The Unwilling(6)

The bright eyes were a challenge, and I felt the same coldness in me. “Like you could make that dive,” I said.

“Any day of the week.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“How about this, then? I make the dive now, and we go out tomorrow, you and me. Not only that, but you tell Mom what you’re doing. You tell her all of it—me, the girls—you tell her all of it and see what she says.”

I stared at the cliff, thinking of my mother. Different kind of ledge. Different kind of dying. “You understand what she’s afraid of, right?”

“Course I do,” Jason said. “She thinks you’ll go to war because Robert did and I did, or that you’ll decide it’s cool to be like me, that maybe you’ll get arrested or do drugs or, God forbid, screw a girl. I think mainly she’s afraid you’ll learn to think for yourself. Are you allowed to do that, little brother? Form opinions? Live your own life? Does she even know you’re here?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

“Here’s the deal.” Jason stepped closer and draped an arm across my shoulder. “I make the dive and we go out this Saturday. All day. The two of us.” He squeezed my neck. “A brother should know his brother.”

I studied those bright, cold eyes, and something twisted inside, like grease and old metal. Did he want to know me at all or was he just messing with me? I replayed his homecoming from war: the bitterness and unanswered questions, the family fights and all the ways he’d changed. How many days before the first arrest? How long before the heroin? I stepped away from what I saw in those eyes, and his arm fell to his side. “I don’t want you dying because of me.”

“A deal’s a deal, little brother.”

“I mean it,” I said.

“I know you do.”

He gave the grin and the wink, and looked so much like our dead brother it hurt. Kicking off his shoes, he shrugged off the shirt, and I saw all the places he’d been wounded in war, the bullet holes and burn marks and ragged scars. Beside me, Chance was small and tense and staring.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Shut up, Chance.”

Jason ignored my friend, and that felt about right. This was about us, alone. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“You know why.”

“I really don’t.”

“Don’t be stupid. You know exactly why.” He pushed his cigarettes into my hand. “You keep those dry for me. I’m going to want one, after.”

“Jason, listen…” I ran out of words.

He turned and started walking, and Chance gave a strange, small laugh. “No way, dude. No way he dives.”

People stared as my brother moved out onto the stony beach, and I thought a few of the older guys recognized him. A couple of them nudged each other and whispered, but Jason looked neither left nor right. He made a shallow dive, and slid beneath the surface for a dozen beats. When he rose, it was into an easy crawl that took him out from shore.

“No way,” Chance muttered. “There’s no fucking way.”

Across the quarry, Jason pulled himself onto the face of the cliff, and was pale against the rock. He made the ascent with effortless grace, and by the time he reached the top, word of his identity had spread along the beach. I saw it in the whispers.

Jason French.

Vietnam.

Prison.

A few eyes found me, but I ignored them. Becky Collins looked my way, but even that felt like the tail end of a nightmare. “He’s going to do it,” I said, and felt the moment as if I stood beside him. The same wind licked the stone, and the water, below, was cold, gray, and hard. The only difference was the silence as Jason spread his arms. No one spoke or called out, and I would swear, in years to come, that the wind stilled and even the birds fell quiet.

Please, God …

The prayer came in the instant of my certainty. I felt his breath as if it were my own, his toes as they took the weight. I knew the bend of his knees, the commitment, the moment his life was not his own.

“Sweet Jesus.”

Chance spoke the words as my brother rose, and lint-colored sky spread between his feet and the stone. He hung on invisible strings, and looked as our brother had looked: the light on one side, the bow of his chest and arms. For that moment, he was pinned and perfect, then the weight of his shoulders took him down; and like that, I was thirteen again and choking; and I heard the same words, somewhere deep.

One Mississippi.

Two …

I counted as I had for Robert, and feared that a second brother would die. He was waiting too long, arms still spread as Three Mississippi sounded in my mind, and brought with it a terrible certainty.

He would hit wrong.

He would shatter.

But in the last moment his hands came together and, like the tip of a knife, split the surface to let my brother pass. He disappeared in black water, and I didn’t breathe until I saw him again, his head above the surface, those long arms stroking for shore. Chance said something, but I was half-deaf from a sound like roaring wind.

It was blood in my ears, I thought.

Or maybe it was people cheering.





3


For the rest of the day I thought of my brother and his dive and the deal we’d struck. Saturday. The two of us. I didn’t tell my mother at dinner that night, even though we ate in awkward silence, and she opened the door as if to invite the conversation. “Did I see Ken in the driveway?”