Ash Mounds

Dad will be here soon. I’m on my belly with a pair of heroes who have been forced to fight each other even though they’re on the same side, usually. In my hands, they jump like it’s their power. The action is right in front of my face so the carpet rubs my chin red. What I’m doing was exactly what I needed to be doing until I remembered I’m not allowed to leave this room unless to go to the bathroom. Now I want to be everywhere else.

Mom sure blew her dummy top off after she found me today on the ash mounds, which makes the really fun birthday party that happened before it seem like it wasn’t fun even though it was really fun.

Really fun but way too short. I drank so much soda and nobody said not to. The cake was bad. Alanna was the only girl there, like usual. She says she’s our same age but she’s taller than everybody, so I don’t know. I asked Charlie what he gave Jamus and he said an Action Dog, so I made sure Jamus opened mine first. He said, Alright! An Action Dog! Then he opened Charlie’s and tried to act like he wasn’t mad about it. He said, No, really, I can use two, but you could tell. And plus we all got kazoos.

Mom picked us up and we weren’t the last ones to leave like I’d hoped. Sometimes when you’re the last ones to leave, you get to start playing with the new presents and could maybe ask to borrow one. But I solved that problem. And I noticed for a second that Mom was way, way prettier than the other moms, and might have mentioned it except now, not a chance. I said where’s Dad. She said he’d forgotten he had a business lunch in Florence, so we were stuck with her. I shrugged to make the best of it but Mom looked like she wanted me to say something. So I said Charlie got two Action Dogs.

On the way home, Mom wanted to stop at the bookstore with her birthday gift card from Dad and asked if we wanted to come in with her, but Alanna and I just wanted to play kazoo songs in the car. I took mine out of the front pocket of my backpack and kept the main pocket zipped all the way. For a minute the kazoo was my favorite instrument but it got old in the middle of our first song, no warning at all, and popped the door open and said we should check out the ash mounds.

Or snow mounds, technically—those heaps, the ones in the back of the Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble parking lot, which the city or whoever picked as the place to dump the snow. The regular snow melted, since it’s now officially Spring. But the mounds are still there, way past the ugly brown of salt and car smoke and now just gray. We knew it was dirty. We’re not stupid. Or I’m not. But we figured there was clean white snow somewhere in the ash mound, and that was an exciting prospective for me and maybe for Alanna. It’s hard to tell with her.

I mean I’ve been sick of the cold for as long as it’s been cold. But when I noticed that the snow was leaving, the mounds looked sad in a things-keep-changing way, like the way Mom talks about when Hadley was just farms, and I thought last chance!

So we got out and went to the biggest mound. I punched my arm through the ash, and there was just more ash. I punched it through even more and the snow got whiter. But then Alanna, whose arms are longer than mine, punched through even further and it got gray again. And then we were on to something, an important experiment like the part in the Al Gore movie that made Dad go wow, when they show the difference in the tree rings from before they saved the environment and after. But now it needs saving again because polar bears are swimming to nowhere, which was the part that made me go wow. We watched that movie when Dad was supposed to be punishing me for the Math class thing. Mom thinks he spanks me. She says just wait till your father gets home. That’s why I’m not scared right now while I wait, just bored to be a jailbird, longing for sweet living room freedom while Mom clangs around out there pretending she doesn’t like doing dishes.

So after we punched the mound, we climbed it. I stepped up on the snow and my foot went clear through. I had to lean onto the mound with my stomach and climb it like a Mount Everest Mountain Climber, using my hands and feet. My shirt started to lift up and the cold dirt got inside it and in my shoes and even in my eyes a little. But I climbed on heroically. It helped to imagine my bones were bonded with adamantium (which is the strongest metal in the known galaxy) and that climbing was the cinchiest thing ever. I got to the top of the mound and straddled it. I was king of the mountain and I said I was, then played a song of victory on the kazoo.

Alanna said she could get up here faster than I did. She’s funny because sometimes I think she doesn’t even care, but then she says stuff like that. She didn’t get up faster. She needed my help to make it up the mound. We looked awesome up there, above all the cars. We waved. People wished they were us.

Really quick, though, Alanna made the mistake where you stand with your feet together and your weight is all in one place, and she fell right through the mound. All the way, so that I could just barely touch her fingers if I reached down. It was hilarious. She was crying down in her hole. I spit on her, but just as a joke. I said I’ll help you.

The snow was mostly white there in the middle, like an oreo. That made me think to do something. I took a big clump of the grey snow, right off the top of the mound, and I put it in my mouth. It tasted worse than earwax or even pennies, and when I spit it out, the taste was still there. I got pretty mad at Alanna for that, for putting me in the kind of position where you don’t know what to do so you see if eating the snow helps. I told her I was going to pee on her. She screamed. I didn’t do it because privacy is important, but I did spit on her again and this time not as a joke.

I made a good point to Mom when she found me there, spitting, and told me to come down right down. I said that if the globe is warming, this could be the last time I see snow ever. I knew it didn’t work like that. It works slow. But good points don’t have to make sense. She said where’s Alanna? I said Alanna’s mom had come by to pick her up while you were in the bookstore. I said they had somewhere to be.

Mom told me to hop in the car and had a couple of her white tic tacs, which is the flavor she gets cause she knows I won’t ask for one. She says she eats a lot of them because she used to smoke, like that makes even any sense. My door was stuck, normally no big deal but I was tired from my climb, so Mom opened it and said I didn’t have to come up with an excuse every time I could use some help because everybody needs help sometimes. I thought of something funny to say to that.

