The Falls of the Wyona

by David Brendan Hopes

  “Yes sir, if . . . I mean, if it’s—”

  Coach reared his hand back and delivered Vince a blow across the face. Everyone had stopped to watch the drama in the lobby, and most everyone gasped when the blow connected. Vince staggered back. His hand moved as if trying to comfort his face, but in the end stayed at his side. He stood up, to take another one if that’s what Coach planned. No one dared speak. Except Glen Copland. Out of all that stunned silence came a little laugh, brief and pointed.

  “Oh, big man,” Glen said, smirking at Coach as though he’d caught him with his pants down.

  Coach roared toward Glen with both fists up. He hissed under his breath, “You fucking homo. Are you the one who—”

  “Maybe I am and maybe I’m not, but all you need to know is that if you touch me I’ll have your job and anything you will ever own.”

  In a time when teachers beat kids all the time, it was hard to measure how much of the threat was serious and how much bravado, but there Glen was smirking with his chin against Coach’s fist. Coach backed down. Coach whirled on his boy and said, “You ever embarrass me like that again and you won’t be able to play football. A fucking talent show?” Coach spit the last two words out as if they were poison.

  Coach Zeus and his entourage passed through the lobby doors to the sound of manufactured laughter, and out into the night. We all stood for a moment, dumbstruck. Finally Glen grinned and said, “And he didn’t even hear you sing.”

  Vince spent that night with me. He didn’t tell me what happened when he finally went home, and I didn’t ask. It was the end of his entertainment career.

  V

  We got Calvin Cummings after we left Nancy McWhirter. I think it was a deliberate calculation on the part of the school, for Cummings was as by-the-book as McWhirter had been innovative. One of Coach Silvano’s former stars come home, Cummings was as steely and inflexible as she had been gushy and accepting. It sounds like it would have been a shock; it wasn’t, but rather like a family, where one parent fills roles the other doesn’t, and like most families, it worked out pretty well. After initial nostalgia for McWhirter’s softness and nurturing, we began to like Mr. Cummings and cherish his less lavishly doled-out affection. We liked his gruff voice and almost undetectable hesitancy of speech, a manly lisp, especially when he said childish words like “puppy” or “arithmetic.” We liked his being sternly committed to his rules, however arbitrary. Without losing our crushes on Miss McWhirter, whom we often visited before class began, we were happy with Mr. Cummings, and adored him as, somewhere deep inside, a Marine must adore his drill sergeant. Vince adored him in particular, for he was a stern, strong man in whom there was no streak of cruelty. He was as Coach Silvano might have been.

  He was also so handsome you lost track of what he was saying from time to time. Blond hair nearly shaved, fit slim body, severe wardrobe selections, he looked like a fighter pilot or an admiral one shore-leave. He’d mustered out of the Navy two weeks before he showed up in class. Larry Bibby leaned over in his seat the first day and whispered to Tilden, “Have you ever noticed how all Coach’s favorites look like movie stars?” Larry let his wrist fall limp and put on this Daffy Duck lisp and added, “What’s with that?” Tilden rolled his eyes and let it pass, but the comment stayed with me. I figured it explained something. More than one person asked why Coach never served in the war.

  I’d been happy sitting in a front seat for a change—the name “Summers” usually put you back and to audience left of every damn classroom. I was so close I could smell Cummings’ Old Spice. But one morning he motioned for our whole row to move a seat back. Before I had time to protest, he gave my seat to a new kid, a girl. Teacher’s brief intro informed us that Sherry came to us from Alabama, from whence her father had been transferred, and we were to be ladies and gentlemen and welcome her into our family.

  “Sherry, would you like to tell us something about yourself?”

  Sherry stood, turned to the class without a trace of self-consciousness, and spoke in this molasses drawl that even we full-fledged Southerners found delicious. I’ve no idea what she said, though I was listening intently. Finally, I was grateful for Cummings putting her in front of me, where I could—nay, had to—watch the back of her head for a couple of hours a day. Her little-girl string of pearls fastened exactly in the middle of the back of her neck, and never seemed to deviate. I wondered how she managed that.

