The Quarry

I’m parked in the same overgrown field where Marty’s ’66 Mustang sat ten years ago. But I don’t have a Mustang. I have a ramshackle rusted Ford, and it's now the only home I have left. A sleeping bag is in the back seat, boxes are everywhere. Now that I'm back in my hometown, my mind drifts to my mother. I would guess she's still in the old house, but I don't have the courage to go see her.

Ahead of me, bulldozers knock down trees. A real estate sign says, ‘Lakeview Estates—Waterfront’. I know the flooded quarry is beyond the tree-line and the memories rush back.

I slip the pint bottle of Jack Daniels into my glove compartment. The questions never stop, but now I have new ones to add to the pile. Why now? Why go back? What drew me here?

****

It was the summer of lasts, followed by seasons of firsts. High school was ending, and I was headed to State College. I’d never drink a thirty-five-cent beer again. This was the first time I’d see Easy Rider on the big screen, and the last time I’d think it was the epitome of cool. It was too late to kiss a girl for the first time, but not the last time I’d marvel at how perfect a woman’s collarbone could look against the curve of her neck, the miracle of her repose. I would never again crash through my parents’ porch screen door to see friends I’d known all my life, my heart thumping with excitement. I would never breathe the wonder of life so fully, smell a rose so sharply, or hear the trains to my future whistle so clear across town. It was also the first time I met real loss, or a depth of sadness, or the carriage of death—who, that summer, not so kindly stopped for me.

Even when we were six, he was my best friend, his gap-toothed grin spurring me on. I was three months older, but always just The Kid. “Stick with me, I’ve got your back,” he’d say. At six and a half, technically I was older, but he was like a big brother. They called us The Show and The Shadow. Where Marty went, I followed.

We didn’t grow apart as we grew up in the early ’60s—instead, we grew closer. Summers stretched out, endless and golden. We’d gather with our friends on Marty’s parents’ porch for board games—Risk, Parcheesi, Monopoly—tossing dice for hours. The Shaw’s farm was our battlefield, playing army with our air-guns, building forts from bales of hay, the pungent straw clinging to our sweaty skin. A big outing meant biking into town with playing cards clipped with clothes pins to our spokes, the tat-tat-tat motoring all the way.

As we got older, but not yet teens, the flooded quarry became a refuge from rules. We’d strip to our underwear and swing out on a tree rope, hooting and howling over the water. After letting go of the rope, we’d cannonball into the ice-cold surface, laughter echoing off the quarry walls. Later, we would stretch out on a granite rock bank, the sun hot on our skin, the hairs of our arms tingling. The quarry became a forbidden excitement as we headed into Junior High, a hidden place for beer, and girls, and smoking dope. And as odd as it sounds, a place for skipping stones when the surface was like glass. Marty would stretch his lanky arm and spin the flat rocks out over the water. He scrutinized each of his stones and I would kid him about it. But then he would skip a few and they were perfect—one, two, then five, TEN skips across the lake. “Get your arm right, Kid. Like this.” He’d wind up and skip another, ten skips, then another, his gap-toothed grin looking back at me splitting his handsome face.

My throw would die after three skips.

“There’s a special method,” he'd say, weighing a stone in his hand. “I don’t know why, but you gotta’ believe you can throw it ten skips, or you never will.”

When Marty got like this, he’d go silent and gaze out over the water a long time. From his look, I never thought he was thinking about stones, but something else. He’d do that, talk from another place, like when he’d say he lived before as an explorer, or a pirate, or a vagabond.

“You talk like the stones are alive,” I laughed. We were walking back to the field where our cars were.

Marty gave me his look. “Hey, Kid," he said. “Maybe when the stones skip, they’re talking in their own way. They’re forgiving us for building quarries, for carving the land with more houses, for thinking we’re better, when we’re not.” We were back at the one thing he loved more than life itself, a convertible ’66 Mustang. He leaned over the dash. Soon, the eight-track player belted out, Crosby, Stills and Nash: Our house, a very, very…nice house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be…hard…

The last day before heading to college, I crawled first under the chain-link fence to get to the quarry, the signs reading, Danger No Trespassing. We’d been under that chain link hundreds of times, but this time Marty slid me our scuba tanks, wetsuits, masks, and flippers. Then he crawled through himself. The path through the woods ended at the water. A few beer cans lay crushed in the ash, past fires where kids camped.

