By Emanuel Asher

“The neighborhood is fucked,” Eli says, poking at his mask with one of the sharp points of an X’ed-open pair of scissors.

Reed does his best not to take Eli too seriously, being a little preoccupied with trying to pee with his friend talking at him and the echoing music of some sort of not-so-discreet YouTube video emanating from the other side of the shitter-partition next to him.  

Eli pokes a little too hard and sends forth a sound of tearing cotton, leaving the mouth of his mask split by almost an inch—too much, he admits with a sigh, to go unnoticed by Mr. Stephenson when he ambles back to class. “Shit. Whatever.” He pockets the ruined mask and decides to return to his soliloquy. “Seriously, Shawtown is like a giant turd… but a turd with a bow on it.”

“UmmHm—” Reed finishes with a shake and stows himself, then moves beside his friend at the sinks.  

“I don’t mean that it doesn’t have, like, character or something, but I was just thinking about this, and I want to know what you think, I mean, we live there, I mean we’ve always been there, but… okay, so, you’ve got the place on Ferry with your dad, right? And I’m over in Oak Ridge—”

“Oak Ridge Estates,” Reed contributes, sarcastically referring to the less than illustrious trailer park in which Eli, Eli’s mom, Eli’s uncle, and three of Eli’s sisters have always lived.

“Right,” Eli goes on, “but it occurred to me how close and far away the neighborhood really is with itself, you know?”

“Um… no?” Reed says, smiling.

“Okay, what I mean is… I mean, think about it, the whole thing is this hill, right? And it’s right next to the river, and the whole thing is stratisfied—”

“Stratified?”

“Sure. Like a wedding cake. I mean, think about it, there are like not that many people who even live there, I mean total, but like the majority, numbers-wise, the majority of people who live there are down by us, down by the river, the old part, down by where Shaw’s old mill used to be—”

“Whose ghost they still hear in the middle of the night,” Reed says, with a smirk, “sawing wood,” before self-amusing with a fake snore.  

“Uh huh,” Eli dismisses, “But I mean we—us in the Estates and you all over in the little, no offense, but, you know, little places that are squeezed between Ferry Street and the river… then there are like, the other levels. You climb half way up to like Cleveland Street and the yards get a bit bigger and it’s all two car garages. And then you take Monte Carlo Drive… I mean that even just sounds, like, ‘I’m up on Monte Carlo,’ and you are literally up on the top of the world. Meanwhile, we’re down there next to the water treatment plant.”

“Welcome to the Monte Carlo, Mr. Bond,” Reed utters absently to himself in the mirror.

“And that’s nothing strange, I mean, I know rich folks everywhere just want a view, but with Shawtown, we’re almost on top of each other. I mean, it’s a climb, but really, it’s what? Five blocks? Maybe? From your place to those mansions?”

Reed nods his head, honoring his friend’s seriousness with a moment of attention.

“I mean, segregation is segregation… not that, well, like segregation by money, I mean, but we are surrounded on three sides by an interstate, a water treatment plant, and a river, and on the fourth side of us we have this neighborhood, these kids we go to school with and sort of know, who sort of know of us, but we might as well be from different countries. I mean, is there a single one of them that you know enough to really say hi to if you saw them in the hallway?”

*

Eli is not entirely wrong about Shawtown. In the summer, with the leaves all flushed out, Shawtown seems no more than a nondescript hill in a procession of similar hills running the river. But in the winter, with the leaves gone, the hill and the hinterland containing the little neighborhood lay naked, broadcasting the stark delineation between the aging little domiciles clustered down near the water and the modern three-car manors occupying the hill’s overlooking crest.  

Stranger still—and serving as a punctuation of sorts—is a ramp that extends up from one side of the hill, with its topmost point coming to an abrupt end high in the air, as though it was built to be some mammoth interstate overpass, but was never finished. This is the ski jump belonging to the Flying Eagles Ski Club, a huge structure, made larger by its placement, extending out from the top of the neighborhood’s defining hill.    

