Dave sits in the front window of his second floor apartment
near Vernon and Crooks like a
Buddha, long fingers wrapped around one of the two plastic walkie talkies we
bought downtown in the cheap electronic store where the Rivoli Theater used to
stand.
Click, click, he flicks the switch, asking if anyone can
hear him, trucks rolling by on their way towards Lakeview Avenue and the hill
down Crooks Avenue that takes them back to the highway and beyond.
At the best of times, I barely hear him from my third floor
bedroom in my house at the top of the hill, a desperate voice lost in a sea of
static to which I can barely reply.
Dave needs to catch the truckers before they get over the
hill. So he sits in wait, watching for the trucks when they cross Trenton
Avenue a block down from him and calls to them
until they pass out of reach. If they hear him they honk, the way they used to
before Dave got his small radio, when we stood on the corner and jerked our
arms at their approach, imitating how the truckers pull down on the cord inside
their cabs to set off the air horn.
Dave loves truckers more than he loves anyone, even his
family, mother, brother, sister, father, and yells loudly when one of the
truckers actually calls him back, the voice of a god rippling through the
plastic grill of his cheap radio.
This doesn’t happen often, but the truckers all seem to know
who he is when they come into the neighborhood, that kid with the cheap radio
reaching out to them from someplace near and yet remote, someplace maybe they
were when they were his age, a lost soul beyond a dashboard thick with
cigarette burns and spilled coffee.
Dave dreams of a day when he can be out there like they are,
moving along highways from one remote place to another, away from the remote
place where he is currently trapped, that cheap plastic radio his only
connection to an unreal world he hopes someday to make real.
We come down from the mountain on that third path to a flat
land that was once a railroad, thick now with fireweed and tall grass, walking
our bicycles where the wheels roll over stones we dare not ride on.
We walk side by side even after the land gets even, this
place that once ran rails all the way the Hudson River, the slant of its
remains leading to an abandoned rail road station my family once used,
splinters and rust now, and heavy layers of dust on signs saying Scranton or
Hoboken, places we barely know exist.
Dave doesn’t love this place the way I do, no trains to
watch, he says.
I see the train with their plumes of ghostly smoke rolling
out over Paterson’s roof tops as
ghostly trains roll by.
We drag out bikes over the gravel and the last of the rails
to the flatter land slanting down towards where the work crews construct the
new highway, a road Dave tells me will touch both coasts at either end, and
bring tractor trailers from places so far away he can barely imagine, and
drivers he can speak to over his CB in the middle of the night.
Dave loves the road more than he loves trains, and comes
down to where the work men have their trailers, asking as he has asked before,
just when they think they will finish so he can ask the truck drivers to talk
to him, and the worker, who know us by this time, laugh and say, they may never
get done.
And as we usually do, we beg them for water they issue us in
cone-like paper cups with water out of a large silver cooler, pushing the lever
down to let the ice water flow, we feel through the paper straight into the
palms of our hands.
And then, we roll on, Devil’s Crack above us as we move west
on those lanes already complete, but not yet open to traffic, our wheels the
first wheels other than those of the workmen to roll over, as it turns through
the gap that makes way for the Passaic River to pass, and Devil’s Crack a gap
in the flat face of stone on one side of that gap, filled with ice in winter
and dripping streams from the mountain above this time of year with the turn of
flat land the rail road once rode over, some of which the highway absconded
with, workmen ignoring the flat face of the mountain and its widening crack up
which kids like us often try to climb, the way he climb up and down the walls
of the quarry a mile south; this face a terrible face from which kids like us
often fall, against which the town puts up fences, kids like us always tear
down, and warning signs kids like us ignore, more an invitation, a challenge we
must take, and so, we do, me, Dave and tag-a-long Dennis, who has about as much
business being with us as Little Davy would, we fitting our fingers and toes
into the tiny fissures past blasting for the railroad made, feeling the sharp
edges bite into our palms the way the workmen’s ice water does, rising, inch by
inch, crevice by crevice, to this ledge and the next, not looking back to the
widening crack we can’t see close up, too large for our imagination when all we
can see in the next place to fit our fingers or our toes and keep from falling.
