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.

Originally published in MungBeing.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Guess,” I said. I pulled off my hiking boots, scattering grass seeds over the doormat. The boots were only a couple of weeks old, not yet broken in. My feet were covered in hot spots, some of them already turning into blisters. I peeled off my socks and rubbed the red skin underneath.

“Don’t leave your shit in the middle of the floor this time,” said Marshal. He was sitting at the table, flipping through a sporting equipment catalogue. Since he was being so free with his language, I knew mom wasn’t around.

“Where’d mom go?” 

“Fuck if I know.” I would have bet he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

I balled up my socks and tossed them into the laundry room, then kicked my shoes into the closet. There wasn’t much room for them. I owned two pair: my hiking boots and my school shoes. Until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even have the boots. The rest of the closet was for Marshal’s football shoes, soccer cleats, white Sketchers, black Sketchers, and ski boots. Mom had started keeping all her shoes in her room.

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” Marshal took a Sharpie and circled something in the catalogue. Then he took a Post-It and used it to mark the page. That night, he would leave the thing on mom’s bedside table. A week later, a package would arrive. 

In two years, he would be old enough to get his own credit card. My guess was he wouldn’t bother signing up for it, or wouldn’t need to if mom kept it up.

I undressed in the bathroom I shared with Marshal. Like the closet, the sink was overcrowded with his products, leaving just a small square of porcelain for my deodorant and razor. Until a couple of weeks ago, I would get angry every morning, not only at having to share a bathroom with my twin but at having my share valued around ten percent, if that. Just one of those little things that start the day out on the wrong foot, like rolling over in bed and realizing a power outage has reset your clock, or being rattled awake at three in the morning because your brother snores like Moses.

Like I said, until a couple of weeks ago, my days were full of those kinds of wrong feet. Then, something happened that made me feel as if I had lowered both to the starting line, wrong and right, and every day since had started out all right. 

I stepped into the shower and cranked open both taps, relishing the quick — and quickly replaced — stab of cold from the water that had been sitting in the pipes. As always, I was amazed at how much dirt sluiced around my feet, and at how dark it was, like charcoal, at first, then lightening to the color of caramel before going invisible. I hadn’t been sent far that day, but the layer of grime was as thick as ever. Most of it came from the cave, from its close walls coated in ancient dust.

Every day since that Saturday when I had sort of run away from home, I had gone to the cave. I had gone down on my hands and knees, like a pilgrim, and scraped forward into the tight, cool path inside the rock. Crossing the threshold was like going to bed late in summer with the windows open and the sprinklers on outside. It was peace, held tight to the bosom of the mountain. It was old peace, with air that hadn’t moved for centuries. 

More importantly, it was mine. Something possessed me when I first laid eyes on the cave’s small, pursed mouth, something like what my fourth grade teacher had tried to instill in us when she dressed us up in buckskin and had us blaze Lewis’ and Clark’s trail across a deserted park. I didn’t have a flag, but I planted a twig of blooming forsythia at the threshold to mark it, and took note of the trees and boulders around so I could find my way back. 

But, for a second there as I ducked my head into the hole for the first time, I thought maybe I had gotten myself all excited for nothing. There was light coming from the other side, maybe twenty feet in. A short tunnel, hardly worth naming, much less discovering. I sat back on my heels. 

As soon as I let my focus slip from the cave to the backdrop of the hillside surrounding it, my temples began to throb. The ache pushed toward my sinuses, making my eyes feel as if they were about to pop out of their sockets with every beat of my heart. The last time I had felt a pain so sudden and specific it had been at an amusement park, watching a movie that was supposed to be in 3D. I had burned the tops of my ears, playing too hard in the sun, and it hurt to wear the special glasses, so I just watched the show with them off. Images that my brain knew were supposed to fit together had divided like cells across a screen too big for me to take in all at once. 

I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my thumbs, igniting puffs of color as I dug in harder. The pain faded, and so did the colors.

When I reopened my eyes, it all made sense. The headache came back, of course, because there’s a long path between sense and understanding, but I could see why it had come on.

The cave opened up into the side of the mountain like a belly button. The skin of the hillside was smooth and flat behind it, occasionally spotted by boulders, but with no gullies, no channels to cut through behind the cave’s throat. It opened up right into the heart, or bowels, of the mountain. There was no way light should be filtering into the other end of the tunnel, not unless it was being reflected, or descending through a hole in its ceiling.

