Breaking the Fall

by Michael Cadnum

  “Nice lecture,” I said as I passed, and Mr. Milliken gave me a careful look, wary that I was being sarcastic, hopeful that I was being sincere. “It was no joke,” he said, meaning his lecture or the Civil War. “I don’t know if it was ignorance or courage that made them go through it.”

  He said this quietly, half to me, but, so not to embarrass either of us if I didn’t give a damn, half to the podium, a maple-stained plinth made of plywood.

  Then he realized that he was going to be late for Driver’s Education, his next class and mine. I could tell by the way he started bubbling-in spaces in his roll book that he had forgotten to post the absences.

  I was stalling, lingering, hoping to fall in with Sky as she left the class. But she was already out the door, having, I realized too late, waved with her fingers, a casual, careless little hello wave.

  Such waves are friendly, but not intimate at all—not even a little. I would need a plan, something ambitious.

  She was smiling, I consoled myself. It was a genuine smile, with that sideways look she has. I was warmer inside considering that.

  “I have made a decision,” said Mr. Milliken.

  He stuffed papers into a scuffed black briefcase, a big worn leather thing like something Drama could borrow for Death of a Salesman. He fell into stride with me, both of us shouldering through the crowded halls.

  There was something sincere about Mr. Milliken, eager and honest, even though he was sick of his job. I did not attempt to flee him, even when he said, “I picked you.”

  We passed Sky’s locker, but she was not there. I was too warm, the air was too close, and I thought I must have misheard him.

  “You,” he repeated, hollering over the rumble of arguments, laughter, and the whack of locker doors thrown shut.

  My expression must have asked: for what? But I had already guessed.

  He laughed. He actually laughed, and I could tell that he was not a teacher now so much as an adult feeling good for just a passing moment. “It’s a key moment,” he said. “We’re going to die together.”

  14

  Driver’s Ed had boasted several driving simulators, which I had never had a chance to use because they had been stolen the summer before. Instead, we had been taking quizzes on the California State Vehicle Code and watching films produced by the Highway Patrol, which included endless footage of car wrecks. Drivers in clothes that looked awkwardly out of style and pedestrians looking somehow historical lay bloody beside mammoth, by now obsolete, ambulances. The dated quality of the films made them less real, of course, but it also made them weigh in with a heavy, hard-to-shake-off message: dead then, dead now.

  Sometimes someone would have trouble figuring out what a particularly awful burn victim was supposed to be; one or two looked like charred birds. “What was that?” I would hear whispered, or not whispered, but no one would respond. I think we were most of all embarrassed by all these victims. We had to look, but we hated it and liked it at the same time.

  But the cars had arrived at last, new Chevrolets of a sort no one ever drove in Oakland, four-door cars that seemed destined to belong to chemistry teachers and Baptist ministers, solid, dull people in a safe place like Kansas or Iowa. These cars all sported a yellow triangle of wood, like the triangle you use to set up the balls in a pool game, but bigger and emblazoned: STUDENT DRIVER.

  Mr. Milliken was going driving with me. He got paid extra for teaching driving, padding his wallet with a little excitement.

  I only wanted to zombie my way through the day. This was not the time to introduce my practically auto-virgin self behind the wheel.

  But he stood with a clipboard beside the Chevrolet. He waited at the passenger’s side while I fumbled with the car door. Two girls I knew only a little, Asian girls who regarded me with both charm and indifference, Dung and Tina, sat in the backseat, and I thought they might be pouting a little at having to wait.

  “Mr. Milliken thinks I’m going to kill us all,” I said.

  Tina chewed gum at me.

  “I wouldn’t have even mentioned the word death if I thought there was any danger,” said Mr. Milliken.

  Dung was from Vietnam. She was pretty, and little, so little you had to keep looking at her. She had the fine features and delicate jawline I associate with pictures of Egyptian mummies.

