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By Root 1494 0

water. I’m not sure why this is, because it’s merely decades of rain piled up between walls of granite and fed and freshened by underground springs, but the moment the scent found my nostrils, I was sixteen again and I could feel the plunge in my chest as I jumped over the edge of Heaven’s Peak, a seventy-foot cliff in Swingle’s Quarry, saw the light-green water yawn open below me like a waiting hand, felt weightless and bodiless and pure spirit hanging in the empty, awesome air around me. Then I dropped, and the air turned into a tornado shooting straight up from the advancing pool of green, and the graffiti exploded from the shelves and walls and cliffs all around me, burst forth in reds and blacks and golds and blues, and I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water, toes pointed down, wrists tucked tight against my hips, dropped deep below the surface where the cars and the refrigerators and the bodies lay.

Over the years, as the quarries have claimed one young life every four years or so, not to mention all the corpses dumped over the cliffs in the dead of night and discovered, if at all, years later, I’ve read the newspapers as editorialists, community activists, and grieving parents ask, “Why? Why?”

Why do kids—quarry rats, we called ourselves in my generation—feel the need to jump from cliffs as high as one hundred feet into water two hundred feet deep and mined with sudden outcroppings, car antennas, logs, and who knows what else?

I have no idea. I jumped because I was a kid. Because my father was an asshole and my home was a constant police action, and most of the time finding a place to hide was how my sister and I spent our lives, and that didn’t seem much like living. Because often, as I stood on those cliffs and looked over the edge at an overturned bowl of green that turned and revealed itself the more I craned my neck, I felt a cold sizzle in my stomach and an awareness of every limb, every bone, and every blood vessel in my body. Because I felt pure in the air and clean in the water. I jumped to prove things to my friends and, once those things had been proven, because I was addicted to it, needed to find higher cliffs, longer drops. I jumped for the same reason I became a private detective—because I hate knowing exactly what’s next.

“I need to catch a breath,” Poole said. He grabbed a thick vine growing out of the ground in front of us and twisted with it toward the ground. The gym bag fell from his hand, and his foot slipped in the dirt, and he fell on top of the bag, clenching the vine tightly in his hand.

We were about fifteen yards from the top. I could see the faintest green shimmer of water, like a wisp of cloud, reflecting off the dark cliffs and hovering in the cobalt pitch of sky just beyond the last ridge.

“Sure, buddy, sure.” Broussard stopped and stood by his partner as the older man placed his flashlight on his lap and gasped for breath.

In the dark, Poole was as white as I’d ever seen him. He shone. His raspy breath clawed its way into the night, and his eyes swam in their sockets, seemed to float in search of something they couldn’t locate.

Angie knelt by him and put a hand under his jaw, felt his pulse. “Take a deep breath.”

Poole nodded, his eyes bulging, and sucked air.

Broussard lowered himself to his haunches. “You okay, buddy?”

“Fine,” Poole managed. “Aces.”

The shine on his face found his throat and dampened his collar.

“Too fucking old to be humping my ass up some”—he coughed—“hill.”

Angie looked at Broussard. Broussard looked back at me.

Poole coughed some more. I tilted my flashlight, saw tiny dots of blood speckle his chin.

“Just a minute,” he said.

I shook my head and Broussard nodded, pulled his walkie-talkie from his jacket.

Poole reached up and grasped his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Calling it in,” Broussard said. “We got to get you off this hill, my man.”

Poole tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist, coughed so hard I thought he’d lurch into a convulsion for a minute.

“You don’t