by Dale Bailey
We buried her the day after Christmas and went home to a houseful of presents. I remember Dad shoving them unopened into plastic garbage bags and dragging them down to the curb while Chris and I watched from the door. A Mom-shaped black hole had opened in the center of our lives and it sucked everything we’d ever known down into it. “Don’t cry, faggot,” Chris said, knuckling my head, and after that we subsisted on week-old milk, cold cereal, and silence.
The silence lasted into the spring. Dad spent even off-duty hours in his squad car, patrolling the streets of the Run. Chris took to the pavement as well, skipping school to cruise around in Joey Stratton’s beater of a Camaro, drinking Thunderbird and smoking weed. Me? I trudged along the way I always had, keeping my head down at school and pounding out my homework at the kitchen table, the way Mom would have wanted me to. Things got a little better in May. The seventh graders took a field trip to the World’s Fair in Knoxville the last week of school. My class shared a bus with some kids from Broadview Junior High, across town, and I kissed a girl on the bus the night we came back. I forgot her name a long time ago, but I still recall the bump in the bridge of her nose and the way her hard little tongue probed at the closed fence of my teeth.
The seventeen-year cicadas emerged in force a month after that, mammoth green insects an inch long or longer, with red eyes and enormous translucent wings. Some mornings I woke to find the yard littered with their husks. They sounded like helicopters when they took flight; their din reached colossal proportions in the heat of the afternoon.
That was the summer I turned thirteen, the summer I smoked pot for the first time, the summer I fell in love with movies and science fiction and rock ‘n’ roll. That was the summer of the Bluehole, and whatever it was that plied its opaque, fathomless depths. That was the summer Jimmy moved into the house across the street. I think I was half in love with him from the start.
I dreamed of him last night, him and the Bluehole both. I do sometimes. Not as often as you’d think, two or three times most years, I guess. Maybe four. But every cicada summer, twice seventeen years ago now, the visitations grow more frequent, especially as July tips over into August.
In the dreams, the vast expanse of the Bluehole opens like a gray eye before me, the far shore a humid blur, reeds upright in the windless afternoon. The flat drone of the cicadas booms out of the trees. We are swimming—as we did that day. Jimmy slices the water before me, his arms knifing through the chop. I struggle along behind him as I always do, gasping for breath, doomed by foreknowledge, jaws locked, tongue swollen in my mouth. Then, ahead, the water froths and begins to boil. And something comes. By morning, only the faintest impressions linger: a long shadow arrowing through the depths beneath me, a glimpse of slick black skin, rolling for a heartbeat above the waves. Three nights running, that dream, and I knew it was time to go back. To scramble down through the underbrush to the steaming, mosquito-infested rim of the lake, and there to take a reckoning.
Oddly, what came back to me in that moment of decision is something my second wife said, in the weeks just before our marriage finally came apart. I recall her leaning over the sink, scrubbing her hands raw, her face streaked with tears. “When are you going to accept yourself for what you are, Jeremy?” she said.
But Jimmy came before all that, in a yellow Ryder moving van that pulled up one day late in June at the house across the street. They were all company houses in that neighborhood, built in the twenties when Holland Coal still owned Sauls Run. By ’82 Holland was long gone, Woolworths had replaced the company store, and work in the deep holes was dwindling in the face of mountaintop removal. But the company houses remained, scabrous and gray in the sunlight, grimly uniform: two narrow dormers, a concrete stoop, a front yard the size of a fingernail paring. That was where I saw Jimmy for the first time, a few days after the van departed. He was sitting on the stoop in the shade of a towering oak: a lean, smooth-limbed boy, reading a paperback and smoking Marlboro Reds, methodically snapping off the filters and flipping them into the sparse grass.
I’d been staring at him through a gap in my mother’s curtains for half an hour or so when he set aside the book and came striding purposefully toward my house. He knocked on the door. Sometimes I think everything would have been different, my whole life up to now, if I hadn’t answered that knock. Sometimes I dream about that, too: just turning away and wandering back through the house into the living room, snapping on the television, and letting the bilge of daytime programming wash over me: Wheel of Fortune and The Price is Right. Sometimes I think everything would have been better. Sometimes I know it.
