Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I WOKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, COULDN’T SLEEP, ROLLED over, and first thing I saw was the date on the wall calendar. It was June 7, 1983. Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom were still sleeping, wall-to-wall dogs snoring noisily in every room in the house. I stopped Bingo as he was heading out the door with Mambo.
It was eight o’clock.
“What are you up to today?” I asked him.
“Nothing. Taking the tour. See who’s around. Why?”
I had just finished speaking to Huntington “Rosie” Ferrell on the phone, my friend since we were little kids. I woke him up. His father was heir to a steel fortune and owned a summer home on the Vineyard. Their principal residence was near Boston. I told him I was bored. He was bored, too. We kind of made a profession of boredom in those days.
Overnight it had turned unseasonably cold, and we were looking for something to do. We put together a haphazard plan for a day trip to Dead Canary Wet Caves on the mainland, a poetically named system of river caves.
It was something we’d done before. It wasn’t a particularly challenging project, especially for a couple of young guys who weren’t overly preoccupied with details and had grown up around the ocean.
“You want to come?” I asked Bing, who cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. I was kind of surprised myself.
“You’re kidding, right? Is this a joke? You want me to go along with you and Rosie?”
“Why not? Look, if you don’t want to come . . .”
“Sure I want to come. I’m coming. Count me in. Let’s go.” Unlike me, Bingo was never bored. He was up for anything. He was already on the porch and heading for the car. “Hey, Coll, is this ’cause I gave you tongue last night?”
“Keep it up. I can always take back the invitation.”
“Sorry. You’re stuck with me now.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Can he come?” Bing asked, casting a sympathetic glance back at Mambo, who was doing a series of jumping jacks off the porch, aching to be included.
“No way. Come on, Bing, just once can we do something that doesn’t involve a dog? You’ve got five minutes to get your shit together or else I’m gone.”
“Sorry, Mambo,” Bing apologized to him as he led him back into the kitchen, Mambo drooping and resistant and then watching from inside the house, through the screen door. Bingo reluctantly pulled shut the big wooden door, Mambo disappearing behind it—he’d gone through one too many screens in pursuit of the car.
“Poor Mambo,” Bing said as we headed toward the driveway, and then he stopped and, facing me, pulled on my elbow, focusing on me with those spooky eyes of his.
“He’ll live,” I said dismissively, unreasonably annoyed by his expressions of sympathy.
“This isn’t some kind of trick, is it? Are you trying to get back at me for last night? You and Rosie aren’t planning to drag me off somewhere just so you can leave me behind, are you?”
“You’re already starting to be a pain in the ass. If you don’t want to go . . .” I stopped in the middle of the driveway and threw up my hands, accidentally tossing my car keys into the air, Bingo lunging for them as they hit the damp sand, stained brown from an overnight rain.
“I want to go. I just don’t want to wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere again and you guys thinking it’s funny.” He stared at me meaningfully, fingering the keys, as I laughed at cherished memories of his recent abandonment at a gas station outside of Framingham after a concert.
“No . . . Jesus . . . come on . . . get over yourself. I’ve got better things to do than hose Bing Flanagan.”
He shrugged and let it go, light and easy, as if he were setting a kite adrift in the wind. I felt a tiny bit ashamed as I watched him, noisy and chattering, hop into the convertible, swinging his legs up and over without opening the passenger door.
I made a quiet deal with myself to do better, be a better brother. I was always trying to give him the brush-off. I was vowing to improve when my good intentions took a sudden detour.
“No way are you driving,” I said as he slid into the driver’s seat and inserted the keys into the ignition, the car rumbling to a start.
“Why not? To the ferry . . .”
“No. You’re not driving my car. Forget it.”
He hesitated, and I gave him a shot in the ribs. “Jesus,” he said, clutching his side, grimacing and laughing at the same time as I used the opportunity to shove him aside and into the passenger seat. He bent over and grabbed the remnants of a half-eaten doughnut on the floor, then turned around and whaled it at me, jelly dripping down the side of my face and sticking to my hair.
“You a*shole,” I said, scraping the doughnut off my cheek and throwing it back at him, his hands held up defensively in front of his face, both of us laughing.
Before we cleared the driveway, I was already devising ways of giving him the slip.
“Hey,” Bingo said, touching me on the shoulder. “Listen.”
