Billy Goat Hill Read online

  More air!

  God, please help me!

  Gasping, choking, fighting to catch my breath, I dog paddle furiously, the stronger kick of my right leg pushing me in a wide arcing circle. Entangled in a mile-long moment of indecision, all I can do is sob.

  “Luke! Luke! I’m sorry, Luke!”

  Arms and legs working full throttle but rapidly diminishing in thrust, I come around to face due west and look up straight into the glaring afternoon sun. I am spent, defeated. The sun beats down, punishing my face with brutal slaps of hot accusation. I want to die.

  Why, God? Some fall off cliffs? Some drown in ponds? But I’m the one to blame. I threw him in the pond. Don’t take him. It’s not his fault. It’s my fault. Take me, God! Luke! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  Then, just below the lower fringe of the sun’s hot glare, I imagine I see something move. I blink hard. There it is again, shapes, two shapes…

  “You swim worse than Drysdale pitches, you big dumb donkey!”

  There on the muddy bank, with Mac proudly stationed at his side, stands a very angry Luke. I blink again, harder, and try to raise a hand to shield my eyes, but my leaden arms won’t respond. Moved by the current, I come around slowly, and my face drifts under a merciful shadow, only to leave me wide open to the blunt force of Luke’s petulant glare.

  His freckles seem to radiate with energy absorbed from the sun, which towers over him like a giant, tangerine sparkler. And there amid my brokenness and desperation, I am, for a fleeting moment, utterly, profoundly, wonderfully relieved that my brother is safe.

  Mac barks, a muffled gong; the pond pours inside me; and I go down in a swirling nebula of bubbles. Spiraling, spiraling, down I go, thankful that God has accepted the trade. I watch as the ghostly forms of Luke and Mac get smaller and smaller, corkscrewing up, up, away, and gone.

  I love you, Luke.

  I’m going to be with Matthew now.

  Take good care of Mac.

  It feels like a school of eels are wagging their tails in my face. My eyes flutter open and I swat out instinctively, missing whatever is there. I am astounded to find myself staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Mac, and the eels are actually one big sloshing tongue. I hold still for a moment and let him lick my face. It feels so good the way it affirms I am alive.

  Thank You, God.

  “What happened?” I feel sick to my stomach, and I groan as I feebly raise myself to a sitting position. My legs weigh ten tons. The ball bearings have turned into bowling balls.

  “I think you drownded.” Luke cautiously keeps a step out of arm’s reach. He is not quite sure if I am mad or not. “But me and Mac saved you.” He grins triumphantly but still keeps his distance.

  “You mean you jumped back in the water and pulled me out?”

  His grin slackens. “Well, uh, not exactly.”

  Given his uncanny knack for showing up at times like this, I look around half expecting to see Sergeant Cavendish. I don’t see him or anyone else for that matter. My head is pounding, my ears are full of water, and the way my stomach is twitching, I think I may have swallowed a few tadpoles.

  Then I belch real loud, moss flavor, and Mac gives me one of those head-cocked-sideways, eyebrows-raised looks like he always does whenever Luke or I make a mysterious noise. “Chase that.” His tail instantly goes into motion, and my stomach suddenly feels much better. “What do you mean, not exactly? Either you saved me or you didn’t.” I shake my head from side to side, but my ears remain plugged. Mac looks at me strangely again.

  “I don’t know how to swim. You know that.”

  “Well? How did you get me out of the pond then?”

  “I didn’t.” Luke chuckles softly. “Mac did.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mac pulled you out, you big dumb donkey!”

  “Well I’ll be a bluenose gopher. How in the name of Pinky Lee did you get him to do that?”

  “Easy, I just shouted, ‘GET THE STICK, MAC!’ and pointed at you.”

  “Well, I’ll be dogged!”

  “I think you were, Wade.”

  Physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted, I sprawl on the bank of the middle pond and let a large shaft of afternoon sun bake me dry. With considerable effort, I move twice to remain in the warm, rejuvenating spotlight. When finally I regain enough energy, I pull the slingshot from my back pocket and unload the near deadly ballast from my front pockets.

