Floating Staircase (19 page)

We did not know who owned the dock until after Kyle's death when the owner—a grizzled old fisherman with rubber waders and overalls, his skin like that of a football, his eyes narrowed in a chronic wince—approached my father in the street while I looked on through the living room windows. To offer his condolences and (I assume now in hindsight) feel our old man out about the possibilities of a lawsuit. (There was never a suit.)

Prior to that, my only other encounter with the owner had been one night Adam, his friends, and I had gotten a little too loud—loud enough to alert the old bird from what was probably a half-drunk, midnight snooze on his sofa. He stormed out of the house with what looked like a broomstick disguised as a rifle. A few of Adam's friends took off through the bushes along the shore, and one kid made it clear across the river to the other side, no small feat. Adam and I swam directly beneath the dock and held our breath.

I remember the man's waders clacking on the boards above our heads as he shouted,
You kids, whoever you are, I'll shoot you, you come round here again!

Our heads bobbing like seals under the dock, Adam and I stifled our laughter.

A second later, a sharp explosion directly above our heads echoed across the river like thunder. Then the old man returned to his house, no doubt to sit watch in the shadows of the willow trees, the broomstick that was not actually a broomstick after all propped up on one shoulder.

After that, it seemed none of Adam's friends wanted to risk life and limb for the three seconds of excitement they got from double docking.

“Cowards,” Adam told me after I'd pestered him about why we hadn't snuck out of the house in over a week. “Bunch of chickens. You still want to go?”

I'd been just as frightened from that experience as Adam's friends, but I wasn't going to have my older brother consider me a coward and a chicken. So I said I wanted to go back. Sure I did. Sure.

“Me, too,” Kyle said, spying on us from the hallway.

Adam and I were in Adam's room, and we both turned to stare at our younger brother.

“Go away,” Adam told him.

“I want to sneak out at night, too.”

“You can't,” Adam said. “You're too young.”

“I'll tell.” This was his ace in the hole, and we'd been expecting it for some time now. “I'll tell Dad.”

“No,” Adam said, “you won't. Otherwise we won't take you swimming in the river after lunch.”

“Travis?” Kyle said.

“He's right,” I said. “If you tell, we won't take you swimming anymore. And I won't let you keep the night-light on in the bedroom when you get scared, either.”

“You just turned ten,” Adam told him, sounding uncannily like our father whether he meant to or not. “You shouldn't have a night-light anymore.”

“I don't hardly use it,” Kyle protested.

“You won't use it at all if you tattle,” I promised him.

And that was the end of it. That night, after our parents were asleep, Adam came to our bedroom and roused me from sleep. I sat up and dressed soundlessly while across the room Kyle rolled over in bed to let me know he was awake. I told him to go back to sleep, and he made a slight whimper, like a dog who'd just been reprimanded.

Sneakers and bathing suit on, I crept out of the bedroom and followed Adam down the hall to the living room. We exited through the patio door at the back, since it was the farthest point from our parents' bedroom and would elicit the least amount of noise. Before following him out, I glanced over my shoulder to see Kyle standing at the far end of the hall, a milky and indistinct blur in the darkness, watching me. Like a ghost.

It went on this way for much of the summer until Adam came down with the chicken pox. He got them pretty bad and was laid up in bed for two weeks, looking depleted and miserable, his skin practically indistinguishable, expect for the knobby red splotches, from the white sheets on which he rested.

Kyle and I had gotten the chicken pox when we were both very young (and despite my mother's deliberate exposure of Adam to us in our mutually reddened and itchy state, he hadn't caught them from us), so there was no concern that we, too, would become ill. I remember Kyle and I eating grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at the foot of Adam's bed while the three of us watched the portable television our dad had transported to the top of Adam's dresser. This vision, however mundane and uneventful, is one of the most vivid I have carried with me into adulthood.

Of course, we'd stopped going down to the river and to the double dock at night. Yet summer was coming to an end, and I'd gradually become addicted to the thrill of springing off those boards and soaring like a blind bat out into the night, interrupted only at the end by the icy, bone-rattling crash through the black, salt-tasting water. I feared he might be sick straight until winter when it would be too cold to resume our nightly jaunts.

Then one night after I was certain our parents were asleep, I sat up in bed and whipped the light sheet off my legs.

I heard Kyle's bedsprings creak as he rolled over and propped his head up on one hand. He watched me dress silently in the dark. “Are you going alone?”

“Quiet. Yes.”

“Mom and Dad say never to swim alone.”

“Mom and Dad also don't want us sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, do they?”

Kyle was silent; he looked like he was unsure if I'd asked him a legitimate question that required an answer or if I was teasing him.

I sat on the floor and pulled my sneakers on over bare feet. I'd grown accustomed to sneaking out of the house with Adam and had done so on numerous occasions without much concern—I believe some part of me understood that had we ever been caught by our father, Adam, the older of the two, would have sustained the brunt of our father's wrath: for me, a buffer of sorts—but on this night I was cutting out alone and with no buffer. With some hesitancy, I questioned my loyalty as a brother: if caught, would I try to lessen my punishment by throwing Adam under the bus, claiming this had been his plan from early in the summer and I was only continuing the trend?

“Let me come,” Kyle said from his bed. The moonlight was filtering in through the partially shaded windows, making his blond hair shimmer a ghostly white.

“No.”

“I could be a good lookout.”

