Jeniva wrote:I wasn't sure if I could just jump in, but hopefully no harm done if I wasn't supposed to. Regardless, here is my story. Hopefully you enjoy it.
-- JenivaRope Swing
The dead man’s facial expression isn’t calm, it isn’t peaceful, it isn’t at rest. He looks like he died angry. He has frown lines, even his eyebrows seem scrunched. How bad must his expression have been that the funeral director couldn’t get it a little happier? I smile a little at the guy. He always used to be able to fake a smile. Strange that it didn’t carry over once he died.
“God, Al,” I whisper to him. I use a nice, soft voice so that anyone who hears me thinks I’m grieving. “Could you make your guilt a bit more obvious?”
I rise to my feet and walk away from the casket, avoiding eye contact with all the hicks standing everywhere. Christ, one guy is wearing jeans and muddy boots. And they wonder why I left this shit hole.
Still, I can’t help but hear their whispers as I walk by.
“Jay? That’s Jay? Like… Martin’s daughter, Jay? Ain’t seen her in years.”
I make my way to the back table where all the flowers are placed. I can’t help but feel out of place. I knew I shouldn’t have brought the Gucci purse. I don’t want to grieve his death, I don’t want to look at any pictures, and I certainly don’t want to talk to his trashy, beloved friends and family.
“Janet Madigan, is that you?” I cringe a little, then turn to face a tiny old woman. I realize, with some surprise, that she was my high school English teacher.
“Mrs. Fernad,” I say in my best attempt at a pleasant voice. “It’s been so long.”
“It has, it has! You graduated… what? Fourteen years ago?”
“I believe so, yeah. I’m surprised you remember.” Hell, I didn’t even know that. The small town mentality must be great for remembering pointless shit no one in the real world would care about for more than a week.
“Oh, I could never forget you and your friends,” she says. I feel like I was just doused in ice water. I look at the nearest flower arrangement and try to focus very hard on the patterns in the leaves. “Always such trouble makers, you five. It’s a pity things happened like they did, with Peter and all. Such a tragedy.”
“Mrs. Fernad!” comes a smooth, familiar voice. I reach my hand out to touch the leaves of the arrangement, maybe if I look busy he won’t bother me, won’t even notice me. “Did you see Sarah Biggins? She came in all the way from Iowa, you should go see her.”
I hear Mrs. Fernad shuffle off with a faint goodbye, I hear him take a step closer to me. I see his tall shadow fall over the table, I can smell his cigarette scent.
“Starting to seem like I only see you at funerals, Jay,” he says. He touches my arm, I pull away and face him. He’s as handsome as ever. His jaw is stronger than the rest of the town’s people’s. His hair is well kempt for a citizen of Rockcreek, Indiana. There was always a sort of dark charm in his face, especially in his dark eyes.
“There’s not much life worth celebrating in Rockcreek,” I say. I don’t even try to hide the loathing in my voice. He smirks.
“More life to celebrate out in New York, hmm?” He leans closer to me. “How’s the big company?”
“Excellent.”
“Bullshit, excellent. Look at you, Jay. Starting to look like one of them government bitches. What happened to the good old days, hmm? When you used to be one of the boys to everyone ‘cept me.”
“I got an education,” I say. “And I don’t mean the college.”
He leans back, his confident physique only slightly falters.
“Do you think Pete’s parents will be here, Shane?” I ask, narrowing my eyes. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell them for some time now.”
“You—We swore, all of us, swore to take that to the grave.”
“Most of us are already there. Two left out of the five. Funny, how we’re all dying young. I’d probably quit smoking if I were you, you might be next.”
“Yeah? You dare utter one word to them, one word to anyone, and I promise you it ain’t gonna be me next.”
“Oh, are we back to threatening?” I say. I look around at all the idiotic grievers. None of them seem to be paying any attention to Shane and I. Will anyone notice if he hits me?
“I don’t need to threaten you,” he says. “You already know. Hell, even if I don’t get to you, your whole life—all that New York shit with your fashionable clothes and white collar job, that’s all gone. You’ll be in prison with the whores and addicts for the rest of your life.”
He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at me with his most wicked grin. After so many years, I've learned there's only one thing I can do against that smile, so I turn from him and walk away. I feel overwhelming nausea. I make my way clumsily to the women’s restroom, as I pull the door open, I see her.
She looks so much older than the first funeral I saw her at, but she looks just as sad. She walks out of the bathroom and though I try to avoid her eyes, I still catch a glimpse. They have the same light blue color as Pete’s eyes, but they have none of the life he had. I swear she looks more like a corpse than the actual corpse in the next room over. I've seen her at every funeral I've attended in this town, but I've never gotten used to my reaction to seeing her.
