American Science: Chapter 4 - C 6 H 12 O 6

Thunder Mountain showed back up about that time with the drinks and my Funyuns.

“What’d I miss?” he asked, sitting down and sliding my can of Fresca over to me.

“Not much,” Homicide said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Hey man,” he grimaced “What the hell? You know I don’t take sugar.”

“Aw, I forgot. You want me to go get you another one?”

“No, I’ll go get it myself,” he said as he got up and headed toward the door. “You carry on with your story, honey. I won’t be long.”

“No problem.” I looked at Thunder Mountain. “So, Michael had to go to his first Boy Scout meeting the night he moved in next door to me. Little did he know that he and the Boy Scouts were going to get on like a house on fire. Two years later, he was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout.”

“What’s so special about that?” he asked.

“It’s the highest achievement a Boy Scout can attain,” Homicide said, as he walked in holding a fresh cup of coffee. “Only four percent of Boy Scouts ever achieve this rank and it usually takes years to get get there. The fact that he was on his way in only two years is pretty impressive.”

“Exactly.” I said. “So, he was a model Boy Scout. It turns out that scouting was his parents’ worst nightmare. It was full of science and technology type merit badges, including the Chemistry merit badge and the Atomic Energy merit badge, both of which he more or less could’ve earned in his sleep. For someone as adept at chemistry as he was, the requirements were a joke. He had been performing complicated experiments for years and they wanted him to do some lame brain experiment with an onion. It was kid’s stuff.

As for the Atomic Energy badge, that was a joke as well. They wanted him to build a model of a reactor. He thought he could do them one better.”

“Is that where the idea for the reactor came from?”

“Maybe initially. It was a long time coming, I think. You see, he was really good at the scouting stuff, but it wasn’t always so good to him. He caught a lot of flack for being a Boy Scout.”

Homicide leaned in. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that kids can be cruel. Michael was really proud of all the things that he was doing in the Boy Scouts. For the first time in a really long time, he felt like he had a place where he belonged. He wanted to share that. He made the mistake of being too enthusiastic about it, I guess. One time, he did a speech at school about what it meant to him to be a Boy Scout. The kids in the class, mostly the other boys, were so heartless about it - they wouldn’t let him live it down. He even wore his uniform to school that day, so the teasing was incessant.”

“Sounds rough.” Thunder Mountain mused.

“It was hard on him, but I guess the benefits of being a Boy Scout outweighed the costs for him and he stayed the course. Maybe it was sheer will and determination, but he wasn’t going to let the kids at school dissuade him from the one place he felt like he could be himself - the one place where people weren’t looking at him like he had three heads when he starting going on about science and chemistry.

It wasn’t only that though. Michael was surprisingly good at leading the younger boys. He was very good natured and the younger boys just loved him. They thought he was so cool, which was awesome for him, since no one his own age thought anything of the sort.

Back to the reactor though, I don’t know that in the end it was all about the Atomic Energy badge. It may have begun there, but there were more things going on than just a boy wanting a merit badge.

“What do you mean?” asked Homicide.

“Well, for one thing, Michael Spaulding is probably the kindest, most altruistic person I’ve ever known. I think that once he got the idea in his head that he could build a nuclear reactor, delusions of grandeur took over. Then it was a breeder reactor. Then he was going to help the community with his reactor. Then he was going to help the whole world with it. But underneath all that, I think that he was just interested in finally proving to his parents that he could do more than blow things up. They never really got over the whole fireworks thing and even though his grandmother was supportive, his mom and dad would have loved nothing better than to have seen him leave chemistry behind him for good and instead foster a love of biology or astrophysics. They wanted a doctor for a son and got a mad scientist instead.”

“What makes you think this?” Thunder Mountain asked.

“Just little things. I’d see literature from pre-med schools in his room. ‘What’s that?’ I’d ask.

‘Oh, just something my parents dropped off,” he would say. Then, “How many hospitals do you think we could run with one reactor?’

You know, little things”

“So, what did he actually do to get the Atomic Energy Merit Badge?” Homicide asked.

