by Jeremy Bates
My parents were lying on their backs now, staring up at the sky, talking nicely to each other again. Adults are weird, I decided. I didn’t know how they could hate each other one minute, then love each other the next. When I got in a fight with my friend Richard Strauss last month because he wouldn’t give back the skateboard I’d lent him, I didn’t talk to him for a full week. And I still didn’t talk to Johnny Bastianello after he squeezed an entire bottle of glue into my pencil case, and that had been last year in grade five.
Anyway, I was glad my parents could make up so easily. I didn’t want them to get a divorce. Sampson Cooper’s parents divorced last year. At first it sounded cool because suddenly he had two homes where we could play, and his dad’s place was in a new-smelling building with a swimming pool and tennis courts. But Sampson said moving between his parents’ homes every weekend wasn’t as fun as it sounded, and the swimming pool and tennis courts got boring after a while. Also, his dad had a girlfriend who was always trying to act like his mom, which he really didn’t like.
My dad rolled onto his side and kissed my mom on the mouth. His hand rubbed her thigh up and down, then cupped one of her braless breasts. She moved it away, and he lay down again on his back.
I was sitting cross-legged about ten feet away from them, and I decided to lie down on my back too. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my face. My mind drifted to Stephanie, the girl I’d kissed and was sort of dating. I couldn’t wait to tell her that I hiked all the way to the bottom of a canyon. She thought I was super athletic, even though I wasn’t, not really. She probably assumed this because she always watched me play fence ball at recess, a game that anybody could do okay at. Pretty much all you do is throw a tennis ball at a chain-link fence. If the ball gets stuck between the links you get five points. If it goes through, you get ten. If it rebounds without bouncing on the ground and someone catches it, you get out.
Stephanie and I had met last month in September. She was the new kid at our school and didn’t have any friends. During morning and afternoon recesses and the hour-long lunch break in-between, she would sit by herself on the portable steps that faced where my friends and I played fence ball because the grade sevens always hogged the basketball court.
I knew what it was like to be the new kid, because I’d been in that same position only two years earlier when my family moved and I changed schools. So on the third or fourth day I’d seen her there, I worked up the nerve to go talk to her.
“Hi,” I said, pounding the mitt of my baseball glove with my free hand nervously.
“Hi,” she replied, smiling.
“Do you have any friends yet?”
“Not really.”
“Do you want to play with us?”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh.”
I waited with her until the next fence ball game started, talking about nothing, making a bigger and bigger fool of myself. Then I went back and played my hardest in the new game, showing off. When the bell rang, I caught up to Stephanie and said, “Do you like this school so far?”
“It’s okay.”
Ralph Stevenson and Sampson Cooper and Will Lee ran by, singing “Brian and Stephanie sitting in a tree…”
I felt my cheeks blush. But I also felt special. I was talking to a girl—a pretty one too. They hadn’t been brave enough to do that.
“Where do you live?” I asked her.
“On Amherst.”
“I live on Cherokee. Do you want to walk home together?”
“Okay.”
We started walking home together every day after that conversation. Stephanie’s house was nice, much bigger than mine, white stucco with brown wood trim. On the third day she invited me inside. I was nervous. I had never been in a girl’s house before. She showed me the kitchen, then the living room. We sat on the sofa for a bit, watching MTV. But all I could think about was whether I should sidle closer or take her hand, and whether her parents were going to come home and get us in trouble. Before I left she showed me her swimming pool in the backyard. I couldn’t believe she had one. Sampson Cooper was my only friend who had a swimming pool, but he had to share it with everyone in his dad’s building.
When Stephanie invited me to go swimming the next day in her pool, I said sure, but I purposely forgot to bring my swimming trunks to school. I was a skinny drink of water, as my dad called me, and I didn’t want her to see me without my shirt on.
I’d been saving my allowance the last two weeks because I wanted to take her to the movies, and I figured I would probably need to pay for both of us. I currently had enough to buy the tickets, but I was going to keep saving until I could afford popcorn and Pepsis too.
My eyes fluttered open. The sun was getting hot on my face. Squinting up at the towering cliffs, the blue sky and white drifting clouds, I spotted a raptor wheeling back and forth on invisible air currents. Then, faintly, I heard what might have been rocks tumbling down the canyon walls.
I didn’t mention this to my parents, because it might scare my mom. She might want to turn back. Then she and my dad might start fighting again. He might hit her this time; if I tried to stop him, he might hit me too, like he did two years ago, after my baby sister Geena died in her sleep. And if I’d learned anything from that experience, it was that fists hurt a heck of a lot more than the usual ruler or belt across your backside.
With our stomachs full and our thirsts quenched, we embarked on the final leg of the descent. The canyon walls blocked out most direct sunlight now, and the sound of the churning river became louder and louder. Then, abruptly, the drainage channel we were following came to a steep drop-off.
“Give me a fucking break!” my dad said, arming sweat from his brow. “A dead end!”
My mom plopped down on a rock. “Can we rest here for a bit before we head back?”
My dad seemed surprised. “Head back? We’re almost at the bottom.”
