The Falls of the Wyona Read online

  Most of the stuff that happens when you’re a kid doesn’t bear mentioning because everyone has the same experiences. You hang out with your friends. You have teachers you hate and teachers you love. You long for a bike, and then for a car. You get into trouble. You discover interests. You flirt. You fumble with girls in the riverside parks after curfew. You see what lies ahead, and you either fight it or you relax into it. Growing up how we did, it was easy to relax into it. It’s what our dads had done. The ways were wide and paved. The War had been fought and old boring Europe lay in ruins. Now there was only us. Given all that, it’s easy to forgive us for thinking it had all been planned out pretty well. Honey poured upon your fingers, and all you had to do was bend your neck and lick.

  My big brother Andy had seen the last months of the European war, driving up into Italy behind General Clark, learning a little Italian which he used when he was with girls. He didn’t need it: handsome dog, my brother was. Before he went away, Andy hung out with us sometimes, occasions which we cherished and tried not to anticipate, like some extra gift under the tree Christmas morning. They let him come home a little while. Leave couldn’t have been much fun if you had to think about going back to the war, but Andy made the best of it. He removed the uniform the minute he walked through the door, and wore the white T-shirt and tan pants he’d worn before, except that the pants were too big and the T-shirt a little small now in the chest, he had become such a man.

  One day he said, “Come on.” I didn’t need a second invitation. Wherever he led I was going to follow. He said, “Bring the other two Stooges as well,” and I spent about ten minutes rounding up the gang while Andy had a little breakfast. This was before Glen came.

  Mom told Andy, “You be careful now.”

  Andy smiled at her. They’d just bombed Monte Cassino right over his head, for God’s sake. I guess, though, there’s things in the woods that there’s not even in the war, and Mom knew about them. Andy would be careful.

  Ended up we were going up Godwallow Creek to where it spreads out under the sourwood trees. Andy went slow, looking at everything like he might never see it again. We went slow behind him. That we might not see anything again never crossed our minds, so we were a little impatient. Tilden began naming the trees and flowers, like he did sometimes. He was good at that. It made a nice contrast to his cussing.

  We’d been there before, but I guess we didn’t know what we should have been looking for, because when Andy began to flip over rocks at creek side, salamanders slid out of them, in a dozen different colors—the regular ones like you’d expect, brown and black, but also orange and spotted orange and olive and almost blue. Andy knew the names of some of them. When a kind of salamander appeared and he didn’t call out the name, you knew he didn’t know the name, and he was amazed as us at the bounty the waters and the mountain could keep exuding. As we moved up Godwallow, other little creeks poured into it. Clearly the salamanders changed as the creeks did, since every ravine and hollow had its own kind. We were splashing around in a kind of salamander town square where they all met for a little while and sampled the local bug supplies, and maybe courted like the high school kids, if that’s what salamanders do. Tilden actually knew a little about salamanders—as he knew a little about every creepy crawler you could think of—and, slowly and very politely, began to fill in the blanks where Andy’s knowledge flagged. Whenever it seemed like Andy was going to say something, you could hear our flytraps slamming shut. We wanted to hear everything. We wanted him to tell us about the war and bazookas and what the Germans were like, but he never satisfied us on those points. He’d talk about the mountain and the salamanders, though, and we caught on that he was filling his mind with them so the war and the Germans could be washed out the other side.

  I tried to be just a stupid kid. That’s how Andy remembered me. That’s what he needed from me right then.

  Andy was bigger than us, but a small kid for his age. Mom called him “compact.” I loved being with him, but had learned it was more profitable to wait for him to make the offer than to try to tag along when he was with his friends. The army changed him. He’d always been serious, the sober one of his gang. Now he was downright solemn some of the time. You’d hear him say something like it was church, and turn around to see a kid in a T-shirt with a solemn look on his face. It was a disconnect. He’d have long talks with Dad, and once I could hear one of them crying. His buddies all went to the war somewhere, so he had to hang out with us by default, I guess.

