Breaking the Fall (6 page)

Jared spoke to it, ran a hand over its back. The dog continued to growl, but pranced away as we flung ourselves over a gate and out across another dew-slick lawn.

He ran much better than I did. My own legs had grown new joints, which swiveled as I ran. There was a numbness in my skull that would, I knew from experience, ripen into pain very soon.

Jared vanished through a tangle of fennel, down into a culvert beside an electricity substation surrounded by a chain-link fence with barely visible
HIGH VOLTAGE
signs. The equipment within made a quiet sound, a sneaky, galactic hum.

I crouched, sweating and cold. Jared shook out a cigarette and I accepted it. We shared, for a moment, that almost sexy leaning-together over a match. He shook it out, and smoked with the glowing end cupped inward, toward his palm, a method I copied at once.

Would I throw up?

He looked away, distracted. From far off there came the mutter of a cop radio. The stabs of static drifted, and faded away.

I was trembling, queasy, and the chain-link fence spun up and down, and then from side to side. Closing my eyes made it worse. The earth swung away from beneath me.

“I walked out the back door,” said Jared. “Unhooked the chain. I took my time.”

I bit my knuckle. I had abandoned him.

“It was easy,” he said. Then, as though I had expressed disbelief, “It really was.”

Of course. Ash trembled off the end of my cigarette. It had been entirely easy.

For him.

The stalks of the fennel around us, and the old, cast-off stalks we were sitting on, gave off a fragance. The air smelled of licorice and tobacco. One of the white metal signs on the chain-link read PELIGROSA. There was a picture of lightning striking a human figure. The fence was old, a black net made of metal, and sloppy rolls of barbed wire festooned the top rail.

“And I brought a really rare prize,” he continued. “It's something pretty unusual. Which I give to you.”

He tossed me something warm and round. I handled it for a moment, feeling the lightweight lump, fibrous and foreign in the bad light. Then I let it drop. I didn't want to touch this stolen object. It was something medical, I sensed, something repulsive out of a person's body, a hairball or a weird tumor.

He drew on his cigarette and laughed. “You wear them,” he said, “on your feet.”

I drew the smoke in all the way, so deep it burned, and let it out, pushing the entire shame out of my lungs until my breath came out clear, empty, and clean. “I'll do it right,” I said in a little, dry voice.

He smoked.

“Next time,” I said clearly, “I'll do it right.”

“You'll have a chance. There's something I didn't tell you.”

I let the smoke out in twin streams through my nostrils. The smoke was having an effect on me, making me feel separate from my arms and legs, and the nausea was completely dead. Jared leaned forward, waiting for me to ask. So I gestured with the glowing cigarette: what?

“They weren't home.”

I woke feeling dead.

I did not move for a while, and when I began to find my way up, away from the pillow, I sat up quickly, clutching the sheets to my throat.

The matter in my head had leaked out onto the pillowcase.

There was not much of it, but there was a definite dark crushed substance, several fragments of it. I recognized it very slowly as snail shell.

I washed the pillowcase out very carefully in the bathroom sink, and then I washed my hair under the shower, telling myself: my parents won't know.

Nobody will know anything.

13

I couldn't lean my head against my hand because my cranium was sore there. I tried slumping way back and down, but the chair met the back of my skull and that hurt, too. So I sat up straight.

“They charged into cannon fire. Eyes scalded, blinded by the smoke. Some of them permanently deafened by the noise. Deaf for the rest of their lives from that day.” Mr. Milliken paced up and down. He glanced at me, and I must have smiled or looked pleasant because he gave a quick little smile himself.

“A cannonball didn't blow up,” announced Mr. Milliken. “It didn't explode and make a nice fountain of dirt, like you see in movies. Cannonballs took off arms. Legs. Heads.”

I was not sure, exactly, how pain medications are supposed to work. Is it something they do at the synapse? Do they keep neurons from firing?

The pills were having no effect at all, or only a little. I could move my neck.

I was aware of Sky, rows away from me. When she bent to make a note in her three-ring, when she ran the point of the pencil back through her long hair, I knew it, even if I wasn't looking.

