by Jason Brown
“Get in,” Eddie said, his voice a current Andrew wouldn’t have been able to resist even if he had wanted to. The brother drove past town hall and turned up the hill. They pulled to a stop, idling at the corner opposite the junior high where Andrew’s old friends Chris and Tom were tossing a baseball. Chris stopped his throw midway and stared at the car. Tom turned around and dropped his arms at his sides at the sight of Andrew riding low in the backseat. Then the brother hit the gas, and the long car shifted back on its haunches as they banked around the corner and sped east, out of town. Eddie tuned the radio to a country station, but even with the volume down, the speakers cracked on the low notes. Every few minutes the brother turned and spoke to Eddie, but Andrew couldn’t hear a word over the wind that ripped through the open window. He held the Frisbee in his lap and watched the rush of trees pass by. The car floated over the dips and rises as they sped up, sizzling through wet spots in the road left over from that morning’s rain. The air was still damp and soft above the ragged spruce tops. The road led them through hay fields that surrounded the Monmouth lakes. Andrew’s whole body relaxed. He wanted the drive to go on forever, around and around the lakes, never straying too far from Vaughn but never going back.
They drove in silence around one of the lakes and returned on the same road toward town, finally pulling up in front of the Small’s faded red house on a ledge above the tracks. The yard was surrounded by chicken wire, and in the corner next to the coop there was a bunch of old living room furniture. The brother sat down in a rotten recliner. Eddie planted himself on a milk crate and began pulling up grass from between his feet.
Another guy, a friend of the brother’s, appeared from around the side of the house and let out a low whistle.
“I told you so,” the friend said and peered down over the ledge at the tracks.
The brother rose to his feet and went over to a clothesline, passing a foot in front of Andrew without seeming to notice him. He trailed a corroded odor that he had either given to or taken from the inside of the T-Bird, and he started picking his clothes off the line; a pair of faded jeans, undershirts yellowed in the pits, a row of gray socks, which he dropped in a cardboard box. The jeans he rolled up like a towel and placed on top.
“We used to be down there for hours playing Frisbee,” the brother said over his shoulder. “One of the first things I was gonna do, but when I got down there I didn’t wanna be there.”
The brother’s friend nodded without turning away from the tracks.
“So you’re the kid whose sister went into the river last March,” the brother said. It took Andrew a minute to realize the brother was talking to him.
“I was in when it happened, but my brother here sent me the papers from Maine. Nothing else to do, except play basketball. I saw this girlie drowned in the river and when I saw her name I thought, shit, I know her from ’fore I went down to Florida, from that bar in Portland—that fuckin’ hole on Commercial Street, the Moon. What a friggin’ waste, a tough one like that putting herself in the river.”
“She was tough all right,” the brother’s friend said.
“It made me wish I’d been there,” the brother said. “Have a few words with her. What was the name a that chump she was wet for? MacDougal’s friend.”
“Mirack.”
The brother shrugged and looked right at Andrew. “Hey,” he said. “I was thinking you could ask your father about splitting wood for him this fall. I see you got about six cord over the side of the house.”
“He splits it himself,” Andrew said.
“Does, huh? Well, you tell him I’m gonna split it for him this fall. Fast and cheap, you tell him.”
The brother’s friend sat down in one of the chairs and leaned back, laughing without sound.
The brother shook his head. “Now don’t wake the dee-ceased.”
There was something wrong with them, the brother and his friend. The friend shook his head with his eyes closed, a wide grin across his face. Andrew told himself he should leave, run, but he couldn’t move. “She fell in,” he said.
“Is that what they told you?” the brother said.
“That’s what happened.”
“No it ain’t. That’s what they told you happened. Was she walking along and fell over? No, cause in March the ice packs ten feet tall along that bank from here to Augusta down to Dresden. I know, I used to pull my uncle’s icehouse before the thaw. She’d had to crawl out that drift ice and slide down on her ass to the channel.”