“Well, there are several requirements to get any badge. I’m sad to say that I know all of this just from hanging around him for as long as I have. For that particular one, hmm, what all did he have to do? He built the model nuclear reactor, which like I said, was kind of a joke considering. Umm, he had to build a 3D model of an element from the periodic table - he chose Uranium. I helped with that one.

Uh, gosh, I don’t remember everything, it’s very involved, but he did all of it like it was Mickey Mouse stuff. It just wasn’t an issue. He had a harder time earning his swimming merit badge to be honest. Couldn’t manage the backstroke for the longest time. Worked at it all summer one year until he finally got the hang of it. I swear we all had fungus growing in our ears from spending so much time in Lake Stella that summer.”

“Why didn’t you all just go to the YMCA if Michael was the pool boy?” asked Thunder Mountain.

I looked at him incredulously. “I’m not the type of person who gets a YMCA membership.”

“What does that mean?”

“You want me to spell it out for you? My family is too poor.”

“I though the YMCA had need based scholarships.”

“Yeah, well we’re just poor enough to not be able to afford it and just well off enough to not qualify for need based assistance. That sort of thing is based on TANF eligibility, which we don’t receive.”

“You’re awfully articulate for a 15 year old.”

“I have to be. Anyway, I thought you guys were the FBI, not HRS and that we were talking about my relationship with Michael Spaulding, not my socioeconomic status.”

“Okay, sorry. Please, continue.”

“Like I was saying, getting the Atomic Energy badge for Michael, was a cake walk, but as far as the Boy Scouts went, it was a big deal. Apparently, he was the only person in a several hundred mile radius who had even attempted the thing, much less gotten it, so he was kind of a big deal in the Boy Scouts afterward. That didn’t interest him though. He was interested in whether or not he could actually build the real thing. The model had been easy enough after all. And it wasn’t like he didn’t already have a little bit of radioactive material he could work with.

For reasons I will never understand, he got it into his head some years ago that he wanted to collect a sample of every element of the periodic table. I mean, every last one. Even the highly unstable ones. Even the radioactive ones. At one point he had a can with a lump of sodium in it. Do you know what happens when sodium meets air? Kaboom! So, in his quest for the elements, he’s managed to amass more than a little radium, some thorium, and a little bit of yellow ore, otherwise known as uranium ore. This was enough to get started with the process anyway."

“Where does a 17 year old kid get radium?” asked Thunder Mountain.

“Well you know where we got things later on, but as for what he had to begin with? For starters, he was probably 13 or 14 when he first started collecting the stuff and he got it from scraping the paint off of old clock faces. You’ve perhaps heard of the Radium Girls?”

Thunder Mountain gave a perplexed look. Homicide decided to chime in.

“Radium Girls: factory painters from the late 1910s, early 1920s who contracted radium poisoning from licking the paintbrushes they used to paint the faces of clocks with luminescent radium paint.”

“Exactly. You can still find some of these clocks in antique stores. Michael would buy them and scrape the paint off into a little jar.”

“Sounds dangerous.” Thunder Mountain said.

“He always used a mask, but yeah, it probably wasn’t the brightest idea.”

“What about the thorium?”

“Camping lantern mantles.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they’re coated with it or something, so he’d process the stuff back out until it was pure thorium.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. A lot of fire? He wouldn’t really let me be around when he was working on that sort of stuff.”

“What about the uranium ore?”

“You’d be surprised what you can buy through a mail order catalog. Why are you guys so worried about this stuff anyway? He obtained all that stuff completely legally. On the up and up. Anyone, anywhere, any day of the week could do what he did, if they had the know how and the wherewithal.”

“Jalisco, is it just me, or do you find that notion particularly disturbing?”

“Most people wouldn’t want to, Martin.”

American Science: Chapter 4 - C 6 H 12 O 6

Thunder Mountain showed back up about that time with the drinks and my Funyuns.

“What’d I miss?” he asked, sitting down and sliding my can of Fresca over to me.

“Not much,” Homicide said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Hey man,” he grimaced “What the hell? You know I don’t take sugar.”

“Aw, I forgot. You want me to go get you another one?”

