Quarrymen

When the pain became too great, Eddy laid down to await whatever should come next. It had not been his intention to come to the overlook at the quarry but his mind was always doing funny things like this, pulling him thoughtlessly toward places that made his heart ache. His friend Callum had brought him here just before his family moved away. They sat in the cool shade of a jutting stone tattooed with teenage graffiti and tossed rocks over the edge to hear them clatter down and echo out over the earth’s open wound and all the growling machinery which deepened it. “They’ll use those,” Callum had said, gesturing to all the groaning cranes and rattling belts way down in the quarry moving rubble from here to there. “We’re being helpful.”

They played a game called Quarrymen where they pretended to be quarry workers and wielded big sticks like pickaxes hitting rocks and breaking off tiny little pieces and stacking those pieces in useless piles. As they worked, Callum would hold certain rocks up to the sunlight then point with his pinky finger as he named the rock for Eddy; there was some isolated smokey quartz and clearish quartz but most of it was granite. There was a lot of granite. Eddy would pick up a stone that looked different from all the rest but when he hurried over to Callum, the boy would shake his head sadly. “Granite again.” The day was inching toward a close when Callum began suddenly hopping in place, then remembering he was a grown professional, grew solemn and beckoned Eddy over with a dignified wave. The rock in his hand was unremarkable, brown and rough and brutal in the light, but when Callum brought it close to his housekeys, they lifted slightly, pulled by some unseen hand toward the ugly chunk of stone. It was called Cumberlandite, Callum explained, and of all the places in the world it was found only in their Rhode Island town and, perturbingly, also in Sweden. Due to its high concentration of iron it possessed subtle magnetic properties but otherwise had little practical use. Callum did not add this one to the pile but pocketed it and winked, don’t tell the boss. When they were done, when the imaginary foreman rang his imaginary bell for them to clock out and head home to the imaginary stew simmering on the stove, Callum stooped his tired shoulders and said, “Good work today, companion. These rocks will feed our families for centuries.” Nothing had ever been so funny to Eddy or ever would be again.

Getting to the quarry required a rather long and unintuitive trek through the dense woods behind the public library but Eddy managed not to get lost despite only coming the one time. Knowing the way might have surprised him if he weren’t so tired and his knees not so traitorous and sharp. The pressure his weight made on the small joints painted white stars across his vision and every step seemed to take some life from him. But he’d wanted to be out here, where there were only stooping trees, trilling insects, birds swooping in a hurry to make something of their tiny lives. None of these characters of the forest seemed to pay Eddy any mind so he could cry out slightly and limp along with his makeshift walking stick and not feel terrible for it. When he slipped through the ancient hole in the chainlink fence and reached the warm pale stone overlooking the quarry some hundred feet below he had not meant to lie down flat on his back, he simply did and that was that. Off his legs, the pain let up and he decided to stay for a while, until one thing or another happened. There would be an ending, he thought. Like Callum moving away, he would just be gone somehow and all the motions of life would go on without him. Everyone would eventually come to pretend he’d never existed.

Callum’s family had once owned and operated the quarry for a significant chunk of history. It was established and opened by his great great great (the number of greats increased and decreased depending on Callum’s mood) grandfather, a proud man who produced several successive generations of foolish alcoholics who inevitably ran the business into the ground with poor management and poorer livers. Callum’s grandfather sold the quarry to an out-of-towner before it could be handed down to Callum’s father and for a time his family had been a sort of laughing stock in town for failing at something so simple as mining and selling rocks. At one time, granite mined from that very earth had been used to construct Roger Williams’ tomb; now it lined driveways and office parks. Hardly anyone knew of this history anymore (or cared) but Callum said it weighed on his father that he’d never gotten the chance to run the business right, not to mention the near poverty which was handed to him instead, and they left town being chased by that self-perpetuated ghost of shame. Eddy had no other friends then and thought that’s just how it goes. Everyone’s got old ghosts in their peripherals and is just waiting for the right moment to run full tilt in hopes of shaking them off.

