Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t seem like science at all. That’s why it was great for beginning classes. He poured these three clear liquids into a beaker. The liquid turned a bright orange and seemed to thicken. He kept on stirring slowly with a glass rod, clinking it against the glass beaker. All of a sudden, the orange turned black. It was just like someone had flicked a switch. He told us that a professor at Princeton had designed the reaction, and that orange and black are the Princeton colors.
    Since then, I’ve been thinking about my own clock reaction in white and red, North Side High colors. It has to be in that order since the white couldn’t cover the red.
    I need to find three compounds, ABC. A and B can’t react. B and C can’t react. But A and C do react, and their product is a white solid. In that product somewhere there has to be something that will then combine with B, but not all at once.
    I can’t have pink.
    For two years I’ve been mixing precipitates—blue-green coppers, orange potassiums, cobalt blues, the yellows. The test tubes go from clear to color, and the solid settles instantly or suspends, milky and in motion.
    Iron gives red, and there are many white metals.
    Dvorak says there are tables and books that just list the colors. That would save me time, but I like to see them for myself—the colors and the grades of solids, sand or silt or crystal. There’s one, just a drop, that turns as it falls through the acid, a little gray worm by the time it hits the bottom.
    Don’t worry—one day I’ll say, “See?”
    White, red .
    My mother thinks I think too much. She’s caught me staring into the sink, watching the Ajax oxidate and turn blue. She thinks I should go out more. My dad doesn’t say anything but worries out of habit. We’ll sit together out on the porch swing. I’ll be reading, and he’ll be smoking a cigar. “Boats this year,” he’ll say after a while. “Sailboats.”
    He’s thinking about the Junior Achievement projects for next fall.
    Rea gives copper wire to a JA company.
    The kids make pictures of things by stringing the wire between carefully arranged pegs. Cars, trains, airplanes—all made out of thread-gauge copper wire, gold-headed tacks, black cloth for the background.
    I am waving to the Kiwanis pontoon going by on the river. I can hear pieces of the talk about the beautification project, the downtown, the fort, the portage that made this spot worth fighting for in the first place. My two sisters are washing nearby, letting the crowd of visitors overhear them talk about the Major, our father, and finding him a wife, how that would make him more tolerable to live with. I go on back to the clearing in front of the gate where the rifle squad is drilling and the cannon is being readied for firing. The visitors shade their eyes, take pictures.
    They’ve been blowing up buildings across the river downtown. It’s the easiest way to demolish the vacant old hotels. From here, we can see some of it. A building turns to dust and disappears from between the other buildings. If the wind is right, there is hardly any sound, just the cloud of dust rolling away. The Keenan Hotel. The Van Ormen. Once the gun crew tried to time a firing with one of the explosions. They aimed the cannon in the general direction so it would look like we were shelling the downtown, the building collapsing before our guns. Jim said it was a stupid idea. The visitors were more interested in the drill, swabbing out the barrel, ramming, loading, the slow-burning fuse. The visitors were from out of town anyway and probably didn’t know what was going on. The local people would be downtown to watch the building go.
    The problem is that it is so hard to imagine this place without buildings even though so much of the old city is leveled now into fields of rubble. The view is broken only by the steeples of the old German churches.
    It’s easy for me to pretend I’ve never tasted white sugar. Basketball hasn’t been