Jumping (2 page)

“Okay, okay. I'll name my first story after you,” I concede. I change the subject. “Have you been out to see it?”

He looks at me, not even having to ask. “Yeah.”

“What did you think?”

“Spooky. Like it's alive, sleeping there in the sun, but not really sleeping. Waiting.” He shakes his head. “You been out?”

“Not yet,” I say. I don't want to tell him about my trip out there yet. I don't know how to talk about it to myself yet. “I thought I might go out there next week.”

“Don't wait too long,” he says, shaking his finger at me, “or everyone will already have told you how you feel about it.”

That's one of his pet peeves—that reporters are regularly told their stories rather than discovering them for themselves. I know what he means. People are pretty opinionated about the Void. They would write this story for me, if I let them.

Henry pats me on the head on his way out of the apartment, his sign of misplaced affection. He's got three daughters, and he regularly forgets I'm not one of them. He can't help himself. I don't complain. There's lots of reporters who are either afraid of him or who actively dislike him. He's definitely a tough old sod, known for being merciless to those who miss deadlines or make excuses. He's old school. In his book, you just do the work. Period. I guess I don't disagree with that. Plus, I like the work. I'm pleased he's even interested in doing a far-out story like this one and letting me do it. I never thought such a day would come. So, no, I'm not complaining. He can pat me on the head all he wants.

I start by hanging out in the village—Alpine Alley, the post office, the library, the drug store. As I said, I'm a stringer, taking whatever stories are assigned to me, used to building them from whatever scraps of information I can scrounge. But at heart I'm a beat reporter, longing for my own assigned, well-known and well-loved territory, so I operate like a beat reporter. I love the routine of it and the gadgets and gear and creating old-style contact lists, all of which help to unearth a community. Us beat reporters start with trying to generate “the person on the street” reactions, attending community events, going where people gather—looking for what one reporter called “listening posts.” I could go directly to community leaders—business people, elected officials, religious leaders—but because this story is about a community phenomenon over which they have no control, I'd rather hear it straight from the people first, without the “expert” opinion. I'll use a little electronic media, too, like blogs and email, and see what kind of response I get, but the town doesn't seem very technologically minded, so I'm not expecting much there.

People are generally friendly, but not everyone trusts me—I am, after all, “the press.” A teller at the bank said, “What you're writing about is really sensationalism. It doesn't make us look good. We'd like to keep it private.” But, still, they want to talk.

Most people's talk is pretty general—their opinions of Voids, of the jump and the town's reaction to it. So, I moved from the general to the specific and began to identify and talk to those who actually knew Duncan Robert. I found that those who knew him tell me all kinds of things, starting with what Duncan Robert looks like. They like doing this, because they like him and it makes them feel informed. I see a fair number of pictures, taken at town picnics, school events, and just regular school pictures. I stare at Duncan Robert—medium height and build, fair hair, hazel eyes, nice smile, dimples.

I learn he used to be a big green-chili-cheese burger fan and then became a vegetarian. That he preferred watching movies to watching television. I could build a somewhat interesting general sketch of him as a person but I couldn't feel I'd captured his essence. I remember reading that Charles Lindbergh slept with his bed next to the window, the window open, his head literally on the windowsill, or that Einstein didn't always wear socks, and you'd see his bare ankles as he walked briskly down the street in his suit. Things like that hint at something that might be profound, if you could just put your finger on it.

