French sighed unhappily. “Who told you he’s back?”
“Marion called. She saw him at the square. His hair was longer, but she knew him. She said he was pale, that prison cost him twenty pounds.”
“I’m going to handle this, Gabrielle. I promise.”
“Gibby will want to see him, to spend time—”
“I won’t allow that.”
“How will you stop it?”
“Gabrielle—”
“He’s dangerous, Bill. He’s a danger to our son. Don’t you see that? Can’t you feel it?”
French sighed again, and knelt by the tub. Gabrielle had tried to make room in her heart for the man Jason had become, but Jason had not made it easy for her. Heroin. Prison. The effect he had on Gibby. Before Jason’s conviction, all Gibby had wanted was to trail in his brother’s shadow, to know about the Marine Corps and war, and whether he, too, should go to Vietnam. “Listen,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you in person that Jason was back, to promise you that I’ll keep Gibson safe.”
“You think I’m silly, don’t you? A silly, overprotective woman.”
“I promise you I don’t.”
“If you were a mother, you’d understand.”
“Jason would never hurt his brother.”
“Not intentionally. Not with malice.”
She left the rest unspoken, but he understood the deeper fears, her worries about corruption, deception, dangerous ideas.
“Gibby’s not in school,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“It’s a skip day. He’ll be at the quarry with his friends. Ken is already looking for him.”
“What if Jason finds him first?”
French looked away from the fear in his wife’s eyes. Gibby was her world, and Jason was a destroyer of worlds. “I’ll go, too,” he said. “I’ll find him.”
“You do that. You bring him home.”
French stood, but didn’t leave. He pushed his hands into his pockets, and looked down on the crown of her head and the curve of a dim, damp shoulder, bits of his wife on an apron of dark water. “Sooner or later Gibson will want to see his brother.”
“Just make sure it’s later.”
“Jason was inside for two years and change. He did his time.”
“Only Gibby matters. I’m sorry, Bill, but that’s the truth.”
“Won’t you at least talk to him?”
“To Jason?”
“Yes.”
“About what?” she asked. “Heroin?”
2
The quarry means different things to different people. For me, it’s about the drop. They say it’s a hundred and thirty feet from the top of the cliff to the top of the water, and from the water that feels about right: the granite rising, the gray sky above that. All that sameness makes the cliff seem small, and I know what people think, floating on their backs or looking out from the narrow shore across the quarry.
I could do that.
The more they drink, the more certain they become. It’s only water, they say, just a dive. How hard can it be?
But then they make the climb.
The first good ledge is sixty feet up, and people do jump from it. A few might make it to the next good ledge. Call it eighty feet. Somehow that looks twice as high as the one right below it. Those who make it all the way up tend to lean out from the waist and look downward as if somehow the laws of physics might have changed on the way up.
Seventy miles an hour when you hit the water.
Four full seconds to get there.
From thirteen stories up, the water looks like plate steel, and people remember the stories they’ve heard: the kid who died back in ’57, the ballplayer who hit wrong and drove a knee through his jaw, breaking it in four places and shattering every tooth on the right side. I’ve seen it a hundred times. The boys go pale, and their girlfriends say, I take it back, don’t do it. I’m not the only who’s jumped—a few others have, too—but only one person had the balls to dive, and that was my brother.
The dead one.
“Come on, man. If you’re going to do it, do it already.” The voice was behind me, my oldest friend. “You know Becky’s watching.”
I looked into the quarry and saw Becky Collins on an inner tube a hundred feet out from the cliff. She was as small as the rest, but no one else wore a white bikini. Her head rocked back, and I thought she might be laughing. The girl beside her might be laughing, too. Around them, a collection of rafts and tubes held half the senior class. The rest were on the far side of the quarry or in the woods or passed out in any of the cars that glinted in the distance like bits of colored glass.
“Are you making this dive or not?”
I looked away long enough to catch the gleam in Chance’s eyes. He was a small kid, but would fight anybody; try for any girl. “Maybe she’s looking at you,” I said.
“I’m not dumb enough to jump off this rock.”
I wondered what that said about me. I’d jumped seven times, but never made the dive, and everyone down there knew it. I’d sworn to do it before graduation, but that was two years ago, and I’d been angry when I’d said it. “Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked.
“I think you’re a rock star.”
“McCartney or Jagger?”
Chance offered up a devil’s grin. “That depends on if you jump or dive.”
I looked away from my friend, and thought about hitting wrong at seventy miles an hour. Beneath me, people began to chant.
“Dive, dive, dive…”
When my brother did it, it was a swan dive drawn against a high, pale sky, and I see it still in my dreams: the way he rose and hung, and then the long fall—no breath in my lungs—and how his hands came together an instant before he struck. Only three of us were there to see it, but word of it spread.
Robert French made the dive off Devil’s Ledge …
Did you hear?
Can you believe it?
At the time, the world record cliff dive was only fifteen feet higher, some guy in Argentina. But this was Charlotte, North Carolina, a little place in 1967. That was five years ago, but on that day in this little city, my oldest brother became a god. People asked him why he did it and how and a thousand other questions, but only four of us knew the truth that mattered, and I dream of that part, too: the way light hit his face when it broke from the water, the eyes that looked brighter and more alive. Let the Vietcong touch that, he’d said; and that was the thing only a few of us knew.
Robert was going to Vietnam.
“I’m going to do it,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“This time it happens.”
“Go on, then.”
“Becky Collins, right?”
“She’ll love you forever.”
I’d pictured the dive a thousand times, and it felt a lot like this: the wind in my face, the smell of heat and dust and distant rain. I rose to my toes, arms spread. “Give me a three count.”
“Wait. What?”
“No talking, all right? This is hard enough as it is.”
“Dude…”
“What?” I didn’t look away from the drop.