Chief Dadlez reacted to the tragedy by closing the park. This was futile on many levels. For one thing, you could close the park (which was a parking lot and a few picnic tables) without limiting access to the Falls very much. Most of us came up through the woods paths anyway. The cove boys used the imposing metal “Keep Out By Police Order” signs for target practice. They made a lovely ting when hit with birdshot. But Dadlez had a hard-on about this. He kept throwing people in jail for being at the Falls, until the county prosecutors told him to stop because they weren’t going to prosecute. They made him take the barricades away, it being state property and not the chief’s private domain. We understood, though. We never wanted to go through that again either. Had Dadlez been local he would have understood that safety is achieved not by barricades, but by brother looking after brother. Marky was a mess for months, not because anyone blamed him (they didn’t) but because he was supposed to look out for Timmy, and for the briefest and most excusable instant, he had not.
The chief did have thick blue lines painted at the cliffs’ edge, to tell people how close it was safe to come. Nobody begrudged him that. He ordered the lines repainted and repainted until long after people—except the people who were there—had forgotten who Timmy Hansen was.
It was a time when parents would never ask “Where are you going?” for there was almost no conceivable trouble one could get into in our little town. They asked then, for a while. “Where are you going?” they’d hiss, as if tigers and rapists lurked just outside the door. You learned never to answer, “To the Falls.” What was the use in upsetting them? The Falls would have whom it wanted. They would call you if you didn’t come on your own. Furthermore, if the Falls claimed one every generation, Timmy Hansen had made us safe until we had sons of our own.
VI
Vince raised the town out of depression. Didn’t take that long. Football practice started in August, and by the time a hint of frost hung in the air again Coach sensed that, through his son’s leadership as quarterback, Eddie Rickenbacker High had a chance at the 2A playoffs for the first time since he himself captained the team. We took the Conference. The well-heeled downstate schools obliged us by picking one another off while we nibbled away in the far west, eking through some matches, annihilating our opponents in others. Reporters came from Raleigh and Charlotte and took our photos—Vince’s photo, actually, though sometimes we were gathered ’round as supporting cast. Game followed game, and when one ended in victory, kids in red and gold streamed down from the stands to lift us on their shoulders. Even Vince, who’d expected his life to turn out in something like this way, seemed taken aback. A clipping service sent him articles about himself from papers way downstate. He showed me when they mentioned me, as they, once or twice, did.
We lost in the sudden-death second round to some low-foreheaded glandular cases from Durham. Coach said they won because they were used to living around colored kids and fighting their way through the halls every day. What did we know? There were two black families in town, and where their kids went to school I had honestly no idea. It wasn’t Eddie Rickenbacker.
Coach hung publicity photos of the Durham squad in the locker room, so we could build up hatred toward them for the next match-up. They were mostly seniors and we’d never see those individuals again, but the sentiment mattered. We wanted to smash them into the ground and run our cleats over their broken spines. Nobody had heard them call us hillbillies, but we assumed they had, and were therefore determined to make that epithet one of fear and respect.
If I look at my old report cards, I see that I took chemistry and English and history and some pretty interesting stuff, but I almost literally have no memories of my junior year but Sherry and football. And by “football” I mean Vince and Tilden and the guys and the cheerleaders, all the sweat and bruises, and, when autumn came, the cries of victory. Dear God, I was in shape. I look at pictures of myself then and wonder if we were the same person.
No man is an entire team, but Vince came close as anyone could. His passes arced to his receivers like babies to their mothers’ arms. He ran the ball like a goddamn gazelle. He leapt over tackles as if they were lying down. When he got into the end zone he stopped and gazed kind of stupidly at the ball as if he were not quite sure he had made the touchdown, waiting for the voice of the crowd for confirmation. I’ve never seen anyone like him, before or since. We were golden, all of us that year, but Vince was diamond and uranium. Coach beamed at him even when nobody was looking. Walking down the hall at school was a march of triumph. I wonder sometimes if Sherry would have married me without the glamour of that season around my head. I’m too prudent to ask. I got voted Outstanding Left Tackle by the sportswriters of North Carolina. I have the certificate framed in my den. Vince collected so many certificates, so many trophies he stopped setting them out on his mother’s shelves. The newspaper ran a feature on how many articles they had run on him in the previous eighteen months, and it turned out to be more than the mayor. You could watch people just standing back and looking at him in the streets. The border mountains had never produced anything like him. Having Vince as my best friend seemed such a stroke of fortune that I would probably never ask anything else of the world.
It was that summer, the one between the first two championship years, that Glen went to Scout Camp out west. His life thus became temporarily more interesting than ours. Vince would gather us together and read letters Glen had written from his bunk under the Grand Tetons, or wherever the hell it was. Vince read the letters aloud, and when he did he made the salutation “Dear Vince and Arden and Tilden,” though you could see by the mark of the letters through the page that all Glen had written was “Dear Vince”:
Philmont is great, for the most part. JC, the guy who teaches rock climbing, is cool, and I’m getting good at it. The cliffs used to look a lot taller than they do now. Can’t wait to show you my bruises and sunburn, and even a snakebite, from something harmless, though, so the bragging rights aren’t so great. You have to shake your boots in the morning to make sure there aren’t scorpions curled up inside. I wouldn’t want to live in my boots, but there’s no accounting. Never ate so much in my life. When you’re climbing cliffs and riding horses all day, you build up an appetite.