  Sherry turned around in her seat to ask me questions from time to time. Normally Cummings would have come down on that hard, but it was her first day, and there were things she needed to know, and it made it unnecessary to stop class to fill her in. Besides, I think Cummings was a little sweet on her. Gentlemanly behavior was big with him, and a frail Alabama girl in a new environment offered all sorts of opportunities to the gentleman. I liked when she spoke to me. The brown-but-with-a-golden-light eyes and the deep-for-a-girl purr of her voice were exciting in ways I had never had to put into words before. After class Mr. Cummings barked over his shoulder, “Good work taking care of the new kid, Summers.”

  Something else was going on down there. I threw wood under my pants when she turned around to talk to me, or when she moved so the string of little pearls moved, or when I just happened to think about her. I wasn’t used to this. Early on I put my hand on my hard dick to figure out what was happening and what I should do about it, but a ferocious glance from Cummings up front informed me that wasn’t the right tactic. I don’t know that I blamed Sherry. It seemed vaguer and more nebulous than that, as though the whole world reeked pheromones and I inhaled some with every breath.

  We got older. Our bodies changed. Vince had been a little tubby as a kid. Now he was a panther. His dad was a panther, too; always had been. It’s a shame they were at odds: they were practically the same person. Sherry was changing my attitude toward my own body. It had needs that were—this is difficult to explain—different from my needs. There were times when we would be at odds, the body and I. The curious thing was that ever since I’d seen Vince and Glen kissing, I assumed that buddy-love was a preliminary to boy-girl relations. I’m not saying it’s not, ever, but it wasn’t for me. I actively tried to feel enthused around Tilden or my buddies on the squad, and though I liked them and felt comfortable with them, what I’d seen on the camping trip was not liking or comfort. Vince manufactured reasons to be with Glen away from Tilden and me, so I assume it still went on. My latency was big, stupid, and lasted longer than almost anybody else’s, but when I came out of it I was a full-fledged straight guy, mildly disappointed that I’d never gotten it on with one of my buddies.

  Watching Vince on the football field was a lesson in the capabilities of the human body. Plenty of those meaty farm boys from the coves were bigger than him, but he was fast and mean. His impulses in a tight spot were nearly always right. He played smart. Had to, I guess, because he wasn’t all that big. Andonian, the JV coach, got a good look at us all back in the seventh grade scrimmage, and I think he started grooming us for our destinies from that point. Vince was built like a quarterback. He moved like a quarterback. He looked like a quarterback. It was fate written in the stars.

  I was his left tackle. I knew I was going to be Vince’s left tackle before I even read the high school roster. It was the sort of thing a guy like me was destined to be: a guy like Vince’s left guard. Like most QBs, Vince was right-handed, and I could protect his blind side when he reared back to pass down the field. I took the hits for him. I landed face down with my mouth full of turf while he danced in the end zone. It was all I wanted. And who was his right tackle? Of course it was Tilden Roundtree, tough, understated, yeoman-of-Sparta, never-a-stupid-mistake-making Tilden. It was good. It was perfect. Through the season, three of the four musketeers were together all day long.

  By the time we left middle school, Vince was so handsome that the rest of us just gave up and accepted his dating leftovers. Melissa What’s-her-name was his main squeeze for a while, then that girl who c
alled herself Kitten. I forget everybody’s name these days. But I can still see them, always the perkiest, always the prettiest. Teased hair. Angora. Little heart necklaces from their daddies on their sixteenth birthdays. They lined up at the locker room door. Except Sherry. I got her. When Vince saw I was mooning over Sherry he left her strictly alone.

  We’d go double dating, or triple dating with Tilden and Mary Andonian, the JV coach’s daughter. I was so proud. We were all so good-looking, so strong and healthy. It’s like we were the queens and kings of Eddie Rickenbacker High School, wafting our cologne about us, flashing our white teeth. Tilden busted a finger once, but other than that we sailed through the football experience uplifted and un-marred. We were like America itself: good-looking, victorious in the moment, destined for victory in the time to come.

