Falling (15 page)

He’d had better vision then. He could see that the water was a rush of green before it went over the edge, then a rush of white as it fell, roaring, to the river. And as they
lowered him down, the Falls came closer and closer. The cable gave one shudder, then another. It would break, he’d thought. It would break and he’d fall into those depths.

He hung upside down. He hung from the cable, looking into his own death. That’s what he was doing, he’d thought, looking into the whiteness of his own death. He’d felt himself grow calm. It wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d circled this way and that as he dangled at the end of the cable, but he felt his heart grow calm.

Roger?
Are you all right, Roger? It’s Jasmine. Do you want me to help you?

Roger was lying on the kitchen floor in a puddle of water. Jasmine picked up two plastic glasses and put them on the table.

Yes, he said, if you could help me up – there. Thank you.

She saw how his hands gripped the chair as if he thought it might tip over.

We haven’t really met, he said, settling himself on the chair. I’m Roger and you’re Jasmine.

Pleased to meet you.

Likewise. If I had a hat, I would doff it.

Doff it?

Yes, he laughed – a quick, strangled sound. That’s what men do. No, it’s what they used to do when they had hats. They’d doff them.

She laughed.

You think I’m crazy, he said.

No, not at all.

If Ingrid were here she’d say I’m crazy. But she’s not here. Do you want to smoke a joint? he went on. I really think I’d like to smoke a joint.

Jasmine imagined Damian, upstairs in his room, listening.

We’ll go outside to smoke it, though. That way the forces of good and evil won’t be able to discover us. What do you think we should worry about most? The forces of good or the forces of evil?

I don’t know. She didn’t know what to say to calm him.

The forces of good always worried me most, he confided.

He made his way down the hall and she saw how his clothes were all wet. He’d been lost on his street and then he’d fallen down in his own kitchen. A wave of tenderness came over her as she held the screened door open for him. He fumbled his way to a chair on the porch and lowered himself into it, rummaging in his pocket before he found a plastic bag of rolled joints and a small red lighter.

I’ll get you to help me, he said, handing her the bag and the lighter.

She lit a spliff, inhaled, and passed it to him. He drew the smoke in and passed it back.

It’s good stuff, he said. Pure.

Mmmm.

They sat quietly for a long time, listening to passing cars.

This is one of the rare moments, he said. One of the lustrous moments. There are thousands of them, but this is one of them.

She turned her head toward him.

Strung together like pearls, he continued. Sometimes bad shit happens, but the string of pearls hangs in the air. Don’t you think?

Jasmine lay back in the chair, feeling lazy, though something in the back of her mind kept bothering her. She pushed it away, concentrating on a string of pearls hovering just above her head. Roger had put the pearls there.

You went over the Falls once, she said, dreamily.

Twice. I didn’t want to go over the Falls ass over teakettle and find myself going down headfirst. So I designed a barrel with a steel frame, about eight feet in diameter, with a six-ply –

Ass over teakettle, she said, laughing. God, that’s funny. She took the end of the spliff from him again. But you didn’t, she said. Go ass over teakettle.

No, the barrel went over just fine. We called it the Bomb Barrel – Ed Kusack and I. Ed was the one who helped me build it.

You must have been scared, though? Weren’t you scared?

I was scared. Did we finish that one already? Let’s light another.

Okay.

That’s more like it, he said, when she lit another and passed it to him.

You went over the Falls twice, she said, so you must have got over being scared.

Jasmine felt light-headed now; she had the feeling her body could drift up to the top of the chestnut tree. What had she said to him? She’d forgotten what she’d said. Scared. She’d asked him if he’d been scared. She wished Damian would come downstairs, even though she was still
annoyed with him. But her body was drifting away, over the roof of the neighbour’s house.

I tried three times, you know, not just twice, Roger was saying. I tried three times and it worked twice. I got stuck once. The damn thing wouldn’t go over; they’d lowered the water level. They saw me, and they lowered the water level, so I ran aground near the brink. It took the Parks Department two hours to haul me in, and they gave me a fine right then and there. But, you know, it doesn’t always work.

