“I don’t think real volcanoes are made the same way you make fake ones,” I said.
“This is how they made Krakatoa,” Mr. Loury said, with certainty. “This is how they made Pele.”
I thought about this.
“This is how they made the volcanoes on Mars,” Mr. Loury said, and went back to digging. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to believe me, but you can look through the telescope and see for yourself.”
Volcanoes made on Mars. Volcanoes made on Earth. What if I could be one of the people who made volcanoes? What if this could be my career?
“Who made them?” I managed. I could hardly breathe.
“People like us,” Mr. Loury said.
“On Mars? Martians?” I asked.
“Krakatoans, Martians, same thing,” he said. “I knew it when I saw you. You’re one of us.”
I heard the distinctive sounds of my father’s car coming down the spiral road. The brakes were failing, and so he kept an anchor in the passenger seat, attached to a rope, in case he lost control going downhill. I ignored the noise. No one was in charge, he’d said. If he wanted me home, he could scream.
I looked at Mr. Loury. He was offering me everything I’d ever wanted, and I was pretty sure he was about to laugh and take it back, the way adults always did.
“What are the volcanoes for?” I asked Mr. Loury, a last testing question. He eyeballed me. I swiped at my face with nervous, dusty fingers, but finally he nodded and surrendered everything.
“I wasn’t sure you were ready for this, but you seem man enough to take it. They’re observatories, but better. From inside a volcano, everyone knows you can look up. Almost no one knows that you can also look down.”
It was not as though I hadn’t been warned by my third mother about people who said things like this. It was not as though I cared. I was a goner. My dad, I imagined, would one day walk up the slope of this new volcano, and bend over to look down, startled to see me there inside it, my telescope aimed at the center of the earth. I’d be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There’d be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries in the Earth, and wonders. Even my own bellybutton, and the possibility that through it I might reach blood and guts, had been known to obsess me. Volcanoes were portals too.
My dad shouted for me from our front door, but I didn’t move. He increased volume and shifted to my full name. I didn’t flinch.
Mr. Loury looked at me suspiciously.
“That you he’s looking for?” Mr. Loury asked.
“Possibly,” I said.
“I thought you were a boy,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice now, a tightness. “You said you were a boy.”
“I’m a Krakatoan,” I said. Finally, with greed and great relief, I knew that I was one of something, part of a group. There was a destiny for me. My life wouldn’t have to be this way forever.
“Your hair’s too short for a girl,” Mr. Loury said, still staring at me with an odd expression on his face.
“It got caught in a pair of scissors,” I said, tersely. It hadn’t been an accident. There’d been braids.
“Shit,” Mr. Loury said.
“Shit,” I replied, and threw another shovelful of dirt onto the volcano. I tromped it down with my bare feet, and spat on the new volcano section.
All the while, Mr. Loury shook his head, and muttered to himself.
“Volcano gods need sacrifices,” he said, finally. “What are you going to do about that?”
“I have thirteen dollars in my piggy bank,” I said. “You have beer.”
“That won’t work,” he said, went inside his house, and slammed the door. “This one only wants boys. Don’t you know anything about volcanoes? Don’t you know anything about anything?”
His voice carried out into the yard, and it cracked at the end, with something I couldn’t figure. I was repulsed by whatever it was. Crying was for babies.
I stared at his front door, kicked it once, and then went home to defrost something frozen. I asked my dad what Mr. Loury had done at the observatory to get himself fired.
“Said the sky was black and all the stars had gone out,” my dad said. “Lost us a heap of funding, which is part of why we’re where we’re at now. Can’t even afford a paintjob. You see how it’s peeling.”
“And so they took him to jail?” I was startled. My dad snorted.
“No. Rick Loury went to jail because he commandeered the telescope, and tried to crash it into the floor. He thinks there’re stars inside the earth. He lost his wife, and then he lost his funding, and then he lost it.”
Whatever it he’d lost, I wanted to find it and keep it for myself.
My dad was making another mark on the wall. There were three of them now, black X’s in the places where his wedding photos had been. He didn’t like the bare spots in the wallpaper.
I didn’t mind them. Sometimes I poked them with a pin, outlining perforations in each pattern. My first mother left right after I was born. She disappeared without warning, and the day after she left, the good part of the story, my dad discovered a new star. After my second mother walked out, my dad’s team spotted an elusive comet.
“Did you find anything last night?” I asked my dad.
“Why would we?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought you might.”
Volcano gods needed sacrifices, Mr. Loury had said. I thought about Pele and her boys. I wondered if other volcanoes wanted other kinds of sacrifices. I wondered if observatories did.
I didn’t know how telescopes worked. I didn’t know what made up the center of the earth. I had muddled thoughts of lava. How would I know what the sky was made of, or that there was not another sky just beneath the surface of the ground? I thought it might be possible.
I knew that Palomar sometimes got angry. The shutters got stuck closed and the telescope couldn’t see out. There’d been days of malfunction that week, things jammed in the works, and my dad had complained to my third mother about it. A grant had been lost because of observatory failure, and there were salary questions. They needed to find something new, something that would attract media. I’d heard a daylight argument.
“Did the roof open last night?” I asked my dad.
“Yep,” he said, and went back to the X on the wall, going over it with his ballpoint. I thought about the picture that had been there until the day before, my third mother laughing, with her mouth full of cake. I wanted the photo back. I wanted her back. I wanted them all back.
I arranged the sticks on the counter into a triangle, the shortest one at the bottom, until my dad noticed what I was doing and took them away, breaking them on the way into the trash.
“Why’d she go to Alaska?” I asked him. “She never said anything about Alaska.”
He didn’t answer for a moment.
“She likes the cold,” he finally said, and looked at me, his eyes wide and bloodshot behind his glasses. “Leave it alone.”
I walked away from my dad, and up the stairs. I cranked open my bedroom window and looked up at the dark of the mountain.
I’d seen a television program about the explosion of Krakatoa, and in it, there was a fact that haunted me. Rafts made of hardened lava had floated up onto the coast of Africa, even a year later, passengered by skeletons. But maybe those people had been sacrificed to the volcano, and their bones thrown up into the air by the explosion. Maybe Krakatoa had exploded because it didn’t like what it was being fed.
I wondered about my mothers. I wondered about Mr. Loury’s wife. I wondered if there was a hole in the floor of the observatory, and if through it you might be able to see things beneath. I didn’t want to wonder, but I wondered.
Later, I snuck out the window, and into the night. Did I even need to sneak? No one was in charge. No one saw me walking to Mr. Loury’s house. I used my sneaker to open a hole in the top of Mr. Loury’s volcano. After a minute, I used my hands. I was a Krakatoan. I stamped on Mr. Loury’s volcano again, and then put my ear to the ground.