Floating Staircase

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The summer of my thirteenth year found me at my most rebellious. Much of it was due to my own restlessness, which had started the previous school year when my classes became tediously boring and my mind began to wander. I drew obscene and quasi-pornographic doodles in the margins of my textbooks and penned grotesque little fables about zombies and werewolves in my composition pads. I earned a week’s detention for bouncing a few smartass retorts at a substitute teacher, and once, at the urging of some friends, I flooded the second-floor boys’ restroom by stuffing balls of paper towels into the urinals, then securing the flush levers in the down position with industrial rubber bands.

It was my last year in middle school before joining Adam in high school, and much of my rebellion was an act to garner unspoken acceptance among my older brother and his friends.

That summer brought with it a previously prohibited wealth of freedom, where my curfew was extended and I was finally permitted to ride my bike across the Eastport drawbridge and into downtown without an adult. These new freedoms afforded me the luxury of tagging along with Adam when he’d traipse off to one friend’s house or another, and although he would sometimes grumble and tell me to get lost, most of the time he didn’t say anything.

We’d play baseball at Quiet Waters Park and sometimes drop crab lines tied with chicken necks into the oily waters by the marina. We would swim, too, though we could do this easily in the river behind our house where our mother would be able to call us in when dinner was ready and the sky burned fine threads of fuchsia at the horizon. Sometimes Kyle would wander out onto the back porch and peer down at us from over the roof of the shed.

That summer Kyle turned ten and was allowed to follow us to the river, provided Adam kept an eye on him. Kyle could swim—growing up on the river in the little Eastport duplex, we could all swim at a very early age—but the current would sometimes turn on you without notice. Although we’d never known anyone to whom this had actually happened, the local folklore wasn’t without its stories of careless boys and girls getting snared in a riptide and dragged straight out to the bay.

(Gil Gorman, a chunky redheaded bully in Miss McKenzie’s social studies class, claimed to have had a cousin who’d been carried away by the tide and out into the Chesapeake. Many months later, the poor kid’s body had washed up, mostly picked apart by fish—Gil always emphasized this part of the story—on the shores of England, clear across the Atlantic. Though I’d always suspected much of Gil’s tale was bullshit, even at my young and impressionable age, sometimes while lying awake in bed at night I would think about Gil’s ill-fated cousin swept out to sea and bobbing like a cork in the pitch-black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, screaming to a blanket of stars for help while some overlarge and unseen sea creature nibbled off his toes one by one.)

Summer nights, when our father’s workload lightened and he could spend more time with us, we would sometimes camp out on the back porch with him after my mother had gone to bed, listening to the whip-poor-wills in the trees and watching the silver orb of the moon through spindly branches.

My father would smoke short brown cigarillos that smelled like bourbon, and if we pestered him long enough, he would eventually succumb to the telling of the most frightening ghost stories I have ever heard, even to this day. Ghosts, he said, populated the woods and waterways of this region, and many of the homes and inns and taverns in the historic district were haunted. He told us of Ellicott City, an old mill town in Howard County, and of its seven rolling black hills and the fire-scarred institute, long since defunct, that sat on a wooded hillside high above the railroad tracks. He told us of the Wendigo, and we would listen for its breathing. He told us, too, of a small boy formed straight from some young girl’s imagination, like a fairy tale, living in the woods somewhere up north, subsisting on small animals and sometimes on small children.

Kyle would always become scared, and Adam would always grow bored, but I could have listened to those stories, as make-believe as I knew them to be, until the sun broke free over the river. After we’d all gone to bed, I would attempt to frighten Kyle with stories of my own until our father’s head appeared as a dark outline in the doorway and told us to go to sleep.

Those are all good memories. If I could, I would wrap them in plastic and store them in some lead-lined safe in the back of my mind, protect them from the world. And while I suppose I will always have those memories to take with me, the darkness of what happened later that summer has overshadowed all else, corrupting their beauty and curling up the edges of those memories like pictures burned in a fire.

