David Friedman Award Winner
The Quarry
The sky was hanging low over Sheridan like a canopy collecting rainwater, swelling with pressure and procrastinating an inevitable collapse into a storm. I was sitting on a rock in my yellow and white striped two-piece, hugging my knees to my chest and fiddling with my toes. It was the summer of 1983, and I had just turned sixteen. My older brother, Paul, held up the damp, but still burning, joint.
“Do you want this?” he asked, acknowledging how lame it looked. I half dried my hand on my bathing suit bottom before pinching it between my fingers. We were perched on the edge of the quarry that sat beyond the guardrail and through the woods at the end of Copperhill Lane. It looked like God had taken a spoonful out of the earth, and for Paul and I, it was like standing on the precipice of our youth. This was our last day before moving west to California to live with our dad and, after spending the morning in the river, we had come to say goodbye.
“Do you think they will ever find Dan . . .? I started, but Paul was already shaking his head.
“This whole town is a sinkhole. It literally eats people alive,” he said, and gave a sad smile.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I just can’t be upset about it anymore, ya know?” he looked out at the water, ignoring me.
I placed the soggy joint between my lips and pulled a trickle of resistant smoke through its middle. I thought of how much rolling paper reminded me of bible pages. My skin prickled in the end of summer air, and Paul tried handing me a towel, but I waved it away. I wanted to feel September in my hometown for the last time, even if it was cold, plus, I wanted Paul to feel a little bad for what he had said. Goose bumps rose and fell on my arms, and the solitary ray of sun that had been my only relief slid behind the shade of a tree. The rock we were on was made of a pumice-like stone and I could feel it fraying the butt of my bathing suit as I shifted my weight. The smoke settled in my lungs and I had an overwhelming urge to be alone because, for some reason, in that moment, it felt like if were to yell at the quarry, it might yell back.
My chance came when Paul announced he was going back to “Jeepy”¾a beat up, blue Jeep Cherokee he had used his grocery bagging money to buy¾for more beer. This meant walking almost half a mile through the woods. This would be enough distance to muffle the conversation I felt was brewing between the quarry and myself.
“Alison, don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone,” he said, and gave me a sideways look, his straight, brown hair falling into his eyes. He meant it, too. I nodded and gave a reassuring smile. He threw his towel over his shoulder, slid his wet feet into a pair of gritty flip-flops and disappeared into the woods. I watched until the reflective stripe on his swim trunks faded into the foliage before turning to breathe in the smell of fishy water and copper on the wind. Just then, the yellow and black spotted leaves above me rustled like tambourine bangles against the sky, and a small pile of dirt in a crevice of the rock danced itself into a tornado. The quarry was ready. I could feel it. Already stretching two football fields wide, the massive body of water became even bigger in my eyes, and deeper in my thoughts. I mustered my courage, expanded my lungs till I felt they might pop, and into the middle of the circle, I yelled, “Give him back!” but my voice was an echo, returning to me in a tinny howl, reverberating off of the stone in different pitches. I thought I saw the water ripple a little at my cry, so again, I screamed, “He’s not yours, you piece of shit!” The anger in my shriek shook on the trip back. I felt a little stupid and a little stoned for yelling into nothing, but I meant what I said. The lack of response made my anger turn into desperation that crawled up my throat in a sore lump. The quarry was ignoring me, pretending that I wasn’t its problem, making me look like a lunatic.
“Danny,” I said quietly, and then louder, “Danny, Danny,” I said it probably a dozen times. “You can come out now,” I told him as if he only needed to be coaxed from his watery grave. The wind came then and ruffled the water sideways. I heard it lapping down below where it met with the steep cliff.
I closed my eyes and begged to some higher power, trying to convince it to prove its existence to me by granting my wish. I kept my eyes pressed tight, remembering Danny standing outside my window one night, trampling my mothers poinsettias and giving me a devilish grin through the glass. “Wake up, sleepy head, we’ll sleep when we’re dead,” he said, an ominous little poem in hindsight. We broke into the motel pool that night and swam in our underwear, paddling around till our skin had pruned, before we were brave enough to swim together, let our legs lock under the water, and find a kiss. I didn’t know it then, but that kiss was the one that all others would never measure up to. “See you tomorrow, kid,” he said as he gave me a leg up through my bedroom window.
