19 - Quarry
We crawl along the top of a cliff that gave our town its
name, when the English, after the Native American Indians, needed to find
something simpler than the name the Dutch had given it, when every farm within
sight of the cliff had a Dutch name already, a cliff someone saw as an
opportunity to make a bundle and over time brought in jack hammers and dump
trucks and carved a chunk as big as two football stadiums out of it, carting it
out piece by piece, leaving behind a gap that rivaled any canyon out west.
We move along the east edge of it, looking down I’m scared
even though I’m almost never scared when I climb, and Dave behind me is scared
because this is the thinnest part where the wall gets more and more narrow as
it gets to the gap at the end we call the gate, a space through which the
trucks used to rumble in and out with their loads of stone; we can almost kiss
the trees to one side, they come to close, tops swaying in the perpetual breeze
we think might push us over the other side where there are no trees except a
few scraggly ones poking out of the cracks of rocks – and some trees at the
bottom where weeds have grow into trees in a landscape of rock after rock that
makes it look like the moon, a drop on that side so sheer we dare not look over
it, yet we do.
“Just a few more feet,” I call back over my shoulder to
where Dave crawls behind me, slow as a box turtle, though his limbs are twice
as long as mine. I’m not just talking to him; I’m reassuring myself, the heals
of my hands stinging from the sharp pieces of stone and thorns of plants that
cling to the cracks.
Everybody warns us against coming to this place; kids get
hurt here; one kid fell here and died; my uncles tell me, and my teachers tell
me, and so do the police when they catch us turning up the dirt track from Valley Road
Many kids take the safe way up, along the muddy paths from
the park on Garret Mountain, awed, scared, too scared to come to near the edge,
always clinging onto the other walls where the quarry has bitten out a chunk of
the mountain, but left enough for people to walk or run or jump or crawl; too
few come to where we are, the thin wall that runs along the side that faces
Valley Road into which a gap we call the gate was dug, a precariously thin wall
not wide enough for Dave to lie sideways without his feet sticking over the
edge, where even we are scared.
“A few more feet,” I say again, over my shoulder as we come
nearer and nearer to the opening we call the gate, and through the trees on the
Valley Road side I see the bits of metal and concrete where the dump trucks
came to get their fill of gravel, time and weather burying most of the
buildings, leaving a few dark openings like the mouths of caves, just high and
wide enough to climb through.
The narrow ledge we crawl on comes to a point where we see
inside the canyon and out, over a landscape littered with chunks of stone, some
as small as a grapefruit, others as large as a bus, the rusted shell of a 1940s
car mingled with these, driven up from the road somehow, abandoned, home now for
the critters that live in the cracks of the rocks.
Dave says his father remembers when they still dug stone out
of this place, and the black smoke that rose from it, steaming like an active
volcano, casting a black clover over the whole valley where we live.
We still see smoke at times, white not black, from fires set
by kids to what little kindling they can find on the quarry floor, camp fires,
mostly fires for fund, we even set a few of our own from time to time.
“I can’t go much farther,” Dave shouts to me, meaning he
won’t, meaning he’s scared; I hear that much in the echoes of his voice
bounding down off the cliff walls inside.
“Hush,” I hiss. “They’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care, I’m tired,” Dave says, his voice lowered, his
gaze glancing around to see if anyone has heard.
“It’s not far now,” tell him again. “Let’s hope they’re
still there.”
Otherwise, I think, this is all a waste of time. I’m even
tempted to give up, and climb down into the canyon, like I usually do then up it again; I’m just too tired from
climbing here in the first place, and wish I had taken the easy way up so I
feel less tired, though the easy way isn’t really easy, just less steep,
slanted with the thin trunks of trees to hold onto.
“A few more feet,” I say, sounding like an echo of my own
voice, really meaning yards, and I feel the smaller, sharper stones bite into
the palms of my hands the closer we get to the split in the rock ahead.
Dave says again he wants to turn back, and I tell him, he
can’t; we’ve already come too far.
“A few more feet,” I say and still mean yards.
“I’m so tired,” Dave says.
“It’s worth it,” I tell him. “You want to see it all don’t
you?”
“All what?”
“You’ll see.”
“I can feel the wall shaking,” Dave says, and though I know
better, I think I feel it shake, too.
It’s so thin now if I stretched, I can reach down both
sides.
“It’s not a far you’ll see it’ll be worth it,” I say but I
have my doubts to.
I do not want to be the kid who falls to my death to save
other kids from coming the one my uncle’s been the one who are teachers talk
about the one the cops tell should have known better and did not.
“Just a few more feet,” I say and definitely mean yards.
And I feel the earth move. And I am scared. Not a falling as
long as I have a place to hold onto I know I can fall it’s when I can’t grip
anything the way I sometimes feel late at night at home at the grumble of my
uncles and the house downstairs dinosaurs rumbling before a rumble none ever
actually gets to just a lot of noise with me always wondering will this be the
time when it happens will one actually due to another what they always promised
they will do like me being the boy that falls the example to others and in my
head I fall not all of a cliff but of out of my room where four walls make me
feel safe where the only we can link is the door to the stairs up from the
stairs carrying the sound of the voices the way this place Carries Davis scared
voice.
I’m scared of being scared, of people see me scared, of Dave
thinking I’m a coward when I’m not.
“The shaking is in my imagination,” I tell myself, knowing
it’s trial yet believing I’m not, and confused over which is true, real or not
real, with meet the boy balanced on this find an age of stone wondering when I
will tumble off and break on the stones below.
