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boiling water or sharp objects to clean

  enter only in soft-soled shoes

  “What’s all this go into?” I asked Rob.

  “That stuff? Can’t say for sure! We always get, uh, approached by businesses that need specific equipment for a stage in their manufacturing, whether that’s, oh, custom moulds, extreme high temperatures or additive introduction, we always say, ‘Hey, if we can make plastic, we can make anything!’ ”

  “How about plastic explosives?” grinned Eric.

  Shawn frowned from behind his bangs. “Dude, no.”

  “No weapons,” said Rob. “Now if you’ll just follow me around here, we’re nearly, nearly at the end!”

  “You sure love your job,” Colleen told him. “That’s so nice to see!”

  Harv lobbed an imaginary three-point shot into a bin of translucent beads.

  “You see,” said Rob, “what we have here is plastic turning from a solid to a liquid—sorry, liquid to a solid. See, it goes up forty-five feet there…”

  It sounded like monsoon rain but there were too many criss-crossing pipes for us to see exactly what was happening up near the ceiling, though down where we were, the clear plastic was perpetually forming the shape of a hot-air balloon thanks to a constant gust of wind from below. The plastic bubble looked like a cross between a twenty-foot goblet and an upside-down tornado. Light shimmered across it.

  “Cool,” said Amber, snapping her gum.

  Harv, a few feet in front of me, nodded whole-heartedly as he stared straight up, his head craned back into his hood. Little Craig started licking Willow’s neck.

  “I want a tent like that.” Colleen trailed fingertips across her teeth. “All our camping trips.”

  “That is cool,” said Grace. “Whoa.”

  Rob stepped away, hands clasped behind himself—his work was done. It could have been my moment if I’d chosen to embrace it, but how to make it teachable without aggrandizing the plastics industry?

  “Moments of beauty,” I improvised, “when you least expect them.”

  I thought they’d look back at me and roll their eyes, but they kept their pierced and mascara’d and acne-blighted faces trained on that flickering balloon.

  I noticed a pink glob, the size of a quarter, on the back of Harv’s head. Had it been there all along?

  “How long does it stay suspended like that?” Megan asked.

  “Oh, all day, three eight-hour shifts!” Rob smiled, rocking forward. “It looks like a solid piece, I know, but there’s twenty gallons of the stuff coming down every minute!”

  Harv ran a hand over his head and brushed across the pink glob. Most of it stuck to his fingers so he brought it down in front of his face and sniffed it. Strands stretched between his fingers. With his other hand he felt his head again.

  “We’ll head upstairs from here and look over some pamphlets,” Rob said, “so if anybody’s in the mood for a hot dog, we’ve even got veggie…”

  Another pink glob appeared on Harv’s shoulder, and he smeared that away with his hand, too, then glanced back at me, brows furrowed, showing his front teeth as if to say, What the hell? I pursed my lips and shrugged, then I looked up too but didn’t see anything in particular. I counted seven pipes of various widths passing directly over us.

  “Is that what it’s called?” Colleen was asking. “Gossamer?”

  “Say, Rob!” I called. “I’ve got a student over here who’s—”

  “No, man, it’s okay,” said Harv, gingerly dabbing the glob on his head. “It’s—”

  Then a blanket of goop dropped over all of us, plastering our hair and our faces, filling eyes and mouths—warm as bathwater, salty as homemade Play-Doh. The kids let out half-gargled yowls. While the stuff kept falling on us I wiped at my face with my sodden shirt sleeve and tugged at kids’ wrists and hoods until we’d slid away from the machines. We weren’t getting smothered anymore, though dropping goo kept spreading in wide puddles across the concrete.

  “Nolan!” Rob shouted hoarsely, clearing his face with gummy hands. “Shut down number nine!”

  Eric had fallen down like a turtle but Harv sloshed across to pull him up.

  “What’s that?” some guy yelled from above us, as though he hadn’t heard a thing before. “Say something?”

  “For fuck’s sake shut off number nine!” hollered Rob.