  Still weak and shaky, I mindlessly count the ball bearings and arrange them into letters on the muddy ground in front of me. I give it my best effort, trying to polish up my downbeat mood, but soon one hundred and sixty-six silver marbles spell out the word STUPID in six-inch capital letters.

  It’s a wonder that I ever came up from that first dive. I’m not as smart as Tarzan. Jane never would have survived with Wade Parker running around bare-chested in nothing but a loincloth. With my luck, she probably would’ve gotten tangled up in one of my swinging vines and strangled to death.

  Meanwhile, Luke seems to be enjoying a new level of kinship with Mac. For once Mac did what he asked him to do.

  Thank the Lord for that!

  And Mac knows he’s done something important. He shows off, retrieving everything Luke can find to throw with unusual enthusiasm.

  I watch them play while I rest my aching muscles. My anger at Luke has been washed away in a proselyte’s conversion. I am blessed to have Luke as a brother and Mac as a friend. Turning it over and over in my mind, I keep coming back to how stupid I was to place Luke in yet another hazardous situation. I really thought he had drowned.

  Will I ever learn? Maybe, but in the meantime I can’t let him down by appearing weak. He needs to look up to me. I may be in chaos, but it’s time to suck it up. I have to reestablish some order and remind Luke who is boss, for his sake.

  “Hey, twerp, what happened to your hat?”

  In all the excitement, Luke has not realized his hat is missing. In a panic, he reaches up to his head and then reflexively ducks. His eyes snap skyward like a cottontail reacting to the blip of a hawk’s shadow.

  “It must have come off in the water,” he utters stonily, eyes to the vertical, his hand still feeling around on the top of his head.

  Mac barks, impatient for Luke to throw the stick dangling from his other hand.

  “Darn dog,” Luke mutters, instantly reverting to his old ways.

  He tosses the stick away without looking down from the sky. Mac watches the stick sail to the far side of the pond. Put off by Luke’s lack of sincerity, he turns around twice and sits in the mud. Game over. I smile.

  “Darn dog,” Luke hisses.

  “Don’t worry about your hat. We’ll find it in the lower pond on our way home.”

  “Okay,” he says tentatively, looking very naked and vulnerable.

  I have a thought. Like Luke, old ways are hard to change. A small smile sparks inside me and begins to multiply outward. I adopt a gravely serious tone. “You know what I would do if I were you?”

  “What?” He’s still looking for jet-trails or maybe a message in the clouds.

  My eyelashes flutter dramatically. “I would smear mud all over my head just in case any mockingbirds are in the area.” Yes, I am feeling much better. So much better, I can’t resist an impulse to push beyond the line of fairness. “You know, the way your red hair lights up in this bright sunshine, you’d probably be safer walking into a bull ring with a red suit on.”

  He doesn’t even look down. He just kneels, scoops, and smears. In a matter of seconds, he looks like a lost gopher popping up in the middle of a peat bog. Maybe I’m not so stupid after all.

  The looming shadows turn the pond from an iridescent green to the color of overripe guacamole. Luke is content to sit next to me and repair his earthen headgear whenever I note a piece has dried and fallen off, while I play a restful game of word-spell with my one hundred and sixty-six ball bearings. Just as I discover I have enough ball bearings to spell Mississippi if I don’t dot the
is, Luke squeals like somebody pinched him.

  “What’s your problem?” Can I make smaller letters and have enough ball bearings for Massachusetts?

  “Look,” he whispers, rapidly patting more mud on his head.

  I look up, hearing fear in his voice. “What?”

  He keeps smearing. “Over there.”

  “Where?”

  His lips scarcely move as he hoists a muddy finger and points across the pond. “Two mockingbirds just landed—” whimper—“in that bush over there. Get your slingshot.”

  I choke back a giggle and look where he is pointing. “Where? I don’t see any birds.”

  “Get your slingshot!”

  “Okay, okay. Take it easy.”

  I force myself not to laugh at the streak of goop working its way down his forehead. I pick up the slingshot and take a ball bearing from the second s in Mississippi. I prepare the ball snugly in the leather sling and pinch the load firmly between my thumb and forefinger.