It was a hot, wet day, a prolonged breath held in summer’s lungs. Even unmoving as he was on his back, Eddy felt the way the sun pricked his skin and drew up sweat from the open pores. In places the skin was still splotchy and red from the family trip down the Cape two weeks prior where his mother had asked on the beach if he was capable enough to apply his own sunscreen and he’d nodded, yes, of course, he could do anything on his own. His back was peeling now in strips that looked like plastic curling in heat and the backs of his legs would simmer and sting when he bent them inward. He did not want to admit his failure, though it was visible. His mother saw, of course, but did not scold, only pursed her lips and rubbed her tired forehead where all her worries resided, the place she called ‘the big, fat hole in her head’. Eddy understood, anyhow, that the pain itself was the lesson and so he bore it and so it came to live within him.

He was unsure how long he’d been lying in the sun for, baking, smacking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, squeezing the loose rock in his pocket. He might have fallen asleep to the guttural ambient drone of machinery down in the quarry but couldn’t be sure. If he considered too much his position or the functions of his body, the pain began to sneak in through that open door of awareness and once the pain made itself known he’d start wondering what he was supposed to do about it and the little whimpers would come back to him unbidden and he’d feel weak, he’d feel like crying out for his mother which was not an option. Like a bad mood, he thought this will come to pass, if only he stayed quiet and still and was not a bother. He would not widen the big, fat hole in his mother’s head.

There was a rustling then and the sound of high voices slipping through gaps in the foliage. Eddy grew very stiff and still like a possum playing dead. The chainlink rattled as the approaching bodies ducked under the fence and came flip-flopping through. Though he kept his eyes closed, he could tell they were girls. Three of them, stepping from the trees laughing and cursing. They sounded like his older cousins who were always pointing their phones at him and telling him to do this or that, something innocent sounding that once done would make them burst into laughter and they’d spend the rest of the day rewatching the video but never showing him. These newcomers didn’t see him at first. One was dominating the conversation, telling the others how so-and-so said such-and-such to her in algebra which she called pathetic in one breath, then sweet in another. A second girl was saying “Yes,” and “Oh, yeah,” in response to everything the first girl said. The third was quiet, though Eddy could feel her trailing behind, could feel her reservation like its own presence.

“Oh,” said the first girl, suddenly halting the proceedings. “There’s a kid in our spot.”

Eddy winced and tried to make his face look peaceful, sleeping, but knew his brow was creased and his throat bobbed with every nervous swallow.

“Let’s just go somewhere else,” said the second voice.

“I guess,” said the first.

Their trajectory shifted and Eddy released slightly, glad to have been avoided, though upset to have been reminded of his physical presence which throbbed again with the sharpness of being inside himself. There was a funny feeling in his face, too, like his cheek and the corner of his mouth had departed him since he laid down but he did not bring his arm up to check they were still there.

“Do you think he’s okay?” said the third voice then, deeper than the rest.

The first voice groaned. “Can you go, like, anywhere without trying to get in other people’s business? He’s literally just laying there.”

“Look at his face,” the third voice said.

Immediately, Eddy relaxed his face and transferred all the tension there to the fists he clenched at his side, skin taut against the stone he clutched hard in his right hand. The same sharp pain that had punctured his knees was in his elbows now and he shuddered as the little knives made incisions along the bone. “I’m fine,” he called out, trying to sound sure and resolved but coming out hoarse and dry.

“See, he’s fine,” said their leader, already turning on her heels to take them elsewhere. Footsteps began to tentatively recede then halted as the girl stopped and said, “Lauren, come on, please don’t make this a thing.”

“Fine, then go,” said, ostensibly, Lauren. “I’ll catch up.” And then she was approaching Eddy and he wanted to cry from the feeling of loneliness on his chest and how badly he wanted to keep it. He was left no choice but to open his eyes.

Lauren stood over him, head blocking the heavy sun and rendering her into a stark silhouette with her hair curling in dark tendrils all around her. The other two girls were standing impatiently in the shade of the trees.

“Hey,” she said. “You here by yourself?”

“Yeah,” Eddy said. “Thank you.” He closed his eyes again but could feel Lauren frowning with her hands on her hips.

“Thank you for what?” she asked.

Eddy faltered. “I don’t know.”

“How old are you?”

He considered lying, as people often told him he seemed older than he was, but he could not think of a reasonable number to deceive with or what purpose it might serve, so he told the truth. “I’m ten.”

One of the other girls was coming over now and Eddy wished silently to be a rock tumbling down the cliffside. He thought he’d be more helpful down there where things are broken apart and repurposed and their origins no longer considered.

