Stones and Spark

by Sibella Giorello

  Glad for Teddy's help.

  Sad for why I need it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Teddy's van belches black smoke all the way up Grove Avenue. I ride my bike behind it, grateful for the rain that washes the sooty clouds into the pavement.

  When he pulls into St. Cat's parking lot, he bypasses the reserved space with its sign, "Science Teacher of the Year!" Teddy's won that award twice—once for Virginia, once for the entire United States. I'm pretty sure the award is the only thing keeping Ellis from firing him. They have a mutual dislike; you can tell because whenever Ellis comes around Teddy's classroom, Teddy will slip into even deeper hillbilly talk, just to drive our grammatically correct headmaster crazy.

  I coast over to the van. The driver's side window is down, letting in the rain and letting out his cigar smoke.

  He stares at the bike, tapping the cigar, sending the ash onto the ground.

  "You need to look at her lock," I say.

  He jams the cigar between his front teeth, raises the window and begins the long process of getting himself out of the van and into his wheelchair. The procedure never fails to provoke some new names for his chair.

  Now I hear: " . . . conniving contraption from the clutches of Hades!" and wait for it to end—while fantasizing about using that example the next time Sandbag asks for alliteration.

  I push my bike beside his chair, over to the rack. We stand under the eaves. My hair is dripping.

  "See the lock?" I ask.

  He yanks the now-wet cigar from his mouth. "Raleigh, I'm crippled, not deaf."

  I shut up. For about five seconds.

  "What—” I can't stand it, he's looking so intently at the bike. “What do you see?"

  "Get my kit." He tosses me the van keys.

  I climb through the vehicle's back end, coughing as the cigar stench coats the back of my throat, and clumsily dig through mounds of accumulated stuff. Hammer-shattered rocks. Rubber-encased glass jars of river silt. Science journals. Old empty film canisters. Boxes of who-knows-what. Finally I find the titanium briefcase buried in the corner, probably here since the summer.

  I yank it out, set it on the ground under the eaves, and wipe the rain from my face.

  "You're going to take the soil from her back wheel," he says. "But not all of it."

  "Why not all of it?"

  "And take photos," he says, ignoring my question. Which means, again, shut up. "Photos of the whole bike, close-ups on the lock, and the wheels."

  I dig through the rock kit for the tools. Over the last two summers, working as Teddy's hands and feet, I've gotten to know this kit like my own as I help him collect geology samples for articles he writes in those science journals. He puts my name in there, too, as "assistant."

  I take the photos, which make Drew seem really gone, then wedge a soil knife—kind of like a butter knife—into the tire's nubby treads. Carefully, I slide the grains into an empty film canister. Everyone's switching to digital cameras, so Teddy's collecting these little plastic cans. They're made to keep light away from film, but they also keep soil totally uncontaminated.

  I press down on the canister's plastic cap. "Now what?"

  "Now," he says, "it's time for fun and games."

  ***

  Teddy's wet rubber tires squeal on the school's polished floors. The sound echoes off the lockers and sends a chill down my spine. My school has never looked so empty, especially with all the litter gone from last night. Now a gray gloom seeps through rain-streaked windows.

  Teddy turns into the Earth Science lab. "Fire up the scopes, would ya?"

  I crawl under the long counter and flick on the power strip. When a teacher wins national awards, science foundations donate all kinds of state-of-the-art equipment. Like two polarizing light microscopes, made specifically for geology samples. They cost about ten grand each.

  I crawl out.

  "You know what's good about dirt?" he asks. "It won't lie to you."

  "Drew didn't lie to me."

  "You gotta admit it's possible."

  "You told me possible is not the same as probable."

  "Man, I hate it when you quote me to myself." He rolls away.

  "Where are you going?"

  "You can do it."

  "But this isn't some experiment."

  "Use your noggin." He slides into his messy desk. "You'll figure it out."

  I've learned a lot of geology from Teddy, but I've also learned that arguing with him is like trying to break glass by screaming.

