Breaking the Fall

by Michael Cadnum

  I couldn’t tell him about running, snot and blood streaming from my nose, running until the stitch in my side bent me double. And how I had run even then, running blinking back tears, half hoping sleepers would wake at the sound of me and call the police so it could all be over.

  But it wasn’t over. It was only beginning.

  I wasn’t hurt, not really. There was blood in my nostrils, a sort of red grit, and a cut on my neck that looked like a cat scratch, or a love bite. My muscles ached, and there was a soreness inside my belly, which I knew would never accept food again, not after last night’s nausea.

  I had slept on the lump, keeping it under my pillow. I wouldn’t even let myself look at it, the stolen trophy, the thing my hand had fallen on while the woman’s eyes opened so wide and she began to scream. If only she had been quiet.

  But it was my own bad luck, my own impetuous dumbness, that had accomplished this.

  I was a thief.

  Maybe I didn’t really have it. Maybe I hadn’t taken it.

  I lifted the bunched pillow, and an object was there, a secret wrapped in an undershirt. I picked up the loose bundle, and weighed it in my hands. Surely it’s not what I think it is. I’ll look and it will be entirely different.

  I let the cotton cloth fall away.

  It was true.

  I had really done it.

  It was a woman’s wallet, and in that glossy leather with the half-worn embossed gold stars, I had taken some hope. A man’s wallet would have been unmistakable, but I had tried to convince myself during the night that this item was a diary or a makeup kit, some booklet or clutch that snapped shut with a strap but wasn’t full of money and credit cards.

  It fell open as I unsnapped it, because it was so full and had been used so many times that it was easy for it to yield and open up, crammed with currency and smiling pictures of older relatives and an elementary-school picture of a little girl with a retainer on her teeth.

  I had stolen her wallet.

  I wanted to cough a dry-mouthed laugh. Hey, wait a minute. This was a mistake. I didn’t really steal this. My hand did.

  But it’s done, I told myself. It’s done. And I had a new plan, a very good one, one that made sense and would settle everything completely.

  There was a bang downstairs. I froze.

  Only a lid off a pot, I told myself. But that reminded me of my father. Any moment he could come up the stairs.

  I hid the wallet in the only place I could be sure of, the only place I could sense every moment: the front pocket of my pants. They were baggy, drab brown pants, with deep pockets. The wallet dropped all the way in, and stayed there.

  Any second my father could be at the bedroom door, knocking, peering in, wanting to continue that talk I knew he had broken off because he needed time to think of the right words.

  He had taken the time. He would have his little speech ready.

  I was trembling, and my breath made a grunt when it came out of me, but I was capable. I could handle this situation. I don’t panic. When my ligament had torn and I lay there on the infield, looking up at the sky, I had even tried to make a joke. I hadn’t been able to think of one, it’s true, but I had been working on it. I could fix things, even now.

  I would give this to Jared.

  I would say that this was proof that I wasn’t afraid. This was the trophy from the last time I played the game. I had improved the game, I would say. I had stretched it from stealing socks and cigarette lighters to something really big.

  I closed my eyes and I felt like I was falling.

  33

  But the wallet stayed with me all day, and I never saw Jared. I would see a figure slip around a corner and I would call out and it would turn out to be someone else entirely.

  Jared was not there, and the wallet was still mine.

  The results of the French test were a disaster. I had done especially poorly on the back page, where there was a mimeographed drawing of a woman arranging flowers on a table, a valise in the background.

  “Iron spikes driven by sheer muscle power,” said Mr. Milliken. “An entire railroad laid by human might.” He paused beside my desk, and smiled, in a sad way I think I could understand.

  “People died,” he announced, as though suddenly remembering it all. “Plunged into gorges. Crushed in avalanches. Chinese people!” he exclaimed.

  We wrote and doodled and the headlines continued, the revolver perfected, the cattle driven, barbed wire contrived, the nineteenth century being hurried, swept along under the headings CUSTER BUTCHERED and INDIANS FREEZE TO DEATH.

  And all I wanted in the world was to slip the wallet into Jared’s hands and say, “Here it is. I took it. You take it back.”

  All I wanted was to have a life again.

  34

  Tu laughed when he saw me, but it was an open, easy greeting. He scooted out just a bit from under the big white Chevy, which was still on blocks and did not seem likely to go anywhere on this afternoon. “Not here,” he said. “Volleyball.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

  “She’s coming home soon. I want to surprise her. I’m going to have this car ready.”

  “It doesn’t look all that ready, Tu.” It still didn’t even have wheels.

  “You can help,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “You have good hands, Stanley. Just the right touch. This is too much, you know. Too much for one person to do.”

  “I don’t think you need my help,” I said, and I was already starting to fade away a bit, out toward the sidewalk. Tu was busy, and Sky was gone, and the wallet weighed in my pocket, warm and fat.

  “You think I can do everything all by myself,” said Tu cheerfully from under the car.

  “Just about.”

  I stayed where I was, kept by the possibility that I could, indeed, help Tu.