That’s what I mean by making sense of the situation: I was clueless, knew it, and was getting closer to a migraine by the second. Sense wasn’t enough to cure what ailed me. Understanding was at the point of light in the cave’s throat. I leaned forward, took a deep breath, felt the cool ancient peace work on my headache like medicine, and disappeared into the ground.

#

Marshal and I never shared much in the way of interests. That summer, while I explored my cave, he sat on the couch playing Madden. We excelled in different areas at school, he in history and current world problems, me in geology. We played different sports; he liked them all except badminton, and I liked badminton. I think it was the silent N that did it for me.

Despite all that, our circles of friends overlapped almost completely. It was kind of hard for them not to, in a school the size of ours where even I could be the second ranked birdhound, but it’s still worth noting that when we went out to hang with friends, we almost always went together. 

After a month or so of spending my days on the far side of the cave, the carnival came to town. For three nights, we didn’t do much more than dine on elephant ears and puke up our guts after long runs on The Zipper. 

If there was one common point between Marshal’s friends and mine it was Carlotta Hernandez. She was at the center of the overlapping rings, the star which we all orbited. That metaphor works especially well for me, because the girl had gravity. Not like mass — though she called herself a “chub” all the time, for no good reason I could ever see — but that she drew intangible things like attention, admiration, and lust to her without effort, by some dint of the natural world. 

That summer, a lot of my friends were out of town. They were visiting one half of their parents or the other, counseling at camp, working on their grandpa’s farm, that sort of thing. Not Carlotta, though; she had two babies to take care of — a cousin and a sister — not to mention the other, older children, and a house to help keep clean and stocked while her parents worked. The carnival was her chance to relax, to let loose, to get the smell of baby poop off her hands and replace it with the stink of sweat, old candy, and beer.

On the last night of the carnival, there were about a dozen of us altogether. It was getting close to midnight, and the barkers were putting out flags in the lines to mark when the ride would shut down. A few of us were waiting for The Zipper; I wasn’t going to ride, but I stood in line to bullshit with Carlotta and a couple of others, including Marshal. The barker dropped the flag right in front of us and shrugged as an apology.

As soon as the barker turned his back, Marshal picked up the cloth flag and threw it over his shoulder. It landed further back in the line, where someone else picked it up. A flash of white fabric, like a gull catching bread in midair, and the flag was gone again. 

“He’s gonna remember what you look like,” I said. 

“Screw him. This is the last chance for me ‘n Carly.” All weekend long, Carlotta had been promising to ride The Zipper with him, only to chicken out every time it was her turn. Even then, more than fifteen minutes back in the line with a dozen people in front of us, her eyes were wide with apprehension. She kept tilting her head back to watch the ride as it spun and bucked.

If you’ve never ridden The Zipper, here’s what you’re missing: Imagine a chainsaw. The chain whips around the long, narrow blade. Pretend that there are tiny people nestled in every tooth of the chain. Now start those teeth spinning as if they were themselves little buzz-saws. Pretty bad, huh? And that’s not even considering that the whole contraption is flipping end over end, as if being juggled.

I couldn’t blame Carlotta for being nervous, especially since the rotation of the two-person cabins was entirely dependent on the sadism or masochism of its occupants, who could shift their weight forward and back to send the little metal box whirring like a pinwheel. Marshal wasn’t one to much mind throwing his weight around.

The closer we got to the front of the line, the harder she gripped Marshal’s hand, and the louder she laughed at everyone’s jokes. She had a shrill laugh, a banshee sort of keening, which I only just caught myself from mentioning to her. It wasn’t very pleasant, to be honest; easy, sure, but not very nice. 

It was almost a relief when they reached the entrance gate. The barker eyed them suspiciously, but didn’t bust them, even though Marshal gave him a big ol’ toothy grin.

“In you go,” the barker said in a voice with so little enthusiasm it made me wonder if he had ever had any. He yanked open the green metal grille that held the passengers in their coffin-sized cabin during the ride. The hinges made a sound like nails on a chalkboard only wish they could.

“I dunno,” said Carlotta.

“Come on,” said Marshal. “We’re the last ones. He’s tired. He’ll go easy.”

