Leverage

by Joshua C. Cohen

  “I’ve gotta piss.” Paul yawns. I open my eyes and glance at my watch. We’ve been driving for an hour and a half and should be close to the turnoff. I sit up.

  “You think you do?” Fisher asks. “I’ve got a hundred and four ounces of soda in me. I keep flashing my lights at Gradley but the bastard won’t pull over.”

  Kurt has his jacket rolled up into a pillow and wedged between his head and the passenger side window. His mouth hangs partly open and I notice his eyes never really close as he sleeps, like he doesn’t trust Fisher or the rest of us.

  “Turn up here,” Bruce and I say at the exact same time, then look at each other.

  “You guys going to give me directions now?” Fisher asks. “Unbelievable.” Gradley’s sedan flashes its blinker and we follow him, turning off onto the unmarked dirt road that begins the unofficial back entrance up to the state park.

  Canary-yellow leaves feather the forest. Here and there, tree foliage the color of young cherries and ripe pumpkins breaks out to dazzle our vision. Sun streams through the branches and dapples the morning mist. Kurt awakens all of a sudden and leans forward to get a full view of the scenery moving past the windshield, blinking against the color and light.

  “Where are we?” he asks without a single stutter.

  “Top secret,” Fisher says.

  “It’s Lorry State Park,” I explain. “Sort of. It’s awesome here but where we’re going is even awesome-er. It’s not marked on regular maps.”

  Gradley’s car slowly leads the way over the rough gravel road and the inside of Fisher’s van rattles like a shaking toolbox as we come to the first “No Trespassing” sign strung across rusted wire hanging between two oaks. I scoot forward to kneel on the transmission hump between Fisher and Kurt, grabbing each of their seats’ armrests for balance. The gravel road slowly fades into a rutted forestry trail. The “No Trespassing” wire corralling the trees to our right drops away and after a couple hundred yards an even smaller path, barely wide enough for a car, veers up through the forested slope. No way could we have found it without first being shown, the secret passing down from senior to junior teammates every year on road trips like this one.

  “Are we tuh-tuh-trespassing?” Kurt asks.

  “Naw,” Fisher says. “It’s still owned by the quarry company or their family or something but they’re not out here. Signs are there to keep ’em from getting sued if some idiot drives off the cliffs. This way they can say they were warned.”

  “Oh,” Kurt says like he’s thinking about it. Then, as the van slips and jerks along the leafy trail, squeezing between tree trunks and scraping past thicket and bramble, Kurt leans forward to better see out Fisher’s dirty windshield. “Wuh-wuh-what cliffs?”

  “Big ones. You’ll see,” Fisher says, wrestling the steering wheel and gunning the engine. The back end fishtails and then drops. Paul and Bruce both pop up and slam down against the rear wheel wells.

  “Damn, Fisher!” Paul snaps. “Take it easy, willya?”

  “Clam it!” Fisher snaps back. He’s hunched over the steering wheel, gripping and twisting it while the engine whinnies.

  Kurt props his left hand on the van’s dashboard and peers intently out the windows as if we might drop off a cliff any second.

  “You see flags nailed to the tree trunks, that means the cliffs are coming up,” Fisher tells Kurt. Kurt glances at Fisher and then back out into the forest creeping by our window. The sun shimmers through gold and maroon leaves and points of light penetrate the forest floor like drops of honey. It’s so beautiful it makes me proud.

  “Wait . . . luh-luh-like that one?” Kurt asks, jamming his finger right up to the windshield and pointing to a faded cloth ribbon nailed to the trunk of an oak tree.

  “Yeah, that’s one,” Fisher says, wrenching hard on the wheel as he guns the engine. The back tires spin over soggy leaves before rubber grabs something solid and we lurch forward, almost rear-ending Gradley’s car.

  “That’s only a yellow flag,” Fisher says. “You see a red one, holler your ass off.”

  “Wuh-wuh-what if we muh-muh-miss it?” Kurt asks.

  “We’re fucked,” Fisher says.

  Kurt takes off his seat belt and cranks down his side window, all the better to spot flags and jump out the door. Suddenly he slaps the dashboard and points out Fisher’s side. “Fuh-fuh-flag. A ruh-ruh-ruh-red one.” Fisher nods but otherwise ignores Kurt. In front of us, Gradley’s car pulls off into the bramble. Fisher squeezes the van past the sedan. Kurt’s eyebrows pull together. “Ruh-ruh-ruh-red flag!”

