CHAPTER FIFTEEN
STANDOFF ON THE ST. CROIX
MERIT BADGES: GUNS, MOTORCYCLES, PERSONAL ENDANGERMENT
“Isaac, I swear, you either jump or I’m going to throw you off.”
“I’m not doing it!”
“Jump!”
“No!”
I’m bleeding and trying not to cry. The edge of the cliff is about twelve inches in front of my bare toes, which is about ten feet closer than I want it to be. The blood is oozing from a big scrape that runs the length of my right shin, a souvenir from the treacherous, slippery climb up here. Beyond the edge of the cliff and a long way down, the river rolls and swirls past, the surface dark and oily. I’m in a semi-semicrouched position, leaning forward slightly, my knees bent, hands out to the side and a bit to the front—a compromise between standing straight up and being where I want to be, which is in a full knees-down hands-on-the-ground pose. Each time I try to sink down into that, Josh puts his hands under my armpits and pulls me upright. We’ve been at this impasse for what seems like hours.
So yes, today is a little different from yesterday.
Yesterday I went shopping with Lesley and got a haircut. Today I went firing assault rifles and crashing a motorcycle with an inbred survivalist freak, and now Josh is going to throw me to my death from a one-hundred-foot cliff above the St. Croix River.
“I’m seriously going to throw you off, Isaac.”
“I’m not doing it!”
“Isaac, do you understand how key this moment is? How important this is to the Quest?”
“What, dying?”
“No, growing a pair and jumping.”
“I could die!”
Behind me I hear Darrell the inbred survivalist freak murmur some sort of comment to his freak nephew Craig. They both laugh. I try to ignore them.
“Isaac,” says Josh, “this is exactly the time you need to pull yourself together, face your fear, and jump.”
“It’s, like, a hundred feet down, Josh!”
“Actually, it’s probably closer to about twenty-six feet, depending on the water level,” says Darrell. “We’ve had a considerable amount of precipitation, though, so I imagine it’s less of a drop. On the other hand, with the increased water volume the current’ll be stronger when you land.”
That’s how Darrell says everything, always in totally assured expert lecturer mode, using terms like “subideal” and “considerable amount of precipitation,” like what he really wants to say is, Let’s get this straight: I have a mullet and bad teeth and I’m a mechanic, but I’m still intelligent.
“You should just jump. Just don’t think about it and jump.”
That’s nephew Craig, chiming in with his helpful advice in his flat tone. He’s standing behind me and to my left, arms wrapped around his bare, bony frame, his big, rabbity teeth chattering. He’s already jumped three times so far.
It doesn’t help that he is only twelve years old but is both taller than me and already knows how to ride a motorcycle and fire a gun, and did both things like they were second nature, like he’d been doing them for years and couldn’t figure out how anyone could have grown up differently. He figured out pretty quickly that he hates me.
Backing up: Josh woke me in the morning from a nightmare where I was being torn apart by dogs. So tired during our A.M. workout that my dream world and awake world blurred and blended together, the dogs still snapping and tearing at me as I stumbled along the road. I thought of Lesley then, trying to hold her image and the sound of her voice in my head, and it made me stronger.
And then we somehow ended up in the car again, not going to school, and drove way out past the end of civilization until we were on a dirt road that ended up in a clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing squatted a cabin that was the setting for every movie ever made about people who take a dirt road to a cabin in a clearing in the woods and get hacked apart by inbred freaks who want to wear their skin.
“No,” I said as the car rolled to stop near a muddy, beat-up pickup truck that was parked at a random angle to the cabin. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope. We’re here.”
As we got out of the car two hunting dogs came trotting around from somewhere around back and began baying and yelping at us, chins pointed toward the sky, hopping back and forth on their hind legs, flashing me back to my nightmare. Then the screen door opened and banged shut, and the person who would turn out to be Darrell emerged, wearing cutoff jeans and a gray army T-shirt, beer can in one hand, shouting at the dogs to shut up.