What doesn’t always work?

Lowering the water level, said Roger. That guy from Tennessee, for instance – Jesse somebody – was stuck just above the Falls. He was trying to go over, and they lowered the water level. So there he was, near Goat Island, getting out of his boat and dragging it over the shallow places. He went over, finally.

Jasmine was trying to follow him. Certain words snagged her. Tennessee. Goat Island. Dragging.

Sharp, yes, that was his name, said Roger, suddenly. Jesse Sharp. They never found him. Never found his body, I mean.

They sat without speaking.

But why couldn’t they find it? she asked.

The Falls have a way of taking things and never giving them back.

Oh.

God, it’s humid, said Roger. What time is it?

I don’t know.

You’re stoned, aren’t you? said Roger. Well, that’s because the stuff was pure. He put his hand on her arm
for a moment. You’ve got to be alive and kicking when Ingrid comes back, kiddo, he said. Or she’ll think I’ve corrupted you.

It’s nice here, she said, but the small, nagging thing surfaced again. Tell me about Damian.

Damian?

Yes.

I may be his uncle, but it’s not as if I know him well. Why?

She shook her head from side to side. I don’t know. He gets – I don’t know – kind of obsessed. It’s like he wants to put me – put us – somewhere where no one else can come into it.

Maybe it has to do with losing his sister. He could be afraid.

Of what?

He could be afraid of losing you.

Maybe.

People can seem a little weird when they lose someone they care about. I was a little crazy myself, once.

She sat up to clear her head, but realized that things were clearer if she slid back down in the chair.

Are you okay? he asked.

Yes.

You’re sure?

Mmmm.

Seems to me that you’ve got a wide-open heart, he said. And if you’ve got a heart like that, you just have to go easy.

I’ll go easy, she said sleepily.

DAMIAN STOOD VERY STILL
in the bedroom after Jasmine had gone downstairs. He could hear her talking to Roger, their voices muted. Then he realized that they’d gone out to the porch. He’d hear their conversation if he left the window up, but he didn’t want to, and he closed it as noiselessly as he could. The room was stifling. He gripped the frame of the window.

It was a question of balancing. When he closed his eyes tightly he saw bright yellow spots blooming here and there in the darkness. But the bottom might fall out of things; he’d learned that the hard way.

Maybe it was just exhaustion. He moved to the bed and sat on it, rubbing his face hard with the palms of his hands. It didn’t help; he couldn’t stop crying.

Fuck, he whispered. Fuck.

The day he’d shot the hare, he’d left its long body slung across the muck of the path and kept going. The snow became thicker underfoot, and when he stepped between two spruce trees to avoid a slushy drift, he saw a small pond,
iced over, though the ice had softened and turned the colour of pale jade. The limbs of a birch, frozen in it, were caught in such a way that he thought of a hand. A dead hand. No, not a dead hand. A birch limb.

He drew the afghan around his shoulders, like an oversized scarf. He didn’t know why he’d brought it with him, because it was heavy and smelled vaguely of mould. He shouldered the gun, Adam’s uncle’s gun, which wasn’t his to take. But Adam had shown him, on an earlier trip, one May weekend, that the key to the gun rack was just above it, on a ledge, and Damian found himself wanting to handle the Marlin. There was a Remington-Lee there too, and Adam had taken it and given Damian the Marlin. Then they’d drunk a lot of beer outside and shot up some of the beer cans. Damian liked the popping sound as the bullets struck the cans, though they didn’t hit them often.

And afterward, when Adam had said that Damian wasn’t a bad shot, Damian laughed. They were lying on the dead brown leaves that had fallen the autumn before, looking up at the bright canopy of green. Everything was alight up there. They lay without talking, and then one of them said a few words and the other answered, and they slipped back into silence. There was nothing to disturb them.

But there was no going back into that time. It was a time before.