Some kids, when standing below, say they see eyes here,
staring down from above the wide crack we climb. Other times, we think we’ve
seen them, too. Not now.
The highway workers watch and laugh as they always do when
kids try this, making bets among themselves as to how high we will get before
we lose courage and turn back, telling us later how we look like pathetic
spiders clinging to webs nobody can see, and they gasping when Dennis, who is
behind me and I’m behind Dave, loses his grip and falls, not far, not all the
way down, just to a ledge with stones so loose, he had to cling to one of the
protruding rocks to keep from sliding off like many of the stones do.
Above me, with his long arms still reaching high into the
dark crevice, Dave looks back and cries for his brother he assumes he will
lose, while below, the highway workers rush to the guard rail shouting for one
of us to save him.
Since I’m closer, I go down first, inch by inch, told hold
by toe hold, clinging to stones I hoped my fingers will not pull loose,
cringing each time my toes send pebbles falling down onto the ledge to which
Dennis clings, and ducking again the shower Dave’s decent from above sends down
on me.
Inch by inch, two spiders gripping places we think we cannot
grip, non-existing cracks in the face of the crack we find in our desperation.
We do not come down onto the ledge where Dennis clings. We
go to either side of it, Dave to his right, me to the left, telling Dennis the
whole time to stay calm, urging him finally to make his way in my direction
since my side seems to have better places to grip than Dave’s.
Inch by inch, Dennis moves towards me, each movement causing
an avalanche of pebbles off the ledge beneath his feet, dragging his feet down
with it, forcing him to cling all the more with his fingers to a ledge of stone
none of us know will hold.
Inch by inch, he comes closer to the ledge’s end and the
supposed better footing where I am, inch by inch until he comes close enough
for me to grab his hand, holding it, putting his weight on me long enough for
him to make the transition from the ledge of sliding stone to a foot hold on
the flat face of rock.
Then, as spiders, we three make our way the rest of the way
down, to the pile of loose stone slanted against the bottom of Devil’s Crack,
and from this we scurry down to the more solid ground near the guard rail and
the watching highway workers, who pat our backs and give us cups of water,
telling us how brave we are.
We are not brave, least of all Dave, who vows never to try
this again, or even chance the walls of the quarry which we know has more to
hold on to, even if no less high. He says he intends to keep horizontal not
vertical, by which he means his route will follow the same route the truckers
take, and so he falls even deeper in love with the road, and makes up get back
on our bikes for a ride out the completed section, not west, but east, waving
at the workmen as we travel towards that part of the highway just beyond the
border of Paterson and beyond where the it crosses over the Passaic River
again, to where the guard rail crosses over all six lanes, and traffic rushes
towards us from the far east where it starts at the George Washington Bridge,
veering suddenly north rather than straight, the three of us, sitting on our
bicycles as the cars charge straight, and turn, as if we are defying them, standing
guard over sacred ground even Dave believes sacred, aware that when the highway
is finished and the guard rails come down, our world will be altered forever
into something even we cannot predict.
We got another threat to turn off our water from the
recently renamed Suez water company
in Hackensack.
Suez had an evil
reputation under its former name since it is largely water services that have
been privatized, and so the public appears to have fewer options when it comes
to complaints.
This changes from town to town, depending on whether the
government maintains a municipal utilities authority to provide over sight.
In our case, moving from Jersey City
to Union City apparently stripped
us of our ability to control this water company’s bad habits – even though both
cities use the company.
We never meant to get a contract with the company, but had
purchased our house prior to the privatization of the services in Jersey
City so we automatically got a contract. For nearly 20
years we had only minor issues such as when they insisted on coming into our
house to install a new water meter and so we lost work hours because the
company maintained a strict 9 to 5
work schedule of its own.