“Hey-ey!” he said as he approached, and gave Josh a big hug and a few paternal slaps on the cheek, like Josh was his long-absent and much-larger son who had returned to the freak roost after looting and pillaging some distant villages. There was some quick back-and-forth banter, mentions of mutual friends, and inquiries about how they were doing, while in the background nephew Craig emerged from the front door in a T-shirt that reached to his knees, rubbing his eyes like he’d just woken up. Why wasn’t he in school? Was he homeschooled? Did he just tend the barrels where they render the fat from the victims? While I was pondering that, Darrell looked me up and down, grinning, and said to Josh: “Yep, pretty much like you described.”
While I was trying to figure out what, exactly, that meant, Darrell cracked the beer, managing to spray me directly in the face, and said to Josh, “So, where would you like to begin? Bikes or guns?”
Guns it was.
Introductions done, Darrell said, “We’re going to go retrieve the firearms,” and then he and Craig went back into the murder cabin to do that.
“Josh,” I hissed as soon as they were inside, batting away the dog who kept jabbing me in the balls with his nose, “I want to go home!”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I want to leave! I’m missing school!”
Josh seemed genuinely taken aback.
“Isaac, I set this up specially for you. Darrell is taking time out of his day, doing this as a favor, because I asked him to.”
“I don’t want to ride a motorcycle, Josh, and I don’t want to shoot guns.”
“You don’t want to—I can’t believe this. I go out of my way—”
“Especially with these freaks. Don’t you know any normal people?”
“Well, yes, Mom, I know plenty of normal people. Darrell is a normal person. He used to work on my bike.”
Did I mention Josh had a motorcycle? Of course Josh had a motorcycle. For a while. And then he didn’t. I never found out what happened. I don’t think things ended well.
“I want to leave.”
“We’re not leaving. I thought you’d be psyched to do this. This is the fun part!”
“The fun part?”
“It’s friggin’ motorcycles and guns, Isaac. It’s about as close to the definition of fun as you’re going to find!”
“Maybe our definitions of ‘fun’ are slightly different.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re about to start lecturing me on the accident statistics, aren’t you.”
“Shut up,” I said, because I had been.
“What is it that you’d rather be doing? Sitting in math class? Don’t answer that.”
“Josh, I just don’t—”
“You were certainly psyched to do the whole Queer Eye thing yesterday—which, believe me, I wasn’t so hot on.”
“That was different.”
“Are you gay? Is that it?”
“NO!”
“Look, you can just tell me.”
“Josh, shut up. I just don’t think I’m a motorcycles-and-guns type of person.”
“Oh, no shit? But that doesn’t mean you can’t at least know how to do it, know what it’s like. That way, you see some dude on a bike, you can say, I know how to do that. Or you hear some jackass going on about guns, and you can think, big effin deal, I’ve done that. He’s got nothing on me.”
“Do you know how pissed Dad would be?�
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“That’s exactly the point. You’d never get to do this with Dad, never, never, never, never. Christ, I wanted to give you a chance to do something like this, and thought it was something special that we could do together. Because once I’m gone you’re not gonna get another chance.”
So we ended up in a field that had plywood targets set up against a hillside. I had to get a lecture from creepy Darrell on how to shoot and the importance of the Second Amendment, and then they all had a great time, an orgy of weeYOOOOing and cheering and BANG BANG BANG POP POP POP BLAM! as they worked their way through a lovely sampler plate of shotguns and pistols and assault rifles. Darrell shoved guns in my hands and I took my turns, flinching with each shot and weirded out and miserable, and, yes, sulky and pouty and uncooperative so that Josh would know just how miserable I was. Pretty soon he was shaking his head and making snide comments, and they were all snickering, and finally they all gave up on me and my half-assed shooting and I faded into the background, eventually just taking a seat on the ground a dozen yards behind them, wanting to go farther away but not wanting to draw more attention to myself.
