Slick Read online

  Near the end of the film, the kids are playing soccer with a paper bag they’d stuffed with leaves. I watch closely, so I can make one myself. Everyone’s happy: the kids shout, birds caw in the nearby jungle. I am just thinking that their life is pretty great when, all of a sudden, a kid grabs the ball and everyone scurries to the side of the road.

  A massive eighteen-wheeler barrels along the narrow dirt road, raising huge clouds of dust and spewing iodine-colored blooms of exhaust. The noise drowns out every other sound. The kids shut their eyes tight. They lift their T-shirts to their mouths to keep out the dust. Some clap their hands over their ears.

  Once the truck passes, the kids slowly lower their hands from their faces. But then another truck bullies through. The side of the truck reads Argenta Oil. It’s a name I know, but how?

  Then it comes to me. That’s the company that Slick works for!

  “Elbows off the table, Liza. Silas, please chew with your mouth shut.” Mom rolls her eyes at Slick, who winks at her. Mom doesn’t usually care about our manners. Our house is totally clean too, cleaner than I’ve ever seen it. She’s changing herself for him, changing us.

  “So, Liza, how was school today?” Slick asks.

  “How was work today?” I ask back.

  “Boring,” Slick says. “A meeting, then a meeting about that meeting, then a meeting about those two meetings.” Silas and Leland giggle. Mom laughs too.

  “I’m having dessert in my room,” I announce, sliding off my chair. I can’t take him anymore.

  “Liza!” Mom calls, but I’m gone. She doesn’t come after me.

  For a while I throw a ball against my bedroom wall, over and over. It makes smudge marks on the wall. The marks remind me of that dirty landscape in the film, and I get angrier.

  I get a paper bag and stuff it with newspaper. It’s pretty difficult to make it round. I have to make cuts in a few places and bind it with masking tape. By the time I’ve made a soccer ball, I’m feeling better. I hear Mom say goodbye to Slick.

  A few minutes later she comes into my room and sits on the end of my bed.

  “Liza, it’s natural for you to dislike Robert,” she says. “You’re worried he’ll hurt me or take me away.”

  “I don’t dislike him, Mom. I hate him. There’s a difference.”

  “Oh, come on, Liza! He’s a very nice man. But, sweetie, you have to know that no one, no one, will ever separate me from you or water down my love for you. That is impossible. My love for you only grows. Which is mathematically difficult, because it’s already infinite. Can something infinite get bigger?”

  Mom hugs me. I hug her back and cry. It’s warm in her arms. Over her shoulder, I see the smudges on the wall. They are like a message of bad news.

  I start to wonder, if she really loves me and knows how much I hate Slick, why does she keep dating him?

  Chapter Five

  Ms. Catalla lets me stay in at lunch to watch the documentary again while she marks homework at her desk.

  “Why are you so interested in Guatemala?” she asks. Ms. Catalla reminds me of a sparrow. She’s small and quick. She grew up in Colombia and speaks with a Spanish accent.

  “I’m interested in how people who are poor can be happy,” I lie. I glance at the sculpture of three monkeys on Ms. Catalla’s desk. One has its hands over its eyes, another its hands over its ears, and a third covers its mouth. “And…and…,” I stammer.

  “Yes?”

  “And those trucks that drive through when the kids are playing soccer. It’s rude! I want to know about those trucks. How often do they rip through that town? Does the company make amends?”

  “That’s easy to research, Liza,” Ms. Catalla says. I can tell she’s really listening. “What do you think those trucks are doing?”

  “Well, it looks like they’re polluting,” I say. “I bet the company pulled oil out of the ground near where those kids live. And they sell it for lots of money. The president of the company probably lives in a mansion. Those kids can’t even afford a decent soccer ball.”

  “Those are good points, Liza.”

  “Argenta Oil’s head office is downtown, you know,” I say.

  “I didn’t know that,” Ms. Catalla says. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen it,” I say. I glance at the monkeys and feel guilty for lying. “Actually, I know someone who works there. Or rather, I hate someone who works there.”

