A Hill to Live On

The roads were quiet, and the Alabama sun still young in the sky, when my friend Dylan turned down the radio and released the full cry of the Cougar. I didn’t know cars, didn’t care to, but normally the sound of that engine climbing the ridges of my spine would make me at least a little hungry for Dylan’s next gear change. But today was not a normal day. And even though the Cougar’s black hood gleamed with the promise of a fresh dawn, there was nothing that could have lifted my spirits to meet it. Tomorrow would be the day I buried my dad.

I felt guilty. Dylan’s dad had died five years ago, that was when he inherited the Cougar, but Dylan never asked me to drive him hundreds of miles on a fool’s errand. It would have been a moot point as I don’t know how to drive. Tried to learn once, with my dad, but I ended up smashing both headlamps against Mr DeGray’s new Pontiac and I never got behind a wheel again. But that’s not the point. I would have done anything for Dylan, he was my best friend, but he never asked me for a damn thing.

“I’m sorry about it,” I said when the engine had settled to a lull.

Dylan said nothing in response, and for a minute I watched the world ahead of him being silently reflected in his mirrored shades.

“I really am sorry.”

“I know,” he said. “You’ve said it a few times now. Don’t say it again.”

I knew Dylan, so I shut up and turned my eyes back to the open road, and surrendered myself to the roar of the Cougar.

*

I had tried to pick the most likely place as our first stop. If I had guessed right, it would have been the last. I was looking for an elementary school I used to go to. I was an army kid and moved around a lot. At a certain point the name of the school, even where it is, kind of become irrelevant. But now I needed to remember one of them. My mom couldn’t help. She drank so much in those days that she didn’t have much memory left of them. Besides, it was better to avoid a conversation about my dad. You never knew when the ice might crack beneath your feet. No, one way or another, this was always going to be my mission.

I knew the school I was looking for had a hill at the edge of a playing field. Shrubs and trees grew along the hill’s gentler slope, forging winding paths for young feet to chase their childhoods through. By strict order of the principal, the hill’s steeper side was only for the older kids; its sharp incline of uneven grass provided a more direct, if treacherous, route to the hill’s sandy summit. The teachers used to hate kids hanging out up there, probably worried about parents complaining when a kid went home with dusty clothes. But the teachers couldn’t do anything to police it without hiking up there themselves, and most preferred to turn a blind eye and dole out a detention later. That dustbowl of a summit was what Dylan and I were looking for. That was where the treasure was buried.

*

The brakes squeaked as Dylan pulled the Cougar to a stop outside the school. School was out, so we didn’t need to worry about looking like creeps as we peered through the gates, only about looking like thieves.

“I don’t see a hill,” said Dylan as he stared across the resolutely flat field bordering the school buildings. “You think they could have levelled it?”

“No,” I said, realising how my mind had been tricked, how this field looked so similar to the one with the hill, but wasn’t the same. “It’s the wrong school.”

“Where to next, then?”

“Dyl, we’ve come so far. We can just turn back.”

“Where next?”

*

The roads were busier now, and the Cougar had to settle for a quiet purr as we fell in with the traffic. All the time I was clock watching, calculating how long it might take to get to the next school, what time of night it would be when we would made it back, and when I had to be at the cemetery the next morning. After a couple of hours, I realised I wasn’t factoring success into the timings. I’d need to find a place to develop the film and get the shots blown up big for the ceremony. Could I do that in the hours I would have before the funeral? Could I even afford the rush fees I might have to pay? I looked across at Dylan. Dylan would find a way. He always did.

I met Dylan in middle school. I was being kicked around by three older boys. I was resigned to the beating, it wouldn’t be the first, but then this tall, long-haired boy wearing a military jacket had leapt in. I was no help to him. He was outnumbered three to one. It didn’t stop him dishing out the best hiding I’ve ever seen. We got into a few more scraps down the years, but Dylan never goes looking for violence, he’s just damn good at it when it shows up.

We went to different high schools when he moved to the next town over, but once he got his car he would come and drive by my place nearly every night. My dad always liked Dylan. He used to tell me that in a way I didn’t like. I almost started resenting Dylan because of it, almost let it blow our friendship up. One night I was a pain in the ass like I didn’t even know I could be. I had no blame for Dylan when he dropped me to the dirt and left me to walk home.

