Rise by L. Annette Binder Page B

graduate in May. Some nights she didn’t get home until eleven. Duffy set his hand on Mason’s shoulder. “You were great today,” he said. “You really helped me out.” He leaned in close, so close that Mason could smell the coffee on his breath and the salt from the sunflower seeds.
    There are so many ways a chamber can fail. This is what he learned from all his reading. The burn time can be too long, and the metal will start to erode. The nozzle bolts can fail or the weld up by the payload. Tiny cracks can form in the grain or air pockets that will increase the surface area of the burn. Flaws so small you’d need a microscope to see them, but the pressure inside will find them. It will always work its way out.
    They’d gone together to spread the ashes up near the Continental Divide. She wore her hair loose because that was how his father had liked it. His father had been Mason and his grandfather, too. Three Mason Rigbys and two of them were dead. She played Elvis Costello and the Stones and all the others they’d listened to when they were young. I can feel him , she said. I feel his spirit in the car , and his plastic urn was strapped in the back seat like it was a baby. Mason looked out the window at the elm trees coming into bud. He didn’t want to turn back and catch a glimpse of his father. It wasn’t right to burn him, to turn him into powder. He knew this right away. What if the resurrection day came and everybody else rose up from their graves.
    She said an Ojibwa prayer at the spot they picked. She talked about a Great Spirit and she could hear His voice and there were lessonsto learn in every leaf and rock and tree. Mason didn’t cry when they opened the urn. He waited for the wind. His father passed from his hand to the air and down the empty bluffs.
    Gone to powder as if he’d never been. Gone to the hillsides where there weren’t any trees. No trees or flowers or fishing ponds. The wind carried him and the snows would cover him and he was going to the Atlantic now and the Pacific, too, because the Divide was the place where all the waters branched.
    Duffy’s basement had a wet bar and a dart board and a pool table with serious water damage. “I’ll get around to fixing it,” Duffy said. “It’s somewhere on my list.” His wife never came down there, so it belonged to him. It was better than a clubhouse. The other boys came sometimes, too, and they sat around the low table and watched movies and footage of other launches. Just before the end of the spring semester he gave them beer to celebrate. He swore them to keep it secret. “I drank when I was your age,” he said. “It didn’t hurt me any.” There was a shine in his eyes. They looked warm as honey in the light.
    Mason stayed after all the others had left. He didn’t want to go home, and he didn’t want to stay. He leaned back against the cushions, and Duffy brought out a stack of rocketry magazines. Rockets and Extreme Rocketry and Sport Rocketry and Launch . Some went back to the ’90s. “You can borrow some if you like,” he said. He spread them on the table, and there was a magazine with naked women, too. Its cover was creased, and the girl on the cover sat like an Indian with her legs open wide.
    Duffy sat down beside him. “You can borrow that one, too.” He reached for it and opened it and laid it across Mason’s lap. He moved closer so he could turn the pages. He ran his finger along Mason’s cheek, and Mason knew that feeling when it came. He knew it and closed his eyes. The wind was blowing again. It was turning things to powder.
    Something was unfolding inside his chest. Every day he felt it growing. It expanded like a balloon and squeezed against his ribs. It was alive. Alive and mechanical, and it took away his air. He stood in themiddle of the hallway. The others went around him. A few of them were