Free Just Beneath My Skin by Darren Greer Page A

truck. Cleve was too fat to dip, so he sat in a chair on the back of his truck and smoked his pipe and watched the dipping and kept a running tally of the crates being brought in from the ramps. Dad said he likely cheated us, but I didn’t know it if he did. I kept track of my own crates, and the number Cleve wrote down on his tally sheet at the end of the day always matched mine.
    When I reach the falls through the woods, I stop because it is like I can almost see those days again. Sometimes this happens in North River. I run across some place I’d been when I was a kid and the feeling of being back there is so strong it’s like there’s two places — the one now pasted on top of the one then. When this happens, and I remember something about being a kid, like how good it was to be dipping fish for Cleve when I was fourteen and how grown-up I felt having all that responsibility and money, it’s like this great empty space opens up inside me I didn’t even know was there. I almost feel like I want to cry.
    It’s weird. Here I am, running from Johnny and soaked right through and coming out of the trees to the banks and the whitewater roar of the falls and no one but Johnny and his gun for miles around and I feel this way. Cleve Ramey has been dead for years — heart attack — and they tore down those dipping ramps ages ago. The gaspereau don’t run like they used to. Acid rain from the States and Ontario has put paid to that. Same with the salmon. Only thing left that runs like it used to is river eels, and even the Japanese got a limit on how many of those they’ll take. But damned if I don’t have one of those moments right then, when I can almost see us all again, and I picture the ramps out over the water, and hear the shouting and laughing and old Cleve calling to his oldest son from his lawn chair on the back of his truck, “Get them goddamned crates out there, Aubrey! The boys need ’em!”
    For a minute I forget all about Nathan, and Johnny and his gun. All I can remember is the past, swirling up and around and across and over me like water, drowning me in memory.

EVERY SPRING WHEN HE WAS home Jake would take me up to the top of Harmony Lake Road in spring near the river to smash June bugs with badminton rackets. They made a loud “pop” when we hit them and we smacked the bugs right out of the air. Jake kept score and I always won. Once I killed forty-two June bugs in one night. I asked Jake once if it wasn’t a sin to murder June bugs.
    â€œNaw,” said Jake. “They don’t feel. No bug feels.”
    I wondered sometimes though.
    Sometimes I wondered if everything didn’t feel.
    But we did it anyway, because Jake said it was something he used to do when he was a kid at his house in Middlebridge and I liked to do things with Jake that he used to do when he was a kid. Like go with him to the North River fair in September and get on the Ferris wheel and look out over everything from way up high. Sometimes the wheel stopped with us on top and the chair rocked back and forth and I was scared. But Jake said not to be.
    â€œIt’s safe, squirt,” he said. “Just enjoy the view.”
    I told Jake it didn’t look like North River at all.
    â€œMy old man always said when he took me up here when I was a kid that it was a ‘God’s eye view.’”
    â€œWhat’s that mean, Jake?”
    Jake laughed. “You know what, squirt? I have no idea.”
    That was the same month Mom made Jake burn his papers, and though we were up high and at the fair and Jake would get me cotton candy after I was sad. I could tell Jake was getting ready to leave, even though he never said anything to Mom or to me, and I was wondering if it wouldn’t be for good. I almost asked him, but the Ferris wheel started again and we were spun back to the ground.

I START TO WALK DOWN along the river towards the eddies below the