That day, Marty and I were alone. The heat was brutal—my shirt clung to my back with sweat. The only sound was the cicadas, strumming in rhythm from somewhere deep in the pin oaks and pine. At the end of the path, the black water shimmered, perfectly still. It felt like the air was listening to us, not the other way around.

Marty threw a rock, kerplunk, and the ripples spiraled out. “Water rushed in so fast they couldn’t get the mining equipment out.”

“Do you really think it’s bottomless?” I asked.

He laughed that high-pitched snicker he had, the one I’d heard since we first met when we were six. I loved his laugh. “Let’s find out.”

So typical of Marty. He was always coming up with his ‘truisms’, as he called them. He’d strike a pose like he addressed a crowd, a perfect orator. “Sometimes you just do things because you said you would, even if you don’t know why anymore.”

I was thinking the dare a stupid idea—to dive the quarry—and my hand shook as it tested the regulator, the ambient pressure gauge. This was not stealing outdoor Christmas lights as a prank, or buying hash in town. This was different.

Marty's eyes took in my hand, my eyes darting, the questioning.

“You still want to do this?” he asked. He held up his long hair so he could put on his diving mask.

“I’m not chicken, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “But it’s ok if we don’t.”

“No. We’ll do it.”

I think he wanted to mark the day. I had packed for State, but Marty was moving out west, the Merchant Marine to travel the world. Neither of us said it, but the day was sad. How do you say goodbye to a friend you’ve known most of your life?

We peeled the black wet suits up around our legs, over our hips, and struggled to get our arms into the neoprene vests. After stretching the rubber flippers over our heels, we helped each other with the weight of the single tank on both of our backs. Testing the regulators, they hissed as we took in a breath, exhaled, and took another breath through our mouth. Hsssst. After a thumbs up to each other, we kneeled, and then slid beneath the black surface.

Like the firmament of another world, the sun shimmered above, then faded as we let our weight belts take us deeper and adjusted our buoyancy airflow. Clouds of mud drifted by in front of my face, then faded to darker brown, then darker still. The only image in my ten-foot world was Marty below me, drifting in and out of the brown fog like a ghost, his bubbles rising. I motioned for him to come closer. He approached with his flippers pumping. My regulator is all I could hear, loud in its singularity, HISSST, HSSST, the sound tight in my head.

Like an alien, the spiked steel teeth of a backhoe’s yellow arm loomed out of the brown fog. My tank clanked against steel. Marty swam up, adjusted something behind me. A hiss of bubbles and then he gave me a thumbs up. Together, we followed the steel arm with our hands until the rusted arm ended. The body of a backhoe lay abandoned and dead, the words Caterpillar on its neck. Green lichen covered the steel. How many years had it been abandoned? How fast did the workers have to flee up the steep banks as the water rushed in? We rose and fell, weightless, in the silence. Other equipment came out of the dark, as if crawling to us: a dump truck full of rock, stacks of piping, a construction trailer, a 50s Ford. With our three dimensions we flew ever so slowly, the only sound my breath. HISSST…HSSST.

Marty drifted in front of me. His face swung in from behind his mask, a clear image, his eyes wide. He grinned, his gap tooth showing, and let out a stream of silver bubbles as he laughed.

But something was wrong.

My breath drew harder, thinner. The regulator shuddered, coughed, then seized as I tried to take a new breath. I sucked hard, but nothing came. I tried to hold my breath. There was no breath to hold. The burning carbon dioxide built in my lungs. I tapped Marty’s arm as my heartbeat spiked. In my panic, I couldn’t think, but desperately held back from grabbing his regulator and ripping it from his mouth.

