The Heart of the Emerald Green

Published Fiction

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Jeannie Wagner

**The following post is one of my published short stories. It’s only available in print and it’s part of a collection so, after discovering that all the publication rights revert back to me after initial publication (2020), I decided to publish it here. I have Paywalled it. I hope some of you will consider going paid in order to read it, as well as many other paywalled posts. This is some of my best work, I think. It was finalist at The New Guard Literary Review which was an international short story contest. Subsequently, it was published in the journal along with nine other finalists. Enjoy!

***As for my Stack, please, as usual, consider subscribing, free or paid, and please share and recommend SINCERE AMERICAN WRITING

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Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash

The Heart of the Emerald Green

There’s an iron cross up at the highest jump-off rock at the Punch Bowls. A girl died jumping off the rock in 1998. Her name was Angie Feckler. She went to Nordhoff High, the only public high school in Ojai.

The Punch Bowls is a big open pool of natural runoff water which coagulates at this spot off the main river. It’s not a river, really, but a big rushing shallow creek. Ojai is a small town 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, nestled in the Topa Topa Mountains, where I was born and raised.

You access the punch bowls by driving west from the coast, near Ventura, about 15 miles on Highway 33, through downtown Ojai, then up the twisting, narrow Highway 150, along the cliffs, and then pulling into the parking lot of Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. From there, you walk along the road and then onto a wide trail which soon narrows and becomes a thin, craggy path running along the creek. You see mountains all around you. You smell the ripe scent of pine. You see chipmunks, sometimes deer. It’s possible to see mountain lions, but I never saw any.

The day which I will never forget started out normally. Me and my two best friends—Dane and Jared—parked in the church lot. It was a Sunday, late August, early evening. I had just graduated high school back in June. Dane and Jared were juniors. We attended St. Andrew’s, a private, Catholic, college-prep school. We were rich kids and we felt appropriate shame about it. I was driving my mom’s hand-me-down 1993 green Jeep Cherokee. It was 2002.

We got out of the car and I snatched my REI backpack. As we walked I heard the fifth of Jose Cuervo clink against the canteen of water. The canteen was made of thin, dented metal and had black thick wool around the bottom. It was my father’s; he’d passed it on to me. He’d told me it had once been his father’s and he’d used it in the mid-50s backpacking with my grandpa in Yosemite. That’d always been something he and his father had shared, and it was something me and my old man shared, too. I still recalled vividly the first time my father took me backpacking. I was eight or nine years old. My mom snapped a photo of me and him standing by the big oak tree out from of our house, me with my steel-frame pack rising above my shoulders, smiles on our faces.

*

Soon we were on the wide trail, moving fast. We had perhaps 45 minutes, maybe an hour of light. Lazy sunlight glinted off the creek. The water rushed and gurgled along slick rocks. Jared—tall, pale, with his beady black eyes—picked up a few small stones and hurled them at the water. Dane, short like me, bedraggled hair, wearing his torn Megadeth T-shirt, walked behind me. He was slower, more contemplative. In the woods, while hiking, he liked to be silent and think. Jared, a ways ahead and to my right, lugged a Marlboro out. He placed it between his thin lips, lit it with his scratched blue bic, inhaled, and blew a web of nasty smoke out.

I thought about how empty the parking lot had been. I thought about how in three weeks I’d be taking community college classes in Ventura. Not exactly what my parents had expected and hoped for when they’d sent me to such a prestigious college-prep school. I should have tried harder, studied more, cared, given a shit. But the truth was I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to gain life experience. I wanted to get laid. I wanted to drink. I wanted to fight. I wanted to get a PhD in the school of hard-knocks.

*

Then suddenly we were there. The creek rushed harder, and it opened up and we were in a little gulch, a mini valley, and there were cliffs a little ways above us, and we veered sharply to the left, up some bone-white and beige gargantuan boulders and we stood up at the top of the rise and there, down below, was the Punch Bowls. It should have been called The Punch Bowl, cause there was only one bowl of water. It was green; emerald green. Deep, probably twenty, twenty-five feet. I saw a silvery fish, big, swim furiously in the middle. I pointed at it.

“Little bastard,” Jared said, squinting from the low rays of the sun. He inhaled more tobacco; the orange at the end of his Marlboro glowed.

Dane stood between us. He and I had been friends since last year. I met Jared through him. He and Jared had met freshman year. Dane lived a mile from me in town and drove his father’s 1980s Mercedes Benz. It sounds cool but the thing had problems constantly. It was always in the shop. It reeked of old cracked leather. When it ran Dane would pick me up late on a weeknight, after my folks went to bed, and we’d drive aimlessly around Ojai until 2am, laughing, smoking cigarettes, trying to score beer, listening to Megadeth. We always had the windows down. Sometimes Dane would say, Are girls ever going to pay attention to me?

We sat down on the wide, smooth boulder. No one was around. In June and July it could be crammed with high school kids from all over town. Gorgeous girls sunbathing in bikinis; muscle-y dudes showing off their arms and jumping from the first or second jump-off rocks. No one jumped off the highest one. Where the iron cross was. Where Angie had jumped from and died. Not since ’98. That must be 70, 80 feet up. I’d jumped from the second highest. That one was maybe 50 feet. The problem, too, with the highest spot was that it had this jagged outcropping at the lip. I’d gone up there once, just to stand on the edge and glance down. I nearly got vertigo. The emerald green pool looked so miniscule from up there it seemed like a joke. Like you couldn’t possibly make it.

I unzipped the backpack. I pulled the canteen out and the fifth. Sunlight lanced off the Jose Cuervo. Jared took the fifth. I twisted off the cap from the canteen and slugged water. I passed it to Dane.

Jared drank from the fifth. He sniffled and shook his head. No chasers.

“Lemme grab a smoke,” I said.

Jared pulled his red-and-white pack out and handed it over. I snagged one and inserted it between my lips. I used Jared’s blue bic and lit up. I inhaled the cloying tobacco deep into my lungs. A breeze rushed through, and the wind through the trees made it sound like traffic in the distance on some raw, rugged highway.

I handed the pack to Dane. Jared handed me the fifth. I twisted the cap off. I drank a deep one. “Ugh,” I said. “Nasty.”

“What do you expect?” Jared said.