As I pass her I nearly fall over, only catching myself on a dirty sink. I stumble into a stall, fall to my knees, and vomit longer than I care to know.
Shane’s truck bounced up and down on the dirt road. The windows were all rolled down, but it didn’t stop us all from sweating like pigs. I sat in the passenger seat while Shane drove. Al and Jim were sitting in the back seat, Al was trying to light up a joint.
“Shit, is this broken?” Al asked as the wind extinguished yet another flame. Jim had given up a few minutes ago, deciding that a beer would suffice. Shane held his beer bottle between his legs as we pulled into Pete’s gravel driveway. Pete had the nicest house of any of us. Al and Jim both lived in the trailer park, Shane and I both lived in little run-down shacks of houses near the ravine. Pete’s house was a farm house though. It had a nice green lawn, unpeeling paint, and a few horses fenced in the back.
“He knows we coming, right?” Jim asked.
“Yep, but you know Pete,” Shane said. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “His parents are real asses. We just got to give him a little time.”
“Fuck that,” I said. I reached my arm out and, before Shane could stop me, I punched the horn.
“God damn, Jay,” Shane laughed. “We don’t want little Petey to get in any trouble.”
The guys in the back chuckled a bit. I looked up at Pete’s house in enough time to see him open his front door and wave back at his parents. He jogged up to the truck, I opened my door for him, and he climbed into the back seat.
“What’d you tell them this time?” asked Al.
“What? Oh, that I’m going to a bible study with Frank Biggins.”
“Pathetic,” Shane laughed.
“You seen his little sister? Frank’s? Fuck, that girl’s been developing. I mean, still young, but damn,” Al said.
Shane pulled out of the driveway, Jim offered Pete a beer. We drove around the town as usual, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, until finally Jim spoke up.
“We ain’t been to the ledges lately. Want to stop by there? Hot as hell in this truck.”
“Sure,” Shane said. “Haven’t been to the ledges in awhile.”
The ledges were some rock formation, like someone had reached down and took a chunk of earth from the ground, leaving big cliffs all around a small patch of woods. We’d learned about them in school, but my report card was enough to let anyone know I hadn’t listened to much anyone said in school. They were in the middle of the woods, but you could park off Quinn road and take a trail to them, which is what we did.
We walked along the trail, bored as always. Al had finally light his joint and was sharing it, but I didn’t take it. I was always experimenting back then with trying to get a better high, and I found that the less often I smoked, the better it was when I did. Instead I just stuck a cigarette in my mouth.
“Fuck!” Shane said after a few minutes and a couple hits of the joint. He stopped walking, so we all stopped too. “Look at us. We’re sheep, all of us. Here we are at the finest natural beauty Rockcreek has to offer, and we’re just going to walk on this path laid out for us? We ain’t gonna explore?”
“Path’s safer,” Pete mumbled, but as always, we ignored his momma’s boy bullshit.
“Come on, let’s walk closer to the edge. Live life on the edge. Huh? We don’t need none of this path bullshit.”
This was a phenomenal idea and we all agreed. I put my hand on Shane’s shoulder to congratulate him on his pure genius. He was always the smartest. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in for a quick kiss, and then we were off of the path, kicking our way through dead leaves and past thorns and branches that snagged on our already torn clothes.
It was beautiful, more beautiful than it could ever be on the path. We weren’t dumb, we knew to stay a few feet from the edge, but we were still close enough to see the whole area under the cliff, and to see the whole surrounding area.
“What’s that?” Jim asked. I looked over and knew exactly what he meant. My dad’s house had one just like it.
“That,” I said. “Is the most beautiful rope swing I’ve ever seen.”
It was tied to one of the biggest trees, some distance away. It dangled just a few feet from the edge of the cliff, so that if someone got enough motion, they’d swing over the edge and feel like they were flying. We agreed immediately that we should go on it, so we made our way to it.
“Think it’s safe?” Jim asked. He reached out and touched the rope, which looked old and slightly frayed. Then again, rope gets a little frayed very fast and still lasts forever.
“Only one way to tell,” Shane said. “Now, who wants to take the rest run?”
No one volunteered.
“Come on now,” Shane said. “We’ll just give it a few swings, nothing big enough to get over the edge, not until we know it’s safe.”
Still, no one spoke up.
“Well, then,” Shane said. “Who’s the smallest?”
Naturally, everyone looked at me.
“Fine,” I said. “If none of you can be man enough, I will.”