“No, I’ll go get it myself,” he said as he got up and headed toward the door. “You carry on with your story, honey. I won’t be long.”

“No problem.” I looked at Thunder Mountain. “So, Michael had to go to his first Boy Scout meeting the night he moved in next door to me. Little did he know that he and the Boy Scouts were going to get on like a house on fire. Two years later, he was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout.”

“What’s so special about that?” he asked.

“It’s the highest achievement a Boy Scout can attain,” Homicide said, as he walked in holding a fresh cup of coffee. “Only four percent of Boy Scouts ever achieve this rank and it usually takes years to get get there. The fact that he was on his way in only two years is pretty impressive.”

“Exactly.” I said. “So, he was a model Boy Scout. It turns out that scouting was his parents’ worst nightmare. It was full of science and technology type merit badges, including the Chemistry merit badge and the Atomic Energy merit badge, both of which he more or less could’ve earned in his sleep. For someone as adept at chemistry as he was, the requirements were a joke. He had been performing complicated experiments for years and they wanted him to do some lame brain experiment with an onion. It was kid’s stuff.

As for the Atomic Energy badge, that was a joke as well. They wanted him to build a model of a reactor. He thought he could do them one better.”

“Is that where the idea for the reactor came from?”

“Maybe initially. It was a long time coming, I think. You see, he was really good at the scouting stuff, but it wasn’t always so good to him. He caught a lot of flack for being a Boy Scout.”

Homicide leaned in. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that kids can be cruel. Michael was really proud of all the things that he was doing in the Boy Scouts. For the first time in a really long time, he felt like he had a place where he belonged. He wanted to share that. He made the mistake of being too enthusiastic about it, I guess. One time, he did a speech at school about what it meant to him to be a Boy Scout. The kids in the class, mostly the other boys, were so heartless about it - they wouldn’t let him live it down. He even wore his uniform to school that day, so the teasing was incessant.”

“Sounds rough.” Thunder Mountain mused.

“It was hard on him, but I guess the benefits of being a Boy Scout outweighed the costs for him and he stayed the course. Maybe it was sheer will and determination, but he wasn’t going to let the kids at school dissuade him from the one place he felt like he could be himself - the one place where people weren’t looking at him like he had three heads when he starting going on about science and chemistry.

It wasn’t only that though. Michael was surprisingly good at leading the younger boys. He was very good natured and the younger boys just loved him. They thought he was so cool, which was awesome for him, since no one his own age thought anything of the sort.

Back to the reactor though, I don’t know that in the end it was all about the Atomic Energy badge. It may have begun there, but there were more things going on than just a boy wanting a merit badge.

“What do you mean?” asked Homicide.

“Well, for one thing, Michael Spaulding is probably the kindest, most altruistic person I’ve ever known. I think that once he got the idea in his head that he could build a nuclear reactor, delusions of grandeur took over. Then it was a breeder reactor. Then he was going to help the community with his reactor. Then he was going to help the whole world with it. But underneath all that, I think that he was just interested in finally proving to his parents that he could do more than blow things up. They never really got over the whole fireworks thing and even though his grandmother was supportive, his mom and dad would have loved nothing better than to have seen him leave chemistry behind him for good and instead foster a love of biology or astrophysics. They wanted a doctor for a son and got a mad scientist instead.”

“What makes you think this?” Thunder Mountain asked.

“Just little things. I’d see literature from pre-med schools in his room. ‘What’s that?’ I’d ask.

‘Oh, just something my parents dropped off,” he would say. Then, “How many hospitals do you think we could run with one reactor?’

You know, little things”

“So, what did he actually do to get the Atomic Energy Merit Badge?” Homicide asked.

“Well, there are several requirements to get any badge. I’m sad to say that I know all of this just from hanging around him for as long as I have. For that particular one, hmm, what all did he have to do? He built the model nuclear reactor, which like I said, was kind of a joke considering. Umm, he had to build a 3D model of an element from the periodic table - he chose Uranium. I helped with that one.

