We heard a low dragging sound. It was Vince moving his log so it was directly opposite Glen’s. He sat back down. They were staring into each other’s eyes. Glen put his hand out and Vince took it. They sat so the candlelight washed over them, as though that were the one thing it was meant to do. Eye to eye, hand in hand. I wondered why there had been no gift for Vince, but I understood now: this was it. The whole artifact was it. The walled garden, the tree of flames, the roof of stars—they were Glen’s gift to Vince, lover to beloved. I was dropping tears onto the snow.
Vince said, “Wherever you go, I will find you.”
Glen said, “Me too.”
After that came such quiet you could hear the candle flames. Then we heard another sound, chuckling, funny-sounding, from low down in the darkness. I speculated that it was a gnome or something talking to itself—the atmosphere was conducive to such thought—but it came close and when it broke into the circle of light one perceived it was a skunk. Now, we were all woodsmen, so we knew a skunk is the calmest of creatures, totally hospitable unless you manage to frighten it. I was going to warn, “Don’t get up, don’t run,” but nobody seemed inclined to do so. Our little friend waddled from log to log, nosing at our clothes to see what manner of creatures we might be in the dead of a winter night with the little fires around us. When he was satisfied, he waddled off, chuckling and singing to himself, until his black and white faded into the ink blue of the undergrowth. The forest had blessed us. The spirits had taken form and communed with us for a precious moment.
Glen got up after a few moments and said, “Onward.”
The roar of the Falls felt tremendous after the quiet of the grove. Glen led us to the brink, and then down a bit of path to a place we knew that overlooked almost the whole drop of the Falls, from the crest to the secret bottom, a little less secret now for its ice and glinting snows. The path should have been slick, and I kept bracing myself, but it became clear that Glen had thought of that too, breaking the ice—with his boot heel, I guess—and scattering it before we arrived. We’d stood there for maybe ten minutes when the light changed. The Wyona flows from the east, so at its far end there was a conflagration of pink and orange, piercing through the hundred mile tangle of trees. While we watched, the moon hove above the horizon, blood red, and then flamingo, then orange, then rising shell-pink until it reigned in snow whiteness in the middle of the sky. It was a half moon only, but it drowned the darkness in a flood of light. It hit the top of the Falls and turned it into a fountain of pearl. Vince and Glen embraced. Tilden and I embraced, and then we made the rounds until everybody had been embraced, singly and communally.
Tilden said the fourth thing that had been said, “This is the best night ever.”
We assumed it was past midnight and another year. It was getting cold, and my toes were a little numb. We turned back. We gathered the candles from the tree, and dumped snow in the candle-bags, meaning to come for them in the morning. We took a different way, for Glen had brought his car so we wouldn’t have to walk back, though maybe, considering it all, we should have. The moon would then have come to the middle of the sky, and turned the Falls from top to bottom into a pillar of diamond. We knew. We didn’t have to see. The same moon lit up the parking lot with blue clarity. There was Glen’s car all right, but another one beside it, one with its motor running. A cloud of steam came from the exhaust. When we entered the open space the doors of the car opened.
Vince said, “Fuck.”
There in the dome light stood Coach. Out of the back seats came a couple of the Varsity guys, looking sleepy and confused, but ready to do whatever Coach demanded. Innocent Tilden said, “Happy New Year, Coach—” and began walking toward him. Coach passed him on the pavement without a sign. He was making for Vince. I had absolutely no idea of what to do. I prayed to Jesus he had come there to wish his son Happy New Year. Unmistakable in the moonlight, Coach shot out his arm and said, “What the hell is this?” I couldn’t see what he meant, what he was holding in his hand. Neither could Vince, or at least Vince made no reply. Frustrated by the night, Coach wadded up the thing in his hand and threw it so it hit Vince in the face. It was paper. It fell to the frost at their feet.
“Boy, I asked you a question. What the fucking hell—”
“I’m not going with you, Dad. I’m going with Glen.”