  “I need the wrench from inside the car,” he said, his voice muffled by the car, rising up from under it and within it, taking on a far-off metallic timbre.

  I opened the car door. His request was complicated. There was the familiar ratchet wrench, glittering on the worn-out floor mat. There was a tool chest, an open box with a wooden handle. There was a grimy wrench, gigantic, with a red handle. I gathered all the tools, clambering into the car. There were even crescent wrenches in the toolbox, I saw, slender and looking too small to be useful here.

  I swung the car door shut and crouched beside the car. “Which one?” I asked, feeling ignorant, but satisfied that I had every wrench possible.

  We both sensed it. There was no sound at all, except for the slightest chuckling noise, and the slightest sensation in my vision that maybe I was just a little dizzy because the world wasn’t steady.

  Tu scrambled out from under the big car and we both gazed at the car, waiting. It inched forward on its blocks, and it was about to fall.

  I didn’t want to move, or make a sound that might cause the car to shift forward, and bring it down on the driveway.

  From somewhere within the car, there was the tiniest creak, a spring settling, or a hinge deciding to stay where it was.

  Tu smiled. “It’s not safe!” he said. “It could fall at any moment, Stanley.” He said this cheerfully. “But I’ll fix it.”

  Tu strode into the depths of the garage to drag forth a jack, a large black contraption on wheels.

  He laughed at the expression on my face. “Don’t worry, Stanley.”

  When I knew that the car was safe, I left Tu, hurrying, feeling that every moment I did not see Jared, the wallet was growing heavier.

  35

  No one answered the door at Jared’s house. I listened hard, and rang the bell again, but the house was empty.

  When I reached my own house, I called Jared’s number, but there was no answer.

  The wallet slipped from my fingers as I tugged open my dresser. A gold-colored Capwell’s card slipped out of the wallet, and I pushed the card back where it b
elonged, and found a place for the wallet among my socks.

  All evening I tried to call Jared.

  There was never an answer, and I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t want to do anything but hear Jared’s voice.

  I couldn’t eat. I unwrapped a candy bar and left it untouched.

  I was wide awake when my father came home late. I heard his car, and the distant rasp of his door key. I hurried downstairs to see him opening a carton of orange juice.

  He did not speak to me for a moment, letting silence settle around us. But his eyes were aware, watching, knowing. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  The words were hard to say. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  My father opened the refrigerator, and turned to look at me, and I could see that he took my remark seriously, and did not want to turn it aside with a casual remark of his own. “Just the usual sort of day,” he said, but he did not mean this lightly. “No accidents.”

  “You were so late,” I said.

  He shut the refrigerator. “No later than usual,” he said. He made a little movement of his head, as though consulting a clock in his mind. “Well, maybe a little.”

  He seemed touched that I had worried about him, but puzzled, too. “Are you afraid of something, Stanley?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not afraid.” That’s the kind of statement I would usually make with a laugh, or some sort of reassuring expression. But I said it with a dry, tight voice.

  “I think I’ll open a can of chili,” he said, opening the cupboard, and turning back to me.

  I could tell that he wanted me to sit down and eat with him. But I said that I wasn’t hungry, and went upstairs in the dark to lie down.

  Knowing there was something wrong.

  36

  Jared came to see me in the middle of a desert of silence.

  I sat up, surprised that I had fallen asleep.

  There was something wrong. He looked taller than I had remembered him, and he moved quickly, pulling my desk chair out just a little so he could sit.

  He was sitting so that he was a silhouette, a figure of blank black against the gray light from the window. He was plainly waiting for me to speak.

  “I was worried,” I said.

  “Why?” he said, with some amusement.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “What did you steal?”

  I met his eyes. “I wanted to impress you.”

  “I don’t think you really understood the game, Stanley.”

  I was angry then. I understood enough. I tried to get out of bed, but Jared was on his feet. He touched me very gently on my shoulder. It was one of those gestures that he had mastered, one that said so many things at once. Be calm, it said. Everything is all right. It also said that something was over. Something was finished.

  “They drink, did you know that?” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “The people with the green shutters are lushes.” He laughed soundlessly. “We thought we were so smooth.”

  Then his manner changed. He watched me for a while as though to judge me, or remember my face for a long time afterward.

  “You never wear the socks, do you?”

  I blinked a question.

  “The socks I stole. You should wear them. For good luck.”

  I WOKE.

  There was too much sun. I would be late for first period. And yet, as I climbed out of bed, I was aware of a sound I had been hearing in my sleep. It was trilling again, and he was answering it.

  I sensed my father’s step in the house, sensed his voice, all but inaudible through the walls, through the floor as he answered the phone.

  Why hasn’t he gone to work? I thought. He’ll be late, too.

  I pulled on an undershirt and stumbled to the open window. Jared, I thought, as though my thoughts could communicate themselves to him. Jared, you shouldn’t sneak into my father’s house.

  But I didn’t mean it, really—not this time.

  I had been worried over nothing.

