On the Free

by Coert Voorhees

  It was late evening, a Tuesday night. There was no reason for him to go out, he thought even then. Eric reached the driver-side door of his Cutlass Supreme and yanked it open. He must have noticed Santi’s hesitation.

  “Let’s go,” Eric said across the top of the car.

  There was no plan, really. There never was. Cruise around, see what happened. Make something out of nothing.

  Santi opened the door. A full 40 oz. lay on the passenger floorboard; another, half-empty one leaned against the armrest in the front seat. The Cutlass groaned slightly when Eric got in, while Santi stood with one hand on the roof and one hand on the door.

  “You coming?” Eric said.

  Santi got in the car and slammed the door behind him.

  Days later, the prosecutor would put a deal on the table. Easy choice, he’d say. Santi wasn’t the driver, was clearly just along for the ride, so how did probation sound? No record, no juvie, no reason this had to destroy Santi’s life. Give us a name, he would say, and you walk out that door. Just a name. First and last. Two simple words.

  Two simple words: Eric Ayala.

  3

  The drizzle is constant. More mist than rain, as though they’re stranded in a cloud. They stop an hour into the hike to put on rain gear and cover their backpacks with plastic garbage bags, even though each pack is already lined with a garbage bag inside. Better safe than sorry!

  Rico, Celeste, and Santi wear Bear Canyon–issued “waterproof” ponchos that leave their forearms exposed and funnel rivulets of water directly to their thighs, but Victor sports a rich-kid Eagle Scout jacket: seam-sealed Gore-Tex, bright red and form-fitting. Top-of-the-line, like everything else in his pack. He even brought an actual climbing rope with him, as opposed to the nylon the others use to hang their packs.

  “Your feet okay?” Rico asks when they start again.

  Santi ignores him.

  “Yo, I said are your heels okay?”

  This will go on all day long, Santi knows, if he doesn’t at least humor the kid. He nods and tells Rico that he’s trying not to think about it, but the truth is that he can’t stop. The wet poncho slips against the garbage bag covering his pack, which slides from side to side no matter how tight Santi pulls the waist belt, and the weight of it means he can’t walk flat-footed to keep his heels from rubbing.

  He tries anyway, taking smaller steps, keeping his ankles flexed so that the boot lands flat on the slope. Doing this puts more pressure on his thighs and lower back, but it’s better than the alternative. Better than using his toes to step. At least the foot stays flat inside the boot.

  The weather gets worse all morning, and they summit Bonfire Pass in the middle of a gray storm, stopping at the top for handfuls of trail mix and sips of water.

  “This is the halfway point and the highest we’ll go,” Jerry says. He snaps a couple of pictures, but the fact that they can only see about a hundred feet in front of them takes a little pizzazz out of the celebration. “Eleven thousand six hundred feet is an accomplishment you should all be proud of.”

  Gusts of wind roar up the valley and over the pass, and Jerry cuts the break short in order to get downhill as quickly as possible, just in case the thick clouds are packing lightning inside.

  Santi is fucked. By hiking uphill as though he had stumps for feet, he managed to fatigue every muscle in his legs to the point of involuntary twitching, and the descent is twice as bad as he’d feared. The athletic tape unpeels with the wetness of his socks, causing the moleskin to bunch on top of the blisters. It gets so bad that Jerry finally sends Amelia to bring up the rear.

  “You know what’s crazy?” she says after a few minutes, as if by ignoring the obvious pain on Santi’s face, she can take his mind off it.

  Santi smiles at her through gritted teeth. “I know a lot of things that are crazy.”

  “We have no idea what’s going on out in the world. There could have been a bombing or a death in the family or whatever.”

  “There probably wasn’t a bombing.”

  “You know what I mean. Parties, friends. So-and-so hooked up with so-and-so. Life, right?”

