Freewill (4 page)

Everybody knows this. It is not a safe swimming hole. No one even claims to know how deep it is, with its forest of underwater vines thriving so thick under there that the Loch Ness Monster could still hide successfully even if the water all dried up.

This is not legend, this is fact. Fact enough that even though it can be a very inviting sleepy-looking little pool, nobody takes the great obvious dare.

Nobody who doesn't want to be dead, anyway.

You are sitting on one of the slopes rising steadily away from the wilting willow tree that is growing as it has for ages, half in and half out of the water. It looks, as it has likewise looked for ages, as if it is ready to quit this life and tumble in.

Right now, though, it is hosting the most lifelike event it has seen in quite some time—the unhappy hoopla surrounding the unfortunate and untimely death of a seventeen-year-old girl.

“Can you believe this has happened?” Angela asks. She is asking you, probably, since you are the only person within
the sound of her voice, but other than that she does not seem to be communicating with you personally.

“I can believe it,” you say. “Why wouldn't you believe it? It's right there.”

Right there is actually about sixty yards away but it is deadly unmistakable all the same. A carpet of flowers, yellows and pinks and whites and reds, fans out from the base of the tree and covers the same area as the shade cover that same willow would throw at the high point of a sunny summer day. Also you can make out other, non-flower things, tributes, difficult to see clearly but familiar enough at dead spots these days. Little hand-printed signs of undying affection, and teddy bears.

And there is one more thing. Like the centerpiece of the whole affair. Leaning gracefully against the tree. It's got a certain power to it somehow, and good thing too, since these high schoolers gathered here would really have no experience in conducting this kind of thing, and in fact there is a danger of the entire proceeding dissipating without some kind of focal point.

And they all seem to have caught it. Nice work there. Fitting. Somebody knows his business. This sad black business.

“So what
is
your story?” Angela asks.

You get to your feet. “
What?
” you ask nervously. “Why should I have a story?
Is this about me?”

Is this about you? Will? What's your story? Tell us a story.

She is staring, and leaning away from you. “Maybe. What are you jumping for?”

“It's about
her
.” You are pointing, down there, down at the shrine, and down at
her
, even though she's not actually down there.

Why should we believe you? You don't appear to believe yourself. Do you believe yourself? What's your story?

“Is it, though?” she asks. “I mean, I don't know. Why do people come to these things? I'm not sure why I did even. But if you know, I'm listening.”

She doesn't believe you know. She is looking you up and down and up and down, you planted rigid like a totem stuck here in the side of the hill, symbolizing god knows what.

You are visible, conspicuous. You are aware. Suddenly, almost involuntarily, you drop to the ground. “Can we just maybe sit here quietly for a while and, like, watch? That would be the
respectful
thing to do, wouldn't it? We owe her that, I think.”

You owe her. You owe. When are you paid up?

Angela continues to sit calmly. She shakes her head. “I don't
owe
anybody anything.”

You stare down for a second, trying to work it out. Is she testing? Is she for real? Is this a conversation? Triple-thinking yourself again, coming full circle back to nowhere. You clutch
two tufts of grassy turf. Tether, Will. Hold on, and try not to give all away.

For a tenuous silent minute or so, the two of you manage to watch uneventfully. It is mad cacophonous noisy on the inside. You have no idea what the outside shows.

“So,” Angela says, “did you kill somebody or something?”

You remain silent. You clutch harder at the grass. If this is what shows . . .

“Sorry,” she says.

You manage after that to stay quiet long enough to think more and more about the girl. She was a fixture around town. Pretty but not gorgeous. Popular but not wildly so. Social to the point of being somebody you thought you saw almost everywhere, but who you probably saw less than that. Neither here nor there, but everywhere. That's why you knew her, because everyone around here did. You didn't stare, abnormally, you looked, like anybody would. Just because you didn't speak, didn't mean you didn't know.

“Did she kill herself, you think?” Angela asks, extra quiet. As though there is some harm in the question itself.

You slide, on the seat of your pants, a few feet down the hill, toward the thinning gathering, away from Angela.

She catches up.

You slide farther.

It now looks like some sort of an inchworm race, the two
of you scooting your way down the hill, digging in your heels, dragging your bodies along behind.

Angela isn't long patient with this. With you. Watch it, boy. You might lose this. You don't want to lose this, do you? Or does it matter? Does anything matter?

“Right,” she says sternly, from three feet behind you. “You want company, you don't want company. You want to talk, you don't want to talk. I never asked to have you dogging me, you know, and I can get along just fine without this, you understand? So don't
bother
with all this moody broody, all right, because I do not care.”

Did you hear that? Did you hear it, Will?

“Did you even hear me?”

With your back to her, you are well protected, aren't you? She cannot see you biting your lip, can she? She cannot see the way your face is now folded into that singular arrangement of conflicting lines that amount to something closer to a fractured mirror image than one coherent expression. She can't see it. Of, do let her see it. Because you know she's not going to make the effort to peer around. She doesn't care, remember? People don't.

“Damn,” she says as she brushes past on her way downhill. “What do you think we're here for,
you?
”

There's a question. You want to field this one, before she's too far off? Are we here for you? Is everyone here for
you? Is everyone everywhere here for you? Or against you?

You watch her pound down the green hillside and whether you are here for you or for the dead girl or the dead girl's family or the six o'clock newscam or whoever, right now you cannot think past Angela. She is a force. All athlete, all tall and sinew and control. She is a mountain goat, same speed uphill or down or sideways, apparently never taking a misstep, or a cautious one.

You get to your feet. Cautiously, you go after her.

By the time you get there, to the tree, a lot of folks have left. The ones who are there are mostly paired off in couples or huddled in threes to stare blankly red-eyed, or to sob quietly and hold one another. Angela, though, has gone dead front center, getting right to the heart of the matter.

