The Water Museum

Twelve. Welcome to the Water Museum

Fat orange light squatted in the brown sky. It wasn’t like that every day — most days were stained-glass blue. But the dust and the smoke tended to hang there more and more. Old-timers told Billy they’d give a dollar to see a good old-fashioned gray sky full of rain. He rode his bike down County Road 120, no cars in sight. And no clouds. Somebody had painted Droughty Road on the signs. That was pretty funny, he thought. The corn and soybean fields were so toasted they were just dirt fields now. Billy couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a cow.

Big white wind propellers turned slowly. The kids called them sunflowers. The towers reminded Billy of those crazy alien machines from War of the Worlds. He really liked that one. He and his boys would fight the windmill towers with BB guns and slingshots.

The ground was crazed in crack patterns like in the westerns Pops loved, but the boys didn’t like those so much.

Billy watched Pops out there in the field, standing between his pickup and the army water unit. Home from work early and working again, but as he pointed out every day — chores were never done. Pops trudged like a mule from job to job. Billy waved. Pops stood there staring at him, then waved back. At least that run of one-hundred-degree days had broken.

A trio of helicopters chugged in the distance, going from east to west. Daily rounds, checking the last crops. They looked like crows, Pops liked to say. Later in the afternoon, they’d show up on the north side of the road, flying from west to east. Going back to base.

Billy biked across the field, ramping off a couple of the crumbly old furrows. He skidded to a halt near Pops and grinned. Dust. Pops waved his hand in front of his face and coughed. He had a big plastic keg attached to the spigot at the foot of the unit.

“Thing about drought, Bill,” he said, “is the air gets baked.”

Billy had heard this a million times.

“Ain’t just the dirt. The air gets thirsty. Sucks the water out of the dirt, the plants. And then the sun sucks it out of the air. Till there ain’t no water no more.”

Mom would never allow Billy to talk like Pops did. Oh no. Billy had a B+ in English, and Mom wanted him to do even better. She even tried to talk in some kind of made-up elegant way, as if anybody ever really talked like that. Not even his teachers were so phony. They had little bottles of cold water in school. The kids were always thirsty. Higgins and Charlie said it was recycled pee. That grossed him out, but by about 11:00 and 2:00 every day, he didn’t care and drank up.

“Way this here works,” said Pops, patting the sci-fi-looking tower, “is some bunch of chemicals is all stacked up inside, in cakes. This shell is mesh, see.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, just to say something.

Billy looked down Route 120. Big flat sheets of land going on forever. Steel sunflowers, most of them rotating. Marching away, smaller and smaller till they blinked out in the yellow distance. He’d heard about the chemicals, too. He’d been here when the army installed them. He’d even read the manual. The Corps of Engineers guy had made it sound like they were going to have swimming pools soon with all the water from the tanks.

“And,” said Pops, “the chemicals attract water through condensation. Can you spell that, Bill?”

“Sure,” hoping Pops didn’t give him a quiz right there.

“Idea was water in the air, free for the taking. So the chemicals suck that moisture out of the air and pass it down here through the filter and into the jug.”

Billy looked into the jug. Its white plastic showed the waterline as a gray shadow. Only about two inches had accumulated.

“How long?” he asked.

Pops put his hands in his back pockets, kicked a clod. They watched it bounce away, tossing up small explosions of dust.

“A week.”

“Jeez,” Billy said.

“Even the air, Bill. Even the goddamned air.”

Billy rolled the bike back and forth.

“The one crop a drought can’t kill,” Pops said, pointing to his head, “is right here.”

Billy waited for the next part of the liturgy.

Pops pulled his blue bandana out of his back pocket and scrubbed his face and neck.

“Once the bees come back,” he said.

“Then I’ll know,” Billy replied.

“That’s right. That’s right.” Pops got in the truck. “Don’t be late for supper.”

“I’ll know the drought is over,” Billy said as the truck bumped toward home, “when the bees come back.”

The dust cloud made the truck look like it was a burning fighter plane going down.

