Gonna go? was about all Sam said, I think, standing there watching the way the failing light fell dead on the hardened corrugation of sludge. Behind him, in front of a line of haggard trees at the far side, winter birds dipped and dove over the edge of the pit. There was the familiar high-pitched horn of a switcher about half a mile away, coming our way with a string of stock; you could hear the shrill yanks of couplings. Industry was seething on all sides, but at the time we didn’t know it, didn’t care to know it, and for that moment we were just two kids silently daring each other to do something fantastically stupid.
The truth was that at the moment Sam wasn’t really asking me to go but was talking to himself, to his bowed legs and his cheap nylon parka with the orange lining and the fringe of fake fur around the lip of the hood. It seemed more like he was saying some kind of prayer for divine protection, tottering there with the cold evening wind ruffling his hair while he toed the edge of the sludge — it was a betraying substance, not paper or ice or anything else, unworldly crap — and before I could say Sure, I’ll go, and step myself, he was taking tiny little tiptoes out, testing the tension of the gook, feeling the give beneath his mud stompers or old PF Flyers or whatever he was wearing that day. He went ahead. He worked his way about five or six yards out. It was the farthest I’d ever seen one of my fellows go on the crusty surface. We swore it dropped off to fifty feet deep right away, dug at a angle. The switcher train was making its way behind us, flexing and tinging the tracks, and when he got as far as he was willing to go he turned slowly around and faced me and moved his lips, saying something, I’ll never know exactly what; but his lips did move quite a bit, maybe five sentences, reciting for all I knew what might’ve been the Gettysburg Address, which we’d all had to memorize for class that year. Worn out and pathetic, in his cheap thin coat against a hardening wind, Sam, a kid with only a meager toy to his name, stood out on the sludge, speaking:
Four score and and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …
Until the sludge gave way and he sank up to his knees — the train behind me still lugging away but slowing enough to make his cry audible now over the rattle — in a thick ooze of dioxin and pulp, of solvents and irredeemable chemical compounds. Like Christ walking on water and failing, his frail, miserable legs cracked the edge of the pulp as he waded back to me, the stuff gunking and caking on his jeans. One shoe (or boot) was missing when he finally got out.
Trudging back over the tracks, across the road, he scraped the crap from his leg with a stick and made me vow never to disclose what he’d done to anyone.
You won’t willya? he kept saying.
I won’t. I swear to God. A stack of Bibles. My mother’s wedding gown. I won’t tell anybody. It’s between us.
I’d tell everyone I knew. It was a story too good to hold to my vest. I’d transform the world with the image of Sam, poor fucker, going down into the gunk up to his knees. Except in my version of the story, I’d make it his waist, or have him swimming through the stuff.
Amy called my own name, Means, and I turned to see her waving frantically to me across the parking lot.
They found Rondo, she said, running a single finger along the inside of her jeans to release some ill-adjusted tension of her underwear waistband; I tried not to look. I was awaiting the news of Rondo’s life or death while, at the same time, drawing into mind and memory the image of Sam in band class right after I slammed my palm into the bell of his cornet; he had the perplexed and bewildered eyes of someone newly hurt, just before the pain releases itself into a huge gush of agony; his eyes showed, I like to think now, that long wide leap to redemptive grace. Two of his front teeth were lost to the rim of the mouthpiece moving inward; all that force translated along the curve of the bell and through the tubing and concentrating onto the metal edge of the size 7c mouthpiece; I knew when I threw the open palm of my hand into the bell of his horn the physics of what was going to happen. I can’t deny it now the way I did then. I didn’t know at the time where my anger came from, but now I do. The lesson I draw from my own actions is clear: I was guilty of many sins before this kid, who, in band, in seventh grade, had already grown his hair long and was wearing stolen leather jackets. I like to think I broke his teeth over my shame; I had told the world about his house, about his father, and about his falling through the crust of sludge (after walking Christ-like on it for a good five seconds).
He’s fine, she said. He was so drunk he didn’t know where he was going and ended up in the campground sleeping next to the pit toilets.
She put her hand on my thigh as if to gauge my balance on the fence rail.
The great roiling swells of sand driven upward by more sand, compiled against itself; the eternal days and nights of Lake Michigan currents and the constant pounding winds rolling grain upon grain; the fronts staggering listlessly across the lake from Wisconsin like drunken louts, picking up moisture over the great body of water and pounding the coast until from nothing grew something. What did the Ottawa Indians think, wandering this moonscape, praying to their beloved Sleeping Bear as he lay prone on the great expanse of otherness, huddled against the lake? All along this side of the state the beaches were being taken away by the currents; houses tumbled down in slow-mo on the news, tag teams of bright yellow bulldozers attempted to rearrange fate, and we smoked our cigarettes and drank a last beer and sat in a little alcove of razor grass and laughed at our fear, at the idea that we could worry that Rondo, all taut muscle and hockey arms, might be dead.
It was turning out to be a brisk, fall-like day. The front had swung through a giant line of anvilheads. Out of the firmament, the ceaseless drive of wind, Sam came to me once more: that day in his house alone in that room with the soft linty smell of furnace heat (What’cha wanna do? Don’t know); the event with the trumpet. And of course his death — his death most of all — taking the whole high school by surprise. His cocky fuck-you’s dead and gone. By that time he was completely one of those fringe beings, absorbed by the vast riptides of misery we pretended didn’t exist; there but not there, a vanquished ghost of a boy barely making class but somehow hanging on, not expelled or in jail. The word around school was that he’d moved out long ago from the house on Burdick and was shacked up with some woman and her baby.
My lamentation began right then, taking a toke on the cig, blowing the smoke into the wind while Rondo and Amy tumbled back behind a clump of grass and Ricky did wind sprints up and down the beach to get the blood flowing back in his shrunken skull. I’d get up and walk alone down the shore and let them finish whatever they were doing. I’d get in the car and drive home with them laughing in the backseat; we’d turn the trip into the butt of a long, endless joke about our fear, and that joke would go on and on for the rest of our lives; but while all this was going on, I’d be considering those last frail moments of a life, and how maybe if I’d embraced him, coming out of the sludge pit, given him my shirt to wipe the paper pulp from his legs, perhaps things would’ve been different. I’d have changed the world; I’d have changed everything.