Even now, some twenty years later, I cannot recall how it all started that summer or who had discovered the double dock to begin with. Could it have been Adam or one of his longhaired, pimply faced cohorts? Or maybe they’d heard about it from someone else at school. Either way, the double dock was finally discovered, and you would have thought we’d unearthed a treasure chest in the sand.

As I’ve already described, the double dock was just that: one fishing pier stacked atop another, providing a roof of slatted, mossy boards for the pier below it. The upper pier was equipped with a winch and pulley. It was later explained to us by one of Adam’s friends whose father was a waterman on the shore that the purpose of the double dock was to hoist boats out of the water after they’d been winterized so the ice wouldn’t cut through the fiberglass hulls. It was a fair enough explanation, but no one cared what practical purpose the double dock served. What we cared about was what we used it for: a raised platform from which to spring out into the midnight sky, soaring blindly through the black, not knowing which way was up and which way was down, unable to believe the water was still there until you actually broke through its surface. Exhilarating.

We did not know who owned the dock until after Kyle’s death when the owner—a grizzled old fisherman with rubber waders and overalls, his skin like that of a football, his eyes narrowed in a chronic wince—approached my father in the street while I looked on through the living room windows. To offer his condolences and (I assume now in hindsight) feel our old man out about the possibilities of a lawsuit. (There was never a suit.)

Prior to that, my only other encounter with the owner had been one night Adam, his friends, and I had gotten a little too loud—loud enough to alert the old bird from what was probably a half-drunk, midnight snooze on his sofa. He stormed out of the house with what looked like a broomstick disguised as a rifle. A few of Adam’s friends took off through the bushes along the shore, and one kid made it clear across the river to the other side, no small feat. Adam and I swam directly beneath the dock and held our breath.

I remember the man’s waders clacking on the boards above our heads as he shouted, You kids, whoever you are, I’ll shoot you, you come round here again!

Our heads bobbing like seals under the dock, Adam and I stifled our laughter.

A second later, a sharp explosion directly above our heads echoed across the river like thunder. Then the old man returned to his house, no doubt to sit watch in the shadows of the willow trees, the broomstick that was not actually a broomstick after all propped up on one shoulder.

After that, it seemed none of Adam’s friends wanted to risk life and limb for the three seconds of excitement they got from double docking.

“Cowards,” Adam told me after I’d pestered him about why we hadn’t snuck out of the house in over a week. “Bunch of chickens. You still want to go?”

I’d been just as frightened from that experience as Adam’s friends, but I wasn’t going to have my older brother consider me a coward and a chicken. So I said I wanted to go back. Sure I did. Sure.

“Me, too,” Kyle said, spying on us from the hallway.

Adam and I were in Adam’s room, and we both turned to stare at our younger brother.

“Go away,” Adam told him.

“I want to sneak out at night, too.”

“You can’t,” Adam said. “You’re too young.”

“I’ll tell.” This was his ace in the hole, and we’d been expecting it for some time now. “I’ll tell Dad.”

“No,” Adam said, “you won’t. Otherwise we won’t take you swimming in the river after lunch.”

“Travis?” Kyle said.

“He’s right,” I said. “If you tell, we won’t take you swimming anymore. And I won’t let you keep the night-light on in the bedroom when you get scared, either.”

“You just turned ten,” Adam told him, sounding uncannily like our father whether he meant to or not. “You shouldn’t have a night-light anymore.”

“I don’t hardly use it,” Kyle protested.

“You won’t use it at all if you tattle,” I promised him.

And that was the end of it. That night, after our parents were asleep, Adam came to our bedroom and roused me from sleep. I sat up and dressed soundlessly while across the room Kyle rolled over in bed to let me know he was awake. I told him to go back to sleep, and he made a slight whimper, like a dog who’d just been reprimanded.

Sneakers and bathing suit on, I crept out of the bedroom and followed Adam down the hall to the living room. We exited through the patio door at the back, since it was the farthest point from our parents’ bedroom and would elicit the least amount of noise. Before following him out, I glanced over my shoulder to see Kyle standing at the far end of the hall, a milky and indistinct blur in the darkness, watching me. Like a ghost.