* * *

Chemicals, Billy thought. They’d pretty much all gone back to using outhouses because there wasn’t water to flush the toilets or to bathe. The house well had long ago gone stinky and sludgy. They used it to wash dishes. The government retrofit had siphoned this “gray water” out to Mom’s vegetable patch. She did all right with crunchy stuff like potatoes and carrots, but the juicy stuff like cantaloupes ended up tasting like soap. So trucks came and filled the water tanks and that was all you got for the month. The waterman always said the same thing: “It’ll break soon!” And more trucks came and dumped chemicals in the outhouse poo-holes — smelled like cherries. Big crazy cherry Life Savers with that dull stink beneath.

One good thing about the drought — the kids got to suck on all the hard candies they wanted. As long as they were sour candies and made their mouths water. It cut their thirst, the grown-ups said. But Billy was pretty sure he’d never eat cherry candies again.

He dropped the bike by the front steps and went in.

Mom was cooking. She mostly did microwave stuff so she wouldn’t have to waste water on boiling. They ate on paper plates. She tried to make it an adventure. “Just like camping!” she liked to announce, though the kids had eaten on paper plates so long they didn’t remember anything else.

She was kind of a dork, but Billy loved her anyway. He noticed how she took a bit of her water dose for the day and shared it with the rugrats — little Mitch and April. Pops liked to call weepy little April “April Showers.” Billy wasn’t able to catch all the yearning nuances in that one. He thought it was all about the tears.

“You crybaby,” Billy’d say to her when she was on a rampage about how unfair his latest Wii or Xbox bullying was.

“It’s not fair!” she’d shout.

“If we bottled up all your stupid crying, we could end the drought right now!”

April would run from the room. This was the small triumph both boys enjoyed every day: making April do The Grand Exit. She had gotten so touchy, they could cause her to freak out over ever more absurd things. If they were watching TV, for example, and a hyena ate a baby zebra, all Billy had to do was say, “April, how come you didn’t warn that zebra? It’s totally your fault it just died!” Or, watching a UFO movie, “April, why did you just blow up the White House with your death ray?”

Her outraged shrieks and stomping journeys upstairs put a saintly smile on Billy’s face.

“Kids, be nice!” Mom would holler.

Billy suspected Mom mostly took sponge baths. Judging from his scent, maybe Pops took dust baths. They kept the fans running all night. Sometimes all the dust in the atmosphere made lightning, but they never smelled rain.

* * *

“Seen a snake today,” said Mitch.

“Saw,” said Mom.

They were working on their chicken parm.

“Didn’t see no saw,” said Mitch, “saw a snake.”

Pops and Billy burst out laughing.

“I swear,” said Pops.

“And I saw a hammer,” Billy offered.

The males all chuckled.

“Where at?” asked Pops. He was piling that cheesy chicken into his cheek like a ground squirrel snarfing up acorns. They still had those. Squirrels, not acorns. Lived under the house.

“He was goin’ under the back porch,” said Mitch. He was a noodle man, mostly. Skipped the chicken. Billy called him a carbo-loader, whatever that was.

“Welp,” said Pops. “There go the squirrels.”

“Isn’t that a shame,” said Mom.

“I think that cottonwood down to the creek finally died,” Pops announced.

“God, Walt,” Mom said. “What next.”

“I know it,” he replied. “Hate to see that. But those are thirsty trees. Nothing in that creek but dirt.”

Billy didn’t tell them, but there were plenty of snakes down in the creek. They lived in the old beater cars and washing machines Pops had buried in the banks when there was water. In case of flash floods. Bummer about the tree, though. Billy always peed on its roots, as if he could keep it alive with his own body.

Changing the subject, Mom turned her eternally hopeful smile to Billy. It made him feel guilty. Like he could only let her down, no matter what he came up with.

“Bill? Have homework?”

“Nah.”

“No, ma’am.”

“…No…ma’am. Not tonight. Got that field trip tomorrow.”

“The school called me about it today.”

Oh, no.

“They asked me to chaperone. Isn’t that wonderful? Cool beans, as you might say.”

Cool beans?

