Unleashed Read online

Years ago, Misty and Marc’s church youth group had taken a trip to the Civil Rights Institute. Grampa had gone with them, and when Misty bragged that he’d been in the movement, the tour guide’s face brightened. She asked Grampa to tell them about his experiences.

  Grampa tried but got choked up. He was a deacon at church and a proud man. Suddenly embarrassed, he excused himself and walked outside.

  Misty followed him, scared he was mad at her. But Grampa shook his head and asked her to sit with him on the steps for a while. They shared a few quiet minutes. Grampa said it looked like it might rain. Misty squinted up at the sky, agreed, and they settled back into silence for a while longer. Then Grampa pointed to a statue on the institute’s landscaped campus. “That’s Shuttlesworth,” he said. “He was a crazy SOB.” Then he told Misty a story in his quiet, stern voice.

  When the National Guard wouldn’t enforce integration laws in Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth—a bootlegger turned shouting, jumping preacher—decided to do it singlehandedly by enrolling his daughter at all-white Phillips High downtown. When they arrived, a mob of Klansmen and other upstanding citizens were waiting. While his daughter Ruby screamed at him to stay in the car, the reverend climbed out and walked toward the front door.

  “And he was smiling, Misty. Just grinning like they were all his best friends,” Grampa told her.

  The mob swarmed. It pummeled him with chains. It smashed the car windows. It stabbed Ruby in the hip before she beat it back with her purse. A friend who’d come with Shuttlesworth managed to grab him and make an escape. At the E.R., the physician took a second X-ray of Shuttlesworth’s skull before being satisfied that he didn’t have any fractures.

  Covered in blood, Shuttlesworth laughed. “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town. He gave me a hard head.”

  Grampa almost never mentioned the movement, and Misty had listened to every word of his story intently. She’d never forgotten it. Getting by in Birmingham demanded hard-headedness, in one sense or another. Grampa and the rest of the movement soldiers had known it. A generation later, Misty’s mom had known it, working two jobs to feed and diaper twin brats. And Misty knew it now, growing up a stray in this tooth-and-nail city.

  Misty’s parents had married and divorced twice. Sometimes seeing a person is bad for you is a lot easier than shaking loose of them. While her dad drifted in and out of the picture, her mom dispatched for a trucking company by day and tended bar at a place over the mountain at night. At first, Misty and Marc would stay with their dad when their mom worked nights. Then he asked Rebecca and her girls to live with him. There wasn’t much room left for his own kids after that.

  When their mom was home, she was usually trying to catch a few hours of sleep between jobs, leaving Misty and Marc to raise themselves. Even at fourteen, as their mom scrambled around grabbing her purse and bartender apron, they still begged her to stay for just a little longer, just a few more minutes. They stopped after realizing how much harder they were making the whole thing on her. If she could have given her kids a stable home, she would have. All their mom could do, though, was show them how to survive without one.

  Never let anyone see you cry except family. Life’s tough; if you’re not tougher, you’d better fake it. Never kiss ass, and never trust anyone who’s kissing yours. And to Misty: If a boy calls you a slut, hit him. If he keeps talking, keep hitting.

  Both Misty and Marc grew to resemble their mom, weed thin and just as stubborn. To kids at school with better families, with parents who bought them nice clothes and taught them to drive, Misty and Marc seemed feral. Misty didn’t help much by telling Geneva Jones that, if she kept her mouth shut, it’d take people longer to realize she was an idiot. The next day, after Geneva’s boyfriend told Marc his sister was psycho, Marc didn’t help much either by head-butting him.

  But a hard head was different from a hard heart. Even after she’d stopped crying when her mom left for the bar, Misty would sometimes jerk awake in the middle of the night and be unable to go back to sleep. She’d want to call her mom. They could have talked about anything, TV shows or what was happening at school. Her mom was busy, though, and couldn’t talk unless it was an emergency. Curling up in the lonely dark, Misty wished her mom could look after them or that her dad wanted to. But her mom had taught her there was no point feeling sorry for herself; the rest of the world didn’t give a damn.