But this is typical of utilities, such as phone and cable
where you have to take off work in order to accommodate their needs.
Sometimes, the water company supposedly just shows up at
your door and in our move, turned off our water in Union City without prior
notice, and then for two days we had to negotiate a convenient time for them to
come back and restore it.
The issue was the contract, which did not automatically
transfer over to us with the purchase of the house as it had under a MUA
regulated system like Jersey City.
While Suez
claims you can go on line and set up an account, this proved not to be the case
in our situation. After four attempts and finally getting accepted on line, the
water company didn’t actually give us the contract. When I called them up, the
representative basically said it doesn’t really work.
It appears that Suez
operating in cities with an MUA doesn’t line up with cities that don’t, and so
your old contract is useless, and more to the point, to get a new contract, you
have to leave a hefty deposit with Suez.
Also in some cases, there is a fee to turn the water back on
once Suez decides you are unworthy of having water – and since it takes 24 to
48 hours to accomplish this (if you take off work to wait for the worker to
come to do it between 9 and 5) you wind up with issues such not being able to
flush the toilet, brush your teeth or shower. God help you if you have kids.
Since the only notice we got about the company turning off
our water came when they left a note on our door handle as to how to turn the
water back on after they turned it off, we had no warning or way to prevent it.
Understand, we never changed our phone number and so the
company could have called us any time and left a message if we were not at
home.
When finally, I negotiated to get the water turned back on,
I gave them even more ways to contact us, such as my cell phone and work
number.
So knowing that they are capable of turning off water at
very inconvenient times such as a Friday when their business offices are closed
over the weekend, we took quite seriously the letter delivered (again on
Friday) telling us because we did not let the contractor into our house to
change the meter, the company would once more turn off our water.
The fact no contractor actually contacted us, unless they
happened to knock on our door during the work day when nobody was home and if
they did, they left no notice that we should contact them.
This idea that the water company can create a health hazard
without any over sight except by going to the state Board of Public Utility is
very disturbing. Of course, the contractor as with Suez
could not be contacted over the weekend so we live with the threat of losing
water. Suez doesn’t even put a contact
number of its own business offices on the threatening letter, but gives the
phone for the contractor, where the best we could do is leave a message.
When posting a comment on Suez’s
facebook page, they did respond. They said they would email me. They never did.
But they did remove my comment from their facebook page. I suppose that is
something.
We sweep into Weasel Brook Park at full speed, sometimes
playing Robin Hood, other times Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Frank and Jesse
James.
But today being Memorial Day, we both play soldiers or
spies, Dave wearing a tattered American flag like a bandana; I wear the soft
army hat my eldest uncle wore on his last trip back from his war in Korea.
Dave’s dad doesn’t come home from the veteran’s hospital
often or for long; he drinks when he does and won’t talk about his time in the
war.
My uncle – my mother’s oldest sibling – doesn’t talk about
it either, a tough man, who likes to lecture me at night, refused to kill
people and so went to war with a first aid kit instead of a carbine, fixing those
who he could fix, trying not to let the soldiers in his care lose too many toes
and fingers to the cold when he could do nothing to fix the bullets imbedded in
them, even when he got trapped in a cave behind enemy lines for three days,
running out of medicine and hope, living with the cold and moans, racing
between the stretchers of the dying,
feeling like the grim reaper rather than a military healer, coming home
later not to drink the way Dave’s Dad did, but not to sleep either, refusing to
use a bed, stretching out on the floor as if retribution for those he could not
save, and now, on this Memorial Day, I play soldier while my favorite of my
uncles, the youngest of my mother’s siblings, fights in Vietnam, and I wear a
hat that doesn’t quite fit, and ride by bicycle up the lonely streets where
nearly all the house bear flags, and we, having come up Clifton Avenue from a
parade where everybody cheered, the remnants of the parade filling side streets
in its aftermath like retreating army.
