Chapter Twenty

Derrick’s arms fluttered wildly as he fell off the side of the mountain.
“Man overboard,” Elizabeth called out on the CB radio. “We’re pulling over. Over.”
Ten-fours rang out over the CB from the drivers. Larry Shoemaker slowed and pulled the shattered gazebo-truck over to the shoulder of the road. Behind him the entire convoy also pulled over, including Rattlesnake in the rose-truck.
Apparently knocking Derrick off the mountain didn’t satisfy Rattlesnake’s bloodlust. Or maybe he had stopped to confirm the kill.
Rattlesnake opened the carriage door and dropped down to the street. He kept his eyes on the ground and walked towards the gazebo truck. Fingering the splintered wood hanging from the back of the gazebo, he kept his eyes to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I guess I lost my cool.”
“You’ll lose more than that!” screamed Larry Shoemaker. He was running at Rattlesnake, brandishing a tire iron, and swinging it wildly.
A couple of the other drivers stopped Larry before he could hit Rattlesnake and one of them relieved him of the tire iron.
“You’re sorry?” said David Schweitzer, who drove the daffodil truck. “You killed Derrick and all you can say is you’re sorry?”
Rattlesnake shrugged. “I have trouble managing my anger.”
“So do I!” screamed Larry Shoemaker, grabbing the tire iron back and running at Rattlesnake.
“Larry Shoemaker! NO!!!” screamed Elizabeth.
Several of the other drivers tackled Larry Shoemaker to the ground and held him there.
“I know I messed up,” Rattlesnake said. “But if you could just give me one more chance.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “This was your second chance. I’m sorry, but I can’t have drivers doing this. You’ll have to find a new job.”
Ben climbed down the side of the ruined gazebo, crawled over sharp rocks to the edge of the cliff and peered down, hoping to see that Derrick had landed safely on a ledge below. Instead he saw a sheer drop of about eight or nine stories. At the bottom was a tranquil blue lake about the size of a football field. At its center, the smashed gazebo roof was floating lazily. At the thirty yard line (or where the thirty yard line would be) Derrick was dog-paddling frantically. It was a long way down and Ben could barely hear Derrick’s splashing and yelping.
“He’s alive!” Ben called back to the caravan. “He survived the fall!”
Down Syndrome Bobby started clapping his hands. Everyone else didn’t want to seem undelighted with Derrick’s survival, so they also clapped. There was a roaring standing ovation.
“There, you see,” Rattlesnake said, as the applause died down. “I didn’t kill him. Everything’s fine.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “What you did was wrong,” she said. “You owe Derrick an apology.”
Rattlesnake nodded.
“A heartfelt apology,” Elizabeth added.
Rattlesnake stopped nodding and his eyes narrowed.
“An apology,” Elizabeth corrected herself.
Everyone was silent. They didn’t want to antagonize Rattlesnake. Rattlesnake seemed pretty calm and rational now. Well, not rational, but certainly calm. And they needed to keep him calm.
Ben figured it was best for him to stay quiet also. Poetry couldn’t help here. His workingman poetry would just get Rattlesnake thinking about how Elizabeth exploited him. The main thing was to keep Rattlesnake calm until they could get him to the authorities. Ben hoped that was Elizabeth’s intention and that she didn’t intend to give Rattlesnake a third chance, but with Elizabeth, it was hard to tell.
Ben looked back down to the tranquil blue lake. Derrick had stopped splashing and was floating face-down. Oh right, Ben suddenly remembered. Derrick didn’t’ know how to swim. His parents had never sent him to swimming classes, afraid that swimming pools were full of diseases. Derrick had been planning to learn, but wanted to lose a little weight before he went to the swimming pool.
“He’s drowning!” Ben shouted. “He can’t swim!”
There were groans all around. They had clapped for nothing.
“If he drowns, that doesn’t count as me killing him,” Rattlesnake said.
Ben felt like a lifeguard, looking down from a nine story lifeguard tower. He had no experience as a lifeguard, but he could figure it out as he went along. He had seen enough episodes of Baywatch, and he remembered how the lifeguards acted at the public pools, blowing their whistles when children splashed too much. Ben didn’t have a whistle, and even if he did it wouldn’t do any good, unless a dolphin heard the whistle and came to rescue Derrick. But this was a freshwater lake, and dolphins only lived in the sea.
Ben backed up, ran towards the ledge and leapt off, aiming at the patch of water between Derrick’s body and the gazebo roof. He wasn’t sure if he should shout Banzai or Geronimo as he leapt, so what came out of his mouth was a mixture.
“BANZARAMO!!!”
Cold air whooshed past him. He didn’t want to belly-flop or land on his back. Or his groin for that matter. He put his hands together over his head in diving position, but somehow couldn’t turn his body; he was falling feet first. The clear blue water came at him fast. Ben took a deep breath, covered his crotch with his hands, and hit the water hard. The water crushed him from all sides, shot up his nostrils, and tasted like cigarettes stuffed in his sinuses.