“Get in or clear out,” said the barker. “I’ve got to close up.”

At those words, the rest of the group behind us kind of disintegrated. The line stretching behind us snapped in a dozen places, coalescing again in as many pockets, thin conversations running like at the end of a long party.

I was about to offer Carlotta a word of encouragement — her young cousins and nieces and nephews would hold her in reverence when she told them about braving The Mighty Zipper — when she shook out her long hair, as if clearing out cobwebs, and punched Marshal in the upper arm. “You throw us around and I’ll kill you,” she said.

Once they were seated, the barker slammed the grille shut and pinned it in place with a bent piece of steel no larger than my thumb. That was the only part that made me nervous.

The other cabins were empty. As the machine ground into life I saw Carlotta sniff her hand, which had been gripping the oh-shit bar, and make a face. Metal and old vomit and sweat. I smelled it, too, or thought I could.

Then they were off, and I realized I was all alone, the leftovers from the line vanished from behind me and the barker, one hand on the machine’s simple controls, with his back to me.

I backed away, found a low metal railing to lean against and watched Carlotta and Marshal go around as best I could. It wasn’t easy; the old beast could still hit a pretty good clip, and all those wheels within wheels made it hard to keep my focus. I could hear them, though. Carlotta, anyway. Her high, thin laugh seemed to come from everywhere, so much like a scream that a few other carnival stragglers shot glances over their shoulders in her direction.

Even I, as accustomed to Carlotta’s laughter as I was, had trouble marking the cutoff between mirth and abject terror, especially when Marshal started their cabin rocking, then flipping end-over-end.

The banshee howl formed words, briefly: “Marshal, stop!” He didn’t.

After a few minutes, the barker brought the ride to a halt. The cabin’s hinges protested twice more, open and closed, and then Marshal and Carlotta were staggering toward me. Marshal had his arm around her neck. Neither could stop giggling, building off of each other, until Carlotta capped it off with one last, delighted screech, which brought the night to a close.

#

The first time I passed through the cave, it spit me out on the other side of the mountain.   It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, but I was all right once I recognized the foothills in the distance, the long cut off of the forest service road in the ridge to my left, and the stream in the valley below. I had entered the mountain on one side, crawled for twenty feet, and come out half a mile further. 

The first thing I did was spin on my heels and check on the cave from this side. Okay, that’s not quite true; the very first thing I did was enjoy the soft heat of the sun on the skin of my arms, but that was only for a fraction of a second. Bending down, I peered into the cave’s mouth.

There was nothing there. No, again I’m misspeaking. If there had been nothing, I would have been all right. What there was was dirt, and rock: a dead end that made the hole a small burrow instead of the entrance to a cave. 

For a panicked moment, I clawed at the dirt, but didn’t make an inch of progress. I had to face it; there was no cave. I calmed down once I remembered that I wasn’t far from home, and that I had been here — or nearby — dozens of times before. It was just that usually I had hiked the intervening distance. 

I was late getting home that day. Mom gave me the silent treatment for not being there to set the table, like I was supposed to. I only wish Marshal had followed her example.

The next day, I couldn’t wait to get back up onto the mountain, to find my cave and study it. I brought a notebook and a pen with me, and scribbled some thoughts that I’m sure, at the time, seemed relevant and profound. Then I crawled through again, the light at the end of the cave drawing me forward twenty-odd feet on my hands and knees.

This time, when I climbed to my feet on the other side I was dead lost. Nothing looked familiar. A steep bluff shot up to my left, and a thick stand of firs huddled in close in every other direction. I checked, just in case, but the cave’s mouth had sealed up again. No going back that way.

It took me most of the afternoon to get to the top of the bluff, picking my way up the side like a young mountain goat, unsure on its feet. Once I had gained the high ground, I was pretty much home free. There was my mountain, a couple miles in the distance, and the forest service road ran just a hundred feet past where I stood. I followed the road back home, but this time it was after dark before I made it in the front door. Mom wasn’t happy, and grounded me for the rest of the week. Marshal was ecstatic. I smelled beer on his breath.

When I was allowed out of the house again, I couldn’t help but plan another trip to my cave. This time, though, I was cautious, in case the cave spit me out even further from home. I packed a backpack with water, food, a compass, and a lighter. I took off early in the morning, hiked to my cave, and dove right in. 

