Saltboy

Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

It was a Saturday when I went out to work on the hole, but I was in my Sunday clothes. Dad had made me throw them in the dryer and put them on hot, because he said we were going to be late for saying goodbye to Lucky. I sat through the whole service, burning in my skin, while everybody said goodbye. Dad told me to stop squirming, and I thought it was kind of funny then because I’d heard him say the same thing once to a nightcrawler on his hook when we went fishing.

Almost everybody who said goodbye followed us home. They drove their cars all over our lawn and dad fed them crackers and his salmon dip. Our house isn’t that big. Old men and dad’s friends and people from the church all crammed themselves together like a bad game of Tetris. With all of them breathing and some of them laughing quietly the air got to feeling like those early days of summer when dad still refuses to turn on the air conditioner.

I asked dad if I could change into my play clothes, but he said I couldn’t. I waited until he had our pastor’s arm around his shoulders and his head bowed, and then I slipped into my bedroom and out the window.

I headed for the forest, right to where Lucky and I had been digging. We had a place a hundred yards into the thicker trees, right next to a creek, where we used to build forts together. Lucky would chop wood with a hatchet while I would draw plans in the pebbles for what the fort would look like. It took him hours to chop through even the smallest branches with his dull blade, like logging with a club, so we never got very far. The creek always washed out my designs, but I’d draw them up better each time.

When Lucky graduated from high school, we didn’t have as much time to make forts. I tried by myself, while he was away at college, but I never got into the rhythm of the hatchet. Mostly, I just played at stories of knights and assassins in the trees by myself. One summer, Lucky came home and said we were going to make something in the forest. He wouldn’t tell me what it was until we were out by the creek. He wore a smile like Orion’s belt, crooked and small and a long ways off.

“What are we going to build?” I asked when we could hear the familiar rush of the stream, its pitch the same as it had always been, like the voice of a father who only knows one bedtime story.

“We’re not going to build; we’re going to dig,” said Lucky. He had brought a shovel for him and a trowel for me. He told me to pick a spot away from the stream, so I found a place with ferns all around it and carved an X in the dirt. We dug for a while. Lucky stamped on the head of the shovel with his sneakers, pulling out piles of wet soil like bites from a cake.

“How deep are we digging?” I asked, chopping at sod with both hands on my trowel.

“All the way to China,” said Lucky. “That’s where I’m going next year. Do you remember Brodie? He came and visited us last Christmas. Him and me, we’re going there to spread the good news of Jesus. So, I want you to be able to come and find me. If you miss me, just come out here and keep digging, and sooner or later you’ll make it all the way to China, and I’ll be there.”

“They walk upside-down in China,” I said.

Lucky grinned and shook a bit of dirt into my hair for fun. “How do you know you walk right side-up?”

“The blood goes into my head when I’m upside-down.”

We dug for a couple of hours. By the time we were done for the day, we both had piles of dirt up to our shins, only Lucky’s shins were taller than mine.

“How close are we?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Lucky. He dusted off his hands against his jeans. “You’ll have to keep digging. Come on. Dad’s probably got dinner ready.”

Dad said that Lucky and Brodie were out late one night in Shanghai and some bullies tried to take all their money, which wasn’t very much. The bullies got angry, and they all got into a fight. One time, when I was in third grade, I got into a fight on the bus home from school. A big fifth grader named Angelo gave me a knuckle-punch because I wouldn’t let him see my wallet, and I scratched him back. He grabbed two of my fingers in his fist and twisted them like an Indian burn, and I cried out.

Lucky had been sitting two seats behind me, thumb-wrestling with one of his friends. When he heard me he stood up, even though the bus was moving. He took a couple steps up the aisle and the bus driver yelled at him to sit own. He didn’t, though; he stood between Angelo and me. That’s all, just stood. Angelo let go of me and tried to give Lucky a knuckle-punch, but got his hip by accident, and I heard his finger pop.

I wondered if that’s what he did in China, if he stood up. I remembered how tall he was, with the dirt up to his shins.