  I dressed with more care than usual, putting on a shirt I almost never wear, a green one with long sleeves. And I tied my shoelaces before going downstairs, something I don’t often do.

  The wallet, I thought. Why didn’t I give him the wallet?

  I came down the stairs, and entered the kitchen, and when I saw my father’s eyes, I knew that something terrible had happened.

  37

  My father moved a spoon from one place to another on the counter, and did not want to say anything for a moment.

  He gave a small cough. “I have some bad news about Jared,” he said.

  The kitchen seemed big, as big as a place that was expanding, walls moving outward, the toaster and the metal frame of the microwave bright and clear.

  My father was waiting, as though I had to give him permission to say anything more.

  If I never make a sound, and never move again, I told myself, everything will be all right. But I asked, in a voice like a whisper, “What happened?”

  “He fell onto the freeway.”

  The words made no sense, as though the sounds fell apart and became nonsense as soon as my father said them. Surely that’s not what my father really said, I thought. Surely my ears made a mistake.

  But my voice, alive on its own, was making a sound. “He fell?” I heard it ask.

  My father came over to me and put his arms around me, and his own voice was tight with feeling when he said, “Jared’s dead.”

  So this is what I do, I thought, when I don’t know what to think or feel. I stand here, looking around at the place where I live, in the morning sunlight, seeing and feeling nothing at all. Nothing at all, except confusion. Very great confusion.

  I wanted to be far away. I wanted today to be a day years ago, far off from what was happening.

  Then I felt myself moving, stepping toward the stairs. My hand slid along the banister. Each step was heavy, and I was not certain I would ever be able to reach the top, and step into my bedroom.

  But when I was there, I pulled open the dresser drawer.

  It was still there.

  On a morning like this, I was no longer certain what would continue to exist, and what would not. But the wallet was still there, a weight in my hand.

  My body knew what to do. It stepped down the stairs, cradling the wallet in one hand. I carried it like a thing that could break easily, at a rough movement, or even a harsh sound.

  I carried it into the kitchen. It looked worn in the morning light, a woman’s wallet that was far from new, smooth and frayed at one corner.

  I put the wallet on the counter and my father looked at it, and then raised his eyes and looked at me.

  Waiting for me to speak.

  38

  Sometimes the sun is in your eyes and you can’t see. You just have to know.

  At the last instant the ball is there, the stitches dark red against the scuff, the leather marred and stained, and the bat knows what to do, and the body.

  I swung, all the way around, and I could feel the sour note all the way up the bat, into my arms. The ball bounced twice and Tu caught it in his hand, the one without the glove.

  “Hit it harder, Stanley,” he said.

  The next pitch was high, and floated in on me, and I fell out of the way.

  I got up and didn’t bother brushing myself off. With Tu pitching, I had to get out of the way a lot. I gave him a look that said: throw it straight.

  “It’s not so easy,” he said.

  “You’re going great,” I called, to encourage him.

  The field was empty except for the two of us, baseball season over, summer vacation already begun. I was careful not to look out across center field, across the faded stripes of the football games, into the empty stands.

  Tu threw the ball at my feet, the yellow streak bounding, the backstop taking the ball and stirring all along its frame.

  Tu stooped and chose another ball from the green garbage bag of them at his feet. It w
as a deal: I would help him learn how to pitch, and he would give me the chance to work on my swing. We worked alone in the field, and when the garbage bag was empty, we both went out to collect the balls and started all over again.

  Tu kneaded the ball, something he must have learned from watching television, and I waited.

  My father had visited the house with the green shutters, and had left the wallet with the man and the woman who lived there.

  “I talked to them,” was all he would say about it.

  When I had asked him what he had said, and why they wouldn’t talk to the police, he looked at me, into my eyes, and said, “It’s over.”

  But it wasn’t over. The game was over, and Jared was gone, but there was nothing left to take the place of the way I had felt.

  I had felt alive because of Jared.

  I hit it hard, and the ball made a sound that was high and sweet off the bat. I leaned forward, holding my breath. It didn’t touch the grass until it reached the dried-up places in the field, and then it bounced, up into the stands.

  I didn’t look away in time. The ball bounded on the hard, flat seats of the bleachers. It took an especially high bounce off one of the boltheads, and it stopped near where Jared had always sat, watching me, mocking me at a distance, guiding me back to him.

  “It’s a home run, Stanley,” said Tu, clapping, a one-man crowd. “Run the bases, Stanley, don’t just stand there.”

  I shook my head. The empty stands were a presence, a thing that knew me.

  Tu was calling, but I didn’t move. It was silly to run the bases there in the open field, no one watching, nothing but two people practicing.

  “Run the bases, Stanley. You hit the ball, you run!”

  I shook my head again, and then I dropped the bat.

  Something about Tu, and his smile, and the way the bat rolled away made me start to skip down the first-base path.

  “A home run for Stanley!” called Tu, like an announcer or a coach, waving me around the bases like a trainer celebrating in the midst of a crowd.