What?
You prinking? Don’t get shy on me now.
They were at the edge of unincorporated Braggsville at Point Pen Dry Bluff, a granite scarp—dubbed The Balcony—from which they’d often Geronimoed into the cool blue twenty feet below, much to the horror of more than one shrieking mother. Earlier that morning, Jo-Jo had asked him to take a ride, which they did in silence, which meant that Jo-Jo wouldn’t admit what was on his mind until he’d cracked at least three High Lifes. Jo-Jo was one of those guys who would snap his fingers and complain—Look here, Cochise, I’m trying to talk to you—even when he wasn’t saying anything. Unlike Quint, who’d inherited from his mother a tongue that could talk a gray sky dry, Jo-Jo measured his words like he was underwater. Matter of fact, with that short, perpetually wrinkled brow, he always looked like he was holding his breath. When Jo-Jo said nothing after the fourth can, except to ask about the juniors, Daron felt a guilty rush of relief and repositioned himself to better appreciate the view. It wasn’t called The Balcony for nothing. Mayor Buchanan, who owned the land, years ago had his earthmovers carve the best-lit ledge into a shallow, beach-like slope lined with smooth pebbles, all at his own expense. Now all four Rhiner girls—woman-sized by middle school to the one—lay splayed head to head, spread-eagle, as if to catch more sun. The Rhiners were there when Daron arrived, so maybe Jo-Jo knew this and planned to hang out and enjoy the natural scenery.
Like a snowflake. Jo-Jo pointed.
Or dream catcher. Or, thought Daron, a tête-à-tête, at last recalling the word.
Or semen catcher.
That, too. Daron adjusted his trunks. The youngest sister had been Chinese skinny when he left for college, but now cut quite the figure. She had a split in her bib damn near deep enough to hide a baby.
So, she ever put a finger up in the juniors? asked Jo-Jo.
What?
Don’t get shy on me now.
Daron shrugged.
Ever got that velvet rabbit when she was on the warpath?
Huh?
Miss Iowa. When she’s scalping.
Yeah.
When Jo-Jo first saw the pictures of the 4 Little Indians, he’d tweaked Daron’s titty as if to say, Good job, hoss. The suggestion had indeed pinched Daron at the time, but he had ignored it. He now regretted not correcting Jo-Jo, but at the same time considered this scenario kin to noticing before anyone else that his own fly was undone. Why call it to everyone’s attention? Yeah, Daron repeated.
You crack those juniors and get up in that wormhole yet?
Yeah.
She ever swallow your Johnny Appleseed?
Yeah.
Ever blew dice so hard she fell off?
Yeah.
Jo-Jo laughed. Hmmm. Might be I ought get outta Draggsville. Go to college.
Don’t see why not.
Might could, but won’t, ’cause it costs, and I mean to be paid.
Yeah.
Old man say I can make foreman in two years. Tells me he seen it happen that quick. Get out of the oven, get over to the saw.
Yeah.
Hmmph. Jo-Jo pointed. Through the pines the mill could be seen in parts: the circuit board of ducts and compressors atop the big brick hotbox where it always felt about ninety million degrees and some distance away the sawtooth roof of the shipping warehouse where the greatest hazards were paper cuts and losing hair to packing tape. From where they sat on The Balcony, they couldn’t see the building that connected the two—the rib—a low-windowed, narrow block structure where the air-conditioned offices were located. Everyone Daron knew spoke of the saw like Canaan. None aspired to the rib, almost as if it was cursed, almost as if it didn’t exist for them, almost as if they went outside and walked around it to get from one end of the compound to the other. Jo-Jo elbowed Daron. The Rhiner girls were peeling themselves off the ground with arched backs, yawns, outstretched arms, and then took to the water with a battle caw, cutting air fifty yards out to Pickett Rock, giggling off the warm sting as they settled on the boulder’s edge, juniors rocking, feet exciting the water, legs exciting the boys, especially where the stringy denim rode high thighs like fine blond hairs.
My father’s at it again.
Sorry, muttered Daron after a moment during which, even after a year at Berkeley—including a special student-led DCal class on interpersonal communication—he could think of nothing else to say.
Daron brushed the rocks from his bottom as he scooted back out of the sun and onto a smoother shelf of granite. The heat wasn’t hearing it, though, and like Georgia humidity was wont to do, the mugginess shadowed him. No one sunned at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park, and the reservoir was polluted, but what it lacked in bikinis, it made up for with decriminalized alien technology and near-perfect Mediterranean weather. Unlike the gorge. Never mind the chain links of light reflecting onto Pickett Rock or gliding metallic along the sandy bed where the lake was shallow, or the buff scent of pine resin, or the empties whistling green and gold as the workers on the far side buckled shut their lunch buckets, he knew what Jo-Jo meant by his father being at it again.
Jo-Jo’s father could be up to any Old Scratch tack, from moonraking, to knocking noggins around the yard, to putting the shine on old Martha Redding down at the Pik-n-Pak, to trying to creep a peek at June Tucker’s butterfly. It was Jo-Jo’s father, in fact, who had told both boys about his infamous and eponymous courtship kung fu move: Just let me stick the tip in, baby. Daron’s own father had told him nothing about sex except to use protection because, Loose lips really do sink ships, and nothing will sink your ship faster than a kid or a disease. Daron’s grandfather, Old Hitch—whom Nana called, in sooth, My right minder—offered the only sober advice: Remember, ripe fruit is always marked down. Gotta see something in ’em they can’t see for ’emselves. Don’t lie, but you gotta be a real generous mirror. (Back in ninth grade, Slater Jones from 4-H said only: I don’t have sex, I make babies. Remarkable prescience for a fourteen-year-old, hence this parenthetical.)
The water clapped below as the girls abandoned their perch. Pickett Rock was chalky where dry and black where wet, so that the wet parts, once the last Rhiner slapped water, were like the shadows of dancing figures, and Daron was reminded of a tenth-grade lesson on Nagasaki, after which the teacher had been transferred out faster than a mad cow. She had read to the class a first-person account by a survivor who was lucky enough to be not only swimming, but also submerged when the blast passed over him. After seeing the flash reflected in the pool, he surfaced to discover that where his friends had once stood only their twisted silhouettes remained, draped on the ground like shadows, forgotten clothes, except white not black. With no frame of reference for such a phenomenon, he could only imagine a bizarre prank, so bizarre that he didn’t immediately notice the damage to the pool house or that the water he trod now felt near boiling. The survivor said he could take no credit for it, that it was preordained that he would live and his friends would die, and he would never understand why. All he knew was who. Who is who? asked the teacher, closing the book with a resolute thump and letting her readers jangle from their rattling beaded-glass tether. It’s us. Japan was ready to surrender as early as the defeat at Midway.
Jo-Jo dragged a heavy hand across his eyes. Now what about those juniors?
Yeah, Daron repeated, nodding, certain that it couldn’t matter because Berzerkeley and Braggsville were two worlds always on opposite sides of the sun.
Chapter Five
His sophomore fall was without incident, but halfway through his sophomore spring, everything changed. As Quint would say, his pancake got flipped. The class was American History X, Y,