There is a shadow below and a whump. He raises his distracted gaze to see she has taken her sweater off.
“There,” she says, “you’re already high and you haven’t even desecrated your holy lungs.”
“Come on, Deanie. They’re great tits. Now I want to go back down. I hate this. I’m not ready to die.”
“Poor baby,” she mocks. “Okay. I just wanted to see that look on your face again.”
He’s trying not to look down, and ludicrously, not at her tits either, as if he’s never seen them before.
“What look?”
“The one where you’re scared I’m going to fall.”
“It’s still on my face, isn’t it? Only now I’m scared I’m going to fall.”
Hugging herself, she shivers. “All right. You go down first.”
“Promises, promises,” he mocks and she laughs. “No, you slide by me, gimme a good feel and get the hell down so I’m not pissing myself for fear you won’t make it. Then I’ll get me down.”
Giggling, she squirms by him as instructed, and he laughs with her at the touch of her body. She is such a witch! With the jay in her mouth, she slithers down the rope and shakes it at him and then shakes herself, like a stripper giving the crowd what it wants.
He sticks two fingers in his mouth and makes a wolf whistle and applauds.
From the shadowed hole that is the doorway of the cubby, the man emerges so suddenly he seems unreal, like a lurching shadow himself. From Sam’s vantage, he is foreshortened, the crown of a head, the tip of a nose, a chin, broad shoulders, the tops of workmen’s shoes. Yet Tony Lord is instantly recognizable as he lunges for Deanie.
“Motherfucker!” Sam shouts.
Deanie grabs onto the rope convulsively, trying to rise again, but the man’s arms are around her waist, dragging her back down. He is wheezing, squealing a kind of gibberish at her, a secret language made up completely of violent obscenities. Clinging with one hand to the line, Deanie bats at him with the other, claws at him, bucks with her whole body against his embrace.
The thirty feet between them and Sam is impassable. It is as if Sam is on the other side of the universe. He cannot reach them either by descending the rope to which she clings or by jumping.
Deanie connects with Lord’s bad eye and he squeals more loudly, and she makes a little progress up the rope before he seizes her knees and drags her back down again. His hands claw runners of flesh from her midriff and she screams.
Screaming with her, Sam steps off the beam.
Sergeant Woods glimpses the long black sleekness of the Eldorado from the overpass and shakes his head. The dashboard clock says past ten. Maybe he’s a suspicious old poop and they’re just larking on the Playground. The teenagers like the Playground as much as the little kids do. But he finds himself turning down the access road and pulling up behind the Eldorado with a burp and a blip. “Shit,” he mutters. “Better not be beer or smoke in that car.”
Damn kids. Surely Sam and Deanie didn’t need to be diddling in a parking lot, they must be getting all they want at home and if he was Reuben Styles he wouldn’t be putting up with that bullshit.
And he flips his light into the sedan’s backseat and it’s empty.
Falling through thirty feet does not take very long but there is a fraction of a second of freefall into gravity’s maw, or so it feels to Sam, almost the last thing he feels in the long heart-stopping launch from the beam to the hoop, and he almost misses—it has to be more than fingertips, and it is, the rough scaled metal of the hoop, curling under his fingers, taking the skin off his hands. His weight drops like a dead man’s through the trap, the joints of his arms taking it just that next fraction of a second before the hoop tears free of the backboard as it separates from the exploding crumbling bricks, which dislodge neighbors of a hundred years and brings down a section of the wall. Even as he grasps the hoop, he twists his body out of its plummet and away, dislocating both shoulders in an exquisite burst that makes the last seven feet a fiery blur. Hoop, backboard and bricks descend behind him and over him, and over Deanie and Tony Lord, tangled together at the rope. The bricks explode on impact, filling the air with a rain of sharp-edged stones around him. The jolt of impact goes through Sam from the soles of his feet, which feel as if they are crumbling stone. It drives the long bones of his legs up into his hip sockets, telegraphing up his spine to the base of his skull and into the roots of his teeth and down through his shoulders and chest bones. He feels the articulation of all his bones in one instant. There is no breath to express the sensation, which is the most all-encompassing he has ever felt. It is like birth, a violent breathless expulsion into an unknown universe.
Though it is beyond Sam’s knowing, he has given Deanie all the chance she needs. In the moment of distraction when Sam plummets from overhead, Tony’s grip loosens enough for her to squirm a little higher up the rope. When everything comes down, hoop, backboard, bricks and Sam, Tony lets go, flinching, trying to get out of the way and she brings her knees up sharply into his balls. She hears the breath huff out of him. And then they are in the midst of the maelstrom of brick. Instinct brings her hands to her face as she drops to the floor