“Like fuck,” Coach said. He motioned behind him without turning around. The bruisers from the back seat ran forward. Vince turned to run, but Coach was on him like the panther he was, dropping him to the pavement. Coach was steel and sinew, and I could hear Vince’s head crack on the ground. He stopped fighting. The other two came up and held me and Tilden off. I had no idea what was going on, so I couldn’t get the fight up in me. Besides, the capability of hitting one of our friend’s dads was not in us. Glen moved forward out of the shadows, but one of the linebackers crumpled him with one punch. Then they were gone.
I picked the wad of paper Coach had thrown off the frost and put it in my pocket. Glen drove us home. Tilden kept chattering, “What? What? What?” but Glen was silent. When I was home and emptying my pockets, I found the paper. It had dried in my pocket on the ride home, though in places it had smeared a little. I opened it and read. It was a letter from Glen to Vince:
Dear Vince,
You must have figured out it’s me putting these notes in your locker. Or, if you have more than one admirer, just don’t tell me. I will try to be content with your kisses. I will try to be content hearing you tap my window in the dead of night, opening, feeling you sink into my arms. You smell of the tree, you know, the tree you have to climb to get in my window. I like that. You know what I like better? On the gorge rim by starlight, with the Falls roaring around us and the swifts flying out at first light, you and I body to body, heart to heart. I still can’t believe that you love me. I’m trying to find the lamp I rubbed to make this wish. I wonder sometimes what would happen if your dad found out, but he’s so stupid we could do it in front of him and he wouldn’t know. Word is he does it with his players, so maybe it’s all right. I want you to know something. If we ever get separated . . . if we ever get parted, you’ll know where to find me. If you want me, come. Come find me. I will wait until you come, for I know you will come. If you want us to be a secret, we can start there, we can start again in the most secret place in all the world. I will not come back unless you come for me. I know you will come. I feel you will come. Nothing else matters.
Your Glen
We had four days before school started up after Christmas vacation. We needed every one of them to decide what to do. In the end we did nothing. Vince appeared at school with a shiner and a small bandage and shaved space on the back of his head. We sat together at the café table as if nothing had happened, talking about everything but that. We didn’t see Glen for weeks. Tilden had access to the typed-up school roll (being an office helper during first period), and reported that Glen Copland was out of town with his parents, an excused absence. When he came back we knew only because he disappeared from the absence roll. He didn’t come to us. He didn’t seek us out. He merely reappeared. I smiled to him in the hall as if he were a new kid again, and had never met. He smiled back.
I packed the Bowie knife away in the top of my closet. It looked like there would never now be an occasion to use it. I still had the wrapping paper and the bag it came in. I really hadn’t looked at everything in the bag when I opened the present—you know how kids are. Folded in there was a sheet of handwritten stationery. I think it was something Glen had dropped in to give me a little flavor of himself—he being a little hard to get at in the normal ways. In the same handwriting of the fatal note Coach threw in the parking lot was the following:
—found slender cliffbrake in a wet seam right where the river goes over. Wyona builds a roof of spray to protect it. Cool. Cool as a glacier. Three, four tiny little stalks. In a thousand miles there’ll be no other, I think. The light shows through them green on the white stone behind
. Mr. Berg says it only grows in the north and that I must have misidentified something else. I ask it what it is. It tells me. Slender Cliffbrake.
Bracken.
Hart’s tongue.
Spleenwort.
Wall rue.
Slender cliffbrake.
Arden likes the flowers. They grow where it’s dry. I find him flowers and he smiles.
Rose mallow.
Corn cockle.
Evening primrose.
I wrote “club moss” down but had to scratch it, because it’s not a flower.
