Leverage (26 page)

I
sit shotgun in Fisher's van as we roll into the McDonald's parking lot Saturday morning. Kurt is there waiting, along with my teammates, and it secretly thrills me. He half sits, half leans on the hood of Gradley's sedan, massaging his temples in slow circles while the other guys loaf around the duffel bags, minicoolers, and equipment plopped at their feet.

“That big fucker actually showed,” Fisher says, voicing my thoughts, if not my exact word choice. “Thought that was just bullshit about you inviting him.”

“Nope,” I answer, trying to hide my own disbelief. Fisher hand-cranks his window down and hollers out a greeting.

“Morning, boys!”

Menderson flips Fisher the bird. Kurt pushes himself off Gradley's car hood and the suspension lifts about three inches.

Bruce sits in the back of Fisher's van, using the big cooler stuffed with ice, soda, burger patties, and hot dogs as a bench. Silent since we picked him up, he opens the back doors, now, and hops out like he needs air. Paul Kim, Larry Menderson, and Pete Delray pile into the back of the panel van, marking their territory for the long drive by throwing duffel bags, backpacks, and pillows over the scattered carpet samples Fisher uses as flooring.

“I call the left wheel well,” Menderson shouts, jamming Pete with his shoulder and moving the small freshman out of the way.

“The space behind Fisher's seat is mine,” Paul calls.

“Where am I supposed to sit?” Pete whines.

“The roof is all yours,” Menderson says as bits of Sausage McMuffin spill out his mouth and tumble down his shirt.

Kurt moves slower than the others, like he's banged up real bad. I get out of the prized front seat and offer it to him.

“Take shotgun,” I say. He nods, still massaging his temples, stepping up into the van, rocking the whole vehicle with his weight. More guys pile into the back and then Gradley takes the leftovers in his sedan. Fisher swings through the drive-through and orders a seventy-two-ounce Coke to go along with his half-finished thirty-two-ounce Mountain Dew.

“You guys ready to roll?” he asks. It is still super early for a Saturday and Fisher is the only one mainlining caffeine, so his question dies on delivery. We pull out of the parking lot and our convoy of two heads for the highway exit.

“Anyone guh-guh-got aspirin?” Kurt asks.

“Danny, you got anything for the superstar here?” Fisher asks snidely, then glances over his shoulder into the pit of groggy bodies trying to get comfortable on the jouncing floor. “Hey, dorks, any of you got aspirin?”

“No!” Paul grumps.

I nudge Menderson's ribs with my toe until he opens one eye. “You got any aspirin?” I ask.

“No.”

“Soda's good for headaches,” Fisher says, handing Kurt his giant tub of Coke. Kurt takes it. “I always get a headache if I don't drink a Coke in the morning before school.”

I lean back against a rolled-up sleeping bag. There is no room for my legs with Menderson hogging the middle, curled up in a ball and snoring, so I prop my sneakers on his butt and shut my eyes.

 

“I've gotta piss.” Paul yawns. I open my eyes and glance at my watch. We've been driving for an hour and a half and should be close to the turnoff. I sit up.

“You think
you
do?” Fisher asks. “I've got a hundred and four ounces of soda in me. I keep flashing my lights at Gradley but the bastard won't pull over.”

Kurt has his jacket rolled up into a pillow and wedged between his head and the passenger side window. His mouth hangs partly open and I notice his eyes never really close as he sleeps, like he doesn't trust Fisher or the rest of us.

“Turn up here,” Bruce and I say at the exact same time, then look at each other.

“You guys going to give me directions
now
?” Fisher asks. “Unbelievable.” Gradley's sedan flashes its blinker and we follow him, turning off onto the unmarked dirt road that begins the unofficial back entrance up to the state park.

Canary-yellow leaves feather the forest. Here and there, tree foliage the color of young cherries and ripe pumpkins breaks out to dazzle our vision. Sun streams through the branches and dapples the morning mist. Kurt awakens all of a sudden and leans forward to get a full view of the scenery moving past the windshield, blinking against the color and light.

“Where are we?” he asks without a single stutter.

“Top secret,” Fisher says.

“It's Lorry State Park,” I explain. “Sort of. It's awesome here but where we're going is even awesome-er. It's not marked on regular maps.”

