Breaking the Fall

by Michael Cadnum

“Skirt,” she answered.

  I held the swinging door open with my weight and, after a while, it seemed to want to shut. It continued to grow heavier as I stood there, “It looks nice,” I said.

  She looked at me for the first time, with the slightest of smiles, and I saw that she was, really, pretty. “Silk/wool,” she said. A little laugh again, remembering, perhaps, the store, or the price. “Sinful.”

  You didn’t have to see it on the five minutes of local news beside the toaster. She was on her way. Seattle had been wonderful for her. She didn’t even look tired. She was going places.

  My goal for today was to avoid Jared, and my second goal was to talk to Sky again, because for all my faith in her—and that’s what it was, faith—I had spoken to her only from time to time, just to say hello. She had watched me play baseball, when I was still playing, including one or two real terrible plays, one of my Face Specials, my eye socket as a sort of secondary fielder’s glove.

  Today would be an important day. That was what I promised myself. All I had to do was talk to Sky, and Jared—surely I could avoid him.

  He was waiting for me somewhere. I would see him soon, leaning against a telephone pole or slouching out of a 7-Eleven. He wouldn’t call out. He would smile, and he would shake out a cigarette for me, and I would take it.

  I couldn’t help it. I wanted to impress Jared. I wanted that more than anything. But I wanted something else.

  I wanted that fear again, that fear that finally turned to light.

  I wanted to feel alive.

  7

  The new school was right across the football field from where the old one had blown up. The old school had been a craggy, castlelike building, ugly but impressive, as though a high school might be attacked by something supernatural, a dragon or a giant.

  The new Wilson School was a series of low buildings with flat roofs, gray and off-gray. You saw the backboards of the basketball court and the big yellow loop of the track around the football field before you saw the buildings. If these walls collapsed they wouldn’t hurt anyone. You’d shake them off like so much bulletin board material that had just happened to fall down.

  Some people liked sitting in the buildings, but everyone with lungs and blood in their bodies stayed out on the football stands. There was always something to watch. There were fights, and you could watch the drug corner across the street—even on the days when the cops staked it out, expensive cars cruised by.

  Before school I sat exactly as I always did, smoking with Jared. Jared stubbed his cigarettes out on the heads of the bolts that held the bleachers together. That way the yellow paint didn’t get charred.

  “The same house,” he said, standing up.

  “With the green shutters,” I said, as though in agreement.

  “Tonight.” He smiled.

  “Not tonight,” I began. A half-dozen excuses crowded me. “Maybe this weekend,” I offered feebly.

  “You’ll just get more and more nervous. It’s best to get it over with.”

  He put a forefinger on the knuckle of my hand, just a touch, as though to push a switch to activate my brain. I shrugged, the way he often did, as though it made no difference to me at all. This was what I wanted, I told myself. The game was life. And this—this was hardly life to me, the sound of the bell barely leaking all the way to the muddy football field, the scraps of old daily bulletins plastered against the chain-link fence.

  But the thought had given my mouth a sour taste.

  Not tonight. Not the same house. It was crazy.

  Mr. Milliken decided to spend the entire period lecturing on the steam engine. He was a round, red-haired man, with white curls of hair on his freckled arms. “They would blow up,” he exclaimed, “scalding hundreds!”

  He stalked the room like a giant zombie. “Painful, howling deaths! Steamboats blowing up on the Mississippi! Locomotives blowing up in the station! These were dangerous machines. Even when they didn’t explode, they rained hot cinders. Blinding ashes! Stanley!” he exclaimed.

  He did this to make sure we were listening. “We the People, in order to Stanley,” he might say, just to make sure I was listening, and I always was, but years of living with my mother have accustomed me to listen without looking.

  I looked at him and waved, a little sarcastically. He gave a frowning smile in return. He taught history as a series of lurid headlines. As a result, we were way behind schedule. I could hardly wait for the Civil War.