“Do you suppose it matters, is all I was thinking,” you say, telling her not
all
you were thinking, but certainly a part of what you were thinking. You have come up close behind her, unusual for you. Unprecedented for you. She allows it, as you speak closely enough to her small copper-brown ear. “I mean, whether she did that to herself or not. Does it really matter, to what life is about?”

“When did you do that?” Angela asks, pointing ahead at your carefully sculpted wooden contribution to the tribute. It is a fine piece of wood. You didn't ruin it.

You are both facing the same way, looking at the same thing, faces inches apart. Frozen in tableau.

“I don't know,” you say.

“Cut the shit now,” Angela says, pulling away from you and turning to look at your face. “Are you suggesting that somebody else took one of your sculptures out of the school and planted it here? Is that it?”

You run through the possibilities. There aren't many, actually.

“I'm . . . I'm having a hard time . . .” is the closest you can come.

She turns again, to it, then again, to you. “So you started it all. That must have been here before everything else. Because it all seems to sort of grow, out of your thing there. You're the architect of this.”

You shake your head, wave a hand. “No. I'm no . . . of anything.”

She looks ready to tear into you. But why? What did you do? Do you know? Does she? Was it bad, was it good?

It sure would be nice if Angela would tell you, so you'd know.

“What happened to you, before you came here?” she asks gently.

You close your mouth as tight as you can, making those rigid white muscle lines grow like tentacles from your lips. You close your eyes just as tight.

That is your move, isn't it, Will? From when you were a kid. Still expecting that it is you who disappears when
you shut your eyes. That the world spins around
you
.

You open them again. She is still there. You are still there. You are lucky. Do you know that? Do you feel it?

“How do you suppose they figure it out?” you ask. “Whether it was suicide or not? I mean, can they ever know for sure? I don't think they can. You cannot ever ever know really what is in there, even if you are right there with somebody. So no way can you know after they take the whole secret with them and go. Don't you think?”

“Will. I won't tell anybody. Hell, you're the only person in the school I've talked to in a month.”

“I came here to live with my grandparents.”

“That wasn't the question. It's a start though, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“And why?”

Yes, why? Will? Hello?

“Hello? Will? You don't want to talk about it. That's cool. I shouldn't do this. You don't want to talk about it, fine.”

But you do. Don't you? And you're blowing it. Talk. Go on and talk. Tell her, everything you know. Tell. Her. Everything.

“I was going to be a pilot,” you say. Your eyes are suddenly so watery you could be looking at her from the bottom of a chlorine pool. “But they put me in shop. Wood shop. Tied me up in wood shop. The opposite of learning to be a pilot. Like a punishment.”

Now you have done it. Don't you ever tire of it? Don't you ever wonder what it would be like to talk to somebody and
not
scare her away?

She goes right up to the sculpture, rubs her hand over it, and as she does, you can feel it in your own fingertips. The hours of careful rubbing, just so, not too fast, but not too slow, until there is nothing but butter there to the touch. She looks at it and talks to you.

“It is very nice, what you did. It is very nice. Beautiful.”

Beautiful. That didn't hurt a bit.

“You know,” you say, backing up, backing up the hill, backing away from Angela and the poor lovely girl whom you knew. Did you know her? “Even if you did like guys, I wouldn't bother you. I wouldn't even think of it.”

You make her smile. She still has her hand on the piece. She looks your way, smiles a rare broad grin that makes her look about half as old. “I think I know that already,” she says.

She does not try to persuade you not to go.

•  •  •

Listen to it, Will. You are the one who keeps setting the alarm to turn on the radio to talk the talk and deliver you the news before your being gets filled with anything as useless as music or the goodness of oatmeal. So you listen.

People are copycats. Teenagers are worst of all. Why be like that, when life is still fairly new and all the choices are
still wide-open? What is wrong with people, that they are doomed to repeat what has come before?

Helpless? Is that what they believe? That they are locked into a pattern of behavior that was established perhaps before they were born, and so when they get the signal, they leap?

Small towns are the worst, aren't they? Why is it that one sad sorry story has to lead into another? Shouldn't it, if life made any sense at all, work the other way around? Cautionary tale, and all?

Hear that? This one was seventeen. Say, you are seventeen, aren't you? This one was also a guy, though he was neither a pilot nor a woodworker. And importantly,
this
sad unfortunate young man dated that sad unfortunate young lady, while you never did. You've never dated anybody, so you're safe there.

•  •  •

This time, you are not alone.

In the murky blue of predawn, she is already there when you arrive at the bridge. The diving point.

The point of departure.

You know how you manage it. You manage it because you keep setting the foolish alarm ever earlier. You should sleep more. Even when you lie there, hour blooming on hour, you know you are not doing anything like sleep.

But Angela. What is she doing here? You were to be first.
You are supposed to be first. You like being first. Second isn't even close.

So you should be more upset than this.

“Hi,” you say as if you had been expecting her, which makes no sense.

“Hi,” she says in the same way, which makes plenty.

You lay the wood carefully against the riveted steel abutment near the hundred-year-old dedication plaque, high above the burbling brown river.

“So then. What are you doing here?”

She shrugs. “Grieving. Mourning. I'm curious. I'm a ghoul. I'm afraid. You tell me.”

You nod. Good move there. Could mean a lot of things. Could mean nothing. In your own ways, both speaking exactly the same language.

“You don't seem the type to be afraid,” you say.

“That's appearances for ya,” she says.

You go to the edge together, peer over together. Talk doesn't come easy now. Talk never does. But this is worse, these things more impossible. You have more experience with this than most, but always you are lost for the right things to say. So you say other things.