For Homecoming that year the Boosters made a gigantic bonfire on the football field. They put up crepe paper and paper flowers like it was a prom, and hired a band, and the mayor was there, and a state representative, and more journalists than was good for a town like ours. Tables of cold cuts and loaves of bread were laid out under the half moon. Vats of pink punch sat unprotected from the surreptitious flasks of revelers. Dogs raced and barked between people’s legs. Baby sisters and brothers toddled in the long grass. The team was got up in our red and gold varsity sweaters, each with a golden cardboard crown on our head to underline the truth that we were the kings of the world. The principal threw a football to Coach and Coach threw it to Vince and Vince threw it to some pretty girl in the crowd. She caught it, and that seemed to all a fine omen. Speeches broke out here, old time fight songs and alma maters. They sang the UT alma mater because everyone thought Vince was going there. It was wonderful. Carmen made sure to maneuver herself and her hair and Vince as close to the bonfire as they could, to make sure of being perpetually in the light. Andy parked his patrol car at the edge of the firelight. He’d say it was to give everyone a sense of security, but it was actually so he could drink in the excitement, the innocence, the great fire that was not a city burning.
Lightning flashed way off to the west. It would take a while to get to us, if it came at all.
The punch was spiked like mad. Each spiker thought he was the first. We had more than we actually wanted, lifting the tin cups higher and higher, to savor the image of ourselves drinking to a stupor barefaced before teachers and parents.
At some point, Glen walked out of the crowd. Sherry saw him and elbowed me. I was afraid at first, but the look on him was beneficent. The glow of hero-worship beamed from his face when he looked at Vince, but in that he was no different from anybody else in the milling crowd. What was different is that he walked up to Vince in the scarlet and golden firelight, pushed Carmen gently to one side, and kissed him on the lips.
For a moment it looked like it was going to be all right. The part of the crowd that could see Vince and Glen fell silent in the first seconds, but here and there tinkled forth a titter of laugher, and it could have been that everyone would laugh it off as some drunken overstatement of enthusiasm, even a kind of nerd satire. There was not a man in the school who didn’t want to kiss Vince that night. I couldn’t imagine what thoughts were coursing through their minds, either of them. I held my breath. I saw Vince come to a decision. He pulled back his bullet-pass right arm and slugged Glen in the face. Glen staggered and went down on one knee. Over all the sounds of bonfire and reveling and the tentative upsurge of laughter, Vince shouted, “YOU GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, YOU QUEER!”
The team closed in around Vinny as though he had been in danger. One lifted Glen up to his knees; another gut-punched him so he fell backward into the dust again. This wasn’t going to stop. Another picked him up. A heavy foot launched toward Glen’s chest. A line began to form. The laughter stopped.
My mom had a cat named Randy who could vanish into thin air. He’d do something wrong, and you’d go to swat at him, and he’d disappear. You’d be looking where he was, and suddenly he was not. Turned to atoms. Glen did that. At some point when the team paused to take a breath, I saw him get up from the ground, but then he seemed to dematerialize, as though he had been made of mist. I should have followed him, but, honest to God, I didn’t know it was going to be such a big deal. It’s not like they’d never kissed before. It’s not like I hadn’t seen Vince drag Glen to the ground so he could cover him with himself and his kisses in the flickering woods. But when I realized that it was war and not love, I was not sure whose side I was on.
Sherry and I went from the bonfire to her parents’ house. Her parents weren’t home. It was like the beginning of a movie. We went up to her room. She kissed me hard. I think she was trying to figure out what Glen had done that lit Vince’s rage so instantly. She was a girl, though. She would never understand men and what things must remain secret among us.
When I got home that gray morning, Mom still sat up, to report that I’d gotten, like, twenty phone calls from Glen’s family wondering if I knew where he was. I said simply, “No,” thinking they might never need to know the details. Glen would tell them when he was ready. Tilden called, and then some others, all with the same query.
It did not immediately occur to us to go looking. We pictured Glen licking his wounds somewhere, expecting to see him Monday morning as covert and hidden as ever.
Tilden hadn’t seen the incident, but I told him and he said, “Whew.” Both of us assumed Glen had not grown out of a phase that Vince had, and it all could be put down to a lack of communication. Tilden phoned Vince to see if he knew where Glen was. Vince said, “I hope he’s dead, the little queer.”