  I stomp over to the far wall, ripping off a sheet of butcher paper. Then I hold the paper up like a sail, letting the massive sheet thunder in the air as I walk back across the room.

  Teddy starts whistling, some hick-sounding jig.

  Laying the sterile paper on the counter, I deposit the soil from the canister and spread out the grains with a clean knife. I see taupe-colored sand, some bright pink pebbles, and some dark objects shaped like tiny icicles. I divide the tiny pile into quarters, placing one part in a glass beaker with just enough distilled water to make a slurry. After I swirl that mixture, I strain out the water and place the beaker under a heat lamp.

  "Why can't you girls spell porphyry?" Teddy complains from his desk. He's grading papers.

  I ignore him, practicing my petty version of the Golden Rule, and spread another dry quarter into a thin layer. I see some gray dust--so pale it almost disappears on the white paper. I decide not to focus on that right now, in case it dissolves in the water-washed sample. That would mean the substance isn't a mineral, but something soluble. Organic. Not geological.

  I pick out the pink pebbles. They look like some kind of granite. Then I check on the weird icicles. They're long and narrow, tapered at both ends.

  And the color of dried blood.

  "Will you please come look at this?" I ask.

  He doesn't even look up from the papers.

  I pinch the dry sample and dust it over a glass slide, placing it under the microscope. The way polarized-light microscopes work is, they have a polarizer on either side of the dock, each positioned perpendicular to each other so that only the light passing through the specimen reaches the eyepiece. Regularly spaced crystalline parts of a specimen will rotate the light that passes through. And some of that rotated light will pass through the second polarizing filter, turning the regularly spaced areas bright against a black background. Like stars in a night sky.

  Staring through the eyepiece, I move the slide around, searching for those blood-red icicles. The magnification is so high that every grain looks like a mountain. I find the icicles. Magnified, the edges look jagged. Like icicles that are snapped off. I wonder if they could be wood—tiny bark shavings?

  When I check the heat lamp, my rinsed sample is dry. I place some of it on a clean glass slide and slip it under the other microscope. Then I move back and forth between the two scopes, comparing the samples. The water-wash eroded a bit of the red icicles, rounding the edges. That leads me to believe these things are sedimentary—a sandstone or siltstone, created by other deposited sediments.

  I look over at Teddy. He's still acting busy.

  I remove the pink pebbles and turn them under the scope. Granite, definitely. The quartz grains are large, which means the rock formed slowly, over time. Maybe some magma that cooled at the Earth's surface.

  Problem is, granite is everywhere.

  But the color. That's more intriguing. Pink granite is kind of rare.

  "Can you please come look at this?" I call out. "I've got pink granite mixed with some kind of sedimentary rock and I just don't see how that's possible."

  "I'll make you a deal," he says. "We'll trade places. I want you to read something."

  "I really don't want to correct papers, Teddy."

  "Just do it."

  He wheels to the counter, and I grumble over to his desk.

  The book he's left open is called Evidence from the Earth. I've read parts of it before, but Teddy's marked a new section
. It tells the story from 1904, when German police found a woman murdered and left for dead in a bean field.

  "This is not helping," I tell him.

  He doesn't even lift his head from the microscope.

  German police also discovered the woman's scarf was used to strangle her. Wonderful. Near her body, they found a dirty handkerchief containing nasal mucus.

  "This is really gross!"

  And yet, I can't stop reading.

  Along with the snot, the handkerchief contained dirt and flecks of coal. When the police later found a suspect, they scraped his fingernails and his trousers and gave the sample to a scientist, a geologist named George Popp.

  Using his microscope, George Popp identified the minerals. But using a geological map, he also pinpointed the location of those elements. Turns out, there was only one place: The bean field where the woman was murdered.

  Police presented Popp's geologic evidence to the suspect, and he confessed. Case closed.

  "Fascinating," I say, walking back to the microscope. "But I never said Drew was dead."

  He keeps his head down. "You say something?"

  "I should throw that book at you."

  "You'd do that, wouldn't you?" He looks up. "I think I know what this is."

  I wait. "So. What is it?"

  He nods.