I pressed the brake. I heard a low keening sound coming from the house, mournful and sad. Mambo was crying.
Bingo shifted in his seat to face the house. “Collie, look at Mambo.”
Turning my head, I caught sight of Mambo standing on all fours on top of the kitchen table. He was staring after us, watching from the big kitchen window—it was an unsettling picture, an enormous, wolfish black-and-red dog, poised and unmoving, intense and straining for one final look, his amber eyes vanishing into his black face.
“Crazy dog,” I said, and then louder: “I’m so sick of crazy dogs and crazier people!”
“What the hell’s your problem?” Bingo asked. “You’re getting more like Ma every day.”
“What are you, nuts? If there’s one person in the world I’m not like, it’s Ma.”
“Whatever you say, Coll.” He burrowed into his seat, sand- encrusted running shoes up on the console. We bumped along the narrow gravel road, and he looked away from me and out over the sky and ocean, both a dark sable color, lines of division blurred as brown-and-gray waves rolled in only yards from the road.
I kept sneaking intermittent sideways glances, which he pretended to ignore as we swung onto the main road, canopy of trees blowing overhead, fishing boats rocking in the choppy bay, wind blowing back the hair on our foreheads.
“Hey, Coll, look out!” Bingo sat up suddenly and pointed to the side of the road as a giant snapping turtle made his way slowly across. I applied the brake, and even before the car screeched to a halt, the door opened and out he leapt, rushing to the turtle’s side. He picked him up, hands gripping either side of the banged-up shell, and stopped at my side of the car, pushing the turtle toward me, its mouth open and hissing, the overwhelming smell of stagnant water filling the car.
“For Christ’s sake, Bing,” I said, recoiling as he dashed across the remainder of the roadway, released the turtle into the water, and then jogged back to the car.
“Great, you stink worse than usual,” I complained as he reached over and wiped his hands on my shirt. “F*ck off. . . .” I stepped on the accelerator, the impetus jerking him backward as we zoomed down the road leading to Rosie’s place.
We were clipping along, the wind fresh and moist and vaguely fishy. The radio was cranked, it was too noisy to talk, so we settled back into our separate compartments, the silence between us punctuated by a smack here, a jab there, and the soundless thump of Bingo’s fingers on the leather seat, tapping in rhythm to the music.
The ferry crossing was cold and damp, and the water was rough. Once we were on the mainland, a sudden morning storm almost canceled the trip, but then the sun shone through, and because he was bugging me about it, we decided to go in Rosie’s new car, a Mustang convertible. I left my car parked in the driveway of Rosie’s “winter” house.
Twenty minutes down the road and Rosie’s new car got a flat.
We made Bingo fix it as we sat by the side of the road and issued profane instructions. Then we shoved him back into the cramped backseat, where we piled our stuff on top of him.
“Jesus, Coll, I can’t feel the lower half of my body,” he said. “Can we trade places for a while?”
“What? Are you kidding?” I said, taking one last bite of an apple before I tossed the half-eaten core behind me, beaning him on the temple.
He scrambled for it and mashed it on the top of my head. A thin stream of fruit juice ran down the side of my cheek. I lunged for him, and the car swerved. At 90 mph, you don’t want too many distractions.
“Hey, a*sholes, f*ck off,” Rosie said, overcompensating, steering the car back onto a straight course, rattling my neck.
“Ouch,” Bingo said without much passion, hitting his head on something back there.
“F*ck you, Ferrell,” I said, grabbing Rosie’s Red Sox cap and tossing it into the wind and onto the road. It’s the kind of eloquent exchange that passed for polite interaction in the rustic world of young manhood, all three of us the knuckle-dragging, shiny-haired by-products of the best education privilege can buy.
“So I hear you met Collie’s girlfriend, Zan. What do you think?” Rosie said to Bingo as he turned the car down a long, narrow country road.
“She’s pretty. She’s smart.” He was staring out the window.
“Why does ‘smart’ always sound like a pejorative whenever you use it to describe a girl?” I said, looking back at him through the rearview mirror.
I shrugged as he turned back to Rosie. “She’s kind of WASPy.”
“She’s a Catholic. What the hell are you talking about?” I said.
“Um, I don’t know; she just seems kind of stuck-up or something.”