“What’s your name?” Lauren was asking but before he could answer the other girl shrieked.

“Oh god, why do his arms look like that?”

Lauren punched the other girl in the shoulder. “Dude, shut up.”

Eddy opened his eyes again, blinked at the two forms hovering over him, Lauren tall and sure, the other girl short and recoiling. “I got a sunburn,” he said.

“That is not a sunburn,” said the short one. “Sunburns do not happen in circles like that. I’ve seen that before, my uncle got it on a hike in Connecticut.” Perhaps trying to withhold the information from Eddy, she whispered, menacingly, “Limes disease.”

Lauren tilted her head. “Go ahead and spell that for me, Katelyn.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Lauren,” said the first girl, now approaching as there was no other option but to come corral her audience. “Just tell her why she’s wrong and you’re right.”

Lauren crouched and the sun spilled over Eddy’s eyes so he was squinting. “Lyme disease,” she said. “Tics carry it. You been in any tall grass lately, buddy?”

He thought back to their day down the Cape. They were on the beach and his brother, Connor, was down in the water talking to a girl and his mother had fallen asleep in her beach chair with her book folded on her chest. He was bored and restless so he’d clambered up the nearby dune, thinking he might find something interesting at the top but it was only more sand and long, pale green grass laid nearly flat from the wind that swept off the water and over the dunes. He traipsed through it for a while, looking closely for snails or baby birds, but grew quickly bored again and wished Callum was there. Then he’d felt himself burning and hurried back down to apply more sunscreen, only too late.

“Maybe,” he said. “It wasn’t that tall.”

“Do your parents know about this?” Lauren asked softly.

“Oh my god,” said the first girl. “Can we go? I just wanna smoke this blunt.”

“I’m fine,” Eddy said again. “I’m just taking a nap.”

Lauren stood and turned to her friends. “Go,” she said. “I’m gonna make sure he gets home alright.”

The first girl scoffed. “You were the one that wanted to do this but okay. It’s always some shit with you, Lauren. Come on, Kate.” Kate hesitated but inevitably relented to the greatest present power. The two girls walked away, suddenly recoiling at any grass that whispered along their ankles.

“Thank fucking god,” Lauren muttered, then sucked in. “Sorry. I don’t have any younger siblings, I forget not to swear.”

Eddy sniffed, momentarily forgetting the pain. “I have an older brother and he swears all the time, so.”

She laughed. “That makes sense. I’m sure your parents have told you never to go anywhere with a stranger but I need to take you home, dude. Lyme Disease is not a sunburn, it’s really serious and it can mess you up for the rest of your life.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated and closed his eyes again.

Lauren sighed. “I play volleyball, dude. I’ll pick you up if I have to.”

Eddy opened his eyes and set his jaw. There was little he despised more than when his brother picked him up and threw him over his shoulder. The world turned upside down and his head lolled and he had to hold in his tears with an awful focus. Even when Connor was being fun and friendly, which he wasn’t always, the gesture only made obvious to Eddy how he was entirely at the mercy of the world around him and maybe always would be.

“I just want to lay here,” he said, quietly enough that Lauren had to crouch down again. She observed him carefully, eyes tracing the red rings along his arms that sat like stains left behind on a coffee table, then sighed and sat down next to him. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll lay with you for a few minutes and then we need to take you somewhere. I’m serious, it’s not like a cold, you have to get, like, antibiotics from a doctor to fix it.”

Eddy shivered in spite of the heat. As if his mind had not already been made up to stay in this spot for as long as possible, the threat of a doctor made him all the more resolute, though he kept this to himself. This girl would give up eventually, he was sure. No one stayed around Eddy for very long before getting bored and getting on with their lives.

But Lauren settled in next to him, pulled a pair of sunglasses down over her eyes and breathed slowly, unspeaking for so long that Eddy was able to close his eyes and pull away from the pain for a time. Though he’d already figured the pain was his fault, at least he knew now that it was and was all the more determined to keep it to himself. He was finding, though, that while his right eye closed as naturally as ever his left eye was wanting to drift lazily open and it took a great effort to hold it in place. A terrible panic came over him in awful, jittery surges in which he imagined his one eye stuck open for as long as he lived, the wind always getting in, never able to truly rest or hide from the bright world. He noticed then how his breath began to outpace Lauren’s and so he slowed it back down and tried to find somewhere else to hide from the pain though it was beginning to permeate and make itself truly unignorable.

