My sister started smoking at the end of March. Openly
smoking, that is; she’d been charming cigarettes off the boys since she
shrugged on her first bra at the age of twelve. My mother and I watched her
from the kitchen window while we washed the dinner dishes. Louette stood under
the streetlight with her kitten heels spiking snow and her thin leather jacket
left undone. The smoke rolled off her and plumed to the moon. Her hand rose
lazily to her mouth and the red ember flashed like a hazard light, her hand drifted
down and the sparks scattered from her fingers. That hand would still be warm
when I passed her the dish towel later, and I would see her footprints in the
snow the next morning, melted there amongst the fallen ash and frozen hard by
the night’s ice.
“Look at her,” my mother said,
“smouldering away like she knows what it’s all about. Just like me at the same
age, and would you look at how that turned out. Christ. Look at her.”
You looked at her, you stared
openly in the street or the mall or the school cafeteria, for you could not
take your eyes off Louette. She’d flow into your awareness with her hips
rolling and eyes arcing and dark hair glowing red where it caught the light.
Her mouth would slowly curl into a smile, and you’d feel the air sucked out of
your lungs. She’d pool into the middle of the room and the heat would collect
there, or she’d quietly slip to the edge of things and pull your eyes with her.
Breathless, restless, waiting for something to happen, you’d look at her. Her
voice came out deep and smoky and you’d swear you were hearing some profound
secret, even if she’d only stopped to ask the time.
“Don’t you start up like her,” my
mom said with her hands shoved deep in scalding dish water, “you’re supposed to
be the smart one. You still going to do that volcano?”
I nodded. The science fair was in June and the
top contestant would go to the provincial finals in Vancouver. I’d planned to
set up a colour wheel and talk about light spectrums; I’d already had the discs
cut out and painted, and spun the patterns to a blinding white in front of my
more easily impressed friends. Then the little earthquakes rattled through
Washington state, shaking up the Ameri cans just over the border and tearing a
crack in their prettiest mountain. The smoke spewed straight up in a delicate
stream and my science teacher passed me a book on Pompeii. He said there could
be an eruption, a real catastrophic event right here in our lifetime.
“Topical, this volcano,” he said,
“a real topical topic, Marie.” His eyes glinted green as he leaned towards me,
and I caught the fresh smell of his aftershave. My face burned red. Mr Robson
was the youngest and most popular teacher in school, and he was good with
words. I practiced all my best one liners for him in private, mouthing them to
the mirror while the bathwater ran. “Mr Robson’s hot,” said Louette, her eyes
half lidded and her hand twisting hair, “don’t you think so, Marie? Too old for
you, though.” She laughed and reached for her cigarettes.
Smoking wasn’t the only thing Louette had
started. My mother would tell us to go to bed at a decent hour, then half kiss
half swat us before leaving for her shift at the all night truck stop. The door
would slam behind her. I’d pack my homework away at ten and prop myself up on
pillow to watch Louette. She sat in front of the vanity mirror and stroked the
glossy red onto her lips, dipping brush into little pot and curving the colour
around her mouth. “Are you going out with Stan?” I asked, that first time. “Are
you going to the lake?” Louette flashed me a look before misting her hair with
drugstore scent and shrugging on Stan’s hockey jacket. I would hear the front
door murmur open and shut as I drifted to sleep. Some time after midnight, a
trail of stale smoke and tinny beer would waft through our bedroom and I’d wake
to muffled creaks and curses. The white of the hockey jacket bobbed and glowed
where it caught the light.
“What’s it like?” I whispered
while she undressed in the dark. The hockey jacket hit the floor with a thunk.
“Who knows?” she said with her smoky laugh. “He says we should wait until we’re
married. Which means we park the car and look at the water for a while. Then we
do everything but and I tell him to stop when he wants more.” She laughed
again, and I sensed something red hot churning under her words.
Louette had been going out with
Stan for two years. Stan played goalie for the Laketown Flames and the pucks
slid off him like rain off a mountain side. He was serious about Louette and he
had given her a ring. It wasn’t a diamond. Engaged to be engaged, Louette
announced to the gathering girls while drifting the cubic zirconia in front of
their faces. The diamond would come later, once Stan had graduated high school
and was working full time in his dad’s auto repair shop. The hockey team teased
Louette and slapped Stan on the back, and everyone said they made a great
couple. Stan would nod, craggy faced and solid, with his big hand clamping
Louette to him.