Uh, gosh, I don’t remember everything, it’s very involved, but he did all of it like it was Mickey Mouse stuff. It just wasn’t an issue. He had a harder time earning his swimming merit badge to be honest. Couldn’t manage the backstroke for the longest time. Worked at it all summer one year until he finally got the hang of it. I swear we all had fungus growing in our ears from spending so much time in Lake Stella that summer.”

“Why didn’t you all just go to the YMCA if Michael was the pool boy?” asked Thunder Mountain.

I looked at him incredulously. “I’m not the type of person who gets a YMCA membership.”

“What does that mean?”

“You want me to spell it out for you? My family is too poor.”

“I though the YMCA had need based scholarships.”

“Yeah, well we’re just poor enough to not be able to afford it and just well off enough to not qualify for need based assistance. That sort of thing is based on TANF eligibility, which we don’t receive.”

“You’re awfully articulate for a 15 year old.”

“I have to be. Anyway, I thought you guys were the FBI, not HRS and that we were talking about my relationship with Michael Spaulding, not my socioeconomic status.”

“Okay, sorry. Please, continue.”

“Like I was saying, getting the Atomic Energy badge for Michael, was a cake walk, but as far as the Boy Scouts went, it was a big deal. Apparently, he was the only person in a several hundred mile radius who had even attempted the thing, much less gotten it, so he was kind of a big deal in the Boy Scouts afterward. That didn’t interest him though. He was interested in whether or not he could actually build the real thing. The model had been easy enough after all. And it wasn’t like he didn’t already have a little bit of radioactive material he could work with.

For reasons I will never understand, he got it into his head some years ago that he wanted to collect a sample of every element of the periodic table. I mean, every last one. Even the highly unstable ones. Even the radioactive ones. At one point he had a can with a lump of sodium in it. Do you know what happens when sodium meets air? Kaboom! So, in his quest for the elements, he’s managed to amass more than a little radium, some thorium, and a little bit of yellow ore, otherwise known as uranium ore. This was enough to get started with the process anyway."

“Where does a 17 year old kid get radium?” asked Thunder Mountain.

“Well you know where we got things later on, but as for what he had to begin with? For starters, he was probably 13 or 14 when he first started collecting the stuff and he got it from scraping the paint off of old clock faces. You’ve perhaps heard of the Radium Girls?”

Thunder Mountain gave a perplexed look. Homicide decided to chime in.

“Radium Girls: factory painters from the late 1910s, early 1920s who contracted radium poisoning from licking the paintbrushes they used to paint the faces of clocks with luminescent radium paint.”

“Exactly. You can still find some of these clocks in antique stores. Michael would buy them and scrape the paint off into a little jar.”

“Sounds dangerous.” Thunder Mountain said.

“He always used a mask, but yeah, it probably wasn’t the brightest idea.”

“What about the thorium?”

“Camping lantern mantles.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they’re coated with it or something, so he’d process the stuff back out until it was pure thorium.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. A lot of fire? He wouldn’t really let me be around when he was working on that sort of stuff.”

“What about the uranium ore?”

“You’d be surprised what you can buy through a mail order catalog. Why are you guys so worried about this stuff anyway? He obtained all that stuff completely legally. On the up and up. Anyone, anywhere, any day of the week could do what he did, if they had the know how and the wherewithal.”

“Jalisco, is it just me, or do you find that notion particularly disturbing?”

“Most people wouldn’t want to, Martin.”

American Science: Chapter 3 - C 12 H 22 O 11

“So, after the debacle with the fireworks, Michael was sent to live with Grandma Stewart in Crescent City, which as you guy probably know isn’t all that far from Fruitland. It’s not like he had to change schools or anything, and really he was probably in a better position overall. He was in town instead of out in the sticks, he was closer to school, to the store, and to friends, if he’d had any.”

“He wasn’t very popular then?” asked Homicide.

“Well, no. I mean, he had friends, but not anyone that he was really close with. He didn’t have people over on the weekends, you know. That could have been because no one wanted to drive all the way out to Fruitland though. Sure, there were a few kids in Mount Royal that he hung out with, but even they weren’t very close. It was a convenience thing more than anything else. He was sort of a loner - more interested in his experiments than in forming relationships with people.