It went on this way for much of the summer until Adam came down with the chicken pox. He got them pretty bad and was laid up in bed for two weeks, looking depleted and miserable, his skin practically indistinguishable, expect for the knobby red splotches, from the white sheets on which he rested.

Kyle and I had gotten the chicken pox when we were both very young (and despite my mother’s deliberate exposure of Adam to us in our mutually reddened and itchy state, he hadn’t caught them from us), so there was no concern that we, too, would become ill. I remember Kyle and I eating grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at the foot of Adam’s bed while the three of us watched the portable television our dad had transported to the top of Adam’s dresser. This vision, however mundane and uneventful, is one of the most vivid I have carried with me into adulthood.

Of course, we’d stopped going down to the river and to the double dock at night. Yet summer was coming to an end, and I’d gradually become addicted to the thrill of springing off those boards and soaring like a blind bat out into the night, interrupted only at the end by the icy, bone-rattling crash through the black, salt-tasting water. I feared he might be sick straight until winter when it would be too cold to resume our nightly jaunts.

Then one night after I was certain our parents were asleep, I sat up in bed and whipped the light sheet off my legs.

I heard Kyle’s bedsprings creak as he rolled over and propped his head up on one hand. He watched me dress silently in the dark. “Are you going alone?”

“Quiet. Yes.”

“Mom and Dad say never to swim alone.”

“Mom and Dad also don’t want us sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, do they?”

Kyle was silent; he looked like he was unsure if I’d asked him a legitimate question that required an answer or if I was teasing him.

I sat on the floor and pulled my sneakers on over bare feet. I’d grown accustomed to sneaking out of the house with Adam and had done so on numerous occasions without much concern—I believe some part of me understood that had we ever been caught by our father, Adam, the older of the two, would have sustained the brunt of our father’s wrath: for me, a buffer of sorts—but on this night I was cutting out alone and with no buffer. With some hesitancy, I questioned my loyalty as a brother: if caught, would I try to lessen my punishment by throwing Adam under the bus, claiming this had been his plan from early in the summer and I was only continuing the trend?

“Let me come,” Kyle said from his bed. The moonlight was filtering in through the partially shaded windows, making his blond hair shimmer a ghostly white.

“No.”

“I could be a good lookout.”

“I don’t need a lookout.”

“What if the man with the gun comes back?”

I paused, lacing up my sneaker. “How’d you know about that?” We’d never said anything to Kyle—or anyone—about the old goat who’d fired his rifle into the air.

“I heard Adam talking to Jimmy Dutch in the yard before he got sick.”

“Did you say anything to Mom or Dad?” I knew that he hadn’t, otherwise it would have been our hides. Still, I had to ask.

“No.”

“And you better not.”

“I won’t. But let me come. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good.”

(This is the moment I relive every time I shut my eyes, every time I think back to the events of that summer. There is no escaping any of it. There is no denying.)

“Okay,” I said after a time. “But you have to be quiet, and you have to do everything I tell you. No question. Got it?”

“Yeah.” He sprung upright in bed; even in the darkness I could make out the ear-to-ear grin on his round face.

“Now get your stuff.”

It is fair to say both those boys died that night. I will; I will say it. I am a testament to that. The walking dead.

—and these two brothers sneak out of the house, quiet as mice treading the floorboards of a vicarage. They enter the woods, wearing nothing but their swimming trunks and sneakers, each with a towel draped around his neck. The dark shapes of the trees crowd in all around them. They are convinced the trees are moving around them like living creatures; yet when they turn and look at them head-on, they are as still as statues... as trees. They walk swiftly beneath the cast of the moon through the wooded path, then finally down to the bank of the river. This is summer; this is grand; this is what it is all about.

Up ahead, the river opens wide as it approaches the mouth of the bay. Both boys feel the immensity of it in their guts. The older boy, the thirteen-year-old, continues quickly down the riverbank toward the looming double helix structure.

“Are the stories real?” the younger boy wants to know.

“What stories?”