Stan had helped me paint the colour discs for
my science project, back when I was still doing light spectrums. Hockey season
had ended and he had some free time. He sat with his knees wedged underneath
the kitchen table and his elbows spread square, and applied delicate strokes of
colour to cardboard. I could do three wheels to his one. He never tired of
sticking the discs on the motorised nail and spinning them to something else.
“Cool,” he said, “how it’s so
solid one minute, just blocks of green, red and blue. Then you turn it around
and it’s nothing but white. Like a faceful of ice after a totally gruesome body
check.”
“Volcanoes?” he asked. “Smoke and danger,
total destruction. Yeah I guess I can see why you’d want that. But this colour
wheel, now that’s just a real amazing thing, isn’t it?”
Stan helped me shape the
paper-mache cone of my volcano anyway. He built up the layers on a chicken-wire
frame, he advised on structure and dry times. He stuck little trees from his
train set at the base of the volcano and added a tin foil lake. A plastic deer
was plonked on hill side. “For drama,” he said, “when that volcano blows, it’ll
take victims.” Then Louette wound herself around him to whisper in his ear and
I knew she was asking him if they could drive out to the lake. She was in a
good mood today, all bubble and froth after a week of sullen silence. Stan
smiled at me and unstuck his knees from under the table. There was the sound of
his Camaro starting up in shotgun blasts, and I was left scraping cold paste
from newspaper.
The winter turned to spring. The
snowdrifts yellowed and softened and the first of the pussy willows showed
their cloudy fluff. The sky rippled between clear blue and swollen gray, and
Louette stormed around with her face drawn tight and twitchy and her fingers
itching towards her pack of cigarettes. She went out in bare arms and stood
under street light with her skin glowing hot.
I plucked up my nerve and asked
Mr Robson for ad vice on my topical topic. He told me to keep a journal, to
watch the news and read the papers. Mount St Helens was making headlines. March
27th – I copied – There is a swarm of earthquakes, one of them registering
five point one on the Richter scale and carving out a crater before bringing an
avalanche. Then comes an ash column, sent seven thousand feet into the air and
falling within a twelve mile radius. A second crater appears March 29th. There
is visible flame, and static electricity sends out lightning bolts two miles
long. Now, in early April, there are at least five earthquakes a day and the
governor declares a state of emergency.
My mother’s ulcer acted up one night, and she
re turned early from her shift to catch Louette sneaking through the front
door. “Why should he pay for milk when he can get the cow for free?” she asked
with one hand on the kitchen counter and the other clutching her gut. Louette
stared at her with her black eyes smoking and her cheeks flushed scarlet, but
said nothing. My mother filled a glass with water and dropped two tablets into
it. They fizzed and frothed while we watched. “You’re on the narrow road to not
much,” said my mother as she shuffled to her bedroom. “Believe me girl, I
know.”
Louette was grounded for the
entire month of April and I was made her guardian. She made a point of smoking
inside and leaving her butts in the plant pots. Stan came over to apologise,
standing in the kitchen with his big hands hanging and his face wobbling, and
waited until my mother told him to go away. Louette brought her biology text
book home from school and sat cross-legged on her bed, drawing a spiralling
cycle on blank paper. Photosynthesis, she wrote with the dot on the letter ‘i’
made into a smiling sun. I told her it looked dumb and she told me to mind my
own business. She helped me paint my volcano, dipping a brush into red and
dragging it down the side of the mountain.
“You ever think about this
place?” she said. “About where we live?”
“It’s okay,” I said,
concentrating on gluing down the trees.
“We live in a goddamn trailer
park,” said Louette, “a trailer park in a shithole town and it’s not okay.”
The volcano sat between us, glistening with
paint, and I could see how the newsprint had smudged gray under neath, how the
entire structure looked shabby and malformed despite our work.
“I’m going to get out of here,”
said Louette softly. She pinched the paintbrush between her fingers and its end
glowed ember red.
Louette helped me wrap the
volcano in a black plastic garbage bag so we could carry it to school. I sat at
our vanity table and snuck the brush into her lip-gloss, smearing on the colour
while my heart beat fast. We delivered the volcano to the science room and Mr
Robson stood up when we came in. “Louette,” he said, “how’s that dark cycle
going?” Louette smiled as he lifted the bag off us, and his green gaze wavered
from her eyes to her lips. I stood silent while they talked, conscious of the
lip gloss sticking to my mouth like glue.