  Sky Tagaloa was in this class. Her long dark hair was held together with a little blue elastic like a minature bungee cord.

  As we were tumbling out of class Mr. Milliken put a big freckled hand on my shoulder. “You look a little sleepy there, North.”

  I didn’t respond, so he said, “Wake up or stay home.”

  I shrugged, and did my gimme-a-break smirk. I was happy to slip away from him, and trudge just behind Sky past the slamming lockers.

  I said hello to her as she found her locker and, spun the dial. “Hello, Stanley,” she said. She had a deep voice, and always spoke slowly.

  Hello, Stanley. She had said as much before. She had been friendly enough. Hello. She had repeated my greeting back to me. And she hadn’t said “Stan.” She had used my whole name, both syllables. I liked that—I hated to be called Stan.

  But my plan was not going well. We had always been on speaking terms. This was not an improvement. This morning was turning out to be just another dead day. A dead day in a school with air conditioning that sucked the oxygen out of the rooms.

  And the day chugged forward, dead, flat, dull.

  Until lunch. Then everything changed.

  8

  It was noon, and the sun was that same rotten smear in the sky.

  I was sitting off to the side, as usual, waiting for Jared to get done talking to the dean or the counselor or whomever else he had gotten himself tangled with this time. A big, broad guy sauntered across the field to get from MacArthur to Blake Avenue, rolling a little, like he was feeling his liquid brunch just about then.

  He hooked Sky’s backpack with one hand, as an afterthought, maybe, or maybe an old habit that was hard to break. She had turned to look back at the building, and the man’s easy snatch of the pack looked like something done as a joke.

  She turned and felt her shoulder, felt her arm, even as she watched the guy take her pack, watched the strap glide off her arm and wrist. Her lips parted, about to smile or begin some kind of rejoinder, and she actually said, with some humor, “Hey, wait a minute—”

  And then she saw it wasn’t a joke. This guy was a stranger, and he was big, and starting a slow lope, good-humored and loose, like he thought it was a joke, too.

  Sky had some trouble finding a place on the forty-yard line to drop her French book. Everything was wet. Then she slipped a little, and when she finally got her footing I was standing up in the bleachers and thinking, no, Sky, don’t go after him. Let it go.

  It was a short sprint, and when she caught up with him, he hit her. Casually, glancing back with a wave, like someone gesturing away a gnat. Not hard, sort of a backhand slap, nearly a joke in itself, but you could hear the smack of it all the way over where I was, and I shrank inside at the sound.

  Sky had him. She got ahold of his jacket, a gray, zippered windbreaker that was open in front, and swung him around. The guy tried to laugh. He tossed the backpack, and it splashed into a puddle. Look, he said with a gesture, I don’t have it anymore. If I don’t have it, his expression tried to say, everything’s okay, right?

  Besides, Sky was having trouble spinning him to the ground. The jacket stretched out, half-pulled off the guy, and the guy was rotating on one foot, but Sky wasn’t exactly making a clean tackle. The day had stopped, and no one could move or even make a sound, except the two who seemed joined together.

  The light changed. The bleary sunlight was even more glaring, half fog, half mist, and my own feet splashed in the wet mud. The stranger was almost entirely out of his jacket,
an escape artist, when he seemed to grow bigger. His shoulders swelled, and his neck muscles bunched and he knotted his hands into fists.

  His fist made a bone-on-bone thwack against her head, and then another, with a motion like someone wielding a hammer. He spread his feet to plant them well, those invisible nails, but Sky was not letting go, not crying out at all.

  She was moving in on the guy, her face crumpled with shock. She grappled with him, and it was this embrace that slowed down the stranger, and pinned his arms, until I found myself with my own arms around one of his legs.

  Something out of television football, years of instant replays, must have been encoded in what I was doing. My feet tore the grass, driving forward, and the man actually left the ground, his weight on my back, heavier and harder than I had dreamed it would be.