I snorted. “Any girl with a library card and clean hair is a WASP as far as you’re concerned.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you’re an idiot when it comes to girls.”
“And everything else, too, right, Collie?” He was leaning forward and directly behind Rosie, but I wouldn’t turn around to face him.
“Come on, you guys, don’t start,” Rosie said, intervening.
“Girls are more than a cup size,” I said, wanting the last word.
“Must be nice to always be morally superior to everyone else,” Bingo said, shooting me an accusing glance, which I caught out of the corner of my eye.
“Would you two shut the f*ck up already?” Rosie had had it.
We rolled into a little hick-town gas station around ten o’clock and picked up breakfast—Gatorade and jelly beans—and waited around for Bingo to reappear.
“Where the hell did he go?” Rosie asked.
I swore. He was always vanishing. “Let’s give him five minutes and then we split,” I said, giving the whole matter about ten seconds’ thought.
“Hey! Wait! . . . You guys!” Bing broke into a run at the sound of the engine turning over, appearing from around the corner of the convenience store building, a smiling, dark-haired girl in a short black skirt behind him, his hand in her hand pulling her along.
“Holy shit!” Rosie said, eyeing them through his rearview mirror.
We exchanged annoyed glances. Bing, despite his field of freckles and wobbly intellect, got laid more than any guy I knew. It wasn’t as if he came on like Pepé Le Pew, either. Unlike the rest of us, who were running around with our tongues hanging out, panting for attention, all he ever had to do was show up.
“Not all relationships boil down to love in an elevator,” I told him, knowing I was delivering my lecture to an empty room. I once saw him emerging from a confessional at St. Basil’s with a cute girl and a big grin on his face.
“One for the road. I’m giving up sex for Lent,” he said.
“Jesus, Bing, that’s sacrilege.”
He laughed. “Not the way I do it,” he said. “The way I do it, it’s pure sacrament.”
“Can she come?” Bing said, dragging his new friend, Erica, by the shirtsleeve.
“Where will she sit?” I asked, smiling at Erica through clenched teeth.
He hopped into the constricted space and pulled her onto his lap, cheerfully making introductions.
“I love your car,” she said as Rosie nodded in courteous strained acknowledgment.
Just what we needed—another girl impressed by a car.
“You’re not exactly dressed to go caving,” I said by way of a hint.
“I just live down the road a mile or so. Bing said you wouldn’t mind if I ran in and got changed. . . . It’ll only take me a minute. Is that okay?”
“Sure it is,” Bingo said. “Collie and Rosie don’t mind a bit. Do you, guys?”
We exchanged a murderous glance, my fist clenching and unclenching.
“No problem,” Rosie said.
“Wow,” Erica said, taking in the whole picture, settling deeper into Bing’s lap, her arm around his neck. “Are you guys rich? It sure seems as if you are.”
“Oh yeah,” Bingo said. “Ain’t life grand?”
Rosie laughed. It was a classic Fantastic Flanagan remark. With his soft features, slight build, and breezy manner, Bing, upper-class inflections intact, looked and sounded as if he’d just stepped off a yacht docked for the social season on the Italian coastline.
I turned around and glared at him. He didn’t care. Only I knew there was more than a little of Pop, percolating like an alchemist’s blend of bargain-basement charm and a handful of cheap tricks, beneath that glistening surface.
As it turned out, Erica worked at the convenience store, was saving for college, was planning on becoming a physiotherapist, and was chatty and transparent as hell but pleasant enough. Nothing I liked better than being mad and exasperated with Bingo, so it suited my ongoing agenda to have her ruin our plans.
I glanced in the side mirror. She and Bing were making out. Nothing so graphic it would offend the Junior League, but just obnoxious enough to make me wait until she was out of earshot, tripping up the steps to her family’s nice little brick house, rushing to get changed, before I took the opportunity to smack him upside the head.
“Man, you’re such a puritan, Collie,” he said, rubbing his ear. “Pop told me it’s genetic. You’re a certain kind of Irish Catholic. . . .”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Typical Fantastic Flanagan horseshit.”
“Admit it. You are a bit of a puritan, Coll,” Rosie said. “So it’s not all horseshit.”
“Next to Bingo, the Marquis de Sade would seem uptight,” I said. “I just like a little decorum, you know. A bit of restraint might be nice. I know it’s a foreign concept in our house, but it’s something to consider.”