Bad enough they had to go to some crappy museum. But now Mom would be on the bus. So much for all the fun he was planning to have with Higgins and Charlie. So much for flirting with Samantha Rember. He called her “Sammy Remember.” She scrunched her nose at him when he did.

“Cool,” he said. He smiled wanly. “Beans.” Thinking: Dang it.

The kids all excused themselves and scattered.

Pops lit his pipe, and Mom took one cold beer from the fridge and poured most of it in his glass and saved a bit for herself. They had stocked up a few cases, and they tended to be parsimonious with it. Coors. She liked the “mountain spring water” part.

She took his fingers in her hand.

“Walt…sometimes…” She shook her head and took a sip. “Lord, Lord.”

He squeezed her hand.

“I know,” he said. “It’ll be over soon. The government’s going to make rain. They do it in China, I heard. You’ll see.”

Mom thought about some silly thing and laughed, and so did Pops, and they went to watch TV.

* * *

Before school, Billy had to help Pops adjust the solar panels. What a major pain. “You like your light and TV and computer,” Pops groused, “you’ll stop bitching and just help me with this goddamned panel!” Good old Pops.

His farming was on hold, but he kept busy. He was on a foundation-reaffirmation crew. Fancy words for guys who went around the state fixing drought creep: the shrinkage from dried-out soil pulling away from house foundations. There was government subsidy money in it. All those houses with cracking foundations and sloping floors from the desiccated earth pulling into itself. They hauled a slurry of cement and soil-expanding chemicals into the gaps around the houses. Everybody had to laugh because the slurry also made the basements waterproof. In his spare time, Pops installed rebuilt air-conditioning units on roofs. Insurance had started to cover that as a necessity, so business was pretty good.

Mom managed to coax enough water out of the windmill to garden an okay corn patch. Nothing like they used to, but enough for the neighbors and themselves.

She helped out at the church, too. Typing up the weekly newsletter. And she did some small jobs at the old folks’ home. “Mad money,” she called it. One of her terms Billy didn’t get. Like when she said things were “boss.” Whatever.

“All aboard!”

“Gotta go,” Billy told Pops. “Mom’s calling.”

Pops muttered something that sounded like Smuffle whazick.

Billy tapped his arm and trotted away.

She drove a Windstar. It was old and nerdy and embarrassed the boys. The radio was crackly with static, and a booming voice was pontificating about how solar desalinization of seawater was a socialist plot by big government. Cheap water was a ploy by Washington to undermine the constitutional…Billy turned it off. Mom glanced at him, but said nothing.

April and Mitch went to Prairie Elementary. Mrs. G had already volunteered to take them home after school. Mom drove into the parking lot of the middle school. The Panthers sign had faded to ochre above the yellow ball field. The VISITORS scoreboard had lost letters: VIS T RS.

Bright school buses stood outside the auditorium. Billy was thinking of trying acting. The drama coach told him he’d be great in If the Boys Wore the Skirts.

He’d said, “You have a flair for the comedic, Billiam.” What a freak! Billiam? WTF. Still…Could be interesting. Sammy Remember was in Drama Club. But Higgins and Charlie would never give up mocking him for wearing a dress onstage.

Mom got busy with all the boring church ladies circling around the lot, more excited than the kids. Billy piled into the back of the bus with the gang. Sammy Remember tried not to look at him. Her red hair was hot in the sun and smelled like coconuts and pineapples. Billy tried to bump into her as he passed her seat. She made him swallow when he saw her. She ignored him and attended to the weird little folding-paper game her friend Peanut was showing her. But the way the girls laughed, he just knew they were talking about him.

Sammy glanced back at him and smiled once. Blushing.

“Oh crap!” Charlie proclaimed, digging in Billy’s ribs with his elbow.

Sammy and Peanut giggled, but never looked back again.

“Second base,” Charlie predicted. “Today in the museum.”

“For sure,” Higgins agreed. “Bra. Boobs.”

They had read Playboy.

“Knock it off,” said Billy, red in the ears. “I mean, jeez.”