  Tina was rough, gum-popping, and bored with me, with cars, with air. Although she had the crisp English of a gangster in an old movie, her native language was Mien. Tina heard my offer and curled a lip. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  Dung laughed. No, no, I should go first. But she sidled her way into the front seat ahead of me.

  “A drive to the park,” said Mr. Milliken, in the artificially cheerful tone of the narrator in a travel film.

  Tina blew bubbles beside me in the back seat. Each big bubble grew huge, then grew lopsided, then collapsed and withered. She unpeeled it from her face each time and stuffed it back in.

  “We should go over to San Francisco,” said Tina. “Have some fun.”

  Dung drove looking up and over the steering wheel, as though she could barely see out through the windshield.

  “Looking good,” said Mr. Milliken.

  We drove up Park Boulevard and then really started to drive, picking up speed as Dung felt the command of the wheel and the accelerator suddenly hers.

  “Gotta watch that limit,” said Mr. Milliken, pumping the brake of his controls. He had a gas pedal and a brake but no steering wheel.

  I did not look off to our left, where the neighborhood of large, spacious houses began. I knew the house with green shutters was there, beyond sight, just as I knew I would have to visit it again.

  When it was Tina’s turn, we were on Snake Road. She blew a bubble, jerked the car out of park, and whipped us up the two-lane road.

  At Redwood Park, after Tina had negotiated the twists of the road with disdain, using two hands only at Mr. Milliken’s prompting, it was my turn.

  “Into the Valley of Death,” said Mr. Milliken.

  I had driven once before—my father’s Honda, which, since it is a stick shift, hopped like a rabbit every time I popped the clutch. I am a fairly athletic person, used to being able to come up with the ball one way or another, but I had decided to wait on driving until I got a car I could handle.

  I could tell Dung and Tina were both relieved that they had made it this far, and were ready to be entertained by whatever blunders I might make.

  “What kind of bombs were they?” I said, hoping to distract my nerves and Mr. Milliken’s humor with a little history. “The ones that burst in midair? You know—in the song.”

  “Not car bombs,” he said.

  The shift was a metal T, and when the transmission slipped from park into reverse, you could feel the gears in there, under there, beyond us, finding what it was I had commanded. I had that wonder I had known as a very little boy watching a helicopter: machine.

  “This is boring,” said Tina.

  The car backed, gravel crackling. I worked the wheel around and found drive. I tested the accelerator, which generated more noise than movement. I tested the brake, and the slight forward movement stopped.

  I turned my head to acknowledge Mr. Milliken, feeling cheerful, nervous. Little Dung made the tiniest noise clearing her throat.

  The car surmounted a hump at the ridge of the parking lot, and the road was littered with scraps of eucalyptus, tree trash all over the place. The air smelled wonderful. I found the lane with the car, and let the car’s momentum take one curve after another, downhill and easy.

  “Too slow,” said Tina.

  That night I sat up straight, and put my hand out into the dark.

  I whispered Jared’s name, and listened. It would be just like him to steal into my own room as I slept, right into my bedroom, just to prove that he could do it.

  But there was no sound, or only the normal sounds of the trees in the backyard making a fine, soft breathing noise in the wind.

&nbs
p; 15

  “I think I made a mistake, Stanley.”

  I did not respond. I was waiting for Sky, and felt both confined and honored to be in the garage. “Dad told me so. He said, Two hundred and twelve thousand’ and laughed.”

  Tu leaned over the engine of his car. He held a wrench, which made a pleasing ratcheting sound as he spun it around and around. “God damn,” he said, seriously and without sounding angry, the two words separate and careful. “Too many miles.”

  Perhaps he misunderstood my lack of response as a macho no-comment way of agreeing with him. It was true that the afterglow of my student driving was still with me. It takes more than a few hours for something like that to wear off. But I could not trick myself into believing that I had cars figured out.

  “Bad carburetor,” said Tu. “Bad everything.”

  “There must be something good about it,” I offered.