The front door opened, and Erica, in shorts and sweatshirt, said good-bye to her mother, who smiled and waved at us from the porch as Erica ran down the steps and toward the car.
You’ve got to be skinny to go caving. You never know when you’re going to run into a tight squeeze. We had a couple of flashlights among the lot of us, no headgear, and we decided not to worry about the rain. Rosie and I had been through the caves in the past. I was familiar with one route in particular and was confident we could make it a pretty straightforward excursion. We talked about bringing ropes, but in the end we thought forget it, we don’t need them, we’re going on a lark, we aren’t Stanley and f*cking Livingstone, for Christ’s sake. Parents took their little kids on excursions through those caves.
We got to the cave entrance—a narrow opening in the limestone—and right away we had problems. Bingo was slim enough, he could pass through the eye of a needle no sweat. I wasn’t as slender, but I was pretty lean, so it was no problem for me or Erica, but Rosie had put on a little beer weight, and he couldn’t make the cut.
Even with Bing pushing down on his shoulders at the surface and me pulling his legs from below, we couldn’t budge his fat ass.
“You guys are gonna kill me,” he said, his face getting redder with each passing moment.
I was so disgusted, I was all for leaving him wedged in there for the rest of his life.
“Well, this was a total waste of time,” I said, hoisting myself back up to the surface, unkindly poking Rosie in his soft gut with a long stick I picked up off the ground.
“Let’s look around for another entrance,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. We didn’t bring any stuff with us. And I only know my way from here.”
“Come on, Coll, where’s your sense of adventure?” Bing said mischievously, eyeing Erica. It was plain to see his reasons for wanting to go belowground. She smiled back at him.
“Adventure’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. “You don’t know what’s down there. If we get into a jam, we’ve got no way of getting out. I don’t want to be one of those weekend spelunker dorks they have to rescue after they’ve spent three days wandering around in circles in the dark.”
Bingo started squawking like a chicken.
“That’s mature,” I said.
“I’ve come all this way. I’m looking for another entrance. Are you coming?” he asked the others.
“I’m in,” Erica agreed, pointedly looking at me. I shifted involuntarily.
Jesus, I thought, outclassed by a girl.
“What the hell? Come on, Coll, we’ve come this far . . . ,” Rosie said, hauling himself up and dusting off his jeans, stained a rich brown from the earth.
“Jeez, we’ve driven for a couple of hours. You guys make it sound like we trekked for days through the Himalayas,” I said, bringing up the rear as the others scrambled out across the limestone, searching for another way in. But no one was listening to me. The momentum, clearly, was for going in.
Everything was telling me it was wrong. I felt my uneasiness spreading as if it were poison ivy. My skin itched with reluctance, and still I went ahead. What is that? Every part of me covered in hives, my whole body screaming out an alarm, and I ignored it? Even after years of thinking about it, the only explanation I have is that those whom God would destroy He first makes itchy as hell.
“Over here!”
I looked up. It was Bingo. I heard him whoop delightedly. I saw the top of his head, and then he disappeared. The others were laughing.
“Jesus, Bing, you a*shole!” I said as I stood looking down at him in disbelief.
He shone his flashlight in our direction from where he stood in the darkness about eight feet below. He’d found an opening in the limestone and he’d jumped, without thinking, without discussing it with anyone, he’d just leapt in. I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s awesome down here,” he said.
I was bent over the hole and staring down at him.
“Come on. Jump,” he said.
“Are you crazy? How do we get back out?” I yelled down. “How the hell are you going to get out?”
“Oh, Collie, there are a million ways out of here. What are you so worried about? I can see light way down at the end of this big cavern. At the worst we can always just follow the water to the river opening. Come on, Erica, I’ll catch you. You can do it. Jump.”
Erica hesitated for a second, giggled nervously, closed her eyes, and let fly.
“One, two, three . . .” Rosie followed, landing with a loud thud.
“Hey, I felt the earth really move for the first time,” Bingo joked. “Come on, Collie. It’s fine. There’s light streaming in. I can see it down round the bend.”
“Bingo’s right,” Rosie said, his flashlight illuminating his face. “You know how porous these caves are. There are openings all over the place.”