“Billy’s got a boner,” Higgins said.

Billy grabbed him and they wrestled until Mom came back and said, “Do I have to separate you gentlemen?” This made Billy feel good. Sammy Remember would not forget that he was, in fact, a badass and had gotten in trouble for being too wild even before the bus pulled out. Though it was, like, a total fail that Mom was the one to scold him.

Charlie pulled a Doctor Who magazine out of his backpack, and the boys bent to it.

Billy popped a lemon drop in his mouth.

The sky was saffron.

* * *

“Museums suck,” said Billy.

The bus rattled along between tan fields.

“Right?” said Charlie.

“History,” said Higgins. “Shit like that.”

“What I’m sayin’,” Billy said, watching the back of Sammy’s head.

“Suckage,” said Charlie.

“Suckola,” Higgins said.

“Sucks the big one,” Billy said.

“That’s what she said,” Charlie said.

They all giggled like Sammy and Peanut.

The outskirts of town. Billy, in spite of himself, crowded the windows. They never saw the city for real, just in movies. Trees. Nice.

There was a car dealership. Empty. Weeds poked up through cracks they had made in the asphalt.

“Dude,” said Billy. “Freakin’ drought, and it’s all freakin’ weeds. Freakin’ weeds, like, never stop growin’. Whyn’t we just farm weeds?”

Higgins was asleep; Charlie was back with Doctor Who.

Billy rested his head against the glass and felt his mind fly out into all the windows and doors. Felt himself move in and out of the alleyways. Like a great sideways yo-yo in a dream. Like he could walk into a thousand life stories. Like he could think up a whole new world. Like he could go out of himself and keep going and find a house on a beach with ten million miles of ocean in front and sweet cold fog and afternoon rainstorms and Sammy there beside him. This thought both comforted and stung him and made him happy and made him want to cry. How did Pops ever tell Mom he wanted to be her boyfriend? How did you do that? And — second base! Bras? How could a guy ever get up the guts to ask? How did a kiss happen, anyway?

The bus pulled into the museum parking lot and farted its air brakes and Mom stood and the doors opened.

WELCOME TO THE WESTERN PLAINS MUSEUM OF WATER.

Another sign said PILGRIM, REFRESH YOURSELF. Some kind of old covered wagon and a plaster ox out in front. Cornball.

The kids disembarked. Grab-ass ensued; impromptu tag, running around like idiots. “I swear,” Mom said, “dealing with you all is like herding chickens.”

The boys feigned disinterest in the hologram of a huge fountain in the entryway. But the girls oohed and ahhed over it — the way the fake water was projected on a cloud of steam and seemed to gush and flow and then change colors.

“Water don’t turn yellow,” Higgins announced.

Then the boys started snickering.

“If it does, don’t drink it,” Charlie said.

As an added feature, each child received a minuscule spritz of cold water in the face, and they shrieked with delight, but were firmly denied a repeat.

They entered through a projected waterfall, a cheesy video loop playing on more steam.

Mom had once seen that effect at Disneyland on the Pirates ride.

They walked on video tiles, and each step made ripples in the fake blue water beneath them. Fat goldfish-looking things swam away from the electric ripples. The boys made big faux splashes by jumping up and down until the digital fish swam out of sight beyond the edges of the floor.

They wandered through the galleries: 3D film loops of Niagara Falls. Higgins didn’t believe it.

“That crap’s from the Avatar movies,” he said, tossing his glasses in the big blue box.

But Billy stood as one hypnotized. He was astounded by the sight of that water. Who imagined wild water was white? And so much of it the earth used to simply throw it away. Still, he was more awed by the sound of it than the sight of it. The sheer noise.

Farther in, they witnessed seashore videos: the announcer droned, “Behold the song of the sea.” The sound of crashing waves. Vents pumped saltwater scents at the kids. Gulls cried.

The moms were smiling, but the kids felt creepy, watching all this water. It felt bad. Billy picked up a conch shell and put it to his ear.

“You’ll hear the sea,” Mom promised.

Just sounded like the inside of a shell to him.