The truth is, I almost did turn away. I felt a faintly voyeuristic embarrassment for one thing. For another he was everything I was not: tall, tan, blond, handesome. The confidence that had propelled him across the cracked, weedy pavement of Maple Street was breathtaking.
But then he knocked again, and this time his voice came through the door as well.
“If you’re going to sit there and stare all day, you might as well come outside.”
Trapped, I opened the door.
He stood on the stoop, smoking, clad in cut-off blue jeans and black Converse high tops, blond hair tousled over a perfectly symmetrical face. L.A.M.F., his tee shirt read, pink dripping letters scrawled across a field of black, and I remember wondering what the letters stood for.
It was ten o’clock in the morning, the sunlight almost blinding. The heat settled over my shoulders like a sodden blanket. The cicadas were tuning up for the afternoon show. Jimmy took a final drag on his cigarette, pinched the cherry between his fingers, and flipped it into the street. He blew the smoke out through his nostrils. The smell of it brought tears to my eyes. It reminded me of my mom’s Virginia Slims—she used to smoke them right there on the stoop, squinting into the fumes as she snapped beans—and a torrent of grief so powerful that I thought I might drown thundered through me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sun got in my eyes.”
Jimmy had drifted back toward his own house. We sat side-by-side on his stoop. Music blared through the open window, something raucous and loud and totally alien to me in that month when “Ebony and Ivory” ruled the charts.
“What’re you listening to?”
“Dead Boys,” he said. He picked up his paperback, creased the spine, and started to read. I crossed my arms over my knees, rested my chin upon them, and gazed out over the yard, letting the raw power of “Sonic Reducer” wash over me. The music’s barreling sense of chaos barely under control—not to mention the lyrics, which declared that they didn’t need no “mom and dad”—spoke to me strongly in that summer of rage and loss. I leaned back, letting the fury wash over me. When I finally opened my eyes, a cicada, involute and green, clung to a stalky weed nearby, its abdomen pulsing. The heat summoned shimmering pools out of the pavement. The day smelled of dry grass and smoldering slag. Dad was long gone. Chris would crawl out of his sheets like a troll sometime in the next hour or so; he’d scarf down a bowl of dry Fruit Loops and hit the road with Joey Stratton for another day of sucking down Budweiser—Because U Deserve What Everyone Should Enjoy Regularly—behind the abandoned mill on Mount Horeb Road. The long day stretched before me. I might wander down to the Woolworths and look for a new Robert B. Parker on the spinner rack. Not that I could afford it if I found one. I’d long since exhausted the library’s paltry collection—and I could do little more than steal a few paragraphs at the Woolworths before Mr. Kowalski ran me off, jabbing his finger at the sign that said This Is Not a Library. Please Buy Before You Read. At four, I’d watch a rerun of Batman, and after that an episode of Battle of the Planets. Most days I masturbated—with a certainty of impending doom—and then I napped away the restless afternoon.
Jimmy shook two more Marlboros out of the pack and snapped off the filters. He lit up and handed me a cigarette. I took a deep drag and vomited over the side of the stoop.
“Nice,” he said without looking up from his book.
What can I tell you of that summer, thirty-four years later? What can anyone say about the past? Memory is the kingdom of deceit, self-serving, colored by desire. I’m forty-seven now, almost half a century of life behind me: two wives and three children, two of whom no longer speak to me; six cars, though I’ve never owned a new one; three novels that sank like stones; more jobs than I care to count, framing houses, tending bar, you name it, whatever it took to make a living while I banged out stories on a Remington manual typewriter, a secondhand IBM Selectra, and almost as many reconditioned Macs as cars. How do you disinter the past and see it for what it is? The summer of 1982 was the golden moment of my life, even if it culminated in a horror that has never quite ended—but what can I really see, or say, beyond the haze of nostalgia?
