Dave is too tall to feel like
I do inside this cardboard box that is to me almost as big as a house, the
boxes my grandfather and uncles unpack outboard motors from then leave in the
yard as trash, eyeholes where the handholds are, boxes that serve me as
spaceship, submarine, coffin, cave, me and Little Dave when I was as small as
Little Dave is now, rolling around in them, as if inside a log, or some monster
from outer space that launched us into outer space, or some whale that has
swallowed us whole.
I’m still small enough to
pretend; Dave – even being more than a year younger than I am – can’t, his feet
or head sticks out the open top no matter how we turn it and all he wants is
for us to find something real we can believe in.
He wants something we can
climb a mountain with or go deep into the sea in, something that won’t buckle
in the morning dew or wither when it rains.
I don’t blame him, and so go
along when he proposes we buy a rowboat from my uncles and sail down the river
to the sea, a foolish notion since we don’t have the money except what I can
steal, and since I steal from my uncles, they might get a bit suspicious if I
can offer to buy the row boat they have displayed in the front of the store,
even though nobody else offers to buy it.
We love the river, not just
where it crosses at the bottom of Crooks Avenue Paterson Great Falls
Mostly we wander on the banks
near the foot of the highway bridge where the river widens and banks of reeds
hide geese that sail in each fall and spring, and love where the river narrows
again at the Dundee Dam and the Dundee Falls – not great falls, not high, just
all ours, where the fish leap and seagulls swim and junk gets stuck, and we
crawl out along the ledge to collect it.
When we find the raft, I get
it into my head we can still sail to the sea – it is not a raft, Dave says,
it’s the top of a crate, and I tell him it could be a raft if we want it to be,
and I won’t have to steal much of my uncle’s money trying to buy a boat they
can’t sell.
All we need are poles, and
food to fill our backpacks, and a little help getting the crate top loose from
the top of the falls, and we get Little Dave and Dennis to help us, though we
won’t let them come along with us on the trip, too dangerous, too many things
might go wrong, my head filled with visions of pirates and Russians, while Dave
tells me he’s scared of sharks, not the small kind like the dead one he said he
found once down stream near the rail road bridge, the kind with sharp teeth and
lust for blood, then I get scared too, and want even more to get started.
In the dead of night, I lift
enough from my uncle’s pant to buy the stuff we need for the trip, unloading it
later at Weiss’s Foodtown, the neighborhood supermarket located at Second
Street and Lakeview where we routinely buy stick matches, but not the peas for
our peashooter, to which my grandmother frequently sent me for something my
uncles forgot when she sent them there to shop – with me still searching for
the ten dollar bill I once dropped during one of those trips as if after all
the previous searches it would suddenly and magically appear, a place where I
am as well-known to the clerks as I am to the local police, dropping down on
the grocery checkout our collection of supplies the way Lewis or Clark must
have at the start of their adventure more than a century ago, the clerk
frowning over each piece because these goods are so different from the goods my
family usually purchases, too many loaves of white bread, too many jars of
peanut butter and jelly, a large bottle of grape juice, along with matches,
batteries for flash lights and pocket radio, and more, finally packing each
into paper bags, me, Big Dave, Little Dave and Dennis carried away in a caravan
to the street and down the hill, in a direction away from where we lived, to
add to the other supplies we each snuck out of our houses, extra socks, extra
underwear, and thicker clothing we will need when we eventually reach climes
where the temperatures drop.
Dave brings a flash light,
compass, pocket knife and canteen, he lifted out of his father’s locker in the
upstairs closet where all the war stuff is stored, claiming we might need the
compass to keep from getting lost, something I argue isn’t possible since we’re
be following the river most of the way, though even I have a hazy vision of
what might happen when we actually reach the sea, Little Dave and Dennis waving
at us as we sail off into the middle of the shallow water at the foot of the
Dundee Falls, shouting after us as to when we think we might come back, Dave
shouting back, “never,” if things work out the way we’ve planned, me wondering
what my uncles will say when I don’t get back by curfew, thinking about the
rowboat we can’t have, and the boxes out of which Big Dave’s feet always stick,
for the first time trying to imagine what we really might find when the crate
top that is not a raft takes us out of sight of where we live, homesick
already, but I don’t tell Dave, wondering if it is possible to sail all the way
to California, the place I really want to see, can’t imaging, even when I was
still small enough to find in the cardboard box comfortably.
