Sons of the 613 (10 page)

“Look, figure it out. That's the challenge.”

“It's stealing!”

“It's borrowing. You'll deliver it right back to him.”

“Josh, what's the point?”

“The point? The point is being a man, Isaac. Conquering your fear, facing danger, dominating the powers of nature—”

“Getting eaten by a dog . . .”

“Look. It's
supposed
to be dangerous. That's the whole idea. I'd rather have you fight a bull or break a horse or hunt a frigging lion or kill a Minotaur. But what we've got is this—four fat-ass rottweilers crapping in some crazy guy's yard. That's what you've got to beat. This isn't defeating the Xbox, Isaac. Or winning the stupid game you play with Dad, the guess-why-the-dude-is-sick game.”

“It's called differential diagnosis, Josh, and Dad says I'm pretty good—”

“‘Dad says I'm pretty good at it,'”
he says, mocking me. “Who gives a shit? This is
real.
The central challenge, Isaac. The key to the whole thing.”

“Josh, that old guy is crazy. Everyone knows that. You ride by his house on your bike and he'll scream at you. Even if I do get past the dogs, he'll kill me.”

“Nah. Dogs'll get you first. AWOOOOO!!!”

I jump at the unexpected noise as Josh throws his head back and howls. The dogs are instantly up, converging into a boiling, four-headed knot of muscular black fur and flashing teeth as they bark and snap blindly in our direction. Josh is already up and running off, and I follow his cackling voice through the woods, heart pounding, picturing those dogs surging over the fence and pursuing us under the night sky.

 

“Josh, please, not again.”

“What, you didn't have fun yesterday?”

“Josh, I can't—would you turn down the music?—I can't miss two days of school in a row!”

“Sure you can. I did it all the time. Hey, look—cows!”

“You do understand that I have to go to school?”

“This is a different kind of school. C'mon, buddy, move it!” He honks his horn at a slow-moving truck. The truck changes lanes to let us pass.

“Is Lesley going to be there?”

“No.” He steps on the gas, and I'm jammed back in my seat as we accelerate past the truck. “This is going to be a little different from yesterday.”

 

M
ERIT
B
ADGES
: G
UNS
, M
OTORCYCLES
, P
ERSONAL
E
NDANGERMENT

“Isaac, I swear, you either jump or I'm going to throw you off.”

“I'm not doing it!”

“Jump!”

“No!”

I'm bleeding and trying not to cry. The edge of the cliff is about twelve inches in front of my bare toes, which is about ten feet closer than I want it to be. The blood is oozing from a big scrape that runs the length of my right shin, a souvenir from the treacherous, slippery climb up here. Beyond the edge of the cliff and a long way down, the river rolls and swirls past, the surface dark and oily. I'm in a semi-semicrouched position, leaning forward slightly, my knees bent, hands out to the side and a bit to the front—a compromise between standing straight up and being where I want to be, which is in a full knees-down hands-on-the-ground pose. Each time I try to sink down into that, Josh puts his hands under my armpits and pulls me upright. We've been at this impasse for what seems like hours.

So yes, today is a little different from yesterday.

Yesterday I went shopping with Lesley and got a haircut. Today I went firing assault rifles and crashing a motorcycle with an inbred survivalist freak, and now Josh is going to throw me to my death from a one-hundred-foot cliff above the St. Croix River.

“I'm seriously going to throw you off, Isaac.”

“I'm not doing it!”

“Isaac, do you understand how key this moment is? How important this is to the Quest?”

“What, dying?”

“No, growing a pair and jumping.”

“I could die!”

Behind me I hear Darrell the inbred survivalist freak murmur some sort of comment to his freak nephew Craig. They both laugh. I try to ignore them.

“Isaac,” says Josh, “this is exactly the time you need to pull yourself together, face your fear, and jump.”

“It's, like, a hundred feet down, Josh!”

