The Sledding Hill (2 page)

W
hen you first die, you don't know you're dead. You know something is
way
different, but you've been playing the game with such intensity, it's hard to realize you've just stepped out of it. The good news is, there's no pain. First I'm pinned to the floor and there is no physical sensation except I can't move, and then I look to a spot on the floor right beside me and suddenly I'm at that spot looking back at a seriously expired Billy Bartholomew, and I'm thinking,
Dang! That was dumb. I'm on the bleachers by the time Eddie finds me, and I try to holler at him before remembering that when you weigh only twenty-one grams—the difference between the weight of a live body and that same body croaked—you have no room for a voice box. So I watch and root for him as he tries to pry my body from under the Sheetrock, which is just too heavy. And I think, Eddie just went into a
dark
room in his Earthgame; two important guys dead in one month, and he found them both. And then he is out of the gym and out to the hot springs, and I keep trying to get his attention to let him know it's okay, but I don't remember how to do that yet.

The longer you're dead, the clearer you become about what the deal is: that your Earth life, which lasted what seemed like a long fourteen years, was not even a subatomic blip in eternal time, and that you just hit
TILT
! You also remember instantly that emotions are for the living and you don't need them
anymore, and in fact they aren't available. There is huge joy—not the emotion of happiness, but the pure joy of
knowledge
—and a sense of coming home. The knowledge itself is monstrous, huge and expanding at warp speed, and you laugh in wonder at all the crazy considerations you had while playing the Earthgame because you were so focused you thought things were important. You immediately understand what the
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff
book was about. You know that in the blink of an eye to the minus one billionth, universe time, when all your friends will also be dead, you can bump into any one of them you want to, so even if you could feel emotion, it wouldn't be sadness.

I could take right off, but once I see my friend struggling so hard to get my abandoned body out from under all that weight, then fleeing to the hot springs, curiosity and my sense of connection to him draws me to stay. I wonder if I can help; not to get my body free, but to deal with what seems to
him like a hurricane of calamity in his life. He looks
so
freaked out.

So I hang around a second, universe time.

In case you think that's some big sacrifice, you should know that once you're dead again—which is like being truly alive—you can haul yourself around eternity at soul-boggling speeds. Earth scientists consider the speed of light to be the ultimate speed. We travel at the speed of
imagination.
Light speed is to imagination speed as the forming of the Grand Canyon is to NASCAR. Times a zillion. Hard to explain in the relative language of Earth. You have to be here. The point is, I can hang around a second and at the same time whip back and forth rediscovering the knowledge of eternity, which I left at the doorstep when I entered Earth. You did, too. So did Eddie Proffit. But the unique thing about Eddie is, he brings the ghost of a memory for his life before life to his Earthgame. That's the good news and the bad news—more accurately, the advantage and the
challenge—for him, because while it gives him incredible insight, it also makes him touchy, as in sensitive, and his bouncing brain doesn't allow him to focus on any one thing for too long. Eddie can light on a truth and be gone before he ever knows he was there. What I know now that I'm dead is that there is a microminisecond when his brain is in mid bounce, when I can bump him.

Two dead bodies in a month. Both loved ones. That much loss can take out the best of us. If you had seen the desperation on his face, the
intent
, while he was trying to get me out from under that Sheetrock, and felt the pounding of his heart while he was buried in the mud at the hot springs, you'd know why I'm going to watch a second, universe time.

 

Eddie sees right away that a big advantage to falling silent is that you get to stop explaining yourself. You're allowed a period of grace if the condition
seems to have sprung from the violent deaths of your father and your best friend, and that period of grace gives you a head start into a later time when adults in charge and other detractors decide you have grieved long enough and it's time to speak up.

There are disadvantages as well. Over a relatively short period Eddie irritates virtually everyone with reason to communicate with him. Also he goes without certain luxuries—like the feather-light, iron-tough pair of New Balance running shoes at Bowlden's Sporting Goods, or the four-pound butter horn in the window of Stiburk's Bakery—and even a few necessities, because staring longingly at something you want might just make those capable of giving it to you,
not
give it just to see if they can make you talk. Eddie accustoms himself to a certain level of deprivation.