You wouldn’t like guns so much, I had muttered to Josh earlier—“‘If you’d ever seen a child with a bullet wound,’” finished Josh for me. “Do you know what would be great? If you had an independent thought in your head that didn’t come directly from Dad.”
While I sat there on the ground I watched Josh interacting with Craig. That’s who he wants as a brother, I thought, the two of them talking about guns and motorcycles and the NFL. Josh gesturing with his hands, describing some fight, Craig looking at him worshipfully. Maybe he could teach Craig my haphtarah.
After a lot more WEEEYOOOOing and gunfire and male bonding and Craig using the 20-gauge to transform a passing crow into a puff of black feathers—they’re really smart birds, you know; they use tools—the ammo was used up, and Darrell said, “Oookay! Let’s ride some bikes!”
Which we did. And I crashed. I crashed within seconds of starting my very first ride, crashed with all of them watching, crashed exactly when I didn’t want to crash, the front wheel rocketing skyward and throwing me onto my ass.
Everyone ran to the bike to make sure it was okay.
I got up and limped in circles, swearing loudly and rubbing my leg, not because I’d hurt myself but because I wanted to make it look like I had, at least a little bit.
Josh watched me for a few moments and said, “You’re all right.” It was a command. So I made some faces and swore a bit more and kind of dialed back the limp, fading it out after a few more circles.
Then Josh sighed—another check mark in my failure column—and said, “Screw it. Let’s just go to the falls.”
Which is where we are now, the whole horrible day building to this moment, with me standing up on this cliff, a gun-flinching, motorcycle-crashing, non-cliff-jumping coward.
“Jump.”
“No.
“You know,” volunteers Professor Darrell in his serious voice, “in these sorts of situations it’s important to dominate one’s fears.”
Giant pine tree, fall and crush him now.
“Oh, shut up,” I mutter.
“He looks like he’s gonna start crying,” observes Craig.
“Isaac, one, two, thr—”
“No.”
“All right, if he ain’t gonna go, I’ll go again,” says Craig, and he gets a running start and brushes past me as he rushes to the cliff edge and launches himself into space.
“WeeeeYOOOOOooo!!!!” he says on the way down before splashing messily into the river.
“You see how easy that is?” says Darrell.
Just because your nephew is retarded, I have to be retarded too?
“All right, go,” said Josh. “I mean it.”
“No.”
“Go!”
“I don’t want to!”
I am aware of Darrell watching the exchange, waiting to see who is going to win the contest of wills. He thinks this is funny. I see Josh glance over at him and shake his head subtly, inviting Darrell to share in his disgust, the four hundredth time he’s done that today. Can you believe what a pussy my little brother is? I want to kick both of them in the balls.
“All right, then,” says Darrell, “guess I’ma go. WEE- YOOOOoooo!!!” Splash.
“Isaac, this is one of those times when you can either stand up and be a man or be a failure.”
Now I am crying, my eyes welling up.
“I don’t care.”
“Isaac, we have to leave and go home in about twenty minutes. And before we go, you are gonna jump off that cliff.”
“No, I’m not going to.” My voice has that thick, slurry sound you make when you’re talking through your tears.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Just jump!”
“No! No! I’m not going to!”
“I’ll go.”
A female voice. I turn, hurriedly wiping my face, and my heart does a backflip.
“Lesley,” says Josh, “what are you doing here?” His tone is not of the What a wonderful surprise! variety.
She shrugs. “You said you’d be here.”
She’s wearing a bikini top and cutoff jeans. She looks incredible. She shifts her gaze to me and smiles and says, as if everything was normal, as if I wasn’t standing there with tears and snot gleaming on my face, “Hi, Isaac.”
Then she says to Josh, “You know, you shouldn’t make him jump if he doesn’t want to.”
“Yeah, well, he’s too much of a pussy to—”
“WEEEYOOOOO!!!” I whoop, cutting him off, and before the thinking part of my brain can step in, I’m airborne over the river and then plunging toward the swirling water.
