Four Octobers

by Hautala, Rick

  Of course, lots of the kids from town, especially teenagers, came out to Nickerson’s every summer to test their courage by jumping off Blood Ledge. It was an unspoken rite of passage for the teenage boys of Stonepoint and a few of the surrounding towns. Most of the boys—and a few girls—had jumped by the time they entered eighth grade, but the thought of actually doing it scared the hell out of Danny. Several times last summer and the summer before, he had walked out to the edge of the cliff and peered down at the water. The view had always made him feel queasy and lightheaded, and he dreaded that some day—like today—his friends were going to pressure him and he would have to make the leap. Shadowed by the overhanging cliff, the flat, black surface of the water below looked like a piece of smooth, jet-black marble, not real water. It was all too easy to imagine that he’d hit the water and go splat like a bug on a windshield.

  Once again earlier this summer, when Danny thought he might be able to muster the courage to jump, he had crept out onto the edge and looked down, but then he’d backed off. He’d had to put up with the jeers of some of the high school kids when he scurried back, but he’d been stricken by the fear that he would be the one in a million who didn’t jump out far enough and who ended up breaking his legs and maybe even dying in the shallow water straight below the cliff.

  More times than he could count, his mother had warned him about not going anywhere near Blood Ledge. He knew he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and if Carl and Tommy wanted to risk their fool lives today, that was their choice.

  It didn’t mean he had to do it.

  But if he couldn’t talk them out of it, if they jumped and he didn’t, everyone—probably even Karen Taylor—would hear about how chicken-shit he was.

  A tense silence, broken only by the songs of birds in the surrounding woods, settled around the boys. The breeze, hot and heavy, hissed like a ground fire through the pine needles, filling the air with a thick, resinous scent. Slick trickles of cold sweat ran down Danny’s sides from his armpits. He found it difficult to take a deep enough breath.

  “It’s not just that,” he said, and now his voice quivered up and down the scale. “I—I just don’t want to—to take a chance of—of… I just don’t like that cliff, all right? It gives me the creeps. Remember what I told you I saw out there last fall?”

  “You mean about your uncle?” Tommy’s eyes brightened. “Man, I wished I’d seen that!”

  Biting the inside of his cheek, Danny nodded sharply. “Yeah… it’s just…you know, what I saw just makes me feel—I dunno, just nervous about being out here and all.”

  Time and again, he’d had to tell both friends about the scene he had stumbled onto late last autumn. He’d cut through the woods near the quarry, taking a shortcut home after football practice, and seen something that both intrigued and frightened him.

  “You ask me,” Booger piped in, “I’d say you was just about the luckiest guy in the world to see something like that. I mean—sure, I might kife some Penthouses or Playboys from my dad’s closet now and then, but to actually see it!” He whistled shrilly between his teeth and shook his head as though absolutely amazed. “To really see someone doing it! Jesus-H!”

  “I wish I hadn’t skipped practice that day,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah,” Danny said, “but if we’d walked home together, we probably would’ve stopped at the store for sodas or something, so we wouldn’t’ve seen them.”

  Danny allowed a slow smile to spread across his face as he recalled the surprise and shock he had felt that day. His Uncle Bob, who was a few years younger than Danny’s father, had always been his favorite uncle. He was a regular “hot shit,” as the kids said, almost a kid himself. He knew how to relate to Danny and his friends.

  But Bob was married to a small, pale, pinched-faced woman named Margaret, and Danny had never really liked her. It wasn’t that she was outright mean or nasty, but he’d always thought she was a little strange. She worked at Frank’s, the corner store where the kids all bought their snacks, and she had a reputation around town for being aloof, standoffish. If she hadn’t been married to Bob, she no doubt would have been a cranky Old Maid like Old Lady Henry used to be.