  I’ve never hit a thing I’ve ever aimed at with this stupid weapon, and now I’m supposed to hit a bird I can’t even see from a hundred feet away? Right.

  “Where are they?”

  I have about as much chance of hitting a bird as I do to meet Duke Snider. Those birds, if there are any birds, are safer than raw liver crumpets at a Shirley Temple tea party.

  “They’re right across the middle of the pond. Look on the top branch of that smallest bush next to that L-shaped rock.”

  He couldn’t be more precise. “Oh yeah, I see them.” I squint harder. “You’re absolutely right. There are two of them, and they’re checking out your head, I think.”

  Luke’s neck disappears down inside his T-shirt. Now he looks like a turtle, a scared little mud turtle.

  “Kill them,” he nervously urges, oblivious to the little chunks of mud now slipping off the end of his nose.

  Mac dozed off earlier. He is whining in his sleep, dreaming of Molly, no doubt. It is just as well that he doesn’t see my shot miss. He can be very judgmental.

  Luke is about to come out of his skin. “Hurry up! They’re getting ready to attack!”

  I prop my left elbow on my knee and raise the slingshot to eye level. The birds look to be a mile away as I position their faint little shapes at the center of the yoke. Slowly, I pull back on the black rubber straps, back, back, as far back as I can. My shoulder trembles and the muscles in my forearm bulge from the strain. I hesitate, held back by an itch of guilty sympathy for the birds.

  They are so small and I’m so big. It doesn’t seem fair. Am I Goliath aiming the slingshot at David? That’s not how the story goes.

  Luke is nearly apoplectic. “Shoot, Wade! Shoot!”

  Aw heck, I ain’t gonna hit them anyway. I close my eyes and let go.

  Thwack! The ball bearing sizzles forth, singeing the air over the water, and instantly a puff of feathers floats around the bush. In stunned disbelief, I watch as the feathers settle on the leaves like fake snow in a Sears Christmas window display. The recoil of the rubber straps snaps the slingshot out of my hand and flings it into the pond, where it dips and bobs away in search of Luke’s Dodgers cap.

  “You got ’um!” Luke roars. “You got ’um both!”

  He’s right. No more birds. I’m a murderer!

  Mac opens one eye, winks at me, and goes back to sleep.

  Luke dances around in a circle, a fearsome warrior celebrating a fruitful hunt, and then takes off upstream toward a spot where he can cross over to the other side without having to swim.

  “Wait up, for crying out loud!” Still fazed with a strange mixture of amazement and regret, I hurry to catch up with him.

  On the other side of the stream, we hurry back downstream to the middle pond. Out of breath and full of excitement, we jostle through the undergrowth until finally we stand side by side at the feathery bush. There are lots of feathers, but no birds. Puzzled, we push farther into the thicket, scouring the branches and ground as we go.

  Robbed of the prize, Luke turns sour. “Some bird dog Mac is.

  Look at him lying over there snoozing in the mud. He could be helping us, you know. But he’s not even interested. Darn dog.”

  “Why do you always have to pick on Mac? Just be quiet and keep looking. They’ve got to be around here somewhere. Birds can’t possibly fly with that many feathers missing.”

  I feel guilty. I am sure they have to be dead, at least one of them anyway.

  We push our way deeper into the brush, maybe thirty or forty feet, and come upon a small open space. No birds.

  “Darn, Wade. I bet they’re hiding and getting ready to launch a counterattack. I need more mud.”

  “What could have happened to them?”

  “Hey, what’s that?”

  Luke points to a piece of cardboard big enough to use for sliding at Billy Goat Hill. It’s standing on end leaning against a waist-high rock, looking quite out of place in these undisturbed surroundings. Noticing something even more peculiar, I step closer and observe a perfectly round hole in the cardboard, exactly the same diameter as my ball bearings.

  “Look at that.”

  We step closer. I lean down to peek through the hole. Luke reaches over and grabs the cardboard. The cardboard falls over.

  We both scream!

  My face wavers inches away from a man’s face. He’s sitting upright, legs outstretched, torso leaning back against the rock. His mouth is open as if frozen in mid-speech, his glazed eyes staring in disbelief. And there for the whole world to condemn is my killer ball bearing buried down a bloody vent in his forehead. I see the shimmering sphere lodged one knuckle deep in the finger size hole. Flies already flit around the wound, excited by the early smell of death.