A smell came drifting over the rocks from higher up and Eddy turned his head slightly to see if Lauren noticed. Eddy’s brother had started smelling that way recently, soon after the thing they didn’t talk about happened. Almost every night Connor went out into the backyard and came back in smelling like a sweet skunk at which point he’d sigh into the couch and not seem so bothered by Eddy anymore.

“You can go with them,” he said, breaking the silence. “If you need the–the stuff.”

A little smirk pushed up the corner of her lips. “Now what do you know about ‘the stuff,’ little boy?”

He shrugged and rolled his gaze back up toward the sky, little plumes of dust from the quarry dispersing in real time. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

She shifted. “You still haven’t told me your name.”

A hot knife wedged its way between the bones in his elbow and made him bite down. “Eddy,” he breathed.

“Hi, Eddy,” she said. “I’m Lauren.”

“Lauren, you know you’re too old to be hanging out with me.”

“Hmm,” she thought aloud. “I’m a camp counselor so I hang out with kids all the time. Sometimes I like them better than people my age. I actually–” she laughed, “I’m only hanging out with those girls for, you know, the stuff. I told a bunch of the other camp counselors that I’d bring some back for–I don’t even know why. Just to be useful, I guess. Which is embarrassing to admit out loud but I don’t think it bothers you, does it?”

“I guess not,” Eddy sniffed. He could feel her looking at him, his right side which he hoped looked more normal than the left, feeling as though there was an ice pack pressed so hard against the cheek he couldn’t even feel the prickling cold, just a vague numbness, the absence of feeling, an even greater absence than when he went away to hide from the pain. Choosing not to feel and not being able to feel at all were greatly different things, he thought.

“Why did you come here all by yourself, Eddy?” she asked.

Lauren seemed alright and she’d probably be gone soon anyway so he didn’t think about it too hard. He just spoke. “So my mom is at work and my brother is supposed to be watching me while we’re on summer break but he goes out every day to hang out with his friends and leaves me by myself but I know how to make a sandwich and stuff so it’s okay. But I was standing in the kitchen making my sandwich and my knees started to hurt really bad so I sat for a while and tried again but they really, really hurt and I didn’t want my mom to see me when she got home because she would worry about me and she has enough to worry about, it’s enough to put a big, fat hole in her head and I don’t wanna be a big, fat hole in her head. She can’t afford it.”

Lauren sat up and took a deep breath, the way his mother did before her body gave out and she became impossible to reach. Eddy braced himself for his new friend, who he was beginning to enjoy, to pull away and leave. But then the breath came out slow and even and she looked down at him and he let his eyes open and stay that way.

“She can’t afford you?” Lauren asked.

He hesitated then shrugged. “We never have enough money, I guess. It makes her mad. Especially the mail, that’s where bills are. Mail makes her really mad.”

Lauren nodded. “And you’re worried how much the hospital will cost.”

Reluctantly, he looked over at her and saw in her creased brow that she could tell there was much more wrong with him than the red rings, more even than the pain in his joints or the fact that the left side of his face was almost entirely slack now and drooping like a dog’s heavy jowls and he could not feel it, not his cheek or his eyelid, half his lips and half his tongue. More than any of those physical symptoms he could tell that she saw how loud his heart was and how much it terrified him. She could see his weakness and soon she would either grow angry about it or she would laugh and he’d feel weaker than before.

“Eddy,” she said and took his hand carefully into hers. “Your life is worth more than any amount of money. Your suffering won’t stop your mother’s. That’s too much for you to take on. It’s too much, buddy.”

Eddy shrugged and winced from the pain that lanced up his arm. “I’m okay,” he said.

Lauren laughed sadly, through her nose. “Is that what you say so that you don’t worry your mom?”

“No,” he said. “It’s what my dad always said when something was wrong. When everything is wrong, say you’re okay until it’s true. But then he had to go somewhere and won’t come back so I don’t think it worked.”

From somewhere up on the rocks the sound of the other girls laughing tumbled down like sharp, loose stones. Lauren put his hand down and stood up. He watched with tight lips as she stepped toward the quarry’s edge and peered out onto the desolate industrial valley and its beige sprawl and the unflinching blue sky beyond. Tall and lean and sure on her feet, Eddy thought she looked nothing like his friend Callum but felt him near anyway.