We watch the shore shrink, at
Little Dave and Dennis growing smaller, as small as we used to be, and then
vanish, and we pushing poles to keep from getting stuck on stone, or sailing
into the backwater from which we can never get out, then we sail under the rain
road bridge, passed places my uncles sometimes talked about when they were as
old as we are now: paper mills their aunts and uncles worked in, factories that
shut their doors before my uncles would work there, too, then around other
curves, under other bridges, near where the smokes stacks of still other
factories rise, then open land on one side and houses on the other, near where
the river seems to run straight for a while.
Dave wants to know how far
the sea is; I can’t tell him. Dave wants to know if we’ll reach it before dark;
I don’t know that either. Dave wants to know if we’ll run out of food, or drown
or get eaten by sharks neither of us has actually ever seen.
The brown water is deep, if
not wide, framed by rippled walls of metal, like crumpled typewriter ribbon
stretched out with brown or tan rust marks to indicate how high the river has
risen at times, lower now that it has been, yet deep enough so that we see
nothing when we look down into it. We no longer need the poles to propel us as
the water is too deep and the current catches us and drives us on wherever it
wants, we merely using the poles to push pieces of things out of our way,
branches or bottles or even a few dead animals the water has warped so we can
only guess what the animal was before the river twisted it into something else.
Dave asks if our families
will miss us by which me means he already misses them, though we both know
Dennis well tell them all, and Dave’s mom will call the police just as she has
each time we have tried to run away before, the last time the police finding us
in the quarry in the midst of a blizzard and me wondering how they can find us
now if we really reach the sea, and we might have done better, gone faster, in
the road boat nobody else wanted but us to buy, and then Dave tells me we are
sinking.
Not fast, not like a real
boat might, inch by inch, the water feeling the pores of the crate lid that is
not really a raft, so everything gets heavy, soggy, and instead of floating
over the water, the wood glides about an inch under it, our feet already wet,
our backpacks saturated and held down only by the weight of what they contain.
Then Dave tells me, he can’t
swim.
We are dead center in the
middle of fast water with poles that can’t reach the bottom or to either side,
traveling slower and slower as the raft that is not a raft slowly sinks, and
water that was just over our toes before is now over our ankles and nobody
anywhere we can see to call for help, except for some cars to the west speeding
along the road there, and I don’t know what to tell Dave, so we both start to
yell.
When we can’t yell anymore I tell Dave I will
teach him how to swim, remembering when my uncle taught me by throwing me into
a part of Greenwood Lake ten times over my head, only I can’t throw Dave
anywhere; I just push him in when he least expects and dive into the water
after him as the crate top that is not a raft goes by, a little higher in the
water than it was because we’re not on it any more.
Dave gurgles between screams,
even after I swim over to where he splashes and show him out to tread water;
his gurgling ceases, but not his screams, or his cursing me and my fate and his
father for ever being born, promising to kill me if he ever survives my
drowning him, clutching me like he would one of those round life preservers we
see in the movies on the sides of ships and which my uncle sells, but I never
thought to steal, and with him still clutching me, I start a slow, painful swim
towards shore, his weight dragging me down the way our weight did the raft,
just as I drag him down with all of my schemes, the oily water worse than the
lack of air, its taste cling to my tongue so I gag; I will never be rid of it.
When Dave runs out of breath,
he stops cursing; we reach the rusted metal wall. He clings to it instead of
me, a six-foot two-inch infant unable to find his mother’s tit to suck, his
chest and my chest heaving, his breath and my breath mingling as we both gasp
for air, his face and my face covered with the oily slick the water leaves,
dripping down off our brows like sweat, his fingers and mine finding the tiny
crevices by which we might rise out of the water, inch by inch, a baptism
neither of us intended, a rebirth neither of us expected, lost yet not lost, not
lost in a way we thought we would be, inch by inch, dripping that oily water
from all of our pores, fingers finally finding the top where the helpful hands
of the cops haul us up, shaken yet not completely sad. Dave’s question still
resonates in my head: will they miss us when we’re gone, and the answer: they
already have.
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