“Who is?”
He motioned toward the path the snowshoes had made into the woods.
“Vince?”
“No, not Vince. His friend. His—well, you know.”
“Tilden?”
“Not fucking Tilden. The one . . . the other one . . .”
“Glen?”
“Yeah, Glen.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s here all the time by himself. I come and think I’ll be alone, and catch a glimpse of him crawling around in the rocks. Looking at things.”
“Him and his nature.”
“Yeah. Makes me wish I had something like that. I had—” Clarence stopped and knitted his brow, trying to remember what it was he had. The effort proved too much. He bent over, laughing helplessly. When he almost had control of himself again, he wheezed out, “I can’t . . . fucking . . . remember . . . what I had.” He thought it was so funny. I did too, for his sake.
I saw Tilden and Vince reappear out of the forest. I wanted to say goodbye to Clarence, but he was still laughing, bent over with his hands on his knees, in exactly the stance I used a few minutes ago for exhaustion. I punched his arm. He nodded and waved me on, unable to cut the laughter long enough to say goodbye.
A storm came up that night and continued for two more nights, snow and snow and then blown and drifting snow. It would have been perfect for snowshoeing, but they were school nights, and by the time the weekend came the temperature was in the sixties and the snow was gone. Additionally, I got another invitation. Sherry decided we should use the winter thaw in some unexpected way. We should go on a January picnic.
Mrs. Tanseer packed Sherry and me a lunch and we cycled up 414 to the Falls. Sherry carried the lunches in her backpack, because she was less likely to act like a retard and take a spill, and we didn’t need for all the sandwiches to be smashed when we got there. The day felt warm and the very unseasonableness of it assured us some privacy. Unmelted snow flashed in the shade of the trees. One sunny side of one rock on the bike path wore a blue spray of anemones. They had likely been blooming already, under the snow. I admired that. I admired that they would not bend to circumstance.
We’d eaten our lunches and stretched out on a sun-struck stone, a chip a glacier had broken off from another mountain a thousand miles to the north. We intended to take a nap in the sunlight, but we were too excited from the ride and the proximity of one another. Sherry sat so the light came through her hair into my eyes. I always thought of her hair as dark, not black, but black’s cousin. With light in it like that, it went up in rays of red and dark gold, the dark of it like a shadow rather than a real color. The sun came too bright from that direction for me to see much else. I realized that, facing away from the sun the way she was, every detail of my face would be clear and illuminated. I lay exactly as a photographer would put me to take my picture in that light. I hoped she liked what she saw. I lay so the muscle of my arm made a bulge when I rested my head against it. She’d taken a liking to fashion, that you could get from the magazines at the hairdressers’, and was giving me a run-down of designers I had never heard of and whose designs I could not imagine even with her detailed descriptions. I was clueless and I didn’t mind. I was listening to her, not to the words. I vibrated with an electrical excitement that was partially agitation from the bike ride, partially something else I could not quite define. I was new to such matters, and it took me a while to recognize what I felt. This is it, I thought. For the first time I was certain what I wanted, and it was Sherry, and there would be no finesse, no delicacy up there in the wind and rock.
While she was still talking I leaned over and kissed her at the nearest part, which was her ankle. She stopped talking. She reached down and touched the spot I’d kissed. The light shone so bright in my face that I couldn’t see her expression, but she hadn’t slugged me, so I took the next step. I rose up on my knees so my mouth could find her face. She met me halfway. She met me more than halfway. I thought she was going to push me off the stone. We jumped at each other like a pair of cougars. I thought she was going to break my ribs, and then I thought I was going to break hers. I don’t know exactly what thing led to the next, but in moments we were kissing, hard, hungrily, Sherry making little moans that turned me on all the harder. I’d never heard that. In all the kissing scenes in the movies, I had never heard moaning. I guess everyone conspires to save that for the real thing. Sherry smelled like grass and sun and the stone we had been lying on. She was under my shirt, chewing away, so I must have smelled all right.