Reed has never been hung up on money. Not that it hasn’t occurred to him to be, but money doesn’t mean to him what it does for Eli. That said, when he drives back toward his neighborhood at night, his eyes do instinctively lift to the hill, up beyond the confines of his life, though not to the overlooking manors—and not with disdain—but to the ever-extending ski jump, with wonder.  

Since he was ten or eleven—since he came to own not only the finality of what happened to Maggie, but also its mode—Reed has been mesmerized by the ski jumper’s lifestyle. The mysterious equipment of moon landing-quality polymer-based skin suits, helmets like formula racers, and skis like canoe paddles. The team of coaches, teammates, friends, equipment managers, aerodynamic engineers, parents. The internationality of it, that Shawtown—the Shawtown of the Oak Ridge Estates and people who think they can walk on water—sees visitors from around the world—like, Lichtenstein, around the world—for the annual Silver Mine Competition, utilizing another jump just down river, and there in the middle of the international crowd would invariably be a couple of hometown fliers, a couple of a kids as foreign in lifestyle to Reed as anyone else in attendance, with their own polymers and support teams, kids no older than Reed, kids maybe still harboring Olympic aspirations, trying to thread the needle, taking in the Silver Mine no differently than the trials in Colorado or the invitational in Switzerland, but then sitting in U.S. History class a few seats from Reed and struggling, no less than him, to remember what the hell Gilded is supposed to mean. These kids who have seen the world. Who have been welcomed into the world. And it has always been right there, this alternate universe, this thing that could launch a person to a higher realm—erected silently above him, seeming sometimes like the church steeple, sometimes like a middle finger, reminding him of the presence of other people’s potential.

Yet when folks ask him what he wants to do when he grows up, Reed always says, “My dad wants me to take over the business… construction,” which seems to satisfy people, though it’s an answer that leaves him feeling strangely privileged and thoroughly voiceless—or captive, maybe.  

Albeit a lot of the time he just says astronaut.  

*

So now, at seventeen and a half, and in his last half year of high school, Reed has found himself at his home on a Tuesday evening in December, setting out the paper plates that arrived with the pizza, and asking his dad if he prefers soda or milk—yet knowing full well he’ll say beer.

Reed heads to the bathroom and uses it, more as a matter of stratagem than out of necessity, allowing for a few erasing moments, before returning to the kitchen, grabbing two cans of Coke, and bringing one to his dad, who’s occupying his usual end of the couch behind a rickety aluminum TV tray.  

“Thanks,” says Randy, with a smile, though keeping his eyes on the TV. “Who’s playing tonight?”

“It’s Tuesday, dad,” Reed reminds him.  

“Oh,” says Randy, biting off the triangular tip of a piece. “How about the Twins?”

“Seriously?” Reed says, looking at his dad—who sits in a room with a Christmas tree, frost-cornered windows, and the distinctive rattling of a dilapidated furnace on high.

Randy chews for a moment, blankly, as though waiting for the answer about the baseball game, before the corner of his mouth wrinkles upward to reveal the pulling of his son’s leg.

“Dear lord,” Reed sighs with a chuckle.  

*

When it started, Reed thought it was drinking. Randy would forget things or would be confused over when/why/how/who, and his son figured that the bottle, which had rendered his grandfather completely useless, had finally caught up with his dad. Actually made things easier for the teen, for a while.  

The plan for Ebbing Quality was always for it to be passed to Reed. There was nothing cryptic about it. Reed had been riding along in the summer and learning from his dad and Travis since he was ten. But then he met Avery. His new friend had been jumping since he was twelve, and had international aspirations. Despite Avery’s family being of considerable financial means, the boy had always been drawn to solitary activities, and spent long months traveling, leaving him socially dislocated from his peers whenever he was in school. Suffice it to say, his friendship with Reed was mutually appreciated. Avery was unsurprised that Reed found ski jumping intriguing, but was almost shocked when his friend showed interest in trying it.  