He wasn’t in China anymore, but I wanted to dig, to move away from all those people in my house where they wouldn’t think to look. My teachers always told me how much I reminded them of Lucky, in the way I looked and the way I acted. He was always such a good student, they would say, and vice-president of the technology club. My last report card was all A’s, and I came up with the idea this year of the technology club having a sleepover to play video games on the school’s computers.

Lucky went to China. I dug until my shoes were filled with cold dirt, and then I took my shoes off and kept going. I hadn’t made much progress on my own in the few months since Lucky left — maybe another couple feet down in a hole you could fit four of me into, shoulder-to-shoulder — but that night I guess I got down another whole foot. If I stood in the pit on my tiptoes, now, I could hook my chin on the lip of sod.

I crawled out of the hole on my hands and knees. My Sunday clothes were a mess; I’d never be able to wear them again, but I didn’t really want to. I walked back to my house with my head down, my fingers hooked in the laces of my shoes. Most all the people who had followed us home were gone, but I could still see a couple through the kitchen window, just talking with dad.

I took off my clothes, so they wouldn’t get the floor dirty, and wiped my bare feet in the grass so I wouldn’t leave filthy prints. Dad didn’t notice when I slipped inside. I went straight to the shower and buried my clothes at the bottom of the hamper. I was breathing all wet steam and letting my muscles melt when dad knocked on the door. It was gentle; maybe he had tried a few times before I heard him.

“Hey,” he said. “Great-uncle Steve wants to see how much you’ve grown.”

#

The next morning, with Lucky all the way in the ground, I felt weird when I got out of bed, almost as if I were a few inches taller than I should have been. Like humans who weren’t sure if they were supposed to fly, I tried to keep low, my head down and my neck kinda bowed. I ate breakfast with dad and a couple of relatives who had stayed the night, and then I asked to be excused.

I went right out to the forest with a promise to be ready for church in a couple of hours. I knew just how to fix my height problem. I could get so close to the ground that it swallowed me right up. It felt right, as if neck-deep in the dirt had been waiting for me to find it, like China had been waiting for Lucky.

As I approached the clearing, that sense of propriety vanished, replaced by an awkward fear that something was dreadfully wrong. The normal sounds of the forest were cloaked behind a sound like wind, but not quite — wind is an outward force, and this sounded and felt like one great indrawn breath.

The ferns and low bushes of the clearing were waving as if underwater, and the stream and leapt its banks by a few inches. They were all bending toward my hole to China. I felt my hair whip around my ears, tugging me toward the rounded lip.

I peered over the edge. The bottom, which had been far too shallow the previous day, now had disappeared into a cold, black distance. For a moment, I felt as if all my perceptions of distance had somehow become tangled in my brain to make four feet seem like a glimpse into infinite space. A quick experiment with my hand in front of my nose disproved that theory, and I lapsed into a kind of blankness, just staring down forever.

I whispered a couple of small words, and felt them tugged off of my lips like coiled ropes attached to a descending anchor. I raised my voice and never even heard an echo.

Next thing I did was what I bet anybody would have. I dug around the clearing until I had a good handful of different-sized rocks, and I dropped them one-by-one down into the hole. After the last one faded quickly out of sight I waited for a good five minutes, but I never heard anything other than that big, long inhale. The sound of it reminded me a bit of the times Lucky would take me fishing, because nature is nature. We would lay out bow-to-stern and shoulder-to-shoulder, this close to capsizing under our awkward weight, and listen to water slap against the hollow aluminum of our little boat. It was nothing, and it could fill hours.

I don’t know how long I spent staring down the hole, because I didn’t look what time it was when I first came out, but it must have been a while because dad started shouting and hard. I picked myself off the ground, dusted my knees, and ran to meet dad before he could find me at the hole. I knew he’d want to do something to it, or keep me from playing in the forest anymore.

You just know your parents like that. I know kids from school who ask their moms for money for the movies, and their dads to let them stay home sick from school, because it wouldn’t work the other way around. Lucky would have found our Fourth of July fireworks and tossed a lit sparkler down the hole. Dad wouldn’t.