  Glen didn’t play sports. He was fast, and could have made the track team if he’d wanted to, but track didn’t have all that much glamour back in the day, and anyhow, he showed no interest. He kept pretty much invisible in high school, one of those kids who wears a backpack and sits beside you in Algebra and you never know what’s going on with them, and somehow never manage to ask. Debate team, I think, but there’s no picture to confirm that in the yearbook. He was the one of our gang whose name people would forget. He was known as “Oh . . . the other one” as often as he was by his name. He didn’t seem to care. He even called himself “the other one.” This made Vinny grin one of his big movie star grins.

  Every so often we renewed acquaintance with the Falls. We’d have a boys’ night at one of the old camping spots, hauling our illicit booze and our dirty magazines up from the parking lot—instead of miles on foot through the forest, the way we did when we were kids. The swifts went away in the winter, so on winter junkets we didn’t hang around much at the lip of the Falls, where it was blistering cold anyway. We’d huddle around the fire and crow about how wonderful it was to have the women off our backs for a weekend, how high maintenance they were and all that—though one noted we talked, at least for the first few hours, of very little else. We never opened the magazines. I guess the girly mags were there in case anyone came across us all cuddled up in the dead of night. Tits and ass would make that OK. In summer we did open the magazines, and masturbated like we heard they were going to put a tax on it. It’s each boy’s secret what he thinks about to make it happen. Glen wasn’t dating yet, but he’d laugh whenever we’d make a joke about our girls; he’d listen closely when we needed to talk about them seriously. He was good company, the perfect confidant. Maybe his fling with Vince lay way in the past, Vince being such a hound-dog with the girls these days.

  One evening Jake Hannerty sauntered by our camp. He was with the Church Street gang. There were six or seven of them, and we could hear them bellowing and carrying on through the acre of woods that lay between us. A prime weekend night, and all the guys in school were hunched over sloppy little fires with their buddies, complaining about girls—or lusting after the ones they didn’t have—easing out of the tensions of the week. Hannerty had to take a piss or something, and when he walked past us we all waved and looked away, to let him have his privacy, but he stopped dead and said, “Copland?”

  Glen said, “Hannerty!”

  “Shit man,” Jake said. “Don’t you get enough of this place? I see you every time I come.”

  Jake made his way a decent distance into the woods. We could hear him pissing into soft pine needles. Maybe I was the only one to take heed of what he said. The expectation—tacit, unarticulated, but an expectation nevertheless—was that one would not come to the Falls alone. The surface reason was that it was dangerous. The more subtle reasons included the feeling that it was the setting for the deeds of the Brotherhood, and without the Brotherhood, nothing should happen at all. Maybe I heard wrong. Maybe Hannerty was bullshitting, the way one does.

  I eyeballed Glen. He had that look on his face you have when you’re hoping nobody paid attention to what was just said.

  I couldn’t help myself. Vince and Tilden were off doing something, and I took the occasion to say, “So, Glen, you’ve been coming up here yourself?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Not for . . . not for anything like that.”

  Glen saw that I had no idea what “that” meant. He sighed. He opened his backpack and pulled out a canvas bag. It wasn’t a bag, really, but a flat sheet of khaki canvas rolled around and around layers of something. Slowly he unrolled the bag. Inside, pressed flat between sheets of wax paper, and then rolled up like precious oil paintings, were fern leaves and liverworts and bright feathers fallen from birds Glen might have known but I did not.

  “What do you call that?”

  “Oh . . . specimens. I don’t know.”

  Glen shrugged, but it was all right. He was a collector. A scientist. That was all right. It was firmly among the activities that would have been all right. I sighed in relief of a danger averted, without knowing exactly what the danger might be.

  Tilden and Vince had been back in camp for about ten seconds when commotion arose in the temporarily over-populated woods. I thought they’d set fire to something or taken a crap on somebody’s bedroll, but when the noise began—most of it seemed to come from the Church Street camp—they looked as bewildered as anybody. Jake Hannerty came sprinting back through the woods. He was tall and lanky, and looked like a giraffe loping on, pushing the pine boughs to one side or the other. The look on his face was not graceful.

  “Hansen!” he managed to gasp out. “Hansen!”

  Glen said, “Hansen? What do you mean? Timmy Hansen?”

  Hannerty nodded frantically and continued flying through woods. We could hear him a way off crying “Hansen! Hansen!” at the next circle of sleeping bags.

