The Unwilling Read online

  Robert was going to Vietnam.

  “I’m going to do it,” I said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “This time it happens.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Becky Collins, right?”

  “She’ll love you forever.”

  I’d pictured the dive a thousand times, and it felt a lot like this: the wind in my face, the smell of heat and dust and distant rain. I rose to my toes, arms spread. “Give me a three count.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “No talking, all right? This is hard enough as it is.”

  “Dude…”

  “What?” I didn’t look away from the drop.

  “Dude. Seriously…”

  Something in his voice was strange to me: a note of doubt or panic or fear. “What’s the problem, Chance? We’re here, right? Two weeks ’til graduation.”

  “Just jump, dude. Make it a jump.”

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “You know you can’t actually do it, right? You can’t make that dive.” Chance looked embarrassed, turning his hands to show the palms. “I mean … come on. There’s a pattern, right? You talk about it. You stand there. You never actually dive.”

  “But you egg me on. You tell me to do it.”

  “Because I’ve never once thought you were stupid enough to actually dive. It’s thirteen stories.”

  “You think I’m afraid?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think I can do it?”

  “I think your brother’s dead whether you do it or not.”

  The color drained from my face.

  Chance didn’t care. “Robert is gone, man. He won’t see the dive or pat you on the back or say, Welcome to the club. He’ll still be underground in that cemetery you hate. He’ll still be a dead hero, and you’ll still be a kid in high school.”

  Chance was earnest and worried—a strange combination. I looked away as catcalls rose up the cliff, and someone far below yelled, Do it, you pussy! I found Becky Collins, a slash of brown and white. She was shading her eyes; she wasn’t yelling. “You think I’d die if I did it?”

  “I know you would.”

  “Robert lived.”

  “Hand of God, Gibby. One in a million.”

  I watched Becky, thinking of God and luck and my dead brother. The Marine Corps said he took one in the heart, and that it killed him before he felt a thing. A painless death, they said, but I didn’t buy it. “Two years ago I said I’d make the dive. I told everyone down there I’d do it.”

  “You mean that everyone?” Chance pointed at the water, where even more kids were yelling up the cliff’s face. “You mean Bill Murphy, who told Becky to her face that you were a loser because your mom won’t let you play football anymore? You mean his lame-ass brother? Fuck that guy, too. He blew spitballs at the back of your head for pretty much all of seventh grade. What about Jessica Parker or Diane Fairway? I asked them both out, and they laughed at me. They’re not keen on you, either, by the way. They say you’re too quiet and that you’re distant and that you look too much like your dead brother. Listen, Gibs, you don’t owe anyone down there a damn thing. That crowd there, those people…” He pointed down. “Empty heads and bullshit and vanity. They don’t know you or want to know you. Maybe three are worth a crap, and they’re the only ones not yelling at you to kill yourself.”

  I leaned out; saw jocks and stoners and pretty girls in mirrored shades. Most were laughing or smiling or yelling at me.

  Do it …

  Dive …

  Dive, you chickenshit motherfucker …

  They’d rafted up for the best view: a jigsaw of rubber and smooth skin and bits of bikini that looked like colored sails. I listened for a moment more, then studied the sky, the jagged rock, the far, familiar water. Last, I looked at Becky Collins, who, with a single friend, floated apart from the others. She was unmoving, one hand at her mouth, the other pressed across the heart. “You know something,” I said. “I think maybe you’re right.”

  “Really?”

  “In part, yeah.”

  “What does that mean, in part?”

  I disliked needless lies, so I shook my head, then turned from the edge, and started walking to the trail that would take us down. Chance followed, still worried.

  “Dude, wait. What does that mean?”

  I kept quiet, unwilling to share the conviction he’d put inside me. It was powerful and strange, and made me drunk with possibility.

  Me alone, I thought.

  Me alone when I dive …

  * * *

  It wasn’t the first time Chance and I had walked the long trail down. We followed the slope east and then switchbacked through the trees, coming out a quarter mile later on the far side of the quarry, where people parked their cars. Walking to the edge of the field, we stood and looked down. Chance nudged me. “She’s on the beach to your left.”

  “I wasn’t looking for her.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Becky saw me and waved. A squad of guys surrounded her, football players, mostly. One of them saw me looking, and spit on the cracked, granite ledge that passed for a beach.

  Chance said, “Come on. Let’s find a beer.”

  We turned for the trail that would take us to the water, but saw movement in a shaded place beneath the pines. A man was squatting with his back against the trunk, and his head shifted as he ground a cigarette into the dirt. “I caught your performance. Thought for a minute you might actually do it.” He stood, and moved into the light: black hair and denim and prison-pale skin. “Hello, little brother.”

  Jason was five years older, but my size and shape. The same hair brushed the collar of his shirt. The same eyes stared out from a face that was similar in every way but the hard edges of it. “You’re out,” I said, and he shrugged. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you, believe it or not.”

  A pint bottle appeared from his back pocket. He unscrewed the cap and offered me a sip. When I shook my head, he shrugged and tipped the bottle back.

  “You remember Chance,” I said.

