Authors: Vestal McIntyre
“No, I live in Eula.”
“But you live in the United States?”
“Yes.”
“I live in Juárez.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But I’m going to move here.”
And with that he had run off.
Enrique had watched him for a while and fantasized that, when Julio moved here, they would become best friends.
Now Uncle Víctor said, “
A ver, sonrían.
Say cheese!”
Enrique leaned back against Julio’s knees. The group said “cheese” with the hardest
ch
and the softest
s
ever: “Tcheeees!”
Uncle Víctor snapped the picture and said, “Hol’ on, don’ move, I got another camera here.
Momentito, por favor
.”
All the kids squirmed except for Enrique, who couldn’t move for the thrill of being supported—even gently clutched—by Julio’s knobby knees.
“Okay,
sonrían
!”
In a brash moment, Enrique leaned farther back and draped an arm over Julio’s knee, and—rapture!—Julio lay his hands on his shoulders.
Julio never ended up moving to Idaho.
That night
Mamá
didn’t say good-bye, even when Lina took her hands and repeated
“Adiós,”
and
“Te amo, Mamá,”
until her voice broke. Lina couldn’t stay over—all the rooms were full, and it was a school night for Enrique—but neither could she tear herself away. Finally she embraced her mother and said, into her ear, “
Mamá, tus diamantes
. . . the earrings I gave you for your birthday when I was little, the ones you called your diamonds—I stole them from the drugstore.”
Mamá
’s eyes fluttered uncomprehendingly.
Lina cried and cried as they drove across the dark countryside, and Enrique stroked her shoulder for a while, then fell asleep, his head resting on the soft armrest that divided the driver’s seat from the passenger’s in their squeaky old station wagon. Then he was awakened by his mother whispering,
“Shit! Shit!”
“What is it?” he asked, afraid she had run over an animal.
“I’m going to run out of gas. I forgot to fill up in Payette.”
“Can we go back?”
“No, baby, it’s too far. There’s that Texaco just before Parma. I just hope we can make it.”
Now Enrique watched the dark road, wide-awake, anticipating the moment the engine would give, while Lina murmured prayers to Saint Christopher. After several minutes she said, “We’re going to make it.” But then, when the gas station came into view, its lights were off and a
CLOSED
sign hung in the window. Lina pulled in anyway, parked, and turned off the car. The silence was scary.
“Enrique,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we have to sleep here until they open. Otherwise, we’ll never make it home.”
They put down the backseat and covered themselves with a scratchy woolen blanket. Lina shivered, but Enrique felt warm huddled up next to her with her arm as his pillow.
Now she cried again. “I’m so sorry, Enrique. I’m a bad mommy. I’m a bad mother and a bad daughter, both.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am,
mi vida
.”
“Stop it! You’re a good mother!” She was making him cry, too.
“Arright, arright, I’m sorry. Let’s go to sleep.”
And Enrique had gone to sleep. But Lina stayed awake, listening to the sounds of crickets. There was a rumbling, and the car was illuminated by white shapes panning like searchlights, then the semi passed and, again, it was dark.
I’ll do better
, Lina thought.
I’ll make more money. I’ll get a doublewide and bring Jesús home to live with us.
O
ur project is entitled ‘You Are Totally Infected,’ ” April Martinez began. “All over your body, microorganisms are living and growing. For example,” she held up a drawing of what looked like a fur ball, “tiny mites live in your eyelashes, just like squirrels live in trees.”
“Ew!” squealed some of the girls.
April attached the drawing (which was backed with double-stick tape) to the head of an outline of a boy’s body, which hung on the wall. This body was the same height and proportions as Tommy Hess, April’s partner. Above the diagram,
YOU ARE TOTALLY
INFECTED! was written in Magic Marker. The last word was spelled in warty, oozing green capitals.
