It was unsigned.
'The Rim Rocks?' I said.
'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.
'The steel cable,' I said.
'The what?' he asked, his head tilted peculiarly in the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.
I pulled into the drive of the Vanzandts' home. Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch, were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.
So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and envy the rich.
Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch. He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and accident.
'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.
Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm of the chair.
'Is Darl around?' I asked.
'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.
'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine. But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.
'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma said.
'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties, whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's brains,' I said.
'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.
I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.
'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice faltered.
'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.
'Cable?' he said.
'With U-bolts,' I said.
He kneaded the sheet of paper with one hand into a ball and dropped it on the drink table. It bounced and rolled onto the floor.
'I'll be back,' he said to his wife.
'Jack…' she said. Then she said it again, to his back, as he walked around the side of his house to his four-wheel-drive Cherokee.
I bent over and picked up Darl's note and put it in my pocket. I thought Emma would say something else. But she didn't. She simply propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her forehead on her fingers, the smoke from her cigarette curling out of the ashtray into her hair.
I walked back down the drive in the cooling shadows to Bunny's car. At the end of the block, the taillights of Jack's Cherokee turned the corner and disappeared up a winding street whose high-banked, blue-green lawns hissed with sprinkler systems.
'Can you take me to the Rim Rocks?' I said to Bunny through his window.
He didn't reply. Instead, he was looking at something through the front windshield. He opened the door and stepped out on the pavement.
'I think that boy done growed up on us,' he said.
Lucas and Vernon Smothers slowed their pickup truck to the curb. They were both eating fried chicken out of a plastic bucket. They got out and walked to the back of the truck. Lucas dropped the tailgate and slid a plank down to the pavement to offload the Indian motorcycle, which was held erect in the truck bed with four crisscrossed lengths of bungi cord. He kept looking at us, waiting for one of us to speak.
'Hi, what cha y'all doing here?' he said.
What follows is put together from accounts given me by Marvin Pomroy, a sheriff's deputy, and a seventeen-year-old West End girl who had not guessed that a late-spring evening high above a lazy river could prove to be the worst memory of her life.
The wind was cool on the outcrop of rocks above the gorge, the evening star bright in the west, the air scented with pine needles, wood smoke from the campfire, the cold odor of water flowing over stone at the base of the cliffs.
Earlier, the others had been worried about Darl. Speed took his metabolism to strange places. His face had popped a sweat for no reason, then it had run like string out of his hair while he sucked air through his mouth as though his tongue had been burned. He peeled off his shirt and sat on a rock, his hand pressed to his heart, a blue-collar girl from the West End named Sandy mopping his skin dry.
He toked on a joint sprinkled with China white and held the hit in his lungs, one time, twice, three, four times, until his eyes blinked clear and the angle iron twisting in his rib cage seemed to dissolve like liquorice on a stove.
He snapped the cap off a beer and drank it in front of the fire, bare-chested, the leggings of his butterfly chaps molded against his thighs like black tallow.
His face was serene now. His mouth seemed to taste the wind, the blue-black density of the sky, the moon that rose out of the trees.
'This is the way it's supposed to be, ain't it? We're up here and everybody else is down there. It's like a poem I read. About Greeks who lived above the clouds,' he said. 'Know what I mean?'
The others, who sat on motorcycles or logs or on the ground, stoned-out, euphoric in the firelight, their skin singing with the heat of the day and the alcohol and dope in their veins, toked and huffed on joints and nodded and smiled and let the foam from their beer bottles slide down their throats.
'What about you, Sandy? You read that poem?' he said to the West End girl, who sat on an inverted bucket by his foot.
'I wasn't too good in English,' she said, and raised the corner of her lip in a way that was meant to be both self-deprecating and coy.
He twitched his metal-sheathed boot sideways, so it tapped hard into her bare ankle.
'Then you should read this poem. Because it's a great fucking poem,' he said.
'Yeah, sure, Darl.'
'What makes you think you got to agree with me? You haven't even read it. That's an insult. It's like you're saying…' He paused, as though on the edge of a profound thought. 'It's like you're saying I need you to agree with me, or otherwise I'm gonna be all broken up 'cause my ideas are a pile of shit or something.'
'I didn't mean that, Darl.'
Her eyes looked into the dark. He stepped closer to her so his chaps intruded on the edge of her vision. His beer bottle hung loosely from his hand. The orange hair on his wrist glowed against the fire.
'What did you mean, Sandy?' he asked.
'Nothing. It's just real neat out here. The wind's getting cool, though.' She hugged herself, feigning a shiver.
'You ever pull a train, Sandy?' he asked.
The blood went out of her face.
'Don't worry. I was just seeing if you were paying attention,' he said, then leaned over and carefully spit on the top of her head.
Jack Vanzandt had found the access road to the Rim Rocks at the bottom of the hill. He shifted down and ground his way up the slope, through woods that yielded no moon or starlight, bouncing through potholes that exploded with rainwater, shattering dead tree limbs against his oil pan. Gray clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hung in his headlights. In the distance he thought he heard the flat, dirty whine of a trail bike, then the roar of a Harley. But he couldn't tell. The camping equipment in his Cherokee caromed off the walls; the glove box popped open and rattled the contents out on the floor; a rotten tree stump in the middle of the road burst like cork against his grill.
Then he reached a fork, with a sawhorse set in his path. He stopped the Cherokee and moved the sawhorse to the other side of the fork and went on. He looked in the rearview mirror at the divide in the road and at the reflection of his taillights on the barrier and was disturbed in a way he couldn't quite explain, like cobweb clinging briefly to the side of the face.