Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It (7 page)

CHAPTER 11

Ed and I bounced down the highway toward the meeting. “Almost there,” he said, which was a relief. I had to use the bathroom and I felt almost as ready to burst as the day Khalfani and I did the bladder experiment.

We passed a sign for the state fairground. “We go to the fair every year,” I said. “My grandma, Gladys, always gets her picture taken with the pig. Not a real pig. It’s just a guy in a pink costume with a big pig head and a red bandana around his neck.” I talk faster when I have to pee.

“I know the one,” Ed said.

“Last time we went, Gladys slapped the pig on its rear and said, ‘Now go get some clothes on, you big hog!’”

Ed let out a big laugh, but I held mine in. I know what happens when you have to pee and you laugh too hard. “I reminded her there was a real man inside, but she just said, ‘I’m sure he doesn’t mind.’ I thought it was hard to tell since his smile was sewn on.”

Ed chuckled. “Your grandma sounds like a real live wire.”

“She is,” I said, because I know what a live wire is like, and that’s how Gladys is. Shocking.

We drove by the fairground entrance. “I always have my minerals at the fair,” Ed said.

“How come I never saw you before?”

“Your mom probably avoided the area.”

“She knew you were there?”

“Been there every year since she started high school.”

I suddenly felt the opposite of laughing. All these years Mom had kept Ed hidden. She had lied. So if I hid the truth from her to see Ed, I was just making up for all the times she’d done it to me.

We drove up to a building with a sign that said
PUYALLUP COMMUNITY CENTER
. I ran to the bathroom and got there just in time.

When I came out, a girl and a man with the same color brown hair were coming in the front door. She carried a box labeled
GEOLOGY KIT
. On it was a picture of a bunch of rocks, a magnifying glass and a beaker of liquid.

I followed them into the main room. We sat at tables in a big square. Ed welcomed everyone to the meeting. I could feel the smile on my face. That was my grandpa, the president.

He gestured to a man he introduced as the secretary, and the woman who was the treasurer, and then he talked about some upcoming rock and mineral shows people might be interested in. I kept thinking he would introduce me, too, but when he didn’t, I decided that was okay. After all, I didn’t have an official position in the club. I was just a normal rock hound like everyone else there.

I looked at the girl with the geology kit. Her hands sat folded on top of her box. Did she come to every meeting? She was lucky if she did. She glanced at me and smiled. She had braces. I smiled back.

Ed introduced a man wearing glasses that made his eyes bug out like giant marbles. The man had gone on an expedition for something called thunder eggs. I sat up and leaned my elbows on the table, eager to know what a thunder egg was. With a name like that, it must be pretty fantastic. Did it rumble if you cracked it open?

He held one up. It didn’t look like much—like a petrified baseball or a stone that might be hurled by a catapult. Its roundness got my attention, though. I’d never seen such a perfectly round rock—like a miniature gray moon. What made it so round? I wrote the question in my notebook.

He reached into his box and pulled out two pieces of rock. The outside was the same rough, gray material of the first thunder egg, but this thunder egg had been sawed in two. Inside, the solid stone looked like a four-pointed blue star surrounded by fire.
Wow,
I thought,
I need to get a thunder egg.

The man passed the two halves around and while we all looked at the rocks, he told us the legend about where thunder eggs came from. American Indians said the rocks were eggs from the thunderbird and that thunder spirits who lived at the tops of the Cascade Mountains threw them at each other when they got angry.

The story made me think of Mom and Ed, two thunder spirits living on two different mountains. Were
they
angry? They didn’t talk like they were. They just didn’t talk.

After the man finished with his presentation, Ed said it was time for the rock swap and sale. People who wanted to display their rocks could do so. My heart fluttered. I didn’t want to swap or sell any of my rocks, but I pulled them out to show. I lined them up on the table, including the calcite and my latest acquisition, corundum.

The room filled with chatter. I glanced at Ed, but he was busy talking to the thunder egg guy. I drummed my fingers on the table, then switched my rocks around so they went from biggest to smallest. No one was coming to see what I had.

The girl had laid out her specimens. She had a lot—at least twenty. She’d moved her chair so she was on the inside of the table facing out. I headed in her direction. Each rock sat behind a neatly handwritten label.
FLUORITE, TALC, GYPSUM, SULFUR
.

“I’m Morgan,” she said, standing, “and these are my rock-forming minerals.” She opened her hands, palms up, and waved them over the samples as if she were introducing trick-performing seals. “Display only,” she said quickly.

“Mine, too,” I said, but then wished I hadn’t, because she turned and looked at where I’d been sitting. Mine didn’t look nearly as good as hers. I hadn’t even thought about making labels. “Can I pick them up?” I asked.