That night, I laid awake on top of my blankets in my damp clothes until the sun rose. I remembered his shoulders hunched over his schoolwork in class. I had sat behind him most of middle school, relaxing my chin into my palm, pretending to take in the hieroglyphics on the chalkboard beyond him, but secretly watching the smooth way he turned his head, revealing his profile just enough that I could guess the look on his face. Danny had a bit of a crooked nose and a shine on his cheek from the side, but when he looked at you head on, his eyes would flatter you with secrets that escaped in slow, soft blinks. The thing I thought about most was the way he walked: humble, but cool, as though he owned the world, but was steadily rooting for the underdog at the same time. He would walk down our school halls; stopping for a brief moment here and there to lean on a locker and, ever so effortlessly, one foot would slide over the other to rest. He would pose there like a black and white photo, shadowy in the swagger of adolescence. I was young, but I was in love. I loved him so much that an ache had settled in my jaw from clenching my teeth all day to keep from saying it out loud.
Some might call us victims of circumstance, growing up two houses apart from each other and all. We shared the same bus stop, the same teachers, and the same summer barbeques. Maybe they were right. Maybe if another boy had moved into the upstairs bedroom of that blue house on Willit Street, I would have fallen in love with him too, but I like to think Danny was special. I like to think there was some karmic reason for our proximity, that we were tied into each other’s fates because the universe knew something we could only guess. If such a fate had existed, though, we never had the chance to know it, thanks to the quarry, which had robbed us of that, the summer before, swinging our fate into a parallel universe in an instant.
The night it happened five of us were there, passing a bottle of cheap red wine around in a circle. It had changed hands so many times that it was warm. No one noticed Danny was not there, until someone said, “What’s he doing?” and we all looked up. It was as if he had just appeared on the other side of the quarry, standing there in the moonlight like a totem, his bare chest glowing white.
“Danny, what the hell,” Paul had said in an almost annoyed tone while balancing the wine bottle precariously on a rock. I smiled nervously in the dark because I knew there was a chance that this show of bravery was inspired by my presence. This smile haunts me; I see it in the mirror, foolishly giddy and still smiling to itself. We watched as Danny dove head first into the water so many feet below.
“Wait!” was all I said as he flew through the air. The time it took him to fall seemed to stretch like taffy on a pull, becoming longer and softer, mesmerizing us into silence like kids at a candy store window. The immortality of youth flapped around him like a cape on the way down, and then a small splash, no louder than a fish biting a fly, sounded from the dark spot he landed. His dive was so precise; he seemed to simply slip inside the water without cracking the surface. The deafening silence that followed is what made us run toward the spot he had flown from. By the time I reached the other side, my lungs were burning and the acid from the wine was making me hiccup.
“Where is he?” we asked each other as if one of us must have known. Even on the brightest of days, the quarry’s water burned black and reflective like tar with oily ripples of purples and reds from the rusted minerals swimming through it, but on this night it was so dark that even the moonlight couldn’t find it¾couldn’t find Danny in it, either. Waiting there on the edge for the sound of a gasp, or the liquid pull of arms through the water as they breast-stroked to the rope that was slung down the side, we started to panic.
“Why isn’t he coming up?” I said, looking at Paul, who’s face had gone as white as the moon above us. His desperate expression made me cold. My big brother was never afraid; never unsure of what to do, but here he was changing colors and shivering like a lost dog. No one was in charge. We stood there, waiting to grow up.
“Move,” I said finally, and started pulling off my sweater, but Paul pushed me back by the chest, the same way Mom did when we would come to a sudden stop in the car.
“No, I’m going in,” he said, and before we could argue he had jumped, flailing in the air, rushing and hesitating all at the same time before crashing into the water, cracking its glass surface like a cannon. The rest of us huddled together, whimpering, and I dropped to my knees where Danny’s feet had just been to peer over the edge and listen as Paul took big hurried breaths before going under again and again, for what seemed like hours, but was probably only minutes.
The quarry must have pulled Danny so far down that he lost his grasp on which way was up. It must have liked the way he felt so much that it refused to let him go. He went too far in, and the quarry wouldn’t let him come out.
The search went on for days, divers in alien wet suits popped up like turtles, before waving empty arms and slipping again beneath the dark mirror, but the quarry had already taken him to its hiding place. Perhaps it thought of him as a token, and placed him in a shoebox underneath its bed. They say that, sometimes, the earth below a quarry can give out, that a canyon even further down than the bottom of the pit can exist. They say that is where he must have been.
His parents were uncomfortably quiet at the funeral, weeping in small sniffles over an empty casket. I watched his mother hang her head when as it was lowered into the ground, rubbing her pearl necklace like prayer beads. I could not bear to look her in the eyes because I had smiled and if she saw me, she would know it.