In the dirty window of the house, an old man’s face appeared but seemed not to see them. He chewed on his cracked lips until Tiny Small pushed him out of the way and pressed her forehead to the glass, with her mouth moving, talking either to the old man or to them.
The brother grabbed the friend by the arm. They headed toward the car, and both of them leaned over something the friend had in his hands.
Tiny Small appeared at Andrew’s side, her nose and chin curving toward each other, her eyes scrunched like a mole’s, her skin the color of paste. Her hair was like Eddie’s, ink black. She had been at Andrew’s school, in Special Ed, until she stopped showing up. Now she talked at him with the urgency of someone being chased, her hands held out to her sides, fingers splayed, and her words cataloged a list of desires: “I would like a Hostess Fruit Pie and a milk shake have you ever been to Portland I hope it does not rain on Saturday I want to go to Portland it does not rain there my brother Matt said I said I was I was I was I was—Andrew. Andrew,” she repeated and finally closed her eyes with relief, as if all these other words had led her to the right one.
“Leave us alone, Tiny Small,” Eddie said from behind his hair.
At the sound of his voice, she started again: “If I does I is going to buy me something I won’t tell me what but do you think I could I could I could I could chop some wood I had a Hostess Fruit Pie this morning Mamma.” She stopped again on this last word and stared at her brother.
“Yeah,” Eddie said and stood up. He took Andrew’s arm and pulled him away from Tiny Small. “Come on.” Eddie led them down the hill, and Andrew knew they were going to his house a half mile away. Andrew wasn’t sure he wanted to go there, but Eddie took them.
The door to his father’s shop was still open, and when they went into the house, he saw that his mother was asleep on the couch. Upstairs, Andrew paused on the way to his bedroom. Stephanie’s door was open. Eddie pushed his way inside, where, since this morning, the curtains had been stripped, the rug taken up, the books pulled off the shelves, the room made empty. Even the picture nails had been removed, leaving small black pinpricks. Eddie lay back on the wood floor and closed his eyes. Andrew sat down on the bed and looked out the window.
Across the street, a red glow appeared inside a dim upstairs room of Mrs. Shumaker’s house, where a cigarette perched on her fingers. Kids in school said she had been desperate for sex after her husband left for Augusta—a woman in her forties without a husband or kids or family. The red glow flared when she inhaled a long breath. In the rhythm of the glow moving to and from her mouth, Andrew thought he recognized the echo of a pattern that he had never noticed before. He looked at the house next door and had the same feeling. Out on the rope swing, Mr. Sawyer’s daughter played her game of twisting the two ropes together into a coil and then sitting on the seat to spin like a top. She spun in silence, stood in the middle of the lawn for a moment afterward like an unsteady drunk, and then did it again.
In the week before Stephanie drowned, Andrew heard her late at night walking through the house. The floorboards creaked for two beats of his heart, paused, and creaked again. Eventually, he realized she was going from window to window. On the night she drowned, the river boomed as shelves of ice along the banks crashed into the frozen river mud at low tide. He pictured Stephanie walking out the door and down the dark street to the landing by the river, her breath steaming in front of her face. The moon shone full over the neap tide, illuminating the ice flows. She scaled t
he jagged rubble and looked down through the thin ice where silver air pockets raced like panicked fish in the current. She knew that what was about to happen was no accident.
“Let’s go,” Eddie said abruptly, and leapt to his feet. He led them downstairs and out the side door, which he somehow knew how to find, and up the hill behind the house. Andrew asked where they were going, but Eddie didn’t answer. After a mile or so, Andrew saw they were headed to Vaughn Stream.
At the top of the hill, Eddie said, “My brother showed me this spot. No one else knows about it except him and me.” Andrew knew this wasn’t the case. His father had wanted him to swim there just a few days ago—his father went there every summer, following the stream through the woods to a clearing where an old white oak towered over a deep pool. Everyone knew the guys who hayed for old man Vaughn swam in the stream at lunch. Eddie had lied, but there was nothing about his lie that made it seem untrue.