  She has a point. Even during his first stint in juvie, a month on unit for being caught with someone else’s weed, he didn’t feel this cut off. There was a set schedule: weekdays were school days, movies at night if all went well. The outside world wasn’t exactly accessible, but at least he had the sense that it existed. His sister visited once a week.

  “There’s a flip side, too,” Santi says. “The real world has no idea what’s going on here, either.”

  “It’s creepy, is all I’m saying. It feels weird not knowing what happened yesterday, what my friends were up to.”

  “Your boyfriend, too?” Santi says.

  Amelia doesn’t answer at first.

  “I can hear you blushing from back here.”

  “Yes, him too,” she says.

  “Check out this scat,” Jerry yells back to them.

  He’s waiting in the middle of the trail, and when they’ve all caught up, he squats down close to a long tube of crap and pokes at it with a stick. “Mountain lion scat. Cougar. See the little white flecks in there? That’s bone.”

  Uncle Ray had a cat for a while. A stray from the neighborhood that used to come inside the house to eat and take shits on Marisol’s bed. That’s what this looks like, only bigger, and with more bones in it.

  “Cat shit’s a tourist attraction now?” Victor says.

  “Is that hair?” Celeste says.

  Rico adds, “Why did it take a crap in the middle of the trail?”

  “Because if it had gone in the woods,” Jerry says, “we wouldn’t have seen it.”

  Santi notices a white flash in the distance, and he instinctively begins counting to himself. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Thunder rumbles before he makes it to six. The lightning is about a mile away.

  “Let’s go, guys,” Jerry says. He leads the way up the trail, followed by Celeste and Victor.

  “Wait,” Rico says to nobody in particular, “what did he mean about the shit in the trail? Why would the mountain lion want us to see it?”

  Santi shrugs into the padded shoulder straps and feels the pack slip against his poncho. He yanks the waist strap tighter, moving even more weight from his upper back, then winces at the sharp pinch on his hipbones. He convinces himself to start moving. One foot in front of the other.

  The trail emerges from the forest and makes a scar across the side of the mountain. Jerry is hustling, pushing the pace even as the trail gets sketchier.

  In the distance, a thin sliver of sunlight pierces the cloud cover, and while the clouds are still thick above them, the rain has regressed to its earlier mist.

  “Don’t look down, bro,” Rico says.

  Of course, the first thing Santi does is look down. The muddy trail cuts directly across a steep barren slope, probably a slide path in the winter, judging by the lack of trees and bushes. The mountainside uphill, to his left, is steep enough, but the right side is worse, the slope becoming more and more vertical and finally ending at a littered heap of avalanche debris. To make matters worse, long stretches of the trail are only slightly wider than the sole of Santi’s boot.

  “What the hell, Rico?”

  “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

  “Not heights,” Santi says. “I’m afraid of what’s at the bottom.”

  His legs are so tired that he stubs his toe on a little rock as he steps forward. The pack lurches up his back, and he reaches for the muddy uphill slope with his left arm, flailing to regain his balance.

  This is it. Tonight he’ll give in to Jerry. He’ll have to figure out a way to save face, though. Maybe he can talk to Jerry before they get to camp, and they’ll come up with a plan. He’ll get Jerry to make a big deal of forcing Santi to give up the food, like Santi’s doing a disservice to the others by carrying everything. This trip is all about individual responsibility, after all. “Órale,” Rico sa
ys. “Santi. You got a lady back home?”

  Santi wipes his hand on his thigh, leaving a thick brown smear on the wet jeans. He doesn’t even know how to answer that one. It depends on what happens when he gets back home. Depends on what Diana says. Depends on if she even says anything.

  He should have a girlfriend, and if it had been up to him, he would. If it had been up to him, he wouldn’t even be here now. He’d be with Diana instead. But it hadn’t been up to him, no matter what anybody said.

  “I do,” Rico says proudly. “She’s hot, too.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Rico’s answer is immediate. “Lucy.”

  Santi lets a smile come to his face. The kid hasn’t learned how to lie right yet. If you’re that fast with the name, it sounds too fake. “Good name.”