Anyway, when he moved in with Grandma Stewart, his parents also told him that he was going to join the Boy Scouts and get a job. They thought that this would keep him too busy to get into trouble with his experiments. Part of the reason he was sent to live with Grandma was the fact that Crescent City was closer to the jobs and she could drive him to work until he was old enough to drive. They had hoped that he would get a job at the Miller’s Supermarket, but the manager was still a little sore about the whole ammonia incident, so instead he wound up being the pool boy at both the YMCA and the KOA Kampground. This was right up his alley as he was able to use his chemistry know how with the pool chemicals. He was really good at it too. The pools were never so clean as when Michael worked on them.

The day he moved into Grandma Stewart’s, my cousin Diane, my brother Stephen, and I were all hanging out on the porch of our trailer next door. The houses were up on this hill that overlook the lake - probably the only high ground in Crescent City, right next to the fernery and the Magnolia crop that belongs to Mr. Newbold - but you all knew that. Why am I telling you that? You can see the lake from our porches.

We were sitting on the porch looking for something to do when we saw Michael moving all this stuff out of his Grandma’s car into the garage. He was hauling box after box of clanking glass and eventually curiosity got the better of me and I had to pop over and introduce myself. I was only 12 at the time and rather precocious. Stephen and Diane went with me.
I was the first to peek my head around the side of the open garage door. Michael was inside setting up his lab/bedroom.

‘Hi! Can we come in?’

He looked up, startled and nearly dropped a box of beakers. ‘Uh, hi. Sure. I guess. Who are you?’

‘I’m Marlene,’ I said, extending my hand, ‘and this is my brother Stephen. We live next door.’

‘Stephen? Aren’t you Mr. Behm’s T.A.?’

‘Yeah,’ Stephen replied, ‘How’d you know that?’

‘I’ve seen you around.’ Michael said as he began un-boxing the beakers and setting them on a shelf.

Just then, Diane butted herself in front of Stephen and myself ‘And I’m Diane,’ she said, glaring at me. ‘Thanks for introducing me Marlene.’

‘I was getting to it.’ I said.

Michael looked like a deer caught in headlights as Diane batted her eyes at him. ‘Um,’ he swallowed.
‘It’s nice to meet you too.’

‘Oh, the pleasure is, all mine.’

Now, it should be noted that despite the fact that Michael was at this time a fully fledged Chemistry geek, he was not an altogether unattractive one. He was a little gangly, and little lanky, but he was what adults would call conventionally handsome. Blonde hair, parted to the side, blue eyes, average height, nice smile. If it weren’t for his awkward manner, most girls would have been all over this guy.

Diane, however was not most girls. She laughed as she flipped her frosted, Rachel cut hair over her shoulder and said in a chirpy voice “I haven’t seen you around before.”

Michael swallowed. ‘That’s funny. I go to Crescent City. I’m going into the 10th grade.’

‘Oh, wow! I’m going into the 9th! Maybe I’ll see you around next year!’ Diane shrieked.

‘Wow, that is cool,’ Stephen said, rolling his eyes ‘we’re all going to go to school together. How fun.’

‘Yeah, I’ll be starting 7th grade out there in the fall too.’ I said.

“Wait,” Thunder Mountain interrupted. “What do you mean by that?”

“Don’t you remember?” Homicide replied. “They have a Junior/Senior High School. It goes from the
Seventh to the Twelfth grade.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Noth that that matters. Get on with the story.”

“Let the girl take her time, we don’t have anywhere better to be, Martin.”

“Okay, Jalisco, but you know, at some point, we ought to break for dinner.”

‘‘Jalisco’ I thought. ‘Maybe ‘Martin’ is Thunder Mountain’s last name.’

Homicide shifted in his seat. “It’s only 4 o’clock.”

“I know man, but I got low blood sugar.”

“Go grab a Coke or something then.”

“Alright, you want anything?” Thunder Mountain said, as he got up and started to walk toward the door.

“Hmmm . . . Maybe a coffee if they have any. How about you, sweetheart? You want anything?”

I looked up at Thunder Mountain. “I would love a Fresca.”

“She wants a Fresca.” Thunder Mountain scoffed.

