by Dale Bailey
As a kid, this story held me mesmerized with terror. I could imagine the divers flipping backwards off the boats, the lake growing calm as the algae-thick water took them in. Kicking deeper then, the water growing colder, the pressure tremendous, the darkness ever more impenetrable. How puny their flickering cones of hand-held light must have seemed—I could see the glittering sparks of sediment in the murk, the flash of schooling fish wheeling away into the gloom, the rails themselves plunging ever deeper into the midnight depths, red and scaly with rust and strung with veils of greenish-blue weed, until the earth gave out beneath them and they twisted away into the abyss at last, torn asunder, as if by some unimaginable geological cataclysm.
“Bullshit,” Jimmy said. “Bullshit on the divers and bullshit on the monster, too. Especially the monster.” Shaking his head in disgust, he waded naked into the water. A moment later, he began dancing from foot to foot. “Cold, jeez it’s cold.”
“I told you.”
“No, you didn’t. You told me some crap about railroad cars disappearing into the bottomless depths.” He hugged himself, shivering. “And lake monsters.”
“Screw you.”
He didn’t bother acknowledging this riposte, just waded farther out, still shaking his head in disbelief. And then he disappeared. For a moment of heart-stopping panic, I feared that the bottom had cut away beneath him, but then he surfaced, flinging water out of his hair. The spray glittered in the sun. “Cold’s always better once you get your head wet,” he called back to me; then he swam away from the shore, five yards, ten—
I sat down by his scattered clothing, pulled my knees to my chin, and wrapped my arms around my shins. The incessant clatter of the cicadas rang from the trees around us. Jimmy swam with natural grace, his body slicing the murk. At twenty yards, anxiety began to build in my chest. At twenty-five it felt like someone had jammed a hand grenade between my lungs. At thirty they pulled the pin.
I stood, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Far enough, you idiot.”
Jimmy executed a perfect flip, like a seal, and dove. White legs flashed in the sunlight. Water frothed around his kicking feet. A moment later the surface settled into a placid, unnatural blue.
He was gone.
I don’t know how long it was before I started counting seconds, but I was at sixty-five when he breeched the surface. Treading water, he laughed out loud, a laugh so full of joy that I couldn’t hold on to my resentment at the scare. “You touch bottom?” I shouted.
“Too deep,” he gasped as he began the swim back to shore. A minute later he walked out of the lake and flopped down beside me. He leaned on his elbows and turned his face to the sun. He was as unconscious about his body as any human being I have ever known, and I count myself lucky, even now, to have had the opportunity, if only for the space of a single summer, to have known him.
Did I envy him, then? I don’t think I did. Not yet. What I felt was a kind of worshipful adoration: he was everything I wanted, everything I could never be. His ease in his own skin, his casual disdain of authority, his physical grace: I admired them all. I wanted to be Jimmy, I guess. And if I couldn’t be him, I wanted to bask in his charisma, to look at him, to love him from afar.
Kids had drowned there.
Three that I knew of for sure, and others that the high-school mythology I’d overhead only dimly hinted at. The three were easy to confirm: they had died together nine years ago in a Senior Skip Day challenge gone very bad indeed. I don’t suppose the tradition of Senior Skip Day varies much from town to town. If you were shooting for the perfect attendance badge come Awards Day, it placed you in a tight spot; otherwise it was a day free of the stultifying boredom of Sauls Run High School. By ten that morning a two-keg bash had gotten underway down at the Bluehole. By noon, a third keg had been procured and the Bluehole was rocking: kids splashed in the shallows, made out along the shoreline, thronged the keg. Somebody in the scrum—it could never later be determined who—issued an alcohol-emboldened challenge, and five young men set off to swim to the far shore, over a mile away as the subsequent investigation would confirm.
Three of them never made it back.
What exactly happened was never quite clear. The small audience on shore lost interest and drifted away as the figures disappeared into the distance. The two strongest swimmers pulled ahead; by the time they threw themselves panting on the far shore, the tragedy must have already occurred. The other three must have drowned, of course: one can imagine the onset of beery exhaustion; the panicky cries for help skipping unheard across the sun-shot surface; the final thrashing resistance as the waters closed overhead. A last desperate splash. Then, nothing: just water, opaque, icy, indifferent.
