Blow Smoke

It’s nine thirty and our son’s snuck out with his girlfriend; that bitch. Delilah. She’s brought

him to a trashy party, some hoedown between trailer homes lit by a bonfire and music flowering out

from an iPhone 3 she bought off e-bay for five dollars. Right now they’re kissing over the end of the

same joint under a cloud of smoke and in a pool of vodka. My son is fifteen, far beyond my control.

But I can’t help knowing that if we lived over two thousand years ago, he would be a Spartan soldier

preparing for battle with overgrown Persian warriors and ogres—at least that’s how Hollywood says

they look. Brutes would stuff him with iron shanks or club his head. And he would get up for it to

happen again—honorable. But the burning leaf would be sin. I think I may prefer it to this girl, this

succubus, this siren with crystal eyes and glass scales like a snake.

Mt. Kilauea houses a lake of lava with an area of 15 square kilometers within its caldera. The

lava, two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, is hot enough to obliterate a human’s hand. It incinerates the

skin, chews through the bone like potato mush, shaves apart the veins and capillaries, swishes it all

around behind its teeth and blows smoke. But it can also swallow a penny, a can of string beans, the

Statue of Liberty and inject the air with smoke, a searing black dust mass. That’s all young volcanos

do—drink, blow smoke. Eat, blow smoke. Take somebody’s hand, blow smoke, tar up Earth’s

lungs. Then the lava erupts. It climbs over the caldera, tunnels from the sides like termites, hardens

into an ugly barren lump of coal, a tumor.

My son left the window in his room open on his way out, a regular Huck Finn. Thick coughs

of wind from outside drag on the curtains. My throat feels like ash.

Mr. McDuffrey’s house is a dark ghost-land across the street. The neighborhood itself is

utterly unlit. Tonight, a moonless sky hides my son from me like a devil’s cloak. Maybe Mrs.
McDuffrey hasn’t dozed off yet like her unreliable husband. Would it be strange to call them at this

hour? I remember Mrs. McDuffrey’s scowl. But then I remember my husband’s purple lips,

blackened finger tips, hazy yellow tongue. I scramble in my back pocket for my cell-phone,

goosebumps bubbling up my arm from the matte-plastic against my cuticles. I claw the back of my

neck, wet. She’s not going to know where he’s gone. But nobody else would either. I punch the

number into my screen and let it ring. A window burns to life across the street. It reminds me of the

lighters, the god awful oily lighters that ate at our savings every month.

Mrs. McDuffrey’s voice on the other side of the line makes me cough. I haven’t breathed

since I dialed. “Hello? Hannah speaking. Who is this? Are you okay?”

I force back my hacks. “Mrs. McDuffrey, I know it’s late but I need to know if you’ve seen

my son.”

“Ah, Dylan?”

“Yes, Dylan. And your daughter.”

“Let the children have their fun.” She yawns.

“Do you even know what your daughter does, Mrs. McDuffrey?”

“I don’t and I don’t want to. I say let them make their own mistakes. Now goodnight, I

won’t hear of this anymore!” A dial tone emerges. The lights across the street blacken again. I guess

I really am alone in this.

I anticipate that Mt. Kilauea will end up just like Vesuvius, underestimated. Mt. Vesuvius

blew its fuse in 79 A.D. and turned the village of Pompeii to cinder, flooded it with ash. The

mountain—a disaster. The victims—relics. All of them froze in awe, watching the army of magma

charge from the mountain side. Some washed away in the boiling waves like driftwood. Some

exploded, bombarded by molten mortars. They all gave their hand to the mountain, lived with it.
Now they eternally look on the mountain with fear, statues with ashen necks, monuments dedicated

to the monster. When volcanos have aged as far as Vesuvius, they lose control of themselves,

manipulate, make voodoo dolls of the people they once loved.

The cold surprises me on my way out of the house. I haven’t been out in the cold like this

alone since my husband blew waves of smoke with me. We’d walk out in the dark with cigarettes

and try to make sense of the smoke with our fingers as paint brushes. Every now and then

something sweet came of it, a heart, our initials on either side of an ampersand, a kiss in the void of

ash where I thought nothing could touch us. I can’t believe how stupid and wrong I was.

