The Sledding Hill (8 page)

I
'm sitting on top of the furnace, which I don't recommend for living people, watching my dad read the last pages of
Warren Peece
to the “dregs” of Bear Creek High School. Ms. Lloyd stands in the back of the room, following along in her copy. It has to be ninety-five degrees in here, and not one kid is asleep. Good book.

“The end,” Dad says, and slams the book shut. “We did it. We're gonna get in big trouble, but we did it.” The room is filled over capacity. Word
spread that the book no one was supposed to read was being read in the catacombs after school, and more kids showed every day.

There is a round of applause. Half the kids in this room have never finished a book.

“Tell you guys what. When the school board hearing comes around, it's not going to matter what the adults have to say. Most of our minds are made up, and all you have to do is walk into the supermarket to get our opinions. What will matter is what
you
say. Most of you know YFC is going to come out strong against the book. That group is made up of some of the best students and a few of the better athletes. I don't see that kind of star power in this room, no offense. If you guys are going to win this one, you're gonna have to do it with smarts.”

I can feel the incredulity index increase tenfold. We're going to take on Dan Moeltke with brainpower??? bounces around the room like a Ping-Pong
ball. That's like taking on Stephen Hawkings in
Jeopardy
, where all the categories are astrophysics. Actually I'm the only one who thinks that, but if I'm actually going to get this story published, I have to take some creative license.

“I can hear what you're thinking,” Dad says, “but you're wrong. There's as much brainpower in this room as anywhere in the school. You guys have been listening too much to your own press.”

“So how do we go about this?” Debbie Simmons asks. Debbie is a mousy girl who has probably read as many books as the rest of the kids in the room combined. Reading is about all Debbie does.

“You get organized,” Dad says. “You get a statement drawn up, and you choose someone to deliver it. Someone with flair. Someone who isn't afraid to stand up to Dan Moeltke in a debate.”

Montana West's eyes light up. “I'll read it,” she says. “Oh, jeez, Mr. Bartholomew, let me read it. Wouldn't that be so cool? Have my dad get up there
and say all the crap he's going to say, then I'll come right behind him telling the whole school board how he's so full of—”

“Let us use our imaginations on how that sentence ends,” Dad says. “Anyone have a problem with Montana reading your statement?”

Montana West is unanimously elected reader of the nonreaders' statement.

“And Montana,” Dad says as the group is breaking up, “might I suggest that no matter what you think your father is full of, if it's in any way scatological, delete it. Remember, people, they'll be looking for reasons to discount what you have to say. Three of the board members are also members of the Red Brick Church board. That puts you at a decided disadvantage.”

Like I said before, if you were going to call up the perfect prototype for the daughter Maxwell West did not order, Montana is the one you'd come up with. Goth kids call her Goth. Black clothes,
enough chains to start a towing company. One of many tattoos she got with her fake ID is a bird pulling a worm out of her belly button. Her preferred reading list is made up entirely of graphic novels, her idea of the perfect dreamboat is Donnie Darko, and though she played connect-the-dots all over her last IQ test with black crayon, she's smarter than they get. She knows KO?N so well she can sing all their songs backward. She is also
way
decent when it comes to people who are like I used to be. She'll see somebody sitting alone in the lunchroom and just go over and sit down and start a conversation, like that person matters as much as Dan Moeltke. When she talks to you, you just light up.

But pick a conversation, any conversation, between Montana and Maxwell, and you get something like this.

“You're not going out like that, young lady.”

“Like what?”

“Dressed like the devil himself.”

“The devil doesn't look like this, Maxwell. The devil wears a red suit and has horns and a three-pronged pitchfork. I'm dressed more like your standard small-time cult follower. Or a school shooter.”

“Don't you be disrespectful with me, young lady. I am your father, not ‘Maxwell.' You will address me as such.”

“I won't be disrespectful if you won't be disrespectful.”

“What's that supposed to mean? What have you done lately that deserves respect?”

“Well, let's see. I have a three-point-seven-nine grade point average. I made the debate team last year. I got my driver's license and I haven't wrecked the car hardly at all—”

“What?!”

“Just kidding, Maxwell. I haven't wrecked it at all.”

“And you do nothing but embarrass me. You are not going out with all those piercings, looking like some lady of the evening.”

“You mean like a prostitute?”

“Yes, I mean like a prostitute.”

Montana goes to the living-room mirror and strikes a pose. “You really think so, Maxwell? How much do you think I'd go for?”

“You little trollop. You get to your room, you're not going anywhere tonight. You will learn to respect the rules in my house, or you will suffer the consequences.”

Montana keeps baiting him, and Mr. West gets madder and madder until he's ready to strike her, and then she moves right into his face and says, “Go ahead, Maxwell. Then I'll turn the other cheek and you can hit that one, too,” and it usually stops. One time it didn't, which is why Montana is able to get away with it. Maxwell West was so horrified that he struck his daughter in the face, albeit with an open hand, that she sometimes gets away with murder. It was the day after that incident that she got the worm tattoo. A good whack carries with it a lot of capital.