Ben looked up through the clear water and saw Derrick staring down, his eyes open, and the sunlight reflecting off the water above him. Ben kicked with his legs and swam up towards Derrick.
Ben flipped Derrick over so he was floating on his back and his head was above water. Derrick wasn’t breathing, just staring blankly at the sky. Maybe a fish was lodged in his throat. Ben opened Derrick’s mouth and looked in there like the bartender had done to Howard Roseman. It was clear. No fish, just Derrick’s pink tonsils.
Ben couldn’t perform CPR in the middle of a lake. If he pressed on Derrick’s chest, it would just push him underwater; he needed Derrick on solid ground. He wrapped one arm around Derrick’s chest, paddled with the other, and kicked their way towards the pebbly bank against the mountain wall, where several lonely trees grew.
When they got to shallow water, Ben was able to walk through it and drag Derrick along the surface. He dropped Derrick on the muddy shore, and knelt down over him. Derrick’s eyes were still wide open, staring vacantly up at the sky, and his skin was pale white.
Ben put his hands, one on top of the other, on Derrick’s chest and then stopped. Was he supposed to press on the heart or the lungs? He wasn’t sure. He just knew that if he succeeded, Derrick would regain consciousness and spit up water. That’s how it always was in the movies when someone lost consciousness from drowning and someone did CPR.
It didn’t really matter if he wanted to press on the heart or the lungs, since he wasn’t sure exactly where the organs were. He just knew that heart and lungs were under the rib cage; if he pressed the rib cage, he would hit something. Ben started pumping on Derrick’s chest.
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five! CLEAR!!!”
It was the best he could do without a defibrillator.
He placed two fingers on Derrick’s neck to check for a pulse and realized that he probably should have checked for a pulse before he started CPR. Derrick’s heart was beating, slowly and steadily.
But he wasn’t breathing. Blue splotches sprouted up on Derrick’s pale face. Now Ben would have to do the other part of CPR. The more unpleasant part.
He didn’t want to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He didn’t know exactly how it was done, except what he saw on TV, and also, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was really gay. He was already a poet and worked in a traveling flower show. That was two strikes against him right there. If he performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Derrick, he would strike out and have to walk back to the dugout, his head hung down and his teammates smirking, shaking their heads, spitting chewing tobacco on the ground, and muttering “homo.”
But Derrick’s life was at stake and there was no choice; he had to do it. He just wished that Derrick had been more assiduous in his flossing.
Ben took a deep breath. Fortunately, this time he could take a deep breath to prepare him for what he was going to do. This wasn’t like sucking neck skin from a pen. He was blowing in, not sucking out, and a deep breath was the proper preparation. The calming oxygen swam through his brain, girding up his courage.
Ben squeezed Derrick’s nostrils shut with his left hand and yellow mucus bubbled out of Derrick’s nose. Ben knew he had to form a tight seal on all oxygen pathways. He needed to cover Derrick’s entire mouth, so he opened his mouth wide like a goldfish, wrapped his lips around Derrick’s, and blew, inflating Derrick’s chest cavity. Derrick coughed up water into Ben’s mouth. It tasted terrible, like soda water flavored with vomit. Ben started to gag as Derrick coughed up water onto the pebbly shore and sucked in deep gasping breaths.
Ben fell backwards down into the mud, trying spit out the lung water. His stomach lurched and contracted violently; he puked up the mostly-digested remains of his trucker’s lunch.
The two of them lay there on the pebbly shore, both gasping for breath.
“Why were you kissing me?” Derrick asked.
“It’s not kissing. It’s CPR.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You weren’t breathing. I think you might have been clinically dead.”
Derrick sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I think I had a near-death experience,” he said. “I saw a bright light.”
“Well, you’re eyes were open,” Ben said, trying to spit up the vomitty remains from the back of his throat. “That might have been the sun you saw.”
“You just left my eyes open? Why didn’t you shut them?”
“I didn’t want to give up on you. That’s what they do when there’s no hope of reviving the victim. The doctor closes your eyes. Then he looks at his watch and announces the time of death.”
“Now I’m going to be blind from staring directly into the sun.” Derrick squeezed his eyes shut. “I can still see the light. It’s burned into my cornea. It’ll keep me up nights and I’ll have insomnia.”
“At least you’re still alive,” Ben said. “Can’t you think of anything positive to say?”
Derrick wrung the water out of his hair and considered this. “At least you didn’t jam a pen in my eye,” he said.
Ben spat into the lake. “There was no time to shut your eyes,” he said. “I had to hurry with the CPR. If I stopped to close your eyes, you could have gotten brain damage from lack of oxygen.”
“I probably did get brain damage,” Derrick said. “Now I’m retarded.”
“Don’t say retarded.”
“Why not?”
“It’s offensive.”
“I’m allowed to say it. I’m one of them now. You’re allowed to say it about your own people.”
***
כ''ד באלול תשס''ז
ירושלים
September 7, 2007
Jerusalem