The Boys from Santa Cruz (7 page)

When things heated up during the third set, Pender earned even Barry’s respect by smoothly disarming a drunken patron. “You’ll make a bouncer yet, hoss,” he told Pender later, after closing, when the crew and the band were unwinding with a few drinks, swapping songs and shooting the bull. And with a few slugs of Jim Beam under his belt, Pender discovered, it was almost possible, if not to actually forget the stuff he was trying not to remember, then to pretend to forget, at least for a little while longer.

Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language,
residential
generally means “locked.”

On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talk
to each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”

“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”

It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered—Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.

The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.

Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.

But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”

I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.

“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”

They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the
boys only
therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.

Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors.
Versus
is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.

The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally consented to let Dr. O (who was our medic despite the fact that he wasn’t a real doctor) treat them. By then I hated him with a passion, having had all that time to obsess about him and Dusty having sex. It hadn’t happened yet, but if it did, it would be soon. Tomorrow morning, we were told at campfire, our individual vision quests would begin.

These were to be like our final exams. We would be picking out our own campsites, isolated from each other, and making our own shelters, where we were supposed to spend twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping, and thereby obtain Wisdom with a capital Wiz.

There was more to it than that, of course. Among other things, we were supposed to find out what our so-called totem animal was. There was also this deal where we were each given what Dr.
O called a MacGuffin, a single candy bar that was supposed to represent our own particular addiction or barrier, sex in Dusty’s case and drugs in my own. (But what if your addiction was candy bars? I joked to Dusty.) And although nobody came right out and said it, if you had half a brain, it was kind of obvious that you weren’t supposed to actually
eat
the MacGuffin.

I wasn’t buying any of it. All I could think about, that night before the vision quest, was Dr. O sneaking up to Dusty’s campsite tomorrow night, and the two of them getting it on. Oh, god, how I hated that man. If he hadn’t already been on it, I’d have added him to my fantasy revenge list. Instead I had to settle for mentally underlining his name.

Sleep was impossible. My tent was getting smaller and stuffier by the second. I opened the flap and stuck my head out to look at the stars. On the far side of the meadow, I could see all four counselors sitting around the campfire, having one of their endless gabfests, which meant nobody was watching us.

Figuring this might be my last chance to be alone with Dusty, I crawled around to her tent. She wasn’t there. My first assumption was that she was off screwing somebody. But just before I went ballistic, I saw a small darting figure zigzagging across the meadow from more or less the direction of the campfire. I dove into Dusty’s tent, and a second later she dove in on top of me. We exchanged
oof
s.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“I was looking for you. Where were you?”

“Eavesdropping on the counselors. And guess what: it’s all bullshit.”

“Congratulations,” I told her. “You just won the Academy Award for Duh!”

“No, I mean the whole graduation, no graduation thing.” She grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt. “They already know who’s going home and who’s not.”

I can’t say I was surprised. “I’m guessing we’re among the
nots.
”

“We
are
the nots. Dr. O said I was ‘continually displaying age-inappropriate seductive behavior’ toward him. They’re sending me to a residential in Orange County.”

“What about me?”

“Military school in Arizona. They had a good laugh about that. Voted you most likely to make the Ten Most Wanted someday.”

“Ten Most Unwanted, more likely.”

She grabbed my hand in both of hers and pressed it flat against her chest. “Let’s go, Luke. Let’s run away, just you and me.”

I could feel her heart thumping like a scared rabbit’s through the thin fabric of her T-shirt and was acutely aware of the nearness of her little breasts on either side of my hand.
At least she won’t be fucking Dr. O now,
I told myself. “Dusty, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s what you think!” Turns out we’d been hiking in a circle all this time. According to what Dusty had overheard, we were only a few miles from the little campground where we’d started out. “C’mon, what have we got to lose? At least let’s make the assholes look for us.”

I tried to tell her how dangerous it could be, tramping around unfamiliar mountains in the dark, but Dusty wouldn’t listen. She kind of threw my hand away from her in disgust and said she was going with or without me. Then she reached up and ruffled the soft stubble where the hair was starting to grow in around my Mohawk, and said she’d much, much rather it was
with
me.

By now Dusty and I were both experts at packing for the trail. Our major problem was going to be food. What little we hadn’t already eaten was supposed to be hanging in bear-proof bags twelve feet high in a tree at the edge of the meadow. I say supposed to be: Dusty and I each had a few protein bars and some trail mix stashed away, and of course our MacGuffins. Also we’d both filled our canteens before bedtime, and since the woods were full of raspberries, blackberries, and elderberries at that time of year, we decided to take our chances.

