The Alchemist’s Apprentice

for Vince Gilligan

My mom says she hasn’t the foggiest and that wherever Jimmy Creedy, her stay-over boyfriend, heisted all those tracheotomy tubes is anybody’s guess. “Possibly Dr. Frankenstein’s la-bor-a-tory,” I joked, but she just shrugged, like yeah, maybe.

For everyone’s sake she asks Jimmy no questions and neither do I. The less we know the better, and it’s been a few months since he liquefied the pure-grade silver and poured it into cookie molds right there on our kitchen counter. Untraceable angels and mermaids and dog bones and bells. Then he double-boxed and packed them like bullion, and sometime after midnight he returned, saying, “Mm-hmm,” and my mom in her nightgown sashaying toward him, and Jimmy already toasting to “Rubies on the mud flaps. Goddamn stardust instead of brake lights.”

That’s the way he talks, always high as a kite after a lucrative score, everything in code, and I figured what he meant was that we were all three of us together suddenly headed for happier times.

A godsend is what my mom contends, given our circumstances. He’s late thirties like her and handsome as Hans Solo—cut broad across the chest but otherwise angular and tall and blue-eyed. Easy-going and good-humored, a state of mind that’d been all but snuffed out in our household. He’s smart, too, and in ways you might not anticipate. Just last week he brainstormed some weird wind physics—inversions and updrafts and crosscurrents—which I then mapped and calibrated and reconstructed for my ninth-grade science project. An octagon of box fans arranged around a dunce stool so that when I hit the power switch the iridescent drawstrings of Evelyn Sacksteder’s sweatshirt lifted slow-motion sideways and writhed and writhed like skinny, electric green eels in the darkened classroom.

A few girls shrieked and later Evelyn whispered in my ear, “Alchemist.” She whispered, “Sorcerer,” but it’s Jimmy Creedy who possesses the magic, the Midas touch, not me. Just last week I opened the door as he unhooked my mom’s bra and somehow pulled it through the sleeve of her t-shirt. He grinned and winked over her shoulder at me as if someday, against impossible odds, I too might perform such wizardry.

Plus he’s the one who got my mom to brush back all that heavy dark hair from her forehead and face, and when they slow dance in the kitchen those oxidized metal earrings he polished glow bright as mercury under the low-wattage light bulbs. If she tilts her head just so, that shapeless, wicked-purple skin graft covering her entire left cheek appears almost soft. He kisses her there like she’s still pretty, like this is her most gorgeous feature, though she’s so afraid of fire that she stood back, palms out, and stared through her splayed fingers when that whispery blue whoosh of my Bunsen burner ignited.

I guess having lighted it makes me an accessory or accomplice. And later, when Jimmy licked his thumb and peeled from his money clip and handed me a couple of freshly minted twenties, I nodded and wadded up the bills like he said so they didn’t look so new and then I stuffed, one each, deep into my front pockets.

Ever since the attack my mom’s been out of work, the manager at Kroger not saying so, but what he meant was that no amount of makeup and cover-stick could alter the sight of her in the customers’ eyes. Worst of all, she said it made her feel like some tramp, all painted up and begging like that, though prior to Jimmy’s arrival she’d continued religiously circling in red Magic Marker every possible lead in the want ads. She even checked the laundromat bulletin board, and I racked my brain for any conceivable scheme to generate some income. Each time she left she’d say, “Wish me luck,” but it’d be the predictable once-over-and-gone as soon as she...