“Only if you tell me your name.” She crossed her arms.

“Brendan,” I said.

“Did you come by yourself?”

“I came with…” I didn’t know what to call him. “I came with my grandpa.” I pointed in his direction. “Ed.”

“
He’s
your grandpa?”

I started to get mad. If she was thinking we didn’t match…

“You are so lucky!” Her braces practically blinded me. “The president is your grandpa! You must know so much about minerals.”

My armpits got hot. “Yeah,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t start asking me questions about stuff I didn’t know. I picked up the talc and rubbed it between my fingers. It felt smooth, like water. I looked at its silky surface under her plastic magnifying glass.

I scanned the rest of her minerals. “You’ve got hematite,” I said, my voice rising in excitement. This was the one in the field guide I thought looked the coolest. It was much heavier than the talc.

“That kind’s known as kidney ore,” she said.

I could see why. It was rounded and bumpy like smooshed-together kidney beans.

“But you probably already knew that.” She picked up a rectangular piece of white tile, marked with a few black and gray lines. “Have you done the streak test on hematite?”

I hadn’t, but I knew what a streak test was from my library books. When you scraped a mineral sample against a tile, it left behind a thin line of powder. Each mineral had its own streak color, which sometimes differed from its outside color. The test gave more information about the mineral’s identity.

She took the rock from my hand. “See what color it is?” she asked, flipping the hematite over.

It was kind of a blackish grayish silvery color. “Yeah.”

“Watch this.” She dragged the hematite down the tile. A dark red streak appeared. Bloodred. I ran my fingers along the scratchy scab on my forearm.

“Never judge a rock by its color,” she said, smiling. “The name hematite comes from a Greek word that means ‘bloodlike.’”

“Cool,” I said.

Ed called everyone together and I went back to my seat. “Does anyone have any questions before we end?”

I raised my hand. I wanted to ask about the thunder eggs.

Ed glanced past me. He didn’t say anything.

I stretched my arm higher.

He looked around the room again, chewing his bottom lip. Finally his gaze came back to me. “Everyone, this is…Brendan.” He said my name as if he wasn’t sure it would sound right coming out of his mouth. “He found us at the mall exhibit.” He talked as if he didn’t know who I was.

The floor suddenly slanted and I thought I might slip from my chair. How could I be just someone he’d met at the mall? Why hadn’t he said anything about me being his grandson? My face tingled. I was a rock sitting out for everyone to see. I wanted to be hidden in the ground.

My teeth bit into my bottom lip. My heart pounded in my palms. I rubbed on the scab again.

“You had a question?” Ed said.

I couldn’t remember what it was. Morgan’s stare bored a hole into me. She probably thought I had made up that Ed was my grandpa. “I forgot,” I mumbled.

“Maybe next time,” he said.

I didn’t know if I wanted there to be a next time if he didn’t even want people to know who I really was.

In the truck, Ed asked me if I’d liked the meeting. I said I had, and that was all.

We pulled up at my bus stop. Before I got out, he opened the glove compartment and lifted out a velvety green package. He handed it to me. “Take this.”

I didn’t know if I wanted any more of Ed’s things after what he’d said at the meeting—or not said.

He shook it at me. “Take it,” he said again.

I reached for it.

“You need a good glass to identify the minerals in your rocks.”

I unwrapped it, slowly. A silver rim gleamed around the large magnifying lens—real glass, not small and plastic like the one in Morgan’s geology kit. “Wow,” I said.

“Bring that with you next time. We’ll look at some of mine.”

Would there be a next time? I got out, mumbled thanks and closed the door.

The truck coughed, then chugged up the street.

I held the glass to my eye, feeling like a detective still in search of the truth.

CHAPTER 12

I stepped off the bus, inhaling fumes, and headed for the bushes. I pushed aside the branches. My heart dropped into my stomach. I spun around. Had I gotten off at the wrong stop?

My bike was gone.

I couldn’t breathe. My heart bounced around like a heated molecule. I flung branches everywhere, searching for a glimpse of the blue metallic frame. I collapsed in the dirt and crawled farther in.

What would I tell my parents? Dad was always lecturing me to be careful—people called the station reporting stolen bikes all the time.

I hid in the bushes with my knees pulled into my chest, breathing the rotten egg smell of the paper mill and feeling sweat drops trickle down the sides of my face.

An hour later, I trudged up the front steps of my house. My legs felt as heavy and shaky as if I’d just spent eight hours at the
dojang
breaking boards.