Enrique had always liked these two. He and April often sat together at Mass away from their mothers, playing tic-tac-toe on the bulletin. She had jagged teeth and a severe slant to her brow that masked her sweet nature, while Tommy had an appealing, if somewhat Muppet-ish, face—blue-eyed and shovel-jawed—under a curly blond mop. He had been gangly and inappropriate in grade school, often making strange bids for attention. Enrique remembered a time he turned his eyelids inside-out and chased the girls around, fluttering those pink, veiny lids. Tommy had now dropped these antics but still seemed to have the most tenuous control over the volume of his voice: he would bark the first words of a sentence, shyly mutter the next, and wrangle his voice into his service only when he was nearly done. Perhaps this was why he was silent now, smiling and shifting from foot to foot as April spoke.
“Not all of the creatures that live on and in your body are bad. It’s like a city block where some of the neighbors are nice and helpful, while others are troublemakers. One of the helpful neighbors is the bacteria that lives in your small intestine. There’s about five hundred species down there.” She attached a drawing of several hairy blobs to the diagram’s belly. “Without it, you wouldn’t be able to digest your food.”
While some in the class made further expressions of distaste, Enrique began searching through his script. How could he jazz it up? April and Tommy’s project was good. It held the attention of the entire class and was scientifically sound, and April had apparently memorized the whole thing.
“Dandruff is more than just flakes of dead skin in your hair; it’s caused by a fungus called malassezia. It eats your skin!” Having gained confidence by grossing out the other girls, April slapped a drawing of a voracious, wide-mouthed monster onto the head of the diagram.
April profiled a few more residents of the bodily neighborhood while Mr. Peterson watched from a seat at the back of the room, his fingers steepled before his mouth, perhaps to hide an amused and approving smile. The presentation reached its climax: “Every cell in your body is like a machine, with an engine called a mitochondrion.” She stuck a drawing of a blob containing a smaller blob onto the center of the body. “Mitochondrions have DNA of their own, which are closer to bacterial DNA than to human DNA. Some scientists think that this proves that at a cellular level, we are totally made up of outsiders.”
This last bit puzzled some in the class who were braced for a final, supreme gross-out, but they applauded anyway. April and Tommy bowed.
“Miriam, would you like to go next?”
Miriam rose and went to the corner near the windows where her sheet of paper hung. At the beginning of class, everyone had posted their project mock-ups, drawn on long sheets of craft paper that Mr. Peterson had provided several days previous. This gave Enrique a mysterious preview of what was yet to come: a waterfall covered in Jesus-fish, a caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly cycle prettily drawn with pastel-colored arrows in-between, two volcanoes, and Enrique’s own poster, which, he now realized, looked like a third volcano, but one dotted with ants and palm trees.
Miriam’s drawing seemed to depict several ponds linked by streams. “The digestive system of the
bos taurus
, or domestic cow, is as puzzling as a maze,” she began. Enrique felt relieved. Miriam, who should have been his and Gene’s best competitor, had chosen a subject that was boring beyond words. Then a searing guilt took over. Poor Miriam. Who was her partner? No one had been absent at roll call. “Why should we care that cows spend eight hours a day chewing? Or that they have four stomachs, or that it takes them seventy to one hundred hours to digest a meal? One reason is that, in part, the future of our planet depends on cow digestion. Methane, a colorless, flammable gas, is one of the main culprits behind a phenomenon scientists call the ‘greenhouse effect.’ In their digestive process, cows release as much as a pound of methane a day—”
Miriam was interrupted by a loud and very realistic imitation of a fart. The class erupted in laughter.
This lit a flash of protective fury in Enrique. He turned toward the source of the noise, Jake Wilson, and inhaled to say something in Miriam’s defense. Before he could speak, though, Jake lifted his wrist, placed his hand to his chest like a prim old woman, and mimicked Enrique’s indignant gasp.
“Enough, Jake,” Mr. Peterson said. “Miriam, you may continue.”
Injured and in a hurry to return to her seat, Miriam limped through the remainder of her presentation.