Climb down to the bottom. The ferns would hate it if they had ears, all that noise. Bruuuuuuuuuu—forever and forever, like a Hindu praying. Bruuuuuuuuuuu. I climb down to the bottom. I keep saying that sentence to myself, “I climb down to the bottom.” It must mean something more. I keep repeating it because I don’t get it. I’m not supposed to be here by myself. Horsetail in the quiet backwaters of the pool. I stay long enough to watch the swifts come home. I’ll be afraid in the dark climbing back up, but it’s worth it. Watch carefully. I watch carefully where they home, the zillion birds. Listen, there’s a hole in the water. Part of the cliff sticks out, and there’s a hole in the Falls under it, twice as tall as me, and no wider. Thousands and thousands all pass through. I climbed to the bottom and now I must go in. If you go careful around the rim it’s OK. Slippery, but OK. Liverworts I’ll have to come back for. Hold onto the wall with two hands. It’s not big, though, not very big. The pool will let you go around. Then I stood there. I stood at the door, smelling, listening. I whispered pretty quietly into the door in the water, “I’ve climbed to the bottom now.” I wish I hadn’t. There is someone there. There is someone in the cave under the falls.
Cut myself climbing. Kept looking back. Everyone says you shouldn’t go there by yourself. Now I know why.
I dialed six of the numbers to Glen’s phone. I set the receiver down before I dialed the seventh.
IX
The grounds crew left the hoses out on the field. They’d been watering the grass, and something else came up, or they got distracted when the cheerleaders came out to hone their routines. The marching band was out there practicing their hearts out, stepping over the hoses, tripping on the hoses, tooting their tubas. Coach regarded the marching band with real hatred, which was funny because they existed for no other reason than to exalt him. Maybe he thought they took too much attention away at halftime. We watched him watching them with the familiar rictus of contempt on his face. Then something happened. The rictus changed into a sly grin, which on Coach was really rather terrifying. He motioned his boy Vinny and Gordy Merritt over and whispered something into their ears. We saw them jog to the sidelines. We watched. What were they doing? In a minute we understood. On signal, they both turned the water on at the same instant, and it came spraying out of the nozzles, right underneath the band. The band broke ranks and fled for their lives, trying to hold their precious instruments away from the water. It was choice. It was really, really choice.
Rickenbacker High made the playoffs again that year. Big surprise. Coach nearly always aced the local champ, but the conference had lately extended down into Buncombe County, where we faced the big County and the Asheville City schools, and out past Nantahala, where massive boys came out of the narrow hollers with murder on their fearsome brains. Something about growing up in the wilderness put the wild animal into a kid. They were saved and church-going, and would rip your head off at the toot of a whistle. We were up to it. With Coach at our head, we were inspired to win and terrified not to.
Sherry and I attended the inter-varsity dance parties the Athletes for Christ set up so the kids from the various schools could meet one another. A mixer, they called it at college. The dances were sock hops, where you took off your shoes and danced to Nelson Riddle and the Dorseys on the gym floor. Most of the local churches didn’t like dancing, so the fact that there were records and a record player present set the right tone of gentle rebelliousness. You had to dance a certain distance from the Victrolas, or the records would jump. The AFC get-togethers were thoroughly jockey. Though tacitly invited, regular kids never went, only the athletes and their buddies and their girlfriends. The Jesus sock hops were unexpectedly sensually charged. They were flirt-fests, and though they were not advertized that way, everyone knew. The girls dashed home to change after school and came rushing back dressed in intriguing compromises between cheerleader and cocktail lounge chanteuse. The boys stopped at their lockers to douse themselves in cologne. Sherry, who was a Unitarian, was a little apprehensive before the constant and vivid display of born-again faith, but she went through it for the team’s sake. The honor of praying over the cold sandwiches and the coke went to the host team, and part of the honor was deriving a prayer of exceeding length and eloquence. If the coke was not flat when the praying was over, someone had not done his job.
You could say anything you wanted if you added “In Jesus’ name” or “to God be the Glory.” You could express in prayer the wish to grind the opposing team into the dirt if it could be to God’s glory, or vaunt your own splendor on the field if all you did was done in Jesus’ name. You’d say “praise God” where in ordinary conversation you’d say “uh” or “fuck,” and the ease of transition between the worldly mode and the transcendent seemed to be the mark of the advanced Christian.