  “Is that why you’re interested?

  “I want to do something for those kids,” I answer.

  “Out of the goodness of your heart?” she asks. “Not out of revenge against this person you don’t like?”

  “Yes,” I say. But Ms. Catalla has a point. Do I just want to dig up dirt on Slick? I think about it for a minute. No, it doesn’t matter how I feel about Slick. Now that I know those kids are getting choked out of their games, I have to see if I can help.

  Righting a wrong is the priority. Exposing Slick’s evil company will just be a convenient bonus. I look over at Ms. Catalla’s monkeys again. She follows my gaze.

  “Mizaru,” she says, patting the monkey with its hands over its eyes. “He sees no evil.” Ms. Catalla strokes the one covering its ears. “Kikazaru. He hears no evil.” Ms. Catalla puts her hand over her mouth, muffling her voice. “And Iwazaru speaks no evil. In Japan, these monkeys are a reminder to be of good mind, good speech and good action. Here in North America, they’ve come to represent people who pretend nothing bad is going on.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be like that,” I say.

  After school, Olive and I borrow my mother’s laptop. Ms. Catalla said I could research Argenta Oil’s work in Guatemala for my next social-studies project. Olive takes a research class at her school and has agreed to help me. We google Argenta Oil Guatemala to start. The first site we find is Argenta Oil’s company site. It’s about how wonderful the company is and how happy they are to have oil rights in Guatemala.

  “What was the town in the documentary called?” Olive asks.

  “Las Angelitas,” I say.

  We google Las Angelitas Argenta Oil. Nothing. “Don’t worry,” Olive says. “Research is mostly dead ends. Research. Like rewind, redo. You search over and over. Let’s check out the town on Google Earth.”

  Pretty soon we are bearing down on the town, so close we can see the patchwork of steel roofs in the leafy jungle. I look for kids playing soccer. Okay, we’re not that close.

  The town is in the region of Riviera Selequa. We google Argenta Oil Riviera Selequa, and bingo!

  “Wow,” Olive mutters. “We’ve caught a big fish!”

  We’re on the website of Oilwatch, a citizens’ group dedicated to “Uncovering the Eco-Crimes of the Oil Industry.” The website says that farmers who live along Selequa River are taking Argenta Oil to court.

  “They drilled on our land and made a mess,” reports a farmer. She says the company’s drilling killed animals, broke fences and polluted wells. “They must pay for repairs.”

  The website says the farmers have waited two years. Argenta should have paid up a long time ago.

  “So, he is wanted by the police, Olive!”

  At that moment, Mom walks in. “There you are.”

  She has had her hair cut. It looks nice. But there is something else… What?

  “Mom, did you get your eyebrows done? You swore you’d never pluck! What happened to ‘My shaggy, bushy, wooly, fuzzy, furry, fluffy, rugged, scraggy, tufted, bristly brows’?” This is a ditty she sings. “Or, ‘So what if I’m wild? Better than mild!’”

  “Liza, a person can change her mind, you know,” says Mom.

  “Changing ideas is different from changing ideals, Mom,” I sputter.

  Olive elbows me. I’m not sure if this means “Good one!” or “Be nice!”

  “I’m going to a movie,” Mom says. “Rachael’s downstairs.”

  “Why don’t you watch a movie here?” I ask. She and I often curled up together to watch a DVD.

>   “I’m going with Robert, sweetie. I’ll be back to kiss you goodnight. Look, you guys can watch a bit of tv. Okay? Even though it’s a school night. I’ll tell Rachael—”

  “Yeah, sure,” I pout. “Have a good time with your boy-felon—”

  “My what?”

  “Boy-felon. Your boyfriend’s company bullies poor farmers.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mom asks.

  I hand her the laptop. “Read it and weep,” I say sourly. “Isn’t Guatemala where your fair-trade, organic, bird-friendly coffee comes from?”