  “Got it,” Fisher says, then throttles the engine. The van jumps forward. Kurt reaches over and almost rips Fisher’s arm off.

  “Ssssstop!”

  “Okay, okay, relax.” Fisher grins.

  Gripping Fisher’s armrest for balance, I raise off my knees to a crouch. I know exactly where we are and Fisher’s a dick for scaring Kurt but part of me didn’t think someone like Kurt actually gets scared. The clearing appears, just a simple opening in the forest. You would never know from our angle in the van that at the edge of the clearing, the world drops away over the side of a man-made cliff, dug out when granite paid good money.

  Coming up from the back, stepping over the others and squeezing next to me, Bruce finally joins the living. “This is far enough, Fish,” he says, stern as Mr. Klech. Fisher hits the gas one more time, watching Kurt while he does it.

  Bruce cuffs Fisher on his head.

  “Ouch!”

  “Dumbass.” Bruce cuffs him again for good measure.

  “Just trying to give the big man a first-timer’s thrill is all,” Fisher says, and then throws the van in park and kills the engine. Paul opens the back doors and we pile out.

  “Come on,” I order everyone, unable to contain myself any longer. I have one of the climbing ropes coiled around my shoulder. Coach Nelson donated all his old climbing gear and ropes to the team. He taught us how to take care of the ropes, to never drop them on the ground and never walk on them, and how to wind them up properly to make them last longer. He taught us how to knot them, clip in and tie into our harnesses, and how to belay a partner. Since we’re trespassing, he can’t lead us on this trip like he does the big trip upstate in the summer. But this secret location, we’re pretty sure, was originally handed down from him, though he’d deny it.

  “Hold your horses.” Bruce harrumphs like an old man, which I take as a good sign that he’s coming around. I don’t mind him cuffing Fisher at all.

  “Kurt!” I shout back to the van. “Kurt, take a look at this.” Paul, Gradley, and Menderson trail behind me but they already know what lies ahead. It’s not them I’m interested in. “Come on, man!” I turn around and watch Kurt slowly getting out of the van, stretching his arms wide and yawning. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes and then puts a hand up to shade out the partial sun. He’s so big. And, at the moment, slow—it’s killing me—as if he can’t waste a single ounce of energy, as if he needs to store it all up for Friday night games.

  “Come on!” I shout, ignoring everyone else, anticipating his reaction.

  “Coming.”

  Branches canopy overhead in gold and cranberry while the sun, rising higher, heating up, fights to punch down to the forest floor. Only at the edge of the quarry do you finally see the drop-off as the forest disappears, the sun bursts through, and light finally wins.

  “Whoa!” Kurt exhales, peering over the edge, down the granite cliff to the water below. I clap my hands together as if I’ve conjured the magical scene change myself. I can’t help it. Kurt now knows about the best place in the whole state because I invited him, because we chose to share it with him. Then it hits me that maybe Fisher’s not so keen on anyone outside our group discovering it.

  “Cool, huh?” I prompt. Kurt doesn’t answer right away, just keeps looking out over the giant man-made canyon. I can tell the drop-off makes him wary because he refuses to move right up to the edge. It makes me feel strong watching
someone as tough as Kurt be scared by something I think is so beautiful.

  “Yeahhhh . . .” Kurt slowly answers, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Wuh-why’s it here?”

  “It isn’t natural,” Menderson says. “It’s totally man-made.”

  “How far down? To the wuh-wuh-water.”

  “About eighty feet,” Paul says. “If you walk the edge that way a couple hundred yards, the cliff lowers to about forty feet above the water.” Paul points along the edge of the forest that grows right up to the lip of the drop-off. At the edge, the sky pours down in blue so bright it hurts your eyes. It makes me want to thump my chest and breathe deep, holding all that blue sky inside me. The bridge of my nose starts to tickle under the strong rays and I’m sure it’ll be pink by the end of the day.

  “Wuh-wuh-was the lake always here?” Kurt ask.