He was in the backyard, walking head down toward the forest, and it looked as if he had given up on yelling. He was just angry. I thought about calling out to him that I was on my way, but decided not to. Sometimes if I don’t talk he doesn’t either. We just looked at each other, and I dusted off my jeans again.

“We’re late for church,” said dad, not as angry as his face looked.

“Sorry,” I said.

Dad got down on one knee so he was just a little bit shorter than me and put both his hands on my shoulders. “It’ll be back to you and me in just a bit, I promise. We can talk, then, and figure some of this out.” I nodded, and then he kinda jumped the gun. He kept talking, about everything that Lucky had touched in his life, or even just breathed on. I stood there in my dirty clothes and listened as he poured his words into me. He didn’t wait for echoes, but he wouldn’t have got them, anyway.

#

School the next day was about Galileo. It was just about the last week of school, so Mister Tripp had a bunch of fun things planned. Monday’s was a lesson on gravity, and the school janitor let us up on the roof for it. Mister Tripp stood at the edge overlooking the tether-ball courts and talked to us about how gravity is an acceleration, which meant getting faster all the time and only stopping with some other force to say so.

I hung at the back, because I’m a little scared of heights — actually, I’m more scared that I’ll take myself up on the urge to jump off of one some time. Angelo stayed back there with me, but for him it was because he didn’t feel like listening. Mister Tripp was going on about Galileo and his experiments, and I wanted to listen, but Angelo breathed down my cheek and said, “I heard about your brother. That’s what they do to homos over there.” I pulled away, because his breath smelled like farts, and came face-to with his grin. He always shut his eyes when he grinned, squinted them shut as if to make more room for his dull-toothed shark mouth.

I had learned a little trick from Lucky, back when he taught me to read using the book of Jonah and his high school science textbook. I grinned back at Angelo, but not so wide that I would lose sight of him. “Are you a homo sapien?” I asked.

“No,” he said, stretching the syllable as if to give me more time to realize what a stupid question it had been. I just kept grinning. The sun slid out from behind a cloud and got me in the eyes, so I squinted them shut. That must have been what did it; Angelo saw his own expression thieved and turned back on him, miniaturized like a third-grader’s stupid hand puppet.

His eyes drifted open, and I could almost see the spark of realization traveling backward along the nerve to his brain. He took one step forward which was enough to put all his weight right across my toes, then he gave me the tiniest shove on the breastbone.

Unable to move my feet to balance myself, I took a quick tumble to the graveled roof and landed in a lobster crawl. I’m not very tall, gravity got me hard enough to scrape the skin off the heels of my hands. I landed right behind a girl and sprayed a couple pebbles across her ankles. I glanced up and saw her legs climbing into the folds of her skirt, and her panties between them. They had hearts on them.

The girl turned and slapped her arms against the sides of her skirt, pinning them down. “Mister Tripp!” she yelled. “He looked up my skirt!”

Mister Tripp gazed over at me between the other students, a bowling ball in one hand and a book in the other. I felt a rush of heat in my face that I would have loved to attribute to having been close to the roof and the radiation caught and reflected from the sun. I would have been all right with Angelo just pushing me down. He always had detention after school, so it wasn’t hard to get away from him; just wait until the bell rings, and then it was freedom in several ways.

Making me look like an idiot in front of Mister Tripp was what really burned. Mister Tripp had been Lucky’s favorite teacher when he was in grade school. The first thing Mister Tripp had said to me, reading attendance on the first day of school, had been, “Now there’s an illustrious last name.” Then he had written “illustrious” on the blackboard, and I knew I was going to like him. When the principal called me away from class to tell me that Lucky had died, Mister Tripp had come with me, and kept his warm hand on the back of my neck for the whole, cold hour.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I pushed myself up to my feet. When I dusted off my hands, little flakes of skin came off.

“Do you need to see the nurse?” asked Mister Tripp.

