by Ted Neill
We could clear it.
“What are you doing?” Kurt asked.
“Kurt, let’s do something crazy.”
“What?”
“Let’s drive a car off this cliff.”
“What?”
“Just like a movie. We’ll get some beat up jalopy, back it up that hill,” I was running back towards the hill now. “Ride that baby down and off the edge.”
“And we’ll be inside the car, as it goes over the edge and down?”
“Yep.”
“Are you fucking nuts?”
“Nope.”
“We’ll get killed.”
“No, we won’t. It’s not like we’ll be some drunk driver going off into a river. We’ll plan it. We’ll be careful. Methodical, like stuntmen.”
“We’ll drown, Sid.”
“We’ll have scuba tanks in the car.”
Kurt was quiet a minute. He looked down at the lake. It would be a frightful drop—and completely awesome. I don’t know what went through his mind right then, but he looked down at the drop, back up to the hill, and then at the drop again.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
It was sunny that afternoon. The sun was on my face and I felt good, like anything was possible.
We each bought notebooks to write down a list of things we would need. We were going to be organized and systematic about things. First, we thought about how we would keep from drowning and wrote down: scuba tanks. My brother Mitch and I were both certified divers and had our own equipment. If we would be swimming free of the car, it would probably be best not to wear shoes. So we wrote down, aqua socks. Of course, we would need goggles: goggles.
We carried the notebooks with us everywhere. I’d work on mine during class. I drew a diagram that I thought was pretty close to scale. I figured the forward motion of the car would get us over the shore, but how far would we make it? And how deep was the water? That was an important question. We went to the quarry that afternoon to figure it out. It was kind of strange to be there, on business. It seemed like we were violating the serenity of the quarry somehow, like conducting business in church or something. Kurt had brought a lead weight tied on some kite twine. I told him to throw it over so it landed just a few feet from the shore. The weight made a little silver splash, then the only indication of its existence was the string that it was pulling through Kurt’s fingers. The line stopped.
“It’s on the bottom,” he said.
I looked down at the string. The white line of the string going down diagonally into the navy blue water made me dizzy; I think it was the angle. But it was also like a doorway into another world.
“Pull it up.”
We pulled it up carefully. I took the point where the wet part of the twine began, and Kurt walked away towards the gate with the weight. This way we could tell how deep the water was. I watched Kurt walk to his car, then past his car, and he didn’t stop anywhere near it. He was at the rusty gate when he looked back at me with the little weight in his hand.
“That’s deep!” he yelled.
I looked at the string. It was definitely wet from my fingers onward.
“That is deep.”
This was going to work. I knew it.
The Stunt, as we called it, was all we talked about. It was all I could think about. I didn’t pay attention in class, unless I thought it would help me plan for the stunt. Physics class helped with this. I was smart. I just didn’t get good grades, because I was a slow reader. But all my teachers admitted that I was brilliant. I would walk by the honors classes and look in on all the “smart” kids. I’d have liked to see some of them put their noodles to work on our little project. Of course, they wouldn’t; we were doing something they would never do. They’d be sitting at their preppy little parties, getting slightly buzzed and thinking they were the new rebels without causes. They’d grow up into their lives of banal suburban subdivisions, mundane minivans, and missionary positions, whereas Kurt and I would have this majestic vision of us plunging through air and into a rising blossom of parting water to look back on forever. And them? They would have nothing but a void or just boring memories of hours spent over books, calculators, or keyboards, studying for the next test, cranking out homework, or writing the next essay.
We would end up ahead. We’d live life to the fullest, without regrets. It didn’t take a genius to see that.
Kurt came up with a few suggestions, but I was the real brains behind the operation. I realized that the impact on the water would be pretty fierce, so we would have to secure the scuba tanks so that they wouldn’t hit us in the back of the head—an object in motion, you know. There would be a considerable impact too. Helmets, I wrote down. At the same time, we would have to be able to pull the tanks out of the car. They had to be secured, but we had to be able to get them free quickly. Bungees, I wrote down. Then I realized that Kurt had never gone scuba diving before. Scuba lessons.
When the weather got warmer, Kurt and I climbed the fence into the neighborhood pool. It was Friday night. We had almost gone downtown, but we decided that we had work to do. I went over the basics with Kurt, about breathing slowly and evenly.
“Now, you’re going to be pretty excited, so just remember: deep breaths.”
“Yeah. Deep breaths,” he said as he lifted the mouthpiece near his lips, bobbed his head up, then went down. He looked at me from underwater. He looked like a two-hundred-pound peach fly with his big pink goggles. He gave me the thumbs up sign and then surfaced.
“Sid, don’t you think you should do this too?”
“I can do this in my sleep, man.”
We decided we would have to have a protocol, a routine, so we didn’t panic when we went under. We sat at the top of the slag hill rehearsing what we would do. Land. Unbuckle. Mouthpiece. Un-bungee. Swim. L.U.M.U.S. We would launch with the windows down. That way, by the time we reached the un-bungee step, we figured the car would have filled with water, equalizing the pressure so that we could open the doors and swim out.