  “No,” I explain with a tone like I know what I’m talking about, but really I’m only repeating what I heard on my first trip up here last year. “They say the water’s, like, two hundred feet deep. It filled up with rain and runoff after the quarry company abandoned the pit.”

  Bruce walks up with two coiled ropes slung over each arm and a climbing harness in each hand. “Okay,” Bruce says, “let’s give the big man here a little climbing lesson before we send him over the edge.” Bruce keeps sounding like his old self and, despite his being a dick to Kurt earlier, I want to slap Fisher on the back as a thank-you for his idea to come out here.

  “I’m nuh-nuh-nuh-not going over thuh-thuh-that.”

  “The hell you aren’t,” Fisher says, his grin growing, enjoying Kurt’s discomfort. I take back my wanting to thank him. Now I just want to shove him over the cliff. “Going down in ropes is cake. It’s climbing up that’s hard.”

  “I nuh-nuh-never duh-duh-done this,” Kurt says. He takes a step back, eyes narrowing at me—at me only—as if blaming me for luring him into a trap. I’m responsible for this, for him.

  “It’s not that dangerous here,” I say, lowering my voice, feeling protective. “You’re in ropes and someone is belaying you.”

  “Wuh-wuh-what’s that muh-muh-mean?”

  “It’s French, man,” Fisher says, like he knows any more than what Coach Nelson taught us. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “It means someone’s controlling your rope,” I cut in, holding a hand up to Fisher’s face to shut him up. “So if you slip or fall, you won’t go anywhere, we’ve got you.”

  “But yuh-yuh-you guys are luh-luh-little. You kuh-kuh-kuh-can’t buh-buh-belay me.” Kurt’s stutter intensifies, I notice. As he fights to speak, his eyelids fold down and his big shoulders ride up against his ears and it suddenly feels like we’re all ganging up on him. I’m about to explain the pulley system of belaying that Coach Nelson taught us that allows a person to anchor someone much larger with not much effort, but Fisher opens his yapper first.

  “Look, big dude, it’s not a problem,” Fisher says. “Besides, worst-case scenario is you fall and land in the water. You know how to swim, right?” Fisher doesn’t wait for an answer. “You swim over to the rock path and walk back up here, no problem.”

  “Wuh-wuh-what iffffff I fuh-fuh-fuh-fall at the tuh-tuhtop?”

  “Then just make sure you hit the water straight, feetfirst, legs tight together, arms tight by your sides.”

  “And if I duh-duh-don’t . . .”

  “Okay, well, that’s a worst worst-case scenario. I suppose, hypothetically speaking, if you hit the water from up high and landed on your back or side or stomach, you’d die. Water feels like concrete then.”

  Kurt backs away from us. His lips twist and his nostrils flare with the scent of a betrayal. It’s the same face he wore the day he walked in on Ronnie’s attack.

  “That ain’t going to happen,” Bruce says, shoving Fisher out of the way. Bruce moves right up to Kurt just like the day he tried to stare down Jankowski in the locker room. “I guarantee you won’t fall or hurt yourself, not even once, today. I swear it to you.” Bruce says this and his voice shakes. “Danny and I invited you up here. Our arms’ll rip off before we’d let you slip in the ropes. That’s a promise. Right, Danny?

  “Yeah,” I say, my throat dry.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” Bruce asks Kurt, not taking his eyes off him. Kurt nods yes. The strength of our promise is backed by the weight of our debt—something understood only if it’s known who stopped the attack on Ronnie. Bruce hammers things right in a way I can only imagine. Makes me proud of him. Also makes me think I’ve got a long way to go before I’ll ever be captain material.

  “Can I get that same guarantee?” Gradley asks, and the other guys snicker.

  “Bruce is kinda freaking me out.” Paul titters.

  “Hey, man,” Fisher tells Kurt. “We don’t invite just anyone up here. You’ve got to be U.S. Grade-A athlete. Not just a big fat ass in shoulder pads like Jankowski.”

  Even though it’s a joke, the mention of Tom sweeps through the air like a whiff of dead pig. Bruce turns away and starts uncoiling one of the ropes. Kurt steps over to the quarry pit ledge, sizing it up.

  “Okay,” Kurt says after a minute of study and a long breath. “I guh-guh-guh-got this.” And just like that, we are unstuck. Bruce tells Paul to go pull the cooler and hibachi grill out of the van. I scout trees to tie ropes around.

