Yo, fuckhead, Rondo came down behind me and began drilling my back with the tip of his index finger. He wanted me to turn, to grab his shins and take him down. I was sitting right up near the water. The waves, good six-footers, were licking the tips of my All Stars.
Shut up, dickhead.
Yo.
You remember that kid, that kid Sam whatever, you know the guy who was, like, buried here in the sandslide?
No, Rondo sighed. It was a final no, a terminal no, the end-of-conversation no. He’d say that no and wave his fingers through the long flax of hair that hung down in his eyes; it was the dead-end no of Columbus’s ship falling off the idea of a horizon.
The force of the mouthpiece against his teeth drilled his two front whatever-they’re-called back a bit, damaging the dentine and the gum and nerves enough to kill them. The enamel turned gray over the course of the next few weeks and then, a month later, they both fell out. It was an accident, I told Mr. Tear, our band teacher. Blame was put on Sam’s shoulders.
You see, it was like this: he disappeared, like Rondo did that morning, except he really left this earth — lifted, unfolded his angelic wings, and flew across the great lake to Wisconsin. He was with some friends (that much I know), four other poor kids from our town, smoking dope, fucking off, doing what they do; he was with them and he went off on his own (or so they said) and then disappeared for a week. We didn’t know this. If one of us had disappeared it would have made the papers, but for guys like Sam, to be gone from the earth for a short while was to go unnoticed. (He hitched to Chicago to see the Dead. His old man took off with him to the U.P. to go fishing.)
But eventually somehow they figured things out and sent search parties out to the dunes to poke and prod the sand. Men with long poles stabbed here and there, working in teams, marking quadrants with stakes and string. They were probing for the softness of flesh, for the give of a corpse. It took a week. There was a lot of ground to cover.
This is how I imagine it, and I like to think that it is more than just part of my lamentation. That it really happened this way.
It was a guy named Mel, a worker for the State DNR, a guy with long jowls, drooping eyes, and a perpetual smoke between his lips; a guy with sad eyes who lived in one of the trailers the state provided near the Sleeping Bear campgrounds; a man content at being alone with the sand and the constant sweep of wind through the slopes. He was doing a double-check of a quadrant. He had his own suspicions about the body’s location. Years and years of being a ranger had given him a sixth sense about the way the sand shifted; he felt the areas that were waiting to give, the places where slides might occur. He went to his spot and looked skyward before putting the probe into the sand. There were four gulls marking the dark sky of late evening. He took a deep breath and said a wordless prayer and put the probe down into the sand a few feet and felt the soft give and knew right then that it had been his destiny to discover the dead boy’s body; knew that he’d stand to the side while the rest of the men — the forensics folks and the experts — came in to finish the job, their spades making hissy sighs while he had a smoke and watched another clump of gulls come in to feed on the fish, dead from the hot wash of the power plant a hundred miles downstate. He’d finish the smoke, say so long to Mike, his boss, and walk slowly down the trail to the back of the park. (He could’ve driven but preferred to walk the thin wobbly trail alone.) On the way he’d think of his own son, living with his wife in Paw Paw, and how much he feared for him in the same way that he was sure some father, somewhere, had feared for the soul of his poor boy. He’d stop for a moment, hearing something in the brush, a tern, or a sparrow, or maybe some kids making out, and in that moment he’d say a kind of prayer for the dead soul and bow in his own way before the great forces of nature that had produced this huge swell of sand along the mitten of the state, and that had somehow conspired to find a way to kill a kid who was probably in no way expecting to die in a sandslide. What is fantastic about this moment, I think, is that in it Sam will have received more love than ever before in his life: that great profound love of the father for the son that we all need, a love greater than I, or his own nasty father, or anybody on the earth now living ever provided him.
I have to imagine all this and leave it at that while Rondo, back in the dunes, screams my name through the wind and calls me a fuck and asks me to get up off my ass and get going because we have to get the tent down and get packed up and home so he can be there for the kickoff of the Notre Dame game. He keeps yelling, his voice fuzzed by the wind and the surf, and I just sit there and think about how I’ll have to come back here on my own, drive the four hours back after I drop them off, and find this same spot so I can commune with Sam, find a way to say I’m sorry. And I will, I think, I’ll come back here and sit and go over the whole thing; the moment I stood in the doorway to his room — not the person I am now, and not some heartfelt kid, but someone still dulled by the vast desolation of that room with the Matt Mason space station in the middle of it, the little slab of mattress in the corner, the flexing membrane of cardboard in the window reading the breath of cold winter air pulsing on that part of the city on that particular day.
Back on this spot, I’ll lament those two front teeth, which of course he was never able to have fixed or replaced. He died without them, swallowed whole by the earth one summer afternoon while his friends made moon-walk bounds down the side of the great dune, stretching their arms skyward, feeling relieved of gravity for a few seconds during each bound — stoned on bennies and acid and loneliness, the smoking cigarettes between their lips streaming tracer paths that zigzagged wildly against the blue sky.
THE REACTION
LATE IN the afternoon Sloan thought he was having an allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, an instantaneous — in medical terms, although it might take twenty minutes to begin — violent reaction of the body’s defenses against the allergen; all-out attack, was how he thought of it, an immediate overdrive of the bodily functions causing severe muscular constriction — including, of course, the muscles around the throat. He’d been reading in the journals about such reactions. In truth, what he was really experiencing at that moment was ulcers in his throat, a reaction to a pain medication he was taking, containing a few similar symptomatic indicators. A whole different matter. Common stuff. No big deal. Just lower the dose or change over to Advil. It took him only a few seconds to make the proper diagnosis.
Twilight bled over the trees in his backyard. In the orchard, past the stone wall, a dog was barking, the bark wrapped in silence because the road through the trees — normally a busy hiss at this hour — was closed to traffic. His neighbor, Congers, was having his house moved; the old monstrosity lumbered down the center of the street, scraping the upper reaches of trees, at four miles an hour, the paper reported the next day, but Sloan figured it must’ve been three miles an hour because it took more than two hours to get the house to the new lot, which was six miles away. (There was a photo in the paper that showed the house in the center of the road, with an accompanying article that made the move sound glorious and profound, an attempt to salvage the past, when in truth it was an act of greed.) Congers was selling seventy-five acres of prime orchard land that had been deeded to his ancestors by George in, along with six hundred fruit-yielding trees, stone terracing, a rickety farm stand, several outbuildings, a hand-operated cider press that had been in service for over a hundred years, and a view of the valley down to the river — all this was to be subdivided into clumps of high-income housing for senior citizens. The orchard embraced the south and east side of Sloan’s five-acre parcel, financed by years of commuting the hundred-mile round trip to a hospital in the city. That practice had gone on for thirty years. Now he was running a small office just up the road, covering about two hundred patients, barely making it with the large insurance premiums, not making a profit at all, often living for months off early withdrawals on his retirement fund.