Jumping (17 page)

“So, scared to the point of throwing up outside the recruitment office but figuring he was due to be drafted anyway, O'Reilly went in and enlisted. He threw up the moment he came out. Vietnam was on, and he knew that's where he'd be going.

“After three months of training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, and a thirty-day pass home, he was on a twenty-hour flight into Cam Rahn Bay. Once there, his company was assigned to the Central Highlands, the border between North and South Vietnam.

“Around 350 American soldiers were dying every week in Vietnam. And an estimated thousand North and South Vietnamese men, women, and children were dying every week during the worst of it. But O'Reilly didn't know those figures. His days were organized around patrols into the rice paddies and the jungle, to keep the army's hold on the territory secure. The only thing worse than the daytime marches, he learned quickly, was the nighttime ones. It was on these night patrols that most of the original men in his company—men he was there to replace—had been killed or badly injured.

“Their patrols were single file, each soldier keeping a space of ten feet between him and the soldiers in front of and behind him, because of land mines. Soldiers learned all about land mines and what they did to a human body, because they saw it firsthand. It wasn't long before his best friend, Bob Bywater, was killed by a mine. The two had connected during their first days at boot camp when they were assigned as battle buddies, meant to always travel as a pair, having each other's back. Under the circumstances, they'd grown as close as brothers.

“One sweltering hot morning they were out on patrol, crossing the rice paddies on the dikes that ran between the flooded areas of the fields. O'Reilly followed Bywater, matching his steps without thinking, when Bywater stepped on a mine.

“The explosion knocked O'Reilly from his feet, ears ringing. He saw that Bywater's legs had been shredded badly by the blast, and he was losing blood quickly. It flowed into the watery field. Bywater was yelling for help, but his fall had set off the gas canister at his waist, releasing a particularly lethal form of tear gas. Everyone who tried to rush into the narrow space on the dike was forced back by the gas. They watched helplessly as Bywater, within the cloud of the poisonous gas, bled to death. O'Reilly never moved from the ground where he dropped. It was as if his own legs were useless, and he sat watching and listening to Bywater call, ‘Help me, O'Reilly. Help me,’ more and more softly, until he called no more.”

I put the pages back into my grade book and then look up at them. They're quiet.

“O'Reilly told me that story forty-three years after it happened, and he still had tears streaming down his cheeks when he told it.” They're quiet.

“So, does that answer your question about telling someone else's story? The idea is that your truth is in the telling, too, not just theirs. Could you hear mine?” I ask.

One of the two girls, Carrie Jean, says, “Yes.”

“What did you hear?”

“That you hate war.”

“How did you hear that?”

“In your description of the stupidity of it, of sending men marching in broad daylight out into an open field, unprotected. Of wearing so much equipment it can turn on them, as if they were the enemy. Of someone needing help, and no one can. It makes me hate war, too. Isn't that how we know it is truth? We feel it as our own?”

I gaze at this tall Native American girl and wonder at her. I like her answer. Her mind works like a writer's mind, clear and straight to the heart of the matter. Obviously, she has a base of experience and wisdom beyond her years. I know that she's part of the Tribe, the loosely affiliated group of Native Americans that live just north of town, between town and the Void, but closer to the Void. That's all I know about her. I've had members of the Tribe in my classes before, but they're not usually talkative.

“Is she right?” I ask the others. “Do you agree with how she describes truth?”

“Yes,” says Donal, from the back row. “You know it when you hear it. It has its own fit.” He nods at Carrie Jean.

“And my truth is different from O'Reilly's truth. He believes his time in the army made a man of him, though he's still confused by his experience and says he wouldn't recommend it to his sons,” I tell them.

Lonnie, the boy who originally asked the question, says, “Yeah, I can see how you can tell someone else's story, but I don't know if I can do it that good.” They all laugh.

“Well, you can't,” Kevin, the third boy in the class, says from the back of the room, and they all laugh again, including Lonnie. Kevin can almost always make us laugh.

“Okay. I'm setting the timer.”

