Memory Boy (2 page)

“What was that noise?” Nat asked. She cocked her head. It didn't sound again.

From our chairs we glanced about the dining room and through the windows. “Maybe something fell,” I said, and took advantage of the moment to slide the beans toward Sarah without taking any myself.

“Is the security system on?” my mother said, turning to me. Before my father left on the new tour, he had a top-of-the-line home security system installed. “So you'll feel better,” as he put it.

“Yes, it's on,” I said.

“You haven't been fooling with it again, have you, Miles?”

“No,” I said, annoyed.

I thought motion-sensor technology was cool, and soon after it was installed, I couldn't resist taking a peek inside the main power unit. Just a few tiny Phillips-head screws was all it took. Trouble was, within four minutes a rent-a-cop car with flashing lights and two security guards inside came speeding up the driveway to the house. I was impressed; the guards were not, nor was my mother.

“Maybe there's someone down there!” Sarah said, her blue eyes widening.

“There's no one in the basement,” I said. I made a show of slouching up from my chair and clumping down the long stairs. It was the least I could do for my mother. And, as everyone knows, clumping one's feet is always important when it comes to weird noises in the basement.

The downstairs still felt strange. All my father's musical equipment, including his big trap set with all its drums and cymbals—the stuff I'd grown up with—was missing. The space down here was always too big, but now it looked like an empty gymnasium. I walked around, even rattled open a couple of closet doors. “Dad?” I said softly. There was only silence.

“Nobody there,” I announced as I reemerged upstairs. “Told you so.”

Sarah let out a huge sigh of relief. Even though she dressed as dark and as scary as she could get by with, she was still a little girl.

“Thank you, Miles,” Mother said.

I shrugged. We went on eating.

Later, after dinner, as Sarah and I cleaned up in the kitchen, my mother called our names. Loudly. She was in the den watching the news on television; Sarah and I stared at each other, then hurried in.

“Look!” my mother said. A banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen:

“Those volcano people have been predicting this for months, but I never really thought it would happen!” my mother muttered. She rapidly surfed through the channels. CNN was first on the story, but just barely. The anchorwoman with the long face and big hair was speaking in fragments as she listened to a voice in her earpiece.

“Major seismic event. Massive eruptions.... Mount Rainier in Washington State, perhaps Mount Adams as well, plus several small ones in between.... Bigger than any of the volcanology forecasts. ‘Like a string of firecrackers,'” she continued. “Up to fifty times bigger than Mount Saint Helens.”

“Saint who?” I asked.

“Mount Saint Helens,” Sarah said immediately. “You know. Washington State?” She didn't include her usual, “If you'd just read for once, Miles.” That was her other, younger self. Lately she read only trashy, vampire-type fiction.

“I have friends in Seattle,” Nat said softly, as if to herself. “I know people there.” She clicked rapidly through the channels. I stood there for a couple of minutes, but no details followed. I'd heard so much—for years, it seemed—about seismic activity in the Cascade Range that it was like old news, like a movie with so much prepublicity and so many television trailers that it feels like you've already seen it. Why go to the theater? I eased toward the front door.

“Miles hasn't filled the dishwasher,” Sarah said.

“Fill the dishwasher, Miles,” my mother said automatically.

I glared at Sarah and headed back to the kitchen. I was only half finished when my mother called us again. “Children—you really should see this.”

I sighed. Sarah hurried off, and I followed at my own pace. On the big-screen Sony a column of ash rose straight up like a gray broccoli stalk, growing even as we watched. Everything below and around it was flat and gray. “My God,” my mother murmured. “Mount Rainier really is gone.”

Sarah plopped down and leaned her purple head toward the screen. Close-up images showed a forest tipped over like an exploded box of toothpicks. The scene switched to a suburb of Tacoma. At the edge of the mud slide, cars were washed up in jagged rows like leaves in a gutter after a rainstorm.

Sarah suddenly sucked in her breath and whirled around. “Dad! Where's he playing right now?” I hadn't heard her call him Dad for a long time.

“East Coast. Boston area,” my mother said quickly. She touched Sarah's hair. “He's fine. Not to worry.”

Sarah brushed off her hand and returned her gaze to the television. There were scenes of crushed houses and rescue workers running around like crazy. It was a first responder's dream come true. That and a great opportunity for documentary filmmakers. I loved those programs with names like
Nature's Fury
and
Savage Earth
. I watched bulldozers carefully uncovering cars. There were people still in them, some alive, some not.

“Do you think we'll have school tomorrow?” I asked.

Both my mother and Sarah turned to stare at me.

“Why wouldn't you have school tomorrow?” my mother asked.

I shrugged. “Just wondering,” I mumbled. It was the kind of dumb question that kept getting me in trouble in ninth grade that year. Sarah laughed at me, then turned back to the screen.

“By the way, your purple hair looks stupid,” I said.

The next morning in school we were sent to our advisor pods rather than to first-hour class. There, in small groups, we watched continuing coverage of the Cascade Eruption, as it was already being called. All the anchor-people—Joie Chen, Wolf Blitzer, Nancy Rodriguez—were out of their offices and at the scene. But old Dan Rather had them all beat. He was dressed in combat gear—green fatigues, Army helmet against falling pumice stone, goggles, and a major dust mask that made his face look like a grasshopper's head. He breathed heavily, like Darth Vader, as he moved through dust and smoke. Pausing before a leg poking out of the mud, he wheezed, “… Vietnam, the Gulf War, I've been there—but nothing compares to this.”