“Do you plan on flying the rest of the way, Steve?”
“Maybe we can monkey down or something.”
He started toward the drop-off.
“Steve, be careful!”
“Stop worrying so much.” But he was indeed being careful, taking baby steps, testing each foothold before progressing forward. He looked like a man walking on thin ice who expected it to break beneath him at any moment.
Then he was at the edge, peering over it. He whistled. “Not too far to the bottom, fifty feet maybe. But it’s a sheer drop.” He turned back to us. “Let’s look for a different route—”
Loose talus and scree shifted beneath his feet. A surprised expression flashed across his face. His arms shot into the air. Then he was gone.
My mom shouted. I would have shouted too, but every muscle had locked up inside me, so I couldn’t move, breathe, make a sound.
“Steve!” my mom cried. She took a step forward, almost lost her footing, stopped. “Steve!”
He didn’t answer.
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” She repeated this litany over and over.
“Mom?” I managed in a tiny, breathless voice.
“He’s gone!” she said. “He’s gone!”
I’d never seen my mom so scared before, which in turn made me all the more scared. Finally my body responded to my thoughts and I started instinctively forward, to peer over the edge, to determine how far my dad had fallen.
“Brian!” my mom shrieked, grabbing my wrist and yanking me backward. She pulled so hard she tripped and fell onto her bum, pulling me down with her. Then she was hugging me tightly and sobbing and whispering a prayer, and when I got past the shock and bafflement of what just happened, I started crying as well.
It took my mom and me an hour to find an alternative route to the canyon floor. At first my mom kept crying, albeit silently, like she didn’t want me to know she was crying even though I could see the tears streaking her cheeks and could hear the occasional muffled sob. She kept telling me that my dad was okay, that he wasn’t replying beca
use he probably hit his head and was sleeping. I didn’t believe her, the way I didn’t believe her when she told me she wasn’t angry at my dad after they’d had one of their fights. Which left one alternative: my dad was dead. But this proved impossible for me to comprehend. He was my dad. He couldn’t be dead. He was my dad.
My mom was moving so quickly I had to half jog to keep up with her. To the left of us the canyon wall soared to the sky. To the right the river splashed and frothed, filling the air with a thunderous roar and a fine damp mist.
Soon the rocky ground turned to burnt grass, then to hardy shrubs—then to poison ivy, a huge patch that stretched from the chasm wall to the moss-covered rocks along the riverbank. I recognized what it was it right away because I’d contracted a rash from it two summers before while my parents had been visiting their friends at a cottage in Colorado Springs. It had spread to every part of my body, from my face to my toes, and itched like crazy. The worst was when it got between your fingers and toes and began to bubble. I popped the bubbles, which leaked a yellowish puss and probably spread the toxin to other parts of me as well.
And those poison ivy plants had only come up to my shins. This stuff easily reached my waist and had leafs as broad as pages from a book. They ruffled in the slight breeze, almost as if they were beckoning me to come closer.
My mom had stopped before the patch. She was looking for an alternate path. Finally she said, “This is poison ivy, baby. We have to go through it.”
“No way!”
“We have to, Brian. There’s no way around it.”
I glanced at the river. The poison ivy stopped at the rocky bank. “Maybe we can walk along the edge of the river?”
“Those rocks look really sharp, hon, and they’re covered with moss. If you slipped on them, you could cut your leg wide open. Or get washed away by the river. Now, all you have to do is hold your hands above your head, like this.” She demonstrated. “If you don’t let the leaves touch your skin, you won’t catch anything.”
“But the poison will still stick to my clothes.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that, honey. And I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”
She pioneered a path through the poison ivy patch. I followed, holding my hands above my head as instructed. When we reached the far side, I examined my hands, half-convinced I could already see welts forming. I was wondering what Stephanie would think if she saw me covered in yucky red splotches and pussy bubbles when my mom stifled a yelp, then burst into a run. I looked up and saw the yellow of my dad’s jacket in the distance.
He was lying on his back beneath the skeletal branches of an old, twisted tree that looked as though it had been dead for a real long time. Bloody gashes and ugly purple bruises covered much of his body, almost as if someone had shoved him in one of those industrial dryers at the coin laundry alongside a handful of razor blades and put the machine on permanent press.
Nevertheless, he had a pulse. He was alive.
My mom had a fully stocked first-aid kit in her backpack, and we spent the next half hour plucking pine needles and clumps of dirt from his wounds, dousing them with iodine, then taping bandages over the larger ones. I thought we did a pretty good job, but my mom was worried about broken bones and other internal injuries we couldn’t see.
“How are we going to get him back to the top?” I said, staring up the canyon walls. They looked impossibly high when you were at the bottom.
My mom didn’t reply.
“Mom?”
“Do you know how to get back to the campsite, honey?”
“It’s just up, then…that way.” I pointed east.
She didn’t say anything.
“Mom?”
“We walked for a long time, Brian. I wasn’t paying any attention. I let your father take charge. I’m not sure I remember where we came out of the woods the first time.”
“The first time?”
“When we saw the canyon for the first time. If I can’t find our car…”
“I can find it,” I said. “I’m sure I can.”