  As soon as she got her license, Misty applied for a job at Florence Deli, partly for the money, partly just to have somewhere to go. On her first day, Misty kept burning her knuckles pushing sandwiches into the oven. A girl named Val, who Misty sort of knew from gym class, stopped and showed her how to slide them in like hockey pucks while keeping her fingers clear.

  Val seemed mousy and quiet at school, and maybe a little nervous around Misty. Once they got to know each other outside McCammon High’s rumor mill, though, they grew tight. Soon, they were hanging out at each other’s homes before work and smoking weed in the deli’s walk-in cooler during their breaks.

  Marc decided he was too cool to wear a fast-food uniform. Instead, he spent nights roaming the city with his friends, and sometimes just by himself, exploring all its secrets. On the way to school one morning, out of nowhere, he turned to Misty and said, “There’s this weird place near the viaduct. Like a closed up steel furnace.”

  “So?”

  “It’s just weird. It’s like nobody’s been there for years. Everybody’s just forgotten about it.”

  “You really don’t have anything better to do than kick around an old furnace?”

  Marc shrugged. “It’s just weird is all.”

  “Whatever.” Everything she knew had just started cracking like ice under her feet, but she never heard a sound.

  She started dating Andre a few weeks later, Doberman-sleek with a bottomless well of jokes and chatter. Misty was in love. Once, she and Val went to an army surplus store. Val wanted a peacoat, but they spent hours trying on bandoliers and gas masks, talking about Andre and Eric, a sweet, sad boy Val liked.

  Misty saw a pair of tanker boots. They had leather straps and buckles instead of laces. Their thick rubber soles made her feel a foot taller and dangerous. At least until Monday, when Andre saw them.

  “Letting your ghetto show, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “What? People are going to say, ‘Damn. She needs army boots to squish those military-grade cockroaches at her place’”

  “C’mon. They’re cool.”

  “If you’re headed out to pick cotton. Why can’t you wear normal shoes?”

  “Because I’m not a normal girl.” But suddenly, clumping around in boots a size too big for her, Misty felt her ears burn. When she got home, she took them off. They wound up forgotten in the back of her closet.

  Andre could get frustrated with Misty’s hardheadedness, scolding, “You want people to stop thinking you’re a little hoodrat? Quit acting like a little hoodrat!”

  Misty would apologize and try to be more sociable. And even if Andre’s barbs stabbed too deep occasionally, she clung to him. She finally had somebody to call in the middle of the night. They’d talk about nothing in particular for hours. After hanging up, Misty sometimes lay in bed crying and laughing at once, flush with love and the wonderful feeling of belonging to somebody.

  Last October, Misty and Andre, Val, Eric, and Marc went to buy from Charlie Say What, a pot dealer who lived in Misty and Marc’s apartment building. Charlie wasn’t holding that day, though, so they just drove around. They passed through the city’s ugly side—warehouses and factories, women’s shelters and AIDS clinics, all clustered together in the shadow of the viaduct. Then suddenly, Marc said, “Want to see something weird? Pull in here.”

  Eric steered into the empty parking lot of a machine shop. A fence, curtained with dead honeysuckle vines and topped with coils of razor wire, ran behind the shop and stretched the entire block. Rusting metal signs were hung every few yards, reading PROPERTY OF VICTOR DEVELOPMEN
T, NO TRESPASSING.

  As Marc started tugging at the honeysuckle, Andre asked, “What is this? The old furnace?”

  Marc glanced at him. “Have you ever been inside?”

  “No, it’s an old furnace.”

  The names of Birmingham’s neighborhoods, Ensley, Powderly, Owenton, were vestiges of factory-town fiefdoms, smokestacks stabbing a fume-blackened sky, dynamite buried in the roads to keep out union organizers. Most of that brimstone empire was gone, the mills and forges replaced by office parks. Traces of it remained, though, like old scars.

  “Come on, Marc, let’s go get something to eat or something.” Val blew warm air into her hands.

  “Just check it out. It’s really—here.” Marc ripped away the honeysuckle and revealed an opening someone had cut into the fence. Without another word, he scurried through.