  The Dockside lunchroom was upstairs from the offices and bathrooms, and at the end of the row of white tables a big picture window looked out over the factory floor. We worked our jaws through buns and wieners as we gazed down at orange-coverall guys, working their mops and buckets across the concrete beneath Pipe #9. The stuff had been warm and sticky, sure, but it’d washed away with soap and water.

  “A defect in the join,” Rob was saying in my ear. “Too much pressure and the thing just opened up like it had a zipper down the length of it, you understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, and lifted my veggie dog from the paper plate.

  The kids, all dressed in orange, had pulled their chairs up to the window too. We smelled acridly of citrus soft-soap after scrubbing ourselves in the company showers, and Dockside had even cracked open a fresh carton of coveralls while our clothes tumbled through the company washers and dryers.

  “At least the new guys know how to mop a floor,” Rob sighed.

  “What’s happened to your regular guys?” I asked. “Flu?”

  He nodded—he had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in eight days.

  “Too many guys sharing Mr. Daniels at the company picnic.”

  “We should’ve walked through school with that pink crap all over us.” Grace sat on the carpet while Amber braided her damp hair. “That would’ve been a parade.”

  “If you want to freak people out we could just wear these crap outfits,” said Amber.

  “Your go next, Franny,” said cold-sore’d Jacob as he slid back onto his chair. “There any more grape soda?”

  “Why, yes, there is,” said Rob, reaching for a two-litre.

  Behind Megan’s plastic chair, Colleen in her tracksuit shifted her weight and sighed—she’d been far enough to the right that just a single drop had landed on her neck. She gave me an exhausted half-smile and absently fluffed her hair up on one side. The clock said two o’clock but it felt like we’d been in Velouria since the day before.

  I followed Franny to the other end of the room. The coveralls didn’t flatter her figure—she looked like a Weebles toy from the seventies. The first-aid attendant, Clayton, was a curly-headed guy with a handlebar moustache.

  “Any news?” I asked, as Ryan Farnsworth straddled the examination chair.

  “Everything clear so far,” Clayton said in his gravelly voice. “All the eyes and ears check out. I’ll trust you guys to say if you noticed any—Jeez! What the shit?”

  He held Ryan’s face steady to peer at the underside of his jaw.

  “What’s this scab, it’s all down your—how come nobody else has this?”

  I felt the pinch on my earlobe before I realized I was doing it.

  “Might be mustard?” suggested Ryan.

  “Oh, hey, yeah. And this shit on your neck is presumably relish.”

  “What kind of factory is it?” Red Beard asked, as I stood taking another head count in the aisle of the bus—yes, one parent volunteer, fifteen kids.

  “Garbage bags,” I said.

  “Thought it must be a planer mill,” Red Beard rasped. “You smell like sawdust!”

  And what tremendous teachable moment did I deliver during the ride back?

  “Accidents will happen,” I told them as the October sun ambled over the ragged cornfields. I said it fourteen times, which was as often as Megan Avery complained that her butterfly-sequinned cardigan should not have gone through the industrial dryer.

  “There’s the
place, G!” Franny called from the back. “Ye Olde Candy Shoppe. Okay, not cool, now it’s behind us.”

  “You have been very good about this little crisis, Peter,” Colleen said, leaning across the aisle and shaking my knee. “Especially since you’re not the real teacher. But you need to make him stop at the next gas station, understand?”

  “What for?”

  “I need a Slim Jim!” Megan yelled. “I need some meat!”

  Man, when she said that, I realized how much I could’ve gone for a Slim Jim myself, all spicy and wet inside its plastic wrapper—heck, was that some post-traumatic symptom, were we all protein-deprived? I looked around to see if everybody was salivating but ninety percent of the kids were already dozing with their earbuds jammed in, Little Craig with his head on Willow’s shoulder.

  “Can’t stop, I already filled ’er up while I was waiting around,” Red Beard rasped over his shoulder. “I got to hurry and get it swept out for the Shriners tonight!”