“It’s okay, Mister Tripp,” said Angelo. “Homos don’t like what they see.” Some people giggled. The girl with the heart-speckled panties blushed.

“Keep your insights to yourself, Angelo,” said Mister Tripp. “I won’t stand for that kind of bigotry in my classroom.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“We’re not in the classroom,” said Angelo.

“Come here, please,” said Mister Tripp, beckoning to Angelo. The big kid snorted himself into motion like a steam engine. I slipped back to the edge of the group and kicked flat designs in the gravel at my feet. Mister Tripp started up his lecture again but I only tuned in halfway. I was thinking about the thickness of the roof, and wondering how long it would hold our weight. My stomach gave a cold shudder.

“When I say so, drop the ball,” said Mister Tripp. He had given the bowling ball to Angelo, and was holding the book spine-down over the edge. “Three, two—” Angelo heaved the ball over the edge before Mister Tripp got to one. My classmates rushed the edge and peered over, but the drum thump of the ground bending under the impact had already shook up through our ears before they could see what had happened.

“Yes, thank you, Angelo. You’ll be staying after class.” There was an expression of disapproval on Mister Tripp’s face, but Angelo probably couldn’t see it, because he was grinning.

Mister Tripp asked one of the other kids to run downstairs and retrieve the bowling ball. While the kid was gone, Mister Tripp talked about wind resistance and friction. I listened to this part; it made me wonder about how it was down the hole, with all the wind pulling inward, greedy for something instead of slowing its fall. I paid such close attention that I didn’t notice Angelo sneaking up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders in a bear hug and my stomach tightened up, kinda like being hungry. He smelled like my bedroom in winter when I keep the window shut for whole months.

“Bet you drop faster than a dumb book,” he grunted in my ear. He laughed, loud enough for everyone to hear and to make my head hurt. I kicked my legs to get free, but I couldn’t find purchase. He hauled me over to the edge of the roof and, with one great forward thrust of his hips, shoved me out so that the playground twenty feet down was the only thing underneath me. My sense of the present dropped right out of me, and all I had left was a bunch of imagination, spinning reels of me falling and making a thud like a six-pound bowling ball. Mister Tripp yelled some wordless syllables, and my bladder let go. I caught it before it got too far — I checked afterward, and only saw a tiny stain by the zipper — but it was enough to get my briefs sickly hot and then cold.

Someone yanked hard on Angelo’s shoulders and I heard his shoes trip backward. He let me go. My butt hit the lip of the roof hard; I felt the pain come center on my tailbone. I threw my weight behind me and landed in a crab-walk again. The thing I remember most is that sharp rocks got me right in the places the skin had been scraped off before, and I wondered if it would have been better never to hit the ground.

#

That night I only had a little bit of time to play in the forest, since dad had this big plan to take us out to dinner and rent movies. I dashed off the bus before the pneumatic doors had squeaked all the way open, darted into my room and changed out of my damp underwear. With a tossed-off promise to be back in time to wash up, I went out to the garage and dug out one of our camping flashlights before jogging out to the forest.

The slow vacuum of the hole rustled the trees like happens before a good storm. I got down on my knees a good five feet from the edge and approached on my knuckles, trying to keep the dirt out of my scrapes. The suction from the hole pulled all my favorite smells of the forest right past my nostrils: the moss, the wood rot, the creek.

I switched on the flashlight and aimed it down the walls. They were rough, dark brown, and broken open by webs of thick roots that just seemed to stop a few inches out. I shined the light further down, but there was too much dark and not enough battery power. For as far as I could see, the walls looked the same. If you were in a room with those kinds of walls, you’d never be able to tell north from south.

I just kinda lay my head on one hand and propped the light so it shone about as far down the hole as the school’s roof was above the ground. It started to rain, just a little — more a smell than a sensation. My head filled with the sound of the creek, the lap of small waves, and the scent of water.

