Pitchblende
The last semester of my senior year, I signed up for industrial arts. That was fine with the Colonel, my father, who’d been off fighting wars most of my life, and hardly knew me. My mother was another matter. “You’re smarter than those other boys, Michael,” she said. “You’re not a thug.”
Maybe it wasn’t your future teachers or lawyers who took industrial arts. We were farm boys, mostly, and, when we graduated, became farmers ourselves, or joined the army. But we weren’t thugs. We were the names you see on those brass plaques at the courthouse.
I suppose the idea originally was that you’d spend half a day in some factory, learning how to run a lathe or sweat fittings, so that when you graduated you’d have a trade. But I never heard of a kid who found a job because he—or she; we had two girls in the class—took industrial arts at Mountain Vale High School. You might get on with the county if your uncle worked there, but the factories had all moved to Mexico.
Mostly, we hung around smoking cigarettes and grab-assing. The shop teacher, old Dan Gooden, was asleep in the teachers’ lounge half the time, and, when he did show up, he said, “This place is a mess. We’re gonna clean it up, men!” The trade you learned in industrial arts was how to push a broom, and how to lean on one.
Fridays were the best days, when we cut all our classes, and hauled the school’s trash to the landfill. Little Joe Harpster, he’s dead now, always drove, and the rest of us climbed behind the cab with the garbage, at the ready to whistle at girls. We took off our shirts and stood with our noses to the wind like hound dogs.
The county crew let the landfill mound up for a while, then bulldozed it flat, leaving a long, gradual hill with a drop-off like a cliff. You could see the water towers, gleaming like stars, of towns as far south as Arkansas. I liked to climb up there and roll a tractor tire off the edge. When it hit a rock or an old car it bounced high, scattered the turkey buzzards, and finally splashed in the putrid little creek.
If you looked back from the peak, the landfill was like a battlefield, strewn over with broken things, dotted with fires. I liked it. Wandering among the ruptured water heaters and stained mattresses, every now and then you found a treasure, a jar of pennies or a bundle of thirty-year-old love letters.
And I liked it because you could fire a weapon there. Little Joe had a Remington .22 semi-automatic that was cheap to shoot, and Sam Jablonski had that Springfield rifle he’d shot a fourteen-point buck with down by Gentryville. Sometimes, C. C. Cooper brought along his dad’s banana clip and what he claimed was an AK-47. C. C. went into the army the week after graduation, and got hit bad on Thanksgiving Day.
C. C. handed me the banana clip and I prowled the trash, eyes shifting, ears cocked for the rustling of a rat or ’possum, as Sam crept behind with a bucket of beer bottles. “VC, two o’clock,” Sam yelled, and threw a bottle, and another one, and another one. I sprayed a dozen rounds, kicking the bottles along or shattering them first hit.
One time a car drew up and a beautiful woman stepped out. She wore a red suit, and there was something about the way she carried herself, so slender and graceful, that put you in your place. A professional woman, I thought, far off her route, and, even then, I wondered if anything so fine would ever come my way in life. She walked toward us, and, as if we’d been caught masturbating, we were shy little boys again.
Then I felt like crying, because the woman was my mother, and I hadn’t recognized her. She had just bought the car. She’d had her hair done, and the red suit was new.
“Mike, that’s your mom!” Little Joe said.
Her perfume smelled like crushed blackberries. I held her close and then stepped back, sad. C. C. and Sam and Little Joe stood a distance away, their rifle stocks propped on their hips, but I don’t believe she even saw them. “I’m leaving the Colonel,” she said.
I couldn’t answer.
“It’s not that he’s cruel. Michael, he’s—”
“Crazy?”
Her eyes glistened but she didn’t cry. “I’ll come back for your graduation,” she said at last. “I can’t take any more.”
The Colonel was on the Cat, pushing blue clay and jagged hunks of limestone, when I drove up Bald Mountain. He threw me a mock salute like he always did.
I sat in her room for a long time, thinking I’d hear her call, then I lay across her bed and dreamed about her in the fine dress. When I woke the Colonel sat opposite me at her little writing table. “We got some adjustments to make,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”
He brought his fist down on the table. “Won’t say a word against her. Only there ain’t a Goddamn thing to eat in this entire house.”
We got in the pickup and drove to town. It was hot for March and I put my feet on the dash and leaned back drinking a Coke, thinking maybe I looked pretty cool alongside my military dad, and would impress the girls when we passed the tennis courts.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