After an initial period of unfamiliarity, Sherry was delighted with it all. A change of pressure from her hand onto mine would signal when something especially notable was going on. Jonathan Mick, the big fullback from Mountain Heritage, was praising his girlfriend to her face. She was a looker, all right, her pink sweater straining at the seams and her hair dyed a flaming orange. Her name almost had to be Missy. Anyway, Mick, instead of pointing out how hot she was (as if he needed to), said, “I honor the good work that God is doing in my girlfriend Missy,” and everyone nodded as if they thought that’s what he really meant. How we kept straight faces I don’t know. I didn’t worry so much about how to take all the crap with Sherry there. She thought it was all funny, without judgment or cynicism, and her view cleansed mine. The room brimmed with girls who were officially the most attractive in their schools, cheerleaders and homecoming queens. Sherry was the only one who wore no angora and had no aspirations toward the cheerleading squad. She was the only one who could have named the capital of South Carolina. I wouldn’t have traded her for anyone. She seemed more substantial, older than the rest of them, and the only one who had not moth-balled her sense of humor for the sacred event.
Vince came late, after practice was over. He did not dog practice anymore, as we varsity heroes sometimes did, and stayed late to drill the laggards. Being the apple of his father’s eye rather than a big disappointment was something he began to savor. He had not had time to clean up and douse himself with cologne, and one caught a glimpse of Sheila Gorman waylaying him in the hall to rub grime off his face and smooth his hair with her hand. He had to bend down to give her access, and the moment was quite beautiful, like a scene from a sentimental vignette or an old movie. Sherry was watching too. She laid her head on my shoulder and we watched a man we jointly loved perform an act of unconscious grace. That’s what the Christians should have been talking about.
Vince had changed since the New Year’s night nobody talked about. Sherry, without knowing anything of the details, said it was as though he had come in out of the night. His voice was louder. His hair was brilliantined. His shoes were shined. He wore his dad’s championship ring on a finger beside his own. He’d always dated, but now he was dating through the crème de la crème, using up the A-list girls one at a time as though his curiosity and sexual restlessness had become insatiable. He dipped into B and C list, and his attentions raised these girls up. He was the captain of the football team. He was the quarterback. He possessed his father’s swoon-inducing handsomeness. He became the stereotypical high school heartthrob that was within a decade of being immortalized on TV. Even I forgot the feel of the New
Year’s night on the mountain, assuming all that had been a phase that my friend was out of now, all whisked away by the hand of the Ordinary.
It was better this way, for Glen to be history and everyone else to be the way they were supposed to be. I’d enlarged my life to include Glen, but it had been an effort, and I didn’t want to know about that anymore. Glen came to my house like we were old friends, and when I was with him, I liked him. Mom and Dad liked him. If Mom were cooking he would dice the onions. He did everything wrong and still you liked him, a little, though you were never disappointed when he went away. You can’t have a friend who’s an issue every single minute. It had been a phase. Nice, but over. Glen seemed to sense this and faded into the periphery.
Vince and his Sheila entered just as the prayer began. The Chosen build up quite an appetite, and nine delivery boxes balanced precariously on the lab table. They couldn’t be opened until they were prayed over. After a moment of hesitant expectation, Steve Jenkleman strode out of the crowd, his countenance beaming with the pride of being that day’s thanks-giver. Jenkleman and I had gone through the grades together, but our paths diverged as he grew into a behemoth evidently intended by God to be a linebacker. Jenkleman’s forearms were famous. He wore short sleeves because his muscles would not accommodate too much cloth around them. He was stupid, too, but not quite as stupid as the expression of lobotomized beatitude he wore for the moment made him seem. I could tell through her grip on my arm that Sherry was mocking him with a goofy angel face of her own. I dared not look at her.
Jenkleman bowed his head, closed his eyes. A voice from somewhere in the crowd reminded us, “All heads bowed. All eyes closed.” I bowed my head but I didn’t close my eyes. We Episcopalians didn’t take instructions for our prayers. Jenkleman took a deep breath and recited what I took to be the accepted litany of things to be prayed about by such people upon such an occasion. He took a second breath, and the tone changed a little:
The Falls of the Wyona Page 10