L.U.M.U.S. became our secret word. When we saw each other in the halls at school we would say: “Hey, what’s up, L.U.M.U.S?”
“Not much, L.U.M.U.S.”
People would try to figure out what we meant. I remember this girl in the lunchroom asking us if we were in a secret society or something.
“Something like that,” I said.
One day when I was at my locker, Kurt came up to me.
“Sid, I just realized something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The windshield.”
“What about it?”
“All that pressure when we dive. It—it may come inside and pin us.”
Kurt had a good point. We would have to take the windshield out. But then the water would be slapping us in the face at fifty-some miles an hour. That was unacceptable. I was kind of sore at having to change something so fundamental, so late in the game. Maybe I was just angry at myself for not thinking of it. But Kurt was right. Then I realized the solution was not to take the windshield out, but to have the car land bottom first. The only way to guarantee this was by making the back as heavy as the front. We would have to put something very heavy back there. We decided that old car batteries would work. There were always a ton behind gas stations. My brother Mitch worked at the nearby Exxon, so we got fifteen from him. We kept them in the woods behind my house.
My parents were curious about what we were doing. I didn’t tell them. They wouldn’t approve or understand. But they didn’t pry. They never did, as far as my life was concerned. Mitch was their favorite, even though he was the one who shot my eye out . . . but I digress. Anyway, Mom and Dad would say The Stunt was poor judgement, plain stupid, reckless, dangerous, and all that. But they were old, as old as that rusty gate that had originally barred our way into the quarry. I would tell them someday afterwards, when I was older, and they would be amazed. But they wouldn’t understand now.
We had everything set. All we ne
eded now was the car. Between us, we scraped together 250 dollars from odd jobs and birthday money. We looked up the cheapest used car lots in the county. We wrote down the addresses from the smallest black and white ads in the yellow pages. The first place was Henry’s Used Auto. The place was just what we were looking for: old cars, gravel lot with grass growing up through the stones. It was an overcast day. If it was a new car lot, it wouldn’t seem appropriate, but since it was a used car lot, the dead sky and drops of rain on the hoods seemed to add to the cars’ dilapidation. It was not like we wanted to drive a brand new car into the quarry. That would be crazy.
A guy in an orange rain coat and white cowboy hat came out of the office. I told Kurt to talk. He was big, so I reckoned the guy would think he was older, and strangers look at me funny because of my eye patch, like they are trying to figure out if it’s real or if I’m just trying to look like a badass. I busied myself looking at a station wagon with wood paneling. It had rust all around the bottom. It couldn’t have gone for more than two hundred, I was certain.
“How you all doing?” the salesman asked.
“Fine,” Kurt said, trying to pitch his voice low. “Are you Henry?”
I pretended to be looking under the car, then I kicked the tires.
“Nope, Henry is my boss. He’s not here on weekdays. I’m Jeb.”
“Oh, well. I thought he would be, since it’s his Auto World and all.” Kurt laughed a little. He was trying to be funny. He always came off as an idiot when he tried to be funny.
“You boys interested in a car?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we are. Something basic, minimal.”
“You have a certain model in mind?”
Kurt turned around and looked at me.
“Uh, no,” I said.
“You both looking for a car?”
“Well. We’re brothers. We have a farm, and we need something to carry around hay in,” Kurt said. I couldn’t believe Kurt was trying to lie.
“Then you need a truck.”
“Uh, we have a truck. We need something smaller, that will fit into our barn,” I said.
The guy was staring at us. He had sized us up and knew we were wasting his time.
“How much do you boys want to pay?”
I figured if he thought we had more money, he’d be a little more cordial.
“About five hundred.”
I saw Kurt’s eyes get big at my lie, but he tried not to look at me. Instead he rubbed his hands on his thighs.
“Well. Why don’t you come into the office, and we can sit down and talk about financing, check your credit history, and I can give you an APR.”
Now Kurt looked right at me, his mouth open.
“We were going to pay cash,” I said, as cool as I could be.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t do cash transactions. You can come inside to talk about financing if you like, otherwise I can’t help you boys.”
Kurt and I were both quiet for a second or two. I patted the fender of the car I was leaning on and stood up.
“Well, thanks for your time then,” I said, all business-like.
“Have a good day,” Jeb the salesman said before he turned his back on us and walked back to his office. Kurt and I got into his parent’s car, which we had borrowed for the afternoon. He started the engine and the wipers. The rain pinging on top of the car and the gravel hitting the undercarriage sounded the same as we pulled off the lot. We had planned on going to more lots that day, but we went home instead. We never talked about The Stunt again. We never went back to the quarry.
4.
Michael’s Story
I was happy because all my best friends were with me for the New Year’s Eve holiday. Brent and Andre, along with my girlfriend Inez, had arrived at my parents’ cabin in the mountains on the thirtieth of December. We were all excited. The four of us hadn’t been together since August, when we all had left for our first year of college. After my parents went to bed, we stayed up telling stories from high school. Andre eventually fell asleep on the couch. Brent and I continued talking, with Inez listening on the couch beside me.