  “Hello?” It’s Slick, calling from the door.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Mom calls absently. She continues to read, furrowing those nicely shaped brows. Finally, she hands the computer back.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  After a little more research, Olive and I make a mini air horn with a film canister, a straw and a balloon. We cut a hole in the bottom of the canister and slide the straw into it. Then we cut a smaller hole in the side of the canister to blow into. We stretch a piece of balloon over the top and snap the lid on. Get ready for 120 decibels!

  Later, we brush glow-in-the-dark paint onto the propellers that Slick gave the boys. We stand on the back deck and send them spinning into the yard. They are a dizzy glow in the night air. Beautiful! I imagine one sailing all the way to Guatemala and being caught by a child in Las Angelitas.

  Chapter Six

  For breakfast, I make a huge pot of hot chocolate, adding half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. I’m using Rachael’s recipe. Silas and I play chess while we drink from our mugs. Leland spins a Ninja Turtle in the new cheese grater. Mom is fixated on the newspaper.

  “Incredible,” she says. “A curator’s nightmare! Check this out: the Cleveland Museum thought they had a real hair from Amelia Earhart’s head. But all these years, it was a piece of thread!”

  “Who’s Amelia Earhart?” Leland asks, spinning his Ninja Turtle more slowly.

  “A famous aviator. Well, aviatrix is what they called the women. There were many female pilots during the world wars. When the wars ended, a few managed to keep flying. They ran deliveries, taught at flight schools and some did stunts at fairs.”

  “Wing walking,” says Silas, who reads every nonfiction book that comes under his radar. “Barnstorming. One woman danced the Charleston on the wing of a plane at 2,200 feet.”

  “That’s right!” Mom says. “Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Then she tried to fly around the world. But she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Seventy-five years ago. She was never found.”

  “But someone had one of her hairs?” I ask.

  “They thought they did. Before setting off around the world, Amelia was a guest of President Roosevelt’s. A maid at the White House plucked a hair from the pillowcase Amelia had slept on, as a souvenir. It eventually ended up in the museum’s collection. But they just ran a dna test to see if it matched some bones recently found on a Pacific Ocean island. All these years, and it was just a thread!”

  “She’s good at vanishing!” Leland exclaims.

  “I’ll say!” Mom laughs and then looks at the clock. “Race time!” She upends all five of our egg timers. We leap from the table, brush our teeth, get our shoes and jackets and backpacks. We’re out the door before the last grains of sand fall to the bottom of the crow-shaped, African Blackwood egg timer. It’s our favorite, since it’s the slowest, giving us a full fifteen seconds extra.

  Ms. Catalla isn’t surprised by what Olive and I discovered online.

  “It would be hard to find an oil company that isn’t running over people’s toes,” she says. “Still, you need to find out whether Argenta is acting in bad faith. Do they know they’re doing wrong? And, if they are acting in bad faith, what will you do? There is a common belief that if you know something bad is happening and you do nothing to stop it, you’re part of the problem.”

  “But what can I do?” I say, trying not to whine. “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t live in Guatemala…”

  “But you are someone,” Ms. Catalla urges gently.

  “I’m a kid. A teenager. A student.” I feel stronger by the second. “I’m Canadian. So is Argenta Oil. And I’ve been owed money. It sucks.”

  Mom drives us to the beach for a picnic supper. It’s a cool evening. We pack sweaters and blankets. I also bring a cookie sheet so I can test for rattlebacks, also called wobblestones or Celtic stones.

  Rattlebacks are ancient toys that can be made from pretty much anything. They’re shaped like a twisted kayak and fit easily in one hand. You place them on a flat surface and spin them. In one direction, they spin as you’d expect, eventually slowing to a stop. But when you spin them in the other direction, they spin for a while, slow down, start to wobble, then, on their own, reverse in the other direction for a little spin! It’s kind of eerie. I have a rattleback collection. Some are carved from wood, some are clay. I have one that is just a telephone receiver that happened to be weighted right, and one I made with a stick of gum in its foil, bent into shape. Five of the rattlebacks in my collection are stones I found on the beach.