This time, upon exiting, I was struck by a sense of familiarity, rather than the usual disorientation. I was at the top of a mountain; the cave had opened for me between a pair of granite boulders just below the summit. Sweet, cool wind brushed past me, in a hurry to go nowhere special. I scrambled to the top of one of the boulders and looked down.

There was my house, down at the base. Marshal was mowing the lawn. I could see him, but not clearly; he moved like a blob of mercury, sliding across the grass as one cohesive, unchanging shape. 

No point in wasting good preparation, I figured, so I turned around to look over the valley behind the mountain, planted myself in the lee of the stone, and busted out the food and water I had packed. In the silence, I thought maybe I ought to be terrified, in the same absent way that remembering a near-collision makes your mind race, but not your heart. There was no explanation for the cave’s behavior. I’ve never been one to get scared of the unknown, but jumping into it with no tether ought to at least have creeped me out a bit.

There was a big distance between knowing I should be scared and feeling it. Instead, I felt strong, accomplished, as if I were a subscriber to the ends justifying the means and it had turned out the universe was, too. I sat there, watching cloud shadows make two-dimensional shapes on the rocks, at peace. I guess partly because I hadn’t had to hike much at all, and so wasn’t tired out. Still, it’s one of the first moments that comes to mind whenever someone tells me to relax. 

As the sun dipped lower, I headed for home. It occurred to me, on the way down, that playing with my cave was the riskiest thing I had ever done, and, for no reason I could put to words just then, that made me very sad.

#

By the time the carnival season ended, mom had stopped caring when I stayed out so late on my hikes. I don’t think it was for any reason having to do with me, exactly; it was that Marshal had started staying out later and later with Carlotta, and mom figured if she wasn’t going to rag on Marshal, she couldn’t very well pick on me. That suited me fine. I spent less and less time around our few friends, and more time exploring. As if to quell even those small tremors of fear I had felt on the mountaintop, the cave never sent me further than a few miles from home. The furthest was ten, by my guess. 

Not that I was trying to turn into a recluse, of course. You know how habits start? Because they’re the easy thing to do. You don’t form a habit of difficult tasks; maybe you repeat them, consciously, until they become easy, but they don’t turn into habits until there’s so little resistance from your body that they go automatic. That’s how it was with the cave. It was so easy to slip into the ground, to come up someplace far away, to own all the sunlight, breeze, and birdsong for miles around.

I only realized that hiking had become a habit when Carlotta invited me to her birthday party, and I almost made an excuse to miss it. It was her sixteenth; I couldn’t just bow out. I said I would be there, and she sounded so pleased I didn’t want to hang up. We chatted for a while longer. Marshal was still asleep from the night before. We didn’t talk about him. Instead, we fell into the topic of her family and stayed there. Her youngest cousin, Jacob, was a precocious little thing of three, so she told me stories about him while I made a sandwich and a glass of milk and carried them out to the back porch.

Jacob had taught himself to tie a half-hitch. Jacob had said a bad word with such perfect timing Carlotta couldn’t help but laugh. Jacob had detuned their little upright piano so it sounded as if it were underwater. 

By the time my sandwich was gone, we were on to how Jacob had asked Carlotta what had happened to his mother, and Carlotta hadn’t been able to answer with anything like the truth, and how she could see so much of his father in him, and how scared that made her. I hadn’t known the dad — he had been four grades ahead of us in school — but I knew his reputation.

There was a long silence after her fear was out in the open. She was the one to break it. “I hate how I always tell you my problems.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, I mean I hate that you don’t tell me yours. It’s… weird, I guess. Like you’re not really a person.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We said our goodbyes, I said I was sorry, and that I would see her at her party. “I’m glad,” she said, but that was it.

#

Summer wound to a close. Our friends started reappearing in town, back from their summer jobs and vacations, each one of a them a little bit changed from the time and distance. I heard about them mostly through Marshal. “Damn! Trina lost her baby fat at the beach. Marty’s spending all his time on the phone with some chick he met in New York. Bree’s a stuck-up bitch, now, since her dad spoiled her the whole summer upstate.”

I was too far gone by then, too caught up in my habit. In the last week before school started up again, I spent almost every waking moment up in the mountains, sometimes leaving home before the sun was up and not coming back in until the moon was high or setting.