My cheeks were tight where the tear tracks had dried. My eyes felt like jelly-donut filling. I had told myself a hundred times not to cry while I sat there, hoping whoever took my bike was on a joyride and would bring it back any second. But the farther the sun traveled in the sky, the faster the hope leaked out of me, like air from a punctured tire. I’d put my forehead on my arms and bawled like a baby.

When the sun had gone way past the high noon mark, I knew I had to face the facts. I’d done something dumb. I should never have left my bike. And now I would have to listen to Dad tell me the exact same thing, probably ten-to-the-third-power times.

The TV was on in the basement. I closed the front door quietly and moved quickly up the stairs and along the hall. Mom came out of her bedroom. “How’d it go?” she asked.

“Good,” I said, keeping my eyes down and trying to sound like everything was great.

She pushed up my backpack from the bottom. “Doesn’t feel like you found much.”

“I don’t want to pick up just any old rocks,” I said.

She nodded. “Of course,” she said. “Good idea.”

I started toward my room.

“I’ve got something for you.” She went into her room, then appeared again with a photo. It was Ed DeBose. He had his arm around Grandma DeBose and they were standing in front of their house. They looked a little older than they did in the family picture on his wall.

“I finally cleaned out my photos, and you had asked to see one,” she said. “I decided it couldn’t hurt.” She squeezed me with one arm and kissed my forehead.

The truth scaled my throat and pushed into my mouth, but I pressed my lips tight. I couldn’t tell her now. Couldn’t tell her I’d been to this house
today,
seen Ed in person, driven his truck, gone to his rock club—where he hadn’t told anyone I was his grandson.

But what about my bike? They would notice eventually.

I’d figure it out later. Now I just wanted to lie down. “Thanks.” I looked at Ed again with his calcite hair and sticking-out ears and his grin that reminded me of another grin I’d seen in pictures.

Mine.

I stayed in my room the rest of the day with my
EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
sign on the door. When I had to go out, I tiptoed around as if the ground were covered with glass.

My promotion test was only a few weeks away and I wasn’t prepared. In my room I went through all my
hyungs.
My first opponent was the tall boy at the stream. Then I imagined I was fighting the mystery enemy who had taken my bike. Sometimes when I punched or kicked, I saw Ed DeBose standing opposite me. Sometimes I saw myself.

When I came out for dinner, Dad patted me on the back. “Heard you practicing in there.”

All through dinner, I waited for one of them to bring up my bike. No matter how much I chewed my pork chop, the pieces felt like they were getting stuck in my throat. Dad had been in the garage earlier. Hadn’t he noticed the bike wasn’t there?

Keeping down the truth felt like trying to hold Khalfani’s basketball underwater in his pool. “My bike got stolen,” I blurted out.

“What?” Mom said. “When did this happen? At the park again? Why didn’t you tell us?”

Dad set his elbows on the table with his fist in his hand.

I kept my eyes on my mashed potatoes. “It was my fault. I left it while I went…looking.” Again, not the whole truth, but not a lie, either.
Yom chi,
integrity, meant being honest. Was I being honest enough?

“I guess you better get used to walking to Khalfani’s,” Dad said. “I’ll list it at the station as missing. Maybe it’ll turn up.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. And that was the end of that.

On Monday, Mom drove me to Gladys’s. After the trouble I’d been getting in, she didn’t want me staying by myself or going to the park—at least for the next week.

I said goodbye and got out of the car. I was glad Mom hadn’t made me walk. It took only thirty steps to get to the front entrance and already my armpits were sticky. I sniffed under one arm to make sure my new deodorant was kicking in.

Dad had given me the deodorant the night before. “This’ll help you with the girls,” he’d said. He tossed it to me while I sat at my microscope looking at a dead fly I’d found on the windowsill when I was putting my rocks back. I didn’t really care about girls, but I liked that I was getting to do something my dad and other grown men did.

I stepped into the air-conditioned lobby, feeling my sweat cool.

Nancy, the lady at the front desk, smiled at me. “Hey, Brendan.”

Gladys said Nancy had a tattoo of an eagle on her back. It felt funny, knowing about the eagle. I would have liked to see it, though.

“Your grandma’s at chair-obics. Downstairs in the rec room. She told me to send you down as soon as you got here.” She held out the pen for the guest registry. Her long, curled fingernails were painted sparkly red. They looked like claws.

“Thanks,” I said. I wrote my name.

I took the stairs to the bottom floor. A woman’s voice boomed. “And lift. And lower. Lift. And ho-o-o-ld.”