  They both fell, and the force of the fall separated them. The stranger smiled, a smart I’m-okay twist to his face. He stood up in stages, planting a foot, pulling himself up, flicking grass off his knees. He glanced at Sky, and then he smiled at me, and I thought—it’s okay. It’s really okay. He’s taking it as a joke.

  He kicked me. I saw the foot retreat, and I saw it loom in my eyes, and the world contracted to a little circle of blue and green. The dark, muddy shoe burst into my skull, and a single blue star flashed for an instant in my vision.

  He kicked me again, a noise like two boulders clunking together.

  I saw what happened next as though I existed on another planet. Trying to climb out of the muck and grass clippings, I watched on my own little television, the little screen that perched right before my eyes, all I could make out of the world.

  A new figure joined us. A new, big shape fell from the sky. He was there, suddenly, and he dropped on the guy, actually leaped, flew through the air and flattened the stranger with a whoosh of air and a gristly, butcher-shop snap.

  It was all quiet.

  Then the rescuing figure ascended to his feet, and I recognized Tu, Sky’s brother. He marched upon me, all bulk and white teeth.

  I flinched.

  He put his arm all the way around me. “Hey! Get this guy some water!” he called, illogically, perhaps remembering the line from a movie. “Fuck!” called Tu, who always swore awkwardly. “Some water for this guy!” he called, and I was certain he was about to lift me like a trophy.

  Behind us, off to one side, the stranger dragged himself together and began his fade from the field.

  Sky looked me in the eyes. Looked right into my eyes, with her face close to mine.

  “Stanley,” she said, in her slow, gentle voice, not even breathing hard. “Are you all right?”

  “This guy!” cried Tu, and his words were like the cry of a man who has made a wonderful discovery. “Let us through with this guy,” said Tu as we shouldered our way to the nurse’s office, where I sat with Tu pounding my back and Sky watching me from the doorway as though she had never really seen me before, as though she realized after all this time that I was someone she used to know, in another world, in another life, and that she had been a fool not to recognize me before now.

  9

  Afternoon is my favorite part of the day. In the afternoon there is an island of an hour or two, an extra day in the day.

  In the afternoon streets look like friendly places, ways to go from one place to another. A city has houses, fences, bushes, and the trees that expand into the sky and give a feeling that the world is a refuge. By day this is all our home, every grocery store, every parking lot, a way for people to live and find their lives.

  But at night, outside, when the streetlights are not strong enough to dilute the dark, the streets are another, foreign place. The world is not our home after all.

  My father was not home for supper, as usual, and my mother came home as I was making a show of going to bed. She unpacked her briefcase and scattered papers all over the desk in the crowded sewing room she used as an office. When I stepped into the room to say good night, she was eating a Burger King cheeseburger, a ragged tendril of lettuce hanging onto her spreadsheet.

  She did not look up as she said, “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re so …” She hunted for a word while stapling two pages together. “Thin.”

  I wasn’t really thin, no more than usual. But it was typical of my parents. They were buried by their work, but from deep within the heap of paperwork, I always heard the injunction to take vitamin C, or not to take out the trash in my bare feet.

  Besides, there was something changed about me. I could tell, and anyone who saw me could tell. Maybe that beast in me, that hunting creature, was gradually taking over my body.

  “Did you eat the beef burgundy?” she was asking.

  “I had some eggs.”

  “Look in the freezer, Stan. I always leave you something.” She looked at me then, peering hard before she glanced away. She did not look as pretty as she had. She had lost weight herself, it seemed, and there was a little wrinkle on each side of her mouth. “Homework?”

  “Sure.”

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “French. A quiz tomorrow. U.S. History. Read a chapter.” I shrugged, to say: just standard homework.

  “If you’re smart,” she said cryptically, “people just expect you to do more work.”

  I turned to leave, but her voice stopped me, chilling me.

  “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  I could not make a sound.

  “You know how I feel about it.”