  "What is it, Teddy?"

  "You'll figure it out."

  "Stop! Stop doing this to me!"

  "Raleigh, the only way you'll learn this is to do it by yourself."

  "But this isn't some class exercise—Drew's missing."

  "Which is why I drove to school on a Saturday when I could've been eating more bacon."

  "Please, help me."

  "I am." He leans back, sighing. "Just like when I ask for help, I don't expect anybody to walk for me."

  He turns and wheels out the door.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At the corner of First and Franklin, the Richmond Public Library stands like a dried out wedding cake, regal and abandoned and waiting for someone to appreciate it. I do, but not many other people seem to hang around this place. Except some homeless guys.

  But I've hung around here so much that I'm now on a first-name basis with the Reference desk librarian, Nelson Heid.

  "Hi, Mr. Heid."

  He looks up from the book, laid open on the Reference desk, and takes in my wet sweatshirt, my wet jeans—dripping on the library's marble floor—and my wet hair. He says, "Nice to see you, Raleigh.” A true Southern gentleman. “How may I help you?"

  "I was wondering if you had a surface map that also shows Richmond's geology."

  "The tunnel again?"

  "No, actually. I'm looking at other side of town. Around the West End."

  "Branching out?"

  "You could say that."

  "The archives might have something along those line," he says. "When do you need this information?"

  "Now."

  Slowly, he lays a bookmark on the thick book's page and sighs. I've learned these sighs are nothing personal. The guy just hates to stop reading. And if it weren’t for me, he wouldn't have to. This particular branch of the library, stuck on the edge of downtown but not yet in any residential area, isn't the most happening place. I've seen two or three elderly people checking out those large-print books where the pages look like they're yelling at you, and there's always that one homeless guy camping in the club chairs, reading the newspaper like he's in his own living room. But otherwise it's usually just me roaming around the abandoned stacks. I've learned that if you pull out a random book and start reading, you will soon forget about whatever's bugging you. Like, your mom is saying the mailman is a CIA spy. Like, your mom is asking you if you've done something to the water in the faucet.

  That’s how I found out about that train tunnel with the dead men inside. I yanked out a book and started reading.

  Mr. Heid closes his book like a parent gently tucking a sick kid in bed. I glance at the gold embossed title: Definitive History of Plantation Homes of the James River. I feel a huge yawn tickling my throat, but I'll bet that book's first entry is DeMott Fielding's plantation house.

  "You're certain you need this information today?" Mr. Heid asks.

  "Yes." Already impatient with his slow pace, I'm getting cold standing here in these wet clothes. "It's urgent, Mr. Heid."

  "Urgent," he says, shuddering at the thought.

  Dripping on the marble floors, I follow him through the stacks to the back of the room. He keys a service elevator, and we take it down two flights to the basement. This place smells like they mothballed the Confederacy.

  Mr. Heid draws a deep, appreciative breath.

  "What precisely are you looking for?" he asks.

  "Some place that has pink granite."

  "Nevermore."

  "No, I saw it. It's out there."

  "You cannot be serious." He draws himself up, appalled. "I was quoting Poe!"

  Edgar Allen Poe, the famous writer, was born a Yankee but was later adopted by a Richmond family. Now he's a city icon, and that final line from his poem "The Raven" is a particular favorite around Richmond, maybe because the Confederacy is "Nevermore."

  "I'm sorry, what’s the connection between Poe and pink granite?"

  "His statue."

  I shake my head.

  "Over by the capitol? The base? Pink granite?" He acts like I should know this fact. And since I don't, he feels compelled to name all the other Poe statues around town. "—and the one by the Bell Tower, where he holds a tablet in his left hand, or is it his right?"

  "The pink granite," I say, returning him to my search. "Maybe it was mined locally?"

  He gazes at me. He has hooded eyes, but I can see the expression. He's hurt by my interruption. "Perhaps you've heard that patience is a virtue."

  "Not when something's urgent," I point out. "Then patience is probably a vice."

  "Raleigh, ‘urgent’ can only be used if Yankees are marching into Richmond to burn us to the ground."