“The stories Dad tells.”

The older boy, who has dark curly hair and a body like a lizard or a bird, with long arms and long legs, says, “Yes. Of course they are, stupid.” Trying to frighten his little brother. “Why would Dad lie to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re real, all of them.”

“Even the Wendigo?”

“Especially the Wendigo. It’s probably out there right now, watching us.”

“No,” says the younger boy. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Chuckling.

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Will you be scared when it comes time to jump?”

“Jump where?”

The thirteen-year-old points at the threatening dinosaur shape of the double dock. “Off there. Off the top pier.”

Suddenly, the younger boy looks very frightened. All their father’s stories are real to him, the monsters and the imaginary boys who live in the woods and eat children. It is a warm night, but the little boy stands there shivering, his pale chest pimply with gooseflesh and his teeth chattering like a rattlesnake’s warning. He looks white, too white. Almost transparent. The older brother thinks, Ghost.

“Climb the stairs to the top,” instructs the older brother, “then take a deep breath, run, and jump off.”

“Jump,” parrots the younger brother, the uncertain tone of his small voice bending the word somewhere between a statement and a question.

“You’re not scared, are you?”

The younger brother shakes his head.

“Then climb up and jump. I’ll hold your towel.”

“First?”

“First what?”

“You want me to go first?”

“Unless you’re too scared. Unless you’re a chickenshit.”

“Don’t say that,” reprimands the little brother, though his voice is too weak and trembling to sound imposing. “Don’t say that word.”

“Shit,” repeats his brother. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Stop it.”

“And fuck, too,” says the older brother, lowering his voice. This is the forbidden word, the word of all words. Biblical in its mystery and strength. “Are you a fucking chicken?”

The little boy looks like he wants to cry.

“You wanted to come out here,” says the older brother. “If you’re not scared to do it, then do it.”

There is much hesitation. Paradoxically, just as the older brother is about to club him on the shoulder and tell him to sit in the weeds and be quiet, the little brother hands him his towel and takes off his sneakers.

The brazenness surprises the older brother—had the situation been reversed, he’s unsure whether or not he’d be able to summon an equal amount of courage.

The younger boy steps around the shrubs in bare feet, leaving little prints in the mud, and proceeds to climb the staircase leading to the upper pier. His climb slows midway, where he glances down at the ground, and then he continues until he reaches the top. He is just a black blur, an outline in the darkness. The moon is distant and covered by trees and clouds; the night is as dark as the basement of lost dreams, and the older brother can hardly see him.

He whispers to him, “Be careful.”

The little boy’s small, frightened voice comes back to him: “I will.” There is the sound of a deeply inhaled breath.

He’s really going to do it, the older boy thinks.

Small, hurried footfalls race along the planks of the upper dock, the sound like a distant train rattling a wooden bridge.

Wow, he’s really going to do it. I don’t believe it.

Then silence as the little boy reaches the end of the pier and leaps into space. Somewhere out there, suspended in the black.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .

The older boy anticipates the splash—he can hear it and feel it before it even happens.

But it doesn’t happen.

There is no splash.

There is a sound, though—a harsh, sickening thud from the water. It reminds the older boy of baseballs slapping the hide of a catcher’s mitt. No splash. He calls his brother’s name, and there is no answer, either.

No splash. No answer. Just that sickening thud that froze his marrow and paralyzed his feet to the ground…

“All right, son,” said Detective Wren, placing a doughy hand on my thin, quaking shoulder.

Tears blurred my vision, and my chest hitched with each sob.

“It’s all right. Calm down for a minute, and we’ll keep going when you’re ready.”

A small floating dock—no bigger than a twin mattress and covered with a panel of slate two inches thick—had broken free of its moorings earlier that evening. It floated unanchored and unobserved for several hours, making its way up the river and toward the bay. By the time Kyle leaped off the upper pier of the double dock, the floating barge was directly below him, invisible in the darkness.

The sickening thud I heard was the sound of Kyle’s head opening up on the slate before he rolled, unconscious, into the river where he sank like a stone and drowned.