  “Yeah, bro,” Rico says. “She’s all sorts of hot.”

  “All sorts of hot?” He finds himself actually laughing, but not in a mean way, and he makes the decision to believe. He imagines Rico on a date, holding Lucy’s hand in the park or at the movies. Rico’s face twitching as he tries to muster up the balls to kiss her. Santi suddenly wants to know more. What does she look like? How did they meet? How long have they been together?

  But he’s falling.

  One wrong step is all it takes. His left foot plants itself on a wide, flat rock that slips out from under him like a banana peel, pitching his foot forward. His boot’s leather folds over at the heel and digs into Santi’s raw skin, and he has just enough time to squeal in pain before he crashes to the ground. Hard.

  The momentum of his backpack takes over from there, spinning him so that his head is pointing straight downhill. All that weight and no solid ground for it to rest on.

  For a moment, he’s like a turtle on its back, limbs flailing, his pack sliding down the hill as if greased. Santi looks between his legs as he slides, and Rico’s terrified face uphill tells him everything he needs to know.

  “Santi!” Rico says.

  He watches Rico’s face get smaller and smaller, and then, in his mind’s eye, sees the rocks below coming up behind him.

  His muscles go limp for another five feet of sliding, and then something in him triggers movement. As if his body finally realizes what his mind already knows. If he doesn’t do something, he’s going to die.

  He’ll die, and Marisol will be alone.

  4

  A full year before Santi even met Eric Ayala, he did a month for possession. Hours of mandated alone time in what passed for his cell: a bed, a shelf, a waist-high wall cutting halfway across the open end instead of a door, and a thick yellow line across the threshold that no other detainees could cross. It was different enough from what he’d thought his cell would be that he took to calling it his room instead.

  Even when he wasn’t in his room, he kept to himself as much as possible, trying not to get into shit with anyone, trying not to piss off any of the guards. Stressful as hell, but when he was in his room, he was fine.

  The unit had twelve cells just like his, six on either side of a long rectangular room, with a series of picnic tables in between. A television hung on the wall at one end, but they only got to watch it if things went well on unit. That only happened twice in the four weeks and three days he spent inside.

  On the afternoon of his third Saturday, Santi lay on the thin mattress, working his way through an article about tree ants in Discover magazine, waiting for Marisol to come make him laugh.

  Officer Vazquez appeared in the open doorway. Thick shoulders, big forehead, one long eyebrow across the top of his face. “Rivas,” he said, knocking on the wall inside his room.

  Santi tossed the magazine on the bed and put on his slippers and followed Officer Vasquez along a red line to the unit’s exit, where they both looked up at the surveillance camera in the corner and waited for the door to buzz open. More steps along the red line on the linoleum floor, down the beige hallway. Another door, another buzz, and into the visitation room.

  The long table in the center of the room was completely full, but his sister was waiting at one of the small circular tables that lined the walls, her long black hair draped over her head like a hood. Only three years younger than he was but ten times smarter. Math prize, History prize, Outstanding Attitude prize. Make Your Brother Seem Like a Piece of Shit in Comparison prize. That last one took no effort.

  This time she didn’t get up to hug him, and when he sat down, she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Marisol?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded slowly.

  He reached across the table, and she flinched slightly but let him push the curtain of hair away, revealing the purple shadow of a bruise.

  Santi could hardly breathe. He bit his bottom lip until he was able to speak without yelling. “What happened? Who did this?”

  “Nobody,” she said softly. “It was an accident. I tripped.”

  A rising panic quickly overtook his anger. “Mari, please tell me.”

  “It was just some girls after school. I should have been more careful.” She looked at him, and he saw the sadness in her eyes and the swelling on her cheek and the twin scratches down the side of her face, and he almost threw up.

  “I wasn’t going to come,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want you to be worried about me.”

  “I should have been there,” he said. “This wouldn’t have happened if I had been there.”

  “Maybe. You know how it is.”