Dave loves playing soldier, carrying around on his bicycle
with him imaginary armies in which to beat back communism. But the Weasel Brook
Park we come to now is the wrong Weasel Brook Park for that, too grand and
open, filled with trees and light and pure wart that paints war too gloriously
for me, we always reserving the other Weasel Brook Park for mission so that
sort, the dark park near Lexington Avenue and Passaic where the brook rises up
into a park mostly made of concrete, where green hardly exists except at the
tips of branches of each dying tree, the trunks of which are imprisoned in
concrete, and the brook – this same brook – travels in a concrete viaduct this
with detritus: old shopping carts, rusted bicycles, broken bottles and trash.
The street gangs from across the border in Passaic go there
at night, so we don’t, though sometimes, I get off the bus to Passaic early and
search for the park entrance, tucked between two brick apartment buildings, an
entrance no wider than a store front to a park barely wider than that inside,
and stroll along the asphalt paths and cracked concrete and splintered benches
occupied by old people and pigeons, searching for something there I can never find
in this the park’s pretty twin sister ten blocks farther west, searching for
something real, feeling a little like my older uncle felt when refusing to lie
down in a comfortable bed after he had seen some many men dead.
The radio is filled with reports of the new war where my
younger uncle is, not a cold war like Korean or even a sane war like the one
Dave’s Dad fought, but hot and moist, the way the air feels here in the pretty
Weasel Brook Park, with water somehow made clean by its ten block journey
underground, bubbling up into channels that have concrete banks down which we
ride, through the water and up the other side, giggling and west, cold tears on
our pants and cheeks on a hot day that is not yet summer, our holiday still
three weeks ahead when school finally will set us free.
This park is bigger than four football fields with the brook
winding through its middle, broadening out briefly into a lake before narrowing
again, winding under several small wooden footbridge, past trees so large
families hold whole picnics beneath them when it rains, passed park benches and
cooking grills, and near asphalt path that weave their own way up and down
grassy knolls we might ride over, too – playing solider with imaginary armies
and imaginary death, winning wars against imaginary enemies in reality we
cannot possibly imagine.
Dave pauses at one of the large family picnics to bed for a
drink, and the family filled with kids and kites and a few men in uniform asks
us in, handing up paper plate with potato salad, hot dogs and hamburgers,
giving us cold soda instead of water, laughing loudly as if no war waged on
around us, but we see the war, especially in the eyes of those men in uniform
who have come home on this Memorial Day for one more pass before they go to
where my uncle is, and they think they might not come back.
And maybe, they see something in our eyes, too, the shadow
of a war Dave’s dad went to and only partly returned from, and the restless,
painful nights in a cold cave in Korea where my uncle still paces in his dream,
still doing guard duty not against the threat of a visible enemy, but with a
more devious enemy that continues to haunt him long after he has come home.
Then as with the parade earlier, the family dissipates and
we true soldiers volunteer to help clean up, inheriting blocks of dry ice we
soon discover turn to fog when dumped into the brook, fog that floats over the
water and under the footbridge and across Paulison Avenue to the dairy with a
fake cow on its front lawn and two real sheep along its side, a fog rising up
over us and the park, covering over its beauty like a shroud, disguising the
twisted paths and wandering brook as if to hide something, we do not know what,
even in the bright sunlight on this next to last day in May.
We heard about the sweet water in the mountain long before
either of us ever tasted it, a rumor, an Indian legend, a tall tale my mother
told, Dave got in his head one day to find out more about.
No strangers to the mountain, we often drove our bicycles
there, even walked, mostly always taking the same route, passed the same icons
of our lives, up Crooks from our homes near Lakeview and Vernon, across Trenton
and passed the sweet shop near Curry and over the tracks to the less familiar
landscape near Getty Avenue – hotdog grill and pizza parlor, gas station and
diner, and then on farther passed the lines of houses that served as home for
kids we would not meet until we attended junior high to Hazel Road, and the
house my school mate from St. Brendan’s lived in with the American Legion Post
sign on its lawn and the World War I cannon aimed straight down Crooks Ave.