  “What do you think?” asked Tu, almost challengingly. He had, like his sister, a slight accent. His t’s sounded just slightly like d’s, and his words were delivered slowly, each syllable with weight.

  I shook my head, meaning: I wouldn’t know.

  “A piece of junk.” Tu grinned painfully, misunderstanding my blank look for something more manly and more dignified.

  He tossed the wrench, and it hit in a place on the workbench padded with cloth so the tool made a soft thump. Tu spun the butterfly nut on top of the engine, and tossed it to me. My baseball reflexes snatched the little winged nut from the air before I could think.

  Tu lifted away a big circular device, a car part grimy and gray, and set it aside.

  We both looked into the exposed engine. Tu prodded a valve with his finger. The small trapdoor made the slightest squeak.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “At all.” My words were not the simple confession I intended. They were naked statements, and I hurried to add, “About cars.”

  Tu worked his fingers into a rag. “I think the car has a good heart.”

  “Cars are a little mysterious,” I suggested cautiously.

  He looked me in the eye. “Not so mysterious, Stanley.”

  I thought for a moment he was criticizing me.

  “Sky has volleyball practice,” he said, working a flap in the engine that was uneasily bright amidst the grime of the rest of the machine.

  I wanted to say: I know. I wanted to clear my throat and say something about how good she was at sports. We both knew she was late.

  “She doesn’t understand,” said Tu. “About things. She doesn’t understand the way guys think. Girls are different. They think about other things.”

  “I like Sky,” I began.

  Tu looked at me and shook his head, leaning toward me. He was a senior and only a year older than I was, but there was something about his bearing that gave him dignity. “You don’t know Sky very well yet,” he said.

  The “yet” sounded promising, I thought. Or hoped.

  “You should know a couple of things,” he said.

  My expression must have silenced him, or perhaps it was the weight of what he had to say. He bit his lip for a moment. “Sky knows some people.”

  This was hardly news, but I went dry inside.

  He gestured with a hand, perhaps missing the wrench to play with. “A lot of people at our church.”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans. “And she has a boyfriend already, Stanley. A big boyfriend. Goes to Hoover.”

  I wanted to lean against something.

  “I like him okay,” Tu said. “But I don’t really like him all that much.”

  My voice was a thin little noise, barely human. “What does Sky think of him?”

  Tu leaned against the car and gazed at the engine. “I think she likes him, Stanley.”

  The sunlight through the open garage door was an ugly bleached yellow, hard on the eyes.

  Tu lurched around the car and flung himself into the front seat. The big old Ford slumped to one side with his weight. “Okay,” he called, “open that valve. Like I was doing. That little valve.”

  I moved in small jerks, thinking: you don’t have to explain which valve. I’m not a total idiot. I was also thinking what a loud voice Tu had, and how he really ought to work on keeping it down so it wouldn’t sound so annoying to people.

  The engine made several distinct sets of squeaks as his foot depressed the accelerator before he turned the starter. The absence of engine rumble made the smaller hinges and connections of the car click and squeak.

  I blocked out the garage for a moment, thinking of those other car sounds I had heard in the house with green shutters. Those other little car sounds, those hushes and thuds. My chest went tight and I felt weak at the memory, which was not a memory at all but a physical and present fact, like my skin or my bones. I felt dizzy.

  The blast of the engine made me jump back. The big machine chattered, and was powerful, even dangerous, the fan blade spinning so fast it was a blur. Then the engine whirred into silence.

  “Use a tool or something, Stanley,” said Tu from inside the car. “Hold it open. The car needs lots of air.”

  I had to force my attention into the engine and poke the screwdriver where it belonged, holding open the trapdoor valve as Tu clicked the ignition. The car made that robot laugh old cars make when they have trouble starting. And then the engine caught, rumbled, and Tu pumped the roar, played it, until the big car idled.

