The Raising (8 page)

13

I
t was not a dorm known for its great parties, to say the least, but there was a tradition in Godwin Honors Hall of throwing one big blowout the Friday night after midterms.

Craig had, himself, only one exam (Political Science) and a paper due (Great Books). He’d already tracked down on the Internet a “model” for the paper, and had begun to sketch out some tentative plans for the model’s rebirth as his own term paper. The Poli-Sci exam seemed like no big deal. He’d just make it a priority to go over the outline at the back of the book the morning before the test.

Apparently, his fellow students had harder schedules, or approached their studies differently. Beginning the weekend before midterms, Godwin had become a ghost hall, and Perry barely darkened the doorway of their room except to sleep for a few hours in the early morning before he was gone again.

(“Where you been, man?” Craig asked him in passing, to which Perry replied, “The library. Studying,” as if it were a given.)

Even the cafeteria was silent. Instead of the usual clusters, people sat separately, absentmindedly lifting forkfuls of eggs or baked beans to their mouths while staring intently into the textbooks open beside their plates. Craig watched as one kid accidentally speared the page of his book instead of the meatloaf on his plate, and then even brought the fork halfway to his mouth before realizing there was nothing on it.

Jesus Christ. No wonder his father had had to call on his old buddy Dean Fleming to get Craig into this place. These were not his people. They were an entirely different species. Back in Fredonia there’d been professional students, for sure, but theirs had been such a casual superiority that Craig never bothered to pay any attention to how they were doing it. They just waltzed out of their Advanced Placement courses fluttering the A-pluses on their exams, sauntered down the hallway to the meetings of the clubs they were presidents of, or grabbed their violins and headed off to the orchestra room.

That these Godwin Honors College kids worked so hard both frightened and puzzled Craig, and made it even more impossible for him to imagine, somehow, joining them at the library. So far the only thing he’d done at the library was check out an armload of CDs, which he’d downloaded to his laptop.

“Are we going to meet this week?” Craig asked as Perry stumbled past him on his way to the shower in the middle of midterm week.

“Huh?”

“Study group?”

“We’ve
been
meeting,” Perry said.

“When?” Craig asked.

“At the library,” Perry said. “
Constantly.
”

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” Craig asked.

“I don’t know,” Perry said. “I guess we figured if you wanted to study you’d be at the library.” The two of them looked at each other blankly, and then Perry grabbed his towel and was basically gone again until Friday night.

C
raig’s paper looked pretty good, he thought. He’d gone way out of his way to make sure no series of words in any given sentence could be Googled to reveal his source. He also thought his Political Science exam had gone well, though it concerned him a bit that he’d finished it so much more quickly than the other twenty-two students in the class, who were still chewing the erasers at the ends of their pencils as Craig handed his test in and grabbed his backpack (making as little noise as possible, but, still, a couple of girls on either side of his seat looked up from their papers and glared at him).

It had been a bright October afternoon. Blue sky, red and yellow leaves, green grass. A very distant and watery-looking half-moon was hanging over it all.

It was Thursday, so he went looking for Lucas, to get high. On Thursday afternoons they usually met in the arboretum with their stashes and smoked weed until it was time to go back to the hall for dinner, but this Thursday even Lucas seemed to be off somewhere studying, so Craig smoked up what he had alone, and then he went to Village Corners, flashed his fake ID at the fat man behind the counter, bought himself a fifth of Jack Daniels, and headed back to the deserted dorm.

He was feeling, for no reason he could pinpoint, the kind of vague depression he’d felt on and off for years, but which had lifted last summer (forever, he’d hoped). It had been bad, the few weeks right after graduation, when the sense that he should be happy, and proud of himself, somehow made him want to cry all the time (although he never did). It had been June, he’d graduated from high school, he was on his way to college, and his dad kept telling him he was going on to greatness and better things and should be excited, and the fact that he
wasn’t
happy, proud, or excited made his arms feel tired all the time, as if he were carrying around a big block of cement.

The first “episode,” as his family doctor would come to call these periods of depression, came on him when he was fourteen, in Belize. A famous movie director was trying to woo Craig’s dad into selling him the rights to his most successful novel,
The Jaguar Operation
, and it was supposed to be his dad’s special treat for Craig, taking just him along, leaving Craig’s mother and Scar in New Hampshire.