Monday came and Glen had not appeared. For fifteen minutes that was the talk in the halls. When 8 a.m. came according to the hall clocks, and the bells had not rung for homeroom, we began to get agitated. But some collective gravity started to draw us to the tiled lobby in front of the offices, where the cabinets full of trophies—most of them Coach’s—gleamed in the light from the constantly opening and closing front doors. A crowd gathered. In the center of the lobby was a sturdy podium, and on top of the podium a box . . . like a radio, but different from a radio. Only a few of us who’d been to Knoxville or DC realized that what we were looking at was a television. The principal was standing behind the podium. He raised his hand and fiddled with something on the front of the box, and a light sprang up. The light grew, and then condensed, and shadows appeared in the flat circle of light. We arranged ourselves so that everyone could see, over or under or through someone’s arms. The shadows thickened and sharpened until they were shapes. They were—it was hard to say. Sound came with the pictures, like it did in the movies, but the sound was too weak to hear back where I stood. There was a thing with one huge tooth . . . and a woman . . . two of them were puppets. Someone shouted backwards over the murmurs “It’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.” It was Martian as far as I was concerned, but it was wonderful, too.
Television . . . television . . . I tried the new word in my mouth.
The principal let the picture run until it began to break up. Someone touched the box and the picture came back for a moment, but the signal was just too weak. The principal stepped in front of the podium and said, “I want you to remember this. It is the start of a brave new world.” I kinda liked him for a moment; he seemed so excited, so sincere. Had one been close enough one might have seen a tear in his eye.
One did not think of it then, but Kukla, Fran, and Ollie flushed Glen Copland out of our heads. Tilden got the job of standing in the lobby for the rest of the day explaining how the television worked. Turned out he actually knew.
Nobody blamed Vince for being full of himself. He was the Man of the Century, as far as Eddie Rickenbacker High was concerned. There was no point in his even taking midterms, though he did, as a gesture of courtesy. I thought he overdid the kiss-indignation a tad, but his emotions, and his expression of them, could be extreme. The Silvanos were one of few Italian families in town, and we cut them slack when it came to emotions. I loved him. Lots of people would notice before I did when he hardened and soured.
Maybe I did see it. The number of people who could be called “queer” with that famous Silvano sneer expanded. Sherry didn’t like to double date with him and Carmen any more.
I thought everybody was overdoing Victory Rally night. Glen probably just misjudged the moment. He might even have been joking.
Chief Dadlez marked Glen down as a runaway. I might have done the same thing, to have some finality to it, to prevent the daily trek of Mr. and Mrs. Copland down to the station asking, with their undertoned politeness that was somehow scarier than rage, whether he had found their boy. Sherry kept suggesting we check the Falls, but he wasn’t the type, Glen wasn’t. Some liverwort would have stopped his morbidity in its tracks. Glen’s grandparents lived in St. Louis, and they were tried, but they had not seen him. They kept the porch lights on, but after a while there was little hope. As for me, I was anxious every day for a while, a week or so, as though there were something I could do to help find him and I wasn’t doing it, some knowledge I had that could be helpful that I was failing to draw forth. Then one day that stopped. It’s not that I stopped thinking about Glen, but rather that wherever he was had gone beyond my doing anything about it. Andy shrugged when he was asked his opinion about all this, as if he had no better idea. If he didn’t, nobody did.
Vince laid low for a while, coming to school only for the vital classes he had to have for eligibility. On the same day I felt an odd, mystical release from Glen and his ghost, Vince showed up at school looking like he had just stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine. It was good to know we were on the same wavelength.
I talk about Vince as though he were separate from us. In some ways, maybe he was, but that’s not how the masses of Rickenbacker High would have seen it. To be honest, we were a gang, a pack of broad-shouldered bruisers perpetually clumped together in places of public resort. We were kind of attractive, and everybody was proud of us, but you get a pack of young athletic males together and you risk energy overload, and when those young men admire each other chiefly for warrior attributes, you have a potential problem. We ourselves wouldn’t have noted it, but we were a pride of hellcats to the unpopular kids. Some of us were bullies. We were all bullies in a way, for if some of us weren’t active scourges, our chief reaction to the brutality of our brothers was to watch and laugh. Let me admit it never seemed other than the natural order of things, acknowledged by all sides. If Vinny got to call Allen Betts “Porky,” Allen got to be called “Porky” by the school hero, who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed him at all. Judy Herman, whom we called “Muffin” because her acne made her look like her face was studded with raisins, would otherwise pass through the halls unknown and unmarked. I’m not defending the custom, but defining it. What would have caused us to question this order of reality unless one of us crossed over to the other side? None of us ever did.