  Only part of the war was over at the time. He had to go back. Still, that day was one of the golden ones. Curiously incurious as a boy, I thought those matters worth investigation were all in books. As often as I’d been to Godwallow Creek, it had never occurred to me to ask how it got its name, or where it came from, or where it went. Where it came from was the easiest told, for it descended like a narrow carpet down hard stairs made of the stones of the mountain, from nearly the very top, Andy said, getting quite agitated in places, pooling out into nice calm ponds good for fishing in others. “A big old hemlock got blown over and lies on its side,” Andy said, “way up there, way higher than you’d think a hemlock would ever grow. The tree got blown over, and out of the hole its roots left bubbled Godwallow. The tree is still alive, too, its branches twisting around like little trees to get back to the vertical. The creek keeps it alive.”

  “There was no creek before the tree fell?” Vince asked.

  “Must have been. I never saw it, is all.”

  “You saw this tree?”

  “Yep.”

  “How far?”

  “Farther than I want to go today.”

  We all pictured a creek liberated from some subterranean world by the fall of a tree, like champagne popping from a bottle. Andy led us to one of the wide pools, the biggest we’d found yet, with a black oozy bottom from generations of fallen sourwood leaves. Sassafras leaned over in spots where more light struck, dipping close to the water with its three leaves like three different hands. The pool was not often—perhaps never—fished, and rippled with fins and the loud smack of fish taking bugs on the surface. Andy said, “Here,” and hove his backpack onto a rock at the side of the pool.

  “So where does it go?” Vince asked.

  “What?”

  “Godwallow Creek.”

  I knew this one. I said, “We’re on the western side of the Continental Divide. It all goes to the Gulf of Mexico.”

  Andy said, “But first it goes to the Wyona. Right under the Picnic Bridge. Then over the—”

  “Over the what?”

  “Nothing.” We didn’t know about the Falls then, and he wasn’t going to tell us. Instead, he said, “Start lifting up anything flat, that something big could live under.”

  Vinny wasn’t all that interested in wildlife, though he was interested abstractly in the hunt and in lifting heavy objects, so he became the official rock-turner. He’d wait for us to situate ourselves in a place where our bodies would shade the water from the glare of the sun, then he’d hoist the rock and let us see what dwelt under it. Crawdads, predominately, but leeches and bugs and stuff, the occasional snake, which would scare me witless and make me scream like a girl. Vince liked lifting the heavy ones, and though Andy explained the big ones were not necessarily the likeliest choices, he went to the rocks that Vince was set to lift, it was clearly making him so happy. We were standing against the light and ready, when Vince began to tug on a flat white stone that proved considerably weightier than it appeared. It went down deep, half in the mud and half in the water, and while he was lifting, Vince breathed out, “This is the one! This is the one!”

  I don’t know how he knew, but it was, in fact, the one. Vince got the rock vertical before we saw squirming movement in the water. My first impulse was to scream the snake scream, but the motion wasn’t serpentine. Not a snake. What we thought at first was something really big was actually two black bodies, writhing around in the black water. Had they stayed still we wou
ld never have seen them at all. The first one darted between my legs and out into the pool. It was lizard-shaped, but blunter, fetus-like. It moved like nothing I was familiar with. It scared me and I was afraid to pick it up. The other body made for the same gap, but Tilden stepped into the pool and headed it off, grabbing past me and bringing the creature out of the water. It was as long as his forearm, struggling and whacking his chest wet with its flat tail. It was a hellbender. We would have called it by that name even if we had never heard it before. It regarded us with tiny, primeval, expressionless eyes. It was magnificent.

  Tilden held the giant salamander so it couldn’t bite him. It didn’t look like it was inclined to bite, but you never knew. It looked like the warmth of Tilden’s body was something of a comfort. A ripple went through its long body, a cold, muscular contraction that made Tilden make a face and say, “Eww.” Vince stood right up to it, eye to eye. I looked on from a safe, though scientifically engaged, distance. Andy looked less at the hellbender than at us, pretty well satisfied. The creature itself looked at the blue dome of sky, which it probably didn’t see that much.