It made me remember a time a couple years back, when Lucky had taken me to the public pool for a swimming lesson. I was already mad at him that day because earlier he had punched me in the shoulder for standing too long with the refrigerator open. The muscles hurt deep where his fist had landed, and he wanted me to try a butterfly stroke while he leaned against the pool wall, his arms out of the water and crooked back like wings. One of his friends — Michael? Gabe? — was sitting in the lifeguard tower near the deep end chatting with him, white sunblock caked up on his nose.

I did a couple of laps until Lucky stopped watching, and then I practiced swimming as slowly as I could. When you swim slow, you swim quiet, so I played a game where I got as close to Lucky as I could without him knowing it.

Under the water, his skin was pasty and leopard-spotted. His trunks were a dark something, purple or red, like the Cowardly Lion’s robe. I inched closer by degrees, causing too much of a ruckus when I reversed direction, and gradually learning to slip in circles like a submarine.

At my bravest, I got close enough to touch my brother, so I did. I turned my right hand into a torpedo and I got him right under his xylophone ribcage. Through the water in my ears, he sounded like a sick dinosaur. He caught me under the armpits and lifted me right out of the water. The lifeguard was laughing, and Lucky joined in, both of them aiming their mouths at some point away from me so I only caught the reflections.

“That’s good,” said Lucky. “Now you ought to try it over here.”

I hadn’t realized we were so close to the deep end. I breathed in to shriek just as Lucky let me go, and sucked chlorine in my mouth. I coughed, but it was still in there, so I swallowed it down. For a few seconds, bubbles from the surface trailed the zig-zags of my feet and fingers, but then they floated away and it was just pure water, wave-shadows mottled on my skin. I could taste the chemicals high up in my nose and kicked down with both legs. My throat caught on a bubble of something, and I tried to spit it out; it came up as a scream. I felt as if I were spitting all the tones the human body can produce, but all I could hear was a high-pitched, mosquito whine, cutting into my ears.

Lucky’s hands found one elbow and one wrist and I saw his white legs kick out like a fish’s tail. I wanted to bite him, but my head was in the wrong direction. I screamed again, and god I wanted to be more than a mosquito. He kicked again, and I caught a glimpse of his toes, painted dark something like his swim trunks. It took me a couple seconds to realize it when he got me above the surface, because of all the water spilling out my nose and mouth.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Lucky was saying. “Here, come here. It’s all right.” His skin was warm, and all of the sudden I realized the water was cold. “Grab on, hey. Grab on.” We were at the edge. I put both hands on the concrete lip and hooked my chin between them. “You were just here,” said Lucky. “Okay? Are you all right?” He chuckled through his teeth. “You did all right here, yeah? Put your legs down. Come on, put your legs down.”

I bunched my fists tighter on the concrete; it was warmer than Lucky. I let my legs uncurl, sliding them toes-first down in the wall. “It’s over your head right here,” said Lucky. “See that? You were playing in it.”

I looked up. The lifeguard was leaning forward in his tower, right above me, hiding behind an umbrella shadow and sunglasses. “Yeah,” I said to Lucky.

“Yeah? You were doing all right. Once it’s over your head it doesn’t matter. All right? It’s just water on down.”

The rain was starting to seep through my clothes and puddle on the small of my back. I switched off the flashlight and tried to scrape some new mud off my hands. I hadn’t had a brave face then, at the pool; I hadn’t really known what one looked like. Since then, I had had plenty of time to remember how I should have been, when the water was over my head. Almost everywhere in the pool, it was over my head. I knew what a brave face ought to look like, and sometimes I had myself convinced that I had worn it all the way through the deep end.

Whether I had or not, I put it on to go have dinner with dad. I made him rent a PG-13, which had thematic elements and violence, and during the boring parts I caught him admiring my face in the dull and shifting blue of the screen.

#

Somehow it got back to my dad that Angelo had tried to throw me off the school’s roof. He set up a meeting with the principal of the school, and Mister Tripp, and Angelo’s parents. For some reason, he set it for a weekend. I was supposed to go along, but Angelo was there, too, and after a few minutes of sitting in the room with whispers from our parents, Mister Tripp told me I could wait on the playground.