  After our supper of salmon sandwiches, I look for rocks that are long and curve upward at both ends. Mom stokes the fire with a piece of driftwood. Then she throws the stick toward two seagulls thrusting their beaks into the picnic basket. “Shoo! That’s our dessert!” Silas and Leland are across the beach, building a driftwood fort.

  After a while, Mom speaks. “So Argenta Oil’s no angel.”

  “That’s right,” I agree.

  “But how on earth did you find out? Why were you digging around?”

  “Mom, that doesn’t matter,” I say. “The point is, the company your boyfriend works for is evil.”

  “That’s a little extreme, Liza.”

  “What’s extreme is how poor the Maya are. They’ve been robbed, Mom, big-time,” I say. “Ooh! Got one!” We watch as my stone spins, slows, wobbles, then changes direction.

  “Good one!” Mom cheers before turning serious again. “Liza, Robert is a good person. He has a good heart.”

  “Well, if someone works for an evil— okay, bad—company, doesn’t that make them bad?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know,” says Mom. “Like that museum in Cleveland— they didn’t mean to dupe anyone by displaying that hair. Or imagine one of the auction houses is selling stolen goods, but I don’t know it. I appraise the goods and help the auction house sell them. Am I a thief too?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Robert needs a job—he’s got a house and car to pay for,” Mom argues. “Anyway, probably every company has a bad record somewhere. No one’s perfect, Liza.”

  “Mom, stealing from poor people is a long way from ‘not perfect.’ Couldn’t Slick talk to his bosses? Get them to pay up?”

  “Robert would probably be fired,” Mom shrugs. “Or moved to a lesser position.”

  “For telling the truth? So he works at a place where he can’t say what he wants?” I had a vision of Slick, crouched like a monkey, a hand over his smile.

  Just then we hear Silas scream, “Leland’s in the water! Leland’s in the water!’

  Mom and I leap up, but a woman walking her dog near the boys wades into the water and grabs Leland before we can get there. He is sobbing while the woman soothes him, “There, there, it’s all right.”

  Mom is crying. “Thank you! Oh, thank you. What if you hadn’t been there? He would have been lost!”

  “But I was there,” the woman says, calmly putting an arm around Mom. She is older than Mom and nicely dressed in a long coat and white leather boots. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You’re wet,” Mom says to her. “Come, get warmed up by the fire. We’ll gather our things and drive you home.”

  “Thank you,” says the woman. “And thank you!” she says cheerfully to a chattering Leland. “I wondered how cold the
water was, and now I know!”

  “I’d really like to make it up to you,” Mom says as we drop the woman off.

  “Don’t worry about that,” says the woman. “Really. It’s just nice to see a family that’s so close.”

  “I’m going to report her to the police!” Mom announces as we pull out of the woman’s driveway. “For heroism!”

  “No kidding! She was old!” Silas says. “And she just jumped into the freezing water, got her fancy boots wet.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, darting a look at Mom. “It was about doing the right thing, not about things, like a nice house and car.”

  “What are you talking about?” Silas asks, perplexed.

  “It’s just something between me and Liza, honey,” Mom says firmly. “A subject we’re going to give a rest right now. Okay, Liza?”

  “Okay,” I mutter. “But—”

  “That woman was a mermaid,” Leland sighs. He is drifting off to sleep. “I’d walk the plank for her.”

  Chapter Seven

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear OilWatch,

  I’d like to help make Argenta Oil pay for drilling on Mayan land. I’m a grade 7 student in Victoria, where the company has its head office.

  I watched a documentary about the Maya of the Ixcán, where Argenta Oil trucks plow through the kids’ soccer games, choking the air with dust and exhaust.

  Could you send me info about the court case and scummy Argenta Oil? I’m also researching the company for a school project.

  Thank you,

  Liza Maybird

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Liza,

  Totally cool to hear from you. You’re right: Argenta Oil is scummy!

  Our organization keeps track of oil companies in Central America. We alert politicians and the media—newspapers, radio and tv stations, bloggers—when people or the land get hurt. We also raise money to help with legal costs.