Since, the two have conspired on how to procure skis and boots for Reed, how to get him the needed faux jumps into summer pools, and how to free him from his mounting obligations at Ebbing Quality. Adding to this, as pretty much a given when describing the life-planning of a teen—though in Reed’s case one of significant enough consequence to note—was the emergence of a natural resistance to anything that resembled fulfilling the wishes of his father. So when Randy’s confusion began, Reed took it as an omen, a sign that things for his father—and by extension things for Ebbing Quality—were turning southward, and that the completely sad (but also completely unavoidable) ruin of his dad’s business would soon free him to fly through the air however often his young heart desired.

But then Travis called. He picked the boy up under the guise of needing to sort some material before the onset of a big job, but then drove the two of them out to some farm fields and parked the truck.  

“I’m really worried about your dad,” said Travis. 

“I know, I know,” Reed dismissed, failing to grasp what was being said.

“You know?” asked Travis, disbelieving the response. “He’s losing things.”

“Yeah,” Reed said. “He’s drinking. Runs in the family.” Reed’s mood grew dark. His thoughts turned to his mother. Maggie had drowned while trying to walk across the Chippewa River as it surged during a spring thaw. Alcohol was a contributing factor. What Reed will never know is that his mother had threatened to take on this challenge a host of times while drinking with Randy and friends around their backyard fire pit. It had become one of those harmless running gags. Then the river took her, and Randy was cursed with the recurring chore of having to remind their son that she wasn’t coming back. Now it was Reed reminding Randy of the things he’d lost.      

“You think it’s drinking?” Travis drew a big breath, then exhaled carefully. “Reed, I don’t know how to tell this to you, but it’s not drinking.”

There was a silence only broken by the distant chirping of frogs and crickets. A single firefly pulsed weakly from the long grass of a ditch.  

Since (and really since a few weeks later when they got Randy’s early-onset Alzheimer’s confirmation), Reed and Travis have worked like hell to keep Reed’s father healthy, occupied, and financially solvent. They have done so with the absolute understanding that upon graduation Reed would assume the role of owner and proprietor of Ebbing Quality, with the hope that the transition might be completed—that Randy could successfully pass on the business as he’d always dreamt of doing—while his marbles were yet intact enough for him to be able to enjoy it.   

For his part, Travis—guilt-ridden at how he had deprived Reed of his mother’s funeral, operating under Randy’s instructions to take the kid to a Minnesota Twins game instead—was now mortgaging every local relationship and straining every tie of his own marriage to keep Ebbing Quality afloat and leave Reed with something worth inheriting.  

*

“Pass the ketchup,” Randy says.

“Dad, it’s pizza,” his son starts, with sympathy, before catching himself and realizing that he’s been had by another of Randy’s quips. Reed concedes his own defeat with an, “Oh, for fuck sake,” with an inflection of sarcastic annoyance and his hands on his hips. But the joke does shake him a little—not just his father’s lucidity taking him by surprise, but the surprise itself, that his father’s withitness would elicit surprise. It makes Reed realize or recognize or remember how much of his dad is already gone.  

“Dad, gunna take the trash out. You just keep on flipping for that Twins game.” Reed gives his dad an over the shoulder grin, but he’s feeling suffocated. He hasn’t yet mastered the thermostat, and whenever it gets cold, his dad cranks it to compensate then forgets to turn it back down, leaving the usually drafty house feeling occasionally not unlike the inside of an oven. Clad in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans, embracing the frigid air against his skin, glad for the reprieve from the suffocation of the house, he trudges down the driveway to the trash can that has already been brought down for the morning’s collection. 

Steam lifts from Reed’s shoulders as he releases the bag into the big green plastic trash can. From his house, he can’t really see the ski jump, but on nights like this, when there is enough snow and ice particles floating around in the air to give light a sort of shape, he can recognize its location from a yellow aura. The aura owes its existence to an oversized nativity star made of decorative lights that has been fastened to the city-facing side of the jump near its peak. He stands in his driveway for a minute, just breathing, relishing the cold, and looking up at the hill above him.  