  “We’re doing okay,” called Tu. “We got power after all, Stanley,” he said. I smiled at him through the dust of the windshield, as exhaust crept forward from the rear of the garage. Power after all. The phrase seemed political, or like something from an ad, and Tu laughed, aware that he had been quoting something, or misquoting.

  I thought: tell Tu. Tell Tu all about Jared and the game.

  I needed to talk to him, and hear what he would say.

  I needed to tell someone.

  Tu climbed out of the car, and the car settled back again. There was satisfaction on his face as he held out his hand so I could drop the butterfly nut into the creases of his palm.

  Tu slammed the hood by lifting it a little higher to disengage the hinge and then throwing the hood down hard, back where it belonged.

  We both coughed against the exhaust, and Tu smiled. “You want to drive?”

  I shrank. I began to say that I didn’t know how to drive, that I had missed Driver’s Ed as a sophomore because of my ligament, that I didn’t even have a learner’s permit. And just as quickly I thought, sure. Why not?

  But Tu was already in the front seat, and the car was rolling, and as we made our way down the driveway, Sky stopped at the sidewalk, gazing at us with her head held slightly back, an empress enjoying the sport of her subjects, her eyes nearly closed, telling her brother: so you got it moving.

  It caught me, how well they knew each other.

  “Hey,” Tu called, “get in the car. We’re going for a ride.”

  And the way he said it made it sound like we were going to go for a drive into the afternoon sky, over the sea.

  “This is no car,” she said scornfully, and more than that, lovingly.

  We drove to the intersection by the video store, and the big white car stuttered and rolled silent. Tu leaned his head on the steering wheel.

  “It’s okay,” said Sky from the backseat.

  A car behind us honked, and Sky turned back and called out so clearly I knew the driver could hear, “Our car is broken. Don’t you have any sense?”

  The car honked again, belligerently, and then the tires squealed and the car passed us.

  Sky put her hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Stanley,” she said, her breath in my ear, her hair tickling my neck. “Let’s push.”

  16

  My mother had a black carry-on over her shoulder. It was leather, the shiny, soft leather that makes a silky noise when it moves.

  She was slipping a map into a side pocket. “Don’t put so much salt on the popcorn,” she said. “And if you use
the microwave popcorn, make sure you open the packet away from your eyes. You might get blinded by the steam.”

  I was in my dad’s chair, looking, as he often looked, at the blank television screen.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I thought for a second there was another person in the room, someone with ears who spoke English.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Christ.”

  The television screen was a peculiar color when you really took a moment to look at it. It was gray-green, a flat, empty green like nothing alive.

  As so often before, the words came before I could stop them. “You feel guilty,” I said.

  She tugged at a zipper, and did not respond.

  “You feel bad,” I continued, hating to hear myself talk. “You worry about me eating enough fiber because you’re running away all the time.”

  She let her black bag drop. “This is very interesting, one minute before my cab gets here.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Your basic form of conversation is sneaky, you realize that? You think communication is a long-running argument. You save up wise things to say. Reality as a sort of baseball game. You score points.”

  “Runs.” I clamped my teeth on my tongue.

  “I’m going to spend the night drinking coffee on the plane and finishing a report, have breakfast, look fresh and cute, and then I’m going to get on a plane and fly back here to an empty house.”

  I glanced at her, expecting an irritated, impatient person. Instead, I saw that she was near tears. “And you think you’re so smart,” she said, her voice soft and cutting. “Completely disengaged. Just a passenger on this trip. You have nothing to do with anything.”

  I ached. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to hide. “I’m sorry,” I said, lips numb, my voice a rasp. I wanted to add a dozen other questions, but I gripped the arms of the chair. There was a honk outside.

  “Sorry,” she echoed, and I could sense her measuring me, wanting me to be a different sort of son, wanting her life to be something it wasn’t.

  She moved fast. She flung the carry-on over her shoulder, and only looked back from the door. “It’s a disaster,” she said, so calmly that it made her statement into a statement of fact, ugly and beyond dispute. “A complete disaster.”