I hesitated. I was thinking about something, and for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I’ve gone over every moment of that day a thousand times in my head, so thoroughly that I can account for every second, but no matter how I try, regardless of what tricks I play on myself, I can’t remember what I was thinking at the precise moment before I jumped.
Mostly I remember following the trail laid down by Bing’s laughter.
“Are you finished?” I asked as Bing emerged from the darkness, his knees covered with mud, yellow dust in his hair, his eyes shining like an oil lamp, Erica trailing him, this ever-loving girl, this obliging mattress he’d found somewhere on the way and insisted on dragging along.
“I think I’m in love,” he said, full of high spirits. Clapping both hands around my head and dragging me into him, he kissed me as Rosie and Erica hooted in shock and delight.
“Come on, Collie, let’s f*ck!” he shouted, and even amid the ensuing hilarity, no one was more amused than he was.
“Yeah, yeah, hey, Shecky, let’s get going.” I gave him an impatient push. “We’ve got to find a way out of here in the next couple of hours,” I said, turning away and starting the meandering trek around the bend and toward the light glimmering somewhere off in the distance.
It was then I noticed Bing limping.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“It hurts,” he said. He had twisted his ankle in the jump.
“What a f*cking a*shole you are,” I said. “What are you going to do if we have to climb? Damn it, Bing.”
“You’ll help me,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’ll be fine.” He said it as though he meant it, as if he knew it was true, as if he could count on me.
We were navigating a long, narrow pitch down to the level of the streamway. There was a squeeze in the middle that gave us a bit of trouble. Bingo slipped and fell a couple of times as we carried on our journey downstream. Three hours into our trek and his ankle was swollen and bruised and his toes felt cold.
“Ouch,” he said, jumping, grabbing my forearm as I gently felt my way around his foot in the semidarkness.
“Jeez, Bing, I think it might be broken.”
“Nah. It’s just a sprain,” he said, looking over at Erica, pretending to be brave, trying to impress her.
“Oh, and you’d know, of course,” I said. “I’m telling you it’s broken.”
“Poor baby,” Erica said, kissing his forehead.
I reached out and, taking his hand, helped him to his feet. “Put your arm around my neck,” I said.
We hobbled along for a while, Bing making the odd joke, but for the most part he was uncharacteristically quiet, not singing or whooping it up or cracking wise. It was a bit disconcerting, him being so silent.
“How you doing?” I asked him.
“Just leave me here to die,” he said. “I can’t take another step. You guys go ahead and save yourselves. If I get hungry, I’ll gnaw on a limb.”
“Shut up, you idiot! Here . . .” I bent over and gestured for him to climb aboard. “Get on my back.”
“Thanks, Coll.”
“I wish you were my big brother.” Erica looked over and smiled at me.
“No, you don’t,” I said.
Just ahead, we heard the muffled roar of water. We came around the bend and saw a deep pool fed by twin waterfalls—tall, explosive cascades of surging water feeding the plunge pool, the water, unusually high from the rain, sweeping in a strong, circular motion, a series of complex currents competing. At one end, the pool narrowed and opened up into rapids phasing into a fast-moving current that by the look of things—I could see light sparkling on the water’s surface off in the distance—eventually led outside the cave and onto the wider river.
There was a huge boulder near the base of the waterfall. I felt uneasy.
“Rosie, do you remember anything Mr. Morrison said about aerated water?” Mr. Morrison was our geography teacher at Andover and had led us on a few caving expeditions.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rosie said. “What’s aerated water?”
“You can’t swim in it,” I said, struggling to recall the details of Mr. Morrison’s warning. “You need to be careful in a pool like this where there’s a waterfall. Especially when there’s something like a rock or a log—see the big boulder down there? Something about the currents making a hole in the water and you just sink to the bottom. Remember he told us the story about the guy in Australia who tried to swim out of a cave, but he drowned because it was aerated water?”
“No,” Rosie said. “I remember something about staying away from dams. Who ever heard of water you can’t swim in? Where the f*ck do you come up with this stuff?”
“Tell me about it,” Bingo said, sliding off me and back onto the ground. “Collie, you’re like the Grim Reaper or something. Don’t be such a downer all the time.”
“Pointing out legitimate danger isn’t a character defect,” I said. “You guys are acting like Curly and Larry.”
“I guess that makes you Moe,” Bingo said as Rosie laughed a little too appreciatively.
