I crouched near where his foot was lodged between the rocks. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to hold him, and that he would fall anyway, but I took hold of the edge of the worn sole and shoved it forward. Chet made a grunting sound, then I heard the sound of scraping followed by a loud crash as he hit the bottom of the well. I expected to hear him yell some more but he was quiet. There was only the sound of falling dirt and debris still pattering down the well, plus two crows cawing at each other on the other side of the meadow.
I pulled the penlight I had brought out of my back pocket and twisted it so it turned on. It didn’t produce a very powerful beam but it would be strong enough for me to see into the darkness of the well. I thought my hands would be shaky but they weren’t. I felt focused, and lost in my own brain, the way I felt when I was reading a good book and the afternoon disappeared. I peered over the edge and pointed the beam of the flashlight down toward the bottom. I was so sure that Chet would survive the fall and would be begging me to help him up. I had been prepared for it. Instead, he lay still at the bottom of the well, on his back, his legs against the side, and his neck at a funny angle. I stared at him for a while. My penlight beam was weak and the well was filled with shifting dust, but it didn’t look like he was moving. Then I saw an almost unnoticeable shift and heard a low sigh that could have come from Chet or could have come from something settling in the disturbed well.
I stood and walked the few feet to my low pile of heavy rocks that I’d been collecting. I selected the largest, a jagged hunk of gray stone with a vein of quartz running through it. I had to carry it with both arms so I gripped the penlight in my teeth. Waddling like a penguin I came back to the well, straddled it, and bent at the waist. Pointing the penlight into the darkness, I lined up the rock as best I could and dropped it straight down toward Chet’s head. I didn’t watch the rock after I dropped it but I heard the noise it made when it struck Chet’s head. It was a sound like a watermelon cracking open. If Chet had still been alive after the fall he wasn’t anymore.
My arms ached from carrying the rock and I stayed crouched for a moment. A crow watched me from his perch on a dying maple tree on the outskirts of the meadow. I wondered if he could smell the death in the air, and thought that he probably could. He dipped his head, ruffled his black wings. I felt like he was welcoming me to a special world.
After turning the penlight off and returning it to my pocket, I pulled the stake out of the ground, dropping it and the greased-up rope into the well. Then I walked back and forth from my pile to the well and dropped about six more large rocks down toward Chet. I would cover him more later but figured that it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start on the process. I would have kept going but the light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadow and the surrounding woods losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray. My initial plan had been to return to the apartment above the studio, and start packing up Chet’s things, bring them back through the woods to the well and dump them in. Then I would cover everything over with rocks and re-cover the well hole. But as I walked back through the blackness of the woods, my penlight’s beam only carving out a small patch of forest floor in front of me, I decided that I could pack up Chet’s things now, and move them to the well in the early morning. I knew that my parents would sleep late.
I was very familiar with the small apartment above the studio. It was one of my favorite places when it was empty, but I hadn’t seen it since Chet had moved in at the beginning of the summer. I had been worried that he would have a lot of stuff that I would need to pack up, but he didn’t. He was still living out of a large army-green duffel bag that was spread open by the single bed. I began to search the place using the penlight, then realized I could simply turn the lamp on. On the off chance that either of my parents looked out their bedroom window toward the studio they would hardly be surprised to see a light on in Chet’s apartment. In fact, they’d be more surprised if there wasn’t a light.
The lamp cast dim yellow light across the whitewashed walls and the wide, bare planks of the floor. There was very little furniture in the studio apartment, just my beloved beanbag chair, looking deflated, and two upholstered chairs, each with rips in its fabric, foam coming out. The chair with the pastel sprigged print was another of my favorite reading spots. I was glad to see that Chet had used it to stack some books. It meant he hadn’t been sitting in it.