  The realization of what I have become rampages to my very core, driving a pile at the pit of my stomach and slamming up my spine to my brain, where a silent scream builds to a mental roar raging to split my skull wide open.

  I am a murderer!

  A moment later, Mac stands bracing against my weakening legs. He sniffs cautiously at the dead man’s shark skin pant leg and looks up at me, his big brown eyes flooding with worry, as if to say: This is not good, Wade. Not good at all.

  Before I faint, there is an instant of revolting sickness, then a hallucination of me softly descending into the safe, protective arms of my father. But Earl does not catch me. Instead, my head crashes hard on the rock next to the dead man.

  t is nearly dark when I come to. I am lying near the overpass at San Pasqual Creek. I do not know why I am here or how I got here from the middle pond. Did I somehow get to my feet and stumble to the road on my own power? Mac sits next to me, my amazing friend. Maybe he dragged me this far and then got tired?

  I am dizzy and my head hurts. I feel a plum above my right eye—otherwise, I seem to be in one piece. After a minute, I get up, take a deep breath, and start walking home. Three blocks later a patrol car pulls up behind me and stops at the curb. My heart is vibrating. I am too scared to run but certain I am about to be arrested for murder.

  The cop waves me over to the car. “We got a report of somebody lying by the road.”

  “Yes, sir, it was me. Uh, I mean, my dog accidentally tripped me, and I sort of fell and bumped my head.”

  “Nice shiner.”

  “Yes, sir. It hurts, but I’m okay. I’m, uh, on my way home now.”

  “It’ll be dark soon. You better get moving.”

  The cop is satisfied and drives off. Stunned, I stare at the police car and wish he had been the Sergeant. I think I would have told him the truth. Instead, I throw up on the sidewalk.

  Lucinda buys the story I make up about banging my head on a low branch. She is very upset about us losing our tennis shoes, though. Luke panicked, I fainted, and we both ended up at home barefoot. I lie again and tell her some big kids swiped our tennis shoes. Luke isn’t talking at all.

  Later, Lucinda takes the coffee can down from the crawl space in the hall ceiling. She do
esn’t know I am in the bathroom with the door cracked open. I hear her crying and know there isn’t enough money to replace the tennis shoes and still buy the new pair of high heels she needs for work. Too ashamed to face her, I stay in the bathroom for a long time.

  I finally marshal the courage a week later, with my heart quaking to rival the San Andreas, to creep back to Three Ponds to see if our shoes and the man are still there. It is awful. A stabbing pain in my stomach nearly forces me to chicken out halfway there.

  At the scene, lots of footprints have been cast in the mud, not from animals, from humans, and more than I remember ever being there before. Everything else is gone: our shoes, Luke’s Dodgers cap, my slingshot, all of the ball bearings, the sheet of cardboard with the hole in it—and the dead man.

  A knot of nerves in my middle comes up in a sick whoosh, dropping me to the ground in a thicket of bushes amid the only remaining physical evidence of my crime, a scattering of dull, lifeless feathers.

  I am so sorry for everything, God.

  Weeks pass. Each seems like a century. Rampant guilt consumes me from the inside out in a lonesome, protracted torture of conscience. Methodically, bit by bit, like a carcass hauled away by ants, I am being dismantled. What little that is positive about me melts away, shrivels down to nothing, absorbed by the gluttonous sponges of fear and remorse. I long for Earl to show up and beat a confession out of me, knowing I will feel so much better after it’s over. And what if he kills me? Well, so much the better.

  The knot above my right eye is gone. A faint bruise remains, like a smudge that won’t wash off. That my injury was only minor serves to compound my guilt. I should have at least lost an eye.

  Luke is making progress. Yesterday he came out of the house and sat on the porch for a whole twenty minutes. His young conscience bothers him, too. He feels bad for running away and leaving me lying there. I tell him not to worry about it, that I am proud of him for not fainting, like I did. Still, he is suffering, and I don’t know what to do for him.