The Field (14 page)

“Well, I'm happy to be the benefactor of her hospitality,” Will says.

“You are very welcome, William,” Mrs. R says as she comes down the steps from the porch. I'm pretty sure she's checking to see if we are stuffing ourselves properly. “Just let me know if you boys need anything else.”

We talk about music and school and nothing in particular while we're eating and I can't help but notice that Will is especially jazzed up, almost hyper-positive. It seems forced. I feel like I should talk to him about the drinking, but I'm not sure how to bring it up without pissing him off. Like last night.

“How're things at home? How's your mom?” I ask instead.

“Not great. Dad's got an apartment now and my mom's like a walking zombie. I mean she's there, but she isn't really
there
, you know?” He taps his head. “At least she's not constantly crying anymore.”

“That sucks,” I say, knowing it's totally inadequate. “Is there anything we can do to help? Like meals or anything?” Isn't that what people always do in a crisis? Bring food? Not that I would cook anything, but I'm sure my mom would.

“Thanks, but my mom's friends have been coming by and helping us with stuff like that. We're all taken care of so my dad can go out and party, because isn't that what it's all about?” he says and tips his drink can toward me in a toast.

“Yeah, about that,” I say slowly, figuring this is as good an opening as I'm going to get. “What's with the drinking? You know it could get you kicked off the team.” Not exactly confrontational, but I see Will stiffen. Cole continues to eat his potato chips, wisely staying silent.

“Like I said last night, Coach isn't going to find out. It's not a big deal anyway, so lay off.” He pushes himself back from the table, his chair scraping against the stone patio.

I figure I've done what I can by bringing it up and pushing harder won't get a better result, so I change the subject. “Renee told me that her Dad's decided how he's going to choose the student for the internship. It'll be based on class grade, a short essay and an interview.”

“So when were you planning on sharing this information with us, huh?” Will asks sarcastically.

“What the hell? I'm telling you now. She just told me about it yesterday, and I think Dr. Ogle is going to say something to the class on Monday.” I know Will's dealing with a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean he has to act like a jerk. “Everyone in class has the same shot at the internship. Chill out.”

“Yeah, whatever. I'm going for a swim.” In one fluid movement he gets up from his chair, takes three steps to the pool and dives in. He swims underwater to the far end and then turns and starts doing the crawl with long powerful strokes. Cole and I just look at each other. “That went well,” I say.

“He's pretty touchy these days, that's for sure. Maybe we should back off a little bit.”

“There doesn't seem to be much else we can do.”

After we clean up the plates and bring the remaining food inside, Cole suggests we play three-man water polo, where we each have a goal to defend. Our games can get pretty rugged since we're all so competitive, and today Will and I are especially ruthless. But it's a good way to work out our anger and frustration. On the first play of the game, he slams the ball at my head to take me out and then scores when the ball ricochets off me back to him and he knocks it into my goal.

“I see how we're playing it,” I say, but I'm laughing. “You'd better watch your back, Asplunth.”

“Bring it!” he says.

On the tip-off I retaliate by shoving him underwater and grabbing the ball from Cole. I take off toward Will's goal, holding the ball in one arm and swimming with the other and am about to send the ball in when I'm tackled from behind. I come up sputtering and see Will scoring on Cole.

“Gooaaal!” Will calls out falling backwards into the water with a splash.

“Maybe you should be playing striker,” I say.

“Then who would be there to protect you from getting scored on?” he replies.

“Okay, that's it, you've been warned. It's all-out war now!”

The rest of the game goes pretty much the same with all of us alternately dunking and slamming each other to get the ball. Will wins by getting to twenty first and we drag ourselves out of the pool and flop onto the deck chairs breathing heavily.

“That was awesome,” I say, and hold out my hand to fist bump Will and then Cole.

“Nothing like a little full-out water polo,” Cole says as he towels himself dry.

I laugh, but he's right. The tenseness between Will and me is gone. Will even brings up the internship again.