It was weird, playing on the big toy with no one else pushing for space. I sat at the top of the slide and no one yelled at me to hurry up and move. There was a crossbar right above me, built to keep people from shoving the younger kids over, I think, but I used it to swing myself back and forth, building up and then canceling my momentum. After one massive pump of my elbows I let myself go. I kept my arms up in the air as I slid down, and couldn’t help grinning at how the air all got out of my way. I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the bottom.

The ground came up sooner than I had expected. The soles of my shoes caught at an awkward angle on the unturned dirt and sent me head-over-heels. My eyes snapped open on reflex just about the time my hands went up to shield my face. My skin scraped on the hard-pack, right on the places that hadn’t healed from when Angelo dropped me on the roof.

It wasn’t the first time I’d taken a tumble like that. My favorite time to slide was right after the bell rang to come inside, because everyone else would be streaming toward the door, and I could try and get a good run without anyone seeing. I’m not very coordinated, though, so four times out of five I ended up on my butt or worse in the dirt, and most of those times there was someone — a teacher, a sixth grader on his way out to PE — to laugh or try not to.

The playground was dead silent, but as I levered myself up I felt as if my classmates were laughing at me, just from further away, and more quietly. To ignore them, I started building a city in the dirt, with roads and dry rivers. It wasn’t the best stuff — the banks of the rivers crumbled, and the shoulders of the roads disintegrated. It wasn’t like the dirt out in our forest, by the stream, or even the stuff in the corner of the playground by the big tires, where I usually spent my recesses.

There were some girls, a grade under me, who used to sit under the trees near my spot because they liked the shade and could talk about things without the boys making machinegun noises right through them. Mostly, they ignored me, but one day, after it had rained the previous night, a blonde saw me splattering wet clods all over my clothes. I was playing Moses and the Egyptians. She called me “mud monster,” and it wasn’t until now that I realized she said it the same way that other people called Lucky “homo,” careless and sort of like they were the same word, just pronounced differently.

Lucky didn’t call himself a homo. He called himself “on fire.” He called me “little man.” Dad called us both “dear son” and called himself “dad.” I don’t know what I called myself, other than my name. I didn’t have much. I thought “mud monster” wasn’t too bad. I got in trouble that day, because I threw handfuls of half-dry sand at the girls.

Dad came and found me when he was done talking with the principal. I had gotten bored with my city and was working on a hole for the little people. I dug it down with my fingers, wide enough that someone so small wouldn’t be able to see both sides, and deep enough that they couldn’t see the bottom.

“What are you working on?” asked dad. He had his hands in his pockets with his fists clenched, as if he were afraid of getting close to the dirt.

“Nothing,” I said, standing and brushing myself off. Dad opened up one arm and drew me to his side.

“If that kid so much as says another word to you, calls you ‘turkey’ or something, you tell me, okay?” He squeezed my shoulder into his stomach.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. He led me away from the slide. I sidestepped my finger-deep hole. I knew what he’d do. He’d come down here and have another meeting, and I’d play in the dirt, and we’d go home. There wasn’t much of anything more than that, but it wasn’t enough. It was like standing at the lip of a hole and trying to gauge its depth by tossing a stone instead of jumping right in for proof positive. Once it’s over your head, it doesn’t matter how deep it is.

“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” said Dad.

#

Saturday two weeks after Lucky’s funeral, I caught up with Angelo in the park outside the public library, where he was flicking pieces of bark at hungry chipmunks. I had been looking for him. For half a breath, it was weird to see him off the playground, like it’s weird to see a teacher out of the classroom. Then the long stretch of grass began to look like the soccer field, and the half-dead oak tree by the band-shell didn’t look that much different from the big toy. There was already a slide there.

Once the world felt like the right place, I pushed it just a little bit to hang on to some of the weirdness. I walked up behind Angelo, but not sneaking. I dragged my sneakers through the grass to make a noise. He knew I was there before I said anything, I figured, even though he didn’t turn around. He took a finger-long piece of bark between his thumb and pointer finger like a boomerang and let it fly with a spin. It landed and bounced right next to a squirrel who had been cramming pine seeds into his cheeks. The squirrel jumped, scattering his food. Angelo laughed, and I joined him.