Discretion did cross our minds. We slid down the far side of the stone, so we could not be seen from the path, or at all unless somebody climbed the boulder directly over our heads. The downside was that this gave us less than four feet of mossy shelf before the plunge into the gorge. This made our lovemaking compact and concentrated, and I can’t say that was a detriment. Either Sherry had done this before, or girls were naturals at it in a way boys weren’t. Whenever I fumbled she set me right; whenever I wondered what next to do, her hands and lips put forward a suggestion. I tried to pull away before I burst in her mouth, but that’s what she wanted, and she wouldn’t let me pull away, and I let go with a scream that amazes me in recollection. It echoed against the rocks of the gorge. It sounded like someone falling. When the waves had passed, she eased herself forward and lay down on top of me. We lay that way for a long time. My legs went to sleep under her, but I didn’t care. Her hair flew around us and I could see nothing but that. I could feel a deep sigh in her that had no sound to it. She rolled onto the mossy stone beside us and sat up.
I said, “Oh boy.”
This made her laugh. She leaned over with her chest over her knees and belted it out until tears came into her eyes. I loved the way Sherry laughed. It was anarchy personified. Now she was full in the light so I could see her. Her hair was dark again, waving around her head so that her laughter-tear-streaming brown-gold eyes were only sometimes visible. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. I couldn’t believe that someone that beautiful had accepted me—no, had chosen me. Sherry was leaning pretty close to the edge of the shelf now. Her laughter simmered down. But she didn’t draw back. Something caught her eye. She focused on something in the gorge. The gorge and the bottom of the Falls were not visible from the rocks above, but some of it was from this new vantage, where none of us had been before. Neither Sherry nor I was uncomfortable with heights, so I got on my hands and knees and joined her at the brink.
“What are you looking at?”
She pointed. “Isn’t it disgusting,” she said, “how people are so careless—”
A white mass lay on a stone at the bottom, garbage that had dived over the falls, or perhaps been tossed by piggish picnickers. But it was on a dry slab of rock and too far from the Falls, so it became clear that whatever it was had been tossed deliberately, probably from the very spot where we lay.
We had both realized what we were seeing before either of us spoke again. Sherry said, “Fuck,” in that way she had, at once pointed and contemplative. It was not garbage. It was a body. The little flapping motions we thought was paper flying around was the tail of a white shirt. Both the shirt and the stone were clearly stained red. We jumped on our bikes and rode in absolute silence back to town, at speeds around those mountain corners that only the urgency of our mission allowed. I knew even before we ran into the sheriff’s deputies at Roscoe’s Diner at the edge of town that it was Clarence.
I was curled up in bed when Andy got home, too excited to sleep, being a sort of hero, being one of those who had found the body. I didn’t know what to say to my brother, so I pretended to be asleep. Andy came in and took off his jacket. The leather smelled of Andy, and it comforted me, as it always did. He dropped his clothes on the floor and kicked them under the bed to be sorted out in the morning. I heard his familiar sounds in the bathroom. He brushed his teeth. He entered the room and closed the door behind him. He didn’t lie down. I knew he was standing
in the middle of the room, listening to see if I were asleep. Then in a voice that sounded like it was coming from far away, I heard him say, “Buddy . . . buddy . . . what have you done?” Andy sobbed himself to sleep. The sound was loud enough that I don’t think he heard me sobbing too.
I wakened to Andy brushing my hair back from my face. His face was puffy, his eyes sleepless. I supposed it was morning, though it was bitterly dark.
“Get up, Ardo. By the time you get your clothes on, it will be light enough.”
I heard Andy on the phone downstairs as I dressed. He whispered, but it’s surprising how the s’s of whispering carry. When I went down he stood on the porch, his bike and mine resting against the porch wall. Louie and Marcus were in the yard waiting. Louie and Marcus were all of his gang that were, for one reason or another, home from the war. Marcus was black and the Army didn’t want him so much. Louie had asthma and flat feet. Marcus sucked on a gigantic thermos of coffee. The sweet smell of it filled the yard.