  Tilden ventured, “Maybe it’s a salamander scientist, and lured us up here just so he could get a good look at us.” It was, in fact, scrutinizing us with disturbing concentration.

  Vince said, “We ain’t keeping it.”

  “Naw,” Tilden answered. He lowered the creature back toward the water. It moved nothing but its head, which it raised to keep the same angle of perspective it had on us before.

  Vince got out of the water and lowered the rock back down, so the hellbenders would have their shelter to return to. When the rock settled back down, Tilden released the animal. He didn’t surge away the way you’d expect, but balanced himself for a moment on Tilden’s boot. Then he blended his body with the water, and was instantly invisible.

  Tilden said, “I felt him. I felt him push off my boot into the pool!”

  We stared at the motionless water. Except for the spinning water bugs, there was no sign that anything dwelt there at all.

  Andy said, “We’d never have seen them unless they wanted us to.”

  Our four shadows went still over the stillest water in the world. Then Andy added, “That goes for damn near everything.”

  Going home I realized what all that had been about, why Andy wanted to take us to Godwallow Creek. Whatever was happening in the world, on the day of the hellbenders there was perfect peace.

  Glen came that fall. Whenever I mentioned Andy, Glen said, “Who?” This irritated me no end. Then I remembered he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen the hellbenders. I gave a lot of thought to why we should have seen the hellbenders and Glen not. The mind of a child is symbolic and speculative and “because he didn’t live here then” did not suffice. I took him out there once, to Godwallow Creek, to the same pool Andy had shown us. We grunted big slabs of wet rock high into the air, but there were no hellbenders. This disturbed me. I remarked on it and Glen said the right thing. He said, “Probably Andy is a little magic and that’s why you saw them then.”

  “Yes,” I thought, “exactly.”

  For a while we were almost indistinguishable, Tilden and Glen and Vince and I, until freshman year and football entered our lives for real. Vince separated out pretty quickly. He played every minute of the JV games. We thought it was because his dad was Coach Silvano, “Big Vince,” but after a while we had grudgingly to admit he was pretty good. No, Tilden and I were pretty good; Vince was a phenomenon. Coach Silvano seemed hard and cruel to us, and not much interested in his only son, so when Vince began to put us in second position behind the one thing that should have made his papa proud, we understood. Football came first from then on.

  We played at my house—Vince’s mom had “headaches”—so I didn’t know Coach that well until we began to learn football from him. He was skillful and mean and unfair and often cruel, but I was in love with him for a while. All the boys were. Many of us went through a hard-ass stage in his honor, only to have it beaten out of us by someone we admired even more later on, a mother or a girlfriend or a best buddy who had seen enough. We wanted to be praised by Coach. We wanted to be Coach. His son had to want the same things, with fiercer desire even than the rest of us. Coach was good at what he did. He won over schools a lot bigger than ours. People took lot of shit from him without ever calling it “shit.” Coach Silvano was the one thing our town had that resembled a permanent celebrity.

  Glen came at almost the same moment football did. Glen was like a stone dropped in a pond—a thing that makes a disturbance for a while, then blends in to the quiet scene as though nothing had happened. Vince had always been my best friend, and we never varied in that. But I recognized Glen and Vince had a connection I didn’t quite understand. I thought it was that Glen was a bit of a spaz, and Vince felt protective. I hoped it was that. Tilden was the lowest maintenance person anybody ever met, and whether he was ever jealous or uncomfortable it was impossible to tell. Even his cussing was gentle, a kind of benediction particular to him.

  Coach was very big on not being a homo. I had, at first, no idea what he was talking about when he talked about that. We did not associate “homo” with human affection of any kind. A homo was someone who was not on the football squad, someone in the marching band or the choir or a reader of unassigned material or one who took art class beyond the requirement. Glen fit into a number of these categories. That something more loomed behind “homo” was a gradual discovery. I credit full exploration of the term with releasing me from Big Vince’s spell a little quicker than most.

