THE KRAKATOAN
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work.
“What’s wrong?” I finally asked, though I didn’t want to know.
“No one’s in charge of you,” my dad told me. “No one’s in charge of anything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”
The cold fell out of the fridge like something solid, and I edged closer, hoping it’d land on me and cling. I was still vulnerable to the possibility that one of the mothers would work out.
“Alright then,” my dad said. He left the ice cream out on the counter, along with the contents of his pocket: three charred sticks, one of them short, two of them long, and a list of dead stars, as in celestial, his specialty.
Then he went to work, driving in the dark up the spiral road to his job at the observatory. It was one of the great mysteries of the heavens that my father had been married three times. He only looked up, and he was awake all night. Each of my mothers had complained about this, and eventually I picked up some things about which direction you should be looking, and which hours you should be keeping if you wanted a woman to stay with you. I practiced eye contact. I practiced sleeping.
I ate the entire carton of Neapolitan, beginning with the chocolate. I visited the top of my father’s closet, removed five Playboy magazines, and read them. I considered my three mothers, and compared them favorably to the naked women. I turned on the TV, and then turned it off. She’d taken the rabbit ears from the top, and now all we got was static. She’d taken the doorknob too. It was made of purple glass. When you put your eyeball up to it and looked in, it was like you’d arrived on Mars. I’d gotten a black eye that way, when she opened it accidentally into my face. Getting out of the house now required kicking and a coathanger pushed through the hole where the knob had been, and by the time I arrived outside, it was seven AM.
My dad was sleeping at the observatory. There were bunks. The astronomers were like vampires, slinking around under the closed dome until the sun went down, at which point they swarmed out to look at their sky. My dad had once referred to the solar system as My Solar System. He seemed to consider himself the sun, but he was not, and if he didn’t know that, I did.
We lived at the bottom of Mount Palomar, where the spiral road started. If you stayed on our road, you’d eventually make it to the observatory, a big white snowball of a building on the top of the mountain, and inside it, a gigantic telescope. The observatory, with its open and shut rotating roof, was like a convertible car and the astronomers were teenagers in love with black holes. Their sky made me miserable. I wanted humans. There weren’t many of them on the mountain, and my options were limited. I rarely went up. I went down, if I was going anywhere, and that day I went to Mr. Loury’s house.
Mr. Loury’s wife had, two years earlier, gone into the Great White Yonder. That was what my second mother, the hippie one who’d thought that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, had said about it. I don’t think she’d ever seen Jaws. I didn’t know what a Yonder was, and so in my mind, Mr. Loury’s young wife dove into the mouth of not just a great white shark, but a megalodon, every night for months. Then she got chewed up, and at the end she looked like canned spaghetti. My second mother hadn’t had much patience for a year of me retching over ravioli. I was pretty sure that was why she’d left.
Mr. Loury, with his attempt at a handlebar mustache and his short-sleeved button-downs, with his sadness, was a human fender-bender. I couldn’t stay away from his property. Normally I paced the perimeter, feeling his woe, but today, I had woe of my own and it entitled me to trespass.
He was sitting on his front steps drinking a beer when I arrived, and I sat down beside him, like this was something I did every day. My face was on-purpose sticky with ice cream, and it was beginning to acquire a furry stubble of dust. I was no longer nine years old, but a grown man in misery. My third mother was the one with whom I’d long been significantly and hopelessly in love.
“Hey, buddy,” Mr. Loury said. Not kid. This was progress. “Want a beer?”
I took one. No one was in charge. It was known by men the world over. There was comfort in the shared understanding.
Mr. Loury was an astronomer like my dad, or he had been, until his firing due to an attempted sabotage of the telescope. I didn’t know the details, and didn’t care, beyond the thrilling fact of sirens making their way in slow frustration up the curve of the mountain. He’d been to jail. Again, this called to me. It seemed he never slept. I never slept either. I stayed up all night reading, and during the day, I patrolled the mountain, checking for aberrations. I felt like I’d know them when I saw them.
Together, we watched the goings on of the spiral road, first a rangy cat patrolling, and then Mrs. Yin, our local ancient peril, driving too fast downhill in her Cadillac. I didn’t question the fact that it was seven in the morning and he was drinking already. It seemed reasonable. Some people drank coffee. Others drank beer. I was, I decided, a beer drinker. At last, Mr. Loury stood up, and looked at me for a moment, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was a kid. He waved his hand slightly. I thought he might be getting ready to send me home.
“My third mother moved to Alaska last night,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.”
“My wife died,” he told me. “That’s like Alaska, but more.”
I wanted to ask about the Great White Yonder, but I was worried he’d tell me too much, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t afford another summer of nightmares, the mouth of the shark opening and showing its chewed food like a cafeteria bully gone gigantic.
“Want to help me with a project?” Mr. Loury said. “A dollar an hour. Yardwork.”
“If it’s lawnmower,” I said, negotiating. “I charge by the square foot.” Lawnmowers weren’t safe for me. My toes begged to be run over. There was a deathwish in me. One of my ears had been the recipient of eleven emergency room stitches. Hidden under the skin of my right knee, there was a jagged piece of gravel that seemed to have become permanent.
“Digging,” Mr. Loury said. “Got a spare spade for you, you’re interested.”
Spare spade. I repeated the words in my head, a triumphant vision of myself at the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the dirt, looking up at a narrowed world.
Mr. Loury had already begun digging. He had a hole the size of a swimming pool, and a huge heap of dirt beside it. After an hour, the sun was high, and I yearned for the freezer, and the rocket-shaped popsicle I was pretty sure was left in there, amid the foil-wrapped unknowns.
“Why are we digging?” I asked Mr. Loury. I had a couple of ideas. One of them involved the burial of the Great White Yonder. I wondered if the stomach of the Great White Yonder still contained the body of Mr. Loury’s wife.
Mr. Loury looked at me like I was very, very stupid.
“We’re making a volcano,” he said, jerking his head toward the heap of dirt, which I’d taken for beside the point.
I’d made a volcano once, in a science class, out of dirt, vinegar, red food coloring, and baking soda. It erupted in the car, and the screams of my third mother, caught in the lava flow, still echoed in my ears. She’d cried. I’d cried too, in mortification. I’d made it to woo her.