Damian knew he should go downstairs to Jasmine and say he was sorry. But somehow he knew this was not what he would say to her. He would tell her something else, blurting out things he didn’t mean to say. He’d say that his mother had given away Lisa’s clothes, all of them, from her summer
dresses to her good cloth coat and brown leather jacket. Even the blue dress she’d worn to the dance with Trevor. He’d watched his mother doing this, sorting things methodically in Lisa’s bedroom. But Damian had managed to save the blue high-heeled shoes, taking them out of Lisa’s bedroom with the intention of putting them on his own bookshelf.

He’d balanced them on his palms, one on each hand, without knowing what to do with them. Each shoe had a thin shaft of heel, supporting a cushion for the foot, then a slope, gently curved, down to the delicately shaped place for the toes, with two straps across, finely engineered as miniature suspension bridges, with the rosette linking the straps. He’d turned around in his room looking for a place to put them, still holding the shoes on the palms of his hands. Then he noticed where the toes – Lisa’s toes – had pressed down on the insole. It was the merest imprint, a ghost of her.

He would tell Jasmine about the shoes. She’d look at him strangely, with no idea what he was talking about.

When Jasmine was near him, he wanted her to be closer. She was miraculous to him. He wanted her to lie down with him so he could feel the ridges of her pelvic bones and the supple skin of her stomach between those bones. He wanted her. Even when he drew her, when he was some distance from her and concentrating on observing her precisely, it was a way of going inside her, of having her, a way of leaving himself behind.

Before he arrived at the hill above the river he knew what he was going to do, as if he had already seen both the hill and the river in a long-ago dream. He knew he would sit
down in the snow at the top of the steep incline. So when he got there, and brushed the snow from a stump, seating himself, he was simply confirming what was inevitable. He drew the afghan close, wrapping it around his body, since his skin was clammy with the cold. He put the gun across his knees.

From his vantage point on the stump he could pay attention to the late-morning sunlight jittering across the water below. The riverbanks were edged with a crust of ice, and the water was the colour of ink. The river widened out and then narrowed so the water churned through a gap; here the rocks above the water’s edge were decorated with a frieze of ice. Warriors, maybe, running with spears in their hands.

His teeth chattered and his eyes began to fill up. It was too fierce a thing; it came over him and there was nothing he could do but let it come. He could feel himself begin to heave, and he retched a stream of yellow vomit into the snow next to him. He sat still until the nausea passed, then dug a handful of clean snow and put it in his mouth to rinse it. He spat, dried his eyes on his sleeve, and took up the gun, cocking the hammer and placing it in the best position between his legs. Now he saw that he’d have to extend his arm to get at the trigger. He’d have to drop one shoulder to extend his arm fully, though it was entirely possible to do it. The trigger would have to be pushed rather than pulled. He hadn’t thought any of it through, and now it came to him as if it was part of a slowed-down film. One action, then another. Each action was separate; it was not linked to the next. The wiping of his nose, for instance, had nothing to do with him leaning forward to rest the gun against the trunk of a birch tree.

He got up and paced around in a circle, and then went
back to the stump and sat down, wrapping himself in the afghan in such a way that it would leave his arms free. Then he took up the rifle and realized the bulky afghan was in the way. He flung it into the snow and put the rifle between his legs, sliding the end of the gun’s barrel into his mouth, immediately wanting to retch again because of the taste of the metal. But he willed himself not to. As he raised his fingers to the trigger, it seemed to him that the gesture resembled that of a cellist getting ready to play.

All his senses were alert and keen. He thought of the snowshoe hare and its twitching nose. Everything dazzled his eyes. The water in the narrowed gap of the river could have been plunging horses: down they went, and down again, into the pitch-black water. The sound was soothing, blending with the wind. And the woods too, though he hadn’t noticed until this moment, were laid bare in the first warmth of spring, with the birches vulnerable and white in the midst of the spruce.

Within days, weeks, everything would be furred with the softness of new growth. The leaves would unfurl from new buds, pink as kittens’ noses, and open fully, allowing the light to pierce them and reveal a tracery of veins. Hundreds and thousands of leaves would come to life. And the river, unspooling in its long, winding bed, would move above stones and around them, pushing against one bend, another, dropping over the side of an old beaver lodge, so it could keep rushing in full spate.