“Don’t worry” I said. “I know they have them in the soda machine, and if not, they have them in the package store at the Parker House next door. Actually, if you’re gonna go over there, a bag of Funyuns would be great too.”

“Funyuns?”

“Yeah,” I said, digging around in my pocket. “Here’s five bucks. That ought to cover it.”

“Okay.” Thunder Mountain said as he grabbed the money from my hand. “I’ll be back.”

And with that Thunder Mountain was gone. I looked at Homicide.

“Should we wait for him to get back?”

“Nah, I’m recording all of this for posterity. You can go ahead.”

“Where was I?”

“You were telling Michael that you were going to be starting 7th grade in the fall.”

“Oh, right. So, we were all going to be going to school together, and yet somehow, no one was acquainted with one another yet.

‘Well, this just won’t do,’ I said. ‘You’re our neighbor now.’

I was the kind of kid that was always trying to make connections. I was the matchmaker of the group. I thought that we would all be the best of friends like one of those groups you read about in books that go on adventures together and solve mysteries together or something. I guess in some ways it sort of turned out like that, except it way more like a trio cum duo instead of a group. Diane was never really involved except to try and get into Michael’s pants.

‘What sorts of things are you into Michael?’ I asked.

‘Um, science?’ he replied, while absentmindedly opening a box of lab supplies.

‘Oh really? What kind of science?’I asked, as I began to put the supplies on the shelf next to him.

‘Chemistry?’he said, handing me jars of chemicals out of the box.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘By the way, where to you want these bottles?’

Michael pointed to a shelf above my head. ‘There.’

‘Ah.’ I said, placing them where he wanted them. ‘Stephen here is really into chemistry as well. Aren’t you Stephen?’

‘Well, yeah.’ Stephen said, looking down at the floor.

‘See!’ I exclaimed. “Common ground. Friends!’

Michael stopped unpacking and looked at Stephen. ‘What is your primary area of research?’

‘Analytical chemistry. You?’

‘Some analytical chemistry, but primarily nuclear chemistry. What are your plans?’

‘Pharmacology. Yours?’

‘Nuclear physics.’

‘I figured. Are you looking at any schools?’

‘Michigan State.’

‘I’ve heard that their program is up and coming. I’m thinking of Stetson for my undergrad since I feel like I have a pretty good chance of landing a good scholarship and then Emory of UF for my graduate degree.’

‘Not a bad plan.’

Diane was so irritated the entire time this exchange was going on. She couldn’t stand for things to not be all about her. Suddenly, instead of the focus being shifted to her, if shifted to me.

‘What about you, Marlene,’ Michael asked. ‘What are you into?’

I laughed. ‘I’m not much of a science buff. I’m into religions. I want to go to Stetson for Religious Studies.’

‘Really. That’s interesting. I don’t know a whole lot about religions. I mean, I go to church with my family, but I don’t really think about it a lot outside of that.’

‘My faith is very important to me. I want to be a light unto the world.’ I said. At this Diane rolled her eyes. ‘Maybe you’ll go to church with us some time?’

‘Maybe.’ Michael replied.

‘Maybe in the meantime, you’ll let us show you around town? Take you on a walking tour?’Diane said.

‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,’ I agreed.

‘Well, it’s not like I’m new around here. I’m just sort of new to living here. I only moved from Fruitland.’

‘Still, it’s different when you live here full time,’ I said.

Michael looked at me and smiled. It was the first time I saw him smile and I was charmed. ‘I’d love to, really, but I have someplace I have to be very soon and I can’t be late. Can I take a rain check?

I smiled back at him. ‘Sure. There’s plenty of time. We have all summer.’

‘Thanks,’ he said as he continued to unpack another box and assemble his lab.

American Science: Chapter 2 - Ba Cl 2

While I’m sure that it all really began a long time before this, for me it began on Memorial Day, 1995 or, as others fondly remember it: “The Day Michael Spaulding nearly burned down Mount Royal.

“What’s Mount Royal?” asked Homicide.

“What’s Mount Royal? How long have you been skulking around here following us, and you haven’t figured that out yet?”

“We’ve been a little pre-occupied with some precocious teenagers.”