In the end, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, while irritating certain people may fall into the negative column, irritating others,
such as the Reverend Sanford Tarter, is most definitely a plus. Eddie and I have been anticipating Tarter in our lives for some time, with significant trepidation. The reverend is a fire-and-brimstone, eye-for-an-eye kind of preacher who can make a simple thing such as being a sinner seem like taking center stage in a Stephen King novel. Under normal circumstances a sinner could avoid him by simply staying away from his church, but he's also one of three Bear Creek High School English teachers, so unless you drop out of school after junior high to work in the lumber mill, he'll get his hands on you.

You start hearing about Tarter around fifth grade, and the day you hear about him is a good day to start worrying. He is the king of creative discipline. Somehow he has cleared with the school board certain techniques of torment, such as requiring student insurgents to stand before the class with their arms extended to the sides, like a crucifixion without the cross, or sit with their backs against the wall
as if in a chair, without benefit of that chair. He calls these “stress” positions, and they are evidently perfect to assume when you need to think about what you've done wrong, like chewing gum or talking out of turn or trying to get the attention of a friend when you're bored almost blind.

Eddie has many reasons for wishing his dad was still around, but a big one right now would be to insulate him from Tarter. They were exact opposites; Tarter is five-six and weighs 132 pounds and John Proffit was six-five and weighed 231. (
That's
a little coincidence only I, from my privileged vantage point, know.) Eddie's mom and dad were very different in their religious beliefs, Mrs. Proffit far more traditional and “fundamental” in her quiet way, and Mr. Proffit a believer only in what he could see and touch. Mrs. Proffit attended church religiously—pun intended—and Mr. Proffit attended on Christmas and Easter to hear his wife sing in the choir. Eddie started going to Sunday school in first
grade because that was prerequisite for Friday night roller skating in the church basement. I went, too, to protect him, because when your mind wanders the way Eddie's does, skating on a crowded roller rink is classified under “danger to self and others.”

Sunday school is where Eddie first ran afoul of Tarter.

His first difficulty came when we were eight. Mr. Foster was our Sunday school teacher, and he had just told us the Old Testament story of Jonah living in the belly of a whale. The way Eddie's mind works, when he hears some great story like that he has to picture it, imagine what it would really be like. He'd seen
Pinocchio
, and Pinocchio also spent time in the digestive tract of a fish, so he could see how a cartoon character could pull it off, but the Question Man inside him, the Man Who Seeks the Truth No Matter the Consequence, told him if you were a real human inside a real whale it would be seriously dark and you'd be working your way through all kinds of
slime if you were looking for a way out, which you most certainly would be.

“What kind of protective rain gear did Jonah have?” Eddie asked.

We all looked up.

“Excuse me?” Foster said. Foster ran Three Forks Auto Parts and volunteered reluctantly as a Sunday school teacher.

“My dad told me the digestive juices in a human stomach are strong enough to dissolve a jawbreaker like a sugar cube in hot water,” Eddie said. “A whale's gotta have at least as strong digestive juices as us, right? And if Jonah's in there wearing his regular Bible clothes, it seems like they'd get, like, seriously eaten up. So I thought he must've had some kind of special rain gear or something.”

“God was taking care of Jonah,” Mr. Foster said.

“I know,” Eddie said back. “That's what you said. So did he give him a special suit? Or did he just make the whale's stomach acids not work? That's no
fair to the whale. I mean, even if he's gonna spit Jonah up whole in a day or two, there has to be a bunch of other stuff down there he needs to digest. I mean, whales just suck in everything. You know—” Eddie stopped because I put my hand over his mouth.

“Eddie, being a true Christian is about having faith. It is disrespectful to question lessons from the Bible. What you hear in this room is true.”

Eddie gave a muffled okay, because I wouldn't take my hand away. I could see by the marble popping up at the top of Foster's jaw that Eddie was close to trouble, which happened often when he went ahead and said what he was thinking.

But when your mind bounces like Eddie's, it's easy to forget what you've been told, and a couple of weeks later, when we were hearing about Moses allegedly parting the Red Sea to help his people get out of Egypt, Eddie started wondering about the sea life on the bottom.

“I could see how the fish could just swim off to the side and stay where the water is,” he said, “but what about the crustaceans and stuff that lived on the bottom? It had to take a while for the Israel guys to get across, right? I mean, it's a sea, not just like a small lake. Wouldn't the animals that lived on the bottom dry up or drown in the air?”

“God takes care of all his creatures,” Foster said, and Eddie could see the marble growing again, but when you're Eddie you get pretty used to being in trouble, especially in places where you're supposed to be quiet or speak one at a time, so being in trouble isn't an abnormal or distressing circumstance.