“I don’t know what your problem is, but it ain’t with me,” he had said, before sweeping away in the Cougar.

He picked me up the next night and we never mentioned it again. I couldn’t have a problem with Dylan if I tried.

*

It was late afternoon when we crossed the border into Louisiana, following a detour to another school. I didn’t think this was the one we were looking for, but it was on the way to my next best possibility. As it happened, we spent almost an hour getting lost in samey suburban streets. Eventually we cruised by a row of identikit new-build houses and realised we were looking for something that didn’t exist anymore.

I couldn’t help but cry a little as we left that town. Dylan chomped exaggeratedly on some beef jerky, trying to give the space to be disappointed. Seeing those houses where the school had once stood brought home how stupid this whole trip was. Dylan passed me his sunglasses as we began losing the light, and I put them on to dim out the world and let my tears gather in peace.

My dad didn’t have a lot of nice things, so I remember exactly how excited he was about his camera. I was excited too. There was something magical about it. You point, click, then send your film away in a little envelope and a week later it returns as packet of memories. I loved everything about the process, especially the black, protective film canisters. The pop the cap made when you fixed it on tight, a tiny cylindrical fortress against the light. I can’t explain, other than childish fascination, why one morning I hid under my bed with the curtains drawn and emptied the roll in the camera into one of those canisters to take to school.

 “This is pictures,” I think I said at the front of class. The teacher made a decent salvage of it. We had been studying caterpillars and she likened my little black canister to a chrysalis. She made me promise to bring in the pictures so we could all see the “beautiful butterfly” when they were developed. But that day would never come. At lunch I sat on the dusty hilltop, the canister in my pocket and a stick in my hands, casually poking a hole in the dirt. Eventually the simple possibility that my canister could probably survive being buried in the dirt seemed a good enough reason for me to dig its grave. 

My dad never got over it. I didn’t know it, but Gerald Ford had visited the barracks. Apparently, fate had seen him pick my dad to exchange a joke with, and one of his buddies had taken his camera and captured the moment. He would have been unbearable if it had ever been developed. He would have made copy after copy, handing them out to everyone he met in the bar, anyone he would meet at all, and the tale would have grown taller with each telling.

He went ballistic when he found the camera chamber empty. I was so frightened I never told him I buried it, he just knew that I lost it, and that was enough for him to knock me flying across the room. He would fly into a rage at least once month and the lost pictures would always come up. As time went on, he added my disastrous driving lesson to his rants, but his main complaint was always how could I, his son, have robbed him of his proudest moment.

Maybe I could have saved myself from it all if I had gone back to the hill the next day and dug up the film, but I never did. In my young mind it was the scene of the crime, and worse things would happen if I ever went back up there. I had always meant to retrieve it someday, just turn up on his porch and surprise him with it. Maybe we could laugh it all off and drink a beer. It was always unrealistic, a fantasy, but when the cops knocked on my door to tell me he had died, that damn black film canister was all I could think about.

*

“I think we’re almost there,” announced Dylan.

I’d had my eyes closed and hadn’t realised how dark it had fallen. Dylan’s shades no longer made any difference, and I folded them carefully into the cup holder.

“Look,” I said. “There’s less than no chance we’re going to find anything here. Even if it is the right school, the film must be worm food by now. But… I just wanted to say… thanks for doing this with me.”

“No sweat,” Dylan replied in his usual laconic style. That’s the thing with Dylan. He never sounds like he means anything, but if you pay attention, he never says a word he doesn’t mean.

“Listen,” I said, beginning to form a question I wasn’t sure I should ask. “Do… do you think it matters…”

I trailed off. Dylan grunted to indicate I should go on, but I wound up telling him it didn’t matter. I already knew the answer to my question anyway, and I didn’t like it. 

*

We pulled up outside the front gates of the school. Dylan got out. We’d arranged that he would check to see if there was a hill. I didn’t think I could bear that moment, standing out there in the cold and dark, when the reality would finally bite. Better to be wrapped up in the familiar surrounds of the Cougar, and have his calm voice break the news. To my surprise Dylan came back to the passenger window rather than getting back behind the wheel.

“We might be on,” he said. “There’s a field, and I don’t know about a hill, but there’s some kind of rise.”

I walked with him back to the gates and squinted into the gloom of the school grounds. I couldn’t believe how small the hill looked, but I guess I had been much smaller when I had last laid eyes on it.

