Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

Billy tapped his arm and trotted away.

She drove a Windstar. It was old and nerdy and embarrassed the boys. The radio was crackly with static, and a booming voice was pontificating about how solar desalinization of seawater was a socialist plot by big government. Cheap water was a ploy by Washington to undermine the constitutional…Billy turned it off. Mom glanced at him, but said nothing.

April and Mitch went to Prairie Elementary. Mrs. G had already volunteered to take them home after school. Mom drove into the parking lot of the middle school. The Panthers sign had faded to ochre above the yellow ball field. The VISITORS scoreboard had lost letters: VIS T RS.

Bright school buses stood outside the auditorium. Billy was thinking of trying acting. The drama coach told him he’d be great in If the Boys Wore the Skirts.

He’d said, “You have a flair for the comedic, Billiam.” What a freak! Billiam? WTF. Still…Could be interesting. Sammy Remember was in Drama Club. But Higgins and Charlie would never give up mocking him for wearing a dress onstage.

Mom got busy with all the boring church ladies circling around the lot, more excited than the kids. Billy piled into the back of the bus with the gang. Sammy Remember tried not to look at him. Her red hair was hot in the sun and smelled like coconuts and pineapples. Billy tried to bump into her as he passed her seat. She made him swallow when he saw her. She ignored him and attended to the weird little folding-paper game her friend Peanut was showing her. But the way the girls laughed, he just knew they were talking about him.

Sammy glanced back at him and smiled once. Blushing.

“Oh crap!” Charlie proclaimed, digging in Billy’s ribs with his elbow.

Sammy and Peanut giggled, but never looked back again.

“Second base,” Charlie predicted. “Today in the museum.”

“For sure,” Higgins agreed. “Bra. Boobs.”

They had read Playboy.

“Knock it off,” said Billy, red in the ears. “I mean, jeez.”

“Billy’s got a boner,” Higgins said.

Billy grabbed him and they wrestled until Mom came back and said, “Do I have to separate you gentlemen?” This made Billy feel good. Sammy Remember would not forget that he was, in fact, a badass and had gotten in trouble for being too wild even before the bus pulled out. Though it was, like, a total fail that Mom was the one to scold him.

Charlie pulled a Doctor Who magazine out of his backpack, and the boys bent to it.

Billy popped a lemon drop in his mouth.

The sky was saffron.

* * *

“Museums suck,” said Billy.

The bus rattled along between tan fields.

“Right?” said Charlie.

“History,” said Higgins. “Shit like that.”

“What I’m sayin’,” Billy said, watching the back of Sammy’s head.

“Suckage,” said Charlie.

“Suckola,” Higgins said.

“Sucks the big one,” Billy said.

“That’s what she said,” Charlie said.

They all giggled like Sammy and Peanut.

The outskirts of town. Billy, in spite of himself, crowded the windows. They never saw the city for real, just in movies. Trees. Nice.

There was a car dealership. Empty. Weeds poked up through cracks they had made in the asphalt.

“Dude,” said Billy. “Freakin’ drought, and it’s all freakin’ weeds. Freakin’ weeds, like, never stop growin’. Whyn’t we just farm weeds?”

Higgins was asleep; Charlie was back with Doctor Who.

Billy rested his head against the glass and felt his mind fly out into all the windows and doors. Felt himself move in and out of the alleyways. Like a great sideways yo-yo in a dream. Like he could walk into a thousand life stories. Like he could think up a whole new world. Like he could go out of himself and keep going and find a house on a beach with ten million miles of ocean in front and sweet cold fog and afternoon rainstorms and Sammy there beside him. This thought both comforted and stung him and made him happy and made him want to cry. How did Pops ever tell Mom he wanted to be her boyfriend? How did you do that? And — second base! Bras? How could a guy ever get up the guts to ask? How did a kiss happen, anyway?

The bus pulled into the museum parking lot and farted its air brakes and Mom stood and the doors opened.

WELCOME TO THE WESTERN PLAINS MUSEUM OF WATER.

Another sign said PILGRIM, REFRESH YOURSELF. Some kind of old covered wagon and a plaster ox out in front. Cornball.

The kids disembarked. Grab-ass ensued; impromptu tag, running around like idiots. “I swear,” Mom said, “dealing with you all is like herding chickens.”

The boys feigned disinterest in the hologram of a huge fountain in the entryway. But the girls oohed and ahhed over it — the way the fake water was projected on a cloud of steam and seemed to gush and flow and then change colors.

“Water don’t turn yellow,” Higgins announced.

Then the boys started snickering.

“If it does, don’t drink it,” Charlie said.

As an added feature, each child received a minuscule spritz of cold water in the face, and they shrieked with delight, but were firmly denied a repeat.

They entered through a projected waterfall, a cheesy video loop playing on more steam.

Mom had once seen that effect at Disneyland on the Pirates ride.

They walked on video tiles, and each step made ripples in the fake blue water beneath them. Fat goldfish-looking things swam away from the electric ripples. The boys made big faux splashes by jumping up and down until the digital fish swam out of sight beyond the edges of the floor.

They wandered through the galleries: 3D film loops of Niagara Falls. Higgins didn’t believe it.

“That crap’s from the Avatar movies,” he said, tossing his glasses in the big blue box.

But Billy stood as one hypnotized. He was astounded by the sight of that water. Who imagined wild water was white? And so much of it the earth used to simply throw it away. Still, he was more awed by the sound of it than the sight of it. The sheer noise.

Farther in, they witnessed seashore videos: the announcer droned, “Behold the song of the sea.” The sound of crashing waves. Vents pumped saltwater scents at the kids. Gulls cried.

The moms were smiling, but the kids felt creepy, watching all this water. It felt bad. Billy picked up a conch shell and put it to his ear.

“You’ll hear the sea,” Mom promised.

Just sounded like the inside of a shell to him.

A friendly docent appeared in a sky-blue suit.

“You supposed to look like water?” Higgins said.

Kids laughed.

Billy looked for Sammy, caught her eye. She wasn’t smiling either. She stared at him for a long time before they both looked away, blushing.

It got sucky. Charts. Data. Laser pointers.

How the drought came upon the West first, then the South, then the Midwest. Then how the water states started to flood from too much rain. The docent called this “The Cosmic Irony.” And the oceans rose and the coasts were invaded by seawater. Then, how the water states instituted the border system, to keep the drought survivors from overrunning their lands. How they shipped water units to the heartland until the crisis was over. No shortage of sun or wind here, though, right, kids? So the drought states traded wind energy and solar energy to the national grid. Light for water, the government motto said. And: Light — it’s the new harvest.

“How long’s it been?” Billy asked.

“Pert near twenty years now,” the docent said with her weird anesthetized grin.

“Seventeen,” Mom said.

“Pert,” Charlie snickered.

Higgins couldn’t stop laughing.

“What a hick,” he whispered. Then he asked, “Excuse me, miss. Were you born in 1860?” He and Charlie laughed and snorted. Billy moved away from them.