Andy said, “Saddle up, men. We ride.”
I didn’t know where we were going until Andy veered onto 414. We were going to the Falls. There were the sounds of legs pumping and lungs breathing around me, the sharp smells of the mountain morning. It would have been cold if we were not going fifteen miles an hour straight uphill.
Up ahead I could hear part of a conversation between Andy and Louie. Andy’s buddies had come because he summoned them, not because they had any idea what was going on. I lost the front part, but the back part of what Andy said was, “—didn’t do it to himself.”
“It was an accident,” Louie said, halfway between a question and a declaration.
“That’s right.”
“We’re going to prove that?”
“That’s right.”
In the day since the news got out, people seemed more concerned over whether it was a suicide than the fact that Clarence was dead. He survived the war but didn’t survive the peace. People didn’t like that. People didn’t want to know about that. People die, but when people die on purpose, especially the kind they like to say “have their whole lives ahead of them,” people worry that something is wrong at the core of things. Rot at the root. Andy worried about that. He did not want for something to be wrong at the center of his friend’s life. I knew now he had lain awake all night, thinking of this, measuring what he knew of his friend against the dark concept “suicide,” deciding there was no resonance between them.
I’d never gotten to the Falls so fast. Not many cars could have gotten there much quicker. My lungs were bursting, but it felt great. All the guys stood by their bikes for a moment in the parking lot, blowing mist out of their mouths, catching their breaths, clouds of steam rolling off their bodies as if they were hot metal. Louie had his Atlanta Braves ball cap turned backwards on his head, which meant he was ready for action.
Louie said, “I say we split up and—”
I interrupted, “He had a camp here. A kind of . . . bivouac.”
Andy looked at me. “That true? You know where it was?”
I nodded. I led them to the place where I’d found Clarence drunk five days before. A thin wisp of smoke, hardly discernible from the fog all around, still issued from the center ashes of his little fire.
Marcus said, “Clarence could build a fire on an iceberg and keep it burning in a hurricane.”
We began to ransack the camp, gently, though, so no clue, no bit of proof, no salvageable memento could be lost. Andy found ropes and crampons. Marcus found a store of victuals, hoisted up into a tree against the bears, meant to last for at least a weekend.
Marcus said, “People intending to kill themselves do not bring Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.”
Louie looked into Clarence’s backpack. Inside were some clean clothes, and a pen, and a journal to write in with the pen.
“He kept a diary.”
Andy said, “Close it up. We’ll decide what to do later.”
When we’d gathered what there was to gather, I made a suggestion.
“I think I know where he fell from. Sherry and I didn’t just . . . come across him. We found him at a particular place.”
I felt many pairs of eyes on me. When I looked up, Marcus grinned a big shit-eating grin. He said, “You two were making out, weren’t you?”
Like a real man, I said nothing.
I brought them to our flat rock, which was not sunny now, but clammy and uninviting. I showed them how to drop over the far side and still have enough room to stand before the plunge to the abyss. The Falls roared so around us every word had to be blasted at the top of lungs. You had to lower yourself down from the ledge a little in order to see anything. Andy twisted tufts of grass in his grip trying to peer into the depths. Louie and Marcus held onto his legs.
“Fucking fog.”
We’d never been to the Falls very early in the morning—and when we spent the night, we had not roused ourselves in time—and so didn’t know when the fog finally burned away. Andy couldn’t wait. He kept inching over the brink, Louie and Marcus holding onto him for dear life. Finally Andy’s hand shot out like a thrown spear. He shouted, “There!”
We couldn’t see, but we trusted he’d found something. Andy refused to move, lest it be an apparition and vanish when he did. When the fog blew thinner, we all peered over very carefully and saw what Andy saw. It was a length of rope, one frayed end caught in a fissure and the other descending we knew not where into the misty depths. As Louie was finding a spot to look over himself, his hand touched cold metal. It was a climber’s anchor, a new one, that Clarence had clearly driven into the ground the day before to anchor his descent into the gorge. The drama came suddenly clear.
His rope broke.