I ignored them and looked around, trying to decide whether we should go forward or head back and wait until someone else came along who could help us.
It didn’t look good. The only way to avoid the pool and waterfalls was to go up to the source of the light shining on the water. Above us was a narrow limestone ledge, covered in moss and slick with water and wear. It wrapped around the tops of the waterfalls, gradually ascending to what seemed to be a series of openings beyond the rapids in the cave’s ceiling that I hoped were wide enough to take us aboveground.
But there was no way in hell Bingo could make it across with his injured ankle.
He read my mind. “To hell with it, I’m gonna swim out of here.”
“Are you crazy? You can’t take the chance. It might be that weird water,” I said. “There’s no buoyancy. You’d sink like a stone.”
“I can swim in anything,” he said, appraising the boiling currents.
“No, you can’t,” I said, a tone of desperation creeping into my voice. “There’s no discussion, Bing. We’re climbing. I’ll help you. Just forget about swimming.”
I held on to him as we made our ascent, the color draining from my hands, my fingers aching. I was afraid he’d jump in, so the truth was I was holding on to him for all I was worth. I think he knew, too, because he held on a little tighter to me.
“It’s okay, Collie,” he said. “I won’t do anything stupid. I could do it, though, you know, I can hold my breath forever if I have to.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Rosie and I were okay swimmers. And Bingo? He was the best swimmer I ever knew. He could hold his breath forever, started practicing breath-hold diving when he was a little kid after pretty much outgrowing the asthma that almost killed him.
Even I had to admit there was something magical about seeing him in the shallows along the beach at home, sliding beneath the water’s surface, barely creating a ripple, smooth and silent as the schools of silverfish. I’d watch for the fleeting rhythmic flick of long flippers—his only concession to equipment—as he made his descent, heartbeat and respiration deliberately slowed, air packed and waiting for him. My own heartbeat and respiration accelerated, panic rising, as I waited for him to emerge, four minutes, five minutes, six minutes later.
Quite a trick; a real hit at parties, where Bingo inevitably spent half the night with his head in a bucket of water and the other half touring the hidden depths of just about every girl in the joint, each one lining up for the privilege. His magic expressed itself in many ways. I wouldn’t have minded a little of what he had. There was no magic in me.
All of us were getting soaked by the silver spray assailing the rock. The water and the air were cold. Bing’s teeth were chattering from the cold and the wet and the pain of his ankle.
“Are you okay?” I asked him as we inched along the narrow passage.
“No,” he said.
We didn’t have far to go. I nearly slipped a couple of times. I was afraid I would lose my balance. We decided it was safer for him to walk than ride.
“Once we get beyond the waterfalls, I’ll piggyback you to the top to where the opening is,” I said, promising him.
So it was me leading the way, followed closely by Bing, who was limping, then Erica, and Rosie reluctantly bringing up the rear.
“Whose f*cking idea was this, anyway? Shit, Bingo, I could kill you for getting us into this jam. I’m f*cking freezing up here. Where the hell is the way out?” Rosie had lost his enthusiasm for the whole project around the same time he got stuck.
“Lay off,” I said. “You’re not helping. Anyway, you were all in favor of this little adventure until you found out you might actually have to move your fat ass—speaking of which, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”
Bing looked over at me, eyebrows raised, clearly pleased that I would take his side over Rosie’s.
I had hardly finished sputtering before Erica gave this tiny gasp, kind of an eek—a soft little yelp tacked on the end of a sharp inhalation of air. Her foot shot out from under her, and Bing instinctively reached over to grab her to stop her from falling. The unexpected twist and force caused him to lose his own footing. I saw what was happening. I lunged for him—too late.
“Collie . . . ,” Bingo said quietly, no alarm in his voice, falling, midair, parallel to me, stopped in time, so close that I could almost reach out and touch him. Maybe I did touch him. I think so. I felt the tips of his fingers. I’m sure I did. And then he was falling, hitting the water, causing a minor sensation, blue and black and silver spray soaring skyward, the top of his chestnut-colored head disappearing beneath the gurgling surface, a roiling cauldron of jostling currents, the noise of him swallowed up by the noise of all that.
“Bingo!” I shouted, but my shouting was a whisper, pale and bloodless as I was pale and bloodless, powerless to make myself heard or felt against the tumult.