Gradley's car slowly leads the way over the rough gravel road and the inside of Fisher's van rattles like a shaking toolbox as we come to the first “No Trespassing” sign strung across rusted wire hanging between two oaks. I scoot forward to kneel on the transmission hump between Fisher and Kurt, grabbing each of their seats' armrests for balance. The gravel road slowly fades into a rutted forestry trail. The “No Trespassing” wire corralling the trees to our right drops away and after a couple hundred yards an even smaller path, barely wide enough for a car, veers up through the forested slope. No way could we have found it without first being shown, the secret passing down from senior to junior teammates every year on road trips like this one.

“Are we tuh-tuh-trespassing?” Kurt asks.

“Naw,” Fisher says. “It's still owned by the quarry company or their family or something but they're not out here. Signs are there to keep 'em from getting sued if some idiot drives off the cliffs. This way they can say they were warned.”

“Oh,” Kurt says like he's thinking about it. Then, as the van slips and jerks along the leafy trail, squeezing between tree trunks and scraping past thicket and bramble, Kurt leans forward to better see out Fisher's dirty windshield. “Wuh-wuh-what cliffs?”

“Big ones. You'll see,” Fisher says, wrestling the steering wheel and gunning the engine. The back end fishtails and then drops. Paul and Bruce both pop up and slam down against the rear wheel wells.

“Damn, Fisher!” Paul snaps. “Take it easy, willya?”

“Clam it!” Fisher snaps back. He's hunched over the steering wheel, gripping and twisting it while the engine whinnies.

Kurt props his left hand on the van's dashboard and peers intently out the windows as if we might drop off a cliff any second.

“You see flags nailed to the tree trunks, that means the cliffs are coming up,” Fisher tells Kurt. Kurt glances at Fisher and then back out into the forest creeping by our window. The sun shimmers through gold and maroon leaves and points of light penetrate the forest floor like drops of honey. It's so beautiful it makes me proud.

“Wait . . . luh-luh-like that one?” Kurt asks, jamming his finger right up to the windshield and pointing to a faded cloth ribbon nailed to the trunk of an oak tree.

“Yeah, that's one,” Fisher says, wrenching hard on the wheel as he guns the engine. The back tires spin over soggy leaves before rubber grabs something solid and we lurch forward, almost rear-ending Gradley's car.

“That's only a yellow flag,” Fisher says. “You see a red one, holler your ass off.”

“Wuh-wuh-what if we muh-muh-miss it?” Kurt asks.

“We're fucked,” Fisher says.

Kurt takes off his seat belt and cranks down his side window, all the better to spot flags and jump out the door. Suddenly he slaps the dashboard and points out Fisher's side. “Fuh-fuh-flag. A ruh-ruh-ruh-red one.” Fisher nods but otherwise ignores Kurt. In front of us, Gradley's car pulls off into the bramble. Fisher squeezes the van past the sedan. Kurt's eyebrows pull together. “Ruh-ruh-ruh-red flag!”

“Got it,” Fisher says, then throttles the engine. The van jumps forward. Kurt reaches over and almost rips Fisher's arm off.

“Ssssstop!”

“Okay, okay, relax.” Fisher grins.

Gripping Fisher's armrest for balance, I raise off my knees to a crouch. I know exactly where we are and Fisher's a dick for scaring Kurt but part of me didn't think someone like Kurt actually gets scared. The clearing appears, just a simple opening in the forest. You would never know from our angle in the van that at the edge of the clearing, the world drops away over the side of a man-made cliff, dug out when granite paid good money.

Coming up from the back, stepping over the others and squeezing next to me, Bruce finally joins the living. “This is far enough, Fish,” he says, stern as Mr. Klech. Fisher hits the gas one more time, watching Kurt while he does it.

Bruce cuffs Fisher on his head.

“Ouch!”

“Dumbass.” Bruce cuffs him again for good measure.

“Just trying to give the big man a first-timer's thrill is all,” Fisher says, and then throws the van in park and kills the engine. Paul opens the back doors and we pile out.