They shuffle their things for writing and get quiet. They look at me expectantly.

I set the timer for twenty minutes. As it starts ticking, their heads go down. Twenty minutes is enough for them to write three or four pages and still allows enough class time for each of them to read their words aloud.

Every single one of them writes about the Void.

I know this before they're even through. I feel as if the Void has taken a seat in the back row with the other malcontents and is ready to speak its piece. Then the time is up.

The first story is read by Donal, who almost always chooses to be first. He is a member of the school's tiny football team and takes the stature this gives him on campus seriously. He goes first as though it is his duty to volunteer. His story is about the continuing nightmares his little six-year-old brother, Brogan, has about the Void. The family is a large, close knit one without a lot of resources, so Donal and his brother share a room.

“I read to Brogan every night, trying to replace the bad stories with good ones so he can fall asleep. Kids at school talk, and Brogan has heard things he doesn't know what to do with. Things that make it sound like the Void could come and get him from his bed, and he'd be gone forever, never to see his family again. They laugh at him when he cries.”

I wonder to myself if Donal is affected by these stories, too. Maybe he's reading them both to sleep.

Kevin, a welding apprentice, steps up to the front of the class next. He reads to us of feeling the call of the Void, like in
The Call of the Wild
he just read for his English 101 class.

“I feel the call,” he tells us. “I'm drawn to jump, and it scares me. I think the Void is like the
wild
in the book, something bigger than all of us that we all have to eventually surrender to, because it's in our nature to do so.” He looks sincere and worried as he reads.

“For Buck, the dog who is the lead character in
The Call of the Wild
, surrendering to the wild is ultimately a good thing—he lives happily ever after, a legend in his own time.” He stops and goes back to his seat.

“Kevin isn't quite sure how to reconcile that successful surrendering that Buck did with his view of the Void as a scary place. How do you surrender to that? So he stays uneasy about it, and we hear that in his writing, don't we? He writes on a descriptive rather than an interpretive level. Do you know what that means?” I ask them.

Monica, the other girl in the class, says tentatively, “I think so. He's doing what you always call coloring within the lines. You want us to color outside of them.”

“Exactly,” I say, and Kevin nods. “We want his truth.” He knows he's struggling with this, but it's a worthwhile struggle.

The boys are sticking together, it seems, and Lonnie, a full-time student living at home, reads next. He writes of knowing Duncan Robert, of them working on cars together, how much fun that was, and now he's gone, and there's no one else like him to work with, to learn from.

“Why did this have to happen? Where did he really go?” His tone is belligerent. “My girlfriend says there's a lesson in everything. Just what was I supposed to have learned from this?”

He looks challengingly at me, sure I'm willfully withholding the answer, as I sit in the front of the room over my grade book.

“I've got no answers,” I tell him. “I'm just hoping to cure you of run-on sentences before the term is over.” They laugh.

“But I'm still moved by what he has read,” I tell all of them. “I can hear the honest expression of the anger at this unexpected loss behind his words—no chance to ask why, or say good bye, or are you coming back. He's captured real loss.”

They look at Lonnie with respect. He blushes, confused. Usually his anger gets him in trouble, especially in a classroom.

Monica is the first girl to step up to the front of the room. She tugs at her short skirt on the way up, making sure it covers what it needs to. She tells the story of her friend, who went out with Duncan Robert in high school once or twice, who still has a crush on him.

“They drifted apart, and my friend never understood why. She always felt it was some shortcoming on her part.” She looks up at us for a moment, pain in her eyes. “Now she's left wondering if she had any part in his jumping, because we don't really know why he jumped.” She closes her notebook, gives one last tug to her skirt and goes back to her seat.

“This is the stuff of good stories, isn't it?” I ask them. “The friend has made an emotional investment in someone and it hasn't paid off. What other stories does it make you think of?”

“
Romeo and Juliet
,” Carrie Jean says, “or
West Side Story
. They all loved each other, but it still didn't pay off.”