We all laughed, except Mr. Worthing and a few science types and Junior Knowledge Bowl geeks who watched the big screen with their mouths hanging open.

Mr. Worthing turned to us. His face looked strange, too white. “I have a cousin who lives—or lived—near Tacoma. We're pretty sure he's dead.” And then he turned back to the screen.

The room was quiet. We all looked at each other. Leave it to a teacher to ruin a good time. Nathan Dale Schmidt, a skinny kid with yellow dreds, pushed out his lower lip and made the sign of the cross. We all cracked up, but silently.

“Math question, Miles,” Mr. Worthing said without looking.

I can't tell you how I hated the man when he did that.

“Mount Rainier is gone. Vaporized. If it was approximately cone-shaped, with a height of 2.65 miles and a base radius of 6 miles, how much volume would that be?”

I had the usual two options: act dumb and lie, or be smart and look like a geek. The formula popped quickly into my head:
¹
/3
πr
²
h. And if you had the formula, the rest was easy. Sometimes I wished I had recall like normal people. When I was small, at home we played a card game called Memory. Dozens of little animal cards were dealt facedown, and then we took turns drawing two and trying to make pairs. I beat everybody, kids and adults, every time. Memory Boy, my parents called me.... Now I scrunched up my face and crunched the numbers. “About a hundred cubic miles, boss,” I said.

There were giggles about the room over the “boss” part.

“One hundred cubic miles—and that's just one of the mountains!” Mr. Worthing said. He didn't take his eyes off the screen.

We continued to watch the ash rising from the crater of the former Mount Rainier. Talk about boring. The ash cloud billowed up as gray and repetitious as a screen saver designed by a dropout from Cobol 101. The newscasters hyperventilated over the same stuff: “… ash plume will soon reach the stratosphere, about nine to twelve miles above the earth, and begin to disperse into the jet stream,” and “… possible wide-reaching implication for global weather patterns....”

“Mr. Worthing?” I asked.

“Yes, Miles?”

“Shouldn't we get out of school for this?”

“Why is that, Miles?” Mr. Worthing said without looking.

“I mean, it's a national event of tragic proportions.”

“I think our school administration will hold that it's very important to carry on in times like these. Don't you agree, Miles?”

“I'm not sure, sir. At least Mr. Litzke should cancel our oral-history project.” There was a chorus of agreement. The dreaded oral-history project was supposed to start today in social studies. I didn't mind the ninth-grade science project, but I hated anything to do with reading and writing. And in this case, old people.

“We should study volcanoes instead,” someone called.

“I'm sure Ms. Guilfoile will be happy to talk about volcanoes in your science class,” Mr. Worthing said.

Discussion lagged. The newscasters continued to quack on. There were scenes of bodies being dug up from the mud. I felt some pressure to make a move.

“Mr. Worthing?” I said.

He sighed. “Yes, Miles?”

“Watching this is making me very sad. I'm experiencing feelings of anxiety and grief.”

There were snickers.

Mr. Worthing detached his gaze from the screen and slowly turned to me.

I kept a straight face. “I don't think I'm coping well at all, Mr. Worthing. All those dead people. Can I go to the counselor and talk to someone about feeling sad?”

More snickering across the room. Mr. Worthing pursed his lips. I could see he was disappointed in me. Which made me feel terrible. But I couldn't back out now. Once you begin a move, even a stupid one, it's terminal not to follow through.

“Yes, Miles. Of course. If you think you need professional help, then you should have it.” There were hoots of laughter—on Mr. Worthing's side this time. He scribbled a pass. “Get out of here,” he said. His gaze cut right through me, and then he turned back to the screen and its unending geyser of ash.

I made a triumphant exit, slapping hands here and there. And then I stood outside in the long, empty hallway. For one last laugh I peeked back through the little rectangular window of the classroom. My friends had already turned away.

I watched them for a while, but no one looked my way again, so I plodded along the rows of battered lockers toward the counselor's office. I handed my pass to the secretary. “Hello, Miles!” she said cheerfully. They were always so cheerful here. A couple of losers, one with long hair, the other with a shaved head, stared at me from the battered chairs and couches.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” they replied, and looked away.

I took a seat and paged through a
Teen Esteem
magazine. The pages were thick and gummy to the touch; all the pictures were defaced. The cheerful, handsome teenagers had poked-out eyes, extra genitals, and rude dialogue boxes added. I sighed. I wondered what was going on back in my advisor pod.

After a while the losers were called inside, and soon Mr. Montroy Jones appeared. “What say, Miles?”

I nodded.

“This way, kid.”

I was glad it was him. Mr. Jones was a huge black guy who scared everybody but me. He had once been in prison but then was born again or something. He still had lots of bad tattoos, which he kept to remind him of his “stupid days,” as he called them. He was the nicest adult in the school.

He scanned my pass as we entered his office. “Feelings of anxiety and grief over the volcano, Miles?”

I nodded.

He closed the door.

We settled into our chairs.

I tried to put on a sad face. “I have a cousin who might be dead,” I said.

He stared at me, then slowly wadded up my pass and made a perfect shot through the tiny basketball net clamped on his wastebasket. “So, Miles. Your old man's still on the road with Shawnee Kingston?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Next time he plays in Minneapolis, you think you can get me tickets?”

I stared.

“Kidding, Miles,” he said. “Kidding.” He tipped back in his chair and laughed hugely.