We knew this route so well, we could have navigated it in a
blizzard, as we did one Christmas Eve when my grandfather lay dying, and Dave’s
father was drunk again at home.
We mostly went to the mountain in the summer when we had
time, when we did not need to be home in time for bed so we could get up early
for school, this journey one of distance and endurance, even for Dave whose
long legs could take his bicycle places mine struggled to go.
As well as we knew the route, we did not know the landscape,
the people who populated it, the school for nuns, the hotdog stand we stopped
at for soda half way to Grove Street where the funeral home that had helped
bury by grandfather sat like a grave stone marker pointing the way up towards
the mountain peak we could clearly see by that time, and the castle on its
side, and the tower at its top, grand visions that had long attracted us even
when we’d seen them more remotely from the top floor of my house, a real
castle, brought stone by stone to Paterson from Scotland, but a silk baron who
wanted his workers to look up from the mills and admire him the way surfs
admired their lords long ago.
Most other times, we turn up Grove and head for the main
gate, to lay siege on the castle where the old man had lived until the 1913
mill strikes broke his heart and left him a recluse to live looking down on a
city he used to own, still rich, but not happy, growing gray and sad inside a
kingdom that had shrunk to no bigger than the walls he’d brought from Scotland.
We took turns being Richard or Henry or even Robin Hood,
until the county people who took control of the castle after the old man’s
death chased us away, telling us to play up near the tower at the top of the
mountain where the old man in the height of his wealth and power sometimes went
to survey all he owned, most of which the county eventually turned into a park,
not long climb, but steep, especially with bicycles, passed the stone outhouse
the county had installed along with water fountains where the asphalt path
stopped and the stairs started, and then the stairs ceased at the start of a
long, dirt twisted path with a wooden rail along where the land fell away and
the park rangers feared kids like us might fall.
This path ended at the stone wall beyond which the tall
tower stood atop pieces of volcanic rock, stone stuck to stone with round
window like cannon spouts looking out at intervals where the winding stairs
inside rose to the top, stairs we climbed until the county locked gate at the
bottom, and after a fire had gutted the wooden frame below where the concession
stand sold us soda and candy.
And though I thought Dave would steer us there again, he
bypassed the main gate, yelling back at me that we would take the long hill up,
the back road up from Valley Road that snaked its way along the side of the
park, a road so steep even cars had to creep up it, and us, on bicycles,
churned as our legs turned to butter and we did all we could to keep from
falling back – Dave alone with his long legs able to advance, yelling for us to
keep up when we could not.
Trees rose with the rising mountain to our right, while to
the left where the land fell, we rose above the tips of these trees, seeing the
expansion of the valley below, and the peaked roofs of houses that seemed like
sharp edges of stone as they spread out towards the horizon and the haze of a
city skyline we could just barely make out, Dave striding ahead with me behind,
and still farther behind with his even shorter legs, Dave’s brother, Dennis,
yelling for both of us to wait up, something Dave only did when the road
leveled at the top, and the trees to the right parted making way for the
entrance to the park and a park road leading to parts of the park behind and
slightly below the tower.
We had come this way before, of course, scouring ever inch
of the many acres that made up the place, from woodland to swamp, from cliff to
valley, in search of new things we might find, a crevice no one else had seen
before, a place we might call our own, knowing that we continued to follow in
the footsteps of generations before us, Dave’s father had played here, as had
my uncles, and my mother had brought me here often on what she called picnics,
though she really only wanted to find any place where she didn’t hear her
voices.