  “Hello, little man.” Chance bridled at the mocking tone, and Jason stood there looking unconcerned and dangerous and bored. “Why didn’t you make the dive?” I shrugged stupidly, and Jason nodded as if he understood. “It was something to see, though, wasn’t it?”

  He was talking about the day our brother dove. Robert had been the kindest and my favorite. “Have you been home?” He shook his head. “You going?”

  “After last time? I don’t think so.”

  His grin, then, was the first truly familiar thing I’d seen. It had a sharp edge on one side, and the eye above it dipped in a quick wink. If Jason liked you, the wink said, Life is good, I’ve got your back. For others, it was different. Even in high school, grown men would back away from the wink and the grin, and that was before war and death and whatever devil Vietnam put inside my brother. He was calm at the moment, but that could change on a dime. Indian summer. Killing frost. Jason had both of those things inside, and they could trade places plenty fast.

  He lit another cigarette, and I watched him do it, hating how much he looked like our dead brother. Were Robert here instead of Jason, he’d have wrapped me up, laughing. He’d have squeezed so hard I couldn’t breathe, then he’d have pushed me back, mussed my hair, and said, My God, look how you’ve grown. I often wondered if war had changed him as it changed Jason. Was he harder in those last days? Or was it Robert’s goodness that got him killed in the end, some softness that my other brother lacked?

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t know. Hanging out, I guess.”

  “Let’s do it together, the two of us. You have a car. I know some girls.” He smiled around the cigarette, then pulled in smoke and streamed it through his nostrils. “Robert and I used to do that, you know. Back roads and cold beers, life before the war. What do you say? It could be like old times.”
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  “What girls?” I asked.

  “This guy.” Jason hooked a thumb, and looked at Chance. “What does it matter, what girls? You don’t trust me?”

  “It’s not that…”

  I hesitated, and Jason’s grin faded. “Don’t say it’s our mother.”

  “You know how she is.”

  “You’re going to bail on a day with two fine women and your long-lost brother because it might upset our mother?”

  “You’re not around, man. You don’t see how she gets.”

  “Let me guess. Demanding? Judgmental?”

  “I’d call it overprotective.”

  Jason shook his head, and pulled hard on the bottle. “You don’t think Robert would want us to be in each other’s lives? You don’t think that, deep down, even Dad thinks it’s wrong, the way she keeps us apart? But hey, you know what? It’s cool.” He flicked the cigarette, and showed the brightest, coldest eyes I’d ever seen. “If you’re not man enough…”

  “Don’t say that, Jason.”

  “Man enough. Grown enough.”

  “Screw you, dude.”

  He grinned again, and looked at the cliff. “If you were man enough, you’d have made the dive. You used to be a tough little nut. You remember that? How that felt?”

  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?”

  She watched her food as she asked the question. I met my father’s eyes, but they offered no hint of his thoughts on the matter. “He came in behind me,” I said.

  That was true, but not the whole story. My father’s partner had found me at the quarry, and insisted on following me home. He said, I told your father I’d make sure, and those were his final words. He didn’t mention Jason or the kids he’d seen drinking or the guilty way I’d started at his sudden appearance. He’d watched Jason with those flat, cop eyes, then stared Chance down with the same unflinching distaste. Shouldn’t you be leaving, too? In the driveway, he’d watched me to the house, then waited as my father pulled in behind us. I missed their conversation, but from the door, I’d seen my father glance my way with the same cop eyes.

  “You weren’t at school today,” my mother said.

  “I was at the quarry.”

  “Senior Skip Day is tradition, I know, but you’re back in school on Monday. That means homework, papers, final exams. No slacking because the end is near.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She forked a bite of salad, and that, too, was part of the dance. No mention of Robert or Jason or the war. I wasn’t sure where her mind w
ent in the silence between questions, but guessed it was the future or some other bright place.

  My father knew the dance as well: keep it simple and light and surface. “Have you thought more about a summer job?”

  “They want to hire me at the marina.”

  “Again?”

  He was disappointed, but I liked the boats, the water, the smell of fuel. His frown deepened, but he couldn’t really argue. I’d be at college in the fall. That meant deferment. He smiled stiffly, and my mother sipped wine.

  For me, though, the dance wasn’t working. “Did you know Jason is out of prison?”

  The question fell like a bomb. My mother choked on her wine. My father said, “Son…”

  “You should have told me.”

  The anger came unexpectedly and suddenly, and its cause was unclear. How they managed my life? The things I’d felt as my brother fell? Only the emotion was certain, this unfamiliar anger.

  “Who told you?” my mother asked.

  “I saw him. We spoke.”

  She dabbed a napkin at the corners of her mouth. “About me, I suppose?”

  “We might have touched on that.”

  She smoothed the napkin in her lap, and looked away.

  “You knew, of course. Didn’t you? You knew that he was back.”

  “We thought it best to keep the two of you apart.” Her gaze, that time, was direct and unapologetic. She sat calmly and straight, an elegant woman. “Shall we discuss the reasons?”

  “Has anything changed since the last time we discussed reasons?”

  “Not for me.”

  I turned to my father. “Dad?”

  “Give us a chance to talk with him first. Okay? After prison. After all this time. Give us a chance to feel him out. We don’t know his plans or why he’s back.”

  “And when you know those things?”