornpup’s freshly developed Mareno Chem photos to the newspaper. The reporter spilled coffee down the front of his shirt, coughed a little bit, and said, “Are these for real?” He kept looking at a photo of Dan Benecke choking me. Finally he said, “This is front-page stuff. I hope you’re ready, because you boys are about to start a shit storm.” What followed were lawsuits and public outcry. Barbed-wire fences, government inspections, and tens of thousands of dollars in fines. Mareno Chem workers lined up outside the unemployment office. Chemical tankers were confiscated, barrels dug up, soil samples taken. Dan Benecke was arrested, charged with felonies. I wish we could’ve been there to see it. I would’ve stood in front of his mansion and shouted, Hope they put you away forever, asshole! No more fancy vacations! And you can kiss your stupid Lexus goodbye! It would’ve felt so good.

  No one ever found the Phenzorbiflux, though. It has disappeared. And I’m not searching anymore.

  Cornpup runs up my driveway with his shopping cart, but my attention is focused on Valerie and her brother, Matt, who’ve just arrived. Their dad works at a hardware store, and they weren’t kidding when they said they could get their hands on cheap supplies. Val is pulling a wagon full of dented paint cans with no labels. She smiles at me, and I want to kiss her. Matt is carrying a jug of paint thinner, a box of broken glass, and an industrial-sized tub of plaster. His hair is spiked in a short Mohawk. He tells me about this party he’s having next weekend.

  “You should stop by,” he says. “I want you to meet everyone before school starts. My friend Michiu is studying to be a filmmaker. He’s really gonna dig your monsters.”

  “It’ll be so much fun,” Val says. “You have to come.”

  I manage to smile a little bit. It’ll be cool to have some artist friends when school starts, even if they are a full year ahead of me. And it can’t hurt to get in good with Valerie’s brother. High school is still nipping at my heels, and Kevin Thompson is still roaming the neighborhood with his guns, and Charlie is forever gone. I try really hard to focus on the good things in my life. Mom is acting like her old self again, eating less. Cornpup is still here. I am meeting some new people. My girlfriend is unbelievably pretty. And Viper is the greatest dog ever.

  We hike along Two Mile Creek with our art supplies, paint cans, and ladders. Cornpup presses the “forward” buttons on his remote controls. The robots follow him, struggling through the mud. Two Mile Creek is quiet tonight—no bubbling, no sludge. When we reach the edge of the old Mareno Chem property, I swear I can feel Charlie laughing from somewhere deep in the sulfur-smelling sky.

  The chemical complex is in ruins. There are melted steel beams, piles of blackened rubble, chemical tanks, smoking and oozing.

  Molly touches her fingertips to a towering wall of concrete. “This building looks almost like a skeleton now. It’s so weird how this is the only wall that didn’t burn.”

  We start slowly. It takes time to get a feel for the brushes in our hands, to set up our flashlights and lanterns, to figure out what colors are in the unlabeled cans. I paint detailed outlines of my monsters, lifelike in size, terrifying. Valerie adds webs of burnt trees to the background. Cornpup’s robots use rollers to paint a yellow and green chemical sky. With epoxy, Matt attaches broken glass to the monsters’ bodies for texture. Molly stands high on a ladder and paints a ball of flames where the moon should be. Randy sculpts fangs and jagged bones out of plaster. I add tiny details: black blood oozing from the petroleum serpents’ injuries; a two-headed squirrel on the shores of our creek; and the fault line, with Chemical Mountain looming in the distance. Cornpup adds one detail of his own. He covers the uranium monster in hideous purple rashes and white, pus-filled cysts. All of us, we paint with madness, a fire in our guts.

  At sunrise, we want to take a break. We want to step away from the wall so we can get a good look at our work. The robots are out of juice, and our flashlights are out of batteries, and we’re as hungry as hell, but still, we keep painting. We only stop once, briefly, to watch what must be a hundred birds circling a nearby landfill. It starts out a
s just a few seagulls, black silhouettes against the rising sun. Then the sky starts to spin with layers of gulls and vultures and hawks. It feels like the birds are here for us, like they’re putting on a show.

  Randy says, “Why do they keep circling that thing? They can’t get to the garbage. It’s buried.”

  “They can get to the rats,” Valerie whispers, and I smile because this past summer, me and Charlie and Cornpup were like birds of prey. We brought Mareno Chem to its knees.

  We got to the rats.

  For another hour, we work. We cannot quit until Charlie’s wall is perfect. We’ve got a rhythm down: telling funny stories, laughing, singing, flinging globs of paint at each other. In some ways, it’s the best night of our lives. We’re declaring victory over Mareno Chem. We’re painting this tribute to Charlie. We are bonded in creativity and insomnia.

  When the pink sunrise gives way to real daylight, we pack up our gear. We stare at our wall of monsters for a long time, taking in every detail, every bold brush of color, such terrifying beauty. This monster mural is the most amazing thing any of us has ever been a part of. It looks like it was done by famous artists, not a bunch of regular kids from Poxton. I open up Charlie’s lockbox, and I pull out the horsehair paintbrush he gave me. One by one, quietly, we say our goodbyes. I say goodbye to Charlie. I say goodbye to Dad. I say goodbye to the anger that has been with me for too long. Then we take turns dipping the brush into green paint, signing our names boldly underneath the uranium monster’s webbed feet.

  Acknowledgments

  Without a resplendent supporting cast, I’d be a neurotic hermit buried under an avalanche of unfinished manuscripts. My Chemical Mountain exists because of the wonderful people in my life:

  My wise, generous, patient, handsome, and accomplished husband. Thank you for taking me on adventures, supporting all my dreams, always knowing just what to say, and being the person I rely on most of all. You are the love of my life.