“Do you know where the internship's going to be? With the Universal Energy experiments or doing that mind-reading stuff?” he asks.

I wince, but I don't think he's being sarcastic. He's just not into the remote viewing. “No, Renee and I really haven't talked about it. Maybe we'll find out more from Mr. Ogle on Monday. Are you applying, Cole?”

“No, AP Enviro is cool, but science isn't really my thing. I just took it for the AP credits. You guys can duke it out.” Which is exactly what I'm worried about.

I
KICK ASIDE
a pile of clothes on the floor of my room to see if the shirt I'm looking for is underneath it. Nope. It's possible that it got shoved under the bed, so I get down on my knees to look. There it is—a gray/blue Henley surrounded by several of Ralph's chew toys that he's ‘buried' under my bed. I pull it out and give it a sniff. Not too fresh. So it's time for the Eric ‘special' clothes wash. I grab a few more shirts that look excessively wrinkled and are not exactly smelly, but not exactly clean either, throw them in a laundry basket and take the stairs two at a time on my way to the laundry room.

My ‘special' wash is a true time saver and last minute personal care miracle. I'm supposed to be doing my own laundry, but as it doesn't always get done, I devised this simple fix. A few squirts of clothes freshener on the item to be cleaned, then five to ten minutes in the dryer, and—‘voila!'—clean, wrinkle-free clothes! The freshener comes in Spring Rain and Ocean Breeze scents. I prefer Ocean Breeze myself.

Marcie comes into the laundry room with her hamper while I'm spraying my shirts. She has to do her own laundry too, and as she is a little more fastidious than I am, she doesn't ascribe to the special wash method.

“Thanks for just dumping my clothes on the floor,” she says. Her load had been in the dryer—finished, I might add—so I had to take them out to put my clothes in.

“Sorry, I have to do a load. Anyway, folding your clothes is not part of my laundry duties.”

She starts pulling her clothes out from the pile, folding them and putting them into her hamper. She notices that I'm spraying my shirts. “Oh, the Eric ‘special' wash. Do you have a date or something? Are you dating that Italian girl who's always waiting for you after the games?”

“She's actually French, and yeah, we're dating. After dinner we're going to the Benton County Wind Farm. I want to take Dad's telescope so we can go star-gazing too, at McCloud Park.”

“We haven't been out with the telescope in forever.”

“It's not your usual sort of date. I hope Renee likes it.”

“She probably will. Most girls would think it's romantic.” She's quiet for a minute, lays a folded red shirt on top of her growing pile and then says, “Do you ever think about star people? I mean, like if they exist or if they're actually already here, on earth?” This is not as weird a question as it seems. In my family we've talked about stuff like this around the dinner table for years.

“I think it's naïve to believe we're the only inhabited planet in the Universe. But I have no idea about aliens. I guess they could be here, but wouldn't we know?”

“I think they'd be so advanced they could be hiding in plain sight. And maybe some people do know. Maybe the whole planet isn't ready to know about them and they're helping us without interfering.” She's stopped folding laundry and is just looking at me. Now it is getting a little weird.

“Well, yeah, I guess, but who knows?” And then I just can't resist adding, “It almost sounds like you've got some inside knowledge,
Lieutenant Uhuru
. Beam me up Scotty?”

“Very funny. Like that would ever happen.” She starts swatting me with the shirt she's holding. “My mistake for trying to have a serious conversation with
you
.”

I hold up my arms to shield my head. “I'm sorry, but there was no way I could let that opportunity go by.”

She stops hitting me and gets back to folding her clothes. “Didn't you go on a field trip to the wind farm last week?”

“My AP Enviro class went, but it's awesome to see at night. There's an amateur astronomer's stargaze tonight and I don't have a game, so I thought we could do both.”

“That'll be cool. So, the soccer team's on a pretty good winning streak, right? What have you won now, like ten straight games?”