A friendly docent appeared in a sky-blue suit.

“You supposed to look like water?” Higgins said.

Kids laughed.

Billy looked for Sammy, caught her eye. She wasn’t smiling either. She stared at him for a long time before they both looked away, blushing.

It got sucky. Charts. Data. Laser pointers.

How the drought came upon the West first, then the South, then the Midwest. Then how the water states started to flood from too much rain. The docent called this “The Cosmic Irony.” And the oceans rose and the coasts were invaded by seawater. Then, how the water states instituted the border system, to keep the drought survivors from overrunning their lands. How they shipped water units to the heartland until the crisis was over. No shortage of sun or wind here, though, right, kids? So the drought states traded wind energy and solar energy to the national grid. Light for water, the government motto said. And: Light — it’s the new harvest.

“How long’s it been?” Billy asked.

“Pert near twenty years now,” the docent said with her weird anesthetized grin.

“Seventeen,” Mom said.

“Pert,” Charlie snickered.

Higgins couldn’t stop laughing.

“What a hick,” he whispered. Then he asked, “Excuse me, miss. Were you born in 1860?” He and Charlie laughed and snorted. Billy moved away from them.

The docent ignored them.

“And now, children,” she said, working a remote that caused smoked-glass doors to swing open, “we go to meet water.”

They followed her through.

* * *

Creepy, man. Are you kidding? What is this, Halloween? Billy’s mind was racing. It was dark in there. Crazy bug noises everywhere — he wasn’t used to bugs. He didn’t like it. Bouncy little lights among the trees with awful gray beards hanging down.

“What’s that?” he asked Mom.

“Fireflies,” she said. She was happy. “Isn’t it awesome?”

Mom trying out her kid-speak again.

“Awesome,” Billy said.

He pointed.

“And what’s that?”

“Spanish moss.”

“Has it got spiders?”

“It’s fake,” said Higgins. “Dumbass.”

Splashes in dark water. He squinted. Water. They were walking on a spit of fake ground in a big dark pool of water at night and there were freaky things croaking. Water was beneath them, looking poisonous in the gloom. Anything could be beneath it.

“What’s that?” Billy asked the docent.

“What, hon?”

“That sound.”

“Frogs.”

One of the girls let out a tiny scream and the rest laughed.

“It jumped on me!” she cried.

“What is this place?” Billy asked.

“This would be a swamp,” the docent explained. “This was the Atchafalaya basin in Louisiana before the coast deteriorated and the wetlands were destroyed. This is what you’d see.”

“Are there alligators?” Mom asked.

“In the tanks, yes.”

“Gators!” cried Billy. He moved closer to Mom. She put her hand on his back. It was hot and clammy. He pulled away.

Higgins snapped a girl’s bra strap.

Billy heard Sammy’s voice.

“Miss?” she said in the gloom. “What’s wrong with the air?”

“Wrong, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am. The air feels, um, heavy or something.”

“That’s humidity. That’s what humidity feels like.”

Silence.

“I’m glad we’re in a drought!” Charlie offered.

They moved on through a beaver dam room and an African watering hole with wack plaster elephants and a Walden Pond diorama. “Who’s that dude?” Billy said, pointing to a bearded figure in front of a tiny cabin.

Little dragonflies hung from wires and bobbed among cattails. They stared at catfish in murky tanks. The catfish stared back. It was creepy as hell.

But the worst thing of all was The Rain Parlor.

It was a round room with concentric rings of benches with a small octagonal dais in the middle. The docent climbed up three steps and smiled down at them. “It’s best if you move to the center,” she said, but Billy hung back and took a bench on the outer ring. He was shaky. He felt like he had ice in his stomach. He didn’t want to hear any more crap from his boys. He didn’t want Mom pawing at him. He couldn’t understand why she was all jazzed. He didn’t like this room with its fake blue sky and its painted green fields and far little trees and its stupid little white clouds looking like sheep on the horizon. To his astonishment, Sammy Remember came and sat beside him.