The soundtrack of that summer still thunders in my ears—Television, the Jam, the Undertones, Jimmy’s long row of vinyl. Summer days we used to lay roasting in his bedroom listening to Blank Generation and talking about girls. Jimmy was infinitely more knowledgeable than I was. I had my kiss. He had a hand job in the back seat of a ’77 Caprice while Darkness on the Edge of Town played on the 8-track mounted under the dash.
And I remember the day out on the stoop when he changed the course of my life forever. He handed me a Marlboro with the butt snapped off and a battered paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The smokes will probably kill me—I still snap the filters off and flip them into the street—but the books saved my life. It started with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect and the Vogon Constructor Fleet, and it went on from there—Silverberg and Bradbury, Simak and Lovecraft, the lights that would illuminate my miserable high school years. A whole new well of call numbers opened up before me down at the public library; when that went dry, Jimmy taught me the fine art of shoplifting down at the Woolworths. That’s how I sustained my addiction in the years that followed, when Jimmy was gone—The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Sandkings, The Day of the Triffids, two dozen others. I still have them on my shelf at home.
What else?
Summer days down at the pool, where I sat on a towel, my heart clenched with anxiety, while Jimmy disported himself in the water with an expert’s abandon. I didn’t swim well, and hadn’t been in the pool since an incident involving the high dive last summer. Overwhelmed with terror—of the height and of the water below—I’d had to climb back down from the board. Yes, that, plus banging stones off the pitted stop sign at the end of Maple Street. Shooting bottle rockets at eighteen-wheelers on the turnpike. Stealing cigarettes from the gas station vending machines they used to have back then: two quick blows from the flat of Jimmy’s hand and a deck of Winstons or Marlboros would rattle down into the tray. He must have shown me how to do that trick a thousand times, but I never mastered it.
And there was the booze, of course. The bottle of MD 20/20 we snagged out of Rodger Dillon’s glove box while he and Chris were behind the high school getting high. The six-pack of Schlitz we lifted from the 7-Eleven. The fifth of vermouth we filched from Jimmy’s mom’s liquor cabinet. We sucked it down in the patch of scrub behind Loudon’s Hardware. Jimmy held it together, but I staggered out of the woods to vomit on the battered dumpster. All fun and games until Old Man Loudon himself put in an appearance. Reeling or not, we scooted. He must have chased us fifty yards down High Street, his face brick-red and his gut swaying, before he turned back, cursing between gasps.
Later that afternoon, Jimmy sprawled sweating across his bed. I sat cross-legged—Indian-style we called it those days—on the floor, still buzzing as we listened to the cicadas and the LP spinning on the stereo just then—Germfree Adolescents, by the X-Ray Spex.
I wondered aloud where he’d buy records in Sauls Run—knowing that the limited selection at the Woolworths would not cater either to his taste or my developing one (on the other hand, if you wanted “Ebony and Ivory,” you were in luck).
“Beats the hell out of me,” Jimmy said bitterly.
I’d heard the story by then, of course. Jimmy had been dragged back to his mother’s home in West Virginia from southern California when his parents divorced. His mother had found work pulling the day shift at the Maidenform plant over in Princeton.
So much for the Pacific, bye-bye to the Buzzcocks, sayonara to the Slits.
The last chords of “Identity” faded. The needle bumped the center of the record; the looming wall of cicada song filled the room. I picked up a copy of Starlog: Kurt Russell and The Thing were on the cover. We didn’t actually see the film until early August, but our anticipation had been thoroughly whetted by mid-July. Between the two of us we’d thumbed that magazine slick. Fuck that fifties Gunsmoke guy, Jimmy had said, this is going to be the real deal. We’d hunted up a copy of “Who Goes There?” in The Best of John W. Campbell in the library. One sentence still sticks with me: MacReady was a bronze man.
So there were a lot of firsts that summer. A lot of beginnings.
But this story’s really about endings. I think most stories are. What I really remember about Sauls Run in the summer of ’82 is that mom-shaped hole, which occluded everything that had come before it. What I really remember is the stultifying heat, the din and hum of the cicadas.
What I remember most is the Bluehole.
