“I was quoting Shakespeare, you vulgarian.” Poole came off the tree and began trudging up the hill.
“Then you should have said, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” Broussard said. “Would have been more appropriate.”
Angie took a few deep breaths, caught Broussard’s eyes as he did the same. “We’re old.”
“We’re old,” he agreed.
“Think it’s time we hung ’em up?”
“Love to.” He smiled, leaned over, and took another breath. “My wife? Got in a car accident just before we were married, fractured some bones. No health insurance. You know what a fracture cost to fix? Man, I’ll be able to retire about the same time I’m chasing perps with a walker.”
“Somebody say a walker?” Poole said. He looked up at the steep slope. “That’d be sweet.”
As a kid I’d taken this path several times to reach the watering holes of Granite Rail or Swingle’s Quarry. It was supposedly off-limits, of course, surrounded by fences and patrolled by rangers for the MDC, but there were always jagged doors cut through the chain link if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t, you brought the equipment to make your own. The rangers were in short supply, and even with a small army they’d have been hard-pressed to patrol the dozens of quarries and the hundreds of kids who made their way up to them on a blistering summer day.
So I’d climbed this ridge before. Fifteen years ago. In the daylight.
It was a little different now. For one, I wasn’t in the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager. Too many bruises and too many bars and far too many on-the-job collisions with people and pool tables—and, once, both a windshield and the road waiting on the other side—had given my body the creaks and aches and constant dull throbs of either a man twice my age or a professional football player.
Second, like Broussard, I wasn’t exactly Grizzly Adams. My exposure to a world without asphalt and a good deli was limited. Once a year, I took a hiking trip with my sister and her family up Washington’s Mount Rainier; four years ago I’d been coerced into a camping trip in Maine by a woman who’d fancied herself a naturalist because she shopped at army-navy stores. The trip had been scheduled for three days, but we’d lasted one night and a can of insect repellent before we drove to Camden for white sheets and room service.
I considered my companions as we climbed the slope toward Granite Rail Quarry. My guess was none of them would have made it through the first night of that camping trip. Maybe with sunlight, proper hiking boots, a sturdy staff, and a first-rate ski lift, we’d have made respectable progress, but it was only after twenty minutes of thumping and banging up the hill, our flashlights trained on the imprints and the occasional embedded railroad tie of a railway that had stopped running almost a century ago, that we finally got a whiff of the water.
Nothing smells so clean and cold and promising as quarry water. I’m not sure why this is, because it’s merely decades of rain piled up between walls of granite and fed and freshened by underground springs, but the moment the scent found my nostrils, I was sixteen again and I could feel the plunge in my chest as I jumped over the edge of Heaven’s Peak, a seventy-foot cliff in Swingle’s Quarry, saw the light-green water yawn open below me like a waiting hand, felt weightless and bodiless and pure spirit hanging in the empty, awesome air around me. Then I dropped, and the air turned into a tornado shooting straight up from the advancing pool of green, and the graffiti exploded from the shelves and walls and cliffs all around me, burst forth in reds and blacks and golds and blues, and I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water, toes pointed down, wrists tucked tight against my hips, dropped deep below the surface where the cars and the refrigerators and the bodies lay.
Over the years, as the quarries have claimed one young life every four years or so, not to mention all the corpses dumped over the cliffs in the dead of night and discovered, if at all, years later, I’ve read the newspapers as editorialists, community activists, and grieving parents ask, “Why? Why?”
Why do kids—quarry rats, we called ourselves in my generation—feel the need to jump from cliffs as high as one hundred feet into water two hundred feet deep and mined with sudden outcroppings, car antennas, logs, and who knows what else?
I have no idea. I jumped because I was a kid. Because my father was an asshole and my home was a constant police action, and most of the time finding a place to hide was how my sister and I spent our lives, and that didn’t seem much like living. Because often, as I stood on those cliffs and looked over the edge at an overturned bowl of green that turned and revealed itself the more I craned my neck, I felt a cold sizzle in my stomach and an awareness of every limb, every bone, and every blood vessel in my body. Because I felt pure in the air and clean in the water. I jumped to prove things to my friends and, once those things had been proven, because I was addicted to it, needed to find higher cliffs, longer drops. I jumped for the same reason I became a private detective—because I hate knowing exactly what’s next.
“I need to catch a breath,” Poole said. He grabbed a thick vine growing out of the ground in front of us and twisted with it toward the ground. The gym bag fell from his hand, and his foot slipped in the dirt, and he fell on top of the bag, clenching the vine tightly in his hand.
We were about fifteen yards from the top. I could see the faintest green shimmer of water, like a wisp of cloud, reflecting off the dark cliffs and hovering in the cobalt pitch of sky just beyond the last ridge.
“Sure, buddy, sure.” Broussard stopped and stood by his partner as the older man placed his flashlight on his lap and gasped for breath.
In the dark, Poole was as white as I’d ever seen him. He shone. His raspy breath clawed its way into the night, and his eyes swam in their sockets, seemed to float in search of something they couldn’t locate.
Angie knelt by him and put a hand under his jaw, felt his pulse. “Take a deep breath.”
Poole nodded, his eyes bulging, and sucked air.
Broussard lowered himself to his haunches. “You okay, buddy?”
“Fine,” Poole managed. “Aces.”
The shine on his face found his throat and dampened his collar.
“Too fucking old to be humping my ass up some”—he coughed—”hill.”
Angie looked at Broussard. Broussard looked back at me.