Dad’s almost forgiven me for trying to get out of coming here this summer. I told him I wanted to spend the summer with you, but he didn’t even understand what I meant. Or maybe he did. I do like the Scouts, though, and I’m learning so much. You and Tilden and Arden are all the time showing me up in the woods. This is catch-up, sucker! Dad spent a lot of money and went to a lot of trouble, blah blah blah, so I make sure to tell him what good things we’re doing and how I’m really getting use out of his money. I am having a good time and all that, but I’m not glad I came. I miss you. I miss you like hell. Thank you for that last night together. I carry the feel, the touch, the sound of your voice with me everywhere. I’ll see you in twenty-six days.
Love, Glen
Tilden said, “What’s that touch and sound of your voice stuff?”
“Oh, he’s bullshitting. You know how we’re always bullshitting.” But Vince’s face was bright red. He hadn’t edited the letter first. He kept reading the letters as they arrived afterward, but you could tell by the way he moved his head that he wasn’t reading all of them like they were written.
One day in Youth Sunday School we had a visitor, a whippet-thin gent who had been a missionary in China, and sort of looked Chinese now, with a wispy beard and long eyes and a wise bald head. He was about a thousand years old. He’d taught the Chinese to grow better wheat, or something. We were talking about the things you talk about with a thousand-year-old missionary, when Doug Lazorn—ever the wise-ass—made the point that heaven must be boring after a while, since even the best thing drawn out to eternity is boring. The old guy smiled. He said we—or at least Doug—had gotten it wrong. You should think of paradise not as an infinite extension of moments, but one moment of perfect bliss in whi
ch you live fully, in the moment, of the moment, without thought for what came before or would come after. Before the end of the day I started applying this to my life, which was so good at the moment that I made a deliberate effort not to think of whatever might come after. Kids not in bliss might be picking out colleges and writing admissions essays. Not us. We were in the clouds and not ready to step down. Maybe we can be forgiven for thinking our lives would never change, that all was perfect and a gold haze lay on the encircling mountains. We were OK, I think; even our arrogance was a kind of gratitude.
VII
I remember the day and hour that Andy came home for good. He ordered us not to bother picking him up at the station in Asheville. He said he’d get a ride with one of his buddies, so the first we saw of him was when Clarence, his best friend from high school, braked in our driveway and helped Andy out of the back seat of his jalopy. Clarence had been a Marine, and the back of the jalopy was painted with something that looked like an amoeba (it was meant to be The World), under which was stenciled in flame-red letters, Semper Fidelis. Andy was still a little weak, and it gave me joy to take over from Clarence and help him into the house, and hence into our room where he would sleep for a couple of days before we could start the long-planned-for welcome home party. The way he was lying in his bed I could see the bandage over his wound. I lifted up his shirt a little so I could see better. The place was smaller now than it had been in the photos. If I could judge by the bandage, the entry hole was no larger than a quarter. Got his lung, though, and a couple of other things inside there, and sent him home to us.
Andy would have been halfway through college if he hadn’t gone to war, but he seemed older. His body was hard and compact. I remembered him bigger than he was, but I realized he had not shrunk; I had grown. Something in the way the bullet had entered him made him prone to muscle spasms, and sometimes his whole chest would seize up, and he had to breathe real shallow to breathe at all, and sweat would be pouring off him because of the pain. He smiled at you then to let you know it would pass and you shouldn’t worry. You could get him a glass of water. That made it better. He was not doing anything different than he had done before, I guess, but he was doing it in a different way. It was hard to put your finger on. Andy was sad. Had he killed a lot of people? I’d let him settle in before I started peppering him with questions.
Mom said, “He’s going to be spending a little time with us while he decides what to do.” That was fine with me. I thought he and I would take over Dad’s hardware store in the fullness of time, Summers Family Feed and Hardware, but that didn’t seem to be his dream anymore. Well, I’d do it, and hold his place until he was ready.
My brother’s friend, Clarence, had been part of the undifferentiated cloud of young male energy that was my brother’s friends, not particularly noticed or marked. My brother’s friends were kind to me—I gathered from other kids that this was not a universal state of affairs—and Clarence the kindest, even, once in a while, staying to play with me if he came over and Andy wasn’t home. Clarence was the one on whom my mother pressed an extra apple or one more pass of the cookie plate. She did this with Andy within the family, too, in a gesture I recognized from the first was not really favoritism. Andy got an extra kiss on the head when we were leaving in the morning. If there was an extra slice of chocolate pie, Andy was offered it, because everybody knew it was his favorite, and how he’d eat away the meringue, because he didn’t like that so much, and leave himself just a sagging edge of shimmering chocolate for the end. Andy and Clarence were not greedy or favored: they were sad, and all the more so because for the sadness there was no adequate explanation. Mom was just trying to bring light where the shadow lay deepest.