“Yeah, I know you said he takes care of all his creatures—and I won't even count the chipmunk my mom killed in the car on the way to school Friday—but did he move them over so they could still be under the water, or did he just make it okay for them to be dry?” And before Foster could answer: “Oh, he would of moved them over, or all
those Israel guys would be stepping on them.” And before I could get my hand over his mouth: “'Course that would give them a lot better traction.”

Foster was up and out of the room, and the next face we saw was Tarter's and we got to see some biblical
wrath
, because now
Eddie
was up and out of the room and his feet didn't touch the floor once. I couldn't hear exactly what Tarter said to him, but I did hear the word “blaspheme” four times. I got anxious for class to be over so I could see if Tarter had disappeared Eddie. He hadn't, but he sure made him stand with his arms out for a long time.

Mr. Foster began sending Eddie to a wooden bench in the hall when he got tired of not answering his questions adequately. Eddie was grateful for the bench, because it was a lot easier to sit there than it was to stand in the outer alcove with his arms extended. Between the bench and my hand over his mouth, that was the last time we saw Tarter that mad for a while, though Tarter stopped us a week
later as we were leaving the Sunday school and asked Eddie if his dad was putting him up to this.

Eddie said, “Up to what?”

“All the foolish questions.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as a foolish question.”

“Your dad
is
putting you up to this.”

Eddie shook his head, incensed because he resented that Tarter thought he wasn't smart enough to come up with his own foolish questions. In truth, Tarter would rather they came from Eddie than Mr. Proffit, because Eddie's dad was the smartest gas station owner in five states and Tarter couldn't make him stand with his arms out like he could with Eddie.

F
or a while, right after all the dying, it seems to Eddie like it's All Tarter, All the Time. He's going to church with his mother because, well, because she makes it hard to refuse. Without benefit of speech, it's tedious to come up with an excuse, so he listens to her sing and lets his mind wander.

He listens in short spurts to Reverend Tarter's words and imagines his father arguing with him down by the gas pumps, and he starts smiling and sometimes giggling, which is right about the
time he gets his mother's elbow in his ribs.

Once school starts he'll have Tarter as a teacher every day, as a preacher on Wednesdays and Sundays,
and
Tarter has started coming to his house two or three times a week to help Eddie's mom with her “grieving process.”
That
doesn't feel quite right, because often he stays for dinner and sits where Eddie's dad once sat. It is not a good way for Eddie to spend dinnertime, particularly with Tarter urging him to consider what his silence is doing to his mother, to rejoin the world, which he never really unjoined; he just reduced his participation. Eddie isn't talking, so he can't say that, and Tarter rambles, undeterred. Eddie continues to imagine his father answering.

It would be hard to articulate how much Eddie misses his dad. Before my dad started helping him, if it hadn't been for
his
dad, Eddie would have accepted the mantle of dumbest kid in our class. Most of his schoolwork indicated that his parents
should have thrown him back. But Mr. Proffit's brain was the prototype for Eddie's, so he taught him to deal with it. “When teachers say you have a disorder,” Eddie's dad told him, “they're full of it. Your mind just works differently. Most kids dwell on one thing at a time, which is usually whatever boring thing the teacher is talking about. You pick the parts that have the power to hold your attention, and when they aren't interesting anymore, you move on, like anyone who doesn't want to die of boredom should. And besides, listen to you,” he went on. “You and Billy sound like a couple of English profs.”

Any time Eddie came home crying, once again in trouble for not paying attention or for speaking out of turn, his dad told him not to worry; that he'd be an astronaut while the rest of us were balancing other people's taxes or selling insurance or teaching school. Then they'd retire to the backyard and find the North Star or the Big Dipper or Orion's Belt, and Eddie would pay attention just fine.

Eddie does not like looking to the head of his kitchen table at the Reverend Tarter instead of his dad.

 

I've been dead a good two months, Earth time; Eddie no longer visualizes my coffin as it disappears into that dark hole (believe me,
I
didn't go there with my body that
could
be feeding worms and mud varmints but instead is filled with formaldehyde and stuffed into an airtight box so it can do
no
environmental good), no longer automatically wonders what I'd say about the latest Seattle Mariner trade or whether Montana West is the craziest girl in school.