That Friday — the last weekday of freedom, thirteen days before Carlotta’s party — was the end of a week of light days. On Thursday, the cave cave sent me an easy six miles out, along the floor of the valley. I followed a stream back, enjoying the lively sound of clean water over sparkling stones. My reflection caught my attention now and again. I couldn’t help feeling a bit like Marshal must have on a good day, in the best shape of my life, slim and balanced. Not much muscle on my frame, not so you could see, but plenty on the inside. Strong heart and lungs. 

By the time I reached the back side of my mountain, I was full enough of pride to float right to the top. It was a strange sensation, impossible to reproduce in any other way. The confidence that my body could handle whatever hit it. Sun, time, distance, whatever. 

I got home well before dinner, and took a shower. Marshal was in the living room, playing a video game, so I borrowed some of his free weights and then gave Carlotta a call to see what she was up to that evening. Busy with kids, it turned out, but I went to bed happy anyway.

Friday promised to be another lovely day of hiking, with a high sun shining through thin clouds, dappling the world like a careless painter. Reaching the easy slope at the base of the mountain, I pushed into the thin path I had stamped into the underbrush over my many trips. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a voice say: “Ow!” followed by a quick gasp, which didn’t seem to last long enough to have been of pain. It was lower-pitched, more like a breath. It had come from nearby, off to my right, somewhere in the wild juniper bushes. 

I held my own breath and tiptoed off the path. Thin, dry brambles whipped my bare arms, stinging. They must have cut more deeply than I thought, but I didn’t notice that until after. Right then, I just tried to ignore the itches they left behind so I could concentrate on moving quietly. 

Ten feet in, the vegetation was thick enough to conceal pretty much everything of the world beyond, but a bit short, so it only did so from my chest down. The voice had become two voices, each exhaling rapidly, but neither seeming to pause long enough to breathe in. They were nearby, but I couldn’t guess how close. I froze, because I sure as hell didn’t want to stumble right into the two of them. 

I heard Marshal’s voice say: “Yeah,” like victory. That’s when I turned and crashed back to the path. I didn’t care if they heard me. 

You know how, when you go indoors after a day spent under the brightest sun, your house seems dim and full of pockets of the dullest shades of red and blue? That’s how I saw the path ahead of me as I slouched ahead, up the first easy slope of the mountain. I doubt the world itself was any dimmer, but the embarrassed blood and the angry blood mixed behind my eyes, darkening everything by increasing degrees. 

Before I knew it, I was standing hang-dog in front of the cave. Suddenly, I felt too hot in my skin. I shrugged my pack off, unable to stand its weight for a moment longer. I slid headfirst into the welcoming dark and the cool, dead air. Something smelled like rain. The far end of the cave seemed to float like a promise, which only time or distance keeps from being fulfilled.

I pulled myself to the surface, taking a moment to catch my breath before checking my surroundings. My backpack lay on the ground right in front of me, collapsed and shapeless. I turned around. The cave’s mouth remained open. All it had done was turn me around. Some of the sick energy had lifted out of me, maybe leeched into the guts of the mountain. I sat with my legs crossed, my face into the wind.

That’s when I noticed that my arms had been cut by the undergrowth, and some time in between then and now I had pressed them against my shirt. Cross-hatched lines of blood stained my white T-shirt, overlapping like the teeth of a zipper.

#

On the morning of her birthday, Carlotta called around to cancel the party. She wasn’t feeling well, she said, and didn’t want to have a bunch of people over. We had spent hours at her house the day before, putting up decorations. By “we,” I mean “I.” Marshal was there to start with, but as soon as the scissors, tape, and glue came out, he was off to the convenience store to buy a pop. It took him hours to choose a flavor, I guess.

So, when Carlotta called it off, I offered to come and undecorate for her. Her entire family was out of town, visiting yet more relatives. Carlotta had volunteered to stay behind and sit the house. If I knew her family like I thought I did, they probably wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to tell her no parties, what with trying to shuffle all the various children into the minivan. Still, they wouldn’t appreciate coming back to a house full of streamers and balloons. With a trace of reluctance that even I picked up on, Carlotta agreed to let me help. 

