The Boys from Santa Cruz

aware of the nearness of her little breasts on either side of my hand. At least she won’t be fucking Dr. O now, I told myself. “Dusty, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s what you think!” Turns out we’d been hiking in a circle all this time. According to what Dusty had overheard, we were only a few miles from the little campground where we’d started out. “C’mon, what have we got to lose? At least let’s make the assholes look for us.”

I tried to tell her how dangerous it could be, tramping around unfamiliar mountains in the dark, but Dusty wouldn’t listen. She kind of threw my hand away from her in disgust and said she was going with or without me. Then she reached up and ruffled the soft stubble where the hair was starting to grow in around my Mohawk, and said she’d much, much rather it was with me.

By now Dusty and I were both experts at packing for the trail. Our major problem was going to be food. What little we hadn’t already eaten was supposed to be hanging in bear-proof bags twelve feet high in a tree at the edge of the meadow. I say supposed to be: Dusty and I each had a few protein bars and some trail mix stashed away, and of course our MacGuffins. Also we’d both filled our canteens before bedtime, and since the woods were full of raspberries, blackberries, and elderberries at that time of year, we decided to take our chances.

Our plan, such as it was, was to hike out to the road, then hitchhike to a phone. Dusty said she had a friend she could call in Arcata, but we hadn’t really thought things out beyond that. Not that it would have mattered if we had, because within an hour, we were hopelessly lost.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault: we just guessed wrong. The trail forked, and the fork we chose began to climb and narrow and narrow and climb until it looked like it petered out at a crumbly shale ledge barely a foot wide. Sheer cliff to the right, sheer drop to the left. The moonlight had petered out, too, so I couldn’t tell how far the fall would have been, but I could see with my flashlight that the path widened again on the other side of the ledge.

“I’m going to check it out,” I told Dusty. “You wait here.” Keeping my weight on my toes, I inched sideways out onto the ledge, hugging the cliff with my belly, and feeling as if my pack was going to pull me over backward at any second.

But it didn’t. The path began a gradual descent, then widened to a grassy plateau. I put down my pack and went back for Dusty, took her pack from her, and helped her across the abyss. When we reached the plateau she threw herself into my arms and dragged me down onto the grass, laughing and crying and covering my face with wet kisses and salty tears.

“My hero,” she said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me that.

Dusty and I zipped our sleeping bags together and made love under the stars that night. I didn’t tell her I was a virgin, but I think she knew. She went gentle on me at first. I remember how her little breasts trembled and how my fingers trembled when I touched them. After I got the hang of it, though, things got rougher, which was how she liked it. She made me call her names and pinch her and slap her around, and when the names weren’t dirty enough or the pinches and slaps hard enough, she’d call me names, names like wussy and pussy and faggot.

But no matter how hard I slapped her or how long I screwed her, she couldn’t come. The problem, she said, was that she usually did it drunk or stoned or with poppers. “I need something, or I just can’t, you know, let go at the end.” Then she gave me this sneaky little look. “Would you mind choking me?” she said.

“Choking you?”

“Yeah. It’s something I learned from my minister. He used to make me strangle him with his tie just before he came.”

“But I don’t want to choke you.”

“Wuss,” she said.

So I did it. I slapped her and called her names, even though all I really wanted to do was kiss her and stroke her and whisper her name. At the end, when she was really squirming and thrashing and her nipples were like little pebbles, I put my hands around her throat and squeezed with my thumbs. She came so hard her eyes rolled back in her head and I could feel her belly rippling under me. Then I exploded inside her so hard I blacked out, too, for a microsecond.

When I came around I could still hear my own yell echoing back from the far side of the canyon we’d almost fallen into earlier. Dusty lay under me, unmoving, her head turned to the side and her eyes closed. She didn’t seem to be breathing. Oh, god, I killed her, I thought.

Then her eyes fluttered open. “Oh, baby,” she said hoarsely. “Where have you been all my life?”

Which sounded kind of funny, her still being a couple weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

3

We woke at dawn, our sleeping bags drenched with dew. We squeezed them out, packed up, then ate our MacGuffins, which we’d saved for last. Dusty’s canteen was empty, so I gave her half of my water. In the daylight we could see the path we were on was a dead end, so we reversed course and started back up the trail in the direction we’d come.

We knew we’d have to hurry, because if the counselors hadn’t missed us yet, they would soon. But there was no question of hurrying when we reached the narrow, crumbly ledge that had nearly stopped us last night. It looked even scarier in the daylight, with the cliff rising straight up on one side of the ledge, which was only a foot or so wide, and falling straight down on the other, a drop of at least thirty feet just to the tops of the pine trees-lord only knows how far it was to the ground.

I went first, slide-stepping sideways with my belly pressed against the cliff wall and my pack trying to tug me backward. I told Dusty to wait for me, that I would put down my pack where the ledge widened, then come back for her. But she didn’t wait. I don’t know why, I guess I’ll never know why. All I know is, I had just dropped off my pack and was starting back for her when I heard the word shit, that’s all, just shit, followed by another one of those screams that will be with me until the day I die. Not that eerie eeeeeee Teddy had made, but a sad, falling ohhhhhhhh.

After the scream came the sound of crackling, snapping branches as Dusty crashed into the evergreen canopy below. I thought, hoped, prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, that she had survived, that the branches had broken her fall. But when I got down on my stomach and peered over the ledge, I saw her body lying spread-eagled in the trees, her head thrown back and her arms and legs splayed out, as if she were floating on her back, bobbing on the surface of a dark green sea.

“Hold on,” I yelled. “I’m coming down, hold on.” But then her body jerked a couple times, and the branches shifted and swayed, and I saw the dark stain spreading across her Mountain Project T-shirt, just above her heart. The branches had broken her fall all right: Dusty had been impaled before she reached the ground.

CHAPTER SIX 1

When Monday finally rolled around, Pender still wasn’t ready to face the music. Instead he went camping with Amy and the crew down by the Kern River and found himself living through a two-day beer commercial. Daylight was for grilling burgers and franks over an open fire, drinking Bud out of the can, playing wiffle ball, and taking turns swinging out over the old swimming hole on a truck tire hanging by a thick rope from an overhanging tree branch. Evening was for sitting around the campfire toasting marshmallows, drinking Jim Beam out of his beat-up old pewter flask, and singing Merle Haggard songs. Nighttime was for making love under the stars, on a mattress in the back of Amy’s pickup.

And whenever the stuff he wasn’t thinking about showed signs of surfacing, he told himself a couple more days wouldn’t make much difference in the long run. It was like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock: it’s not so much the extra ten minutes of sleep you’re buying, it’s the illusion of control.