And then he closes his eyes one night and there I am, all dead and stuff, staring at him exactly like I was the day he tried to turn me over. When I get his full attention, I
smile
. If he weren't so freaked out, he'd want to know what I think I have to smile about, but he
is
freaked out and pops awake like he's spring-loaded. And there I am, framed in his bedroom window, staring through the blackness, and he
leaps up and pulls the drapes, except he knows I've found my way into his closet, because he can
hear
me there! And he flips on the light and jerks open the closet door, but the noise is suddenly behind him in the big storage closet on the other side of the room, so he jerks
that
door open, and it is seriously dark in there. If he wants light, he has to walk a good ten feet into the darkness and screw in the lightbulb, which there is
no
chance of his doing, so he slams the door and sits on his bed with the lights on, sweating like he's going to melt.

Now, you gotta know it isn't really
me.
I might try to scare Eddie into the next time zone if I were alive, but scaring him while I'm dead could get him a mental-health diagnosis.

His mother hears the closet door slam and hollers up from her bedroom, though she knows he won't answer because mute guys, by definition, don't answer, and he flips out the light and crawls
way
under the covers, because he wants her to think he's
asleep if she comes up and he wants me to think he's
gone
in case she doesn't.

After that night Eddie thinks he's going stark raving mad, and if I weren't privy to information the living aren't, I might have thought that, too. In his mind, I'm everywhere. Mrs. Proffit opened the service station again because “We have to eat,” and while she's filling the tank and checking the oil in some customer's car, Eddie washes the windows all the way around, and guess whose face fills up the back one, looking the same, all dead and smiling. (I didn't look
that
bad the day he found me.) He sees me in stores. Out at the hot springs. I almost scare him into talking, but he doesn't know who to tell.

It comes to a head on a Wednesday night. Mrs. Proffit is ready for church, and Eddie sits on the couch watching TV. She is getting better at decoding his style of communication, such as it is, understanding that if he doesn't move once she's ready, he's probably not going unless she makes it a big deal.

He doesn't imagine his mom would be much help should I decide to suck his blood or scoop out his eyeballs with a spoon, but there's comfort in having somebody—anybody—in the house when you're under ghostly siege, and his mom isn't gone more than fifteen minutes before he wishes he'd gone with her. But it's too late, so he turns on every light in the downstairs part of the house, microwaves a bag of Paul Newman's buttered popcorn, turns on the TV, loud, and wraps himself in a blanket on the couch.

Wind whistles through the branches on the large pine tree next to the house, and fat raindrops begin splattering against the windows. In the distance, thunder rumbles. The sky lights up, and he throws off the blanket and scurries around the living room, pulling the drapes. The last thing he needs is theatrical lighting behind my smiling dead head, should I make an appearance.

I said before, when you're dead there are a few people you can
bump,
and Eddie is a prime candidate.
But you can't bump them just anytime, because you weigh twenty-one grams and you are feathery. You are subtle. You need an
in.
I would give Eddie a big break right here, but he gives me no
in.
He is busy being deranged, which clogs all his avenues.

He flips to the Discovery Channel because how bad could
that
be, and that's exactly what he finds out. The Discovery Channel has discovered a real live haunted house. A woman in a small town in Massachusetts was murdered in this house generations ago. The police never solved her murder, but at certain times the current occupants encounter what looks like a stain on the wall but turns out to be the ghostly outline of the victim, screaming. The stain is brownish red and if whoever sees it summons the courage to
touch
it—like why would they? Eddie wonders, but they do—it feels wet. Now while this might be, given his current emotional state, a good time to see if he can find Lassie on the Animal Channel, he can't pry his gaze from the
screen. A family member will be minding their business and the stain appears behind them and they turn around and see it and Eddie pulls the blanket over his head and then, like a soldier calling in friendly fire, makes a sight tunnel and keeps right on watching for the next victim. Outside, the wind howls and rain slaps against the windowpanes like running soles on wet pavement.