  But he strides over to the map cases. These are metal drawers about two inches deep and they hold amazing things: Surveys from the 1600s, commissioned by the King of England; maps from the 1800s by America's first trained geologists; surveys from The Great Depression; and then the wars, when people needed commodities like coal and gold and even gravel.

  Nelson yanks open several drawers. The dust plumes. But he closes each of them, still searching, until he says, "Ah. Yes." He turns to me, pulling out an ancient tome. "This should be what you need. But good luck reading it."

  "I don't believe in luck."

  "Fascinating." He smiles and looks at his watch. "And even with only twenty-one minutes to closing, I don't believe in urgent."

  ***

  Richmond is, officially speaking, sixty-two square miles. I know that number because Drew actually measured the squiggly city boundaries to calculate Area. That's her idea of fun. For a real hoot, she also calculated how many square feet existed for each of us 198,000 citizens. Theoretically, of course. But I don't remember that number because ‘theoretical’ rarely interests me. It's why I like geology: It's real.

  And why I like maps. These places actually exist, and you can get to know them down to the rivers and rocks and hills. This map, done by the U.S. Geological Survey, details the fault line that runs through town. It's a tectonic break that turns the amiable James River into Class 3 white water. And I can see why Mr. Heid chose this drawer: there's a ton of granite exposed around the river, mostly mound-backed boulders. But the map confirms my suspicion: that stuff's not pink granite.

  I open more drawers, blowing off the dust that tells me I'm the only person interested in this stuff. Each map shows Richmond bedrocked by granite composed of three minerals: quartz, feldspar, and mica, all mixed together in varying proportions and textures. But nothing's pink. I keep pawing through the maps—coughing and sneezing and shivering in my wet clothes—until I discover the geological survey map showing the section of
the James River where I screamed at frogs last night.

  Geology maps are not like road maps. They're more like human anatomy charts, the ones that show surface skin, then veins, muscles, ligaments, until you're down to the bones. Here it's rock formations, stones, and minerals. Each piece has its own separate color.

  The elevator doors open.

  Mr. Heid stands inside.

  "You have ten minutes," he says.

  The doors close.

  I run my finger over the topographic lines that show the cliffs above the river. I follow it down to where the frogs jumped all over me. The mapmaker marked those soils in gold and green colors. On the right, I read the vertical chart that explains the sediments. Quartz sand and clay silts. Green to symbolize ferrous-bearing—or, full of iron.

  But no granite.

  The elevator opens again.

  "Five minutes."

  Mr. Heid sounds cheerful, like he's determined to teach me about urgency.

  I keep running my eyes over the map, begging it to speak. Once more, I run my finger over where St. Cat's would be. I rub and rub, almost stirring the page, and suddenly I see one tiny oval. It's purple. The size of a small spider. It doesn't match anything around it. Once again, I read the explanation on the map's right side.

  "Petersburg Batholith," it says. "Typically a homogenous pluton but subdivides into four distinct units. Granite gneiss, foliated granite, megacrystic granite, porphorytic granite, and subidiomorphic granite."

  Geology descriptions: like all the adjectives are beating up the nouns.

  But I know what a batholith is: hot magma that bubbled up through the Earth's crust. Like cherries baking inside a pie. If it gets too hot, the cherries break through the crust. But when the liquid magma cools, it develops into crystals. Whatever the surface temperature is will determine what size the crystals are. Fast cooling—like, if the magma plunges into water—will create a stone that's as smooth and shiny as glass. Slower cooling temperatures give the chemistry time to do its atomic thing and create larger crystals—that's what’s meant by the "megacrystic” granite.

  But I don't see any mention of color.

  Staring at the map, it's like I can feel the room closing in, like I'm in another kind of tunnel, underground with all this old information nobody cares about. I fix my eyes on the map's purple spot and suddenly it's like seeing an invisible hand reach through time and connect the dots. The cartographer chose green for those ferrous sands, because they often look green. So why not choose this color—my best friend's favorite color—for granite that happens to be pink?