It looms large in my memory—another turning of the way—but at the time it was just another late-July morning. Jimmy had pinched ten bucks from his mother’s wallet and we blew it playing Galaga at Dewey’s Arcade on Main Street. Afterward, we scrambled down the overgrown embankment under the great arc of the Stone Bridge. We lounged in the shadow of the bridge, smoking Marlboros as cars rumbled by overhead. The tangle of railroad tracks before us stretched a hundred yards to the other side of the declivity. Every once in a while a freight train, cars loaded with glittering mounds of coal, would rumble by. In between, we talked about music, girls, or the murderous heat. The sun boiled in a flat gray sky, and the underbrush was parched and brown. Jimmy wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand.
Finally, he said, “The hell with this,” and climbed to his feet. He struck off west, his sneakers scuffing the gravel. We hiked down the tracks in the blistering noon sun, jumping from crosstie to crosstie, or walking the curving rails side-by-side like tight-rope artists, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, our arms outstretched like wings. Everything was a contest. Who could leap the most crossties? Who could balance the farthest walking the rail?
When we discovered the abandoned caboose on a spur of track that ran down into the tangled woods, I shrank from what we found inside—a cache of damp-swollen men’s magazines, a handful of wrinkled condoms, a graying bra draped over the back of a vinyl seat. Jimmy crowed in delight. I wondered what kind of woman left her underclothes behind when she was done. Hell, I wonder that still.
He looked up at me, grinning as he peeled apart the pages of a moldy Gallery (“Home of the Girl Next Door”) and dangled a mossy centerfold before me. “How’d you like a piece of that, Jeremy?”
“Who knows where that thing has been? C’mon, let’s go.”
“Don’t be a faggot all the time,” he said.
But he cast aside the magazine, pushed his way the length of the caboose—I still remember that way he passed through the bars of shadow and light slanting down through the high louvered windows—and out onto the platform at the other end. There, far below us, sparkling like a toxic sapphire through the trees, lay the Bluehole.
The name is misleading, I guess—it suggests an abandoned quarry, something deep and narrow. It was actually a lake, a mile or so wide and three times or more as long, winding through the hollows with great forested massifs climbing to either side. In another time—in a place less stricken by poverty and despair—it might have been developed; instead, trees and brush, a mix of evergreen and stunted oak, bramble and thorn, ran untouched down its steep, rocky shingles. Its waters glimmered an opaque blue; I suppose it must have been irretrievably polluted by run-off from the Holland
mines.
But none of that would stop Jimmy.
“Hey, wait up!” I called, but he was already swinging over the platform’s railing. He landed with characteristic grace. I climbed over the railing and set off in pursuit. By the time I’d blundered up behind him, he’d already stripped off his shirt. His upper body was lean and tan, well muscled.
“Care for a swim?” he said, grinning as he unzipped his shorts.
“You can’t,” I gasped, head down, hands on my knees. “You can’t.”
“Sure I can.”
“No, really, you can’t—”
“Why not?”
He slid down the shorts and stood before me. I swallowed hard. “There are stories.”
I guess there must be stories about any large lake, particularly one as deep and cold as the Bluehole. My father told me the first story, or at least the first one I recall. I was probably four or five years old then, and I suppose he intended it to warn me away from the potential hazards the lake posed. But in later years I would learn that his story of the Bluehole—in some variation or other—was common currency around town. The gist of the tale was that back in the early days of the railroad—this would have been sometime in the 19th Century, I guess—the C&W line had run a track down into the water, loaded up obsolete freight cars, and disposed of scrap iron in the hole. How long this went on (or indeed if it went on at all) I cannot say. But when the war came—the sources disagree on which war—the battle on the home front called for civil engineers to salvage any scrap metal they could lay hands on. So a team of divers deployed to locate the abandoned cars. Anyway, the story goes that the divers never found the cars, of course; worse yet, they never found the bottom. Nor did the divers themselves escape unscathed. One never came back at all. Another spent the rest of his life in the Weston State Hospital for the Insane, raving about monsters. The rest of the divers never spoke of what they had seen in the shadowy depths.
