Hatch and I camped last night along the Sycamore River, getting blitzed despite ourselves. Claire passed out early, so she’s the first one up along with her boyfriend, Derek Candela, a former Prepster and teammate of Bobbie the hockey player. That’s Empire Ridge for you. We don’t like to wander too far from our usual fishing holes. We decide to hit the Waffle House south of the livery.
“This World Famous Pecan Waffle isn’t sitting too well in my stomach, fellas.” Claire backs away from the table. “Can you excuse a girl while she goes and splashes some water on her face?”
I help her with her chair. “Sure thing, darlin.”
Twenty-two years old, in her red spaghetti-strap tank top and jean shorts, Claire sticks out in a diner of old truckers and farmhands. Even hungover, she owns the room.
Claire and Derek have been a semi-casual couple for about a year now. I like Derek, even though he’s known for getting drunk and playing “dick games.” For example, I might be standing around a pool or a bar, meanwhile Derek will pull his penis out of his shorts. “Hey, Hank!” he’ll shout. Then I’ll turn, unable to prevent myself from looking straight at his penis, to which Derek says, “Stop looking at my dick, you fag.”
Derek leans over the table. “I got a secret, Hank.”
“Oh yeah?” I wipe some syrup off my face, then flag the waitress. “More coffee, please.”
Derek shakes his head. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Telling me what?”
“I know somebody who likes you.” Derek smirks. He’s one of those hairy missing-link types, with a thick black mop for a head and dark tufts sticking out of the neckline of his shirt. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Elvis, whom he worships. There’s a flea market about halfway between the livery and Waffle House. Claire and I had to talk Derek out of a hundred dollar bejeweled velvet painting of the King. “A Velvis with real rhinestones,” he said. “How can I pass that up?”
“Spit it out, Derek.”
“She’s a buddy of yours, a buddy of mine, and a very close acquaintance of Claire’s.”
“No way.”
“Then you know?”
“Well, I saw Beth earlier in the summer at a softball game. I even invited her to one of these canoe trips, but she’s kinda been blowing me off ever since, so I figured—”
“Bingo,” Derek interrupts.
“Seriously?” I say.
“Seriously. She’s wanted to ask you out since the beginning of the summer. Everyone in Empire Ridge knows she likes you. She’s never stopped liking you.”
“Even if I concede there’s still something there between us, what about The Tool?”
Derek places his hand on my shoulder. “Hank, my brother from another mother, do I really have to convince you of your chances against a guy nicknamed ‘The Tool?’”
“I guess she did leave a message at my mom’s house last week.”
“I know she did.”
“Something about getting together to see a movie.”
“You return her call?”
“Didn’t get the message until a few days after the fact. My mom and I aren’t on the same page right now.”
“But did you return Beth’s call?”
“No. I didn’t even recognize her voice on the answering machine at first. I thought she was just trying to get a group of us together.”
“Well done, dumbass.”
“Fuck off. I still say you’re shitting me.”
“I’m not shitting you, and don’t tell Claire I told you.”
A little over eight miles long, the Sycamore River is a small offshoot of the White River. Sycamores stand as living and dead sentries along the river’s edge, breaking off and drifting downstream, hence the river’s obvious name. For years, drunken Empire Ridge kids have plied these not-so-treacherous waters in vessels of battered aluminum and fiberglass.
Today is one of those days.
“Hank!” Derek stands up in his canoe, which he shares with Claire. “Pass the fucking Jägermeister over here, you pussy!”
Hatch and I share the other canoe. I haven’t started drinking yet. I can still feel the Waffle House World Famous Pecan Waffle sitting in my stomach, but it’s starting to settle. I’ve brought a twelve-pack of Natty Light, but I need to catch up.
“Wait your fucking turn!” I shout, unscrewing the cap off the Jäger. I take a long, aggressive pull.
Derek raises his fist in the air. “Now that’s what I’m fucking talking about.”
