Upright Beasts (11 page)

“I not jumping in that.”

“You can scamper down the side there to a ten-foot ledge.”

A hot cloud of smoke blew into my face.

“Fine,” I said, pulling off my shirt.

Across the gap there were a few teenagers, two guys and a girl. The boys were doing flips into the water while the girl cheered them on while looking at her phone.

“Eight point five for Aiden.” I could just make out the girl shouting.

“That was a goddamn ten!”

I looked back at Natasha rubbing sunscreen on Emily's pink cheeks. I took off my shoes and stepped up to the ledge. The heat was pulling the sweat out of my skin. I tried to remember the technique for jumping thirty feet into water. I knew I had to keep my arms straight up, but I couldn't remember if I was supposed to knife my toes into the water or break the surface tension with my soles. It felt as if I was standing there for a long time, staring down into the bright blue water. The walls of the cliff still contained rectangular cuts on the otherwise smooth surface. The water below was making me thirsty.

“Get a move on, dick nut!”

Across the way, I saw one of the teenagers, a small boy with black hair, with his hands cupped around his mouth. The other one high-fived him. They were drinking beer and laughing the cheap laugh of idleness. I turned around and gave a wave to the baby and Natasha. She didn't look up from her book. I flipped off the teenagers and held it long enough to sink in, then stepped off the cliff.

The water was the same color as the sky. When I jumped in, I felt like a fly hurtling toward a bottle of Windex. The water was shockingly warm. It must have been cooking there in the Virginia sun. I let myself plunge into the warmth and held my breath, curled in a fetal ball. I looked around and couldn't see anything at all. Not a fish, rock, or weed in sight. No nature at all, only sunlight stabbing through the blue.

I stayed down there until I felt a splash in front of me and saw a stalactite of bubbles form. I rose to the surface and saw the dark-haired boy swimming toward me.

“You trying to show me up in front of my girl, old man?”

“Fuck off,” I said and kicked water in his face to swim away. I was dog-paddling when his arms gripped my ribs from behind. He crawled onto my shoulders and pushed me down under the water.

I couldn't see anything except bubbles. He was on top of me, and my face was pushed against his abdomen. I tried punching him in the ribs, but the water slowed down my fists to the point where I felt like a small child trying to beat up his father.

I hit him impotently a few more times, and he let me up. His friends were whooping as he held his arms in a victory formation.

I backstroked toward my side of the cliff, watching them. There was a low ledge, and I pulled myself up. I sat there breathing for a minute. My wife was calling me, but I couldn't hear
what she was saying. I coughed up a bit of water. My breath was still hard, yet I felt peaceful. A small bird hopped around the rocks in front of me. I took a warm, fist-sized rock in my hand, stood up, and chucked it at the kid's head. For a while in high school I'd been a middle reliever on the varsity team, until practice interfered with partying. But I still had my arm.

The rock glanced off his head, and the boy limply went under.

“Jayden!” the girl shouted. I looked up at her, but she didn't seem to notice me. The teenager surfaced a few seconds later, the water turning pink around his neck.

I looked up the cliff wall and began to climb. It was covered with small chips of stone that spilled down past me. The dirt stuck to my wet body. My fingers dug painfully into the rock, but I had the adrenaline of a young man pumping through me. The climb only took me a few minutes, even though I sliced open my palm on a rock. When I reached the top, Natasha and the baby were smiling in the shade.

“How is water?”

“Hot,” I said.

I looked over and didn't see the other boy and girl. Only a six-pack of beer and small piles of clothes sitting on towels. I walked back to the edge and saw the two others near the water with the third. He seemed to be all right. He was sitting on a rock and cradling his head. The second boy pointed at me with his mouth open. Then he dove into the water, swimming freestyle across. He was a smooth missile in the water, like a pink barracuda. I watched him climb up, pointing and shouting at me every few feet. He had hair like wet wheat, and his body seemed to be one throbbing muscle. It was the kind of body I'd had once, before the butter, beer, and sloth turned me squishy and tired.

“Dead man!”

“What is happening?” my wife asked. She was walking toward me with a towel.

“You know. Kids,” I shrugged.

I squeezed my bleeding palm into a fist so Natasha wouldn't notice. I thought about how easy it would be to toss another rock. There was even a good jagged one by my foot, but the way Natasha was looking at me felt like a warning. Like it would be a cowardly image that would sink into Emily's little brain and alter what I was to her.

Natasha handed me the towel and draped her arm over my shoulder. Her cigarette was hovering above my nipple.

“What the hell is he doing?”

I shrugged. The kid was working his way up the cliff. “Dead man!” he kept shouting.

“What you say to him?”

I could hear the little rock chips falling down the cliff as the teenager climbed.

I turned away from the kid and looked at Natasha. The sun was bright on her face. She looked frightened, and I wanted to hold her tightly and kiss her there on the ledge. Then I realized I had misjudged something. Natasha's eyes narrowed.

“Do not let him to speak like that,” she said. “Beat his ass!”

Natasha glared down at the boy, her own hands curling into fists. What had seemed dreadful and unavoidable seconds before was suddenly exciting. Blood pulsed its way around my skull, getting me ready. I bent down and picked up the largest rock I could find. I could feel Natasha's eyes moving over me, perhaps seeing a new me hidden inside the old, like the nesting dolls she kept on top of our fridge.

The teenager was only about three feet from the lip.

“Go cover Emily's eyes,” I said. I flexed my hand around the rock and cocked my arm back into position.

But just then, right before the moment could be completed for everyone, a gunshot whistled above the quarry. A sharp, short sound that reset the whole scene.

