Loving Tad, Alida worried about him — a lot, and especially when he was out of her sight. But in his presence these worries seemed remote, like a half-remembered nightmare on a sunny morning. A word she’d lately discovered was “hypochondriac,” but true hypochondriacs were afraid of disease in themselves; she was a hypochondriac for Tad, and there must be another word for that.
As they walked up the hill outside the school toward the parked Beetle, Alida saw he was hiding a bandaged wrist beneath the cuff of his shirt. “What happened?”
“Oh, nothing, just a scratch. Had a close encounter with a shovel. I was in this stupid play all day — you saw the smoke? That was when the scenery caught on fire.”
“A play?”
“The Comedy of Errors,” Tad said, puffing uphill in the heat, his face even pinker than usual.
You could always see Tad’s car from miles away: it was older than anyone else’s, and its backside was plastered with an untidy collage of fading stickers. The battered VW, with its rust patches, with the door that had to be wiggled just right to get it open, with the mouthlike gash in the front passenger seat that sprouted tickly stuffing, was named “the heap,” and Alida found it hard to understand why he was so proud of it. When his mom died last year, he’d inherited her big white car, which was spooky to ride in because it really belonged to a dead person, but it still smelled new, and Alida luxuriated in its mondo-comfortable seats, the soft red glow of the dials at night, the clock with hands on the dash, and the expensive hush inside even when it prowled through the streets — a silence she’d fill by sliding her Green Day CD into the stereo, which made the whole car shiver deliciously with the thunder of the bass. She’d just decided she could probably get over the car’s spookiness when Tad sold it. Asked why, he said that compared with the heap it was a gas-guzzler and got too many caribous to the gallon.
“Think Globally, Act Locally” and “Support Your Local Planet” were two of the bumper stickers on the heap, along with “Just Because You’re Paranoid It Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Out to Get You,” the names of old, forgotten politicians who’d once run for president, and the mystifying “Sack the Cox-Sacker.” You could always get Tad going by asking “Who was Jerry Brown?” or “Who was George McGovern?” It seemed like nobody he’d voted for had ever won — something else that Tad took a strange pride in, as if losers were better than winners, and Alida had the feeling that if his hero Ralph Nader had actually become president, it wouldn’t have taken Tad any time at all to despise him. He was always saying “He sold out” about some politician, and in Tad’s language winning appeared to be the surefire way of selling out.
When Alida herself won — like taking first place in the individual section of the interschool sixth-grade Math Olympiad, which was filmed on community TV — she had to be careful about how she delivered the news to Tad. She didn’t want him to think she was a sellout. It probably would’ve been better to come in third, but Tad seemed happy enough with her first place and bought her the iPod the next day as a reward.
Windows rolled down, the Beetle jounced and rattled into the crawl of traffic on Boren. Alida’s seat was unpleasantly, intimately hot. Falling away below them, the city looked as if it were melting: tall buildings trembling in the heat like columns of gas, cars afloat like boats in streets of liquid haze, skinny gold rectangles of water showing in the gaps between the office towers. When Tad turned right into the low sun, Alida caught the sudden blaze through the grimy windshield and covered her face with her hands. “It’s kind of like enervating,” she said, trying the word out aloud for the first time.
“Enervating, right. Be glad you’re not a sockeye salmon.”
“Why?”
“They were talking about it on the radio this morning. Know what temperature a sockeye gets stressed out with heat exhaustion? Sixty-eight degrees. Last week they measured the temperature of Lake Washington — sixty-nine degrees. It should be like fifty this time of year. By June, when the sockeye come in from the sea, they’re saying it could be eighty. Which means that every stupid fish that makes it through the locks is going to die of asphyxiation.”
“That’s so sad,” Alida said, keeping to herself the fact that salmon was her absolute least favorite food.
“Imagine Lake Washington full of angelfish and guppies.”
“We did the greenhouse effect. I wrote a lab report about it. We used a heat lamp and soda bottles, black construction paper and water and thermometers and Alka-Seltzer. It was cool.”
“Alka-Seltzer?”
“Yeah. It gives off carbon dioxide when it fizzes.”
The tang of smoke from the morning fire grew thicker as they drove down over the bridge across the freeway, where the packed miles of cars and trucks were at a growling standstill, toxic gunk spilling into the air from every tailpipe. Alida counted off emissions on the fingers of her left hand: sulfur, carbon, nitrous oxide, ozone. “It’s so obvious,” she said. “Why can’t they just get it?”
“All the usual reasons: greed, arrogance, stupidity, blind denial. Lobbyists. President Reagan — he was the one before Bush’s dad — said that cow farts did more damage to the atmosphere than the entire automobile industry.”
“The president said that?”
“I expect some flack for General Motors dreamed that bright thought up for him.”
“But the president said farts?”
“Maybe he said ‘flatulence,’ I don’t remember. He had it in for trees, too. Very dangerous things, trees. Fouling up the air with their horrible hydrocarbons. Like a Douglas fir is a whole lot worse than a Chevy Suburban or a Ford Expedition, and a whole forest is a frigging ecological disaster.” Stopped at a light, Tad was doing his actor thing, assembling his face into a new shape. His cheeks bulged, his upper teeth were exposed in a slightly crooked grin, and when he spoke it was in a solemn, rusty-sounding grandpa voice: “And so, my fellow Americans, today I ask you to join with me in saluting the heroes of the timber industry, the loggers who daily risk their lives to preserve this blessed land, this last and greatest bastion of freedom, from the deadly pollution of trees.”
“No he didn’t.” Tad was a good actor, but his exaggerations could be pretty silly. “He never said that.”
“Well, not in so many words, maybe, but he thought it.”
Which was not, Alida thought, a satisfactory explanation. She didn’t like fantasy — had totally hated The Lord of the Rings, for instance, which they’d had to read last semester. The trouble with fantasy was that you could always see how everything could just as easily have been otherwise, and Tad’s tall stories suffered from the same problem. Like her mom said, though she meant something a little different, Tad’s weakness was his tendency to be “unrealistic,” and Alida was hungry for realism. Most of her favorite books were nonfiction, like Anne Frank’s diary, and Peg Kehret’s memoir of the year she had polio as a kid — books where stuff happened because there was no other way for it to happen, however much the author might have wanted it to happen differently.
The Beetle turned the corner onto Adams Street; then Tad wrestled the gear stick into reverse and began to back into a parking spot. “You’ve got your prosecuting attorney’s face on, Ali. What’s up?”