I biked down the hill into town, getting a little sweaty in the process. At the time, I still believed a healthy musk held some sort of attractive power over the opposite sex, some sort of gravity I could harness. She answered the door in her pajama-bottoms, a gray sweatshirt, and big pink slippers. I hate to say it, but she looked awful. Her hair looked brittle, cracked at weird angles, and with no makeup her face looked as if it had lost all its depth and weight. 

“Where can I start?” I asked. 

“Whatever,” she said with the ghost of a smile. I could smell vomit on her breath. Hugging herself, she went into the living room. It was as clean as I had ever seen it, thanks to our efforts the day before. All the kids’ toys sorted and put into drawers, the carpet vacuumed, the dozens of family pictures dusted. There were still spots, origin unknown, staining the floor around the couch and coffee table, and the whole place smelled faintly of sulphur, but it might as well have been immaculate. Compared to how it usually was, it felt like another world, and not a bad one. 

Carlotta curled herself up on the couch, her face half-buried in a pillow, while I hauled a chair in from the dining room. I climbed up and started pulling out the pushpins that held the streamers in place. Point-by-point, they came loose and dangled limply, some held in place by more pins down the line. 

“Sorry you don’t get to have your party,” I said. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“I was looking forward to it.”

Pretty soon, a curtain of multicolored crepe paper hung between Carlotta and me. I kept on talking about nothing much, which was more than she had to say. In a long moment of silence, I considered bringing up some of my problems, like real people do, but they all started with Marshal. Instead, I talked about things we would both remember. That time when Mr. Beeheimer caught us gluing bugs to our desks. Or the year I sat behind her in English and we passed notes using our feet. Hiding from bullies inside the big tires at recess. The middle-school dance when I asked her for the last one, and she said all right because Marshal was out sneaking a cigarette. 

I retrieved the last few pushpins. The streamers slipped to the floor, puddling on the carpet. Carlotta was looking at me. I tried to read the expression in her eyes, but without something on her face to bolster it I couldn’t even begin to guess. Suddenly self-conscious, I fidgeted with the pins I had slipped into my pocket.

“This is one of those times,” she said. 

“Which times?”

Instead of answering, she sniffed loudly. I could hear junk in her sinuses. Stepping down off the chair, I set about gathering up the streamers. “You want to save them?” I asked.

Carlotta shook her head. 

When my back was to her, as I bent, wrapping my fingers in strips of every color, she said: “I should have gone with you,” as if she were second-guessed the answer she had picked on a quiz. It made me smile and shut up.

#

Call me oblivious, but I didn’t figure out Carlotta was pregnant until the second week of school. She and I weren’t in any classes together that semester, so I picked up on it through our circle of friends. I’ve got to stop putting myself in a good light like that; when I say I “picked up on it,” I mean that Dominic sat down at the table where we were eating lunch — Marshal, me, and a couple others — and said:

“Carly’s keeping it, man.”

“No, she ain’t,” Marshal snapped back, with no hesitation.

Dominic raised his hands. “Just what I heard from Heather. Shit, it’s not like they’ll notice around her house.”

“It ain’t even been a month,” said Marshal. “She’s faking.”

“Puked her guts up first period,” offered one of the other boys, in a so-what voice.

“Yeah, ‘cause she been sick!” Half of it came out in a squeak, Marshal’s voice cracking as his frustration climbed. It vanished too quickly into the other shouts and laughter of the lunch room. Silence should have descended. People would have paid attention. Instead, Dominic and the other boys just shrugged and set back to their food. “God,” said Marshal, exasperated. That’s what pushed me over the edge, that he had the audacity to be annoyed.

I leaned over the table and slapped him, open-palm, across the cheek. My finger nails caught above his lip, two of them leaving red, stick-thin lines. Startled, he pushed backward from the bench, landing on his tailbone. He had had a fork in his hand when I hit him, and had held onto it as he fell. With a snarl, he threw it overhand at my head. I twisted out of the way, but not fast enough. It must have been the tines that connected, because afterward I found two bloody streaks just beside my nose.

I launched myself right over the table, slipping on Marshal’s lunch tray, but at least hitting the floor right side up. By then, Marshal was on his feet. We didn’t circle, didn’t size each other up. There was no grace between us, not even the beautiful, animal ferocity that some folks show in a good, noble fight. We just fell on each other, swinging, kicking, biting, and none of it worth remembering beyond that he bruised my left eye, and I gave him a hell of a shiner on his right.