“In here,” Dave said, pointing into the park, passed the
large one-way sign, do not enter, as we steered the wrong way down a paved but ulcerated
road only the most hearty of cars might take, and those we saw, coming at us
from down below and around a long, sloping curve and the lake beyond, and the
gravel lot where hikers and fishermen and picnickers parked, the smoke from the
grills filling the air with the flavor of sizzled meat.
We could see the south end of the lake through the trees,
green scum spread across the dead water where only turtles and frogs thrived, a
stench as odious as a cesspool, reaching us even where we paused. We all knew
where people said the sweet water was, but this wasn’t it, and I told Dave as
much, and he told me he already knew, but still turned the wrong way, north not
south, towards the soggy path along the lake’s eastern shore, passed one of the
two gazebos that stood as sentinels near the mouth of the path, sad, decaying,
gazebos with leaky roofs and loose stone walls, in which we sometimes took
refuge from rain, coming out nearly as soaked as if we hadn’t.
“If you know, why are you going to wrong way?” I asked, pointing
back south, towards the flat roofed stone building that had held the toilets
and concession stand, built when the gazebos were, of the same rough stone but
with better roofs and square windows that glinted a little in the sunlight.
Somewhere beyond it, up one of the dirt paths we had
frequently taken in one of our fantastic adventures as Daniel Boone or Davy
Crocket, a small grotto stood, into which, people said, sweet water ran.
“Because,” was all Dave said, and then with a swift kick on
his bike pedals launched down the path north, passed the place where the gravel
ceased and the rutted muddy path began, hoof prints and dropping of horses we
never saw, made immortal in the dried mud over which our bicycles ran, shaking
so hard I had to hold on with both hands, not merely a road less traveled, but
one trekked at our own risk, Dave ahead of me, Dennis behind, a caravan on a
pilgrimage I still did not understand.
Much later – though not by way of anything Dave said – I
realized Dave went this way not to delay our finding the spring out of which
the sweet water sprang, but to stir up a greater thirst so that when we did
finally reach it, the water would taste that much sweeter.
We could have reached the spring straight from the gazebos,
passed the concession stand and up the dusty path that rose again from the
depression in which the lake sat, climbing into the rocky ridges of the park’s
south eastern corner, following the trail of tears the city women took,
carrying buckets and plastic milk jugs to fill and bring home, sipping sweet
water from cupped palms.
But Dave wanted us to earn it first, leading us along a path
that circled the lake, first through the muddy track and gullies the rain water
took draining down from the heights where the tower stood, then over a decaying
wooden bridge to more solid ground, rough with points of stone, and then
smoother yet riddled with tree roots, and finally, near the north west corner,
wide open grass land where the geese fed and a thin sheet of water washed up
onto the shore.
We rolled across another wooden foot bridge, newer, boards
still bright, rumbling under our wheels and then we dipped into yet more bog,
soggy soil thick with reeds and fire weed, rising up around us and under us, so
that we shoved the branches away with one hand while keeping the wheels
straight with the other, muck sucking at the spokes as our wheels sank, a
wilderness rising up around the western most portion of the lake, trees so
thick we could not see the water beyond, only the wet that washed up around the
tree trunks and through the low laying branches of the brush, Daniel Boone
would have struggled to navigate; few kids did; dark things stirred in its
depths, turtles and frogs, skunks and raccoons, opossums and foxes, and worse,
things that stared out from the close branches at we passed, not rabbits or
chipmunks, not squirrels or owls, though they occupied this space as well,
larger things, rumored things, inappropriate beasts that had come here and
stayed here, such as the alligator Dave said people had seen floating in the
water not far in, a creature someone had collected as a pet when very small,
brought north and then abandoned when the bowl, sink and finally tub could no
longer contain it, abandoned here to live in the ooze. I saw toads, turtles,
even an egret once, but never the alligator, though I remained on constant
watch each time we came. Dave, convinced the story was true, would pause to
look now or ever, pumping his legs as hard as he could to make his wheels work
better in the thick track of mud, until we rose out of it again, coming to a
part of the trail where it turned the last corner of the lake and started up
onto large, flat pieces of stone, chunks of mountain soil could not cover, on
which cormorants sometimes dried their wings along with the ducks, where
seasoned fishermen spread out nets near the edge of the water, collecting boots
and bottles along with bait for bigger fish.