They love each other; I mean, if one of them died, the other one would be
way
sorry, but neither expects the other one to do that soon, so they fight like gladiators. Tell you what, Maxwell West is a smart guy, but if I were he (dead guys know good grammar), the one person I'd stay out of a verbal squabble with is his daughter.

 

“Okay, time to get down to the truth. Billy Bartholomew, is this really you?

“O ye of little faith. You need to hear more Russian?”

“How crazy does this make me?”

“No crazier than you already were.”

“I need to know all I can know,” Eddie says.

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

“Was that you on the courthouse lawn telling me to come in out of the rain?

“In the flesh,” I tell him. “Well, in the spirit.”

“So I wasn't crazy.”

“Well, you did run out into the stormy night in your pajama bottoms with no shoes on.”

“You know what I mean.”

He runs, letting me sink in, allowing himself to believe a little, then a little more. And I feel the moment his faith kicks in. He's been close before, but now he simply decides it doesn't matter if I'm “real” or not. I'm there, he's talking to me, case closed. He says, “Why did you come back?”

“Actually, I never left, but I'm here because of you. You're my friend, and you'll always be my friend. We're connected into eternity. Dead or alive. I didn't want you to waste the rest of your teenage years brooding and grieving and wondering why just because two of the people you cared about most were too absentminded to stay in the game. And I wanted you to know everything turns out okay, so you don't have to be afraid, and you can do what you need to do whenever you need to do it.”

“I really don't like you being so confident and everything,” he says. “That's all backward.”

He runs farther, speeding up, working for that clarity. “I can't figure out exactly why the book thing is so important to me.”

“Want me to tell you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Because it's about freedom. A guy out there writes a story and it moves your teacher and she decides to see if it moves the kids. It does; some, anyway. It's not a classic; it's not a Bible, but it's a story told by a guy who wants to get his little piece of truth out there. You recognize it, you feel the connection, and then somebody tries to take it away from you. So you get hacked off because they're messing with your freedom. It could be any book, you know. Freedom is a birthright.”

“Do you know Chris Crutcher? I mean, now that you're dead?”

“I know anybody I want to know.”

“What's he like? I mean, what would he think about all this?”

“He'd love it. It happens a lot, and even though
he's an old guy, he's kind of arrested in his teenage years. Likes a good fight. He was a lot like you in school; had a hard time paying attention and was in trouble a lot for opening his mouth without raising his hand or thinking. He isn't as smart as you are, and not as spiritual. He could never connect to me like this, but he could connect to you. Takes him forever to write a book because every thought leads to a whole bunch of other thoughts that have nothing to do with the story he's telling. But he finally gets them out there.”

“So he's worth fighting for?” Eddie says. He's running easy now, in that zone where he could run forever. I'm glad I'm dead and just floating beside him, because if I were alive I'd be into third-degree oxygen debt.

“This isn't about him, Eddie. You know that. Chris Crutchers are a dime a dozen. And it's only a little bit about you. Heck, you've already read the book. It's about freedom, with a little ‘f'. You live in a free country, at
least relatively speaking. I can go back into the heads of the people who created it, and what I can tell you is that they wanted the little freedoms, the ones that affected them in the moment. It's easy to go back in history books and look at the big picture, see the larger philosophies and all that. But people do things in their regular lives that affect them right then. The big stuff is little and the little stuff is big. If you don't make your stand here, you'll make it later, you're wired that way, but there will always be people who are afraid, who will try to take your freedom. They'll tell you what to be afraid of and how to be afraid, and they'll tell you if you follow them they'll keep you safe.”

“But I won't be safe, will I?”

“You got it, buddy.”

“I'll always be scared, because I'll be waiting around for them to tell me what else to be afraid of. Like Tarter and the YFC want everyone to be afraid of
Warren Peece.”

“Right. If you let them take this one thing away, you
give them the right to take everything. It's about freedom, man.”

Eddie stops and turns toward me—I mean directly toward me, though I only weigh twenty-one grams and can't be seen. He knows exactly where I am. “Are you going to stay with me?” he asks.

“Not much longer.”

His shoulders slump.

“You won't need me,” I tell him. “You're way farther along than I am, Eddie. I won't leave until you say it's okay, how about that?”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” I say back. “Everything's under your control. Actually that's true for everyone; most people just don't know it.

He starts running again. “Tell me about Tarter,” he says.

“He's not nearly as scary as we thought,” I say back. “Tell you this, he's never done anything to anyone half as tough as was done to him. Relatively speaking, he's
evolving nicely. Just remember: He's scared and he can't afford for anyone to see that. He's not the enemy. His ideas are the enemy. He's doing his best.”

“So I should be nice to him?”

“Be however you need to be to do what feels right. He signed up for the game, too, and it's not your job to make his game easier. Your job is to tell your truth. That's everybody's job.”

“Even Chris Crutcher?”

“Yeah, he's doing his best, too. I said, he's not as smart as you.”

For a moment I hear only the even slap of his shoes on the dusty trail and the rhythm of his breathing. “Is he scared, too?”

“He's scared, too. But he's not scared to tell his stories. That's probably the only place he's not scared.”