“Actually, it's probably closer to about twenty-six feet, depending on the water level,” says Darrell. “We've had a considerable amount of precipitation, though, so I imagine it's less of a drop. On the other hand, with the increased water volume the current'll be stronger when you land.”

That's how Darrell says everything, always in totally assured expert lecturer mode, using terms like “subideal” and “considerable amount of precipitation,” like what he really wants to say is,
Let's get this straight: I have a mullet and bad teeth and I'm a mechanic, but I'm still intelligent.

“You should just jump. Just don't think about it and jump.”

That's nephew Craig, chiming in with his helpful advice in his flat tone. He's standing behind me and to my left, arms wrapped around his bare, bony frame, his big, rabbity teeth chattering. He's already jumped three times so far.

It doesn't help that he is only twelve years old but is both taller than me and already knows how to ride a motorcycle and fire a gun, and did both things like they were second nature, like he'd been doing them for years and couldn't figure out how anyone could have grown up differently. He figured out pretty quickly that he hates me.

Backing up: Josh woke me in the morning from a nightmare where I was being torn apart by dogs. So tired during our A.M. workout that my dream world and awake world blurred and blended together, the dogs still snapping and tearing at me as I stumbled along the road. I thought of Lesley then, trying to hold her image and the sound of her voice in my head, and it made me stronger.

And then we somehow ended up in the car again, not going to school, and drove way out past the end of civilization until we were on a dirt road that ended up in a clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing squatted a cabin that was the setting for every movie ever made about people who take a dirt road to a cabin in a clearing in the woods and get hacked apart by inbred freaks who want to wear their skin.

“No,” I said as the car rolled to stop near a muddy, beat-up pickup truck that was parked at a random angle to the cabin. “You've got to be kidding me.”

“Nope. We're here.”

As we got out of the car two hunting dogs came trotting around from somewhere around back and began baying and yelping at us, chins pointed toward the sky, hopping back and forth on their hind legs, flashing me back to my nightmare. Then the screen door opened and banged shut, and the person who would turn out to be Darrell emerged, wearing cutoff jeans and a gray army T-shirt, beer can in one hand, shouting at the dogs to shut up.

“
Hey
-ey!” he said as he approached, and gave Josh a big hug and a few paternal slaps on the cheek, like Josh was his long-absent and much-larger son who had returned to the freak roost after looting and pillaging some distant villages. There was some quick back-and-forth banter, mentions of mutual friends, and inquiries about how they were doing, while in the background nephew Craig emerged from the front door in a T-shirt that reached to his knees, rubbing his eyes like he'd just woken up. Why wasn't he in school? Was he homeschooled? Did he just tend the barrels where they render the fat from the victims? While I was pondering that, Darrell looked me up and down, grinning, and said to Josh: “Yep, pretty much like you described.”

While I was trying to figure out what, exactly, that meant, Darrell cracked the beer, managing to spray me directly in the face, and said to Josh, “So, where would you like to begin? Bikes or guns?”

Guns it was.

Introductions done, Darrell said, “We're going to go retrieve the firearms,” and then he and Craig went back into the murder cabin to do that.

“Josh,” I hissed as soon as they were inside, batting away the dog who kept jabbing me in the balls with his nose, “I want to go home!”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I want to leave! I'm missing school!”

Josh seemed genuinely taken aback.

“Isaac, I set this up specially for you. Darrell is taking time out of his day, doing this as a
favor,
because I asked him to.”

“I don't want to ride a motorcycle, Josh, and I don't want to shoot guns.”

“You don't want to—I can't believe this. I go out of my way—”

“Especially with these freaks. Don't you know any normal people?”

“Well, yes,
Mom,
I know plenty of
normal people.
Darrell is a
normal person.
He used to work on my bike.”

Did I mention Josh had a motorcycle? Of course Josh had a motorcycle. For a while. And then he didn't. I never found out what happened. I don't think things ended well.

“I want to leave.”

“We're not leaving. I thought you'd be
psyched
to do this. This is the
fun
part!”