Two of the bodies were never recovered. The third, what was left of it, washed up on shore months later—long after the official investigation had issued its conclusion. But by then, whispers had already gotten started: some of the students out there that day, working the deep edge where the bottom sheared away into the abyss, had seen and heard things that their friends on shore had missed: a clap as of distant thunder, a brief animal stench, a thin shriek, like the screech of torn metal. Then, far out in the blue haze at the horizon, a great silver plume shot up and pinned itself glittering to the wind. A heartbeat later, it collapsed into spray; and a heartbeat after that, the kids floating out there in the deep water felt the shockwave pass, a gentle rocking in the deep, like the sway of ocean currents.
The Lavon Theater debuted The Thing near the end of July and then only as a late-show special. It was rated R, and Hazel Pinsky, who sold tickets most nights, sternly policed admission. Getting in required some ingenuity: Jimmy’s idea was to stand outside waiting for the late showing of E.T. to end, then slip through the exiting crowd murmuring—lost my wallet, excuse me, ma’am, lost my wallet—and hey presto, magic. Usually, the mere threat of a hiding would have precluded such a stunt. But three Starlog articles on The Thing—including one about special effects, accompanied by appropriately gruesome photos—had whetted our appetites to a razor edge.
Besides, Jimmy shamed me into it.
“Come on, Jeremy, do you want to be a pussy forever?” he would say, tousling my hair to show it was friendly. Or, abruptly, spinning down the volume on Black Flag, he would chant, “Jeremy is a pussy,” his voice lilting over the syllables.
By the time we slipped outside that evening, the summer sky had deepened to indigo and the first stars were starting to wink through. The windows of the neighboring houses printed buttery trapezoids on the scorched grass. The constant buzz saw of the cicadas cut the air. “The Thing, baby,” Jimmy crowed, throwing an arm around my shoulder as we loped across the lawn. And soon after we’d managed the not-so-difficult trick of free admission—Jimmy’s idea worked like a charm—we were settling into front-row seats.
The theater went dark. The previews began and the lingering dread of Hazel Pinsky faded. I barely remember the sticky floor underneath my feet or the teenagers hooting at the screen in faux terror. What I do remember—the last thing I remember before the film swept me into its spell—is an image of Jimmy staring rapt at the screen. He was handsome in profile, a vision of the man he’d never live to become.
Then the movie took me. Despite the Antarctic setting, despite the film’s surgical dissection of posturing male heroics, what I saw on that screen—what I see to this day—was a reflection of myself. Campbell’s story of an alien that could take the form of any living thing spoke to someone who felt so much like an imposter in his own skin. And the paranoid premise of the film—that you couldn’t trust anyone, not even your closest friends—hit me with unexpected urgency. Maybe that’s simply the existential condition of adolescence, but to me it felt—it still feels—stunningly real.
But that intellectual understanding of why the film spoke to me came later—much later. What came that night was sheer exhilarating terror. From the opening frames to the final shot, what I recall is a series of stark flashbulb images, so s
harply limned that even to think of them now is to plunge me back into the lacerating dark of the Lavon Theater. Can a movie haunt you? Those images haunt me still—a dog gnawing in terror at its chain link enclosure, the sheer magnitude of the spaceship buried in the ice, a man’s severed head growing spider legs and scurrying toward an open door, before the white-hot flare of a flamethrower consumes it. What I remember most of all is a single eidetic image of a man only partially transformed, standing alone in a sea of churned-up snow, his face transfixed with terror and loss, great alien talons where his hands should be. What I remember is his cry of desolation and despair, his echoing and alien lament at being stranded forever in a body—in a world—that is not his own. That alien wail still haunts my imagination, all these years later.
I couldn’t sleep that night, of course.
The walk home in darkness had been dreadful enough.
