I wasn’t supposed to go to the quarry. But tell a kid he can’t go somewhere and it becomes the Promised Land. Nothing you say or do can keep them away; starve them, tie them up, ground them, it doesn’t matter. Mother was more understanding about my need for adventure. But my dad, well, he’d seen more than one person drown in the quarry, and the last thing he wanted was to see me in the coroner’s office with a gash in my head and my belly puffed up like a dead possum on a summer day.
I didn’t really expect Teg to show up, and truth be told, I didn’t care if the little snot did. I was hot and tired, and a cool dip and a short nap sounded good before I headed home to my own dinner. I was just relieved that I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Big Mike. But Teg did show up. He appeared out of the woods, walking silent like an Indian might, and scared the bejesus right out of me.
“You’re awful jumpy for a doctor’s kid,” Teg said.
“What do you know about it?” I had one leg out of my trousers, and I tumbled over on my aching butt. “Damn it.” I rolled and kicked off the other leg.
Teg burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he cried and had to sit down.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’. Except you look like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz fallin’ off his post. I’m sorry,” he said. “I better go.”
“No, don’t. I mean, you can stay.” I stood up, and pulled up my skivvies. “You ever swim here?”
“Nope. I was kind of scared to. It looks deep.”
“It is, but here, let me show you, over here it’s not so bad.” I made my way through a thicket and found a path that led down to the edge of the water. There was a twenty-foot bank of sand that eased slowly into the water before it dropped off to depths unknown. I dived in, expecting Teg to follow. “Come on,” I said. “The drop-off is fifteen feet out. You can see it.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ve swam here a million times.”
He nodded, took off all his clothes except his Fruit of the Looms, and jumped in.
“Feels great!” he screamed. His voice echoed off the limestone walls and he laughed.
“Yeah,” I said, “it does.”
I swear I heard someone in the woods that day, but I thought at the time it was a deer or a coon, even though it felt like someone was watching us.
It’s funny. One day a snot-nosed kid walks out of the woods in the summer, and the next minute he turns into your best friend. The joys of childhood, I suppose, are pretty much lost by the time you get to be an old man like me. Or taken from you. Innocence is robbed from you like a thief in the night carrying a long switchblade. But I didn’t know any of that then. All I knew was that I liked being around Teg.
He’d read everything. He told me about Don Quixote, and David Copperfield. He liked the classics, but his momma would buy books from the dime store and he’d been reading a lot of books by a guy named Raymond Chandler that first summer. He used words like “dame” and “gams,” and before long, much to my own mother’s dismay, I was using them too.
We went to the Rivoli together on Saturdays when Teg could break away from his momma, and we’d watch Roy Rogers or Francis the Talking Mule movies. Movies played forever in Harlow, but it didn’t matter, we’d go anyway. I must have seen Francis Joins the Navy ten times. I think I still do a pretty good imitation of Chill Wills, but I’ll spare you that talent for the moment.
I never went to the Bowman place. Teg always came to my house. And my mother, well, she took him under her wing like the stray pup he was. Teg didn’t talk about Lehigh or Loreen much, but when the subject came up, he got real quiet. Loreen had recovered from her miscarriage, but she didn’t work for Miss Chad anymore. Lehigh thought that she should stay home and be a proper wife, which to Loreen meant sleeping till noon, making Teg do her chores, and moaning about some new sickness that had set in. It seemed the only cure for her was a whiskey bottle she kept under her mattress that she began sipping on as soon as her feet hit the floor in the afternoon.
I think my mother was thrilled that I had a friend of my own, so she didn’t push much, but I could tell she was a little nervous around Teg sometimes, like she was going to say the wrong thing. Dad was always coming or going, so he didn’t seem to notice Teg being around as often as he was. He readily accepted Teg’s presence as if he’d always been there. But Pearl, well, Pearl was Pearl, and that meant she had her chance to be as difficult with my friend as I had been with hers.
One day Pearl was spouting a story to a circle of her friends on the porch about Lehigh Bowman getting drunk and almost running over Bobby Fuller, the high-school quarterback, with his police car. She didn’t know Teg was in the house; he had been engaged in a conversation with my mother in the kitchen about the latest round of books he’d got from the library. The story Pearl was telling was all true, but she veered off the path a bit, as usual, about the time Teg came walking out onto the porch to go home.
“...And that’s when he belted Loreen one, right square in the mouth,” Pearl said.
Teg stopped directly behind Pearl. Missy Bernice sucked in her breath and motioned for Pearl to shut up. Pearl didn’t notice, she just kept at it. “Then he went after Teg.”
Teg couldn’t take much more, so he pushed by her. Lord, I thought Pearl’s legs were going to disintegrate right then and there. She stuttered and stopped, trying to apologize.
Teg would have none of it. He just kept walking until he was off the porch, and then he stopped and turned back to Pearl.
“Lehigh never hits anybody, Pearl. At least not where it can be seen by the light of day.” With that, he turned and started for home.
Mother and Pearl had a big to-do after that little round of storytelling, and, well, things changed for Pearl pretty shortly after that, too. Because it wasn’t much longer, a week to the day I think it was, that Teg Saidlow turned up dead.
Pearl’s current beau, Tommy McVey, was fishing down at the quarry when he found Teg floating facedown. Teg was caught under some brush and the fish and turtles were already starting to nip at his flesh.
Tommy ran like lightning to our house, and Dad promptly called Lehigh Bowman. There was nothing my father could do, of course, but you could see it in his eyes, a glimmer of hope, a chance that he hadn’t woken up in a world where another boy had drowned at the quarry.
I begged him to let me go.
Dad stiffened as he grabbed his black bag of wonders. “I don’t want you to see that,” he said.
A whisper in the form of Mother’s voice drifted in from the kitchen. “Let him go, Earl. Let him see what happens when you swim at that quarry alone.” She assumed Teg had gone swimming, and that it would be a good lesson for me to see.
Dad looked at me; the sheen of his face flickered deep red. The only time I saw that look was when I’d disobeyed him and was about to get a good swat on the ass. The red faded when he made eye contact with Mother, and he motioned for me to come along.
All the way out to the quarry I kept praying to Daddy’s snake-taming Pentecostal God that Tommy was mistaken, that it really wasn’t Teg he’d found. But when we got there, I saw my prayers weren’t answered, and it was the last time in my life I ever prayed to that God for anything.
Lehigh beat us there, and he and Big Mike were pulling Teg out of the water.
“Damn it. Damn it! What the hell am I going to tell Loreen?” Lehigh yelled as he dropped Teg onto the ground.
Teg Saidlow lay lifeless on the ground, arms stretched out as if he was about to be fitted for a crucifix. His eyes were wide open, and he was completely dressed. I knew right then that Mother was wrong about that swim; Teg would’ve never swum with his clothes on. He only had two pairs of pants, and a few pairs of socks. Besides, he knew better than to walk into Lehigh Bowman’s house dripping wet. Teg always swam in his underwear.