“Fucking pussies,” Tom shouted. “You’re all a bunch of pussies.”
Then the guy behind Tom hit him over the head with a full bottle of beer and he went down.
JC was across the room so fast, I didn’t even see him move. He was over there in one second. And there were two more blue overall guys there to meet him but they couldn’t stop it. It was like JC just flicked a switch in his head and he was back to being the kind of guy he looked like. He went right for the one who hit Tom with the beer bottle. In one swoop JC was over the table and he swung at the guy so hard that when his hand came into the other guy’s face the guy’s nose just exploded. JC had his whole body behind that punch. When he came up on the other side, JC had blood on his face but I knew it wasn’t his.
Robbie and I started to go over and some of them came to get us. It was like we were all in this game and everybody knew the rules and everybody needed to be partnered up. The staff were screaming at us, calling us all drunk pieces of shit and trying to push the whole thing outside into the parking lot. During all of this — even when one of the coverall guys with a big ring on his finger smashed his hand into the space right between my nose and my eye — I kept wondering how we could have made this not happen on Robbie’s last day. At the same time, I was thinking that it couldn’t be avoided.
When we came out into the back parking lot I saw Tom lying balled up on the ground. There was blood coming out of one of his ears. Two of the blue overall guys were taking turns kicking him in the head and in the ribs with their big boots.
Another guy ran up to me and put his two hands on my shoulders. Then he pulled me forward and jammed his knee up as hard as he could right square between my legs. I felt something tearing and I went down. The two guys left Tom to go for somebody else behind me, but I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t breathe right and I couldn’t turn around.
Tom wasn’t moving anymore. He just lay there, face up, on the hot asphalt, between the yellow lines of a parking spot. It was so warm. We’d only been in there for a couple hours and it was still very early in the day, probably not even three o’clock yet. The sun just kept streaming down on us, all bright and summery. It wasn’t right and I kept wishing for it to be darker so I didn’t have to see it all so clearly.
Adult Beginner I
There is a sequence to follow. Two steps.
Mel explains it again.
“You go all the way out,” she says. “Then all the way down.”
She points over the edge and into the dark. Very specific. As if there is only one spot, a particular place in the sky, you have to reach before you can turn and head for the water. Her arm sways through an up-and-down roller coaster motion. “You swan dive it, right? Out first, then down. Know what I mean?”
The wind picks up and pushes them both forward. Up here, the air feels colder than it did before and the bugs are bad. Stace waves a swarm away from her nose. Down below, a thin layer of mist smokes above the water.
Mel pulls back another swallow from her Wildberry wine cooler and circles her thumb and finger around the clear neck of the bottle. She is still wet from the last time and uses her foot to re-smear the line on the roofing tar. It is two-thirty in the morning, but the tar or the melted tires or whatever toxic black substance they use to coat the roof is warm and spongy, holding on to the heat from the day.
“Right from here,” she says. “Then fast as you can until, bang, you hit the side and you’re gone.” There’s a hard stomp in the middle of her instructions.
“And when you’re out there, you put your hands wide like this, like you’re flying. Like one of those cliff divers in Mexico. And you keep your chin way, way up and you keep moving out, out, out as far as you can. Then when you feel the out giving up, you pull a quick tuck and go for the water.”
Mel moves her whole body as she acts it out. Her chin strains upward, arms stretched to a capital T. Then a complete creasing fold at the waist, palms flattening on the roof. Fluorescent pink wine cooler foams in her bottle like radioactive potion. Her hips and shoulders, all her limbs and joints, move loose and graceful and drunk. She is unstoppable.
“If you get mixed up,” she says, trying to steady her stare into Stace’s eyes, trying to make the words come out separately, one-by-one, and clear.
“If you get mixed up, remember the lights are blinking inside the river. That’s the water, right? Not the sky. The lights are reflecting inside the river and you reach down into the lights. Don’t get lost and get yourself all turned around or you end up belly-flopping or just falling straight off the side.”
“Down to the light,” Stace nods. “Right.”
“Some people use the buildings on the other side. They look at the Renaissance Center and keep themselves in line with that. I think you’re supposed to dive down like you’re following the elevators. Doesn’t matter really. Just keep track of where you are and make sure you go in smooth.”
There are seven of them up here on the roof of the hotel — four guys and three girls — and everyone else has already done it two or three times. It is nothing new. Kids have been jumping from this spot, the top of the Waterfront Holiday Inn, for years. The Odeon movie theatre is connected, built right into the hotel, and not long ago the two sets of owners were supposed to hook up and hire some extra security to finally put a stop to this kind of stuff, but nothing really changed. They only had enough money for a weekend guy and this is a Tuesday. Stace knows they will not be caught. Nobody is going to climb up that ladder and stop this from happening.
The routine is simple. They start behind the line and sprint to the edge and scream as they take the last step and disappear headfirst into the dark. Then there’s a long, long moment of quiet and then the splash. After that, more waiting, a second long second of quiet, and then the surfacing, followed by screaming and clapping and shouting. Somebody always says Hoe-lee Fuck and somebody else always says Un-fuckingbelievable.
Stace is going to do it, too. Doing is the only thing left. But it will have to happen soon. There are reasons not to, of course, obvious ones, but they seem flimsy and unconvincing right now and in the end every risk has to be measured relative to doing nothing at all. She feels it coming, though. The advance presence of a killer threat. Real danger waiting off to the side. It swirls around them like faint smoke drifting in from an approaching forest fire, but nobody else cares. What are the chances? It is the middle of summer, the night after a sunny day, and the wind is the only thing that demands real attention. A bad gust at the wrong time could mess with your trajectory during the sixty-foot drop. One of the guys sucks back a wad of phlegm and gobs over the side to test what happens to his spit on the way down.
“WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?”
“What do you mean, taste?”
“The water. What does it taste like? I always thought the river would taste like chemicals or like gasoline. Stingy and hot, like Javex or something you can light on fire. Know what I mean? From all the pollution and the pesticides and the factories? Does it taste like that? Does the water taste like oil?”
“No,” Mel says. “What are you talking about?” She shakes her head, tired of the stalling.
“It tastes like nothing, like water. I wouldn’t drink a gallon of it, but come on. Compared to the pool, compared to what we work in everyday, it seems pretty clean and natural to me. Totally fine. And it’s a river, not a lake. It’s just passing through, not sitting around waiting and collecting all that crap. I like the way it moves you and moves around you. You can feel the current pushing when you’re in there and you have to swim hard to get back to the side or it’ll just drag you away. You’ll see. When you do it, when you’re in there, it’s no big deal.”