Shine - Lauren Myracle [44]
“I pooted,” he announced, using the dipped-in-grits syllables of Richard from church, a thirty-year-old man with the mental abilities of a toddler.
Oh, man, we laughed. We laughed so hard, Aunt Tildy had to come in and shush us because we were giving her one of her headaches. It wasn’t long after that she didn’t let us take baths together anymore.
Later, when my own body started developing, I realized Christian had probably been admiring himself in Aunt Tildy’s mirror that day, marveling at his manliness the way I would marvel at my tiny soft breasts, turning sideways in the mirror and pulling my shoulder blades together to make them more pronounced.
I guess we all changed. We all grew up, if we lived long enough to. For my whole childhood my brother had been my hero, and now he wasn’t anymore. That’s what I was thinking as I biked home from Wally’s, with Christian stubbornly trailing me on his Yamaha to make sure I didn’t go off somewhere else.
It made me melancholy, but mixed with that melancholy was an unexpected pang of love for my brother. Despite his shortcomings, I was proud of him for staying out of that stupid meth business. Maybe I was being naive, but I’d never smelled that gross smell on him, the one still coating my nostrils. His pupils weren’t ever dilated or contracted or anything weird. And Wally himself had called him a straight arrow. Surely anyone doing meth in Black Creek would buy from Wally, at least occasionally.
I missed how it used to be with me and Christian, when he was there for me no matter what. He must have saved me a hundred different times in a hundred different ways back then. Like once, out in our yard, he told me in a scarily calm voice to hold real still and not move a muscle. Then he went and got his rifle and shot a rattlesnake basking in the sun. If I’d gone five inches further, I’d have stepped on it with my bare foot.
He saved me again at Suicide Rock one summer. The day was hot—they always were—and Beef’s daddy, Roy, drove a bunch of us up into the forest so we could swim in the river. Patrick was off with Mama Sweetie, but Beef and Gwennie came, and Bailee-Ann and Tommy, too. I was nine, and I had just finished fourth grade. I remembered being so happy on the drive to the swimming hole, because I was happy pretty much all the time. And I loved the water.
On the close side of the swimming hole, the bank was flat and level, like a beach made of mud and stones. The stones were smooth, but they came in all different shapes and sizes, and they jabbed the flesh of your soles like nobody’s business.
The river water was cool and green, flowing so slow that it was perfect for splashing around in. Or if you were in a different kind of mood, you could float on your back and daydream to your heart’s content, the sun kissing your face while the lazy current rocked you like a baby. In the middle of the swimming hole, there was a big old log, sodden and rotting and yet there, always there, and I figured it must have been a mighty tree at one point, given how its gnarled roots reached all the way down to the muck of the riverbed and held on tight. I loved that old log. Bailee-Ann and I liked to heave ourselves up on top of it and straddle it like a horse.
On the far side of the swimming hole, there was no bank. Just the straight-up side of the mountain. It was lush with ferns and ivy and laurel trees, whose gnarled branches made perfect handholds for climbing the footpath to the jumping rock—or if you went higher, to the rock the swimming hole was named for: Suicide Rock.
Jumping off the jumping rock gave a good thrill. Jumping from the higher-up Suicide Rock was likely to thrill you right to death. It was because of how the two different outcroppings were formed. The jumping rock stuck out nice and far over the river, like a diving platform. But Suicide Rock was tucked into the cliff and jutted out only a little, not even half as far as the jumping rock. If you stood at the edge of Suicide Rock and jumped off, you wouldn