his belly and begins slithering up toward the top.
Ruby yells, “I’ll jump over the side. I mean it.”
“No, no, don’t jump,” Larry snarls, continuing his upward slither. “Let me rescue you.” He is about halfway to her, his chest at the point where the slide bulges.
“We’re eating dinner, cut it out,” Robin says. “Get off the ladder, Jackson. Cut it out, Larry.”
He hates the sound of his own voice. He knows that they won’t listen to him. He makes another grab for Jackson, which sends Jackson scampering to the top. Jackson pauses long enough to smirk at Robin and wave his fists above his shoulders, like a weightlifter flexing his muscles.
Robin’s exasperation is at its limit, and he does something he doesn’t want to do—something he thinks is exactly what Jackson wants him to do, which makes it even worse—he gets on the ladder himself. He scurries up the steps and reaches out for Jackson’s leg. Jackson hops up one final rung, forcing himself onto the landing right next to Ruby. He circles his arm around her neck and hisses back toward Robin. “One false move and she’s dead.”
Ruby shrieks. From the other side, Larry grabs her by the ankles and she shrieks again. Robin thinks they might really push Ruby off. He improvises a karate chop into Jackson’s shinbone. Jackson yelps and loosens his grip enough for Ruby to free herself. She squats down and pounds her fists into Larry’s head.
“Everyone go down the slide,” Robin yells. “Now!” He hears the command in his words—his voice at last has some authority to it—but he knows it is too late. Ruby is twisting out of Larry’s grip and leaning back into Jackson, and Robin is trying to hold Jackson in place and reach toward Ruby at the same time, and then Ruby and Robin are both squeezing Jackson between them. Disorientation overwhelms him—the sky is darkening above and the pavement blurs way down below and the four of them, somewhere in the center of it all, compress tighter in struggle. No one is speaking, their throats release only grunts. Robin grabs the denim of Jackson’s pants in his fist and feels him wriggling away, feels the material pull across his fingernails, senses the intent in Jackson’s escape. He tightens his fist but now there is nothing to hold, he senses Jackson lurching away from him, away from all of them. Robin makes a lunge at Jackson, and then Jackson is being pulled upward, his legs rising, his body slipping across the metal curve of the railing, arcing into the wide empty dusk. Jackson is flying.
There is a gasp. Then a sucking whoosh. Then a collision, a stone split open.
Stillness.
Robin looks at Ruby, at her amazed eyes, her mouth straining against silence. He looks at Larry, who is sliding backwards on his belly. He looks into the air where he last saw Jackson. The only place left to look is down.
The wrinkled red and blue stripes of Jackson’s shirt, the back of his shirt.
A curve of skin—Jackson’s neck, very white against the ground.
His face in profile, an open eye, the shell of his ear.
His legs are stretched apart from each other. It is all twisted up, it is not making sense to Robin.
Larry is there, down below. Larry breathing loud, his breath is a chain pulling sounds back into the night—cars moving in the street and crickets chirping and a distant door slamming shut. Larry shoves Jackson’s shoulder and Jackson’s torso rolls sideways but his head stays the same. There is a terrible new noise: the sound of knuckles cracking. Not knuckles. Jackson’s neck.
“Get up,” Larry says. And then louder: “Get up!”
“Stop!” Ruby cries out. “You’re hurting him!” She slides down to the ground.
Alone on the platform Robin’s confusion dissolves, and he grasps at last what has happened. He begins the climb down the ladder, but each step seems to take an eternity so he leaps out, into the air where Jackson just flew. For a moment he believes he’ll hurt himself, and then he obeys an instinct that says bend your knees for the landing. His feet smack, his knees rush into his armpits, his palms screech along the blacktop. The ground burns into his skin.
Larry is repeating, “Get up, get up,” and Ruby is yelling, “Leave him alone,” and finally Robin speaks in a hollow voice. He says, “Be quiet.” And they are.
Larry runs away. Ruby runs away. Robin calls after them, “Go tell somebody what we did.”
It is just the two of them on the playground for a long time.
This much registers: Jackson is breathing. Robin kneels next to him, watching his body inflate and subside. He brushes his fingertips along the back of Jackson’s neck. The spine is not right, he can tell from the way the skin pulls. He says aloud the words he has heard on TV shows: It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. He says, Don’t die, and then thinks, No more Jackson. No more dragging him home for dinner. No more having to apologize to strangers for Jackson saying the wrong thing. No more Jackson bouncing around on his bed practicing new curse words. They’ll plant a cherry blossom tree in front of the school like they did for that girl who had leukemia. They’ll write about this in the Community News. They’ll ask me questions.
He is sure he will be blamed.
He wonders if an unconscious person can read minds. He thinks, Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me, Jackson.
A wet ribbon of blood draws from Jackson’s mouth, inching along the ground. Robin dips his index finger into the tip of the stream and it pools around the nail. He puts this finger in his mouth—the taste of a nosebleed. A grain of stone from the playground floor is mixed in with the blood, he pushes it between the tip of his tongue and the back of his teeth. He remembers his own jump to the pavement, checks his hands. There is blood there, too.
It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. Don’t die. A faint groan travels up from somewhere inside of Jackson. A sob through mucus. His breaths continue, eerie. Wind moving through a cave.
The pavement pushes up into Robin’s knees. He feels it. The hard ground is everything, there is nothing else beneath. No soil, no tangled roots, no Indian bones, no fossils, no magma, no core of the earth. He could not dig down to China. The earth is nothing more than a solid slab of playground.
He puts his fingers in Jackson’s hair, lifts his hand, lets the hair drop back against the skull.
“Don’t touch him!” Dorothy is screaming from the car window. She is speeding onto the playground. The vibrations of the auto reach him first, then the headlights. Jackson looks sicker in the blinding glow. The car seems to roll even after Dorothy jumps out of it. She is hurtling toward them. The place is filled with new smelts—exhaust fumes, scorched tires, the tobacco and wine on Dorothy’s breath.
The ambulance siren cries into the night.
They wait in the hospital, sitting on chairs covered in fuzzy brown material that scratches Robin’s legs and ass through his pants. They entered through the emergency room and then into intensive care. There is a nursing station nearby where the sounds of muffled phone calls can be heard. The sheer amount of activity in the building—two car accidents, a heart attack and Jackson all within the same hour—shrinks the walls around them. Nurses appear from around corners and out of doorways and pass by on their way somewhere else. Robin follows everyone with his eyes.
Jackson is being operated on. A specialist has been called in from New York City. The first time Robin sees a doctor in aqua blue scrubs, face mask and a shower cap he thinks, That must be the specialist. On General Hospital, doctors wear long white coats, their full hair combed neatly. Then he sees another man dressed like this, going a different direction. Later, another. He doesn’t know who anyone is, which ones might have seen his brother’s body, which ones might know the story of the fall. He had tried to explain to his mother in the car but she only listened for a few minutes before making him stop. He tries to picture the surgery. He thinks of a game he