Craig was only partly fooled by this. He knew his mother hated going on these kinds of trips with his father. She hated the drinking, the schmoozing, the phony bonhomie
,
and the competition from younger women smitten with the famous writer, leaning across the dinner table with their silverware held high so that their cleavage practically spilled onto his plate. His mother would have turned down the invitation to Belize anyway, and Scar didn’t go anywhere without their mother unless he was forced.

Still, stepping out of the tiny jet that had been sent for them in Miami—just ahead of his father, a breeze wafting around them that was both fragrant and heavy with the smell of dead things rotting in seawater—when the famous director took off his straw hat and whooped, and an actress Craig recognized from a movie he’d seen the week before on HBO smiled with brilliant familiarity, Craig felt privileged, and thrilled.

He was the famous writer’s kid.

“Hey,” the director said, “you must be the famous kid!”

T
he Caribbean was an amazing blue backdrop to the director’s resort. Twenty thatched bungalows lined the beach, a kidney-shaped pool behind them, and green miles of jungle behind that. Smiling people with beautiful bodies sauntered around the sand paths in bright little bathing suits, sipping drinks. A few fat gray iguanas dragged their tails between the bungalows, and in the jungly distance Craig heard the screaming of crazed-sounding birds. While the director led his father around, Craig sat poolside downing one after another of the rum punches a grumpy Belizean man old enough to be Craig’s grandfather brought to him on a tray.

He was completely plastered by the time his father and the director came back, laughing companionably. The wind had picked up, and the thrashing of the jungle and the Caribbean surf together made a deafening roar around Craig’s head, pummeling his ears, making it impossible to hear the conversations taking place around him at the dinner table. The meal itself was one unrecognizable dish after another, spooned up by the same angry-seeming black man, whom the director called Handsome Man.

No one else seemed deafened by the wind. There was a beautiful young woman on either side of the director, and one sitting across from Craig’s father, and the conversations they were having seemed both lighthearted and intense, as if they could hear and understand one another. But even when the Belizean man leaned down and spoke directly into his ear, Craig had to ask three times before he understood:

“Are you finished? Will you want more? Cream sauce or broth?”

Craig’s father shouted across the table to him, “Fred here says if it’s not too windy tomorrow we’ll go out to the barrier reef and swim with the sharks. What do you think about that?”

Craig had somehow managed to hear this proposition. “Wow!” he said. “Yeah! Sure!”

The director and Craig’s father laughed.

“The boy wants to swim with the sharks!” The director raised his glass. The young women all laughed, and then stared at Craig for several seconds as their smiles faded. It was as if they’d just noticed he was there, that the fact of the writer’s adolescent son had just occurred to them, and that they weren’t necessarily happy about it.

Craig flushed. One of the women said something to him then, but over the wind he couldn’t hear it. He shrugged. She laughed again, even less enthusiastically. He looked down at his plate. It was gone.

He woke the next morning with a throbbing headache and had to lie very still under the thwacking ceiling fan, willing himself not to open his eyes until the bed had stopped spinning. He could hear the wind rattle the thatch overhead and the sound of waves crashing in the distance. He sat up and heaved, once, dryly, before getting his hand around a bottle of water on the nightstand and drinking it down. After he’d managed to stand for a minute or two on his rubbery legs, he wove his way out of the thatched hut to find his father sitting at a glass table with the director, the old black man pouring coffee into their cups.

“Are we going to swim with the sharks?” he asked.

Both Craig’s father and the director looked up. They had obviously been having a serious conversation, maybe a disagreement. Neither of them looked happy to see Craig.

“Sorry, kid. Too windy to get out there,” the director said, holding up his hand as if offering the wind for proof. Over the Belizean man’s head, a ferny tree was leaning so far over it looked like it would be torn up by the roots and blown into the sea.