  I could not even clear my throat.

  “Cancer,” she said. “Of the lung.”

  I was frail with relief. “I don’t,” I managed to say, “inhale that much.”

  She let that pass without comment, no doubt recognizing a lame remark. “Don’t stay awake all night listening to music.”

  For a while I lay on the bed in my clothes. Then I did something I had never done before. I escaped my house, like a convict, hanging from my window, landing easily on the laundry room roof, and springing to the back lawn. The easiness of it made me feel all the more guilty. I could not shake it: this was wrong.

  There was a fluttering in my belly. All of this was wrong. An appetite had been awakened, though, that only one thing could satisfy.

  I met Jared at the bottle brush plant. We crouched in the chilly dark, out of the wind, and smoked. We didn’t say much at first. Jared squatted, peering at the street, and while I could not see his face clearly in the bad light, I did not have to.

  “I heard you were hurt,” he said, standing up.

  It was hard to think of the best way to put it. “Kicked in the head.”

  “In the head?” He sounded amused, and something in me stiffened. “But you are all right,” he added more kindly, “obviously.”

  I did have a lump just above my hairline, and if I shook my head very hard, like someone making a milkshake by hand, it would give me a headache. The nurse had suggested aspirin after I said that she had five fingers and that I did not feel like throwing up.

  “I hear,” he said without looking back, “that you’re a big hit with the Samoans.”

  For some reason I did not want to say any more about it, so I kept my silence. I followed him down the slope, and we both hurried along the sidewalk. I did not want to describe to Jared what had happened, and I did not want to mention Sky.

  I was almost hoping that Jared would suggest some other house, or another plan altogether. We were going down an alley, not a trashy, puddle-strewn alley, but a well-ordered back passage with white paint on the telephone poles up to head height, and red reflectors on the gate posts.

  The house loomed over the fence. The hulk of its roof was dark. The three chimneys were sharp black shapes.

  That voice was back, the dry, fanged voice in me: you remember this place, said the voice with a kind of glee.

  This was the house. This was the place I had promised myself I would never visit again.

  “It’s too earl
y,” I whispered.

  “It’s an appropriate hour. Past midnight.”

  But there was a light on upstairs, a dull copper glow. I pressed my eye to a crack in the fence. The wood was new, and a bead of sap kissed my cheek. There was another, brighter light downstairs.

  “They expect us,” Jared breathed.

  My stomach was a knot.

  “They’ve gone to bed,” he said, with something like satisfaction, “but they’re nervous.”

  I don’t blame them, I thought, my spit drying to nothing.

  “A challenge,” he said, and his smile flashed in the darkness. He put both hands on the top of the fence and was over it in an instant. He hissed at me through the fence, “Come on.”

  Stay where you are, I told myself. Stay right here. Let Jared do whatever he wants to do. It has nothing to do with you.

  But the fear was already working in me, like the yellow pills Jared and I had taken one Saturday, giving me a feeling of power that made my heart hammer. This fear was what I hated, and what I craved.

  The fear itself pulled me over the fence, where I followed Jared toward the great, unsleeping citadel of the house.

  10

  From the start there was something wrong.

  There was danger here, greater than before.

  And yet from the beginning the danger only made the darkness sweeter.

  The back door was not locked, but a chain kept it from opening more than a few fingers wide. A kitchen window eased upward for a few heartbeats and then stopped. Another window pushed upward, too, but when I shouldered Jared up to it, I could feel him shake his head, the movement communicated throughout his body, a tremor: no.

  I was sick deep inside, in my stomach, where there was something cold and dead. Cold and dead, but stirring, aroused to life. The windows opened easily. They weren’t locked. They weren’t locked at all.

  And they should have been.

  I was alive again. Those gray, fuzzy hours in the classroom, those nights lying drowsy in my bed, those endless conversations, the books, the television—it was all nothing. There was nothing else that made me feel so close to my own heartbeat.