Toby Olson - Tampico

I was on my stomach then, in the river, my toes dragging clay as I slid ahead. I saw a corona of leaves and vines coming toward me, my arm like the stump of a stiff battering ram disappearing into the root basket. Then the basket was turning out in the air, and through the empty opening I could see the oak tree, its thick trunk and its branches and leaves in a massive silhouette against the night sky. I was hanging out in the air up to my chest when the roots released me, and I watched the tree turn slowly and grow smaller as it fell, end over end, its roots unraveling like Medusa snakes, then bounced once on the steep escarpment and rolled down like a dervish, coming to rest on the beach, still shaking and vibrating, its branches dipping in the phosphorescence of the incoming surf, foam thrown from its leaves.

My arms hung along the cliff surface, palms pressed into clay. I could feel it oozing through my fingers, falling in wet worms into darkness. The soaked glove slipped from my right hand, and I saw the cuff kick veils of sand beads free as it tumbled and fell. Large shadows took away definition in the cliff face, and only where the alluvial escarpment began, a good hundred feet below, was the moonlight in evidence, a dull shimmering, floating over that broad fan that reflected and absorbed it. There was a large, dark hump, down to the right in shadow below my fingertips, and I couldn’t see the beach over it in that direction, only the curls of gentle waves beyond the surf. I lifted my chin up, turned slightly in the opening, and could see the waxing moon. A single wisp of cloud had drifted across its face and was half hiding it. I turned further and looked beyond the moon and into the cold sky, then turned completely until I was on my back in the shallow river and could see up to the cliff’s brink, only a few yards above, and then I understood the shadows.

The lip hung out a good fifteen feet into the air, and I could see wet roots hanging down from its underside, a pottery shard, pieces of burnt wood, and a slab of stone, fashioned by some hand, imbedded in it. And it was oozing, droplets of falling water dissolving into a smoky mist before they reached me. I lifted my hand to the wet shale in the cliff’s face above, but it was only wind-carved sand in the shape of shale, and it dissolved at my touch and fell in a wash down into my face. I shook my head, turning again, and pulled my father’s cap off and dabbed at my eyes with the clean wool on the inside, and when I could focus again I found that the cloud had drifted away from the moon and the hump in the cliff’s face below me was no longer in deep shadow, but clearly visible in its familiar symmetry. I’d thought it some natural outcropping, but now I saw the distinct edges, and now that all the sound of my turning and touching had ceased I could hear it shaping the hushed waterfall and could see that too.

It was a broad course of cement steps, its treads deep and descending steeply, and were the cliff a house façade and were there an entrance door one might have climbed that stairway and entered into the vertical face. But there was no door, no earth below the first tread but only the moonlight, high above the escarpment and the beach, to step off into where the stairway ended in the air. It hung out a good twelve feet from the cliff face, and from the brink of its lowest step a veil of water spilled, dissolving into a thin rain as it fell down into darkness. The stairway glistened with water, a slow flood that appeared stationary as it followed the sharp contours, and it was only in the scatter of twigs and shriveled leaves, like those blown across the porch steps of a country house after a winter storm, that I could see its movement, miniature waves over branch tips, an acorn lifted on the tide. And I thought of my own porch steps and my lost lover descending them in rain after that final argument four years ago, then turning to look back at me for the last time, curls of blond hair wetted by the rain, stuck to those temples I’d kissed into wakefulness for lazy love in the night, gone now.

And I thought the stairs might soon be going too. They were basement stairs, poured cement and very heavy, and unless they were connected to a cellar inside the cliff somehow, they couldn’t stay there, suspended out in air, and would soon fall and plow a deep cut in the escarpment below, then tumble to the tree in the surf and crush it or land heavily beside it, tilted and half imbedded in the beach.

I hung out in the cold air just above the stairway. It was off to the right a little and I could see most of it, but couldn’t reach down far enough to touch the top step. I felt at the cliff’s face above it. The icy clay was spongy and water-laden there, and wet chunks came away easily in my palms. I let them fall in globs, down to the stairway, where they dissolved quickly and were carried away in the waterfall. Then I extended my arms in the night air parallel to my body, and digging my toes into the river in the floor behind me and rocking my shoulders from side to side, I pulled myself back into the passage until I could see the edges of the opening again and the corona of that moonlight I’d been out in just moments before.

When I reached my bedroom again and looked in the mirror in the closet door, I saw that my hands and face were smeared with clay and dirt and that my clothing was soaked, my sweatshirt heavy with water and so stretched out that it hung almost to my knees. I stripped the clothes away, stacking them along with my soiled tennis shoes on the closet floor, then went shivering to the shower and climbed into it and took a hot one. My mother had called it that when I was a child. How about a hot one, she’d say, when I’d come into the house sweaty and soiled after hours of play. There is no bathtub in the house, and my mother would get into the shower stall with me, modest in her swimming suit, and would scrub my body with cloth and brush, pressing my head into her breasts as she flooded my scalp with cool shampoo. I flooded it then, too, imagining my mother stepping in through the wet curtain, then dried myself and dressed in clean clothing and shoes. Then I went in search through the cabinets in the kitchen, looking for the clothesline rope I knew my mother had kept there, finding it in a deep drawer to the side of the sink. Then I went out into the moonlight on the porch, feeling that tonight I couldn’t go beyond the house easily. There was no specific panic, just a slight fear of fear and a beginning sense of derealization. The night seemed a dream night, the cold and biting breeze as if it blew out of a tomb in some other place and year, and I turned back to the familiar doorway, opened the screen again and wedged the rubber kick in firmly. I could see down the hallway, the kitchen light illuminating the picture frames and carpet. Then I turned and went back out on the porch and headed for the end.

I tied the rope around the pillar at the sea side edge, my fingers aching in the cold, then played the coils out as I moved down the steps to the brief gravel path that runs from the front of the house to the tight turnaround area where Arthur parks. Then I stepped off the path and into the silver frost and headed for the cliff’s brink beyond the house side. There was thirty feet or more of ground between house and cliff, and though my mother had gardened there, the space had grown over completely with honeysuckle and scrub oak since her death so many years ago, and a thick spray of beach grass wavered in the moonlight at the very edge.

I squeezed the rope, pulling and testing the knot as I pushed bare branches aside. I was nervous, waiting for the fist to come, but aware of no aura. Then I slid my foot forward into the brittle grass at the brink, pressing it down hard for a good purchase, then leaned out, the rope taut in the air behind me, and looked down into the night.