“Here to play ‘Smear the Queer?’” he said, much quieter than I thought he could do. He stooped for another piece of bark. I found what I thought was a good one and handed it to him.

“I found something in the forest out behind my house,” I said.

“Good for you.” He dropped the piece of bark I had given him.

“Someone buried a duffel bag. It’s got all these bags of stuff in it.” I leaned in a bit closer, though there was no one around to spy on us. “I think it might be drugs.”

He didn’t turn around, but I saw the skin at the backs of his cheeks start to shift, being pushed out of the way by that grin of his. I shut my mouth and let his imagination do the rest. One time on the playground, when we were even younger, I watched from behind a big tire as one of Angelo’s friends told him about an ant’s nest over by where a group of girls were playing at house. That was all the guy said. “There’s an ant’s nest over there.” Angelo had grinned and slunk over. One of the girls told him to get lost; he kept his distance, found the nest, and picked up a couple of the fat, black bodies. I wondered what he would do. Would he throw them at the girls? Drop them in their hair?

He darted up to them, quicker than protests, and jammed both the ants in his mouth. He crunched them down, open-mouthed. The girls called for a playground monitor.

That’s what I was hoping to do. Just give him an idea – not even an idea. Give him a fact, and let him pursue it. “Drugs” was like a magic word.

“All right,” he said. “Show me.”

We played a game kind of like follow-the-leader all the way home. I was the leader. We would round a corner, and then Angelo would sprint to the stop sign at the next intersection. He would wait for me to catch up, and then say: “What took you so long, slowpoke?” On the last block before we turned off into the forest, I took off fast as I could and waited, grinning, at the stop sign for Angelo to catch up. That time he just walked, and said: “What’s the rush?”

He stuck a little closer in the forest. I knew my way by heart. There were landmarks that never changed if you looked hard enough, but if you didn’t care all you saw were loose boughs and drifts of pine needles that change with the wind, like I read sand dunes do.

Angelo cursed every time I got him with the backswing of a branch, and any time a mosquito got him, and I think every time he noticed his feet were sore from walking. The curses made me want to shut him up even more. They were some kind of magic words, too, unfamiliar in the way they sounded, even though I had read them a bunch of times in the horror books I borrowed from dad’s study. They didn’t sound like they should have.

We reached the clearing and I pointed at the whole. From where we were, even though Angelo was inches taller than me, it just looked like the top of a hole, the foreshortened oval, shaded black.

“All right,” said Angelo. “What’s really in there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I tried to remember the names of some drugs. “I think its heroin.” He laughed at me, because I pronounced it wrong.

He took a couple of steps forward. Not nearly close enough. He stood on his tiptoes to get a better view. “You first,” he said.

“I’m not getting in there.”

“You don’t have to jump down, nut sack. Just stick your head over. You probably put dog crap or like one of those spring-loaded snakes or something.”

“Okay,” I said. I approached Lucky’s hole, got down on my hands and knees and crawled until my head was over the edge. To make it look good, I reached a hand down, as though grabbing for something. For the long moment while Angelo stared, I spread my fingers and let the dark, cooled air flow between them. Gooseflesh rose all along my arm, and I remembered Lucky telling me that each pimple would grow a big, thick hair when I was a man.

Angelo’s sneakers scratched a weird rhythm in the dust. I pulled my hand back and looked over at him. He stood, one knee forward and slightly bent, staring into the hole. His mouth was wide open, like choking.

“Oh my god,” he said. The hole swallowed it up.

He stood there, breathing in one direction, out or in, for a long time. His mouth slid forward and open, his back arched like being hit with cold water from a hose. I stood up, even dusted off my jeans, and got myself right behind him. I’d push him over, and maybe I’d jump after him. We’d fall and fall, the same speed, together and he’d never be able to get up to me. Once it’s over your head, it doesn’t matter.