The stone rose and grew into large cliffs along the western
side, notched at intervals, where birds built nests, and we climbed along the
track to one side of it, eventually coming to the top where Dave finally
paused, looking less like the Green Hornet or Man from Uncle, we both pretended
to be back in the city, but the Lone Ranger, his long limbs straddling his
bicycle as he sat the peak staring out across the lake, at the layers of trees
on the far side, and beyond, up the rising hills to the top of the mountain
where the old tower stood, he, now, looking like the old Silk Baron on a
pinnacle of stone looking over an unspoiled world, seeing and being seen,
majestic and yet also humble, as common as any of the mill workers that had
occupied Paterson in the days of its greatness, raised from that same stock
with the poorest of roots, searching for something in the world pure and
unspoiled, when nothing in the life he knew at home was.
He stared out, yet not high enough to see any of the city
that lay beyond the lip of mountain on which the tower stood (one reason he
loved this place more than he loved the castle or tower), we standing in a fold
of land that made all that invisible, stripping from us the troubles of our
lives, allowing us to see the world as the Native Americans might have, streams
running down the sides of hill, deer darting between trunks of trees, men
carrying fish rods on their way to or from the lakeside, we, going back in
time, before the time of smog and dirty rivers, before the black smoke spewing
from the stacks of factories, and Dave, who almost never smiles, looked back at
me and did, and bolstered by thirst that was more than just thirst, he peddled
down the stone again to the path, heading finally towards the south end of the
lake, beyond which the grotto and the spring waited, passed the gazebos and the
snack stand, and up the stony path on which the pilgrims struggled towards the
glen which people said pure water spouted.
Now he went fast, with me and Dennis struggling to keep up with how well his long legs worked
those wheels, his bike kicking up dust we had to eat, bounding over stone and
root, the speed bumps nature threw across our path, reckless, desperate, the
scent of spoiled water around us from a part of the lake long surrendered to
the green scum, we riding over gravel, then on the grass where the geese fed,
they fluttering up at the threat of our hurried wheels, to resettled in our
wake and feed again as if we never existed, just as the patrons at the snack
bar did when we roared through the open air building, then up the rutted dusty
path passed pilgrims carrying buckets and plastic milk jugs strung along the
side, poor people from the foot of the mountain who made the climb to this
place and would climb back down again once they accomplished their mission, a
dusty mass of sad faces as humble as the land they lived in, related, but not
too closely to us and our, all having come out of the same basic stock, despite
my uncles’ denials, and Dave’s mother’s outrage, and her desperate need to feel
superior. His mother never came here, but mine had, making the same long trek
these people made, up from where the bus left her at the mountain’s foot,
coming the way so many other mothers had on the rumor of faith, a poor person’s
trip of Lourdes and hope that the sweet water they found here might cure some
ailment each felt in their lives.
Dave’s mother had no such belief; so Dave lacked it as well,
coming here not out of faith or hope, but desperation, seeking one place where
he might feel welcomed when he felt unwelcome everywhere else.
And even though my mother believed she might find a blessing
here, I did not, coming only because Dave came or perhaps because it was some
place to go when we had been everywhere else and found nothing.
Dave skidded to a stop where the paths converged, our path
rising from the lake meeting with another from the road, and still another from
the deep woods to the west, dry dirt
Rising up and around Dave like smoke, dry earth from a dry
season with large chunks of granite poking up between the arms of each path
like walls built by nature to define the boundaries of the dry grotto – and
yet, we heard the soft trickle of water we might not have heard without the
silence, a few trees with exposed roots clinging to the stone, delving into the
dry soil to catch the sweet water where it returned underground.