“The
fun
part?”

“It's friggin'
motorcycles
and
guns,
Isaac. It's about as close to the definition of fun as you're going to find!”

“Maybe our definitions of ‘fun' are slightly different.”

“Oh, for God's sake. You're about to start lecturing me on the accident statistics, aren't you.”

“Shut up,” I said, because I had been.

“What is it that you'd rather be doing? Sitting in math class? Don't answer that.”

“Josh, I just don't—”

“You were certainly psyched to do the whole
Queer Eye
thing yesterday—which, believe me, I wasn't so hot on.”

“That was different.”

“Are you gay? Is that it?”

“NO!”

“Look, you can just tell me.”

“Josh, shut up. I just don't think I'm a motorcycles-and-guns type of person.”

“Oh, no shit? But that doesn't mean you can't at least know how to do it, know what it's like. That way, you see some dude on a bike, you can say, I know how to do that. Or you hear some jackass going on about guns, and you can think, big effin deal, I've done that. He's got nothing on me.”

“Do you know how pissed Dad would be?”

“That's exactly the point. You'd never get to do this with Dad, never, never, never, never. Christ, I wanted to give you a chance to do something like this, and thought it was something special that we could do together. Because once I'm gone you're not gonna get another chance.”

So we ended up in a field that had plywood targets set up against a hillside. I had to get a lecture from creepy Darrell on how to shoot and the importance of the Second Amendment, and then they all had a great time, an orgy of
weeYOOOO
ing and cheering and
BANG BANG BANG POP POP POP BLAM!
as they worked their way through a lovely sampler plate of shotguns and pistols and assault rifles. Darrell shoved guns in my hands and I took my turns, flinching with each shot and weirded out and miserable, and, yes, sulky and pouty and uncooperative so that Josh would know just how miserable I was. Pretty soon he was shaking his head and making snide comments, and they were all snickering, and finally they all gave up on me and my half-assed shooting and I faded into the background, eventually just taking a seat on the ground a dozen yards behind them, wanting to go farther away but not wanting to draw more attention to myself.

You wouldn't like guns so much, I had muttered to Josh earlier—“‘If you'd ever seen a child with a bullet wound,'” finished Josh for me. “Do you know what would be great? If you had an independent thought in your head that didn't come directly from Dad.”

While I sat there on the ground I watched Josh interacting with Craig. That's who he wants as a brother, I thought, the two of them talking about guns and motorcycles and the NFL. Josh gesturing with his hands, describing some fight, Craig looking at him worshipfully. Maybe he could teach Craig my haphtarah.

After a lot more
WEEEYOOOO
ing and gunfire and male bonding and Craig using the 20-gauge to transform a passing crow into a puff of black feathers—they're really smart birds, you know; they use tools—the ammo was used up, and Darrell said, “Ooo
kay!
Let's ride some bikes!”

Which we did. And I crashed. I crashed within seconds of starting my very first ride, crashed with all of them watching, crashed exactly when I didn't want to crash, the front wheel rocketing skyward and throwing me onto my ass.

Everyone ran to the bike to make sure it was okay.

I got up and limped in circles, swearing loudly and rubbing my leg, not because I'd hurt myself but because I wanted to make it look like I had, at least a little bit.

Josh watched me for a few moments and said, “You're all right.” It was a command. So I made some faces and swore a bit more and kind of dialed back the limp, fading it out after a few more circles.

Then Josh sighed—another check mark in my failure column—and said, “Screw it. Let's just go to the falls.”

Which is where we are now, the whole horrible day building to this moment, with me standing up on this cliff, a gun-flinching, motorcycle-crashing, non-cliff-jumping coward.

“Jump.”

“No.

“You know,” volunteers Professor Darrell in his serious voice, “in these sorts of situations it's important to dominate one's fears.”

Giant pine tree, fall and crush him now.

“Oh, shut up,” I mutter.

“He looks like he's gonna start crying,” observes Craig.