I peeked around the open door. About twelve old women and an old man sat in chairs with one leg stuck straight out in the air. Bobbi, the lady who led the building’s activities, sat in a chair facing them. A lot of space separated Bobbi from the front row of chair exercisers. I knew why. Gladys said Bobbi was a real riot, but she had bad breath.

I scanned the room for Gladys. She stood off to the side, leaning over a chair doing her own stretches.

Bobbi was heavy on top, but she had narrow hips and skinny legs. Sort of like a buffalo. I’ve always wondered how buffaloes don’t tip over, with such huge heads and tiny behinds. I’d have to write that one down in my
Book of Big Questions.

“Now raise your right arm. And down. And up…” Her voice went up on the word
up
and down on the word
down.

When Bobbi switched to the other arm, she waved at me. Everyone turned in their chairs and looked to where she’d waved. My face heated up like a nuclear reactor and I would have stepped back into the hall and waited until they were done, except that Bobbi said, “Don’t be shy, Brendan. Grab a chair!”

I sat on the floor against the wall. Gladys continued her stretching as if she hadn’t seen me.

At the end, Bobbi slapped her thighs. “Okay, folks, at one o’clock we’ve got the Melody Makers coming in to sing, so don’t miss it. Come right back here after lunch.”

“Are they like the Blues Brothers?” the man asked.

“Something like that,” Bobbi said, “except they’re nuns and they don’t wear dark shades.”

On her way out, Bobbi stopped at the door. She stooped and put her mouth near my ear. “Good to see you again, Brendan.” Her breath smelled like an experiment we’d done in Mr. Hammond’s class involving battery acid. “Don’t let your grandma fool you. She needs the company. She still misses your grandpa a whole lot.” She patted my shoulder and walked out of the room.

Gladys finally came over, dabbing her forehead with one of her ratty green towels. “What was
she
whispering about?”

“Something about candy in her office if I want to come get some.” It was just a small fib, to protect Gladys. It didn’t really count as breaking
yom chi.

“Humph. She needs to get some breath mints in her office. Let’s go. I need my Gatorade.”

Gladys’s place was stuffed like a suitcase, but not much of it would actually be useful to have on a trip. Gladys loved to shop at the Dollar Store. Towers of photograph albums, magazines and fifty-cent videos teetered around the room. A whole bookcase was devoted to shot glasses. She had more than a hundred.

I tilted back in Grampa’s black leather armchair while Gladys stood in the little kitchen, opening and shutting cupboards. If I concentrated hard, I could still smell a little bit of Grampa Clem when I sat here—a mix of his aftershave and hair grease.

I gazed over the TV at the cartoon drawings of Grampa Clem, Gladys and me that we’d gotten at the circus. In my picture, I rode on the back of a tiny elephant. Our heads were blown up much bigger than our bodies, which made mine look even blockier than usual. If only I could talk to Grampa Clem again, I’d ask
him
about Ed DeBose.

A can popped open and the smell of fish times one hundred reached my nose.

“Want some sardines and crackers?”

“Gross,” I said.

“Don’t put down my midmorning snack just because you don’t want any.” I guessed nine o’clock was midmorning for Gladys, since she got up around five every day.

She sat carefully in the recliner next to me, the plate of sardines in one hand, her Gatorade in the other. “Uhoh. I’m seeing the Brown Ridge Mountains.” Gladys says my forehead bunches up like mountains when I’m thinking. She picked up the remote from the little table between us and turned on the TV. Gladys never misses
The Price Is Right.
“What is it this time?”

I shrugged. “Do you have any Ho Hos?”

“It’s only nine in the morning.” She set her food down and pushed herself out of the chair. “Just don’t tell your mama.”

“Like she won’t tell me about Ed DeBose?” A woman was going crazy on TV, jumping up and down and screaming. Bells went off in the background.

Gladys glared at me. “I thought we had a deal.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Good. Don’t scare me like that, boy!” She brought the Ho Ho on a plate. “I got a new neighbor this weekend and I can tell already—she’s one of those hysterical types,” she said, nodding toward the TV.

I bit into the chocolate log and licked the white stuff out with my tongue. It seemed like maybe Gladys was trying to change the subject.

“Got a wiener dog named Dixie.”

“A wiener dog?” I looked at her.

“You know—one of those short, squatty dogs that looks like a wiener.”

Gladys had taken off her shoes and socks. I stared at her toes, pinched tightly together and slightly curved like little wieners in a sardine can. She put the chair back and crossed one foot over the other. “I went over there the other day, to be friendly, you know, and this woman had newspapers lying everywhere. She makes the dog do its business on the papers. She won’t let it go outside to do regular dog things. I told her, ‘A dog has outdoor needs. It needs to sniff around and dig in the dirt.’