“Bingo! . . . Bing!” Erica and Rosie took up the chorus.
“Christ! Collie!” Rosie said, looking at me expectantly.
“Do something!” Erica screamed at me.
Everything was happening so fast—it was as if someone suddenly appeared with a gun. Bang, down he went. Bang, Jesus, Erica went in after him. Erica, Jesus Christ, what are you doing? Bang, followed by Rosie. Rosie, you were supposed to be a coward, remember? Everyone knows you’re not worth shit. What’s this? A hero, it can’t be, not a goddamn hero. Rosie, come back! Bang, bang, bang, each one disappearing beneath the water’s darkening swirl. Each one gone. They might as well have fallen from the top of a mountain through empty space. What were they thinking? And me, what was I thinking, pressed against the rock face?
“Collie!” There he was. I heard him.
I was clinging to the ledge; my palms were cut and bleeding from the sharp points of jagged rock. The sun from the opening ahead hit a patch of water, briefly illuminating something.
I pointed. “There he is!” I shouted, no one to hear me, just me, scrambling and falling, tripping the rest of the way down, close to a ledge overlooking the pool, where I’d last seen him go in, and I waited, knowing he could hold his breath forever. And everything was going through my head, everything but going in after him.
I knew the others were lost; they were human, after all. But Bing was different. Bingo was pure magic. I stood there shivering, threw up, pissed myself; it may have been days I stood there waiting for him, for all I remember.
I waited until my flashlight went out and I was alone in the dark with the only sound the carbonated surge of the water and the ghastly shrieks of night birds swooping round the cave, circling overhead. I couldn’t hold my head up. I sank to my knees, wet and mossy, cold as river rock, a creature of hollow edges, and the sole light was the light from the moon wavering on top of the black water, blackbirds going round and round above me.
When the light went out I knew he was gone, buried at the bottom of the pool. Head tilted back. Face turned up to the light on the water’s surface. Skin turning blue, lips blue, fingernail beds blue. Breathing stopped. Circulation stopped. Heart. Stop. Brain cells dying one after another.
I had to get help. Somehow I climbed back up onto the limestone ledge and worked my way toward the opening, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave them there alone in the cave. The next morning, another group of day trippers found me and called for help.
They found Erica and Rosie downstream right away. Bingo took longer. I was there when the police divers spotted him and pulled him out. He was clutching the chain I wore around my neck, my holy medal in his hand, St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals. He’d torn it from my neck when he fell. He must have grabbed for me as I grabbed for him. All he got for his efforts was a fistful of someone’s goodness and courage, somebody else’s bravery and martyrdom.
Nothing, there was nothing to do. Bingo was dead. It was plain enough. He was white, so white that he was translucent, a tinge of blue under his eyes, pure Irish blue, in the hollow of his cheeks. His hair was filled with sand and was swept back off his forehead, sleek and wet and shiny.
I’d never seen such stillness.
I’d thought dying was the same as sleeping. But nothing about Bingo suggested that he was asleep. Silent and empty, he seemed to have gone far away, leaving a massive vacancy behind. Water trickled from the side of his mouth. He soaked the ground where he lay; water drained from every part of him onto the sand.
“He’s melting,” I said, and the thought terrified me.
He had a deep, narrow cut over his eye. It was shaped like a crescent moon and ran from the outer edge of his eye to the tip of his cheekbone, immaculately executed as if by skilled practitioner with precision blade. Water seeped from his wound. There was no blood. I wondered if his blood had turned to water.
I’d still be there. I swear to God, I would be, I would have waited for him forever, I never would have left him, but someone came along and found me and took me away.
He was scared, just something I knew about him. When he was small, he was scared of so many things, used to shake when he saw a bee, would tremble with fear when he had to go to the doctor or get his hair cut.
Uncle Tom taught him this limerick about a little mouse that lived in a bar and sneaked out at night to drink beer spilled on the floor.
“Then back on his haunches he sat. And all night long, you could hear the mouse roar, ‘Bring on the goddamn cat!’”
After that, whenever Bingo got scared he used to say, “Bring on the goddamn cat!”
It worked. Everyone thought he was fearless, everyone but Uncle Tom and me.
I told myself he was all right. He wasn’t alone. He had that goddamn cat at his side.