I looked at Dylan and nodded. He went back to the trunk and grabbed a flashlight and shovel. I stared up at the tops of the gates towering above me. If the hill looked smaller than I remembered, the fence and gates were certainly larger.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said. “I’m sure they have security.”

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Dylan. “I need to get my shovel back anyway.”

With that, he tossed the tool up high, and watched it land dully in a patch of grass beyond the fence.

I’d have laughed, but Dylan was already scrambling up the gate. I hastened to follow him and soon we were both fully-fledged trespassers, scurrying across the dark field towards the hill. We ducked down to avoid the branches overhanging the tangled pathways as we began our climb. The twisting trails I had romanticised were much shorter than I remembered, and within seconds the beam of our flashlight was drawing over on the dusty mound that marked the summit.

“You know where to dig?” asked Dylan.

“I think I can guess. It looks a little different to how my memory had it, but there’s only so many places and I didn’t bury it deep.”

Dylan nodded and handed me the shovel.

The earth was hard, and the shovel bounced up a few times, but I stayed on it. Dylan’s flashlight caught the foil of half a dozen candy wrappers and potato chip packets as I guided the shovel through the soil, but no matter where I dug, I couldn’t find the film canister.

Eventually Dylan took a turn while I sat on the ground and half-heartedly shone the light for him to dig by. He dug much faster than I had, almost turning over the entire summit within a few minutes. But still, no canister.

“I didn’t think we’d find it,” I said as Dylan once again brought his shovel down on the earth. “I just wanted to try, you know. Really try.”

“I know,” replied Dylan, without breaking his rhythm.

“Do… do you think it matters that we tried? That we came so far for this?”

The shovel sunk once again into the earth.

“Do you think he would have cared? Do you think he’s up there and smiling while we dig through this dirt? Do you think he’s proud?”

Dylan pitched a particularly full pan of dirt over his shoulder.

“He’s your daddy, of course he would be proud of you,” he said, his eyes fixed on the ground.

I watched the flashing strokes of the shovel as it continued to fall. Dylan was digging a much deeper hole than was needed.

“You’ve never lied to me before,” I said quietly.

Dylan stopped digging and rested on his shovel, looking out towards the school buildings.

“Tell me what you really think,” I requested in that same quiet voice, as though I wasn’t sure what I was asking for would be in my best interests.

Slowly, Dylan turned his head to look me in the eye.

“What I think, is I hope your daddy was proud of you, and us coming all this way should have meant something to him, but honestly, I don’t know that anything would have been enough for him.”

“He always liked you,” I said, feeling my eyes dampen. “You would have been enough. It was me. I could never be what he wanted, who he wanted. Look at me, I couldn’t even drive us here. I just never measured up.”

Dylan shook his head.

“I doubt it would have been true if we switched places. Even so, you ask me, your daddy should have paid more attention to the kid he had than the kid he wanted.”

I didn’t want to bawl but I couldn’t stop it. My body shook as I fought to stay as quiet as possible, watching my tears spill into the sand.

Dylan dropped to sit next to me.

“I don’t want to pile on, but I think you need to hear this. Your problem isn’t that your daddy wanted you to be a certain way, it’s that you keep trying to live up to that. I don’t care about what he wanted for you, because you ain’t ever getting anywhere doing that. You got to go set your own standard. Hardest thing you can do, but you got to do it. You’re smart, you can get somewhere, you know. Somewhere he could never… And if you do that I don’t care if he would be proud of you. But I know I would be.”

I clung to him, and his shoulder would become saturated with my tears. I don’t know how long I cried, but I cried openly, until I had nothing left in me, until we just sat there, two boys sitting on a hill in the night, looking out over a school that meant nothing to either of us, letting the chill night air dry the tracks that had run down my face. Dylan was the one to finally break the silence.

“If we hit the road now, you might get a couple hours in your bed. Unless you want to keep digging? We can dig until the last minute if you want to.”

“No, let’s go. We should make sure we get there on time.”

We rose up from the earth and began to make our way down the steep side of the hill.

“By the way,” said Dylan. “You’re going to drive the Cougar on the way back.”

“I can’t,” I replied, panicked. “I wish I could, but I’d just crash her. There’s no way I can drive.”

“Not all the way,” conceded Dylan. “But some of it, while the roads are quiet and I can watch you. And you know what, it’s going to be fun too.”