His rope broke.
His rope broke. Maybe sheared on the knife edge of the black-and-white obsidian just under the overhanging brink. Andy began to cry. Everybody turned their heads into the fog where their expressions could not be seen. It had been an accident. The frayed rope on the stone wall shouted mercy.
Marcus said, “The Falls has claimed its own. Again.”
As if Marcus’s words had somehow broadcast through the fog and reached every ear in town, the streets and cafés and beauty parlors murmured with the sentence, “The Falls has claimed its own.” Isolated people—and despite the radio and pretty good roads, we were hillbillies clinging to the cracked and crumbling side of the oldest mountain in the world—latch on to phrases and catch words as though they were some comfort, as though they were the truth. We latched on to “The Falls has claimed its own.” I didn’t know what it meant, beyond something someone might say almost automatically in a situation like that, something to give a random occurrence meaning, even a sinister one. I didn’t know that it meant anything at all.
We’d made a tactical mistake that morning when we set out to vindicate Clarence. We’d left the beds of four young men empty at the break of day, young men known to be particular friends of the dead boy, young men known in general to be loyal and excitable. Young men have from time to time taken suicide as a team sport. On our bicycles we were too far away to hear the cry that went up from bedrooms and breakfast tables. We didn’t hear the conversations over the telephone wires, nor partake in the shared vision of us crumpled together on the oozy rocks of Wyona Gorge. We didn’t understand when several cars, speeding up 414 in the direction of the Falls, zoomed past us, broke with a squeal of tires, ground their engines trying to get turned around back our way on the narrow road. Why were they honking their horns? When we reached the town square—with horns and flashing high beams behind us—the paved space was overrun with cars, all our parents, all the neighbors of our parents. When we rolled into view heads turned like grasses in the wind, and we knew we were both welcome and in a peck of trouble.
Parents rushed toward us, not necessarily even our own. We were too bad to hug, too big to spank, so the street filled with parents and sons standing two feet from each other, bending forward but unable to touch, unable qu
ite to figure out what the other was agitated about. Marcus’ mother had her hand raised in the air, praising the Lord, or perhaps just barely stopping herself from bringing it down across the side of her son’s head. Mom in her green housecoat, blowing steam through her lips with every word said, “Well, at least Andy was with you. I wouldn’t have worried so much had I known that.”
Chief Dadlez loitered at the edge of the crowd, taking it in. Andy broke away from Mom and began to bulldoze his way toward the chief. I tagged along behind. When Andy got about three inches from the chief’s face, he said,
“You didn’t even look.”
“What do you mean?” said the chief, raising one brow a little, the way he did.
“You assumed Clarence killed himself, so you didn’t even look.”
“Now, Andy, I don’t think this is the time or the place to—”
If the chief just hadn’t had that patronizing smirk on his face, I think Andy would have shut up. If he’d just looked for a second like he was going to listen. The chief was so anxious to keep control that he let himself make a big mistake. He smirked at a man who had just seen where his best friend died.
“There’s a spike driven in the rock . . . oh, we can show you where it is. If you’re interested. Under the spike there’s a length of broken rope. Right there in the rock. He fell. The rope broke. He fell.”
Andy turned to the center of the milling crowd and repeated the words, loudly, slowly, clearly, “Clarence FELL. WE FOUND THE BROKEN ROPE. HE HAD CHEF BOY-AR-DEE. YOU DON’T BRING CHEF BOY-AR-DEE TO A SUICIDE. HE FELL. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. ANYBODY WITH A BRAIN COULD SEE THAT.”
I think Andy had more to say, but his voice choked with emotion. Andy had slapped me across the back of the head a couple of times when I was a nuisance, but I’d never seen him angry. He was angry then. He was so angry his voice would not come out right. He was so angry tears squeezed out the bottom of his eyes like drops from a twisted cloth. Dad moved over to him. Dad stood between him and the chief so if Andy’s fury funneled down into throwing a punch at Chief Dadlez, he would be there to stop it.
The Falls of the Wyona Page 8