Eventually her body’s presence next to mine became too much, and we went upstairs to bed. She was supposed to sleep in her own room, but with my parents already asleep, they would never know if I just . . . visited. We brushed our teeth, and she crawled into bed, sliding across the sheets to me. I liked the feel of her thighs around mine. We kissed. Her mouth was cool and tasted like peppermint toothpaste. I took off her pajama top, but not her bottom. She was from a good Catholic family and still didn’t feel right about that. It was okay. I loved her, and it didn’t matter. I rubbed her breasts, and we came from grinding on each other through our clothes.
Brent and Andre made fun of me, because Inez and I had been together for two years, and we still had not had sex. I told them it didn’t matter. I knew we would be married someday.
It didn’t matter.
The next evening was New Year’s Eve. My parents were taking part in a Progressive Dinner: each course was served at a different cabin. We would be serving dessert and toasting to the New Year at my parents’ place. Brent, Andre, Inez, and I stayed at our place setting up decorations, dessert trays, and champagne glasses. At seven-thirty we went down the mountain to meet the roving party, which was at the Connors’ cabin for the main course.
All the grownups were there and excited to see young people. I introduced Brent, Andre, and Inez. Everyone was excited to hear about how we liked college. People wanted to quiz Andre about what it was like to play soccer at a Division One school. Brent entertained folks with some magic tricks, while my parents looked on with approval.
But Inez was the star. She was all charm and eloquence. It didn’t hurt that she looked amazing. When Mr. Conner sat down at the piano, she knew all the old songs he played then sang a few Bolivian Christmas songs in Spanish and even a few in Quechua, which impressed everyone. Everything was great. The grownups liked us. My friends were having fun. It was a successful New Year’s, as far as I was concerned.
I was in line for the buffet when my mother came up to me.
“Danny, I need a favor.”
“What’s up?”
“There’s a boy here; he’s the Hachettes’ son, and he doesn’t know anyone, and there’s no one here his age.”
“How old is he?”
“Fourteen. He’s handicapped and a bit . . . awkward. Can you guys let him hang out with you?”
“Sure thing.”
“He really likes UVA. I think he’d like to go there. Maybe Inez could talk to him about it.”
“Yeah, I’ll get her.”
Sure enough, Mr. and Mrs. Connor were chatting Inez up about Bolivian culture when I sidled up to them. It took a moment, but I was able to peel Inez away. She filled a Styrofoam plate with food, and we followed my mother downstairs.
The lower level opened out onto a deck where the furniture was covered in tarps for the winter. A TV was playing next to the fireplace. But otherwise the floor was quiet; everyone else was upstairs. The kid, Michael, was sitting on a footrest near the TV. He was a little fat and had bushy black hair. One of his wrists was bent downwards, and when he turned to us he had to use his feet to twist his torso around. They were motions he seemed to be used to. He spoke with a bit of a stutter, but I think that was because he was nervous about talking to college kids.
“Dan, Inez, this is Michael,” my mother said.
I shook his hand. It was fleshy, and he had a weak grip. “My mom tells me you like UVA.”
“Yes,” he said, after a few attempts to get the word out. We were patient while he made the effort.
“I go there,” Inez said.
Michael had a lot of questions to ask. Inez’s answers were a bit vague. I had the sense she wanted to go back upstairs where she was the center of attention for a bigger, more sophisticated audience. She could be that way sometimes. The conversation stopped, and she looked at me.
“What kind of
music do you like, Michael?”
I could tell by the angle of Inez’s head that she was growing irritated with me. She just wanted to go. I tried to pretend as if I didn’t notice. But I did.
“Temptations. Four Tops. I listen to the Oldies but Goodies station,” Michael said.
I asked about movies next, and TV. He had not seen anything new or anything rated above PG. Inez was sitting next to me, her arms crossed and her foot bouncing. We had finished the food on our plates, but I kept talking to Michael. Inez was poking holes in her plate with her fork.
“I’m going to see what Brent and Andre are doing,” she finally said, in the most chipper tone she could.
“Sure, okay,” I said. Michael and I kept talking. Apparently he spent a lot of time on his computer. I wasn’t familiar with any of the games he mentioned.
“I grew up with an 8-bit Nintendo. We were all excited when they upgraded to 16 bits.”
Michael laughed, a little too loud. “Those graphics were Stone Aged.”
“Yeah, well, it was better than playing Pong on an Atari.”
My mom came down and told us that the party was moving to the next cabin. Did I want to take Michael back to our place with us?
I said sure; it would have been mean to leave him now. I invited him, and he got excited, sort of giggling like a little kid. I helped him with his jacket. Brent, Andre, and Inez were waiting for us on the front porch, their breath curling about their heads in the cold air. Brent and Inez started for the car. Michael grabbed my arm while he negotiated the steps. It was just like my grandmother used to. Andre drove us back to the cabin. Michael sat in the front. I was in back with Brent and Inez.
When we got to the house, the dog jumped on Michael and he squealed. Andre sat down and started flipping through a case of old CDs. He asked Michael what kind of music he liked and read some of the bands we had brought up for the trip. Michael didn’t know any of them.