I say, on the day I lost spiritual touch with Glen, Vince returned to school full-time. From that day forward he seemed different. Glamorous. He stopped running with Tilden and me so much, and that gave us a little room to stand back and take perspective. Maybe he had always been glamorous, and we were so close to him we didn’t notice. Like all glamour, it seemed a little false, but you couldn’t say so without sounding, possibly being, envious. He swaggered. He was able to be snotty to kids a whole level above Allen and Judy. He was able to be snotty to some of the teachers, mostly the ones who taught stenography or mechanical drawing. He dressed better than almost anybody who wasn’t an outright homo, and a cloud of Old Spice followed him down the halls, just like it did for his dad. “Like his dad” was the key, actually, for day by day Vince Jr. was more like Vince Sr. Physically, he was almost there. He just needed to put on a few muscle-y inches. He was even developing the doubtful, accusatory squint that drew thick lines back from his father’s eyes.
Used to be you never saw Coach and Vince in the hall together. Now you did. Coach sometimes ate lunch with us in the dining hall, spooning in the same brown slop Mrs. Wirtz dolloped onto every plate as it passed. You could watch Coach watching his son, like a scientist observing some new behavior he didn’t yet know how to classify.
Vince and I still double and triple dated, but if it was a triple, now, it was with some other guy on the squad filling the place Tilden and his girl used to fill. Tilden’s discovery that he was a brain lessened his interest in football, and Coach could no longer hold things like scholarships over his head. He had his own scholarship and he’d never have to touch a pig skin again if he didn’t want to. If Coach didn’t have some power over you, he wasn’t interested, and so Tilden drifted to the side—I have to admit for me too, a little. There are just so many hours in a day.
But Tilden got whole evenings and nights to himself when he’d come over on Friday and just stay as deep into Saturday as he wanted. Andy was about to be his brother-in-law, so it was all about the drawing of the family ties tighter. He’d sleep in the bunks with me, and we’d talk until the dark of morning, sleep until Mom shouted from downstairs that we’d better come to breakfast or we weren’t getting any. We seldom mentioned Glen, though he was the subtext to many of our thoughts. He was the one of us who had been claimed by fate. In our superstition—derived from the myth of the Falls—that meant that the rest of us could breathe easy, at least for a little while.
“Do you miss him?” Tilden said. I knew whom he meant.
We’d built a fire in the fireplace (Tilden had to reach up in there and fiddle with the flue to make it draw right, and there was still a little soot on his forehead). I said, “Not as much as I should. It’s as though he was—”
“Vince’s.”
“Yeah.”
“You were Vince’s for a while.”
“Not in the same way.”
Tilden waited for me to elaborate. I didn’t. Tilden poked a stick into the coals so they sent up a shower of gold. He said, “I don’t think he ran away.”
“I know you don’t. Everybody else does.”
“Sherry doesn’t.”
“What do you mean ‘Sherry doesn’t’? When have you been talking to Sherry?”
“All the time, man. We go to the same school.”
I tamped down the ludicrous spike of jealousy that had just rammed up through my gut. I managed a very neutral, “Oh?”
“We both think he went down into the gorge. Under the Falls.”
“You think he’s dead.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think he lived there?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I let silence grow. I almost asked him what he meant by that—it sounded like the beginning of a ghost story—but I knew. I remembered those days, maybe a week or two, when Glen felt pending in a way I can’t explain. And then it was over, like the ringing of a bell at the closing of a class. I knew what he meant.
“Tilden, they looked down there. In the gorge. The cops. Andy too.”
“I know. I know. Still.”
Tilden would come over to my bed so he could be the little spoon. This used to irk me—him getting all the heat and protection, as usual—but after a while it seemed right. It would have been awkward otherwise.
We took the Region that year, and though we couldn’t avoid being clobbered by the big Piedmont and Downstate schools, we won whatever was winnable within our mountain purlieu. Coach’s stock could hardly be any higher, and we all caught a little of that radiance. We could have done better, though. We could have won with more honor. Vince had his scholarship to UT, and what had once been solid technique turned to razzle-dazzle. He ran sometimes when he should have passed. He made sure he started every game, when it had been customary to let the second string quarterback—in this case Huey Schuckman—start at least once so he could say he started on his high school team senior year. Even showing off like that he avoided injury, which was enough of a miracle to make us assume the gods were on his side.