  “Damnit, Marc.” Misty chased after her brother. Fear calcified in her stomach, waiting for security guards to rush up and arrest them for trespassing. Then she looked around and knew there were no guards or anybody else. The furnace complex had been completely abandoned to rot, rust, and lush new growth.

  Great machines overgrew their crumbling brick control houses. Brambles and kudzu overgrew everything. Rising around railroad cars and trestles, the scrub formed geometric blocks. Blast stoves and boilers seemed to blossom from the ground, unspooling tendrils of pipe.

  Wooden walkways, most of their planks missing, led around the complex. Misty and her friends dared one another to climb to the top of the blast furnaces or down metal stairways sinking into lightless tunnels. Misty stepped through a window and into a long hall lined with identical machines. They were so huge, workers had scuttled up and down ladders to operate the controls. Their vast stillness made Misty aware of the gentle beat of her heart.

  Holding hands, she and Andre wandered away from the others into an industrial grotto, the cold winter sun breaking through a canopy of I-beams and electrical conduits.

  “This is actually kind of pretty.”

  Andre snickered.

  “What? I mean, it’s peaceful. It’s nice.”

  “Sure.” He eyed some empty bottles and a trampled sleeping bag in the doorway of one of the buildings.

  Sighing, Misty heard Val’s laughter on the wind. She and Andre rejoined the others by the mud-banked reservoir.

  “Why’d they just leave this place?” Misty asked, craning her neck to look at the pair of towering blast furnaces that dominated the grounds. “Doesn’t anybody at least want the land?”

  “It’s a con big companies play,” Eric said softly. “After a factory or whatever closes, developers go to city hall and say, ‘Sell it to us cheap. We’ll fix it up, reopen it, and you can brag about bringing all those jobs back.’ As soon as they get the deed, though, they start doing economic analyses, environmental surveys, more environmental surveys based on the findings from the first surveys. They can drag that stuff out forever.”

  “Why? They’re still not making any money off it,” Misty said, but Eric was already shaking his head.

  “Not yet. But eventually, this place will be so run-down, the city will condemn it. Then Victor Development can level the whole thing and build condos or whatever, which was their real plan all along.”

  “Oh.” Wishing she hadn’t needed Eric to explain it to her, Misty tried to think of something smart to add. “That’s a crappy way to play the people who thought they were getting their jobs back.”

  “Yeah, but city hall’s happy. The companies are happy.” Eric shrugged and fell quiet again.

  “Misty, check it out. That’s like the perfect fairy-tale toadstool.” Val plucked a mushroom from the dead weeds and showed it to her.

  “Aw. It’s cute.” Cherry red and speckled with white spots, the same mushroom had filled every enchanted forest in every storybook Misty remembered.

  “Um, actually, that’s a magic mushroom,” Andre said.

  “Really?” Marc asked, suddenly interested. “So if you eat that, you’ll start tripping?”

  “I think so.”

  “You mean we’ve got free drugs just growing out here, and we’ve been giving all our money to Charlie Say What?” Grabbing the mushroom from Val, Marc raised it to his mouth.

  “Or you’ll go insane and poke your own eyes out,” Andre added. “One or the other. Try it and see.”

  “Look, there’s more over there.”

  “And over here,” Misty said, turning in a slow circle. “Dang, they’re every—didn’t we just come from there?”

  “Yeah. So?” Andre asked.

  Mushrooms sprouted along the path leading from the grotto, a dozen or more pushing between the boards. Misty couldn’t figure out how they hadn’t noticed them a minute ago. She plucked one. The scarlet cap felt feverish in her cold palm. “It’s hot,” she whispered.

  “Probably from all the toxic shit they dumped into the—”

  Glass shattered inside one of the buildings. A few muttered, angry words and then silence. Misty and her friends’ eyes twitched around at one another. The furnace wasn’t totally abandoned after all. They started creeping back toward the gap in the fence. Dropping the mushroom, Misty broke into a dead run, her friends right behind her.

  They rolled under the fence and jumped into the car. Once they were safe, unhinged laughter rose from their bellies. Tears squeezed from their eyes.

  “That place was weird, Marc,” Eric said.

  “Deeply weird,” Val agreed.

