Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

The docent ignored them.

“And now, children,” she said, working a remote that caused smoked-glass doors to swing open, “we go to meet water.”

They followed her through.

* * *

Creepy, man. Are you kidding? What is this, Halloween? Billy’s mind was racing. It was dark in there. Crazy bug noises everywhere — he wasn’t used to bugs. He didn’t like it. Bouncy little lights among the trees with awful gray beards hanging down.

“What’s that?” he asked Mom.

“Fireflies,” she said. She was happy. “Isn’t it awesome?”

Mom trying out her kid-speak again.

“Awesome,” Billy said.

He pointed.

“And what’s that?”

“Spanish moss.”

“Has it got spiders?”

“It’s fake,” said Higgins. “Dumbass.”

Splashes in dark water. He squinted. Water. They were walking on a spit of fake ground in a big dark pool of water at night and there were freaky things croaking. Water was beneath them, looking poisonous in the gloom. Anything could be beneath it.

“What’s that?” Billy asked the docent.

“What, hon?”

“That sound.”

“Frogs.”

One of the girls let out a tiny scream and the rest laughed.

“It jumped on me!” she cried.

“What is this place?” Billy asked.

“This would be a swamp,” the docent explained. “This was the Atchafalaya basin in Louisiana before the coast deteriorated and the wetlands were destroyed. This is what you’d see.”

“Are there alligators?” Mom asked.

“In the tanks, yes.”

“Gators!” cried Billy. He moved closer to Mom. She put her hand on his back. It was hot and clammy. He pulled away.

Higgins snapped a girl’s bra strap.

Billy heard Sammy’s voice.

“Miss?” she said in the gloom. “What’s wrong with the air?”

“Wrong, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am. The air feels, um, heavy or something.”

“That’s humidity. That’s what humidity feels like.”

Silence.

“I’m glad we’re in a drought!” Charlie offered.

They moved on through a beaver dam room and an African watering hole with wack plaster elephants and a Walden Pond diorama. “Who’s that dude?” Billy said, pointing to a bearded figure in front of a tiny cabin.

Little dragonflies hung from wires and bobbed among cattails. They stared at catfish in murky tanks. The catfish stared back. It was creepy as hell.

But the worst thing of all was The Rain Parlor.

It was a round room with concentric rings of benches with a small octagonal dais in the middle. The docent climbed up three steps and smiled down at them. “It’s best if you move to the center,” she said, but Billy hung back and took a bench on the outer ring. He was shaky. He felt like he had ice in his stomach. He didn’t want to hear any more crap from his boys. He didn’t want Mom pawing at him. He couldn’t understand why she was all jazzed. He didn’t like this room with its fake blue sky and its painted green fields and far little trees and its stupid little white clouds looking like sheep on the horizon. To his astonishment, Sammy Remember came and sat beside him.

They looked at each other. She smiled a little, but her face was flushed and she looked like her dog had died. She had bright pink splotches on her alabaster cheeks.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh, Billy!” she said and took his hand and put her head on his shoulder.

Whoa. Fortunately, the lights dimmed. And she started to cry — he could feel her tears soaking into his T-shirt. When it was dark enough, he put his arm around her. Then she kissed the side of his face. Followed by the horror of the rain.

* * *

Dark. Crickets. Then stars started to appear above them. And — what the hell was that? It looked like a scary movie. The docent’s voice in the darkness: “The clouds obscure the moon.” And they did — these projected huge beasts rose up and blotted out the stars and the moon, settled like a threat upon them. The clouds started flickering. “And the lightning begins.”

Billy heard Mom say, “Oh!”

Bolts of light shot across the sky — much vaster and more horrifying than their little dust flashes at the farm. A bolt plunged to earth and blasted a tree apart and kicked up flames. Little speakers broadcast its crackling.

“Oh my God!” somebody yelled.

Billy heard sobbing.

When the first thunder crack boomed, they all jumped. It was so loud. It was as if God’s violence had come upon them in deepest rage, dropping temples and crushing idols to the ground. Crash. And crash again. They covered their ears.

Wind started then, cold wind. The speakers made small howlings, as if electric coyotes were stalking their feet. Ghosts, perhaps. More thunder. Some kids cried as the mothers laughed and clapped.

Then came what must have been…rain.

Not real rain, of course. But the sound of it. The sizzle and the whisper and the hiss and the splash of it. The blue light along the faux horizon of the room. The projected banners and veils of rain all around them. Rain like lace curtains, rain like smoke, rain like spiderwebs and flags and wind you could see. Rain that sang to their bones, that ached inside their bellies and their hands, rain that made them thirst and cower and hide. Rain they had never felt yet knew as intimately as they knew their own skins. It was dreadful. Sammy clutched Billy as hard as anyone could, and he wept into her red hair and didn’t care if she knew it or not.

Higgins cried out, “Stop it, miss! Oh, stop the rain!”

But it went on and on and on, the fake electric fields filling again with the lie of freshness, springtime, life.

* * *

They were quiet on the way home. Billy didn’t let Mom turn on the radio. The Windstar hummed along in the heat. The thermometer on the dash read 80. It was long after sunset, and the western sky had a band of red and violet spread along the edges.

Both of them had their little color picture buttons on their lapels — the docent’s last ghastly blessing. Mom had a picture of an icicle. His was a moose standing in an alpine bog. She had bought a CD of frogs croaking. Billy stopped her from putting it in the CD player.

“Billy?” She said.

He turned and stared out the window.

“Mom,” he finally said. “Is that really the way the world used to be?”

She glanced at him.

“Crickets,” he said. “Frogs. Clouds. Like that?”

She sighed.

“Yes, honey. Just like that.”

Five more miles.

“All that color.” He shuddered a little. “All that noise.”

“Son?”

“So cold, Mom.”

He shook his head, watching his own reflection in the window.

“But wasn’t the museum wonderful?” she said.

Sammy. That word kept turning in his head. The scent of coconut red hair. The dry lip-pop on his cheek that in future years would remind him of a pigeon pecking at a grain of bread, but which now contained all hope and fear and desire and a vivid dreamed future expanding forever inside his body. He almost told her he loved her. The way her eyes lit up under the lightning.

“Mom?” he said.

“Billy?”

“How do you ask a girl for a kiss?”

She stifled a small laugh.

“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, I think you know when the time is right. Then you just do it.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s like the rain. You just know it’s coming.”

They drove on.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Please,” he said. “Please. Don’t ever take me to that place again.”

“Why, Billy?”

He bent over and put his arms over his head and did not look up.

Mom drove on in silence, remembering how, when she was a girl, she had run along the banks of the Missouri River. It surged and sang as if water could never run out. It was summer vacation. She kissed her first boy there. The water, the water, she felt it running through her body still. She could hear it. And she rode that beautiful tide, wind lifting her hair, trying to tell him about the copper sea.