The New Year’s party at Carmen’s house was the biggest one anybody had heard of. School colors banners hung all over, so it was as much the hundredth victory party as it was an observation of the holidays. Carmen had hired a band from Johnson City, and though they only played the same hits we could have played ourselves on the Victrola, having a live band at a house party was so outré we figured any extremity of behavior would, therefore, be justified. Only the hillbillies outside the town played their own music anymore. We were a little at sea. It was wild in a way even we wild frontiersmen were not used to. Carmen, what with being a transplanted city girl, was ahead of us in terms of social sophistication, and a lot of us felt uncomfortable without being able to put our fingers on why. Carmen’s parents were supposed to be chaperoning, but I never laid eyes on them. There was plenty of beer, and white lightning from the secret special suppliers that we all had somewhere and talked of in whispers as though they were veins of silver. You put the white lightning into your lime sherbet punch and you were flying.
Sherry was visiting her people in Mississippi for the holidays, so I went stag, without liking it much. Tilden went stag too, and so we hitched up and made out like we were boyfriends, which confused some, irked others, amused still others, but we didn’t care. I was way drunker than Tilden, and I needed him to keep me from slumping to the floor and passing out. As always, he was my good angel, and after midnight and the toasting and kissing (I kissed Carmen hard and long, just to show I could) he dragged me out into the night air. He said, “We’re walking home. You’ll be alert enough when we get there that you won’t have to explain anything to your mom.”
A car idled at the curb outside Carmen’s house, its parking lights on. Tilden said, “Shit, Arden, did you tell your mom? Did you ask her to come and pick us up?”
I didn’t, and she hadn’t. It was Andy in the car. He turned on the headlights when he saw us coming. The beams of the headlights went this incredible silver-green in the grass, and it was there we saw the first pearls of gray sleet that entered the darkness in the year’s last hour. As Tilden was climbing into the back, the freezing rain came for real, slashing and driven down harder by the lead weight of the sky.
Andy said, “Was that timing or what?”
“So, Andy, did you just happen to appear, or—”
“You can hear the band clear down to the church.”
“But how did you know when to—”
“I went through all this myself. I thought you were going to drive, and I’m a cop now and couldn’t let that happen. Glad Tilden was with you.”
“God, me too. We were making out, you know.” I made a smooching sound in Tilden’s direction.
Andy said flatly, “Of course you were.”
A block from where you turn from Main Street onto Linden, where we lived, we were suddenly engulfed by emergency vehicles. Andy pulled over to let an ambulance scream past him toward the river, with a fire rescue vehicle throbbing in its wake. Nothing much happened in our town, so when it did, it was disturbing, even when the odds were heavy on a false alarm. Andy said, “Only one of those is ours. Must be—something.”
Andy started to pull out again when four police cruisers—who knew there were four police cruisers in our part of the world?—set sirens on full and went blasting off in the same direction. Andy did this exaggerated bug-eyed cartoon examination of the street before he pulled out again.
“Should you—”
“I’ve got the night off,” said Andy. “At least until Dadlez calls.”
You could tell from his face that Tilden was as happy in Andy’s company as I was. But finally my poor friend said, “Andy, it’s the best thing in the world to be with you guys on New Year’s, but I have to piss so bad.”
Andy motioned to one of the lordly red maples Main Street is known for. Every cop car in the county had already screamed past us, so if you were going to piss against a tree on Main Street, this would be the time to do it. Tilden got out, took his piss, and, recognizing the unique opportunity, danced around a little for our benefit with his dick hanging out the front of his pants.
Refreshed, Tilden was squirming back into the car when sirens blasted back down Main Street, going the opposite direction, heading for police headquarters or Mercy Hospital or somewhere. Another went the other way, or maybe the same one, changing its mind and turning. The sirens were confused and crossing each other in the night. Maybe ice had pulled down power lines up nearer the mountains. The coves were forever going dark and the hillbillies having to light their candles with Bible verses on them and wait it out.
Tilden intended to spend the night, so we all tumbled out onto the sleet in our yard. We shoved each other and laughed our way up the steps into the kitchen. The freezing rain came so hard you could hardly lift your face into it and keep breathing. The kitchen was brightly lit. Harshly, even. Mom stood there with a look on her face. Paper plates from the adult party they’d had were stacked neatly on the counter. A pot of sauerkraut sent its perfume into the air. Mom said, “Andy, the chief called. Somebody is lost in the Gorge.”
Mom had been making coffee. She began pouring it into Thermoses, adding a Thermos when she saw Tilden.
Dad walked into the room. “Is the car in the drive, Andy?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go down to the river. To help.”
“Was it those sirens? Is someone drowned?”