Our plan, such as it was, was to hike out to the road, then hitchhike to a phone. Dusty said she had a friend she could call in Arcata, but we hadn’t really thought things out beyond that. Not that it would have mattered if we had, because within an hour, we were hopelessly lost.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault: we just guessed wrong. The trail forked, and the fork we chose began to climb and narrow and narrow and climb until it looked like it petered out at a crumbly shale ledge barely a foot wide. Sheer cliff to the right, sheer drop to the left. The moonlight had petered out, too, so I couldn’t tell how far the fall would have been, but I could see with my flashlight that the path widened again on the other side of the ledge.

“I’m going to check it out,” I told Dusty. “You wait here.” Keeping my weight on my toes, I inched sideways out onto the ledge, hugging the cliff with my belly, and feeling as if my pack was going to pull me over backward at any second.

But it didn’t. The path began a gradual descent, then widened to a grassy plateau. I put down my pack and went back for Dusty, took her pack from her, and helped her across the abyss. When we reached the plateau she threw herself into my arms and dragged me down onto the grass, laughing and crying and covering my face with wet kisses and salty tears.

“My hero,” she said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me that.

Dusty and I zipped our sleeping bags together and made love under the stars that night. I didn’t tell her I was a virgin, but I think she knew. She went gentle on me at first. I remember how her little breasts trembled and how my fingers trembled when I touched them. After I got the hang of it, though, things got rougher, which was how she liked it. She made me call her names and pinch her and slap her around, and when the names weren’t dirty enough or the pinches and slaps hard enough, she’d call me names, names like
wussy
and
pussy
and
faggot.

But no matter how hard I slapped her or how long I screwed
her, she couldn’t come. The problem, she said, was that she usually did it drunk or stoned or with poppers. “I need something, or I just can’t, you know, let go at the end.” Then she gave me this sneaky little look. “Would you mind choking me?” she said.

“Choking you?”

“Yeah. It’s something I learned from my minister. He used to make me strangle him with his tie just before he came.”

“But I don’t
want
to choke you.”

“Wuss,” she said.

So I did it. I slapped her and called her names, even though all I really wanted to do was kiss her and stroke her and whisper her name. At the end, when she was really squirming and thrashing and her nipples were like little pebbles, I put my hands around her throat and squeezed with my thumbs. She came so hard her eyes rolled back in her head and I could feel her belly rippling under me. Then I exploded inside her so hard I blacked out, too, for a microsecond.

When I came around I could still hear my own yell echoing back from the far side of the canyon we’d almost fallen into earlier. Dusty lay under me, unmoving, her head turned to the side and her eyes closed. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
Oh, god, I killed her,
I thought.

Then her eyes fluttered open. “Oh, baby,” she said hoarsely. “Where have you been all my life?”

Which sounded kind of funny, her still being a couple weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

We woke at dawn, our sleeping bags drenched with dew. We squeezed them out, packed up, then ate our MacGuffins, which we’d saved for last. Dusty’s canteen was empty, so I gave her half of my water. In the daylight we could see the path we were on was a dead end, so we reversed course and started back up the trail in the direction we’d come.

We knew we’d have to hurry, because if the counselors hadn’t missed us yet, they would soon. But there was no question of hurrying when we reached the narrow, crumbly ledge that had nearly stopped us last night. It looked even scarier in the daylight, with the cliff rising straight up on one side of the ledge, which was only a foot or so wide, and falling straight down on the other, a drop of at least thirty feet just to the
tops
of the pine trees—lord only knows how far it was to the ground.

I went first, slide-stepping sideways with my belly pressed against the cliff wall and my pack trying to tug me backward. I told Dusty to wait for me, that I would put down my pack where the ledge widened, then come back for her. But she didn’t wait. I don’t know why, I guess I’ll never know why. All I know is, I had just dropped off my pack and was starting back for her when I heard the word
shit,
that’s all, just
shit,
followed by another one of those screams that will be with me until the day I die. Not that eerie
eeeeeee
Teddy had made, but a sad, falling
ohhhhhhhh.

After the scream came the sound of crackling, snapping branches as Dusty crashed into the evergreen canopy below. I thought, hoped, prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, that she had survived, that the branches had broken her fall. But when I got down on my stomach and peered over the ledge, I saw her body lying spread-eagled in the trees, her head thrown back and her arms and legs splayed out, as if she were floating on her back, bobbing on the surface of a dark green sea.

“Hold on,” I yelled. “I’m coming down, hold on.” But then her body jerked a couple times, and the branches shifted and swayed, and I saw the dark stain spreading across her Mountain Project T-shirt, just above her heart. The branches had broken her fall all right: Dusty had been impaled before she reached the ground.