When Mom was waiting to turn back on the road she said was I sure it was Alanna’s Mom? Because she thought Alanna’s mom didn’t have a car, which was why we picked Alanna up for school and why we saw her mom at the bus stop most days. And we got on the main road and there was some traffic by then. I said well they have a car but it was broken before and they finally got it fixed. And by the end of saying that, my voice was coming out like I was thirsty in the desert. I knew Mom must have got suspicious since even I was suspicious of me. So I said ohhhhhhh! I just thought of something! Alanna’s mom had said that she was going to pick Alanna up for just five minutes and bring her right back! She’s waiting for us! Mom said you forgot. I said I know I’m really sorry.

So Mom tried to turn around but had trouble finding a place to do it. I mean there were tons of places I found to do it but they all meant we’d have to drive on top of something. So we got in a lane and waited for a light and it took the dummies at the front of the light forever to figure out, duh, it’s green and then we had to wait all over again. And I was starting to get a little bothered because I know Alanna and the longer we made her wait, the worse she’d tattle and make up lies. Like when I asked why she wears boy clothes and she said she liked them.

Finally we turned it on around and made it back to the lot after waiting in more traffic and Mom said now where will she be? I said the ash mound. She said the what? I said where we were before. Mom parked right by the ash mound. I got even madder at Alanna for not standing there waiting for us because it’s the only thing to do that would have made any sense. I said we could get out so Alanna’s mom could find us better. We did that. Mom said does Alanna’s mom have a cell phone? I didn’t know. Mom said what’s that. I said what’s what. Mom said it sounded like crying. Alanna said help.

Mom took off her mittens and dug Alanna out with just her hands, really fast, like it was a race. She was calling out for Alanna to hold on, just hold on baby, and I thought oh brother. And when she got to Alanna, I thought what if Alanna was frozen in a block of ice like Han Solo in carbonate. When Mom pulled her out, I said Alanna! How did you get in there? And I winked but she didn’t see. They were hugging, even though she’s my mom, and both of them were dirty.

This was just more proof that Mom wanted a girl. She only hugs me at bedtime now just because of the times I told her I don’t like hugs, but you’re supposed to say you don’t like hugs, it’s part of the thing. But Mom and Dad don’t always get the thing. They think words mean so much. They think I think all the stuff I say.

But I was nice enough to let them hug and tried to get in the car. I pulled on the handle, pulled it, pulled it, pulled-it-pulled-it pulldit. Mom looked at me like you little turd and Alanna didn’t look at me at all. Alanna sat in the front and had the heat going full blast, just being dramatic, and when we dropped her off, I had to wait in the car while Mom talked to Alanna’s mom.

Mom got all quiet on the way home, then said Alanna could have suffocated in there if snow fell on her, or froze to death after awhile. I doubt it. She could have climbed out if she’d wanted to, and she would have learned a lesson about courage and weight retribution. I kept that to myself. I noticed Mom had bought a CD with the money, with an old country dude and no words on the front. When you’re an old enough country dude, people have been looking at you long enough that you don’t have to put your name on anything, so long as you got your cowboy hat on.

When we got home, I ran real fast into the bathroom and put my mouth under the tap, washing the sick taste out. When I spat out the water, a little dead spider came out with the dirt before going down the drain. That just made me madder. I can’t think of a grosser thing that’s ever happened to anyone.

The floor rumbles my belly, which means Dad’s home. It rumbles me again as the garage door closes. I guess I’m in big trouble, I mean Mom used those words, but I’m pretty sure there’s actually no such thing as big trouble in the world of today. Tonight Dad and I will watch a Planet Earth episode in my room till I fall asleep, and after lunch tomorrow I will tell Alanna she can’t play with the boys anymore. Maybe Mom won’t put a pudding in my bag for a week and I’ll complain about the pudding so Mom knows the punishment is working, when really it’s just pudding.

I hear Dad’s feet in the hall and Dad’s knock at the door. And he comes in after I say come in, still in his work clothes. He sounds different than the other times. He’s saying some things without looking at me and he’s not sitting down. I see him look at my open backpack with a floppy ear sticking out. He says what’s that there? I say an Action Dog. He says the one you gave Jamus? I say Jamus got two and let me borrow one, which will be true tomorrow after I talk to him and the Action Dog is sort of mine anyway. Dad shrugs and keeps talking. Yay for that. He’s saying some things that sound like what Mom already said only he’s sighing a lot like he doesn’t want to be in here, which is the opposite of how he should feel about this room because ninety percent of the house’s fun stuff is in here and it’s all mine. And I start to guess at what he’s getting at so I tell him he better not do it and if he does then he can’t play my games any more. And then I find out my guess is right.

He doesn’t make me pull down my pants because embarrassment isn’t part of it. Or what I mean is: we both just want to get through this. Then ouch. And ouch. It barely hurts. It’s like when Charlie flicks my ear. It’s like, quit it. And he does quit it after just a few swats.

And then Dad turns me to look at him and he looks scared somehow, like maybe this just changed everything. I want to say that’s silly. I can read his face. It says: This is all your Mom’s fault. Crack me open and you’ll see the rings get dark from when I had to get married and lighten up from when you were born and fixed the family. I’m fun and you’re fun and she’s mad because she’s not fun. And if we love her, it’s the kind where we love her because of all the songs and holidays that tell us to.

We hug to seal the deal and then I follow him out to the living room, where Mom is drinking wine, listening to that country dude playing sad songs and never taking his hat off. My life goal is to be like him, only my thing will be I always wear sweatpants and my songs will be the kind heroes have adventures to. Mom looks at me like oh hello there my boy, like you can spank forgetting into your kid and he’ll not remember how you bully him. I need something snappy to say and then think of it because of talent. I know it will make her madder than anything, so I say it didn’t even hurt. I say you couldn’t hurt my adamantium bottom if you spanked it with dynamite.