“Why did you stop?” Dave bass, his voice hushed with dread
“Shush,” I tell him, his voice isn’t loud. We really are only a feet away this time,
from a huge crack that separates where we are from where the edge actually is,
a crack that goes all the way down to the bottom, opening up, creating a dark
space down below, and I creeping up on the crack, and I P. are over, and then I
lean back and whisper to Dave, “They are down there like people said they would
be.”
“Really?”
“Come look.”
“No way. I will fall.”
“Coward.”
“No, I am not. It’s
not being a coward to be afraid I might die.”
“It is if it keeps you from doing what you came here to do,”
I say.
“That’s mean,” Dave says, and I’d tell him to come up next
to me or he’ll miss seeing it, and though Dave crumbles, he does what I say,
and I’m sorry I asked him being weighed two big to fit side by side in a place
so narrow as this and my fingers slipped as a grip, just to keep where I am and
keep from slipping off and becoming the boy everybody will talk about later to
born kids about doing what we’re doing now.
“Stop it,” I say. “you’re
making the stones fall.”
“I can’t help it.”
“I know, you’re a big.
So be careful.”
“I’m trying to be careful.
There’s just no room for the two of us.”
“There is room if you’re careful. So be careful.”
Another few inches, Dave is up with me, shoulder to shoulder
with the slipping over the edge, sending bits of gravel down into the wide
crack.
I freeze and tell gave to stop moving. The tiny stones echo off the walls with a
sound that sounds a lot like green.
We don’t want to scare them off, I’d tell Dave, not after
all we’ve gone through to get up here and take a peek.
When the pebbles cease falling, I ease up so I can’t just
look over the edge. Slanted sunlight
shoots through the gap to show the bottom where the two of them stand.
“Is it them?” Dave asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Are they doing it?”
“Yes, they are,” I say.
“Come look but be careful.”
“I don’t wanna look.”
“Then why the hell did you come up if you don’t want a
look?”
“I thought I wanted it, but now I don’t.”
“Well, I do,” I say.
“So, I’m going to climbed down a little for a closer look.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? I
want to make sure it’s her.”
“I thought you said it was.”
“I did say that, and it is her. I just need to see if what I am seeing them
doing is what I’m really seeing. And
after what she did to us at school, I’m surprised you don’t want to see it
close up so we can both tell other people what we saw.”
“I told you I don’t wanna see it, and I don’t wanna tell
other people we’ve done enough to her.
Let’s leave her alone.”
I stare at his face, and see the pain in his eyes, the same
pain I saw at the pool when she made fun of us, the same pain I sought at
school when she told all those lies about us and got a suspended and nearly
expelled.
“All right stay,” I tell him. “I’m climbing down.”
Not all the way, just to the one ledge where the angle is
better and the view, to see if she really is doing what I told Dave she was,
when all I really see are shadows close together, moving the way people do if
they’re doing it and move. I just need to make sure, the way a big game hunter
on those nature TV shows goes close to make certain the bullet he fires kills
whatever he’s aimed at.
The ground slants down at the edge which isn’t the real
edge, just one higher up than the one I’m trying to reach. I move, the soil moves, I stop until the soil
stops and I can move again. Dave is
behind me where the last tree grows on the Valley Road side, his long fingers
clinging to it or some stone near it, the fear in his eyes replaced by a new
stranger non-pained look. He looks like he wants to stop me; he just can’t
muster up courage to move. I barely have
any courage at all, moving so slowly I make Dave look, closer to the real edge,
my fingers grapple in to hold onto stone, they cling only to air, this scares
me, I have nothing and no one to hold onto, not even Dave, we veering away from
each other even though we remain in the same place.
I crawl another inch, wishing Dave would stop me, I am out
too far, with nothing left but air to cling to and no way to turn back.
I don’t even see the chunk of stone under me fall until it
falls, a crack in the crack snapping with a sound that sounds a lot like
thunder, followed by the rumble of larger stones falling, down into the crack
where he and she’s stand or stood, because I can’t see them standing there
anymore.
I pull myself back just as the last of the further ledge falls,
Dave’s long fingers gripping me by the shoulders, both of us teetering sort of
sideways for a moment, holding not on to earth rock tree or even air, just each
other. That’s all we have.
I hear, but cannot see the retreating figures below, the
clatter of their panic footsteps falling over loose stones, and that envelope
of stone that promises to create an avalanche, reaching all the way up to me,
and it is all I can do to keep a grip, not on stone, a ledge instead inside of
me, to keep from tumbling down like a stone, to fall and clatter among the
raised voices below, to keep myself free of the promise of violence those
voices bring.
Dave yanks me back as I move off ledge and then we both
crawl backwards as more stones give and the dirt and gravel falls, raising the
slick smoke my uncle’s says he used to see rising from this place long ago, we
becoming the stonecutters stealing our piece of the cliff for which our town was
named, we do not leave our mark in spray paint the way other kids do, but mark our
immortality with the absence of what was, that they can see impossible to fill,
our pride the pride of all those who tear down to make progress, not knowing what
we lose until it is gone.
We scramble back on two more solid and wider ground, even
though the ledge we set to fall has fallen and done what damage it is done and
for the moment does no more the clatter of stone distant now from the
retreating footsteps.
“Was it really her?” Dave asks, both of us breathing too
hard.
“Yes,” I say.
He is silent for a long time. Still I hear him breathe,
slow, painful breaths, like a man who has labored to climb a mountain that has
no top, over which he must tumble and fall in a landslide he cannot avoid or
control, when he finally speaks, he says, “Let’s go home. I’m sorry we came.”
“Me, too,” I say, gripping the land hard as we make our way
back, gripping it when we no longer need to.