A BOTTOMLESS PIT

I've never been to a class reunion.

We are walking around the pit telling stories, chuckling. I’m aware of the gravitational pull. It is isolated—backroads bleed into backroads.  I hear the Noon whistle in the distance—back when my dad was a kid that blaring horn screamed LUNCH for the hundreds of scurrying quarrymen, mostly Welsh, Italian, and Polish, guys who ground a living out of the ground. Today it’s just an echo of the past.

I’m still not sure if he jumped or I pushed him.  I look back and he is gone.  That stupid fucking snorkel coat against the snow, through the brush, is all I can make out, some forty feet below. It has started to dust snow.

I stay until the white sleeps thick on the heaving green, and the moaning stops. It feels like I stand there for hours, at peace with the quiet, blowing clouds of icy vapor to nowhere, every exhale my private, crystalline universe.  They won’t find the body until spring. We don’t make things easy here during winter.

Did I dream all that?  I honestly don’t know. I’ve run it through my head a million times over the years. It’s hard to say for sure.  I have never seen Chuck again, though, if that means anything.

Old fucking Chuckwagon, man, that kid could make me laugh.