I wave my hand through my breath in the dark. I’ve got to find Dylan. He’s definitely either

at the trailer park or the brick ally between the drugstore and arcade. Of course one is west and the

other east from here. Trailer park. That’s where I’ll go first. I throw myself to the left and muscle my

way down the sidewalk.

I couldn’t help thinking of Mt. Vesuvius when I saw my husband’s eyes roll back and then

shut down forever. He told me when they diagnosed the terminal lung cancer that he didn’t want to

live in the hospital. He wanted to stay at home with me. So I would serve him soup every day to

soothe his throat. I let him smoke because it reminded him of me. I just kept a window open so

Dylan didn’t catch wind of it. Now the smoke cleared. I watched my husband fossilize, and was left

with a bitter ash in my throat. And to think in high school, I’d been the one leaning on the bike rack

that lit a butt and offered a puff to the innocent boy walking home with his pile of books.

The houses shrink in size with each block I run, more dilapidated—shattered windows,

grazed paint jobs, twisted gutters, starved lawns, ripped fences, stray bike tires loosely propped up
against ruptured door frames, clumps of jagged Heinekens and Marlboro’s sucked down to the butt.

I can imagine the scruffy bearded bums in these houses that feed on ecstasy tablets and old high

school memories—drinking in the garage, burning in the woods, lighting up in the trailer park,

handing some innocent girl her first cigarette like what I did.

Jesus fucking Christ.

“Damn you, Delilah!”

Trailer homes emerge. Oh, please. Dylan has to be here. I sift through wagons and trash

cans set aflame. I look in the brook behind Old man Shanty’s trailer, next to the wooden benches.

This is the kind of place where Dylan’s father and I would smoke. We’d smoke, find an abandoned

truck, climb in the back, toss off our clothes and get real close to each other, just touch, trace each

other with our pinkies. But we knew we were trash. I think I knew it better than he did. He never

failed to smile with his bright pink lips in the lovely chaos of it all.

All I want is for Dylan to be something more than trash. I don’t want to lose him in the

smoke too.

You really can’t know what its like to see lava charge at you down the side of Mt. Vesuvius.

You really can’t feel the lava wash beneath your feet and drag you down, a long drag—it burns like

hell—and turn you into smoke and rock. Your lungs feel like they’re filled with acid, but it’s just the

smell of your own skin cooking. Then you choke. You choke right there in your igneous grave for

the volcano to see. And the volcano feels bad, but she’s the one that made you like this.

When I look in the mirror every morning, I see Vesuvius, the tumor I was to Dylan’s father.

The tumor I am to Dylan. The tumor Delilah will be to Dylan. I really think that’s what we

volcanoes who just blow smoke and nothing more are—tumors.

 I smell fire. I see smoke; it scales the air behind the trailer home right in front of me.

“Dylan!” I listen for an answer, but all I hear is muffled sobs. I walk around the trailer car. Dylan,

squatted down on a log bench before a fire pit, has his head in his hands, nose peaking between

them. Fallen rose petals brown near the flames, a barren stem across Dylan’s lap. Near his foot,

there’s a cigarette, blackened at the tip. It’s barely been puffed, but he’s already stamped it out for

some reason.

I notice a letter by a wheel of the trailer car and pick it up, careful not to reveal myself. It

reads:

Dear Dylan,

I know we had a date tonight. I’m sorry.

I met this guy at the party last week you couldn’t come to.

His name is Fabian. He’s from Cuba. I know, exotic.

Anyway, I’m going to have to break up with you.

I need to see what this guy is all about. But hey, we can still be friends.

If you ever want to smoke, call me.

Delilah

“Oh dear, Dylan.” He looks over to me, tears in his eyes.

The thing people never consider is that some volcanoes have no spirituality to them. Some

aren’t capable of love. And no matter how much we sacrifice for them, our shoes, feet, lips, tongues,

lungs, they will never love back. Some volcanoes are just out there to eradicate, dissolve. Some

volcanoes are godless and heartless. But they all, in one way or another, blow smoke.