Or maybe I’d just put him in. Let him fall to China.

I shoved at his knees with both my hands. He fell to his knees, but they weren’t far enough forward. They dug little divots in the lip of the hole and he fell backward between his legs, folded over on himself. He rolled around to his stomach and clawed dirt getting back on his feet.

I didn’t stick around to watch. I took off into the ferns and devil’s clubs, headed toward my house, running one length of the playground, two, three, then back toward the hole when I ran out of forest. He caught me up just as I was feeling like my heart was going to collapse and my spit had turned all to glue.

He got my arms both wrapped around my back and kicked me hard right where I had shoved him. I fell forward and my shoulders both made this firecracker sound, so loud it made my ears ring. Curses came out of his mouth like he couldn’t stop them if he tried. It made me think of throwing up, leaning over my toilet in the middle of the night and just heaving so hard it hurts, long after everything’s that’s gonna has come up.

I wound up in the dirt. It was strange. It felt warmer than my skin, and not at all bad to curl up in. The hole made its long almost-howl somewhere nearby. My ribs got his fists, awkwardly, and then his feet.

He called me a fag, over and over again. Maybe blood started pooling up in my ears, because he got dimmer and dimmer, and then was gone completely.

The next thing I remember is a dream that seemed to last forever while I was in it, and then seemed only a few seconds long once I got out, like all memory is the same size and shape. I wasn’t in the forest anymore. I was in a bed with thin blankets which smelled of dryer sheets. It wasn’t my bed.

Dad was sitting in a chair that disappeared completely under him. He looked up at me when I shifted the blankets away from my nose. He told me we were in the hospital, and that I had a couple of cracked ribs, and that I could have so much ice cream I’d poo caramel for a week. He gave me this hug that hurt worse than when Angelo had kicked me.

I had to stay the night there at the hospital. I watched a lot of TV, and dad watched it with me. PBS had a show on with this old scientist — dad told me he’s dead now — who said that the earth is infinite, but bounded. If you walk, you can walk forever, but if you jump up then you’ve just busted infinity. Dad fell asleep during it.

The next day, dad set me up in my room with the TV and the VCR and I ate ice cream until my tongue went all the way numb. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was plenty tired, but dad kept coming in to check on me, worse than the nurses with their blood pressure cuffs at the hospital.

When it started getting dark he brought in an album of my baby pictures. We flipped through the pages together, though we could barely fit the two of us on my bed. We looked at all the pictures of Lucky and me playing in pillow forts, him stealing turkey off my plate at Thanksgiving, both of us standing side by side with me coming only up to his belly button.

After that, dad took me through a prayer. He asked god to watch of mom and Lucky and to tell them both we miss them very much. When we said, Amen, I just felt like I missed them more. I pretended to go to sleep so dad would leave. He switched off the light on his way out, and forgot to leave the door open a crack so I could see the bathroom light.

I got up and went to my window. It hurt a little to stand, but it all turned into memory pretty quick. I stared out at the forest. It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t close enough. Words didn’t work. The throbbing in my ribs and arms made me feel a little closer to Lucky, but only like being in the classes with the same teachers he had made me feel grown up.

I waited a bit for dad’s feet to stop drumming on the floorboards, then I slid open my window and got myself out into the grass. Bare feet, in my pajamas, I ran to the hole.

There was a full moon out. It made huge mountains and valleys out of the trails Angelo and I had scuffed in the dirt when we were fighting. I put my feet into Angelo’s big prints and danced around in reverse, until I was kneeling by the hole.

An infinite space, I thought, smelling that blank-like-water smell of the air coming up from below. Like anything is infinite. Lucky never came back from China; there was no “there” to come back from. Just a big, black throat with no stomach. No end to the distance between my forest and the other side of the world.

I cried like throwing up, and caught what I could in my hands. It wasn’t much, but I shook them out as far out into the center of the hole as I could. I heard some splash into the dirt and against the rocks as they went every which way. Some must have gone straight down, all together for as long as they could.