  But on that day last September…

  Danny remembered that there had been huge, white, tumbling clouds overhead in the blue sky, and only a slight chill in the air, just a hint of approaching autumn. He was late for supper after practice and had taken the shortcut, using the trail that skirted Nickerson’s Quarry. As he neared the quarry, he’d heard something, a burst of laughter coming from near Blood Ledge. The laughter hadn’t been deep or menacing…nothing really scary, but it made Danny jump, remembering the stories about hearing the old Finnish stonecutter’s screams. This was a light, airy burst of laughter that, as soon as it was gone, left the impression it had never really happened.

  But the instant it caught Danny’s attention, he had stopped in the middle of the path and turned in the direction of the cliff. He had waited silently for a long time, and he was just about to continue on his way home when he had heard something else—a low, belly-deep grunt that sounded almost as if someone were in pain.

  There was someone over by Blood Ledge, Danny realized. Holding his breath and ducking low behind the brush, he had cautiously made his way along the narrow, winding path that led through the woods to the cliff. When he was about halfway there, he scooched down when, through a break in the scrub pines, he caught a flicker of motion. He inched forward quietly through the brush until he saw the broad, naked, well-muscled back of a man.

  For a moment, Danny was confused because that brief burst of high laughter he had heard certainly hadn’t come from a man. Dropping to the ground, he crawled forward until he saw exactly what was going on.

  A man and woman were lying on the bare rock of the cliff. Both of them were naked, and the man was lying right on top of the woman. There was only a thin beach towel spread out beneath them and the rock, and—

  God Almighty!

  They were doing it!

  They were actually screwing, right there on Blood Ledge!

  Danny’s throat had gone bone dry as he watched the man wedge the woman’s legs apart with his knees and thrust his hips forward time and time again. The man’s back and shoulders glistened with sweat. He couldn’t see the woman’s face from where he was, but Danny listened as she uttered high-pitched squeals of pleasure. Gripping the man’s shoulders with both hands, she linked her feet together behind his back and jerked herself hard against him.

  The frenzied rhythm of their motion increased as Danny crouched in the brush and watched, absolutely amazed at what he was seeing. In the speckled shadows of the surrounding pine trees, the man’s leg and butt muscles tensed and relaxed, rippling with strands of muscle as he dug his knees against the rock and drove himself into the woman, harder and harder with every thrust. Danny wondered briefly if the woman was feeling any pain, lying there on the hard rock with all that weight pressing her down, but from the sounds she was making, she didn’t seem to mind.

  As their grunts and groans became louder, and the man’s movements became more frantic, he tossed his head back and let loose a wild bellow of pleasure and release. In that shattering instant, Danny saw his Uncle Bob’s face as he collapsed onto the woman and let his head loll to the side. Uncle Bob’s body stiffened one last time, shuddering wildly, and then, heaving a sigh that sounded like a distant hurricane wind, he rolled away from the woman.

  When he did, Danny caught a glimpse of the naked woman who was underneath him. A bolt of surprise and genuine fear gripped him when he saw that the woman wasn’t his Aunt Margaret. At first, he didn’t recognize the woman, but then he realized it was the young waitress who worked behind the counter at the Whistle Stop Cafe, across the street from the Boston and Maine train station on Railroad Avenue. Danny knew from the pin she wore above the left pocket of her pink waitress uniform that her name was Alice. He had no idea what her last name was or where she lived, but h
e and his friends often stopped by the Whistle Stop for a Coke during the week just to ogle the swelling of her large breasts and hips inside her tight-fitting, pink uniform.

  Unable to believe what he was seeing, Danny could hardly breathe.

  Uncle Bob was doing it with Alice, the big-titted waitress!

  Smiling widely, her eyes looking distant and dreamy, Alice flopped back on the ground, letting her arms and legs splay wide. Her breasts sagged down on both sides as, with one hand, she reached out and gently ran her fingernails up and down Uncle Bob’s back. The scratches left behind little inflamed lines. Her skin glistened like quicksilver with sweat as shadows from the trees danced across her naked body, giving her an odd sense of motion even as she lay still.