Craig couldn’t help it: He was far from home, fourteen, hung over, and exhausted, and the idea of facing a long day alone at the side of the pool being waited on by the black man, deafened by the wind, ignored by the director and his women, eating little muscled things in coconut sauce, hit him like a punch in the gut. (Why had his father brought him here? Maybe, it occurred to Craig for the first time, simply to placate his mother, to make it seem less likely that he was going to the famous director’s resort in Belize for the attentions of the young women she knew would be there.) “Oh,
man
,” he whined.

A grim shadow passed over the director’s face. He said something to Craig that Craig couldn’t hear again over the wind, and then looked up at Craig’s father and said, more loudly, “Unless the Great American Writer here can do something about the wind!”

Craig’s father strained to smile. He looked up to the sky. He tapped his fingernails on the glass top of the table, something he did when he was being criticized by Craig’s mother, and then shouted, “Cease, wind! I command you!” The director guffawed and looked over at Craig with a genuine sneer.

I
t didn’t happen right away, but it happened.

Within a half hour, the air had grown eerily calm. Craig was sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring glumly out at the crashing surf, when suddenly the churning bath of the wind around his head stopped. A pelican that had been pumping its wings strenuously through the air over the ocean began to glide effortlessly, and Craig could hear again. There was hearty laughter coming from somewhere behind him, and he turned to see the director clapping his father on the back hard enough that the impact of it registered on his father’s face as annoyed surprise.

“Let’s go, Miracle Guys!”

T
he old black man drove the boat over the placid pale blue ocean while Craig’s father and the director drank beer in the back. They seemed no longer to be on speaking terms. Craig sat up front, and the ocean sprayed him in the face with a fine, spitty mist. The Belizean man cut the engine in what seemed to be simply an undefined spot in the middle of the Caribbean, specific nevertheless, and then he turned to Craig and nodded. “Here,” he said. “Put on your snorkel equipment.”

“Have fun, pal,” the director said, raising a brown bottle to him. “Been nice knowin’ ya!”

Craig’s father laughed, but looked uneasy. He stood up with his beer in his fist and looked over the edge of the boat, and Craig, struggling to pull his fins over his feet, felt his enthusiasm for swimming with sharks drain out of him as the Belizean man reached into a cooler, pulled out a handful of bloody fish pieces, and tossed them into the sea.

The chunks floated along the surface for a few seconds, and then there was a roiling of the water beneath them, and then they were gone, and Craig saw beneath the unearthly aqua blue two long black shadows, side by side, moving in awesome silence, each one longer than a tall man. The Belizean man threw another handful of fish into the water, and it never even floated, just disappeared in an instant into a mob of shadows.

“Is this safe?” Craig’s father asked the Belizean man, who shrugged his bony shoulders.

The director said, “I’ve done it myself a million times. Never even been nipped.”

There was, Craig realized now, something sinister about the director.

(Was it possible that the irises of his eyes had no pupils?)

Craig looked away from him, swallowed, put on his snorkeling mask, and stood, but his father reached out and took him by the arm. “Whoa, wait a second there, son,” he said.

“Let him go!” the director shouted. “The boy wants to swim with the sharks!”

It was then that Craig understood what was going on, that the director had cast him in a role: impetuous, spoiled, foolhardy boy.

The sharks rose closer to the surface of the water again, their shadows made of flesh circling over and around one another, and Craig instinctively took a step back, into his father’s arms.

“Forget it, son,” his father said. “You don’t need to do this. I won’t let you do this.”

Craig turned around, and the Belizean man was looking at him with an expression that was impossible to read.

“Let’s go,” his father said, and the Belizean man started the boat, and Craig sat back down and took his flippers off.

B
ack at the resort, he drank rum punch by the side of the pool until everyone else had gone to bed, and got so drunk that the stars seemed to be blowing around in the completely windless black air over him, like moths or silvery ashes. He got up to replenish his punch only to find that someone had locked up the tiki bar, so he stood with his empty plastic cup under the stars and listened to the calm, distant pounding of the surf against its barriers. He tilted his head back and tried to drink the very last drops from his empty cup, lost his balance in the sand, and fell on his ass with a soft thud, and then he sat there for a few minutes and laughed at himself, held up the plastic cup to the stars the way the director had raised his beer bottle to him back on the boat. “Been nice knowin’ ya!” he shouted, and waited for an echo.