It was never clear to me how he saw my relation to him at puzzle-time Fridays. I refer to Al’s father. Leaning over him as he held his yellow stub above his twice-folded Heatsburg Hour I believed he might be including me by waiting for me to say what the next line should be or just to think it out silently before he drew it in. I usually knew the next line, and every particle of my being focused so on what absolutely must come next that, as I now know, my mouth would open. Once, I couldn’t keep quiet, for I had a hunch Al’s father was going to connect the wrong two points, there was a melony air of cut grass coming straight up from his hand to the roots of my tongue, I was going to speak when ye gods at my lower lip an unusually welling mass of spit had moved. Impelled, I got out most of the word “No” but could tear free of it barely enough to drag in my lower lip and with it luckily my dripping drool just before it reached a length of no reclaim from which it would have fallen finally to Al’s father’s smudged, brown forearm. “Got a cold?” he murmured, and made the wrong line. But I’ve gone too fast, even for an ideal audience like you.
Some pages back if you’d been here you’d have said, “Hey wait, why did you have to keep Al and Bob from meeting? That’s pretty fussy stuff.”
Was I afraid they’d become friends or tell each other things innocent until joined? Your questions almost equal Ev’s “Why write to somebody dead?” I solved parabolas for my father quite a while before I saw for myself what a parabola is, which made it a whole new solid puzzle disturbing as it hadn’t been before. And this was probably two years before the parabola came up at Poly in Mr. Cohn’s brisk, afternoon class that made me forget the dreadful challenge and pointlessness of ten o’clock chem.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand replying to the brown arm that no I didn’t have a cold. Al’s voice came very close to the house, beside a window in the west wall of their living room a dozen feet from his regular exit window on the south side; and intensely and low he said to his small dog Archy, “Jesus Christ, Arch, I told you don’t dig there, Jesus peezus.” His mother’s flowers.
As he then raised that rather husky voice and complainingly called me to come out and give him a hand, and from the kitchen his sandy-haired sister Gail said, “Oh he’d rather do puzzles,” Al’s mother’s steps crossed the kitchen floor with an emergency firmness, and the kitchen door slammed: “All right, Brother, you’re gettin’ it now! I don’t know where you hear that language and I don’t care.”
Pork loin hissed as the oven came open with a snap of the catch and a crank of the hinge, and staring at Al’s father’s mistake so close to the completion of the puzzle, I could imagine off there in the kitchen my secret Gail holding her head to one side lifting the pan onto the stove top and turning back to the table to finish mashing, they didn’t have a potato ricer. I called her Gail but Al and his father in their own different tones called her by her real name that she disliked. She was one big year older than me then, when I was nine or ten. Al didn’t run away from his mother, he took what she thought he had coming.
But when I was twelve, the year Gail had on me was different — both more and less to both of us than before. She was a natural swimmer and Al wasn’t, though he pulled strong and deep with his wide, growing shoulders, and when he remembered to kick, you could hear it for a quarter of a mile on a still day. Gail didn’t swim fast but she breathed without much roll and she had that strange skim of the instinctive swimmer who seems not held in the normal way by the water’s friction. Up in the hills south of the Heatsburg road and below a small mountain, was a granite quarry long abandoned. The corner of it that had been filled by converging springs was said by Al’s father to be too deep to measure. My parents took Al with us on a picnic there one Saturday when a business friend and his wife and my uncle Coolidge were visiting us. It was the summer my grandmother died and it was the summer I got my typewriter.
No one ever again found it convenient to take us to the quarry, and Al and I were forbidden by my parents and his mother to go up there alone. So for four summers we went secretly, and until the end of the third not even Gail knew.
Al and I biked up the unpaved mountain road, coasted off into a gorge, then went higher and around, and eventually wheeled our way along a needly, root-ridged path dark and full of the thick, mild growth of pine sap that made me want to lay out a poncho roll for the night.
One spring evening the year I was thirteen my parents argued about going someplace else that summer, trying the ocean where the Pounds went and Bob’s parents. And as I listened in my city room confused by a tone I’d never heard, the extreme essence of all those inland summers was for an unsharable moment the quarry far away. Oh to be sure back in the village was the Old Blacksmith Shop, where they sold old stuff that my parents’ friends up for a weekend would look at for it seemed hours after a long lunch at the tavern — ancient farm tools, wooden spoons, blue goblets with tiny bubbles blown right into the glass, hymnals, a churn you wanted to grab hold of and work, and scented soaps I figured must be practically the oldest of all. And oh yes, behind the Blue Grille of the Major Talcott Tavern there was the pleasant swimming hole you had to have a member’s ticket for with sandy beach and mucky bottom. And there was an inn my father said had been a station on the stagecoach route and was restored; and in its low-beamed lobby they had a typed menu on an easel. And the rest, the road past the goldenrod, the gas smell from our laboring refrigerator, the flat lake as you went toward the town of Heatsburg, our village barber-postmaster who made twenty-six flavors of ice cream, a roster of possibility for me even though, through my six-hundred-odd cones there, there were twenty-five flavors I never tried. The goblets, the swimming hole with its diving board by the rocks and cat-tails and the swinging rope down at the dam end, the goldenrod, the stagecoach route, the lake, the ginger (the baked apple, lemon-peel crunch, or peanut brittle) ice cream, oh yes. But losing all this by going to the ocean for the summer instead, meant the quarry that Al and I had taken secret possession of, though I told Al I was sure Gail had found out. And losing it would have meant losing one afternoon the August I was twelve and it meant a wind that passed through the quarry over our deep corner of it.
It was uniquely open to the sky, which seemed slanted because of the shoulder of mountain that hung over one tier of the quarry. Yet by its cliffs and, above them, the steep retreating banks of fir and birch, it was as secluded as the tight-sealed play of our echoing whistles and calls, Al’s and mine. “OH: OH-Oh-oh-oh,” “HEY: HEY-Hey-hey-hey,” then louder and answered one or two echoes longer “SHIT: SHIT-Shit-shi-shi-shi,” eventually succeeded by the lone boldness of “FUCK,” fading all around that beautiful mountain quarry into the mysterious prospect of “FUck-FUck-fuh-fuh-fuh.” Lying out in the cold water and, as if you hung at a great height, imagining the water’s density suddenly gone, you might spot a small hawk coming over or a stone-chip bombed at you so thoughtfully that its arc would end at a point never nearer any part of you than a yard. But nothing else, not a woodpecker tapping or a squirrel’s rustling weight in a bough.
Al dived again and again off one ten-foot-high setback from which you had to stretch and arch to miss a lower ledge. I did some of that too, but I saw myself rather as the submariner of the team. Al wasn’t interested in my kind of dive, but he listened politely when I came up gasping to report (a) how far down I estimated I’d been (: over fifteen feet one day with earplugs, the second of the quarry summers), and (b) what exactly I’d seen (: nothing — except in the deepening blue-brown shade a pale strip in the granite wall).