“No, baby. You’re going to have to stay here with your father.”
“Without you?”
“You have to be here in case he wakes up. If he does, he’s going to be scared and in a lot of pain. You need to keep him calm, tell him I’ve gone for help, I’ll be back soon.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?”
“You have to look after your father. You have to keep a fire going too. I might not be back until dark, so you need to keep the fire going so I can find you. Can you do this?”
“I want to come with you.”
“No, Brian, you have to stay here. Now, if your father does wake up, he’s also going to be thirsty, so give him some water—but not all of it. Not right away. You have to make it last.”
“But I can get more from the river.”
She glanced at the river. I did too. It was roaring and frothing and moving really, really fast, reminding me of the rivers I saw people white-water rafting down on TV. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get close to it. I didn’t even know how to swim.
My mom took my hands in hers and looked me in the eyes. “You will not go near that river, Brian. Do you hear me? No matter what. It’s a lot stronger than you think. It will sweep you straight away. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Tell me you won’t go near that river.”
“I won’t go near the river.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I’m trusting you, Brian.” She stood. “Now c’mon. Let’s find some firewood and get that fire going.”
We scavenged a good stockpile of sun-bleached deadfall, along with bark and fungi for tinder, and twigs and smaller sticks for kindle. Then my mom started a fire and gave me her bronze Zippo and showed me how to restart the flames if they went out. Finally she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, told me to be brave and to stay away from the river, then left the way we had come, back through the poison ivy patch.
As soon as she disappeared from sight a heavy cloak of fear and loneliness settled over me as the seriousness of the situation hit home. I was on my own. My mom was gone, my dad unconscious. I was in a strange, unfamiliar place. I felt tiny and helpless next to the grandeur of the canyon and the power of the river. I didn’t have any food and only a bit of water.
What if something bad happened? I wondered. What if my dad had a heart attack? What if there was an avalanche? I recalled the sound of the tumbling rocks earlier. What if one crushed my dad’s head, or mine? My mom would return with help only to find us dead, our brains splattered everywhere…
Stop it.
I settled next to my dad, rested my chin on my knees, and watched him for a bit. His face appeared pale and shiny in the bright afternoon light, like the flesh of a slug. His breathing was slurpy, like when you sucked the last dregs of soda through a straw. His chest moved up and down, barely.
I touched his forehead. It was really hot, and I didn’t think that was from the sun. I touched my forehead to compare, and his was definitely hotter.
Did that mean he had a fever? I pondered this, because I thought you could only get a fever when you had the flu.
A fat black ant crawled up his neck and onto his chin. I picked it off, squished it between my index finger and thumb, then tossed its broken body away. Shortly after another industrious ant, smaller than the first, crawled up over his ear and along his jawline. I was about to pick it off as well, but then it beelined toward the wound below my dad’s right eye. I decided to watch it, to see how it would react to the bed of exposed liver-red meat. Ants ate other insects, which made them carnivores. But this one simply stopped before the wound, its antennae twitching, feeling, then turned away. I pinched it between my fingers and dropped it on the gash. It shot straight off, like it was scared, though I didn’t think ants could get scared. It ran up over my dad’s closed eyelid, over the ridge of his eyeb
row, and disappeared into his greasy, clotted black hair.
Feeling bad for letting it find refuge in his hair, I promptly squished any other ants that came close to him. There turned out to be a good number, and I searched the ground until I found the sandy-hole entrance to their subterranean dwelling. I stuck a twig in the hole, so the twig stood erect like a flagpole, effectively blocking any more ants from emerging.
I didn’t want to look at my dad any longer, so I took one of my Archies from my backpack and tried to read it. After a few minutes of staring blankly at the same page, I forced myself to focus on the words in the speech balloons. They weren’t funny or interesting. They were just words.
I closed the comic book and stared the way my mom had gone, willing her to come back soon.
Night came first, and quickly. The strip of sky overhead turned yellow, then pink, then red, then purplish-black, like a giant had pummeled it with its fists, leaving behind a broken mess. The Milky Way glowed impossibly far away, but the starlight didn’t reach the canyon floor, so it was pitch black outside the circle of firelight. I knew this because when I went to pee I couldn’t even see my feet. Only darkness. Emptiness. A void. Like I was a tiny organism at the bottom of the ocean. That’s how it felt anyway.
The drone of the now invisible river continued unabated, and my stomach kept growling hungrily. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch on the rock outcrop, and that hadn’t been much, just the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the apple.
My thirst, however, was even worse. I had about three inches of water left in my water bottle. My dad had less. I’d taken a sip from mine after my mom had left, but that was all. It needed to last me until she returned…whenever that was.
And why wasn’t she back already? According to my wristwatch, it was 10:07 p.m. That meant she had been gone for nearly eight hours. It should only have taken her two, maybe three hours to return to the campground, fifteen minutes to drive to that town we passed on the way in, Montrose, or whatever it was called. Another two/three hours to bring help to us. That was seven or so hours in total. So where was she? Had something happened to her? Had she fallen off a cliff like my dad had?