It was like that with Duncan Robert. Hints were plentiful, but essence not so much. As word got out about what I was doing, people I ran into anywhere shared their anecdotes, insights, or the thing that still haunted them. Duncan Robert slept outside every chance he got—often without benefit of tent or sleeping bag—in the woods and fields. He kept odd hours, and he was occasionally seen taking late-night walks alone. No one ever saw him eat very much at one sitting—the Alpine Alley waitresses said he usually left food on his plate. He kept to himself—most thought he preferred his own company, except perhaps in the case of Reggie, his best friend and girl friend. Blue was his favorite color; he even drove a '75 powder blue VW Rabbit he'd bought with his own money, earned from doing handyman jobs around town. Anyone he'd worked for said he was a hard worker and did a good job. He loved the Beatles, especially their early music—songs like “Imagine.” His mother told me he had come to her when he was twelve and asked her if, as a child of the '60s, she'd ever heard of this group called “the Beatles.” She tilted her head back in a wide-mouthed laugh in the telling of that. One woman, who'd gone to school with him and claimed she still harbored a crush, said he was a good kisser.

Lists and lists of casual observations and a series of photographs, versus the real story of someone. That's not enough for a legacy, let alone a decent article. I could describe him—his likes, his dislikes—but I couldn't tell you the whys of any of it, the what-made-him-tick. Or what made him jump.

Miles, his uncle, was still the best logical source for the story. He's a teacher of writing and argument at the community college in the next town over. He was the one who had been closest to Duncan Robert, everyone said, and the one most interested in making sense of the jump. As I talked to people, I learned almost as much about Miles as I did Duncan Robert. I learned that, to try to understand the why and how of the jump, Miles got as close to the Void as he could get without actually jumping in himself. He went to the Void's edge a lot because he considered Duncan Robert's act an argument for everyone jumping, and he worked hard to frame it that way. He talked to everybody about the Void. He tried to assess what the aftermath of the jump might be, especially for Duncan Robert, that would make it worthwhile, because, more than anything, he wanted it to have been worthwhile.

That's why he was willing to talk about it to just about anybody. He didn't care so much about what anyone else thought, but talking to them gave him the chance to wrestle with it again in the form of a different partner. The breadth and depth of it required a partner, if you were to gain any traction. So, I scheduled an appointment with him at his house in town, one evening after his classes had ended for the day.

I wanted a series of interviews with him, at his house for greater familiarity, so I approached him carefully, not wanting to scare off a member of Duncan Robert's own family. He lives in a small log house on the edge of the town, not far from the woods that hold the Void. Miles is about forty-five, almost ten years older than I am. He is just shy of six feet tall, of average build, with intense dark eyes framed by strongly arched brows and a shock of dark hair liberally streaked with gray. He struck me as having the face of a troubled artist. He came out his front door onto his large porch and shook my hand. He asked me my name. “Babe Bennett,” I said, and he began talking even before he led the way to the large, old-fashioned swing suspended from the porch ceiling. We sat back on worn, comfortable cushions, and I took out my pad and pencil to try to keep up with his words.

His voice had a weight and seriousness to it, but allowed for hints of humor and uncertainty, too. In that first visit, he didn't tell me much I didn't already know or couldn't have gotten from public records, about Duncan Robert or about the facts of the jump. I could tell he had been over this ground many times in the intervening year, constructing an understanding of the basics in his mind, piece by piece.

“Duncan Robert was almost twenty-one when he jumped. We had his twenty-first birthday while he was in the Void,” Miles told me. “He and I taught each other everything we know about hiking and backpacking and camping. Both of us were eager novices to start, but we didn't want anybody else teaching us.” He stared off into the twilight.

“You know the kinds of conversations you have when you're out there in the woods, watching the campfire fade, and the night gather closer around you?” he asked, looking over at me.

I felt a slight chill on the back of my neck when he said that but said, “No. I'm a city girl myself.”

He nodded. “Well, they're the best kind of conversations.” I could feel how much Miles missed him.

“He taught me how to be his uncle, too,” he said. “I wouldn't have known.”

As an adjunct professor of English composition, Miles had undertaken the work of teaching scores of entering freshmen basic writing skills, over and over, for minimal pay and no health insurance or retirement. In my mind, that takes a special kind of endurance and tenacity, as well as some kind of basic optimism, to carry you. I heard that unwavering assurance under his words as he spoke of Duncan Robert and the jump.