Eddie ran down the slope of the green hill toward the water and called for Andrew to hurry as he tugged his shirt over his head. He waved Andrew on and pulled the rope away from the tree, backing up the hill to swing out and up, his long bony toes cutting into the blue sky then knifing into the water. He crawled onto the bank, shook his hair, and scrambled over to the trunk of the oak, where he shimmied easily to the uppermost branch.
Eddie stood straight up, hanging in the air like a hawk, and pointed his fingers to the sky. Without warning, he pitched forward—and here he seemed to pause like a memory before he vanished into the brown envelope of the pool. Andrew was still undressing on the bank when Eddie came out of the water and dropped onto the grass, hands on his knees, his chin lowered. He brushed his hands down his wet cheeks and narrow nose to his mouth. Andrew could see that Eddie’s thoughts were elsewhere, but there was no getting out of it: he had to climb now, and he gripped onto the rough bark, which scraped at the inside of his knee. He wanted Eddie to look over and watch him climb, and eventually Eddie did look. Andrew stood on the branch and stared straight up. Instead of flying through the air like Eddie, he closed his eyes and stepped off the limb. His body lost its weight, his thoughts vanished. The cold stung his skin, and he came up for air, the water curling up against his chest. He was relieved it was over and thrilled as he looked up at the tree. It seemed like an unbelievable distance to have fallen.
Eddie floated out into the current of the stream, drifting on his back, and Andrew followed, turning around in the gentle rapids of the shallows. The treetops revolved as the flow pulled at his ankles, pushing at his neck, bearing him up and setting him down on slippery round stones that nudged his back. He thought of Eddie soaring down from the branch, and the image seemed to broaden in his sight until it covered the sky, making every day before and after partly this day, as if they had always known each other. Andrew held his breath and sank. Through the surface of the water, he watched the tree limbs and the sky pitch in the ripples. The cold numbed the skin of his fingers.
After some time, they floated against the bank and sat up together. Andrew reached over and briefly touched Eddie on the shoulder. Eddie looked down at Andrew’s hand, and his expression softened as his cheeks colored.
“What happened to my sister?” Andrew asked. He was afraid to hear the answer, but he was sure Eddie was the only person who knew.
“She drowned,” Eddie said with a low growl, and his lips closed over his horrible pale teeth, his skin reflected in the water turning suddenly yellow, his eyes black. Andrew jolted and buried his face in the stream and pushed away from the bank, holding his breath underwater for as long as he could. When he looked back, Eddie had already pulled on his shirt and was walking away.
Andrew heard the sound of the train approaching down the valley, and he ran panting to catch up with Eddie. He found him on the other side of the hill sitting on his haunches and tossing stones over a granite ledge that dropped twenty feet down to the tracks. Eddie closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side as if someone had told him a story that he knew wasn’t true. Andrew crouched next to him and tried to catch his breath. The train came into view, louder, closer, the horn blasting, and the locomotive passed below them. The gust brushed Eddie’s bangs to the side as he turned his head and opened his mouth to say something that Andrew couldn’t hear over the roar of the engine.
Suddenly, Eddie clamped his eyes shut and his face balled into a knot. Something was wrong; Andrew didn’t know what. Eddie stood up as the caboose passed and looked down at the tracks with his mouth open and his lower lip hanging dumb as a leaf.
In the silence after the train passed, Andrew would have expected some kind of warning, though there hadn’t been any warning with Stephanie, not for the kind of thing she had been about to do. Eddie bared his teeth and his eyes turned to stones. He leapt off the ledge and into the sky—where, for a moment, his feet gripped the air—and Andrew thought Eddie might sail over the tracks to the opposite bank or keep rising above the trees. As clearly, though, as Andrew had known what would happen to Stephanie from the minute she arrived home from Portland, he knew that Eddie would fall, and he couldn’t look.
He heard the awful crack of Eddie’s bones—a sickening sound that was also, somehow, a relief. The sound of a body breaking. With Stephanie there had been no sound, just her empty room in the morning.