I pass the Jäger over to Derek and Claire. I sit in the front of the canoe, dipping my paddle in the water every third or fourth stroke so as to maintain the illusion I’m contributing to our forward motion.
Hatch is doing most of the work. “I can’t believe you’re drinking the hard stuff already.”
The licorice taste settles at the back of my throat. My cheeks puff out as I puke inside my mouth. It’s just a small puke, one of those you swallow back down and try to pass off as a cough.
“You aren’t going to believe a lot of things, today.” My voice is gravelly with stomach acid.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hatch says.
“Derek told me Beth wants me.”
“Beth Burke?”
“No, Beth Ehlers.”
“Who’s that?”
“The actress who plays Harley in Guiding Light. Of course, it’s Beth Burke, dumbass.”
“What’s she want you for?”
“For a date. Beth wants to go out with me on a date.”
“You and Beth…dating?”
“Don’t get carried away,” I say. “There’s a difference between a date and dating.”
Hatch mumbles something under his breath. Or it might be the shot of Jägermeister I just swallowed rendering me temporarily deaf. Jesus, that shit is nasty.
“What’d you say, Hatch?”
“I said that if you guys last the rest of the summer I’ll give you my fucking truck.”
Hatch isn’t offering much. He owns a year-old teal-green Ford Ranger rear-wheel drive pickup that has a four-cylinder engine, the towing capacity of a one-legged Shetland Pony, and a tendency to careen off the road if you so much as ask for extra ice at a fast-food drive-thru.
“Keep your truck, dickhead,” I say.
I force down four more shots of Jägermeister over the next mile and a half of river. Predictably, we fall behind Derek and Claire’s canoe. We catch up to them at the exact wrong time.
“Oh shit.” I try look away but not soon enough.
Hatch is also caught off-guard. “What, Fitzy?”
“It’s Derek.”
“Dick games?”
“Dick games. Looks like Helicopter Man.”
We’re in a shallow area. Hatch beaches the canoe on a patch of loose gravel. “I hate fucking Helicopter Man.”
Derek has been drinking basically since the Waffle House. Claire sits in the front of the canoe. Derek just took a piss, and now he’s standing up in the back of the canoe, his shorts down to his knees. Three canoes float by, including an older couple scarred for the short remainder of their lives. Derek has a beer in his left hand, a cigarette in his right hand, and in the middle hangs his naked, semi-hard phallus for the whole world to see.
First Derek moves his hips in a circle, sending his dick in a counter-clockwise spiraling motion. “Helicopter Man!”
Next he rotates each hip forward and back, his dick flipping from right to left. “Ping Pong, Ping Pong, Ping Pong!”
Then he rocks his hips forward and back, his dick flopping up and hitting him in the belly then going back between his legs and hitting him in the balls. “Jai Alai, Jai Alai!”
Claire is embarrassed, right up to the moment Derek talks her into flashing him. She thinks no one notices. We all notice. Her breasts are small but nice.
It’s getting well into the afternoon. Our flotilla is crawling the last mile to the livery. Hatch has stopped trying to steer, letting the current spin us in circles. Every movement in our canoe is telegraphed by the shuffling of a carpet of empty aluminum cans.
Hatch throws an empty beer can at me.
“Jesus, Hatch. Do you have to be a constant fucking roughhouser?”
He ignores me, throwing another beer can at my face. “You going, Fitzy?”
“Going where?”
“Off the bridge.”
A century-old railroad line runs through Empire Ridge. That line crosses the Sycamore in the form of a rusted iron truss bridge just northeast of the canoe livery. About twenty-five, maybe thirty feet separates the water from the railroad tracks. We’ve made the jump numerous times. It’s harmless, assuming you avoid the rocks and tangles of tree roots you can’t see beneath the Sycamore’s tawny surface.
We float under the bridge. I look up, smiling. “How about I jump off the top, Hatch?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
I’ve seen one person do it before. You climb the actual ironworks to the top of the bridge. It doubles the height from track level. This is the jump that kills people.
I find the idea of it irresistible.