“Shit!” the teen said, stopping his ascent. He was just high enough to pull his head level with the ground and glance around for a second before diving back toward the other side.

Natasha's arms were wrapped tightly around my chest. “What the fuck?” she screamed. She let go and ran to Emily.

“I don't know,” I said, jogging after her. “A farmer used to own this land. He would always scare us off when we came.”

Natasha turned to me with yet another look on her face. “You take our baby to place farmers shoot kids?”

“I figured he was dead by now.”

The teenagers had made their way up to their clothes and were running off. The dark-haired boy held his T-shirt to the back of his head.

Natasha had Emily and was marching away. I gathered up our stuff and cradled it in my arms. We had two more states to drive through, and I was dreading the rest of the ride. I followed them across the field while the teenagers sprinted past us on the other side. One of them stopped and quickly tossed a rock that whizzed past my leg, then ran to catch up with the others.

“All right,” I shouted to Natasha. “You get to pick the next stop. Deal?”

A rusty
ATV
came rolling over the hill, driven by an old man in a blue baseball cap. Natasha stopped and I caught up with her. A cloud of dust followed the
ATV
down the hill. The man pulled in front of us and flipped off the motor, a .22 rifle leaning beside him.

“You the kids leaving beer cans all over the place? Think you can treat someone else's property like a garbage dump?”

“Do we look like kids?” my wife said.

The old man had the gun clutched in his hands. He started to get off of the
ATV
. “Wait a minute, you Steve Morris's kid?” He pulled the faded baseball cap off his head and scratched at the white hairs beneath.

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Well shit, I thought so. I used to chase you off this place 'bout every month back in the day.”

I tried to let out a friendly laugh. Natasha looked back and forth between us, and Emily grabbed at Natasha's long blond hair.

“Even had you in jail once. Your daddy had to come and bail you out. And now you're starting a family of your own, I see?”

“Yep.”

The old man put his face in front of Emily's and stuck out his withered tongue. Emily giggled.

“Well, I hope you raise it better than your pa raised you.” He laughed again, then sat back down and turned the motor on. “Do say hi to your pa when you see him.”

My father had been dead for two years—done in by a heart attack in the middle of the freeway—but I smiled and said, “You bet. I'm sure he'll get a real kick out of it. I'll tell him first thing!”

Natasha and I watched him drive off and then headed back to the car. The sun was hidden by a cloud, and the temperature felt comfortably warm. I put my arm around Natasha, and she shrugged me off. I was feeling all right though, as if I had fought in a noble war and been sent home before being blown apart or disfigured for life. When we got to the car, there was a long key mark down the left side.

We strapped the baby in the back and rolled down the windows, Natasha putting another cigarette between her beautiful lips. Suddenly I remembered: Carrington Smith. That was the
farmer's name, although when I had known him he'd been fat and mean, and now the years had eaten away at him until he was thin and kind. I had a lot of years to go before I got to that state though.

We pulled back onto the road. I turned up the radio and let the muggy air wash over me. I knew an ice cream and fireworks shack a half hour more down the road, if it was still there. Might be just the kind of place to take a wife and child.

SOME NOTES ON MY BROTHER'S BRIEF TRAVELS

1.

I
don't know. My little brother just got sick of town, tossed a few things in the car, and drove across the country to an old mining town in the mountains of Colorado. He drove straight there in about twenty-eight hours, stopping five times in four states for coffee and gas station sandwiches.

There isn't much else to say about that.

He got to town in the early afternoon and slept for half a day. For the next three months, he walked around photographing the dusty maws of abandoned mines.

Then he came back.

2.

The first thing my brother Foster noticed when he reached the mining town was a man in a chicken costume dancing in the late morning haze. It was a big foam costume, the full football mascot treatment. The man was holding a sign for a regional fast-food chain in one hand and flapping the other in mock flight. It was the kind of soggy, gray day you get in the mountains. Everything was covered in some kind of sad cloud.

My brother had been driving, as I've said, for twenty-eight hours, and his body had reached that special combination of no sleep, caffeine, and a stomach full of salted snacks that makes you
believe it's possible you might never die. The man in the chicken costume was at an intersection where the main road turned off into a gravel road that wound up the mountain. It seemed as if the whole world might dissolve into gray for all time, then suddenly this dazzling yellow figure emerged from the fog.

You have to remember that this was during the recession, and people were taking whatever job they could get.

3.

I can't say if it was because of a girl or not. My brother and I are close in our way, but we don't talk about certain things. Neither of us is good at communicating. Foster called me once during his exodus, and I e-mailed him a few times, links to amusing news stories I'd seen or thoughts about upcoming films we were both interested in. Then, of course, I visited him near the end. My father had amassed a decent number of frequent-flier miles that were going to expire, and he had been bugging me to use them. It seemed like a good enough reason, and anyway, I myself was having issues with a woman that could only be solved by distance.

My guess is that our hometown felt used up to my brother. He had lived there his whole life. We grew up on the outskirts, moved to the center as teenagers, and he had gone to college there as well. Not me. I fled to the big city up north as soon as I could. But my brother bounced around trying to decide what to do with his life before he finally left town. It was a university town stuck in the center of North Carolina. Even growing up, there wasn't much to do except sneak into frat parties or hang out at the cafés and record stores dotting the edge of campus. What I'm trying to say is we'd already done the local college experience in high school, so I can imagine how repetitive life was starting to feel for my
brother. After graduation, Foster spent the next few years trying to avoid our parents, who were still in town, and his old friends, whose successes made him feel angry and alone.