Lauren turned around and he let her help him sit up with his back propped against a flat rockface and he didn’t try to hide the pain, knowing it had already become a big, fat hole in his head that could not be hidden. She squatted down in front of him so they were eye to eye and she said, “I broke my arm playing volleyball a couple years ago.” She twisted her right arm where a faint white line was visible in the harsh light just below her elbow. “Bone poked through the skin, I bled all over the court, it was awful. And, you know what, everyone was worried for me then, too, and I hated it. I wanted to bite down on my tongue so I wouldn’t cry and I wanted to hold my hand over the bone so no one could see it and we could all get on with our day. We were practicing for nationals so it was kind of a big deal. But I was a part of the team so of course they worried. Not just because I’m a great player but because I’m their friend and I was in pain, whether I tried to hide it or not. It’s natural to worry about each other, Eddy. It just means our love is so big we’re afraid to have it broken. But it does not mean we have to be okay when we’re not. When people who love each other lie about how they’re feeling, everybody loses. Do you know what I mean?”

Eddy nodded. The day Callum and his family were leaving he’d sat on the stoop breaking off pieces of the crumbling stone stairs with his fist, shaking with the urge to take off in a sprint down the street, to run all the way to Callum’s house and say–well, he wasn’t sure what. He was afraid that he’d beg Callum to stay and then everyone would be embarrassed. So he remained anchored to the stoop, determined to be strong. When Callum’s family car came down the road and pulled to a stop out by the hedges, he had only a moment to comprehend before Callum was out the door and running down the walkway to throw his arms around Eddy and press into his soft palm the chunk of Cumberlandite, split down the middle, its magnetic twin clutched tightly in Callum’s own hand. He smiled his big, unconcerned smile and said, “I’ll see you again. Quarrymen always come back together.” That night Eddy cried so hard in his bed he couldn’t breathe. He thought that everything goes and there’s no stopping it. Even the solid earth upheaves and crumbles and becomes something else, sometime else.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “I’ll go if you play Quarrymen with me.”

“Sure,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation. “What do I have to do?”

Eddy smiled with half his face then felt the rock in his hand seem to tug at him. “Oh, uh. Well, actually, that one’s just for me and my friend, Callum. He’s pretty cool. We can come up with our own game sometime.” He grew very grim. “I don’t know if I can walk. My knees hurt pretty bad.”

Lauren nodded. “That’s okay, we can play another time, whenever you want. How about I carry you back to the library and we can call your mom there?”

Eddy hesitated then finally relented to his body’s demands. He’d only come here looking for a friend anyhow and it seemed he’d found one. Lauren scooped him up carefully with one arm under his legs and the other around the small of his back so when she lifted him his head came to rest on her shoulder with all her dark hair in his face and the sense that he was being held rather than carried. It stirred a memory in him so old he could not place it. The pain became less scary being held like that and he thought it would pass with time, like rocks on a rubber belt, carrying the old earth to wherever it should end up next, maybe to Callum’s new home, maybe to shore up its foundation, to feed his family for centuries.

Lauren adjusted his weight and started walking back toward the fence, trying not to jostle him. That there were still kind people left after Callum’s departure seemed a miracle bigger than even the departing pale hole in the earth. Eddy watched it grow smaller and smaller from his chin’s perch on Lauren’s shoulder, one arm dangling over her back where he clutched his twin rock and felt its timeless pull.

“I think my brother could get you the stuff,” he said, sleepily. “If you needed it.”

He felt her laugh in his whole body. “Thanks, Eddy, but I think it’s alright. I was being silly. The thing about getting older is you always think you’re done being silly and then somehow you get even sillier without noticing. But I think growing up is all about knowing your own way of being silly and finding people who understand it.”

“Oh,” Eddy said. “That makes sense.” It explained a lot, actually. And for a time, it would ease his worry, his aching, the hole in his too young head. For a time, Eddy would be okay.

Four hundred million years opened wide and no waiting

Hello. It’s been a while. I have a book you can buy here. I’m still hard at work on the next book whenever I can put my ego aside and pick up my big stick to beat it into shape. Thanks for sticking around in the meantime. Appreciate you greatly.

jw