Some totally irrational voice tells him he can scare me out of his head with the likes of
this
. It's like with forest fires, he thinks. Firefighters create a controlled fire around the uncontrolled fire to stop it from spreading. It makes a certain kind of sense, because even though the story on the Discovery Channel is supposed to be real (it is only about 6.3337 percent accurate), the family members are actors and the face, though big-time scary, lacks the power of being a real live dead person, unlike yours truly. Eddie pulls the blanket tighter. A girl, the youngest daughter, stands at the kitchen counter making a peanut-butter
sandwich. She is alone, and behind her the shadowy stain begins to form. The low, dark music builds, and if Eddie were talking he'd scream at her, but he's not, and the stain becomes more and more pronounced. The girl pats the top of the sandwich as violin strings increase to a scream and—

CRACK!
A bolt of lightning flashes so close to Eddie's house that deafening thunder roars simultaneously and the room goes black. Eddie screams, because that's not exactly talking and he couldn't help it if it were. His heart hammers against his chest as he hyperventilates like an industrial-strength respirator. It's darker than a bat cave (which is blindingly bright compared to a black hole, but Eddie doesn't have a black hole to compare with), and he's
sure
something's going to grab him, so he throws off the blanket and leaps up, whirling in the middle of the living-room rug like a kickboxer, sensing fingers millimeters from his neck.

Above the beating rain and the howling wind, a
voice in his head says, Turn into the slide. (I swear it isn't me.)

He freezes; listens:
Turn into the slide.

On a Saturday afternoon the winter before he died, Eddie's dad took Eddie behind the service station to teach him to drive his pickup on ice. It would be several years before Eddie was eligible for his license, but Mr. Proffit liked to stay ahead of the game with important things, wanted Eddie ready for the tough challenges. Eddie's dad pushed the seat all the way back, let Eddie sit between his legs so Eddie could operate the steering wheel while he operated the brakes (and take over the wheel if the situation called for it). Mr. Proffit put them into slide after slide. “Everything in you will tell you to turn the wheel away from the direction of the slide,” Mr. Proffit said before the first try, “but that will just throw you further out of control. Trust me.”

Easier said than done. His dad was right.
Every
thing in Eddie said turn away, and he did and
they slid across the back lot, time after time. But eventually Eddie got the hang of it, and finally his dad hit the brakes and Eddie turned into it and lo and behold the pickup straightened out. To Eddie it seemed like saying “yes” while shaking his head no, but there was a
free
feeling to it, like he'd tricked the universe, or at least discovered one of its minor secrets, which, in fact, he had.

That
is the feeling Eddie now seeks, and the voice is telling him to go in exactly the wrong direction to make things right.

He feels his way along the wall to the kitchen, slowly past the table, the stove, the fridge, to the closed door to the stairway leading to the cold, unfinished basement. He steps through, pulls it shut, grips the handrail like a lifeline, and moves slowly into the pitch black.

It's been weeks since Eddie first saw me dead, and he is sick to death of being scared; so sick he's willing to give up and die to escape the dread, or at least
thinks he is. At the bottom of the stairs he releases the handrail, moves to the middle of the room, and sits on the cold concrete. If you're coming for me, Billy B., he thinks, just do it. He hears himself sobbing, but he will sit here in the middle of the basement floor in pitch black until something gets him or until he's not scared anymore. He trembles and sobs, and he waits, past the embarrassment of being newly fourteen and crying like a baby, past the belief that the universe hates him and is killing off those most important to him, past the awful emptiness of his loss. This is what I loved about my friend when I was alive. He's a skinny little guy who can run like the wind, but at some point he turns and stands his ground. If I weighed more than twenty-one grams I'd grab his hand and lead him up the stairs.

I'm turning into the slide, he thinks over and over and over.

Eddie doesn't know how much time passes, but finally his heartbeats slow and he realizes
nothing
bad is happening
. He hasn't seen my face once. His tears dry. He stands, chilly in just his pajama bottoms and bare feet. He works his way slowly back to the steps. I'm gonna be okay, he thinks. I beat it.

And a mouse runs across his foot.

He screams so loud his voice would be hoarse for two days if he were using it and dashes toward the closed door, slipping twice, cracking his forehead on a stair. He kicks the basement door open, then the kitchen door, then the back porch door and is suddenly screaming down the street. Unaware until later of the throbbing in his forehead or the freezing pavement beneath his feet or the wind whistling in the trees around him, he runs. All of Bear Creek is dark; not a streetlight shines, not a car moves. He runs past the station, past the Mercantile and Woody's Grocery, gouging his bare feet in the gravel intersections, feeling nothing. For days afterward, people will talk of the awful shrieking that pierced the black of that night, though no one will know its source.

Exhausted and terrorized, Eddie crawls in under the low branches of a tall pine tree on the courthouse lawn, eight blocks from his house. In the fraction of a second between his feeling of terror and that of safety, I see a window and swoosh through.
“What are you doing here?”

He glances around, sees nothing.

“Does the combination of lightning and a tall tree concern you at all?”

“Who's there?” he says.