Mr. Milliken was, as usual, trying to sell us history by making it into something you could see on a tabloid:
ANCIENT WEAPONS BLOW OFF ARMS AND LEGS
.
SEVERED HEAD FLIES THROUGH AIR LOOKING AND THINKING
.

It had been Mr. Milliken's contention one day, in an attempt to stir his class awake, that a severed head could see and remember, and even gaze out in wonderment at its new condition. The Revolutionary War, under discussion, had segued into the French Revolution and the guillotine. Just as now the Civil War was about to drift into the Gatling gun. We were never going to make it to the H-bomb.

I was a mess from the night before. Not a wreck; I can take punishment. My neck was stiff and I had the very slightest double vision. My mother's medicine cabinet had furnished some Tylenol and some pills that I supposed were for menstrual cramps. I had taken them, too.

To encourage Mr. Milliken, I leaned forward and drew a small explosion next to the pink line that marked the margin. I wanted him to think I was taking notes. I needed the distraction. I was seared inside with my new understanding: I was trapped.

It was so painful that I tried to edge away from the word.

But I could hear Jared's laugh, kind and mocking at once. He knew, and I knew, the truth. I was a coward until I played the game again.

“Chain shot!” Mr. Milliken nearly shouted, desperate to keep our attention. “Howling, twisting chains cutting men in two.”

The board read:
Civil War. Causes. Armaments
. But what swept Mr. Milliken was the great hunger to have all of us quiet. And more than that. He wanted us to care. “Grape-shot,” he said, getting hoarse. “Point-blank. Bodies atomized.”

The bell rang, and Mr. Milliken slumped on his podium. His freckled face was flushed, and I could tell by the way he did not meet our eyes that he was fatigued by his performance, and at the same time sure that it was wasted on television-dazed cattle. I already understood that Mr. Milliken did not relish the destructive details he recounted. He found them of some interest, but he believed that only gore could keep the attention of his class.

“Nice lecture,” I said as I passed, and Mr. Milliken gave me a careful look, wary that I was being sarcastic, hopeful that I was being sincere. “It was no joke,” he said, meaning his lecture or the Civil War. “I don't know if it was ignorance or courage that made them go through it.”

He said this quietly, half to me, but, so not to embarrass either of us if I didn't give a damn, half to the podium, a maple-stained plinth made of plywood.

Then he realized that he was going to be late for Driver's Education, his next class and mine. I could tell by the way he started bubbling-in spaces in his roll book that he had forgotten to post the absences.

I was stalling, lingering, hoping to fall in with Sky as she left the class. But she was already out the door, having, I realized too late, waved with her fingers, a casual, careless little hello wave.

Such waves are friendly, but not intimate at all—not even a little. I would need a plan, something ambitious.

She
was
smiling, I consoled myself. It was a genuine smile, with that sideways look she has. I was warmer inside considering that.

“I have made a decision,” said Mr. Milliken.

He stuffed papers into a scuffed black briefcase, a big worn leather thing like something Drama could borrow for
Death of a Salesman
. He fell into stride with me, both of us shouldering through the crowded halls.

There was something sincere about Mr. Milliken, eager and honest, even though he was sick of his job. I did not attempt to flee him, even when he said, “I picked you.”

We passed Sky's locker, but she was not there. I was too warm, the air was too close, and I thought I must have misheard him.

“You,” he repeated, hollering over the rumble of arguments, laughter, and the whack of locker doors thrown shut.

My expression must have asked: for what? But I had already guessed.

He laughed. He actually laughed, and I could tell that he was not a teacher now so much as an adult feeling good for just a passing moment. “It's a key moment,” he said. “We're going to die together.”

14

Driver's Ed had boasted several driving simulators, which I had never had a chance to use because they had been stolen the summer before. Instead, we had been taking quizzes on the California State Vehicle Code and watching films produced by the Highway Patrol, which included endless footage of car wrecks. Drivers in clothes that looked awkwardly out of style and pedestrians looking somehow historical lay bloody beside mammoth, by now obsolete, ambulances. The dated quality of the films made them less real, of course, but it also made them weigh in with a heavy, hard-to-shake-off message: dead then, dead now.