I smiled. “Fair enough. Mount Royal is a subdivision out in Fruitland. It’s where Michael grew up with his mom and dad. Mount Royal is so called because smack dab in the middle of it is an Native American burial mound of the same name. This is protected land - so it makes for a really weird setting. You have all these fancy homes, some of which have airplane hangers attached as this community has it’s own runway, and then there’s this burial mound with a fence around it. Sometimes the Native Americans go out there and perform ceremonies on the mound, and at some point in the past several years there was a big archaeological dig out there. 

Anyway, that’s where Michael grew up. His parents are both dentists in Jacksonville and they own a plane. His dad has his pilot’s license, so they fly to work every day. Somehow, that makes more sense than driving. Never made much sense to me, but then again, my family’s income hovers right around the poverty line.

I digress, it was Memorial Day, 1995 and Michael had been working on some new fireworks for the fireworks display that evening. Michael had already been experimenting with chemistry for years at this point. He received some children’s book of chemistry experiments for Christmas one year when he was around eight or nine years old and the thing captured his imagination to such an extent that chemistry became his whole life from that point forward. 

At first, his parents were thrilled. They thought they were going to have another doctor in the family, or maybe a pharmacist, but it wasn’t long before things began to get completely out of control. Michael was mixing any and everything he could to test for a reaction and damn the consequences. One time, his grandmother told me, he accidentally made mustard gas in the toilet while doing chores and the whole house had to be evacuated. He thought that mixing bleach and Windex would just make a stronger cleanser, never thinking for a moment that Windex’s main ingredient was ammonia. After that he got really meticulous about reading labels. 

Another time there was  chemical spill in the supermarket. A whole pallet of ammonia spilled in the aisle. While they were evacuating the store, our intrepid chemist runs to the other end of the place and sprints back with a bottle of The Works and pours it on the mess. A huge white cloud forms. The store manage is irate and bans Michael from the store. Later, come to find out, that’s exactly what should have been done, as the poison control hotline later confirmed. 

So, like I said, Michael was making some homemade fireworks for the community celebration of Memorial Day. There were a few families in the neighborhood who would all get together and have a barbecue and set of some fireworks and sparklers and whatnot for the kids. Maybe they’d have a slip and slide as well. I wouldn’t know. I was never invited. Michael thought he would make some really big and bright fireworks for this celebration. Some fireworks that were going to put the store bought ones to shame. He worked all day mixing this and that together in his little lab and packing the powder into different rockets. He added different metals to make different colors. 

Well, he decided that he wanted to make a green firework. Green is hard to make, you see. It required barium chloride, which is really unstable at room temperature, so it has to be combined with chlorinated rubber to be used in the firework.”

“How did a kid even get all this stuff?” Thunder Mountain asked.

“Man, I don’t know. His parents didn’t know how to say ‘no’ I guess. It’s not like you can’t just order this stuff from a chemistry supply company. People do experiments I guess. Short answer? No idea. Anyway, he’s got all this barium chloride in this firework which was not combined with enough chlorinated rubber. He’s packed all these fireworks with this stuff, and they’re in a pile with all the other fireworks. Suddenly, they all start going off at once, and they’re all on the ground. They shoot off in all directions. Toward houses, toward people, toward trees. It’s chaos. Total pandemonium. No one knows what’s happening, or why, but somehow everyone is pretty sure that it’s Michael’s fault. 

The fire department and the police are called and eventually it becomes clear what happened. Michael feels bad and he apologizes over and over and over, but no one is having it. This was the last straw. His parents are finished with his shenanigans, he’s going to live with his grandmother in town where she can keep a better eye on him. They blame themselves because they work so far out of town, but it’s not like they can close up their practice in Jacksonville and work in Crescent City, you know? It’s not like they’re rich or something, right? It’s not like they have options.

And that’s how Michael ended up living next door to me.”

Homecide shifted in his chair. “What do you mean ‘This was the last straw?’ Other than the mustard gas and the good deed at the grocery store, what else had he done?”