  As he crouched in the brush, a voice inside Danny’s head was yelling at him, telling him to get the hell out of there before either of them realized he was there, but he couldn’t tear his fascinated gaze away from Alice’s body. He was entranced and terrified at the same time by the vision of her soft, rounded curves, her heaving breasts gleaming with perspiration, and the tangle of dark, curly pubic hair. He groaned softly as he felt himself getting an erection.

  This was the first time in his life he had ever seen an honest-to-God naked woman. The pictures in the skin magazines hardly counted. Not when compared to the real thing.

  The next day, when he hooked up with Tommy and Carl and told them about what he had seen, neither one of them had believed him. But he insisted he was telling the truth, and he had given such accurate, graphic details that—eventually—both of them had to accept his story as possible. A few weeks later, Danny and his friends noticed that Alice was no longer working at the Whistle Stop Cafe. When Booger finally got up the courage to ask Bill Taylor, the owner of the Whistle Stop, where she was, he grumbled something about how she’d just taken off without calling in, leaving him short-handed just when he needed her most. Alice apparently had left town because no one in Stonepoint ever saw her again.

  A month or so after that, Uncle Bob’s wife left him, and he left town as well. Danny’s father told him Uncle Bob had moved out to Oregon, but even at Christmas, they didn’t hear from him.

  But the memory of what he’d seen, as thrilling and, although he would never admit it to his friends, as scary as it had been, wasn’t why Danny didn’t want to go with Tommy and Booger to Blood Ledge today.

  The plain truth was, he knew if he went, and if they jumped, then he would have to jump, too, and he was scared to death of doing that.

  “Well…you comin’ or not?” Tommy asked, eying Danny expectantly.

  “Screw it,” Booger said. His features darkened with a frown and he waved his hand with disgust at Danny. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you come or not. I’m goin’, and I’m gonna jump off Blood today. If you guys don’t come, fine. You’re both a couple of chicken-shits, anyways.”

  He put his thumbs into his armpits and started hopping around, flapping his arms like a bird trying to fly as he made loud cackling sounds.

  Danny didn’t have the energy to deny the charge again, but before he could speak, Booger turned and started up the winding path that led up to the cliff, still doing his stupid imitation of a chicken. Just before he was lost from sight behind the foliage, he turned and made one last loud cackling sound.

  Danny stood in the center of the path, watching silently after Booger.

  “You going?” Tommy asked, his voice breaking the silence like a hammer striking an anvil.

  Danny ran his teeth over his lower lip while shaking his head. Tommy shrugged helplessly, then turned and, without another word, started up the trail after Booger. Within a few seconds, he, too, was out of sight, leaving Danny alone. Above the sounds of the wind in the trees and birds singing, he could still hear the faint echo of Booger’s wild, chicken-like cackle.

  His eyes filled with tears as he looked back down the path. He knew the smart thing to do would be just go back to the other side of the quarry and swim without his friends.

  So what if he didn’t jump off Blood Ledge?

  What was the big deal, anyway?

  The big deal was, Booger would tease him mercilessly about it in front of their friends and—worse—in front of Judy and Karen.

  His chest was tight, and when he took a breath, it felt like he couldn’t pull the air deep enough into his lungs. A burning sensation gripped his throat. It took effort to keep his voice from breaking as he cupped his hands to his mouth and called out, “Hey! Wait up!”

  Neither of his friends answered. They were probably already at the cliff, looking down thirty feet or more into the still, green water and trying to get the courage to be the first to jump.

  A coil of nervous tension wound up inside Danny’s stomach as he stared blankly up the deserted trail. Even though the August heat settled around him like a heavy blanket, he shivered when lines of sweat ran down his sides from his armpits. A faint smell of vinegar teased his nose.