A shiver runs his back, tightening everything—a bracing sensation that gives Reed the feeling of being alive, or a reminder of it, and he spends a second watching his breath dissolve into the night air. He tries his best in the moment to be appreciative, to bask in the moment, to see everything as being wonderful, purposeful, and planned—but the yellow aura from around the hill calls to him, mockingly, teasing him out of himself in the direction of that other life, into a thought of his finding Avery, of being so close to having a chance at it, at having an opportunity to fly, of feeling that feeling, of climbing the big one and looking down at the world, of beginning something, being something, and the thought foments something in Reed he never knew was there—a deep seated resentment, a snarling beast of indiscriminate hostility, and he allows himself to do what he doesn’t and he begins to feel the unfairness of it all, of possibilities made impossible, of having no mom—even Eli has a mom—and then having to watch his dad fade away like this, of being totally consumed by taking on more and more at Ebbing Quality and more and more at home and trying (maybe half-heartedly, but still with real hours) to graduate, since he’s only like a semester away from being done, consumed by the overwhelming never-ending soul-sucking shit of life to the point that Avery and Eli are the only ones who even sort of know him, that he hasn’t had any sort of chance to meet anybody, that really Randy is the only one who knows him, like really knows him, and his marbles are quickly escaping, and when they’re gone, who will even really know Reed anymore? 

And in an attempt to protect the only family he has—Reed realizes, now, standing in a t-shirt in the December air—that to have the time he has left with his dad means sacrificing the chance for anyone else to learn who he is, and that while his dad is fading away, so is he.  

Maybe the lawyer that Travis knows could put Reed in touch with assisted living. Maybe he could just be a kid for a while. Maybe Travis could take the business and Reed could just walk away.    

But he feels a tugging back in the direction of his house—in the direction of the river—back to the old man, back because time is not something to dick around with, back to check, clean, plan, provide. Back because there are months, only months, and graduation can give him Ebbing Quality and let his dad drift off with the knowledge that his legacy is intact—that his life has had meaning. A tugging as though Reed’s got a rope tied to his ankles. His breathing crescendos. His muscles begin to shake.

Reed notices himself standing there. Notices the driveway. Notices how the breeze is beginning to tease goosebumps out of his forearms. Drifts out and sees himself as a speck in front of his house and his street. Drifts more and sees himself as a single grain, barely visible, between the swiftly flowing river and the insurmountable hill. Breathes quickly, as if it might reign in the drifting, but it’s as if his perspective is being hoisted on the trail rope of a hot air balloon. Breathes now frantically, sucking and blowing with everything he’s got to keep himself in view. To keep the grain a grain. To keep it from becoming a ghost. Keeps breathing until his head pounds, until his eyes bulge, until his hands are on his knees. He’s almost hyperventilating, but it keeps him in sight, the grain, doesn’t let him disappear—wanting, above everything, for everything, to cling, to hold on, to exist, but he can feel the balloon’s cavity continuing to fill and his lungs beginning to burn and he almost wishes that the air was even colder—cold enough snap him out of whatever awful frenzy this is—wishes he could freeze, be found there in the morning, mixes hypothermia with hyperventilation and wonders how breathing into a paper bag could warm a person’s core, wonders why people exist if it’s only to fade, to dissolve, to disappear, wonders if Maggie had it right, that, if we’re only made for departing, might as well self-select the hour.  

But then he looks up.  

Across an expanse of empty air, he sees it. Sees that he’s ascended to its level. Has halted his ascent there perfectly. The very top of the jump. The platform. Sitting quietly above the yellow star in the darkness. And struck by the exactness of it, of the sudden experiencing of the height that he’s always envisioned himself adoring, he levitates momentarily with a sense of astonished admiration.  

But then peers down.  

And can barely find his grain below.  

And when he does, it’s unrecognizable.    

He gradually descends in long calm stretches of exhale. He wipes the tears that have frozen to his cheeks. He feels incredibly cold all of a sudden. He retreats inside.

Randy sits on the couch watching television, the open pizza box on the couch by his side. Across the entirety of the pizza, saturating every slice, is a tongue-shaped island of ketchup. One of the ketchup-doused pieces has been removed and sits half-eaten upon Randy’s paper plate. Randy’s eyes stare blankly at the screen. It isn’t a joke. From the kitchen, Reed retrieves some paper towels and begins to salvage what he can.