The wind died down and I gave up on listening for an answer. I turned my attention to the silver birch tree to my right. This particular tree was referred to as the Hump Tree¾a juvenile pun, due to the distinct curves on the lower part of the birch’s trunk. It must have had a good reason for growing that way, but whatever it had been avoiding in its youth had long gone, leaving the gesture to appear silly and overdramatic without it, especially to the cruelty of teenage humor. Because of its deformity, high school kids and stray hikers had taken to etching their initials inside hearts on its trunk. To see Danny and I’s initials up there had been a shamefully childish wish of mine, and this was my last chance. My Swiss Army knife lived in the front zipper pocket of my backpack at the time. Despite never having used it before, I liked to carry it around, feel its weight in my bag. I pulled it out that day and stuck my thumbnail in the groove. Out sprung a fresh blade the size of my pointer finger. The tree was cluttered with lovers’ names, some crossed out with a hard X from jilted affairs. When I finally found a space big enough for my design, I began to cut away at the wood. It was surprisingly easy. Once I got past the bark, the meat of the tree split like butter under the knife. The heart extended a bit too long at the meeting point because my hand had slipped, but I liked that it would stand out from the rest. I put my own initial in one half and where Danny’s would have gone, I left an empty space.
“It’s your turn,” I said to the water, but my strange request echoed back to me a few times, mixing with the breeze. I inspected the quarry with my eyes, waiting for something to emerge, but it was still, so still in fact, that it made me nervous. Then a crack of thunder like a gunshot came from the sky and the canopy above finally ripped apart, dumping water down in heavy, blinding sheets. I didn’t move, though. I didn’t want the quarry to think I was afraid. I kept watching, letting the rain beat down on me while I searched for the figure of a boy, maybe climbing the walls or floating on his back, enjoying his death. For a moment, I thought someone was standing on the other side looking at me, but I was distracted by Paul’s voice through the woods, and when I looked again across the quarry, the mirage had vanished back into the trees.
The next day, we boarded a train that would take us to the rest of our lives. The years began to pass with greater speed. I finished high school and thinned under the sun in the West. My hair grew long and had less curl to it. My flesh tanned a dry brown, instead of the sweaty, red, burn of the South. Eventually, most items I kept as mementos of my childhood became foreign keepsakes and were given to thrift stores during address changes. In college, I started to pull my hair back into a tight bun and quote dead men with pride. Then the medical books came and I needed thin framed glasses and shoes that went click on linoleum. A few years later I met a man. He had nice eyes and we knew each other for a time before we married on a beach in front of family and friends. He smelled like coffee and oranges. He reminded me of my adult side, my strong side. My dreamy teenage tendencies were packed into storage boxes and replaced by the comforts of logic and routine. I found safety in the human anatomy, bodies like shells, exoskeletons of function, survival, procreation, nothing more, nothing less. The girl who had thought she could talk to the dead existed only in photographs that were lost in the rubble of age.
It was fifteen years later when I found myself back in Sheridan for Paul’s third wedding. He was engaged to a girl he had dated in high school, and so they had settled back in our hometown. “Third time’s a charm,” my husband and I joked on the drive to the church. During the reception, while the crowd took advantage of the open bar, Paul and I ended up sitting at small table littered with half-eaten pieces of vanilla cake with lemon icing and champagne flutes.
“I’m glad you came back,” he said, picking at the label on his beer bottle.
“Well, I didn’t have much of a choice,” I teased.
“I know you hate it here,” he said, and I felt bad. I wasn’t sure if that were true, but I had avoided coming back for so long that it made sense he would say that.
“There are just too many memories,” I said, trying poorly to explain myself, but we both knew what I meant.
“Well, that’s the difference between us,” he said.
“Oh, I’m too sensitive, is that it?” I raised an eyebrow.
“No, you have a better memory than me.”
“Well, that’s true,” we laughed. The party danced around us as we sat in silence, watching.
“They are draining the quarry this week,” Paul said suddenly and then looked away as if he immediately regretted sharing that information. My chest tightened at this, and before I could ask any more about it, sloppy Aunt Linda, appeared jiggling her hips, and pulled Paul up by his arms for a dance.
I tried to keep my mind off the quarry, but it kept creeping into my thoughts, uninvited. As I talked with cousins about the accomplishments of their children I had never met, my mind wandered out of the dance hall and through the empty streets of the town. As I rested my head on my husband’s shoulder for a slow dance, it walked to the end of Copperhill Lane, past the guardrail and through the woods. As I clapped for my brother and his new bride, my mind stood on the edge of the cliff looking out over a massive black well, waiting.