  A part of his mind was still telling him to say the hell with it and turn around and run as fast as he could away from Blood Ledge. He’d lied when he told his friends that Judy and Karen might be coming up to the quarry, but he’d been desperate to avoid going up to Blood Ledge. More than anything, he wanted to go around to the other side of Nickerson’s, to what he and his friends called “The Baby Side,” where there were gradual, shallow ledges leading into the water, not thirty-two foot drops.

  But almost against his will, the first steps he took were in the direction of Blood Ledge.

  The toes of his sneakers dragged against the iron-hard ground, raising tiny puffs of yellow dust that drifted on the breeze like smoke. He looked up the wooded slope in front of him, craning his neck forward, straining to hear Tommy and Booger. Even the birds seemed to have stopped singing. The only sound he could hear was the hissing sigh of the wind in the pines.

  As he made his way further up the path, his stomach tightened with rising apprehension that threatened to turn into outright panic when he broke through the woods into a clearing and saw the wide, downward-sloping top of the cliff.

  Standing there in his bathing suit, Booger looked at him and snorted with disdainful laughter. His towel, sneakers, rolled up dirty socks, T-shirt, and jeans were all thrown in a heap on the turf close to the edge of the cliff where, last fall, Danny had seen his uncle and Alice.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, “if it isn’t old chicken-shit himself.”

  Without another word, Booger walked to the edge of the cliff, pausing only a second to look down at the water below. Danny couldn’t help but notice the thin lines of his ribs, showing on Booger’s tanned back as he leaned forward over the edge. His only thought was, if Booger really did go ahead and jump, his sun-tanned, skinny body would shatter on impact with the water thirty-two feet down. He was concerned for his friend, but the sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach only got worse when he realized that after Booger jumped, Tommy was going to do it, and then he was going to have to go off the cliff or else really be a chicken-shit.

  “Water looks cold,” Booger said as he backed away from the cliff edge until he was standing next to Tommy and Danny. He leaned forward, placed both hands on his knees, and took a few deep breaths like a track runner waiting for the starting gun.

  For one single, hopeful moment, Danny thought Booger was going to back down, but then he let loose a loud, warbling scream like an Apache and ran toward the cliff edge.

  Struck silent with wonder and worry for his friend, Danny watched as Booger reached the edge of the sloping rock and then launched himself into the air. His arms waved wildly above his head, and he was still screaming like a madman as he dropped out of sight.

  Tommy and Danny rushed toward the edge of the cliff just in time to see Booger hit the water with a splash. He landed well past the shallow ledges directly below the cliff. A column of water shot up into the air and then a foamy ring spread out as Booger sank beneath the water. The water sloshed as it closed ove
r him, and they could see a thin, white, distorted figure scrambling wildly below the shimmering, green-tinged water. The waves lapped against the rocks with loud splashing sounds.

  Danny got dizzy with expectation as he waited for Booger to resurface. After what seemed like much too long a time, his friend’s face broke the surface of the water. He was smiling so widely his top and bottom teeth gleamed in the sun. His face streamed with water, and his hair glistened like a seal pelt as he looked up at his friends.

  “Hot damn! It’s great!” He waved one hand above his head as he tread water.

  “You guys gotta do it! There’s nothin’ to it! You just gotta go for it!”

  Danny glanced over at Tommy, then back down at Booger. Neither he nor Tommy said a word.

  “Don’t tell me you’re both chicken-shit,” Booger called out. His voice echoed from the cliffs like he was at the bottom of a deep well. “Come on! It’s a wicked rush! What are you waiting for?”

  Out in the middle of the quarry, sunlight sparkled like a thousand flares on the surface of the water, but Danny couldn’t stop thinking about how cold and black and dangerous the water beneath the shadow of the cliff looked. And he couldn’t stop thinking about the warnings his mother had given him about this place, and he couldn’t not think about how afraid he was of heights and how—if Tommy got up his courage to go—he would have to follow. Scariest of all was that he was convinced he would die if he jumped off the cliff.