Free Breaking the Fall by Michael Cadnum Page B

well.
    I didn’t say anything else.
    â€œYou think this is just a game,” said Jared. “You think it’s like some kind of Monopoly you can pick up and put down when it bores you.”
    I shook my head, and did not meet his eyes.
    â€œIt’s sick,” he mocked. He folded his hands and looked nearly kind. “You’re so ordinary, Stanley. You could change, you know. You don’t have to be one of these dull people.”
    Why I had tears just then I did not know. I looked away and cleared my throat, blinking.
    Perhaps the marijuana made the spill of light brighter, and made the fibers of the carpet distinct, the thousands of unnoticed filaments bound together into a seamless mass.
    â€œI know I owe you,” I said. “I know I was a coward.”
    The ugly words made it hard for me to speak, to breathe.
    â€œBut I can’t.” I shook my head. I couldn’t say any more for several heartbeats. I closed my eyes. “It’s all over. I can’t do it.”
    â€œYou’re going to try to go back,” he said. “To your old, dead life.”
    I didn’t answer. I had learned silence from my parents.
    â€œBut you can’t,” Jared said, calm, soft-voiced. “You can’t walk away from feeling alive.”
    I knew he might be right.

19
    The large man was sweating, uncoiling a hose and looking up into the tree. The hose was new, and it squeaked, the coiled circles wound into it not shaking out very well. The hose wriggled, a long, looping spiral.
    The tree had a trunk about as big around as my leg. The branches were naked except for subtle black movement. What appeared to be leaves on the twigs and branches were slowly wriggling. The wriggling larvae had fed on all the foliage, and now the black, spiked grubs were starving, raining slowly onto the lawn.
    His hand surrounded mine, but he kept his grip gentle.
    Sky made the introduction, and then she vanished, leaving me in the backyard with her father.
    â€œBaseball,” he said.
    I followed his thought after a pause. “A little.” I didn’t tell him that I had basically taken myself off the team in recent weeks.
    He whipped the green hose, and far away a loop of it straightened out.
    I had met Sky’s mother a few times, a woman who, as far as I could tell, never spoke, a round, slow-moving woman in outsized T-shirts. Sky’s father didn’t talk much either. He twitched the hose and did not talk at all, and yet he was not ignoring me. His work was convivial, a sharing of his presence, the way some people might whistle or hum a song when someone is around even though they don’t want to say anything.
    I sat on a low wall made of bricks. The light was both bright and gray, and the bare tree was alive in places with caterpillars.
    â€œI used to want to be an athlete,” he said. The hose flicked again, the pulse traveling in a wave along the length of the green hose to where it screwed into the wall.
    He turned his back to me, and I made out by his motions and the glimpses I caught that he was fastening a container of poison to the mouth of the hose.
    He did not bother to glance over at me to see if I was paying attention. He was used to commanding people with his size, and as a result was friendly and full of confidence in himself. He drove a truck that delivered big bags of ready-popped popcorn to movie theaters.
    â€œI worked all over,” he said, scuffing his foot over some of the larvae. “I worked in Hollywood, delivering.”
    He looked at me as though he wanted to remember something he didn’t like about me. “It’s all fake,” he said. “Those buildings. You know those buildings? Only half-buildings. You walk around them and they aren’t there.”
    The poison container looked like a space gun worked by a lever. He sprayed poison all over the naked tree, and all over the black, still-crawling larvae, and the ones that