  Global warming pushes back against autumn for the day. The high noon sun bakes the granite wall while the surrounding forest blocks any breeze from cooling things off. It feels good, reminding me of the way things used to be, just a few weeks earlier, before everything changed. Most of us expected a chillier day and have dressed in layers: waffle long johns, sweatpants, T-shirts, jeans, and long-sleeve flannel. Within the hour, most of us have stripped down to long johns and T-shirts.

  The hardest part about dropping down the side of a cliff in a rope, if you’ve never done it, is taking that first backward step of faith over the edge. You have to trust both the rope and the person securing it. That first step is also the best, the one that sends tingles of thrill and fear up your legs when gravity suddenly warps a little and the world tips ninety degrees and you’re walking the cliff face like a gecko. Kurt, wearing a frown of worry, keeps tugging on the rope, testing its tension and resistance, as we all crowd around him, urging him over. He’s already watched all of us go down and come back up a half-dozen times until he trusts that it’s not all a trick. With his back to the quarry pit, the heels of his sneakers kiss the edge of the cliff.

  “Okay, here guh-guh-goes,” he says, still tugging on the rope. He takes the teensiest step backward, leaning his butt into the rope harness, trying not to actually go over the ledge until—he does! Bruce has him tight and Kurt, adjusting his legs, suddenly stands sideways to the earth, eighty feet above water smooth and black as obsidian. He takes another dainty step, letting out a little rope between his hands. His face, stone-serious with concentration, suddenly splinters along his mouth line. He takes another step, playing out more rope. As his head slowly sinks below the edge, me and the other guys step forward to watch his progress.

  “That’s it.”

  “Good job, man.”

  “You got it, big guy.”

  Kurt hops back in inches and then, as he gets the hang of it, pushes farther off the cliff, swinging out and lowering a few feet at a time. About twenty feet from the top, he tips his face up to us, wearing a big smile.

  “You know suh-suh-something?” he asks. All of us are leaning over the edge, monitoring his descent. “Thuh-thuh-this is all right.” And with that his legs thrust from the cliff face and he arcs out about eight feet, letting the rope slip steadily through the carabiner so he drops about ten feet before touching the cliff again.

  Kurt howls and his voice bounces around the bowl of the quarry. We howl back, giddy for him. The first time rappelling over a cliff is a sensation you never forget. As soon as you finish, you want to do it again. It’s as cool as doing a double-flip re-grasp on the high bar but
it doesn’t take years to learn. We gave him this, I think.

  Over the next few hours, we set up several more rope trails along the cliff for guys to descend and then test themselves by climbing back up to the top. By late afternoon everyone is hot and tired. Guys stuff themselves on chips and soda waiting for the burgers and franks to cook over the hibachi grill. There’s also a mini-bonfire roaring, supposedly for s’mores, but, mainly, because fire’s fun to make. No one’s paying attention when I come out of Fisher’s van wearing old cutoff jeans and beater sneakers and nothing else.

  “Hey, Kurt,” I say as I walk toward the cliff, making sure I have his attention. He stops in midchew of a granola bar as I get nearer the edge. “This is the next step,” I say. “Now you’ll know we were never putting you in any danger.” I need him to understand Bruce and I would never invite him up here to betray him. That we only ever wanted to thank him.

  Kurt freezes while the other guys scramble over to watch the show. Bruce stays back by the hibachi to tend the burgers and franks. I catch his eye, though. His look says he’s going to be really pissed if I kill myself.

  The only way to jump off a cliff is to not think about how stupid it is.

  I jump.

  Air.

  Sky.

  SPEED!!!!

  My stomach rockets into my throat as the updraft tries to peel off my face and ears. Falling for three seconds might as well be thirty seconds, might as well be thirty light-years for how fast it rushes past you, overloading your senses.

  Sploosh!

  A cold blackness slaps me in midscream, jolts my heart, jacks up my body. Arctic liquid jets into my nostrils, ears, mouth, eyelids. Numbing dark sucks me down, down, down and ... slowly ... slowly stalls. I’m deep under, hovering at the level of the dead before I’m released, allowed to gradually float upward. Seconds tick as I kick hard toward the light.

  Surface.