They looked at each other. She smiled a little, but her face was flushed and she looked like her dog had died. She had bright pink splotches on her alabaster cheeks.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh, Billy!” she said and took his hand and put her head on his shoulder.

Whoa. Fortunately, the lights dimmed. And she started to cry — he could feel her tears soaking into his T-shirt. When it was dark enough, he put his arm around her. Then she kissed the side of his face. Followed by the horror of the rain.

* * *

Dark. Crickets. Then stars started to appear above them. And — what the hell was that? It looked like a scary movie. The docent’s voice in the darkness: “The clouds obscure the moon.” And they did — these projected huge beasts rose up and blotted out the stars and the moon, settled like a threat upon them. The clouds started flickering. “And the lightning begins.”

Billy heard Mom say, “Oh!”

Bolts of light shot across the sky — much vaster and more horrifying than their little dust flashes at the farm. A bolt plunged to earth and blasted a tree apart and kicked up flames. Little speakers broadcast its crackling.

“Oh my God!” somebody yelled.

Billy heard sobbing.

When the first thunder crack boomed, they all jumped. It was so loud. It was as if God’s violence had come upon them in deepest rage, dropping temples and crushing idols to the ground. Crash. And crash again. They covered their ears.

Wind started then, cold wind. The speakers made small howlings, as if electric coyotes were stalking their feet. Ghosts, perhaps. More thunder. Some kids cried as the mothers laughed and clapped.

Then came what must have been…rain.

Not real rain, of course. But the sound of it. The sizzle and the whisper and the hiss and the splash of it. The blue light along the faux horizon of the room. The projected banners and veils of rain all around them. Rain like lace curtains, rain like smoke, rain like spiderwebs and flags and wind you could see. Rain that sang to their bones, that ached inside their bellies and their hands, rain that made them thirst and cower and hide. Rain they had never felt yet knew as intimately as they knew their own skins. It was dreadful. Sammy clutched Billy as hard as anyone could, and he wept into her red hair and didn’t care if she knew it or not.

Higgins cried out, “Stop it, miss! Oh, stop the rain!”

But it went on and on and on, the fake electric fields filling again with the lie of freshness, springtime, life.

* * *

They were quiet on the way home. Billy didn’t let Mom turn on the radio. The Windstar hummed along in the heat. The thermometer on the dash read 80. It was long after sunset, and the western sky had a band of red and violet spread along the edges.

Both of them had their little color picture buttons on their lapels — the docent’s last ghastly blessing. Mom had a picture of an icicle. His was a moose standing in an alpine bog. She had bought a CD of frogs croaking. Billy stopped her from putting it in the CD player.

“Billy?” She said.

He turned and stared out the window.

“Mom,” he finally said. “Is that really the way the world used to be?”

She glanced at him.

“Crickets,” he said. “Frogs. Clouds. Like that?”

She sighed.

“Yes, honey. Just like that.”

Five more miles.

“All that color.” He shuddered a little. “All that noise.”

“Son?”

“So cold, Mom.”

He shook his head, watching his own reflection in the window.

“But wasn’t the museum wonderful?” she said.

Sammy. That word kept turning in his head. The scent of coconut red hair. The dry lip-pop on his cheek that in future years would remind him of a pigeon pecking at a grain of bread, but which now contained all hope and fear and desire and a vivid dreamed future expanding forever inside his body. He almost told her he loved her. The way her eyes lit up under the lightning.

“Mom?” he said.

“Billy?”

“How do you ask a girl for a kiss?”

She stifled a small laugh.

“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, I think you know when the time is right. Then you just do it.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s like the rain. You just know it’s coming.”

They drove on.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Please,” he said. “Please. Don’t ever take me to that place again.”

“Why, Billy?”

He bent over and put his arms over his head and did not look up.

Mom drove on in silence, remembering how, when she was a girl, she had run along the banks of the Missouri River. It surged and sang as if water could never run out. It was summer vacation. She kissed her first boy there. The water, the water, she felt it running through her body still. She could hear it. And she rode that beautiful tide, wind lifting her hair, trying to tell him about the copper sea.