During this time I also talked more to Silvia, Duncan Robert's mother and Miles's younger sister. I interviewed her at her job, over lunch, and occasionally in her home. She wanted to talk, too, to my great relief and excitement. Even Abraham Lincoln said everything he knew he owed to his mother. I was struck by her resemblance to Miles. She has the same dark eyes and defined brows, accented by her long dark hair, which she wore in one braid down her back.

“All our lives,” she said, “people have asked if we're twins. We're not—Miles is older than I am by a year and a half. We've always been close, and Miles has always played a big role in Duncan Robert's life, too.”

She told me about Duncan Robert as he was growing up.

“Even when he was little, it seemed as if he knew more than he was saying. Though he said a lot!” she laughed. “He talked in whole paragraphs, long before he had the vocabulary for it. I hardly ever knew what he was saying.” She smiled remembering it. “He could look at you as you talked as if he knew what you
weren't
saying, too. He laughed at any old thing and was curious about everything.”

Silvia divorced Duncan Robert's father when Duncan Robert was three. She had never re-married, though I had heard some talk around town that she had a long-standing relationship with the seventy-year-old Vietnamese town sheriff, Michael Nguyen. She never validated this, but he had been great in handling the aftermath of the jump, she said, keeping it as quiet as he could, quelling any possible real investigation.

People feared calling the Void's energy by talking about it, but they thought Duncan Robert was going to jump. In those months of preparation, they saw the comings and goings, and they knew the character of Duncan Robert and his Uncle Miles. While they wondered if the jump might end in death, they never thought that was the intention. Michael talked with Miles and got the basis of the report that went into the official file. No one challenged it.

Silvia had been raised Catholic, and for almost twenty years has served as secretary to the Catholic church in town, keeping records of the congregation's membership and their tithing. She has a loyalty to her employer but seems fairly indifferent to the Church's teachings.

“Well, I've lived most of my life outside of the church's rules,” she said, “because I haven't found them very helpful!” She laughed. “Let's see. I had sex before I married and am not about to ask forgiveness for that. I used birth control, because it suited my own situation, not the church's. And,” she says with another laugh, “I divorced my husband, rather than hold him to a life that made him unhappy just to please the church. He's happier now, and I'm happier, too.”

Clearly, Duncan Robert, not her faith, had been the center of her universe, and she loved him very much. “He was a good person,” she said, looking out the church office window one day. “And he made me better.” She didn't seem to think she would ever see him again, but she spoke of him willingly and even cheerfully. It had only been a year since his jump, and I think talking about him kept him alive for her.

But I still needed the story or stories that could carry the crux of Duncan Robert's life. I needed to get to the
why
of the jump.

S
O, IN THE QUEST
for someone who could tell me what makes Duncan Robert tick, so far I had three candidates. First, Silvia, in her own words:

When he was little, Duncan Robert was very close to his Grandma Ruth, his father's mother. He was her first grandchild, and she doted on him. And I mean
doted.
Grandma Ruth often took care of Duncan Robert, from the time he was born, to help me out. After his dad and I had divorced when Duncan Robert was three, I think Ruth tried to make up for what she saw as the abandonment by her son. She adored her grandson, so it was no hardship for her but a clear preference. So “doted,” in my book, now means the activities of Grandma Ruth. She made whole coconut crème pies just for him, from the time he was five. She served him his favorite dinners on a tray in front of his favorite TV programs. She ironed his clothes, sheets, and even underwear. You're probably not old enough to remember when women did that. She taught him cribbage and they played endless games together. I don't know if she went so far as to let him win or not. He was first and foremost in her existence.

She died when Duncan Robert was 17, after a brief illness, and I believe he misses her to this day. How could he not?

He told me that Grandma Ruth had appeared to him the night before her death. She was in the hospital at the time, in a coma. “She came down the hall and sat at the foot of my bed,” he said. “She told me she was leaving. She looked great. I've never seen her look better or happier.”