I walked up to the swing, put my foot into the loop at the bottom, and hopped back a few feet, then let go and swung there, back and forward over a few feet. Shane came up behind me and pushed me a little, so that I came very near to the edge, but didn’t go over. After a few moments, I reached a foot down to stop myself from swinging.
“Works fine,” I said. “Who now?”
“Pete’s the next smallest,” Al said. “We should break it in, you know? Just in case.”
We all agreed that this was a good idea. Pete walked up to the swing, he put his hand around the rope first. He tugged a little on it, obviously more hesitant than I had been.
“Come on, Pete!” Al laughed. “Jay’s a girl and has bigger balls than you.”
Normally I would punch someone in the face for saying me being a girl had anything to do with my personality, but I was too busy watching Pete reluctantly put his foot into the loop. He hopped back a few feet, let go, and swung forward a few feet.
“Come on,” Shane laughed. “You can do better.”
“Give him a push, Jim!” I said. Jim, being the strongest of any of us, walked forward. Pete looked like he was going to jump off, but Jim was already there, already pulling Pete back so he would swing forward.
Jim let go, Pete flew forward—over the edge, then safely came back.
“All right!” Shane said, clapping his hands together. “Not so bad, huh, Pete?”
Jim caught the rope again, holding Pete high in the air.
“Let me off,” Pete said.
“What? No, we have to get the fear out of you. Let him go, Jim.”
Jim let go of the swing, it swung forward again, over the cliff again. Pete was whimpering, yelling, but all any of us did was laugh.
Then Al was next to Jim, he was pushing Pete after Jim was letting him go, Pete was flying far over the edge of the cliff. His face, as he came back, was white and all screwed up like he was terrified.
“Let me go! Let me go!” he was saying, but Jim and Al were having their fun. I jerked my head in their direction and strode forward, Shane followed me. Shane helped Jim pull the rope backwards, I helped Al push, Pete was screaming, we were laughing, and then I heard the sound everyone growing up in a farm town knows, the long snap of a breaking rope, just as it had started coming back over the cliff.
I watched it as if I were high too, so high that everything was moving in slow motion. I watched as Pete sank down while the rope was giving way, I could see the desperation in his eyes, the hope that the last strand of rope would hold through long enough for him to come back to the edge, but it didn’t. I ran forward with the other boys, ran to the edge, as I was running I heard the thud that must have been Pete hitting the cliff, and I heard the crack as he hit the floor. By the time I reached the edge, Pete’s broken body already lay some forty feet below, sprawled out but in such a strange angle that I knew he must be dead if he wasn’t screaming. The entire length of the rope lay at the bottom with him-- It had broken where it’d been tied to the tree.
Then everything sped up, like time was trying to compensate for the slow motion. We were at the bottom of the ledges, we were carrying Pete up, we were tossing him in the back of the truck. Shane was screaming at us to go home, he would take care of things. I was screaming at him about a proper burial, I was crying. Then I was studying, doing homework to try and forget his face, then I was graduating, and then I was driving away and promising myself I’d never go back unless someone died.
I lean back against the cool metal stall door. I’m not sure if I’m so dizzy from vomiting or from the memories. I take a second to breathe. I’ve never really thought about any of this, not in such detail. Not without distracting myself.
Fourteen years ago. I’m only thirty one, and no one was much older than me. Jim committed suicide two years later. And now Al has died in some freak case of food poisoning. If I die before Shane, no one will ever know. Pete’s mother will never know where her son went. She’ll never know if he ran away, if he was kidnapped, if he was killed, killed himself, or just died. Another wave of nausea sweeps over me when I think about those dead, blue eyes of hers. I sway as I get up, I have to use the stall walls to stand, but I am determined.
I walk back into the room with all the relatives and pictures and flowers, I look for the tiny, old form that’s Pete’s mother. She is next to a board of pictures, touching her hands to one of them. I walk up behind her and look at it.
It’s a picture of us five right before she found out about the drugs and told Pete he couldn’t hang out with us anymore. Jim stands in the back with his arms folded over his chest, Shane looks at me with his arm around my shoulder, but I’m looking away towards Al, probably laughing at some dumb thing he said, because he’s wearing the old giant smile he’d wear when he made us laugh. Pete’s mother’s hand touches Pete, in the photo, not Al. Pete is the only one looking directly in the camera, and he’s smiling because we were all young and life was still beautiful and fun.
“Mam,” I said softly. The old woman turns around and looks at me with her sad eyes. “I’m Janet Madigan. I used to be friends with your son… There’s something I have to tell you.”
The writing style is kind of unexciting, and there's a couple of sentences that need to be smacked by a grammar Nazi, but it's a well constructed story and you pulled off the tragic death thing much more convincingly than Theseonia.