April 21st – I wrote in my
journal that night – Mount St Helens continues to cause concern. Scientists
have noticed harmonic tremors on their instruments. They think the magma under
the mountain is on the move.
Stan was allowed to visit and Louette was
allowed to stand in the front yard with him. The Camaro pulled up with its
engine blatting and my mother called down the hall. Louette sat perfectly still
with her eyes gone dark. Stan’s voice stammered at the door and Louette gave me
a small tight smile before she grabbed her cigarettes and sauntered away. She
didn’t glance in the mirror before she went; her lips were left unshined and
her hair hung lifeless.
Stan seemed as rock solid as
always on the surface, but I saw the changes. He sat at our kitchen table and
tried to talk to me. I poured him a cola and waited. “Some thing’s changed,” he
said, watching the bubbles fizz and rise. “Louette’s all different.” His face
worked then, his mouth twisted and his forehead bulged and I was terrified he
might burst into tears.
“It’s just school,” I said
quickly with my mind casting around for details. “Final exams and all, you
know? Especially biology. She can never remember the difference between light
and dark reactions. Mr Robson is helping her.”
Mr Robson was helping both of us, in the hours
after school ended and the building emptied, and before the janitor cleared his
throat at the doorway. Mr Robson always smiled when we appeared in front of
him. He handed me a tin of baking soda and a little glass flask of vinegar and
told me to mix the two together. The foam frothed over test-tube edge and
Louette laughed in throaty surprise. “An acid and base reaction,” said Mr
Robson, “elemental chemistry.” His green eyes glinted as they slid from me to
Louette. I sat at the high laboratory table and experimented with proportions
of bicarbonate and vinegar and red food colouring, recording my observations in
my volcano journal. The mixture needed to erupt perfectly on the day of science
fair; it would have to bubble up the test tube hidden in the paper-mache dome
and pour down the sides, suggesting fiery magma to my awestruck audience. I
watched Mr Robson lean over Louette and guide her pencil around his drawing of
the dark cycle, and I remembered how he smelled up close, as fresh and mossy as
the forest after rain. Louette turned towards him and her eyes widened a
little, and I thought she’d probably noticed this very same thing.
April 30th. The United States
Geological Survey re ports that one side of the mountain is bulging. This is
from the pressure of the magma building inside. Two hundred and seventy feet of
rock shifted now, and more pushed out every day.
May came and Louette’s detainment
lifted. Stan showed up the door with a big loose grin and his car keys
jangling, telling us how pretty the lake looked with sun on the water. Louette
told him she was studying. I watched his face change shape, the muscles
underneath his skin shifting and setting to stoic silence. “Later, maybe?” she
whispered, and his face softened. I was woken again in the early hours by the
bedroom door creaking open. It was too warm now for the hockey jacket, but
Louette’s skin glowed white where she’d bared it. She sat quietly on the edge
of her bed and I turned towards her. The usual smoky vapour drifted from her
but something had changed; she smelled of some other thing both sweet and
sharp. I thought of leaves unfurling and mossy rock and fallen rain, I sensed
the colour green twisting through the dark and winding tight around my guts.
“Go back to sleep,” Louette
whispered, sitting perfectly still, “you’re dreaming this.”
May 7th. The eruptions have
started again. They are small. You can’t see the magma boiling away underneath
the lid of solid rock. This is called a cryptodome. Crypto means hidden.
Mount St Helens was in the news regularly now.
It had become a familiar face, and it showed up in the comic strips smiling and
blowing puffy clouds into blue sky. The tourists ate hot dogs and pointed their
cameras at the ash plume, the cabin owners snuck into the danger zone to pile
porch chairs and log bed frames into the backs of their pickup trucks. The
geologists spoke to reporters about rate of intrusion and resulting instability
while the volcanolo gists thrust dark and jagged seismic graphs at the
newspapers.
“Don’t be fooled,” they said.
“The entire north face could slide, and if that happens we’ll have a full scale
catastrophe on our hands.” Louette seemed to sleepwalk through those days, slow
and barely there, like so
me of her fire had gone out. She
mumbled and drifted around the place, half dressed and half awake and always
with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. It smouldered and dropped ash on
the carpet, but she seemed to need the weight of it there in her hand. Night
would come and something would spark in her eyes, and I got used to the empty
bed on her side of the room.
Stan dropped by on the Friday
before it happened. I was home alone. Louette had said she would be late as she
wanted to finish off something at school.