  Andy was back at the front for, like, two days when he got shot and had to convalesce in a hospital in Pisa. He sent me a photo of a big red hole in his left side, him turning his head and grinning at the camera like he’d just won a prize at the fair. I was a hero at school for his sake for a couple of days. The assistant principal, Mr. Jay (a homo, according to Coach), appeared at practice and told Coach that the halftime festivities would be extended a little on Friday to recognize my brother for receiving the Purple Heart. We all cheered, but Coach narrowed his eyes. He always narrowed his eyes when he thought the spotlight was going to shift, however briefly, from himself and his squad. He said, “Jesus God, are we going to have to line up and salute every time some homo gets himself in the line of fire?” He looked around to make sure the boys were laughing at his witticism, and some of them did. I didn’t. That broke the Coach spell for me.

  For a couple of years we tested one another’s mettle by doing a polar bear camp along the Wyona just above the Falls, where the slopes faced north and we imagined it would be colder and rougher. We slept all jumbled in a heap, like puppies in a box. We prided ourselves on traveling light, but Glen had a Boy Scout pack that his mother had sewn patches on, and he would not hike without it, being that a Boy Scout needs to “Be Prepared” and all that. There was no Scout troop within thirty miles, so Glen had to carry on the tradition all by his lonesome, a “Lone Wolf,” a pursuit which made him even more conspicuous than usual. He’d have to wear his uniform when he was doing Scout stuff, and if that didn’t make him a target, nothing would. But in that pack he managed to carry the things we found ourselves in need of but were too proud to bear, matches or extra socks or a Three Musketeers bar or what have you. We rolled our eyes when we saw it on him, but praised him silently when it saved our butts.

  On one of those nights—an unusually bitter Thanksgiving weekend—I saw something I had no experience, then, to understand. I was spooning Tilden, his tough little body curled against mine facing the dim, red, still flickering campfire. I hoped I’d wake him so we could trade places—my back was freezing against the river with its winds and sprays—but when I sat up, not all the way, just a little, I saw that Vince and Glen were not spooning. They lay face to face. They were kissing like people in the movies, gentle and hungry at once, passionate, transfigured, no longer boys. Vince moaned a little, like Glen was hurting him, but I knew he wasn’t. I felt .
. . I didn’t know what I felt right then, but when I analyzed later, I knew I felt left out. Vince and Glen had forged ahead where I was not ready to go. With me it would be a girl, but I didn’t suppose the basics were that much different. I wondered when I would want somebody so much I’d groan on a frozen hillside.

  I could tell by the movement he made that Tilden was awake, too, watching.

  I heard Tilden whisper, “Are we supposed to do that?”

  I waited before I answered. I really didn’t know, so I said, “I don’t know. You want to?”

  Tilden waited a very long time. Finally he said, “Naw.” He snuggled back against me where it was all warm and comfy—for him. Changing places would cause too much upheaval now, so I just settled into it and tried to get back to sleep.

  III

  One time Glen came to my house with a long roll of paper. He wouldn’t say what it was; he would only show me, so we tramped down into the basement, and when he unrolled the paper on the ping-pong table, it turned out to be a map of the world. On the Europe part, he had traced in colored pens the engagements of Andy’s company up from Sicily into Italy, with places Andy had mentioned in his letters marked by blue stars. He painted a big star over Pisa (I’d never bothered to find out where Pisa was) where Andy was at that point healing up from being shot by the Jerries. I called Mom and Dad down. Dad picked the map up—the spread of his arms was not quite enough to straighten it out flat in the air—and stared at it for a long time, his nose a mere inch from the blue Mediterranean. After he put it back on the ping-pong table, Mom smoothed it out and traced with her fingers the travels of her firstborn. They said nothing. They didn’t have to. But before Glen left, Dad poked his head back down the stairs and said, “Thank you,” in a tone you didn’t hear that often.