  That was the problem. He knew exactly how it was.

  “What about the science thing?” he said with forced cheer, trying to pretend that this was a normal visit. “Your project or whatever.”

  Marisol hesitated for a moment, and then a smile fought its way onto her face. “It was good. Really good.”

  “I bet you got an A.”

  “Duh,” she said. There was a long pause. Santi looked down at his feet, the plastic slippers, the white socks. Over the murmurs of the other visitors came the newly familiar sounds of the facility in the distance: a buzz to open the doors, a deep metallic thud when the doors closed.

  “I only have a week left,” he said.

  She nodded. “I’m going to be fine.”

  “I know you are. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded again. “Okay.”

  “I promise,” he said, but when he said the word promise, he couldn’t help but notice that she winced.

  5

  Sliding faster now, Santi flails to get off his back, lurching to the left, scraping his arms against the wet mud. His elbow catches first, spins him around so that his legs whip down below him.

  On his chest now but still falling. He digs both elbows into the mud, jamming them deeper. His skin grating away.

  His foot hits something, knocks his right knee up and into his chest, slows him just enough for his right hand to grab onto an exposed root. The other hand now. His body swings like a pendulum against the scree, first to the right of the root, then the left.

  And he stops. And the world returns.

  “Santi!” Amelia’s voice.

  He tries to pull himself up, but the pack is too heavy. He can see all of them up there, twenty feet above him. Too far to reach out for a hand. Too far to chain themselves together. Santi recognizes the fear on Jerry’s face.

  “Should have shared the food,” Santi manages. “You guys are probably going to starve.”

  Jerry does not laugh. “Hold on. We’ll figure something out!”

  For some reason, Santi allows himself a peek downhill—a little glimpse to see exactly how far he still has to go—and he immediately regrets it. Shards of broken trees stick up amid the rocks and boulders another thirty feet below. It’s like something out of a horror movie.

  “Ditch your backpack,” Amelia says.

  “No,” Jerry says. “Santi, hold on. We’re going to get you up.”

  “There’s kind of a little drop-off here,” Santi shouts.

  “Are
you sure you can’t scramble up on all fours?”

  “I look like a goat to you?” he screams. “My feet are dangling.”

  When Jerry speaks again, there’s resignation in his voice, like a TV doctor calling out time of death. “Amelia, get out the radio in case we have to call in a rescue.”

  “Do something!” The root is slick from all the rain, and Santi’s hands are slipping. It’s only a matter of time. “My arms are cramping up!”

  “Just hold on a little longer, okay?” This is Victor, and his voice is all business. Santi sees him take off his pack. He pulls out his blue climbing rope and ties a quick loop at the end.

  “You’re not going to die,” Rico says. “Maybe get mangled or something, but not die. So don’t worry about that.”

  “Rico!” Jerry and Santi yell at the same time.

  “I’m just saying.”

  Victor clips an orange carabiner through the loop and begins to feed the rope down the cliff. “Take off your pack and clip it to the rope,” he says. “We’ll pull it up and then get you.”

  “How do I know you’re not going to leave me once you get the food?”

  “No promises.”

  Jerry quickly says, “He’s kidding!”

  The carabiner dangles in front of Santi’s face, but he can only stare at it. His shoulders twitch with fatigue, and he can’t feel the fingers of either hand anymore.

  “Come on, Santi,” Amelia says. “Clip it to your backpack.”

  “I can’t take my backpack off.”

  Now they’re yelling. Every one of them with a different suggestion at the same time, and all reminding him to hurry, as if he hadn’t already thought of that. He reaches his left arm above and behind him, to the top of his pack, but the damn thing is still covered by the garbage bag, and even though the fall tore up the plastic, the bag’s still too slick to grab onto.

  They won’t shut the hell up and they’re all still looking at him and suddenly this crazy feeling of shame hits him so hard. Shame that he can’t help himself. Shame that he fell. Shame that Victor was the one to throw him a damned rope.