Clarence was the first person not in my gang whom I noticed at the Falls. One of his northern relatives gave Vince a pair of second-hand snowshoes in time for one of the few days they could have been used. Snow fell in great sloppy clumps, as though the Southern sky, unused to the exercise, didn’t know quite how properly to snow. The river was not itself frozen, but its spray froze wherever it hit the cold rock. The upper gorge was a roofless hall of blue ice. The Falls was thwarted by ice in some of its customary streams, and shot out from the cliffs at unexpected angles. Vince forged ahead on his second-hand snowshoes while Tilden and I ran behind with the great loping strides you need in snow. It was great exercise. We poured sweat which froze on our mufflers to a salty white rime. I was falling back a little—it didn’t matter, because they would have to come back the same way if they were going to get out of the forest—and leaned over with my hands on my knees to pant the breath back into me. From that new angle I could see a thin wisp of smoke near the edge of the forest, and a flicker of pale gold under it.
I jogged over and found Clarence sitting alone beside the pathetic campfire. This struck me as strange, for Andy’s friends were as adhesive as mine, and the only one you ever saw alone in the old days was Andy himself, and that mostly when he was on his bike delivering the Times before the break of day. One of the rules of the Falls, passed down from generation to generation, was that one should not go alone. To go alone was asking for it. Whatever haunted the Falls was better faced by two or three than by one. Clarence looked different when not diluted by the boy swarm. He was compact and muscular, almost an adult, with the curly reddish hair of his family. Handsome, I thought, while he was still an unknown boy beside an incidental fire. When I recognized him, this thought faded, and he became just Clarence.
He was in similar confusion. He stared at me for a moment before he knew where he knew me. “Ardo,” he said, using my brother’s nickname for me. I decided I would let him.
Clarence stood up. He removed his glove and placed his hand flat on the top of my head, like a priest giving a blessing. He said, “I wondered when this was going to happen.”
“What?”
“You and the other pipsqueaks finding the Falls.”
“It happened a while back. I’m surprised Andy didn’t—”
“Oh, I haven’t been hanging out with the gang as much as I used to.”
Clarence had been drinking. I was a bit of a prig, so I filed this away for later accusation. He was dirty, too. He had been out on the rim of the gorge for more than a few hours.
“You the first of your group? I bet it was Coach’s kid. Vince.”
“No, it was me.”
“Good work. Your brother was first too.”
Clarence gazed over my head at something. I resisted the urge to turn and look too. I guessed it was just the snow careering into what was already the velvet dark of the deep forest.
“Me, I was so happy. So proud when Andy brought us here. I took to it most,” Clarence said. “I was looking for it, in a way, without knowing what ‘it’ was. Now I can’t seem to stay away. Lost a girlfriend over it already. She gave me a . . . what do you call it?”
“Ultimatum?”
“She gave me an ultimatum. Stop coming here . . . spend more time with her . . .” Clarence stopped. Perhaps he realized that wasn’t exactly a full-formed ultimatum. He belched nobly.
“You know, I should have thought about bringing some substantial food out here.”
“I’m sorry, we didn’t . . . I mean, Vince got these snow-shoes he wanted to try out—”
“No, no, it’s OK. Shouldn’t have come out here. Not alone. It’s one of Andy’s rules. He’s very serious about those rules. How the hell’s he doing anyway?”
“Fine. He’s waiting for you to visit.”
“Oh, I will. I brought him home, you know.”
“I know. I was there.”
“I want to get myself cleaned up a little . . . before I . . . You know how he worries about the people close to him. I don’t want him . . . to . . .” Clarence seemed to lose his train of thought. He looked at his sad little camp and said, “I guess I didn’t know where else to go.” He gestured toward the efficient little plume of his fire. “Fire’s nice though. Marines taught me that. Come o
ver and warm yourself if you like.”
To please my brother’s friend I went and held my hands over his fire. It did feel nice. It was cold on the ridge, and night was coming.
“You could come back with us.”
“Naw . . . I been drinking a little. Wouldn’t do to go home drunk. Gotta work it off a little.”
“It’ll be dark—”
“All right with me. I like the dark. Andy and Louie, they’d have to scurry home at twilight . . . back in the day . . . maybe their moms were waiting . . . you’d know about that. But I’d stay out until the moon rose and I could see enough to find the trail. The moon doesn’t always shine in other places, but there is always a moon here. I couldn’t figure that out. I still think about it. ‘The Place Where the Moon is Always Shining.’ Must be what ‘Wyona’ means in Indian. If it weren’t covered by the snow clouds, you’d see a moon now. Back in town it might just disappear. I don’t know.”
He reached into his backpack for a drink. Remembering me, he aborted the gesture, but not before I heard bottles clink together inside.
He put his forefinger to his lips in a shushing gesture. “Don’t tell Andy, OK?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
He was crying, or maybe he had caught some of the smoke from the campfire in his face. He inspected the dent his body had made in the snow—fragile and tiny in the face of the coming night—and said, “Jesus.”
Then he said, “He’s just like me.”
The Falls of the Wyona Page 7