No Man’s Land. Despite the name, Conner didn’t know of a single boy his age who hadn’t ventured out to the rift just to jump across and back. It was a dare undertaken in trembling packs of youth, the taboos whispered on long hikes, the false tales each year of a boy who had slipped and had fallen into the chasm and whose screams could still be heard. “That’s how deep it is,” an older boy would invariably warn with a sinister smile. “You fall in and you fall forever, screaming and screaming, until you grow old and die.”
Conner had heard these warnings as a boy. Later, he had spoken them to others. When he had gone on his own trek, he had been nine years old and had known that it was the wind that made that noise. And for all the boys who seemed to annually plunge to their deaths, none were ever named. There were never any funerals or sobbing mothers. It was just older kids trying to scare the younger.
The chasm itself was a mere two paces across where boys made brave leaps. Once they crossed, they stood on the other side, trembling and afraid, chests thrust out in defiance of the noisy gods deep in the valley, feeling the wind and sand on their faces, thinking on warnings from fathers who had in their youth done the very same. And then they jumped right back, vastly relieved to have this ritual behind them.
And so it was said that no man returned from this land even though all men dipped a toe in unharmed. But Conner knew, as everyone else did, that legends and law did not have such hard borders as these. They were soft things, probed without bursting, until one pressed the point too far. And the danger in life was that no one knew when the skin would give, just as Colorado had not known how to fight an enemy who wrestled with his friend, how to aim true enough to hit only the one.
They set up the tent and made a fire and warmed bread and stew in silence, and Conner thought on these things. They lit the lamp and sipped caps of water and shared stories of stories about the long dead and long absent, and Conner thought on these things. That night, he lay in his father’s tent while embers throbbed red outside, and he dwelt on the legends, thinking how a boy might leap across that gap and live, but how no boy truly believed he had entered No Man’s Land. Not really. Not for honest. Because this was a place from which no soul returned.
No man, at least.
18 ? No Man’s Land
Conner lay in his bedroll, counting down to the moment, feeling in his bones what his old man must’ve felt twelve years ago to the day. His heart thrummed louder than the rolling booms in the distance. He could feel his pulse in his temples. His blood ticked there like one of Graham’s old clocks. And after it had ticked for what felt like days, he rose as quietly as his father once had. Slipping from his bedroll, he could feel not only Rob’s presence in the pitch black but also Palmer’s, Vic’s, and his mother’s too. He was sneaking out on all of them.
The wind was his noisy accomplice. Conner waited until a gust shook and flapped the canvas, and just as the breeze passed and would not blow sand inside, he added to its nocturnal noise by parting the tent and stealing into the night.
The stars were bright outside, the sky clear, the air cool. There was a half-moon low to the west, giving the sand an even whiteness. That same moon had been high in the night when he’d left the tent to pee and used this commotion to remove his pack. He found the bag now by the light of the firepit’s glowing coals. He dumped the scoop out of his father’s boots and sat on the cool sand to pull them on. Conner shivered and his teeth chattered, as much from nerves as from the temperature. He felt the urge to pee again but knew he didn’t really need to. There was no water in him, only fear.
A wailing lament blew across the Bull’s gash, and the coals in the fire throbbed with life as they inhaled the breeze. There was a great and mysterious rumble in the distant earth that filled Conner’s chest and throat, a sound of beating drums, that echo eternal. He rose and slung the pack over his shoulders, cinched the truss around his waist to carry the load on his hips, and turned to look back one last time. He studied the dark form of the tent, barely aglow from the coals, his brother sleeping inside, all alone. And he felt a final tug of guilt and doubt before steeling himself and heading off into the noisy beyond.