“
Great Gatsby
,” Kevin, our resident reader, calls out.

“
Carrie
,” says Lonnie, and they all laugh, but I can't disagree. The literature classes here all talk about the stories of Stephen King, since he's a fixture in these parts.

I notice that their stories are confessional, as if they were compelled to write about the Void, but they feel guilty doing so, as if they've betrayed a common code. I don't know what to do with that. I can't absolve them. I don't have even the imaginary power to do so. But I know they think I do.

So I ask them, “What do you want, by writing and sharing these stories of the Void?”

“I think we need to know,” Lonnie says.

“Know what?”

“What we're talking about,” Monica says honestly.

“What do you mean?”

And then Donal, their self-appointed leader, says, “We need a trip to the Void.”

They all look at me in agreement, in defiance, expecting me to say the things adults in authority say to them—parents, law enforcement, pastors—who say it directly and indirectly.
Stay away from it. You'd have to be crazy or have a death wish to do otherwise. We forbid you.
No one ever takes into account just normal, natural curiosity—or the fact that forbidding it, trying to make if off limits, just energizes curiosity into action. This is where they are now—energized by all the communal forbidding. Ready to take action.

I suggest we talk about it, hoping to defuse some of the energy. They're disturbed by it all—the existence of the Void, Duncan Robert's jump, his return. They know that Duncan Robert is alive, and yet that somehow makes the Void more disturbing to them, the return having generated an on-going story that lives rather than one that ended and could be forgotten.

I find myself talking to them about Voids in general, the things I know, because I do know a lot now. I do it because I hope it will help. It helped me some, after Duncan Robert jumped, as I thought back on our talks before the jump. Then, it had helped me to think generally about the Void, when everything in me had said to follow Duncan Robert, to help him, or save him somehow. How could I possibly let him jump alone? What kind of uncle was I?

But my feelings about it had remained mixed, like theirs now, and Duncan Robert had known it. I hadn't been sure. I worried if it was the right time. I felt the tug of responsibility here, in this world. Clearly, I didn't feel the call. We both knew that meant there could be no jumping for me.

Jumping is for clear feelings, clear purpose only. It's like unconditional love. You had to have that kind of clarity, that kind of certainty, to jump. And I didn't have it. Duncan Robert told me I had to respect my own humanness, my own instinct on this, and not feel guilt. Funny, I thought at the time, that's just what I would have told him, had the situation been reversed.

So, I worked at that. I could tell them what I'd learned. It didn't mean anyone had to do any jumping. I look at them a moment, not entirely sure I should proceed. It's one thing for them to write about it, another for their authority figure to talk about it, without seeming to encourage it.

“The Void is always there,” I tell them. “We seem to continually create the idea of it, tell the stories of it, include it in our philosophy and religion. We need it. It's the collection place—the dump—for everything we don't want. We create it, and we fill it—tossing our deepest fears together in one place, under one name, and then treating it like a real place. It's been around too long to just be imaginary. We know that better than anyone, because we've got one right here in our woods.

“And jumping? I see jumping as an act of life—jumping rope, jumping into water, jumping into someone's arms, jumping for joy, even jumping out of a plane. Jumping is natural to us. We like it because it brings us into an immediate and intense awareness of ourselves at a moment in which we're at our best—a moment of choice, of courage or joy or just plain fun. It can be empowering. We forget that, by the way, as we get older.” I'm into it now, excited to be telling it. It definitely feels like coloring outside of the lines.

“But a jump into the Void is a different story. We don't do it for fun, or on a dare, or because of a random urge. That's what bungee jumping or sky diving are for. It's not a place for suicide, either. The Void calls for a jump
into
life, not out of it. You've seen that, with Duncan Robert's return.”

“Like
Dante's Inferno
?” Kevin asks, and while taken aback by his question, I'm reminded again that I always know where they are in their survey of literature classes by their associations.

“Well maybe. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ I say wryly, remembering the poem. “Sure, or Captain Ahab being dragged to the bottom of the ocean,” I continue.