We beach our two canoes at the base of the bridge on the west bank of the Sycamore. I start climbing. My right hand moves from one tree root or sapling to the next, careful to avoid the thorns of the boysenberry bushes that have naturalized along the embankment. I reach the level of the train tracks.
The hot, sticky creosote smell hits me with the force of memory. Memories of walks with Grandpa George. The railroad ties baking in the sun. The crickets chirping. The boysenberry bushes. I don’t believe in messages from the grave. But if I did, somebody is talking my fucking ear off.
Hatch has followed me up. “You know, you don’t have to do this. It’s still quite a ways up there to the top.”
I follow his eyes to the top of the bridge. “I don’t have to do this, but I need to do this.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
Hatch jumps, but I keep climbing. I move quickly, the rusted iron hot enough to burn bare flesh. The rivets and joints give secure footing all the way up, although I cut myself in a half-dozen places. The chants of “Go! Go! Go!” urge me forward.
I reach the top. The air is heavy, motionless save for the waves of visibly humid heat coming off the bridge. That’s what air does in July in Indiana—it hands you a wet fur coat and says, “Enjoy!”
My knees are shaking. I make the mistake of looking down. What’s the rate of descent for a near-two-hundred–pound object from this height? I used to know this type of shit in high school. I want to say your weight doesn’t fucking matter, something along the lines of your velocity in feet per second is equal to the distance you had already fallen. Fifty, sixty miles an hour—that sounds about right. Fuck. This is going to hurt.
My arms at my side, I turn my back to the water. I bend my knees, springing up and out from the bridge. I do a back flip with my eyes open. I see the bridge, the sky, the river, and then the bridge again. The fall is fast. My stomach is in my throat. The wind rushes through my ears.
I hit the water.
The force of the impact twists my right ankle, wrenches my arms up over my head like they’re made of rubber. A huge booming sound slaps my ears as the water closes over the top of my head. It feels like somebody has punched me in the face.
I hit bottom.
There aren’t any tree limbs or rocks. But my feet are stuck in the thick, unyielding mud.
I try to push off the bottom with both feet. My bad ankle lets me know what it thinks about that. I’m stuck a good fifteen feet below the surface of the Sycamore.
And I’m running out of air.
“Swim, Hank. Swim goddammit!”
It’s a disembodied voice. My father, maybe? Jesus back to annoy the fuck out of me? Whoever it is, I listen. I open my eyes to try and see. I’m surrounded on all sides by a green-brown darkness. A ribbon of yellow, heaven-like haze dapples overhead.
A cascade of bubbles roll out of my mouth as I scream underwater, wasting precious oxygen. I swallow a mouthful of river water. As my panic begins to acquiesce to resignation, I give one last kick with my good left foot.
It’s out! I’ve managed to dislodge my left foot from the muck. I bend down, grabbing my sprained ankle with both hands. I heave my injured foot out of the mud. Reaching, I clap my hands together as if I was an angel praying, or Susanna Hoffs walking like an Egyptian. My arms doing all of the work as I rise up. The water burns my lungs.
I break the surface to the cheers of my friends. Dirty river water and bile shoots out my mouth in multiple heaves as I crawl ashore. My ankle is already swollen. My shoulders hurt. My ears are ringing. My face is warm just above my lips, the blood pouring out of my nose.
Someone once told me your body forces you to awaken from dreams of jumping off high places before you land, because the psychological trauma of landing can kill you.
Today I landed. Death took its best shot at me, and it pussied out.
Or did it? As much as I might want this to be some type of Messianic bookend to these last few years, my sins washed away in the muddy shallows of the Sycamore River, life just isn’t that perfect.
I forgot to take my wallet out of my shorts when I jumped off the bridge. There’s your fucking bookend, and it isn’t Messianic. It sucks.
Somewhere on the bottom of the Sycamore River, folded alongside my driver’s license, my college ID, and the last seven dollars I had to my name, my faceless belly dancer is drowning alone.