But the darkness of my room was, in the short run, anyway, infinitely worse. The streetlight outside my window swathed the room in shadows. A basketball in the corner might any moment grow legs and scurry across the room toward my bed. And when I closed my eyes, I could see that pitiful man in the snow and hear his awful alien scream. How long I endured it, I cannot say. But the true measure of my fear came somewhere in the small hours of the night, when, exhausted by terror, I clambered from my bed and stole down the hall to Chris’s room. He lay snoring on his back, arms out flung, sleeping the sleep of the drugged or the drunk or both. I crept into his bed and snuggled into his heat, thinking of my mother, the way she used to crawl into my bed and wrap me in her arms when I was afraid.
Chris’s snoring hitched—I could smell the ripe stench of beer on his breath—and he turned his back to me. “Don’t touch me, faggot,” he groaned, and then he resumed snoring. I lay awake for a long time after that, until somewhere toward dawn I fell into a restless, tossing sleep.
I dreamed of Jimmy that night—maybe for the first time, though I can’t say for sure. But I remember standing naked before a mirror, staring at my reflection in wonder, for the boy staring back at me wasn’t me at all. It was Jimmy, lean and tan, his penis tumescent in its nest of golden hair. I reached out to touch him and the boy on the other side of the mirror reached out as well. Our fingers met, sending concentric ripples expanding across the surface of the glass—
Then I was awake, clutching at the corona of pain that had burst just above the small of my back. “What the fuck are you doing in here?” my brother was saying. I curled fetal to protect myself from the next kick—it exploded in a bright flare of agony square above my kidney—all too aware of the morning erection tenting my undershorts.
My brother must have been aware of it, too—I had a nightmarish image of him stirring to wakefulness with it pressing stiff against his back—for as he aimed another kick at me he snapped, “Go play with yourself in your own room.” Which would have been fine, except he didn’t seem inclined to let me go. I scrambled across the bed, dragging the sheets over my crotch. Chris, shirtless, advanced on me, his thick hands—he had my father’s hands—curled into fists. I think he might have beaten me badly—very badly—if the horn of Joey Stratton’s Camaro hadn’t split the morning air.
“Shit,” Chris said, turning away. “You got off lucky this time, faggot.”
He shoved his feet into a pair of beat-up Adidas and snatched an Iron Maiden tee shirt from atop a pile of dirty clothes. “You better be gone like the fucking wind when I get back,” he said. He slammed out of the room and clattered down the stairs. A moment later, the Camaro screeched away and I was alone.
I took a deep breath and tipped my head against the wall, panting.
I must have sat like that for fifteen minutes, breathing through the pain, before I heaved myself off the bed. That’s when I noticed that Chris’s bureau drawer was ajar—and glimpsed the yellow box shoved in among the rat’s nest of unmatched socks. I should have left the room, of course.
All I can say is that I found myself pulling open the drawer instead. I pushed the socks back, pulled out the box—it was a cardboard cigar box—and put it down on the bureau. And then—remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta opens the briefcase and golden light comes pouring out?—I lifted the lid.
A wad of bills as thick as my fist had been shoved in on one side. A heap of neatly rolled joints lay upon the other. It didn’t take long to put two and two together. Chris was dealing—at the very lowest rung of the ladder, true, selling individual joints in the halls of Sauls Run High School for three dollars a pop—but dealing all the same. Once upon a time—when my mother was alive—I would have closed that box and turned away. But Mom was gone now. I think sometimes that her death was the catalyst for everything that followed. I don’t know. All I could say for sure was that I had nothing left other than the kid across the street. So I took another step down that fatal path. I palmed two joints and counted ten bucks out of the unruly wad of cash.
The ten dollars sustained us through the morning in the arcade on Main Street.
It’s just empty storefront now—I drove by it yesterday—but all I have to do is close my eyes and the years peel away to disclose the place to me in all its shabby reality: the astringent stink of the urinal cake in the boy’s room, the cacophony of beeps and explosions, most of all the rattle of quarters in the change tray. For a single cultural heartbeat, a lot of people made a lot of money. But it’s all gone now, of course; you can get better games on your phone—though your reception in the Run, deep in its cleft of mountains, is basically for shit. It doesn’t matter anyway. Who have I got to call?