  Misty wiped the mushroom’s sticky residue off her pant leg. As Eric drove off, she twisted around to get a last glimpse of the tops of the twin blast furnaces. A dragonfly of fancy hummed between her rational thoughts. She imagined they must have taproots reaching down to the center of the world.

  The sun had almost set. They started talking about getting something to eat again. Andre decided he didn’t want to, so he and Misty said their good-byes and went to his house. They watched a movie and made sour-cream cake with Andre’s little sister. Misty, who’d been doing the grocery shopping since she’d been thirteen, had no clue how Andre could assume baking powder and baking soda were the same thing.

  Misty couldn’t stop thinking about the furnace the whole time they cooked and ate. Getting home, she logged onto the Internet. She didn’t expect any real answers; she was just curious. First, she Googled “Victor Development” but didn’t learn anything except it was based in Boston. She tried “Birmingham steel furnace.” There had been several steel furnaces in Birmingham, though, and she couldn’t figure out which websites were about theirs. Finally, she typed in “Red mushroom with white spots.” The top site was called Herbal Magick. Misty read for a couple minutes, then called Val.

  Val had been asleep. Answering her phone, she mumbled, “Couldn’t you hire another best friend to work the late shift? I already pulled a double today. I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m e-mailing you a link. Check it out.”

  Val yawned. “Is it that chimpanzee drinking malt liquor?”

  “Get out of bed and check it out. Andre was right.”

  Modern biologists called their storybook mushroom Amanita muscaria, but the Rigveda, Sanskrit hymns written a thousand years before the Old Testament, praised it as a god. Warriors once drank a liquor fermented from its juices that made them fearless. They hurled themselves into battle snarling, slobbering, and biting their enemies.

  Viking berserkers gobbled the mushroom caps by the handful, transforming themselves into bears. Druids had boiled it down into a salve that made them werewolves.

  The mushroom seemed to have grown in the nooks and crannies of countless societies, silently offering seekers a chance to tear loose of every civilized impulse. The article ended with a warning. While Amanita muscaria was part of many peoples’ cultural heritage, it was dangerous. Nobody should experiment with it, even in small quantities. Obviously, the article’s author wasn’t stuck in a rusted-out city, bored out of his mind.

  None of them really bel
ieved in werewolves and all that; it was just something to do. But the myths surrounding the mushrooms and the strangeness of the furnace made the game more exciting. The next day at lunch, they started working out plans to return that weekend. Andre didn’t say much. Afterward, he pulled Misty aside.

  “You’re not really thinking about this, right?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not get high in an abandoned furnace? I can’t imagine. That’s as safe as eating cookies in Grandma’s kitchen. Come on, Misty. My folks are taking Jenna to that majorette thing Saturday. I figured you’d want to spend some time just with me.”

  “I do, but can’t we do this, then spend some time alone? It’s going to be great, like going to a haunted house or something.”

  “Crackheads don’t jump out and stab you in a haunted house, Misty. Use some sense.”

  Misty squirmed. Andre could make her feel like a raggedy stray easier than anyone. “Fine.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Good. You and me, little food, little music. That’s how you want to spend a Saturday.”

  “Yeah.”

  Saturday, as Misty crawled through the hole in the fence, she told her friends she couldn’t stay long but didn’t explain why.

  On their earlier visit, somebody skulking through the building beside the reservoir had scared them off. This time, Misty brought her MP3 player and a pair of plug-in speakers. The furnace grounds sprawled for acres. As long as they announced their presence loudly enough, they and anybody living there could keep out of one another’s way.

  Fiddling with her player, Misty chose Pins & Needles, mopey love songs at maximum volume. Val’s cousin had done ’shrooms before, and Val was pretty sure they had to be cooked, otherwise they’d be poisonous. Building a small fire, they laid the scarlet caps on flat chunks of slag iron pushed close to the flames.

  When it was cool, the slag seemed dull black, but the heat revealed jewel-tone impurities swimming within. And the ordinary-seeming fungus hid so much power, people had actually worshipped it once, sang songs and written poems about it. Misty and her friends made nervous jokes and watched the flesh of an ancient god darken to the red-purple of blisters.