“If Grace gets poisoned, if all these trees die and this land goes to hell, you’ll just go somewhere else, right? Like the great pioneers, Lewis and Clark. Well, guess what, kiddos, the wilderness is used up.” I walked around my little square of floor like a trapped cat. “People can forget, and forget, and forget, but the land has a memory. The lakes and the rivers are still hanging on to the DDT and every other insult we ever gave them. Lake Superior is a superior cesspool. The fish have cancer. The ocean is getting used up. The damn air is getting used up.” I pointed at the ceiling, meaning to indicate the sky. “You know what’s up there? Ozone. It’s this stuff in the atmosphere that acts like an umbrella.”
I stopped and reconsidered this effete analogy. Teenagers who won’t use condoms aren’t impressed by the need for an umbrella. I surveyed the class thoughtfully and demanded, “Whose Dad or Mom ever worked in the smelter?”
About half the hands went up, reluctantly.
“You know what they did up there, right? One way or another they were around thousand-degree hot metal. You ever see them dressed for work? They wore coveralls like Mr. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and a big shield over their faces, right?”
They nodded, relieved, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to single them out for humiliation. I sat on the desk and crossed my arms. “Imagine that’s you, working up there with that hot metal in your face. Now, somebody rips that mask off you while you’re working. Goodbye face. Goodbye nose and eyelids, beauty queens. You’re dead.”
They might well have been dead, for all the sound they made.
“That’s what the ozone layer does for us, boys and girls, it’s a big face shield in the sky.” I was skipping a few steps here, but not really exaggerating the consequences. Not at all. I attempted to lower my voice and sound faintly reasonable. “And it’s slipping away from us. There’s a big hole in it over the South Pole. When you use a spray can you make that hole bigger. There’s something in most aerosol cans and refrigerators and air conditioners, called chlorofluorocarbons, that neutralizes the ozone. Factories are still making tons of it, right now.”
I suspect “chlorofluorocarbons” was the largest word ever spoken within the walls of Grace High, and I’m fairly sure also that nobody forgot it for at least the rest of the day.
After the bell rang, Connie Muñoz eyed me and said, “Miss, I seen you wear stone-washed jeans to school sometimes.” The other kids were already out of there like bats out of hell.
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t know about the mountains when I bought them. Just like Hector didn’t, and you didn’t.”
“Yeah?” She chewed her gum and held me under a neutral, military sort of gaze. I’d publicly humiliated her new boyfriend; this would require some diplomacy.
“I’ve been learning a lot of this stuff just lately,” I told her. “I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem.”
“So how come you’re so mad at us, Miss?”
I felt conscious of my height, and embarrassed. “Connie, I don’t really know. Because I’m guilty too, I guess. And now I’m trying to fix it all at once.”
A hint of life came into her eyes. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad. Everybody was paying attention. What you said was right, these guys just think when they use something up there’s always going to be more.”
“I shouldn’t have cussed,” I said. “I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I shouldn’t have picked on Hector the way I did.”
She laughed and cracked her gum. “Hector Jones is a dickhead.”
I had dinner at Doc Homer’s house. I’d done so every night since I got back from Santa Rosalia and found out Hallie had been kidnapped. If I badgered him enough, I kept thinking, he would have something more to tell me. But he couldn’t remember anything. If I’d ever doubted Hallie was his favorite, there was no question about it now-I’d never seen him so affected by any event in our lives. He still functioned, cooked for himself and went to work, but it was only an obstinate ritual; he was a mess. I’d found some of his medication bottles in a cache in the living room, inside an old iron coal bucket. There was no way to know whether he was taking them. Half the time he talked to me as if I were six years old.
“Who was the person you spoke with on the phone?” I asked again. “Was she somebody in the government? There’s got to be somebody we can call.” I cautiously eyed the plate he set down in front of me. Doc Homer had prepared liver with steamed apples and yellow squash. In certain restaurants things like this passed for haute cuisine, I knew, but here it passed for weird. It was getting to where he’d combine anything he found in his refrigerator. I’d started shopping for him, lest he get down to refried beans and ice cream.
“She suggested that we call the President of the United States,” he said.
I set my fork down on the table. He’d said this quite a number of times before. “I think I will call the President.” I moved my chair back from the table. It was an idle threat; I’d probably just get a polite recording. But I knew Doc Homer wouldn’t want what he would consider an absurd long-distance call on his bill.
“I understand you have a boyfriend,” he said, cutting his liver and apples into small pieces.
“What do they think will happen? Did this person you talked to sound real worried? Or did she say this was a routine kind of thing? Sometimes they’ll just take a