Enrique was crushed, maybe more than the situation warranted. Jake had been Enrique’s friend in Boy Scouts. Only last year they had spent an hour alone together, panning for gold in a creek where water-skippers made tiny dimples with their feet on the surface. The boys had lined up the grains they found on an overhanging tree branch and fantasized about the boat they would buy with the gold and the distant islands they’d sail to. In the disorienting scramble for allegiances at the beginning of this school year, Jake and some other boys had dropped Enrique. It seemed to have had something to do with entering junior high. Now that they were in the same building complex as the high school, they sensed (or imagined) the critical eye of the big kids following them.
The authors of the caterpillar diagram went next. There was no project here, only information that was as readily available as the nearest textbook. Next came the first volcano. These boys had at least done their homework. The volcano would be built from papier-mâché and would feature a small container at the top, which would hold a mixture of water, vinegar, and dish soap. One of the boys would drop in a packet of baking soda, setting off the “eruption.”
Enrique’s mouth felt dry, and he wondered if he would gag when he went to speak. In grade school he had taken every opportunity to get up in front of the class, whether to read the teacher a poem on her birthday or to lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. He had been well liked. In fifth grade he had served as representative on class council. The position had no responsibilities other than to sit quietly at a few meetings, but he had been elected to it by the rest of the class. Justin Watts, his campaign manager, had hung up
VOTE FOR ENRIQUE
posters in the hallways. Now Justin sat in the back with Jake, egging him on. Enrique took deep breaths and concentrated on memorizing the last paragraph of his script, so he could, at that point, lay down his notes and speak directly to the class.
Jake and Justin went next. Theirs was the second volcano and, unlike the first, it was clumsily drawn, perhaps hastily completed over lunch. As Justin described the project, Jake shrugged the whole thing aside, looking off, acting bored and put-upon. Justin borrowed phrases from the boys who had just gone and who now sat glaring from their seats.
Now it was Gene and Enrique’s turn. They took their places on either side of the diagram. Enrique cleared his throat and began.
“On August 21 of this year over seventeen hundred people died in the middle of the night. They were villagers in the mountains of Cameroon, a country in Africa. Many people died in their sleep. Some made it outside before they dropped dead on the ground. Imagine if everyone in Homedale suddenly died—it was that many people. Although the Eula High football team might benefit, it would be a huge tragedy.”
No one laughed at the joke. Enrique swallowed, and went on.
“Were these people poisoned on purpose, as the newspaper said that first week? Was it a rebel attack or a gassing sponsored by the government? If so, why would nearby Lake Nyos turn red and muddy afterward? Why would the level of Lake Nyos drop by three and a half feet and its temperature rise? And why did the same thing happen at another lake in Cameroon two years ago, killing forty people? That mystery was never solved. This time scientists are determined to find out if something in Lake Nyos killed those people.
“Lake Nyos is a crater lake at the top of an extinct volcano.” With a pencil, Enrique pointed to the top of the volcano. “Every human and animal in a fifteen-mile radius of Lake Nyos was killed.” Enrique made a sweeping gesture across the surrounding land. “Some have hypothesized that the volcano erupted, emitting a poisonous cloud. If so, then why didn’t anyone hear or feel the eruption? Why didn’t anyone see the cloud? An eruption powerful enough to kill seventeen hundred people could not have happened so quietly. Remember Mount St. Helens? We had ash on the cars here in Eula, over five hundred miles away. And the blast at Mount St. Helens only killed fifty-seven people. There was no ash at Lake Nyos, no lava, and no fires. The volcano appears to be dead.
“So what killed all those people?
“Lake Nyos is very deep and very cold. There is no current in the lake, so the water is very still.” Enrique set down his notes and held his hand flat halfway down the mountain. “Some scientists think that poison gas might have seeped slowly into the lake from cracks at the bottom.” He indicated a cloud of gas with a fist under the flat hand. “The weight of the water held the gas at the bottom. On the night of August 21, the gas got to be so much that it bubbled up through the water and escaped.”
