The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read Online Free PDF

controls the water flow into the turbines and Ghost-Mom is trailing me the entire time, puffing through the trees and picking up speed like a steam engine. The chamber was blasted into the heart of Boer Mountain. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust so I can make out the engraved aluminum plate screwed just inside the entrance:
110 ft. long, 80 ft. wide, 118 ft. high parabolic arch. A wonder of modern engineering
. It’s generally empty except for a couple of times a year when workers from Smeltersite come to Bodie for an inspection. Pauley always comes here when he wants to be alone. Ghost-Mom never ventures past the chamber mouth; she must know what’s going on downstream. I think ghosts are like tiny drops of water clinging to a riverbank, waiting for gravity to push them in. She must sense the penstocks, the 900-metre vertical drop, and the dark 16-kilometre tunnel out to the wide-open ocean on the other side.
    I walk in and spot Pauley lying on his back in the dirt, staring up at the smooth ceiling covered in spiderweb veins of dusty quartz. The wind is dead in here, with a cotton-ball silence, an airtight egg-ness like an ear-change in pressure.
    “Your dad says your mom thought her shit smelled like roses,” he says, sitting up. His voice is tough, but it’s hard not to notice there’s envy in it too.
    Ever since I got here, Pauley’s been telling me variations on the same theme. I’m pretty sure he has some sort of care-meter going on in his mind and that I’m coming out on top. And I just haven’t got around to explaining to him that I already know all about my mom, that it’s impossible to be with someone your entire life and not be cognizant of every tinything—like how Mom hated umbrellas and always said “No” when she actually meant, “It’s all right.”
    When Mom used to catch me sneaking out, she’d make me stand with her hardcover Bible held out in front of me, the one with at least four thousand extra Polish verses, until my arms fell off. I think she thought that just by holding it I’d catch something, like the bums who skimmed the river by our apartment for lard floaters. She’d slap at it with her calloused palm so I’d almost drop it. “Dis,” she would say. “Dis is love letter. To you, from Him.” Then she would motion up with her cigarette butt to somewhere beyond the yellowed ceiling, the knocking water pipes, and the thousands of pigeons that spent their day crap-shellacking the roof of our complex, where the wild blue yonder was. Mom did everything with a purpose that reeked of faith. And she made it her job that I should never stop knowing the sacrifices she made for me. She didn’t seem to notice that I was just a kid and I was always rushing to keep up.
    “Father says Blumenkranz is coming in tomorrow,” I say to Pauley.
    “I know. I can already smell his breath.”
    The air in the chamber smells a lot like Blumenkranz’s halitosis. Years ago, Mom told me how he left Europe by hiding in the boiler room of a theatre-company ship heading to the U.S. Then he used his contacts to deliver the greatest wrestling villain of all time, the Russian Ogre.
    “THE UGLIEST WRESTLER IN THE WORLD! WOMEN FAINT! MEN SHOUT! CHILDREN CRY!” Pauley yells into the chamber like he’s reading my thoughts.
    “What are you doing here, anyway?” he says.
    “Fresh air.”
    Pauley snorts and we both laugh.
    I put my arm around Pauley and squeeze. He freezes, his breathing stops like he’s so confused his only response is to play dead. I squeeze harder, but there’s nothing worse than trying to hug someone who is trying to tell you with every muscle to bug off.
    “Pauley,” I croon into the empty chamber. “You unfortunate child.”
    The minute I say it, I know that I’m mimicking the Old Ursine nuns. And I realize that Pauley’s following my father’s ideas about fundamental defense. You never know, he says, when you might take a chair to the back of the head. Suddenly