He nodded, calm, unhurried, removed his regulator, and held it to my mouth. I took a breath, and as I did, he took off his tank and held it between us. His fingers closed over mine, and I thought he said, “Go”, or maybe he only looked at me.

I rose slowly, blind, then faster as I kicked. My breathing quickened. HST-HST-HST. Sucking desperately, I felt the air dying in this tank also, so I pumped harder with my fins. How far was the surface? It should be getting lighter. Am I going up or down in my zero-gravity world? Follow the bubbles, idiot. Finally, I broke the surface, gasping, the sun flashing in my eyes. I pulled off my mask, spit out the regulator. Air, sweet air. “Marty! I’m here,” I yelled. “Marty!”

I thrust my head down into the water and stared into the brown muck. If I stared hard enough, could I see him? No. I would need to go back, so I went down with Marty’s tank slung on my back, but where was he? Where had he gone? The brown mud concealed everything below

Once ashore, I collapsed in the heat, the cicadas humming, the sun still high. I screamed, “Marty! Marty! Marty!” until my throat was raw.

Later, there were red lights and an ambulance, a half dozen police. What bothered me most were the questions.

A stocky detective. “Why didn’t you come up together?”

A small woman whose revolver was too large for her body. “The details again. How did you end up with your friend’s tank?”

Marty’s parents were at the funeral in the drizzling rain. “Why did you leave him? What happened?”

Weeks later, my mom hovered in the kitchen, college long gone: “You’re losing weight, black circles under your eyes. Are you going to let this ruin your life? Don’t accidents happen?”

I didn’t have any answers.

****

A yellow vested tall man leans toward my window. “Sir, you can’t park here.”

“I won’t be long.”

The underbrush chokes the path, but I still know the way to the quarry. The turns are the same on the padded weeds, the earth still smells metallic and sour. The trail rises over the same hill, the same oak tree. The cicadas still hum in the heat, the same sun beats down on my back, and the pines are still thick. But some things have changed. When I break through the trees, the lake is smaller than I remember. And I have changed—my hair shorter, my voice deeper. But the dreams haven’t changed. I hear the hiss and bubble of regulators. I feel the dark closing in, and I still feel Marty’s warm hand on mine as he passes me his regulator. I still see him take off his tank in the brown muck. And in the sweat of the early hours I still scream.

Across the quarry, I’m surprised to see police clustered around an ambulance, the silent lights flashing blue and red. As I approach, men zip up a body bag. Somehow, this makes sense, and I know why I’m back.

“Can I see?”

The officer stares at me. “You don’t want to look.”

His eyes examine my face. “Open the bag,” he says to another officer.

A gap-toothed face looks back. He’s so young, so unchanged, his long hair still black and wet across his neck. “You can close it.”

The officer drags on his cigarette, then tosses it into the water. “It was called in this morning. He was a diver based on the wet suit. Snagged on something, out of air, who knows.”

After the ambulance leaves, I climb to the granite perch where Marty and I used to swing out on the rope and sit with my arms gripping my knees. From here I can see the grading of the roads, the carving of lots for new houses. The trees will soon be gone, but the bulldozers have stopped and it is quiet. The only sound is the cicadas in the heat. The only thing I feel is the sun on my back and I sit there a long time.

After I climb down, I take one last glance before turning to go. Kerplunk. Looking back, the ripples spread. Beyond the expanding circles on the water, a skipping stone jumps as it crosses the lake. As I watch, the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I know how many skips it will make. One skip, three, then ten. Then another, ten skips. Then another.

I close my eyes, and I am back in the dark water with Marty’s warm hand closing on mine. He is telling me to breathe. He is telling me to go on. He is telling me it’s ok. I let out a breath and take in another, larger this time through my nose, then let the breath out slowly. The hot air is cool on my wet face. In the hush of the deep water, I imagine I hear him, deep in the lake where there’re no cicadas. I hear his high whiny laugh, and he is alive and I love him. He is where the water is always deep, and the sun never quite reaches.