We left the bikes against the side of stone and eased down
into a crack in the earth to where the trickle sounded loudest.
Soil gave way to stone, a crevice slick, with a whisper of
water running out from a tiny pipe someone had hammered into the stone, long,
long before, water pooling into a worn basin, then over its lip at the other
side to sink back into the earth from which it had sprung.
A plump Spanish woman kneeled beside the spring, her white
paints and blue flowered shirt moist from the effort of filling up three
plastic milk jugs, now lined up on the rock beside her. She did not move or
drink, just stared down at where the water tricked out of the tiny pipe,
looking the way my mother looked at times at church, hearing and seeing things
I could not hear or see, feeling something I could not feel.
She did not seem to notice us; this agitated Dave, who
wanted to get down and taste the sweet water before the others with their
bottles and buckets came; we could hear the stir of their feet on the trail behind
us, and see the dust rising in the air ahead of them, an army of pilgrim just
like this one, who came to collect and take home the sweet water we merely came
here to taste.
With his face contorted with anxiety, Dave shifted his large
feet, disturbing dust and sending small pebbles down into the grotto where the
woman kneeled, plopping into the pool beside her. But she would not move or
notice us, and the more Dave shifted, the less she seemed to see, staring down
into the bubbling pool near where the water fell, clear water, decorated with
bright sunlight. We could see the slick stone beneath, worn from the years of
movement across it, the dribble of time, the flow of water we believed would to
on until it wore through the stone itself and the water sank back into the
depths of the mountain too quickly for anyone to catch.
Behind us, the other pilgrims appeared, lining up at Dave’s
back to wait their turn, sad, dusty faces, mostly Latino, some black, but a few
like us, all lost souls from other parts of Paterson who had heard tale of the
sweet water and had come here to get their share.
When the woman finally moved, she moved the way a turtle
might, slow limbs lifting her as if she had a heavy shell on her back, taking
up her bottles, and then in a Herculean effort, staggered up out of the ravine
to where we waited, looking nowhere, at no one or perhaps at the after image of
some vision she had seen below, the way she might have had she stared into a
bright light for too long.
Dave rushed passed her before she had fully risen and
somehow, with his long limbs spread this way and that, thrust his face into the
chilly pool of water.
He stayed prone for so long I thought he’d drowned – except
for the sound of his drinking, not gulping the way a man struggling to an oasis
might out of a desert, but softly, slowly; with reverence more like a kiss than
a sip.
And he stayed like that long enough to make the women behind
us grumble, his arms embracing that place, as if to make it his alone.
I nudged him; he told me to go away.
I told him the other waited.
He said he didn’t care.
I said I was leaving, and this, after yet another long
moment caused a stir, his limbs stiffening to life him away from the surface of
the water.
When he finally stood, the scars of the water showed on his
face and chest; dirt covered his knees and elbows.
Yet some deeper scar showed in his eyes. He looked
different, changed, older, the way the old Latina
had looked a moment earlier.
He climbed out of the grotto.
I said we should go.
“Don’t you want to taste the sweet water?” he asked.
I shook my head.
His gaze narrowed as he studied my face.
The women behind me scrambled into the gully with their
buckets and bottles.
We went back to our bikes, then back down the path to the
concession stand, then skirted the lake to the road, riding it the right way
until we reached the crossroads and the steep decline we gook down without once
using our brakes.
Dave’s seriousness faded as our speed increased; by the time
we reached the bottom he became his old self again; I’d never seen him so
serious again.
We went back to the spring again many times; I drank for the
basin, too, but never felt the way Dave did, perhaps, I never will.
This is a novel that collects a number of the classic tales of the Garley Gang. This scan combines two early manuscripts so the names changes a little from one to the other.
This is an autobiographical novel about the first few years I spent living in the Montclair Rooming house from late 1972 to early 1975. I had intended a second novel, but never got around to it. This is the original manuscript.