“Where is she?” Stan asked. He
stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms hanging empty and his chest caving
inwards, but with his face oddly swollen. I could feel that awful tightness on
my own face when I answered.
“With Mr Robson,” I said, as if
it were nothing. I looked at Stan and he looked at me, and the rage passed
between us both. I heard the Camaro throw gravel as it spun away and I had to
sit down for the shaking in my knees.
Saturday was quiet. Mount St
Helens had ceased all visible activity and been taken off the news, the
tourists had gone home and the cabin owners were officially allowed to collect
their belongings. Louette drifted through the rooms, picking up things and
putting them down again.
“Stan?” she said when I asked. “No, I never
saw Stan. I should call him, I guess.” She looked at the phone and picked up
her cigarettes instead.
May 18th was Mother’s Day.
Louette and I had volun teered at the Strawberry Brunch held in the school
cafeteria every year. Mr Robson was supervising the kids and kitchen workers.
Our mother slipped in at seven just as she always did after a night shift, and
told us she’d be along after a few hours of sleep.
By twenty minutes past eight, I was setting
places on the pink-clothed cafeteria tables and Louette was slicing
strawberries into a bowl. Mr Robson hummed as he propped test-tubes of coloured
water and carnations at each table, and neither he nor Louette looked at one
another. The kitchen workers bustled back and forth with baking powder biscuits
and bowls of whipped cream, and the student volunteers laughed and gossiped.
At eight thirty there was a
displacement of air. Nothing more than that, no explosion or sonic boom or
blast of smoke, just a sudden quiet that made me set down my stack of plates
and look up.
Stan stood in the cafeteria
doorway with shotgun hanging from his hands. His eyes bulged and glared in his
swollen face, like they were about to pop from some incredible force within,
and he was panting. The noise of this echoed through the room, bouncing off
twelve grader with her hands clutched to her throat to hockey captain caught
mid-cower to kitchen worker staring over her pot of steaming water. Louette had
half risen from her seat with her hands stained red from strawberries, but Stan
was not looking at her. He raised the gun.
Mr Robson’s hands shook and the
carnations trembled in their crimson water. I saw how the colour had seeped
into their delicate folds, tracing the red there like veins, and I swallowed
hard.
“It was nothing,” he whispered.
“Nothing. It meant nothing to me.”
Several things happened all at once then. Stan
moved faster than I would have ever thought possible, breaking from doorway and
towards Mr Robson with steps like stumbling boulders, the shotgun wedged to his
shoulder. “No no no” said someone and “please” said another and there was the
gurgling cough of the hockey captain retching. The kitchen worker dropped her
pot of hot water and it splashed and steamed and Mr Robson cried out. Stan
moved fast but Louette moved faster, lifting the bowl of strawberries high and
throwing it full force into Stan’s face.
Eight thirty two. I remember how
my eyes drifted from bleeding carnations to blank dinner plates to numbered
clock face, instinctively thinking to record the time. I watched the second
hand tremble and freeze and take an eon to click forward.
Stan wheeled back and smacked
against the wall, slid ing down it almost gracefully. The bowl bounced beside
him and the mashed berries and red juice dripped from his face, spreading
across cafeteria floor. His face crumpled and collapsed and he began to weep.
The shotgun hung balanced across his skewed knees for a moment before it
clattered to the tiles. Someone moaned, then there was absolute silence.
Louette stood facing Stan with
her hair come undone and her sweater pulled off one shoulder. We looked at her,
we stared until her image wavered and blurred and burnt itself into our eyes.
Louette stood still while the air around her roiled and sparked, and we could
not take our eyes off her.
“The ring,” someone said. “She’s
not wearing his ring.”
My eyes slid from Louette’s bare finger to the
glint of gold lying next to strawberry stained knife, and my hand went out
before I could stop it. The ring, his ring; the whisper went around the room
like a wave and I knew I’d not been seen.
“Pathetic,” said Louette then. I
saw how her eyes swerved to Mr Robson and stayed there, I saw how Mr Robson
looked away. Louette laughed, short and sharp and caustic as ground glass. She
turned on her heel and walked out.
I found her outside dragging deep
on a cigarette. “I should quit this shit,” she said, “I don’t even like the
taste.”