“Come on,” I order everyone, unable to contain myself any longer. I have one of the climbing ropes coiled around my shoulder. Coach Nelson donated all his old climbing gear and ropes to the team. He taught us how to take care of the ropes, to never drop them on the ground and never walk on them, and how to wind them up properly to make them last longer. He taught us how to knot them, clip in and tie into our harnesses, and how to belay a partner. Since we're trespassing, he can't lead us on this trip like he does the big trip upstate in the summer. But this secret location, we're pretty sure, was originally handed down from him, though he'd deny it.

“Hold your horses.” Bruce harrumphs like an old man, which I take as a good sign that he's coming around. I don't mind him cuffing Fisher at all.

“Kurt!” I shout back to the van. “Kurt, take a look at this.” Paul, Gradley, and Menderson trail behind me but they already know what lies ahead. It's not them I'm interested in. “Come on, man!” I turn around and watch Kurt slowly getting out of the van, stretching his arms wide and yawning. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes and then puts a hand up to shade out the partial sun. He's so big. And, at the moment,
slow
—it's killing me—as if he can't waste a single ounce of energy, as if he needs to store it all up for Friday night games.

“Come
on
!” I shout, ignoring everyone else, anticipating his reaction.

“Coming.”

Branches canopy overhead in gold and cranberry while the sun, rising higher, heating up, fights to punch down to the forest floor. Only at the edge of the quarry do you finally see the drop-off as the forest disappears, the sun bursts through, and light finally wins.

“Whoa!” Kurt exhales, peering over the edge, down the granite cliff to the water below. I clap my hands together as if I've conjured the magical scene change myself. I can't help it. Kurt now knows about the best place in the whole state because I invited him, because we chose to share it with him. Then it hits me that maybe Fisher's not so keen on anyone outside our group discovering it.

“Cool, huh?” I prompt. Kurt doesn't answer right away, just keeps looking out over the giant man-made canyon. I can tell the drop-off makes him wary because he refuses to move right up to the edge. It makes me feel strong watching someone as tough as Kurt be scared by something I think is so beautiful.

“Yeahhhh . . .” Kurt slowly answers, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Wuh-why's it here?”

“It isn't natural,” Menderson says. “It's totally man-made.”

“How far down? To the wuh-wuh-water.”

“About eighty feet,” Paul says. “If you walk the edge that way a couple hundred yards, the cliff lowers to about forty feet above the water.” Paul points along the edge of the forest that grows right up to the lip of the drop-off. At the edge, the sky pours down in blue so bright it hurts your eyes. It makes me want to thump my chest and breathe deep, holding all that blue sky inside me. The bridge of my nose starts to tickle under the strong rays and I'm sure it'll be pink by the end of the day.

“Wuh-wuh-was the lake always here?” Kurt ask.

“No,” I explain with a tone like I know what I'm talking about, but really I'm only repeating what I heard on my first trip up here last year. “They say the water's, like, two hundred feet deep. It filled up with rain and runoff after the quarry company abandoned the pit.”

Bruce walks up with two coiled ropes slung over each arm and a climbing harness in each hand. “Okay,” Bruce says, “let's give the big man here a little climbing lesson before we send him over the edge.” Bruce keeps sounding like his old self and, despite his being a dick to Kurt earlier, I want to slap Fisher on the back as a thank-you for his idea to come out here.

“I'm nuh-nuh-nuh-not going over thuh-thuh-that.”

“The hell you aren't,” Fisher says, his grin growing, enjoying Kurt's discomfort. I take back my wanting to thank him. Now I just want to shove him over the cliff. “Going down in ropes is cake. It's climbing up that's hard.”

“I nuh-nuh-never duh-duh-done this,” Kurt says. He takes a step back, eyes narrowing at me—at me only—as if blaming me for luring him into a trap. I'm responsible for this, for him.

“It's not that dangerous here,” I say, lowering my voice, feeling protective. “You're in ropes and someone is belaying you.”

“Wuh-wuh-what's that muh-muh-mean?”

“It's French, man,” Fisher says, like he knows any more than what Coach Nelson taught us. “Don't sweat it.”

“It means someone's controlling your rope,” I cut in, holding a hand up to Fisher's face to shut him up. “So if you slip or fall, you won't go anywhere, we've got you.”