Another loud fart noise came from the back of the room, and the class roared.
“Jake!” barked Mr. Peterson. “One more interruption and I’m sending you to the office.”
Enrique flushed red. He picked up his notes in trembling hands, but couldn’t remember what came next. Gene stood still as he had before, but his features drew into a tighter knot at the center of his face.
“Enrique, please continue,” said Mr. Peterson.
“Um, that’s our project. To illustrate what might have happened at Lake Nyos.”
“How are you going to illustrate it?”
“We’re going to make a model of the mountain in a Plexiglas box. We’re going to have ants in there. Gene already has ant farms. Then at the science fair, we’re going to uncover a jar full of cotton balls soaked in nail-polish remover. It will kill the ants.” This was a blunt conclusion, but Enrique had lost the graceful wording he had planned and was desperate to return to his seat.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Peterson.
Other groups described their projects, but now Enrique was deaf to everything. He sat looking at his pencil in its little gutter at the top of his desk, and with the tip of his finger rolled it from one flat side to the next. Getting up in front of class, in junior high, was risky.
Don’t speak in front of class
, Enrique told himself. When he had an important thought like this, he stated it in a short sentence, hoping it would ride the tempest of his imagination like a message in a bottle. It was like the orders he had seen Connie give Gene:
Stop destroying flowers
.
If Enrique’s classmates cared to look at him as he was thinking these thoughts, they might have wondered if he was having an allergic reaction, his face was so red and mottled. But they were all watching the presentations.
Unable to hate Jake—he still held up the fact that they had until so recently been friends—Enrique focused his hatred on junior high.
I hate junior high
. He felt tears rise, and looked up, searching for a distraction. He found his drawing of the mountain and suddenly paper butterflies shot out of Lake Nyos—hundreds of them, in every color offered in Magic Markers. Their wings crinkled as they flapped. The butterflies swarmed the room, swirling in a great whirlwind. Then they burst out the windows and flew over the town. Now in the millions, they filled the sky and choked the sun, yet still more flew out of the mountain. And then clouds rolled in, and rain sent the butterflies down to carpet the ground—soggy bits of paper with bleeding colors like the waste of a parade. And no one would ever believe that Eula, Idaho, had been overwhelmed by a sudden, miraculous infestation of paper butterflies. It might be on
That’s Incredible!
but it would be one of those stories you weren’t supposed to believe.
How’s that, Mrs. Cuddlebone?
Enrique hadn’t addressed Mrs. Cuddlebone for a long time. For much of his childhood she had been a kind of imaginary friend. Her hair was coiled and piled into the shape of a great heart and decorated with dangling jewels, and she never rose from the fan-back chair in which she sat. Recently Enrique had seen a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in a history book, and realized this must have been Mrs. Cuddlebone’s origin, just as her name must have been based on “cuttlefish bone,” something his aunt gave to the parakeets she kept at the Hacienda. Enrique never played with Mrs. Cuddlebone, he presented artwork to her: sometimes finger-paintings or Play-Doh sculptures (
Not quite to my liking
, she’d say, or,
Well done, my boy; I’ll take it
) but usually creations that were purely imaginary. If Enrique’s mind wandered from his grade-school teacher’s math lesson, say, to something dirty, the boys he had seen naked in the dressing room at the pool, he’d catch himself. Suddenly the dressing room’s back wall was rent in two, drawn back like curtains, and out of the pool would charge dozens of dolphins, their arcing dives landing them in the children’s pool, which was now an orchestra pit, with tuxedoed musicians standing waist-deep in water. The dolphins would slosh around, slapping the cranky violinists with their tails and sending into chaos the overture that led anyway to the arrival on the diving board of—what?—an enormous whale, three stories high, teetering on its back fin and blinking its tiny eyes. Fireworks bloomed in the sky, then rained a glowing pink and yellow dust over the audience, who applauded, not with hands but flippers, tentacles, and claws.