  It would have been nice if we hadn’t known what he meant, but we did. Tilden jumped up and stamped out the fire. We all got ourselves arranged and lit out at a dead run for the brink of the Falls.

  The upper reaches of the gorge came alive with boys climbing up and down crying “Timmy! Timmy!” If he’d answered, I don’t know how he would have been heard in the din, but adrenaline was so high it was not the time to try to talk it down. This kid we all knew, Marky . . . Marky something, sat on a stone with his feet in the water. When we first came out of the trees, his face hid in his hands, but he lifted it up in a second and screamed. His face was red and swollen. You had to pay close attention to make out what he was screaming. It was: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED! HE WAS RIGHT THERE! HE WAS JUST FUCKING RIGHT THERE!”

  His face would fall back into his hands, and a couple of the Church Street boys would pat him and coo to him that it was all right. Everybody knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right. In a minute the scarlet swollen face, streaming tears, reared up again, howling: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED! HE WAS RIGHT THERE! HE WAS JUST FUCKING RIGHT THERE!”

  Easy to read. Marky and Timmy had been horsing around at the rim of the Falls, showing off for one another. Marky looked down to swat a deerfly on his leg, and when he looked up, Timmy Hansen was gone. It was that simple. The Falls got at least one every generation. That was the lore. That was the truth as we told it. No one would admit to heaving a sigh of relief that the sacrifice for our generation was now known and accomplished.

  We kept climbing around and screaming, but we all pretty much knew what would be found in the plunge pool at the bottom of the falls. Someone jumped into a car and headed for town. About an hour into the drama, the police showed up. Chief Dadlez had come up from Asheville to helm the village force right at the New Year, and so far he had been all about garnering good will, helpful and cheerful and spruce, getting kittens out of drain pipes, that sort of thing. I didn’t see him when he arrived at the gorge rim, but Vince said it took him a while to get oriented and organize a party to find the body. We were ahead of him there.

  I knew the trails and footholds pretty well, so I managed to get to the floor of the gorg
e, all the way down. The spray of the falls cooled my sweat. I could hear boys hollering over the roar of the water; none seemed to have gotten down this far. I hoped they’d stop trying, so nobody else would fall. I slipped my way over the slick rocks toward the plunge pool. Rainbows stood in concentric arches over the green moss and the blinding white stone. Seagulls wheeled and soared as though the din were surf and not a plunging river. I stopped myself from noticing how beautiful everything was. It was not the time. Down by the pool one discerned two shapes. One was horizontal, a body, shedding red plumes into the relatively calm pool it had drifted into. The other was vertical, standing by the water: Glen Copland. The light hit his Boy Scout knapsack covered with patches so it looked like a tropical bird had landed on his shoulders.

  The force of waters buffeted Timmy’s body slowly to shore. Glen waited for it. When he was close enough, Glen knelt and pulled Timmy in by his baggy denim cuff. I know I could have run and helped, but I sensed something sacred going on, that I should stay out of it until I got the signal. So I watched as Glen hauled the poor broken boy out of the water. Timmy was bigger than Glen, so it wasn’t easy, but Glen got him out onto the encircling shingle of round stones. Glen didn’t know what to do now any more than I would have, so he knelt down and took Timmy in his arms, to keep him warm until help came. I walked to their side then. I didn’t know what to do except to hold Glen as Glen held Timmy. At last, the firemen came with ropes and a canvas stretcher. Dadlez held them up for some regulation or other, but when he finally set them loose, the firemen, who were town boys too, muscled down the same paths and footholds we all knew.

  It had been a while since the Falls had taken anybody. The town had forgotten how to deal with it. People looked at each other in the streets with the look that said, “What are we supposed to do?” They put Timmy’s face on a poster and stapled it up in the grocery stores and on the church bulletin boards. They were up a long time, the posters were, until they faded too much and someone took them down. He was a good kid. Everybody liked him. We all knew the Hansen family. It was just awful. Nobody admitted to thankfulness that there remained three sisters and two other brothers in the family. The numbers of the remnant didn’t make it any better, but they kept it from being worse.