“Allegedly, his mother was terrified that he was going to blow up the house when they weren’t home. She claimed that the carpet in his room was full of holes from his experiments and that he’s caused the house to shake on more than one occasion from an explosion in his lab.”

“You don’t sound like you’re buying it.”

“His mother and I don’t get on.”

“Ah.”

American Science: Chapter 1 - C 8 H 10 N 4 O 2

I was cold and I was ready to go home. I hadn’t really done anything to be here anyway.

“Can’t I go home?” I asked.

“You’re an accessory, Ms. Taylor. We could have you for aiding and abetting.” This was said by the younger agent. He was big and stern, with dark skin, dark eyes, and a dark disposition. His body seemed to take up the whole room and the light from the overhead lamp shined off his shaved head. He was a mountain of a man, his voice, like thunder.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t know.”

“Tell us how it all began, Ms. Taylor.”

Tell them how it all began. Where would I even start? How had I wound up in an interrogation room with a cup of watered down coffee in front of me and two FBI agents asking me how it all began. I was a kid when it all began. I didn’t know what I was doing. We were all just kids. How were we supposed to know what we were getting ourselves into?

“I think it all started before I was ever in the picture,”

“Tell us about it,” said the agent who reminded me of that one cop from Homicide: Life on the Streets. The one that had the bar. “Ms. Taylor, we have nothing but time.”

I sat there in a surly slouch for longer than I should have. I didn’t want to talk to Homicide and Thunder Mountain. I wanted to go home. I wanted to know what happened to Michael. I wondered if I talked whether they would tell me what had happened to him or not.

“Where’s Michael?”

Homicide smiled at me. “All in due time, Ms. Taylor. First, we want to hear your story. We want to know how you and Mr. Spaulding came to be acquainted. It’s not every day that two enterprising teenagers set out to cause an international incident by building a nuclear reactor in their garage.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Homicide smiled. “Oh, but you did. Why don’t you cut the charade and just tell us about it. I promise you, it’ll be better for you in the long run if you do.”

I began to wonder what choice I had. These guys were the FBI and they meant business. Anyway, it wasn’t like I hadn’t already eluded them for so long. It was about time that I get caught. The jig ought to finally be up. It was just a shame that I couldn’t have given Michael a chance to get away. I had no problem taking the fall for him.

Thunder Mountain was pacing the corner, when he suddenly burst out with “Are you going to talk or not?”

“Now Martin,” said Homicide, “there’s no need to rush the young lady. Let her take her time. These things need to be organic you know. We can’t pry it out of her. She’s got to want to talk. We can wait. All. Day. Long.”

Martin. I did not expect that to be Thunder Mountain’s name. I wondered what Homicide’s name was. I imagined that I would learn that too before I left that tiny room in the Crescent City Police Department. I began to wonder where the rest of the local cops were. They couldn’t have been happy to have to let the Feds muscle in on their turf. I’m sure that Officer Maycomb and Officer Isley were just chomping at the bit for the opportunity to interrogate little old me, not to mention Chief Duchennes.

Well, joke’s on them. They missed their chance. All those months Michael and I were zipping around town with radioactive materials right under their noses and they were none the wiser. One little traffic stop and it would have all been over. Alas, they were too busy doing whatever small town cops do. Not hassling the likes of hardened uranium thieves, that’s for sure.

So, maybe I did deserve to be there. I was an FBI eluding, uranium stealing, criminal - and for what? I don’t even know. I don’t know who I even am anymore. I used to have things so figured out. Then he had to nearly burn down Mount Royal and come skulking into my life dragging all that fabulous lab equipment behind him and things we just never going to be the same again.
I looked up at Homicide and Thunder Mountain.

“Alright boys, I’ll talk.”

Happy Halloween!

Tonight, we eat candy, and tomorrow, we begin writing American Science!

Off we go-a Trick-or-Treating!

In Memory of Lou Reed

Jenny said when she was just about five years old 

You know, my parents are gonna be the death of us all

Two TV sets and two Cadillac cars --

Well, you know, it ain't gonna help me at all

Then one fine mornin' she tuns on a New York station

She doesn't believe what she hears at all

She started dancin' to that fine fine music

You know her life was saved by Rock & Roll