Our flight was scheduled for the next day, and as I lifted my suitcase into the trunk in the hotel parking lot, a gust of wind came up around me, carrying on it the scent of something metallic, lonely and familiar. It made me stop and close my eyes for a moment. As I drove, the Blue Ridge Mountains and their hazy, purple smog pulled away in frames. With each mile an idle panic in my legs set in, causing them to jitter on the pedals. I could feel something pulling me back as if a rope were tethered around my middle, cutting into my ribs. The further away I drove, the more it tugged at me. Before I knew what I was doing, the car was turning itself around. I was under the command of something spontaneous, ancient, something that was whispering to me from deep below. My husband questioned me, confused, but I couldn’t hear him through the wind in my head.
The car parked itself at the end of Copperhill Lane, and before my husband could unbuckle his seat belt, I had stepped over the guardrail and begun marching through the woods. When I emerged at the quarry, the ominous pool from my nightmares had disappeared, and in its place a canyon was left. I stared in awe at its emptiness, and then at the group of men in hard hats that were gathered around something on the ground in a small circle. A powdery dust floated through the air, settling in the hairs on my arms and turning into mud in the sweat of my upper lip. When my tongue slid across it, I could taste the grainy soil from the bottom of the quarry. There was an odd tension as I approached the scene. I looked back to my husband who had almost caught up. He stopped when he saw my face and waited for me by the tree line, sensing that I needed to go ahead alone. The men were mumbling in somber, inaudible tones. One man sitting on a pile of metal rods was smoking a cigarette and there were no construction sounds, no drills or saws or machine-droning engines. Work had stopped here and only the woods made noise. Birds fluttered from branch to branch ,yelling to one another, and the wind made the trees shake. The men looked at me as I approached them.
“What is it?” I asked, looking to the middle of their circle. I could see that one of them was preparing to tell me I couldn’t be there, but then something must have stopped him because he bowed his head.
“Let me see,” I said, peering down at their feet.
“It’s a body, ma’am. Don’t think you should look, it’s been down there a long time,” he told me.
“I have to see,” I said, and maybe they could tell that I wasn’t going to give up, or maybe they just wanted to show someone else the strange thing they had found, but one of the men knelt down and pulled back the blue tarp they had covered it with.
It was awful, as awful as death can be when you see it like that, naked, without its wig and makeup on. It’s not the plastic version of your grandmother they show you in the funeral viewing room, who looks like she could wake up and speak at any moment, like she is “playing dead.” This was the real thing, the bones of us, what every one of us is underneath it all, if left out for the elements to play with. I had seen dead bodies hundreds of times, but unlike the cadavers I had stuck my hands in at school, these bones made me bite the inside of my cheek. I loved these bones. The flesh I had daydreamed about, had kissed once many years ago used to be on these bones. It was all stripped away, just a skeleton now, but still, it was him, frozen in time forever. He had never left that night. While the rest of us had moved on, he had floated in the dark shadow of the world above.
“It’s a kid I think,” the man pondered out loud. “There have been five or six kids that died in this quarry, but only one kid they never found, that I know of. That was way back in the day, fifteen years ago now.”
“Danny,” I said under my breath, but the men didn’t hear me. We were all looking at him for a while, the same way people around a campfire lock eyes with the flames. I tore myself away finally, and the men closed the circle behind me, continuing to stare into the orbital sockets of life’s greatest mystery. I glanced over to my husband, who raised his arms in a question, but I couldn’t go back to him just yet.
I stared at the pit. It was sad and empty without its glassy black top, without its boy token. The bottom was scattered with rocks and construction equipment that had rusted into Swiss cheese, tetanus infested formations. I looked at the rock across the way, and could almost see Danny in the moonlight getting ready to jump. I went to it, leaving my husband even further behind. The rock was still there like a sharp sponge, and the hump tree was next to it, still comically bent. I hadn’t dreamed it up. This place had been there all these years. I found my heart on the trunk from its long tail, and in the space where I was sure I had left a blank spot all those years ago, was the clear and unmistakable letter “D.” My hand went to it, to make sure it was real. I traced its lines with my fingers. It was cut into the wood as sharply as any other carving. I smiled. Danny had come back. I looked across the quarry to my small marriage on the other side. He seemed a thousand miles away.