“Yes. I don’t know. They think someone is missing. She left a note—Judy. Dale Herman’s little girl.”
“Muffin?” Tilden said. A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. Surely it was a hoax. A New Year’s prank. I wanted to smile too, but fortunately forced it back. Dad didn’t look like he thought it was a joke.
Andy said, “I have to get to—”
Dad interrupted. “We’re all going. There aren’t enough cops. Even with you, son. The call went out for the men.”
The men of the town were mustering to meet calamity, just as in days of yore. It was rather grand, after all.
We piled into the car. Dad followed, plopping heavily down into the driver’s seat. Andy handed him the keys. The fact that he didn’t speed toward the river frightened us. Maybe there was no more need to hurry.
Riverside Park blazed with flashlights and the beams of cars, a confusing jumble of black and gleam and falling sleet. Coach stood in a ring of light with a look on his face that I couldn’t identify. He was holding coffee, but he wasn’t drinking it. He had a hood on his slicker, but it hung limp down his back, while his hair flattened and his face gleamed with droplets. People spoke to him and he answered, but he didn’t move from that spot. Whether he helped or not, the men needed him, and he seemed to know it. You didn’t appreciate how slight he was, really, until he got among the other men.
Chief Dadlez directed the operations. He sent me and Tilden upstream to check if she might be hiding in the little woods with the cement pagoda where kids played all the time. He gave us a flashlight. The pagoda woods were small, even in the dark. The pagoda looked like it was trying to hide under a wet mass of English ivy. Tilden and I knew she wouldn’t be there anyway. It was upstream from the bridge, from which any sensible person would jump, if they were going to jump. Maybe Dadlez just didn’t want a kid to be the one to find her.
Tilden said, “I keep seeing her going over the Falls.”
“Me too. Like that dog.”
“Except we aren’t there to stop her. Everything that goes into the water here goes into the air there.”
“Yes.”
“I hope Glen was right about that door at the bottom.”
Walking back into the confusion of lights I realized something. Coach Silvano was gazing downstream, but nobody was going downstream. Chief Dadlez had sent no one that direction, the one it was almost 100% certain she had gone, if she had gone into the water at all. It wasn’t an oversight. They didn’t want to know for sure, just yet. They didn’t want to find her. They wanted Judy Herman to come strolling down the road carrying an umbrella, late home from a party, sorry that she had caused so much to-do. At worst, they wanted to find her by the light of day. I walked up to the chief. I hadn’t realized he was old and frail, because he didn’t look it most of the time when he was bossing people around. I said, “Chief Dadlez, you know we’re not going to find her up here.”
Dadlez said, “I don’t know anything of the like.” But you knew he did.
Andy was less doctrinaire about things, and soon he got a group including my dad and Tilden and me moving downstream, sweeping our flashlights over the opaque brown river. If she had sunk we would never see her. We’d have to go all the way to the Falls and hope she snagged on something. Finally most of the party moved west, downstream. Coach carried the coffee cup in front of him like he’d forgotten it was there. It must be half sleet water by now. All of the men had Thermoses. You had to stop to drink out of them, or else you’d slosh scalding coffee onto your face. The milling, raincoated contingent eased forward foot by foot, blasting the mud and the agitated water with rays of light as it went.
Tilden said, “Why is Coach here?”
One of the boys from school—it was hard to tell who under the rain gear—shouted, “Because there wasn’t a day in the week he didn’t wait at the door to call her ‘Muffin’ when she came in.”
Coach looked like he was just staring off into space, but it was he who shot out his arm and shouted “There!” dropping the cup into the speeding water. Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow. In the dark you couldn’t see the color, but it was blue. It was Judy’s blue raincoat that everyone knew—once they stopped to think about it—and she was still in it. The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down. Maybe she was alive, those last few moments. But she was gone by the time we got her to shore. Coach was the one who waded into the furious freezing river—it was up to his chest most of the time—and grabbed the coat. He could get her to solid ground, but he couldn’t carry her through the close trees and the underbrush. He was howling down there in the blackness until we got there to help. I’d never heard such a sound from any man, and never expected it from Coach. Was it fear or grief? You couldn’t tell from his face. When he thrashed back up on shore, carrying the body with four others, his face was back to a cipher, cruel and handsome in the swiveling flashlights.
Poor Muffin. Everyone went to her funeral. Some of the guys from the team couldn’t stop giggling and elbowing one another in the ribs. Mom said it was nervousness, how uncomfortable people, especially the young, were around death. I hoped so.