“I don't need a lookout.”

“What if the man with the gun comes back?”

I paused, lacing up my sneaker. “How'd you know about that?” We'd never said anything to Kyle—or anyone—about the old goat who'd fired his rifle into the air.

“I heard Adam talking to Jimmy Dutch in the yard before he got sick.”

“Did you say anything to Mom or Dad?” I knew that he hadn't, otherwise it would have been our hides. Still, I had to ask.

“No.”

“And you better not.”

“I won't. But let me come. I'll be quiet. I'll be good.”

(This is the moment I relive every time I shut my eyes, every time I think back to the events of that summer. There is no escaping any of it. There is no denying.)

“Okay,” I said after a time. “But you have to be quiet, and you have to do everything I tell you. No question. Got it?”

“Yeah.” He sprung upright in bed; even in the darkness I could make out the ear-to-ear grin on his round face.

“Now get your stuff.”

It is fair to say both those boys died that night. I will; I will say it. I am a testament to that. The walking dead.

—and these two brothers sneak out of the house, quiet as mice treading the floorboards of a vicarage. They enter the woods, wearing nothing but their swimming trunks and sneakers, each with a towel draped around his neck. The dark shapes of the trees crowd in all around them. They are convinced the trees are moving around them like living creatures; yet when they turn and look at them head-on, they are as still as statues... as trees. They walk swiftly beneath the cast of the moon through the wooded path, then finally down to the bank of the river. This is summer; this is grand; this is what it is all about.

Up ahead, the river opens wide as it approaches the mouth of the bay. Both boys feel the immensity of it in their guts. The older boy, the thirteen-year-old, continues quickly down the riverbank toward the looming double helix structure.

“Are the stories real?” the younger boy wants to know.

“What stories?”

“The stories Dad tells.”

The older boy, who has dark curly hair and a body like a lizard or a bird, with long arms and long legs, says, “Yes. Of course they are, stupid.” Trying to frighten his little brother. “Why would Dad lie to us?”

“I don't know.”

“They're real, all of them.”

“Even the Wendigo?”

“Especially the Wendigo. It's probably out there right now, watching us.”

“No,” says the younger boy. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Chuckling.

“You're just trying to scare me.”

“Will you be scared when it comes time to jump?”

“Jump where?”

The thirteen-year-old points at the threatening dinosaur shape of the double dock. “Off there. Off the top pier.”

Suddenly, the younger boy looks very frightened. All their father's stories are real to him, the monsters and the imaginary boys who live in the woods and eat children. It is a warm night, but the little boy stands there shivering, his pale chest pimply with gooseflesh and his teeth chattering like a rattlesnake's warning. He looks white, too white. Almost transparent. The older brother thinks,
Ghost.

“Climb the stairs to the top,” instructs the older brother, “then take a deep breath, run, and jump off.”

“Jump,” parrots the younger brother, the uncertain tone of his small voice bending the word somewhere between a statement and a question.

“You're not scared, are you?”

The younger brother shakes his head.

“Then climb up and jump. I'll hold your towel.”

“First?”

“First what?”

“You want me to go first?”

“Unless you're too scared. Unless you're a chickenshit.”

“Don't say that,” reprimands the little brother, though his voice is too weak and trembling to sound imposing. “Don't say that word.”

“Shit,” repeats his brother. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Stop it.”

“And fuck, too,” says the older brother, lowering his voice. This is the forbidden word, the word of all words. Biblical in its mystery and strength. “Are you a fucking chicken?”

The little boy looks like he wants to cry.

“You wanted to come out here,” says the older brother. “If you're not scared to do it, then do it.”

There is much hesitation. Paradoxically, just as the older brother is about to club him on the shoulder and tell him to sit in the weeds and be quiet, the little brother hands him his towel and takes off his sneakers.

The brazenness surprises the older brother—had the situation been reversed, he's unsure whether or not he'd be able to summon an equal amount of courage.

The younger boy steps around the shrubs in bare feet, leaving little prints in the mud, and proceeds to climb the staircase leading to the upper pier. His climb slows midway, where he glances down at the ground, and then he continues until he reaches the top. He is just a black blur, an outline in the darkness. The moon is distant and covered by trees and clouds; the night is as dark as the basement of lost dreams, and the older brother can hardly see him.

He whispers to him, “Be careful.”

The little boy's small, frightened voice comes back to him: “I will.” There is the sound of a deeply inhaled breath.

He's really going to do it,
the older boy thinks.

Small, hurried footfalls race along the planks of the upper dock, the sound like a distant train rattling a wooden bridge.

Wow, he's really going to do it. I don't believe it.

Then silence as the little boy reaches the end of the pier and leaps into space. Somewhere out there, suspended in the black.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi
. . .

The older boy anticipates the splash—he can hear it and feel it before it even happens.

But it doesn't happen.

There is no splash.

There is a sound, though—a harsh, sickening thud from the water. It reminds the older boy of baseballs slapping the hide of a catcher's mitt. No splash. He calls his brother's name, and there is no answer, either.

No splash. No answer. Just that sickening thud that froze his marrow and paralyzed his feet to the ground…

“All right, son,” said Detective Wren, placing a doughy hand on my thin, quaking shoulder.

Tears blurred my vision, and my chest hitched with each sob.

“It's all right. Calm down for a minute, and we'll keep going when you're ready.”