  “Shriners’ll kick you out for no reason,” Harv announced behind us. “That’s what happened to my dad.”

  Once we got back into Hoover, the school secretary and first-aid attendant, red-headed Kathleen, decided she had to look a few of the kids over before we could send them all home. She sat Eric in a rolling chair behind the office counter and held his hand in her skirted lap while she found his pulse.

  “Oh, nurse,” he sighed. “Everything’s going woozy.”

  Kathleen leapt up, her chair spinning away.

  “He’s fine!” she announced. “They’re all fine!”

  Which was okay with me—I had to pick up Josie and Ray, after all, get Chick’n strips into the oven and ball clean socks into pairs.

  “You got through all right?” Cam winked at me. “I spent the whole afternoon leaving messages on the parents’ machines, and the ones I actually talked to thought I was telling them their kids were radioactive or something.”

  “Accidents’ll happen.” I rattled my car keys. It was only 3:40 so I had plenty of time to be at the kids’ sitter by four o’clock.

  “So I can leave it to you to call those parents back!” Cam clubbed me on the shoulder. “Nah, I’ll take care of it.”

  “What’s the sawdust smell?” Kathleen asked no one in particular.

  Now I smelled it too—something we must’ve stepped in back in Velouria.

  As I curved up Clemons Avenue the sun was settling behind the trees, throwing yellow light and black branch-shadows in long bars across the street. One more turn and another two blocks to the sitter’s, but then I spotted Harv Saunders standing on the sidewalk, hands in his hoodie pockets, staring up a driveway at a green split-level rancher. The door of the house stood open.

  I wasn’t desperate for friends, no, but it’d be an understatement to say that Harv reminded me of myself at an earlier time. I stopped at the curb, leaned across my pile of obsolete handouts and rolled down the passenger window. He glanced at me over his shoulder, his white face longer than should’ve been possible—maybe the pink goo had affected him physically.

  “What’s up, Harv? Everything all right?”

  He shrugged. I could hear voices from the house: a gruff male and shrill female, and from their teetering rhythm it sounded like alcohol had a voice too. A badly primered pickup sat in the driveway. I stepped out of my car and looked across its roof at him.

  “My dad’s girlfriend,” he said. “He sent me out here a minute ago.”

  “You got somebody’s house you can go to for a while?”

  “Won’t be all night.” He looked from me back to the open door. “I’ll hang out.”

  The dregs of the summer’s marigolds huddled along the edge of the driveway, and a wooden deer silhouette stood under a birch tree, making the place look a hundred percent homier than my own house did.

  “Your dad hit you?” I asked, heat rising into my scalp.

  “Just sent me out here.”

  I trudged around the car, past Harv and up the driveway. Evening was coming on and the backs of my hands felt cold.

  “It’s fucking cheese!” the woman yelled from inside.

  The man roared an inarticulate response. I went up three steps and rapped my knuckles against the grapes carved into the front door. Inside, carpeted steps went up to what must’ve been bedrooms, while in the living room to my right, a woman with her back to me lifted a rubber tree back into its pot. A brown La-Z-Boy recliner relaxed on its side, surrounded by potting soil and three barrel-shaped lights on tripods like I’d walked onto a movie set. There wasn’t a camera, but one of those white light-bouncing screens blocked the front window. The uriney musk of stale beer was so thick I could’ve bottled it. Barstools lay toppled under a counter that looked through into the kitchen—sounded like the guy was banging racks inside the oven.

  “It cannot be the same every time!” he yelled.

  “What’re you going to do?” Harv asked behind me.

  “What’s your dad’s name?” I whispered.

  “My dad?”

  “No, man, somebody else’s.”

  “Dave.”

  I rapped the door again. The woman straightened up, flicking brown hair over her shoulder. Her lipstick had smeared so it looked like her mouth was on her cheek.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah?”

  “The fuck’s this?” Dave asked, stomping in from the kitchen, a plaid oven mitt on each hand. He was definitely the guy we’d seen stapling fliers—blond like Harv but with a moustache and black glasses. He marched to the woman and moved sideways between us, brandishing his mitts like they were serrated.

