Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

“But I don’t want to choke you.”

“Wuss,” she said.

So I did it. I slapped her and called her names, even though all I really wanted to do was kiss her and stroke her and whisper her name. At the end, when she was really squirming and thrashing and her nipples were like little pebbles, I put my hands around her throat and squeezed with my thumbs. She came so hard her eyes rolled back in her head and I could feel her belly rippling under me. Then I exploded inside her so hard I blacked out, too, for a microsecond.

When I came around I could still hear my own yell echoing back from the far side of the canyon we’d almost fallen into earlier. Dusty lay under me, unmoving, her head turned to the side and her eyes closed. She didn’t seem to be breathing. Oh, god, I killed her, I thought.

Then her eyes fluttered open. “Oh, baby,” she said hoarsely. “Where have you been all my life?”

Which sounded kind of funny, her still being a couple weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

We woke at dawn, our sleeping bags drenched with dew. We squeezed them out, packed up, then ate our MacGuffins, which we’d saved for last. Dusty’s canteen was empty, so I gave her half of my water. In the daylight we could see the path we were on was a dead end, so we reversed course and started back up the trail in the direction we’d come.

We knew we’d have to hurry, because if the counselors hadn’t missed us yet, they would soon. But there was no question of hurrying when we reached the narrow, crumbly ledge that had nearly stopped us last night. It looked even scarier in the daylight, with the cliff rising straight up on one side of the ledge, which was only a foot or so wide, and falling straight down on the other, a drop of at least thirty feet just to the tops of the pine trees-lord only knows how far it was to the ground.

I went first, slide-stepping sideways with my belly pressed against the cliff wall and my pack trying to tug me backward. I told Dusty to wait for me, that I would put down my pack where the ledge widened, then come back for her. But she didn’t wait. I don’t know why, I guess I’ll never know why. All I know is, I had just dropped off my pack and was starting back for her when I heard the word shit, that’s all, just shit, followed by another one of those screams that will be with me until the day I die. Not that eerie eeeeeee Teddy had made, but a sad, falling ohhhhhhhh.

After the scream came the sound of crackling, snapping branches as Dusty crashed into the evergreen canopy below. I thought, hoped, prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, that she had survived, that the branches had broken her fall. But when I got down on my stomach and peered over the ledge, I saw her body lying spread-eagled in the trees, her head thrown back and her arms and legs splayed out, as if she were floating on her back, bobbing on the surface of a dark green sea.

“Hold on,” I yelled. “I’m coming down, hold on.” But then her body jerked a couple times, and the branches shifted and swayed, and I saw the dark stain spreading across her Mountain Project T-shirt, just above her heart. The branches had broken her fall all right: Dusty had been impaled before she reached the ground.

When Monday finally rolled around, Pender still wasn’t ready to face the music. Instead he went camping with Amy and the crew down by the Kern River and found himself living through a two-day beer commercial. Daylight was for grilling burgers and franks over an open fire, drinking Bud out of the can, playing wiffle ball, and taking turns swinging out over the old swimming hole on a truck tire hanging by a thick rope from an overhanging tree branch. Evening was for sitting around the campfire toasting marshmallows, drinking Jim Beam out of his beat-up old pewter flask, and singing Merle Haggard songs. Nighttime was for making love under the stars, on a mattress in the back of Amy’s pickup.

And whenever the stuff he wasn’t thinking about showed signs of surfacing, he told himself a couple more days wouldn’t make much difference in the long run. It was like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock: it’s not so much the extra ten minutes of sleep you’re buying, it’s the illusion of control.

But sooner or later the buzzer always goes off. Wednesday dawned clear and hot. One last pot of hobo coffee, one last plunge into the river, then they packed up, buried their garbage, and struck camp. It was in the cab of Amy’s F-150, formerly white, now beige with Kern County dust, that Pender finally unburdened himself. He thought she’d be angry; instead she chuckled. “You? An FBI agent?” she said in her Southern Comfort-steeped voice, her eyes hidden behind mirrored glasses and a cigarette dangling from her lips. “Honey, you have got to be shitting me.”

“I shitteth you not,” said Pender, lighting up his first Marlboro of the day with his trusty Zippo. A legacy from his father, it had the letters USMC engraved on one side and the Marine Corps anchor on the other; the chrome finish was worn down to the brass. “The thing is”-he took a deep drag, blew it out the window into the slipstream-“I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t think I can do it any more. Matter of fact…”

He took a sidewise glance toward Amy, who drove like a man, leaning back casually, one hand on the wheel, one elbow out the window. Unable to read her expression behind the shades, he blundered on. “I’ve been seriously thinking about eighty-sixing the whole goddamn enchilada, the Bureau, my fucked-up marriage…just giving it all up…” He paused again, to give her a chance to cut in, make this a little easier one way or the other; no such luck. “…and maybe moving out here for keeps.”

He turned toward her, the seat belt tightening across his chest. The only sign that she’d heard him was that she’d gone perfectly still, except for her steering hand. Finally she blew a puff of smoke out of the side of her mouth and turned to face him. “You do what you got to do, honey,” she told him, her cigarette bobbing. “Just don’t do it for me.”

They drove on through the August heat. Pender took a sudden interest in the landscape, the golden, rolling hills, the dusty green live oaks, a turkey vulture wheeling in the sky, a glowering, hunch-shouldered hawk perched atop a telephone pole. “I’m not sure what that means,” he said eventually.

“It means, believe it or not, that I haven’t been waiting around all those years for you, or anybody, to come along and rescue me. Not that I don’t like you a lot, and not that it hasn’t been fun.”

When they got back to the farmhouse, Pender went inside to pack, while Amy hosed down her truck barefooted, in a T-shirt and a pair of denim cutoffs. A few minutes later he came out carrying his suitcase and wearing his seersucker jacket, the houndstooth tweed hat with the little feathers in the brim, and a pasted-on grin.

“Have you made up your mind what you’re going to do yet?” she asked him.

“Not precisely.”

“That offer still holds good, you know.” A weekend bouncer’s job and the use of the vacant flat above the Nugget until he got himself settled.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Pender as he tossed the suitcase into the trunk of the Bu-car. But they both knew he didn’t mean it. With the romantic future he’d been constructing in his mind unmasked as a daydream-and a rather immature, escapist daydream at that-Pender was having a hard time remembering why he’d decided to drop out in the first place. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about the videos-it was the depth of feeling, the utter despair, that he was unable to resurrect. Hell, maybe a little R amp; R was all I needed, he decided, slamming the trunk lid closed.