Jesus I’m still falling Jesus why did I do this Jesus why did I—
I scramble back up the path, wet, cold, exhilarated, alive. Alive! HA HA HA HA HAAAA! When I get to the top I’m going to rush straight into Lesley’s arms for a celebratory hug and—Where is she? She’s gone. Josh and Darrell and Craig are there. Lesley isn’t.
Darrell is clapping as I get close. “Thatta boy!” he says, and gives my hair a muss before I can pull my head away.
“You see what you can achieve when you focus?” he says while I’m twisting around, trying to find Lesley. “You understand now the power of confronting—”
“Where’d she go?” I say to Josh.
“Who?”
“‘Who?’ Lesley!”
“She left.” He’s fuming about something.
“Why?”
“Sounds like someone’s got a bit of an infatuation,” says Darrell in his wise, amused elder voice. Boulder, roll down the slope and flatten him.
“Did he really jump?” says Craig to Josh, like I’m not worth talking to.
“Yeah, he really jumped,” I say to Craig. “Why’d she leave?”
“I was thinking you were gonna be too much of a pussy to jump,” says Craig.
“Thinking? Wow, big step for you,” I say. “Why did she leave? She drove all the way out here and just left?”
“Definitely infatuated,” says Darrell, nodding his head and grinning. Meteor. Bear. Frozen shitcube from a passing airplane. Anything.
“Josh, why did she leave?”
“She just left.”
“What did you say to her?”
“What did I say to her? What’s it to you?”
“What, it’s like she’s his friggin’ girlfriend or something,” says Craig to Josh with a hopeful smile, waiting to be rewarded for his great joke. Instead Josh turns his head and just looks at him, a deliberate, blank-faced, dreadful moment that makes Darrell hurriedly interject, “Craig, whyn’t you come over here for a bit?” For a few seconds I almost feel a glimmer of affection for my brother.
“Okay,” I say, “I jumped off the stupid cliff. Can we go home now?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
INVESTIGATION
MERIT BADGE: ELEC
TRONIC ESPIONAGE
We say our goodbyes at Taylors Falls and leave Darrell and Craig there. Josh doesn’t say anything about my jumping, like it didn’t count. It’s a long way to drive in tense silence. After a while I fall asleep.
We’re cold and formal with each other during haphtarah practice. I don’t mention anything about the day, and he doesn’t bring it up. We might as well be unrelated, Josh just a grimly professional hired tutor.
When he gets up to use the bathroom, he leaves his cell phone on the desk. The instant he is out the door and down the hallway I grab the phone and start scrolling through his call history. Outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, to someone named Trish. Lots of them—days of them—with only a few incomings from her.
Lots of incomings from Lesley, especially over the past week. A few outgoing.
I pause and listen for Josh. I don’t hear anything.
I go to his text inbox, but it’s empty, and so is his outbox, everything scrubbed clean. There’s one text in his drafts file, a fragment of a message to Trish—“Unfair? How bout u? Y can’t u”—and then it stops.
There are other calls, names I don’t recognize. The most recent call from Lesley was at 3:23 P.M. today, one of a cluster that he never answered.
I get up and go to Josh’s doorway and lean out into the hall. The bathroom door is still closed. I step back into the room and stare at the phone, at Lesley’s unanswered call.
What I should do is put the phone back down. Instead I press the call button.
Lesley answers.
“I hope you’re calling to apologize.”
I nearly drop the phone in a rush of terror and excitement and jab the end call button, then race back to put the phone on the desk, hop away from it, and stand frozen in frightened-squirrel pose, arms hugged close to my sides, fists together under my chin. From down the hall comes the sound of the toilet flushing and then hand washing.
The phone rings. I jump. More frozen squirrel. Ring. I scurry back to the desk and stand over it, dart my hand out, pull it back, repeat, then snatch up the phone and hit end call. The phone falls silent midring.
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