A varsity linebacker pulled us apart. “What the fuck? What the fuck!” Marshal kept repeating as we were separated. It started off as a question, but I don’t think that’s how it ended up. It sounded more as if he were trying to get the words to come out strong enough that he could beat me with them. I didn’t say anything. 

The vice principal suspended us both for a week, but decided that, rather than send us both home, he would keep Marshal on in-house detention, and let mom deal with me. He called her in. While we waited, the school nurse checked us out for sprains. My anger ran low, then died. I apologized, quietly, to the vice principal. My mouth almost kept going, almost said: “Sorry,” to Marshal, but I caught myself in time.

Mom had some words for me on the drive home. “How could you? He’s your brother.” But he hadn’t been my brother for a long time, not since dad died. Mom kept us together, confined us all in the same house, as if place could make family. Maybe it could, like with Carlotta and the dozen people that called themselves her family. I didn’t want to take the chance. Mom was the force that kept us together; it would have to be another that drove us apart.

#

Four days into my suspension, while mom was at work and Marshal was at school, I gave Carlotta’s house a call. One of her nieces answered, and told me that Carlotta was out shopping, but she’d call me back when she got home. I heard Carlotta’s voice, wordless, in amongst the background hiss, and then a loud crackling as the phone changed hands.

“Hello?” 

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Okay, today.” She sounded cautious. 

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Casting the word out like a grapnel. It landed, but shakily.

“It’s all right.”

“And see if you had the time to listen to a problem I’m having.”

“I don’t have time–”

“I know it’s Marshal’s baby,” I said, trying to also make it sound as if I didn’t care that it was Marshal’s baby. “He bragged about it,” I lied. “And he’s the problem.” Silence on the other end of the line. “Can you come up?”

“Yeah, okay,” said Carlotta. It came out as a sigh. “Mom left me the car.”

She took her time, showing up forty minutes later, made-up and wearing her favorite jeans. I gave her a hug, which she returned, lightly. 

“Want to go for a walk?” 

“Okay,” she said. 

I took her along the path I had blazed all through that summer. We exchanged only a few words as we walked. I led the way, so I couldn’t see her face, but I thought — or imagined — I could hear her steps getting lighter the further up the mountain we went. 

I stopped just beside the sprig of forsythia I had planted as a marker, only a few feet away from my cave, and turned to look out over the town. Carlotta pulled up beside me, breathing hard. 

“You’re out of shape,” I teased. She punched me in the upper arm. 

We sat down on a granite shelf and breathed easily. The air was only a little colder and thinner there, but it was enough to notice. I took a long moment to order my thoughts.

“Don’t,” said Carlotta, as if she had been watching the gears in my head tick, though she had barely looked at me since we stopped climbing.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I want to share a secret with you.”

“I know you hate Marshal.”

“Yeah, that’s not a secret. Gimme a bit of credit.”

“So, what is it?”

“No, I have to show it to you. It’s a place.” I got to my feet and held out a hand to help her up. Then I led her past the bush and up to the cave’s mouth. “Through there,” I said.

“Gross.”

“It’s not very far. If you look in, you can see the light on the other side.”

She bent at the waist and peered in, like I said. “It’s straight down,” she said.

“Just an optical illusion. It’s actually pretty flat, and most of it’s rock. And on the other side, well–” I finished with a shrug and got down on my hands-and-knees. 

“That’s all right,” she said, taking a step back. 

“Sure,” I said. “You trust Marshal on The Zipper, but you don’t trust me enough to go twenty feet into a cave?” I made it sound as if my feelings were hurt, just as a joke, but I think she took it seriously. Muttering a weightless complaint, she crouched and moved like a spider behind me, hands and feet splayed out, into the hole. 

A few feet into the darkness, she giggled. “Like hiding in the big tires at recess,” she said. Her voice sounded as if her lips were right against my ear. A shiver ran up my spine. We kept going. 

“I wanna be that old again,” I said, and maybe she didn’t hear me. We were at the far side. I grabbed thick stand of cheat grass at the roots and pulled myself out into the spotty sunlight. The place I stood up in was unfamiliar, but a recognized a couple of the peaks nearby. Not far from home. A couple ridgelines at most.