Eddie lay splayed on the tracks below, his chest slowly inflating. Andrew found a spot where the bank sloped and he scrambled down. Eddie’s eyes opened halfway and stared beyond Andrew’s face at the sky. His arm had snapped clean in half below the elbow, and the raw bone jutted out of his skin. Blood seeped from a cut in his head.
“What happened?” Eddie said, his face as open and pale as the moon in the daytime sky. A glaze of sweat covered his skin.
“You slipped,” Andrew lied.
Eddie’s eyes widened with fear; he scrambled to his feet and searched the ground around him as if he had dropped something. “Come on,” he said and stumbled forward down the tracks.
Andrew caught up, and Eddie talked frantically about how they would do everything together now: swim after school, fish at the lake in Monmouth where his grandma lived, and play Frisbee down at the landing. They would meet outside Andrew’s house in the morning and walk up to school together. Andrew didn’t know why, but Eddie had chosen him.
When they reached the top of a rise, with a clear view of the steeple tops, Eddie abruptly stopped and looked down at his broken arm, and he gasped, his eyes closing over tears. Below the elbow his hand was twisted, and he shook his head either in disappointment or disbelief.
Eddie’s knees buckled and Andrew tried to hold him up. He was too heavy, though, heavier than Andrew ever would have imagined, heavier, surely, than his sister. Andrew could no longer remember the sound of her voice, but as he tumbled under Eddie onto the tracks, he felt that the sudden and unfamiliar weight gave some shape to what Stephanie had left unsaid.
DARK ROOM
Just before the start, I walked up a back trail to the field and stood at the far edge of the finish line because I wanted to see my sister Melissa not run the big race. This was an important day for me because I was a mean person who wished that bad things would happen to those I loved. It was the year Amy Marsden grew an inch, making me the shortest kid in the sixth grade, and the year I told my friends Susan and Emma to “join the choir,” which was a phrase we had for just the opposite. Their mothers called my mother and I got a lecture, which led to this being the year I stopped talking to my mother unless my father made me, and then I only did so as if she wasn’t there, calling her “the woman.”
I believed in God because I didn’t think it was an option not to; I just didn’t think, as my mother did, that He was Good. I had spent the week before the big race begging Him to keep Melissa from running. I also prayed that I would someday not ever see my family or anyone from Vaughn again. When this day arrived I would never, not even in my dreams, visit the town where I had grown up and miraculously escaped from to become th
e person I would be.
I knew Melissa was not at the race, but other people didn’t: they must have thought she was warming up in the back parking lot, as she sometimes did, or stretching in the girls’ locker room. Even if I had wanted to tell them she wasn’t there, they would not have believed me because people believed what they wanted to believe, and they all wanted Melissa to win. People from Vaughn generally didn’t win things, but Melissa was exactly the kind of person everyone would want to win: she was beautiful but humble, she was smart but meek. She believed God was Good, and even though she was too busty and wide-hipped to be a real runner (and didn’t even join the cross-country team until her sophomore year), she had placed third at states in her first season. Coaches, parents, other runners, and writers for the Valley Journal all agreed that she had terrible form, running on the balls of her feet, and no strategy, leaving the start at full speed each time and not pacing herself. She finished each race with her eyes narrowed (sometimes, she said, she could no longer even see by the end), and her head tilted down as if she were listening to a reprimand she had heard many times before. She won these races through sheer exertion of will and because, people said, she had heart, whatever that meant.
William, the staff photographer for the Valley Journal, was one of the first people at the meet, pacing up and down in front of the crowd with his camera raised in the air, his belly pushing against his wind-breaker. He photographed every sports event and was about as well known as someone could get in Vaughn for giving kids the only kind of fame they would ever see. He was anxious as he focused and refocused his lenses—more anxious, even, than Melissa’s ex-boyfriend Doug, who leaned over the tape set up by the coaches and angled his mouth so she would hear his voice above all the others.