“The team's won thirteen, but I've only played in seven games. I'm splitting games with Brett Morgan. But it's still pretty cool. How's cross country going? Sorry I can't make it to any meets, you know, with practice and all.” I'm done spraying the shirts, so I load them into the dryer and put the timer on for ten minutes.

“It's good. I'm really better at the middle distances—200 and 400 meters, but I do okay in the longer races. I've had two personal best times the last two meets. At least I'm improving.”

“That's cool. Hey, I gotta go. I need to find Dad and ask about the telescope.”

I find him on the porch lying on the couch. The ceiling fan is revolving at high speed, fluttering the pages of the book he's reading. The breeze coming through the screens is just pleasantly warm and the nights have been cool. There's a hint of that sweet
rotting smell you get when the plants in the garden are past their prime and beginning to fade and wither.

“Hey, Dad, would it be okay if I took the telescope out tonight? Renee and I are going to the wind farm and I want to show her some stuff with the telescope.” He puts the book down on the coffee table and looks over at me standing in the doorway to the house.

“Sure thing. Do you know what's in the sky right now? We could look it up before dinner if you want.”

“I looked at Indiana Amateur Astronomer's website and it says that M13 is visible and so are the Ring Nebula and Saturn Nebula. I'm pretty sure I can find them. It's also the night of the Harvest Moon, so that'll be cool to look at, even though it'll make it harder to see the stars. Here, I printed off some stuff.” I put the pages I printed from the site down on the table. He sits up and pats the faded cushions next to him.

“Have a seat,” he says. “Maybe you can see the Milky Way. You know there are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth?”

“Yeah, I know.” He's only told me about as many times as there are grains of sand in Florida.

“Dad, have you ever heard anything about the Universal Energy Field? Renee's dad is studying it.”

“Oh, yes.” He takes his glasses off and puts them on the table. “It's also called Dark Energy. Not because it's malevolent, but because we can't detect it. At least not yet. But we know it's there because of movements and behaviors of celestial bodies that can only be explained by the presence of an energy we can't directly detect.” He taps his fingers on the pages spread out on the table. “So Dr. Auberge is studying The Field. Interesting.”

“Really, you've heard of it? What is it?” My dad's always been an amateur astronomer, so he's into this stuff, but I'm a little surprised that he knows about the Universal Field.

“Dark Energy is some kind of cosmos-filling field of energy. It's everywhere in the Universe. In fact, Dark Energy and Dark Matter make up almost 95% of the entire Universe. The matter and energy we can see and measure are only 5% of the Universe.”

“That's crazy. That we really know so little about the Universe.”

“I think it can be overwhelming for some people, but I like to think of it as endless possibilities in an elegant Universe. The hand of God is everywhere.”

“You mean like ‘God the Creator of the Universe?'” We've gone to church sporadically my whole life, but I've never felt much of a connection with the God in flowing robes carrying a scepter directing events from his throne in the sky. Somehow, God seems both more personal and more unfathomable to me.

“I can't claim to really understand what God is, but I feel like God is a part of us and everything else in the Universe,” my dad says. “The Chinese call it ‘Chi.' The energy or life source of all things. Does that make sense?” As with so many things, my parents have never really forced their opinions on me, but have allowed me to find my own way.

“Yeah, it makes total sense.” I say.

T
ONIGHT
I
'M DRIVING
my Dad's Audi, which is an improvement over the minivan, but not by much, as it's about a thousand years old. Still, it is a German-made sedan. Renee and I have the windows down and I've got some low-key driving music
playing. Instead of taking the highway north to the wind farm, I decided to go the scenic route on the back roads. We pass through tiny one-stop towns with only a gas station and a quick mart and sometimes a flea market, and I wonder who lives there and what do they do to make a living or for fun. It's at least half an hour to get to the nearest drugstore, let alone a movie theater or restaurant.

On either side of the road are fields of dry cornstalks with ears of corn still attached, like the kind people put by their doors to decorate for Halloween, and soybean fields turning from green to gold. Some of the trees are starting to turn orange and red, and goldenrod grows in swathes along the side of the road.