  “I’m from the high school,” I said. “There was an incident on the field trip to Velouria today, and—”

  “I know.” The human crab pushed his glasses up his nose with the thumb of his mitt. “Message on the machine. Thought they were complaining about Harv here sucking cock in back of the school.”

  Harv leaned against the doorway and folded his arms. He still had C₁₀H₈O₄ written on the back of his hand—couldn’t have showered too thoroughly in Velouria.

  “We could sit,” the woman offered, picking something off the end of her tongue.

  “I’m not talking about anything like that.” My hands darted from one earlobe to the other, then I folded my hands together. “I wanted to say that Harv might need an early night, and to ask that if you have any, ah, health concerns that you contact the school first thing Monday morning.”

  “You must think I’m an awfully shitty parent if you gotta come in here and tell me all that.” He dangled his mitts beside his knees and looked at the floor. “Maybe you can tell Harv here that if he wants to step up like the big man, he can—”

  “Let’s all sit down over here,” the woman said. “I’ll get this…”

  “You going to all the parents with this?” the man asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what do you do again, Mr. Buttfucker?”

  “I teach high school.”

  “I ride with the State Troopers Auxiliary on Saturday nights.”

  My dad all over again. It was a mistake, sure, but for the sake of families everywhere I thought I’d have my say this one time.

  “Most kids,” I said, resting my elbow on the doorknob, “appreciate it if their mothers and fathers can act like human beings. It makes a real difference, long-term.”

  “I’m on the PTA, all right?” Still staring at me, Dave Saunders took his glasses off to clean them on his shirttail—his eyelids were yellow. “So you can kiss your little job goodbye. What’s your name?”

  “Like you said, the name’s Buttfucker.” I stepped back onto the front step. “Make sure Harv gets enough to eat tonight.”

  “It’s lasagna!” the woman called.

  I started down the steps, and the door closed behind me. I’d got Har
v in from the cold—that had been the main thing, right? Ear in hand, I hurried to my car but then he was jogging out to the sidewalk. His house was quiet behind him. In the twilight everything looked brown.

  “Uh, thanks, I guess,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let me know if you have any problems, one way or the other. It, uh, happens some families just don’t quite fit together.”

  He put his foot on my bumper.

  “Or some people don’t deserve to have children. My grandpa said that one time.”

  “Well, that’s a fine line. Being a parent isn’t the easiest. Different pressures on everybody.” I opened my door. “Where’s your mom, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “We don’t know.”

  A pickup truck stopped in the street and a girl in a black-and-red Pizza Hut uniform slid down from the passenger seat.

  “What’s going on?” she called to Harv. “Is Dad okay?”

  Then I felt anxious as a mother bear about Josie and Ray—I wasn’t late yet but every second was absolutely critical, like it might be faster if I ran behind the car and pushed it. As I flew up Clemons, they had to be thinking, Even when Mom was so nauseous she could hardly hold the steering wheel, she was never late picking us up. And from the look on Carla the sitter’s face, when I finally stood smiling in her carport, she also believed some people didn’t deserve to have children.

  “Your mother-in-law called at ten this morning to say she’d be getting them from school.” She glared at me through the screen, working a toothpick behind her bicuspid. “Sometimes I think if the Lord hadn’t screwed your head on tight you’d—”

  “I can survive without additional information,” I said.

  At 4:30 I was home again, rubbing my feet—they did smell woody, like I’d been camping—and watching NFL-wide completion-percentage stats scroll across the bottom of the tv while Josie, Ray and Deb dug something up in the backyard. Smelled something yeasty in the oven. The phone rang.

  “Peter Giller!” I answered, always anticipating the board office even if I was booked for a month already.

  “Mr. Giller, this is Miss Federici? Ray’s teacher?”

  If he’d done something praiseworthy they’d have sent home a participation ribbon in the front of his daytimer, maybe a certificate slathered in Toy Story stickers, so this wasn’t good. Acid reflux quivered up into my chest.