It’s the past that lies before me now, if that makes any sense—the summer when Minor Threat and X banged out of Jimmy’s speakers, and the sticky days of July spilled over into the still stickier ones of early August, bringing us ever closer to our fatal rendezvous with the Bluehole. But our doom—and I use the term deliberately, our doom—had yet to fall upon us, and if I hadn’t nicked those joints from Chris’s cigar box, if I’d taken only the money that we blew at the arcade that morning—it might never have fallen upon us at all.
But I did take the joints, and the money only lasted so long.
Ten or fifteen minutes after we ran dry of quarters, Dewey showed us the door. “You’re loiterers,” he said from behind the array of novelty prizes under the counter. He squinted at us through smoke from the butt jammed between his teeth. “You’re fucking loitering, aren’t you? So scram.” He waved his hand dismissively and turned back to his paper.
“Screw you, Dewey, you old fuck,” Jimmy said outside, kicking at a Miller Lite can that someone had thrown out in front of the pool hall. It rattled into the street and rolled into the mouth of a sewer grate. The pavement baked in flat, oppressive heat. Sunlight flashed off chrome in dazzling silver bursts as cars whipped past. Jimmy hopped the guardrail by the Stone Bridge. I followed reluctantly. We scrambled down the slope and hunkered in the shadow of the overpass. A dry breeze chased dust devils across the tracks. The air smelled of spent oil and shale. “Jesus,” Jimmy said, leaning on his elbows, legs extended. He laced his hands behind his head and stared up into the shadows. I reclined beside him. A crumpled can of Tab leached white in the sunlit weeds beyond the bridge. Ants marched across the open lip and disappeared into the dark. The undergrowth rang with cicada song.
“I’m so bored,” Jimmy announced, and in that moment I made the worst decision of the summer: I dug in my pocket, extracted the two joints I’d stolen from Chris’s cigar box, and straightened them between my fingers.
“Holy shit,” Jimmy said, and suddenly I felt like the coolest kid who had ever walked the streets of the Run. “Where’d you get those?”
“I have my sources,” I said, feeling even cooler—feeling in fact almost as cool as Jimmy. “Wanna?”
Jimmy dug out his lighter and passed it my way. I sat up and got the joint going. Holding it between my thumb and forefinger like the seasoned pothead I would soon become, I took a long cough
less drag: the apprenticeship with the Marlboros had served me well. I passed the joint to Jimmy. “Chris,” he said, holding it to his lips. And then, exhaling: “Chris’s gonna kill you.”
I dropped back on my elbows beside him, feeling the pressure of the smoke in my lungs. I let it stream through my nostrils. “Chris’s never going to say a word, not unless he wants Dad to know he’s dealing,” I said, and Jimmy, shaking his head in something like admiration—I felt the pleasure of it all through my body—passed the joint back to me. As it burned down, the cars overhead seemed to woosh by. The bridge’s shadow sharpened; the light beyond grew brighter. The cicada song deepened. Complex rhythms now textured the blank drone. I suppose the pot must have been absolute skunk weed compared to the stuff I buy today, but I still nurse a kind of reverence for that first buzz: arms out flung, buoyed weightless by the earth, watching the smoke eddy in the dim under the bridge. A cicada blurred to rest on a blade of sunshot heather, and I remember watching its jeweled belly throb, pushing out song. Harmony pervaded everything. I’ve never been able to get back that sense of primal unity, no matter how much I smoke.
Jimmy flipped the roach out on the tracks and we lay there for a while—I don’t know how long—marinating in heat. I might have dozed—I would have—if Jimmy hadn’t nudged me.
“Leave me alone.”
“C’mon. Let’s jet. It’s fucking hot out here.”
“Where?”
“That lake. You know, the Bluehole.”
“Screw you.”
“C’mon,” he said. He got to his feet and extended his hand to me.