Sometimes someone would have trouble figuring out what a particularly awful burn victim was supposed to be; one or two looked like charred birds. “What was that?” I would hear whispered, or not whispered, but no one would respond. I think we were most of all embarrassed by all these victims. We had to look, but we hated it and liked it at the same time.

But the cars had arrived at last, new Chevrolets of a sort no one ever drove in Oakland, four-door cars that seemed destined to belong to chemistry teachers and Baptist ministers, solid, dull people in a safe place like Kansas or Iowa. These cars all sported a yellow triangle of wood, like the triangle you use to set up the balls in a pool game, but bigger and emblazoned:
STUDENT DRIVER.

Mr. Milliken was going driving with me. He got paid extra for teaching driving, padding his wallet with a little excitement.

I only wanted to zombie my way through the day. This was not the time to introduce my practically auto-virgin self behind the wheel.

But he stood with a clipboard beside the Chevrolet. He waited at the passenger's side while I fumbled with the car door. Two girls I knew only a little, Asian girls who regarded me with both charm and indifference, Dung and Tina, sat in the backseat, and I thought they might be pouting a little at having to wait.

“Mr. Milliken thinks I'm going to kill us all,” I said.

Tina chewed gum at me.

“I wouldn't have even mentioned the word
death
if I thought there was any danger,” said Mr. Milliken.

Dung was from Vietnam. She was pretty, and little, so little you had to keep looking at her. She had the fine features and delicate jawline I associate with pictures of Egyptian mummies.

Tina was rough, gum-popping, and bored with me, with cars, with air. Although she had the crisp English of a gangster in an old movie, her native language was Mien. Tina heard my offer and curled a lip. “Doesn't matter,” she said.

Dung laughed. No, no, I should go first. But she sidled her way into the front seat ahead of me.

“A drive to the park,” said Mr. Milliken, in the artificially cheerful tone of the narrator in a travel film.

Tina blew bubbles beside me in the back seat. Each big bubble grew huge, then grew lopsided, then collapsed and withered. She unpeeled it from her face each time and stuffed it back in.

“We should go over to San Francisco,” said Tina. “Have some fun.”

Dung drove looking up and over the steering wheel, as though she could barely see out through the windshield.

“Looking good,” said Mr. Milliken.

We drove up Park Boulevard and then really started to drive, picking up speed as Dung felt the command of the wheel and the accelerator suddenly hers.

“Gotta watch that limit,” said Mr. Milliken, pumping the brake of his controls. He had a gas pedal and a brake but no steering wheel.

I did not look off to our left, where the neighborhood of large, spacious houses began. I knew the house with green shutters was there, beyond sight, just as I knew I would have to visit it again.

When it was Tina's turn, we were on Snake Road. She blew a bubble, jerked the car out of park, and whipped us up the two-lane road.

At Redwood Park, after Tina had negotiated the twists of the road with disdain, using two hands only at Mr. Milliken's prompting, it was my turn.

“Into the Valley of Death,” said Mr. Milliken.

I had driven once before—my father's Honda, which, since it is a stick shift, hopped like a rabbit every time I popped the clutch. I am a fairly athletic person, used to being able to come up with the ball one way or another, but I had decided to wait on driving until I got a car I could handle.

I could tell Dung and Tina were both relieved that they had made it this far, and were ready to be entertained by whatever blunders I might make.

“What kind of bombs were they?” I said, hoping to distract my nerves and Mr. Milliken's humor with a little history. “The ones that burst in midair? You know—in the song.”

“Not car bombs,” he said.

The shift was a metal T, and when the transmission slipped from park into reverse, you could feel the gears in there, under there, beyond us, finding what it was I had commanded. I had that wonder I had known as a very little boy watching a helicopter: machine.

“This is boring,” said Tina.

The car backed, gravel crackling. I worked the wheel around and found drive. I tested the accelerator, which generated more noise than movement. I tested the brake, and the slight forward movement stopped.