I turned around to help Carlotta out and came face to face with a bare wall of rock. The cave was gone, had maybe disappeared the moment I left it. In the space of a single beat, my heart went to a dead run, pumping quick blood that burned against my suddenly frozen skin. “Carlotta?” I half-yelled, then gave it all up. “Carlotta!” I pounded on the rock, but only managed to cut holes in my fists. 

I knew better than to think the cave was still open behind the rock; it just took me a moment to realize. When I did, I scrambled up the hillside as fast as I could. It was a deceptive slope; I counted three false summits before I made it to the actual top. Breathless, I turned in circles. The nearest peak was more than a mile away. I must have gone around six or seven times before my darting eyes caught the shape of another person outlined at the top of the ridge nearest the town.

It was Carlotta, I was sure. The cave hadn’t sent her far, maybe hadn’t sent her anywhere at all.

“Are you OK?” I screamed, but the wind was against me, catching my words and force-feeding them back to me. I coughed, my throat suddenly bone-dry. In the space of an eye-blink she disappeared over the lip of the summit, the clarity of her motion swallowed by the thickness of the air, the waves of heat falling between us.

I started out at a dead run; I had to catch her, to explain what I could to her. But what had happened? What could I say? I slowed to catch my breath, and the realization hit me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me.

I took the rest of the hike home at an easier pace; head down, sure, and not looking up much from my feet, but unhurried.

When I finally made it home, the driveway was empty. It was after five o’clock; school was out, and mom should have been home from work. The house welcomed me with a puff of cold air as I opened the door.

Inside, I thought about giving Carlotta a call. As I reached for the phone, I saw that the message light was blinking on the answering machine. I pressed the play button.”

“Honey.” It was mom. “We’re at the emergency room. Marshal has appendicitis, and they think they’re going to have to operate.” She was just letting me know where they were, not asking me to come. Without thinking much about it, except to remember to lock the door behind me, I got on my bike and started down the hill.

I pedaled slowly at first, letting the revolutions of my legs drive the engine of my thoughts. They started with the times I had spent in the hospital when dad was dying. I turned down the slope into town, picking up speed. Dad had apologized to all of us, for whatever he could set his mind on at the time. The spokes on my wheels blurred to invisible. For the week after he died, we were like the center of a star, Marshal, mom, and me. Held together by a force much older than all of us added up. I kept my feet going steady, even as the slope lessened and flattened out; my thighs burned. I thought that maybe if I hit a bump in the road, I’d fly out into orbit, or past, maybe escaping the Earth altogether.

#

Marshal was already out of surgery when I got to the hospital. I asked for his room number at the nurse’s station, but didn’t really need to because mom was sitting on a bench outside his door. Her head was in her hands, and one foot bounced restlessly against the dirty tile floor. I gave her a hug almost before she realized I was there. 

“He okay?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Bad infection.” 

“Can I go in?” 

She nodded, the same rate as her juggling foot, for just a moment. 

Marshal’s eyes were closed when I slipped inside, and the lights were off. A sliver of orange from a streetlamp outside slipped in between the room’s hanging blinds like a dagger through a ribcage. He still had his black eye, and I still had mine. I stood beside his bed for a long moment, with nothing at all on my mind. I think everything like intention had fled my mind the moment when I had turned and saw only the rock wall behind me instead of Carlotta. Since then, I had been operating by paths of least resistance, inventing reason after the fact, when imagination could win out fully.

Marshal opened his eyes long enough to turn them away from me. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair by his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, letting the words hang alone until even I started to think it was all I had to say. I had traveled so many miles, gone such a distance. Even though I ended up right back at home, I was so far away in another sense that the only force capable of acting on my body was my body itself, and the mind inside. Not mom’s desperate gravity, not Carlotta’s starlight, not the vacuum that dad had left behind. But which way should I propel myself? I took a deep breath.

“I told mom you didn’t cry when dad died.”

Marshal puffed out through his nose, scornful. “I showed her where you keep your porn.”

This was it. “I told everyone the last time you wet your bed.”

“I wish I hadn’t pulled you out of the creek, that time you were eight.”

“I laugh when you get tackled at practice.”

“I know you’ve had a crush on Carlotta since Kindergarten.”

We went on like that, back-and-forth with all the ammunition we had, heavy and light. At some point, the streetlamp burned out, and all that was left was our voices, separated by a gulf of nothingness, rumbling at each other like cannon-fire.