We missed the eruption of St
Helen’s that day. It is all there in the records, however, with times and miles
and other measurements carefully noted. At eight thirty two a.m., a five point
one earthquake sheared off the side of the mountain and sent it hurtling down
river valley at one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. The resulting
landslide displaced the contents of an entire lake, splashing its water six
hundred feet up and hillside and knocking down the surrounding forest. The
magma boiling inside the cryptodome for so long found itself exposed to the
air, and it reacted instantly, exploding massive amounts of rock debris,
volcanic gas, ash and pumice. The landslide was quick, but the pyroclastic flow
was quicker; it overtook the slide at speeds of six hundred and eighty miles
per hour and even broke the sound barrier. It vaporised everything in an eight
mile radius and its superheated clouds blasted the foliage off trees many miles
beyond that. Fifty seven people were killed: most of them asphyxiated but
others burnt or buried. It is all there in the records, the truth of the matter
noted in numbers.
We missed the eruption, but they
had started showing the footage on the television by the time we got home from
the police station. The smoke billowed a dirty gray and I handed Louette her
ring. Her fist closed around it but she did not put it back onto her finger. We
watched the ash spew and Louette let me hold her hand. I noted that it seemed
small and cold in mine.
The eruption sent an ash column
twelve miles up and the air currents swirled it down again, covering thousands
of miles in a caustic blanket and blacking out the noonday sun. The mudslides
grated across bridges and the acid rain washed the evergreen off the state
signs. The ash flew across the border and we watched our clear blue sky darken
by degrees. There was a fine gray dust covering the tops of the cars by the
next morning. No one went to school, even though it was a Monday.
The police let Stan go after a
few days of questioning. His father paid the fines and was given back his gun.
Stan was expelled from school and forbidden from graduating that year. None of
us saw him for weeks and the rumours swirled and spread, dirtying the mouth
with their taste. Some of that gossip grazed Louette, but she brushed it off.
My volcano journal lay unopened and I stopped
going to science class. A garbage bag showed up on our doorstep the week before
the science fair, with a note attached. I took the paper-mache volcano out of
the black plastic and left the unread note in its place.
I was not surprised to see the science fair
hall steaming with a dozen homemade volcanoes, all in various states of frothy
eruption. The kid with the colour wheel spun his plates to white while the room
filled with the bitter stench of vinegar. The judge pinned a blue ribbon to his
stall and I was not surprised by this either.
The ash fell down and got swept
up, and eventually dispersed to farther places. It was decided that Louette
carried no blame for what happened. No one recalled Mr Robson’s words but
everyone remembered the strawberries bursting from bowl, and how Louette had
stood so strong and resolute afterwards. A relationship outgrown, they said, an
engagement ring handed back and a young man left broken hearted. It was only
natural, for Louette was beautiful. And working surprisingly hard at her
studies these days. Hadn’t she been getting extra help with her biology before
the volcano blew? The younger girls began showing up to school with dishevelled
hair and their sweaters hanging off their shoulders. Louette brushed that off too
and circled job vacancies at the back of the city newspapers.
Mount St Helens erupted a few
more times and the news circled the globe. The ash fell as far away as Oklahoma
and we all got used to the taste of it at the back of our throats. It snowed
black that winter and Stan drove to the lake with his father’s shotgun into the
passenger seat of his Camaro. Mr Robson’s skill with words was recalled, and he
spoke on behalf of school at the funeral. He didn’t mention the volcano, he
talked about flowers in the field instead. I saw the crimson veins of those
carnations and had to choke back the bile. Louette called to say she’d seen the
snow on the news and was it really as black as that? She was working as a
medical reception ist in wealthier part of Vancouver by then, and dating a
doctor.
My sister married a cardiologist
and he made her quit smoking when she turned forty. Mount St Helens still vents
steam and ash once in a while, and Louette phones me every time. “Turn on the
TV,” she’ll say, “you don’t want to miss it.”
I can hear the restlessness in
her voice, that sense of breathy excitement that still draws people to her. I
know how her hands will hum with heat while her fingers flutter and tap,
searching for a long ago cigarette to light and suck to red hot ember. My
sister talks of her pretty children while I tell her about my research, and we
never mention the mornings we wake with the taste of ash still in our mouths.
About the author:
Darci Bysouth grew up in the ranchlands of British Columbia
and remembers the eruption of Mount St Helens. She took a
literature degree many years ago and is currently studying
creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her stories have
won the Lorian Hemingway prize, shortlisted in the Bridport
and Fish competitions, been published in the Bristol Anthology,
and appear online in the Spilling Ink Review and the Cutthroat
Literary Journal. She has just finished her first novel.
