The Heart of the Emerald Green

Published Fiction

**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!

#Originally published one year ago, March 1, 2023

***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.

Dane took the fifth from me. My fingers bounced he snatched it so fast from my hand. He drank. I thought again about that empty parking lot, the newly paved black asphalt. Summer was almost over. I was done with high school. It was over, those four years of excruciating hell. I would go to community college, study writing, move out of my parents’ house in a year or less. I’d be free. The idea both enthralled and terrified me. I imagined some oasis, living in some tiny, cramped studio, writing the Great American Novel, something like Denis Johnson or Kerouac or Bukowski. But some little voice internally knew it’d be different.

Jared took another hard swallow. I did, too. Then Dane. Already I felt buzzed. The shadows had increased around us. The sun was nearly down. We needed to swim before darkness took over.

The fifth was half killed. Jared rose, his long pale arms used as aids, and he stripped his torn jeans off. He wore his white boxer briefs. He stepped carefully down the boulder and leapt off, screaming, saying, “Holy Fuck!” and dove into that perfect emerald calm. I watched his body propel into the green, and then do a sort of curving arc, and emerge twenty feet away on the other side of the pool. Dane jumped up. He tore his Megadeth shirt off, waggling out of it, and then jogged down the boulder and did an awkward cannonball. I closed my eyes. I smiled. I watched them. Dane yelled loudly as he swam around.

“Fuck it’s cold,” he said, thrashing hard to get warm.

“It’s not that bad,” Jared said, his long pale arms doing a lazy breaststroke.

I untwisted the cap of the Jose and drank. God, this was good. This, right here and now. I wished I could freeze time, freeze this moment. Me and Dane and Jared. Together. Before it all changed. I knew they’d stick together. They’d met first, had bonded longer, and were still in high school. I’d be on my own. Alone again. But I was used to that. I hated working at the restaurant. But it was money. And I had the Jeep. Soon I’d get the hell out of this dead-end town.

Here, in the little valley, at the punch bowls, it was simple: Boulders and trees and mountains. It felt like when I wrote sometimes, when I got into the zone and it was like time just passed. Hours would go by like nothing. But then there was real life, and that was different; that was hard. That’s what I was afraid of. High school, though chaotic, had provided a routine, a safety net of sorts. But now? That safety net was gone. I was a penny dropped into a well with no bottom. Where would I land?

I suddenly had this feeling like this might be the last time I’d ever come here. At least with them. At least before I became a man, a real grownup. There were maybe two or three swallows left. I drank, deep. It was almost gone. I swigged down the last remnants.

I stood up, wobbly for a second, but then I gained my balance. Dane and Jared were relaxed, swimming like seasoned fools.

“C’mon in,” Jared said.

I walked to the right, down around the other side of the massive boulder. I pushed through some Douglas Fir branches and was on the red-tinted trail. There were pine cones all around, broken twigs, fallen leaves. I felt my heart banging in my chest, my legs rubbery.

When I got to the spot where the first lookout was, I tromped out to the ledge. I glanced down from twenty feet up.

“Hey, assholes!” I yelled down.

They looked up. Jared, with his shiny black hair and black little eyes. Like a rat. And Dane, his longish brown hair all slick and flat against his skull.

“Jump,” Jared said. He seemed serious.

I laughed. I walked back to the trail. I hiked again. It took a few minutes but I reached the second jump-off rock. I stepped to this ledge.

I looked down. They were already looking up, hip to my game. From here, when I looked out above the little valley, I could see the trees, and some mountains, and the distant hills and more of the winding creek. It made me think of St. Andrew’s, and of Ojai, and of Highway 33 and of backpacking in the canyon with my father as a child. Once, my father and I had been close. He’d been like my hero. But all that had changed. When I started drinking and rebelling sophomore year, everything between he and I had melted away. All I’d seen was a bored, upper-middleclass tycoon. All he’d seen, I’m sure, was a spoiled little shithead. We were even.

“You gonna jump man?” Dane yelled. His voice echoed against the boulders.

I walked back to the path. Why I felt the need—the compulsion—to do this I didn’t know. But it felt important somehow. Like some ritual. I had to do this. It was only as I walked further, and reached the ledge, that I understood I was crazy and slightly drunk.

*

I saw the cross. It was old and bent slightly; ancient, dented metal. Maybe two feet high, three or four inches wide, an inch thick. In gray text it said, “Angie Feckler. Nordhoff. Class of 2000.” I swallowed.

I stepped to the ledge. I kept my body as far back as I could but I moved my face forward to look out. The valley was wide open. I saw more mountains, more trees. Even what appeared to be the tiniest edge of a twisting highway. Must have been 150. Wind ran through the trees again, that all-encompassing rush of traffic sound. Nature, making her declarations.

Dane and Jared started yelling. I couldn’t hear everything they said from all the way up here but I caught some key words: “Idiot,” “asshole,” “get down here,” “don’t jump.”

It was so, so far down. I mean impossibly far down. The emerald water was tiny. It was like trying to jump from a 100-foot cliff into something the size of a Jacuzzi. I couldn’t believe it. And the lip. The lip stuck out too far. There was a second lip, ten, fifteen feet below, and it stuck out even farther, like a middle toe longer than your big toe, and if you hit that you better believe it’s all over. Maybe that was how Angie had died. Or maybe she’d hit the water with such impact that she drowned.

Jared cupped his palms round his mouth and yelled something. Dane swam across the water and pulled himself up and out of the pool. He stood on the boulder and I knew he was going to come try to get me.

I stepped as close to the edge of the ledge as I could. I remembered going to Lake Nacimiento with my friend Greg when I was a kid. We’d jump off cliffs half this height. I sometimes had that debilitating fear, that fear that prevented you from jumping. The key was to push through it, trust yourself, and just commit. You stepped back, you moved forward, you leapt. It was an act of faith every single time.

I looked back down. Jared was off to the side, sitting on the edge of the boulder. Dane was gone. He was probably halfway up here by now.

I glanced back down one last time. My breathing was fast and shallow. I did three or four quick, fast breaths to pump myself up. I jumped up and down.

“Alright, man,” I said to myself out loud. “Do it.”

I took three steps back. Big steps. I waited. I heard Dane’s voice a ways down the trail off to the side. If I died they’d have two crosses up here. Would I be missed?

Right as I heard Dane’s voice very close, and heard some bushes being moved by his hand, I took a few big steps forward, felt that terrible fear, wanted desperately to stop myself, stepped onto the ledge, and shoved myself off.

*

You know that cliché in films where a character jumps off a bridge to their death and on the way down their whole life flashes before their eyes? Well, that didn’t happen exactly, but something not totally different did. I remembered a moment with my father. I was 16. I’d been drinking for maybe six months at that point. By then my father and I had become strangers. I’d been stealing crisp twenties from his black leather wallet for quite some time and with those twenties collected I’d gotten my first tattoo at a parlor on Main Street in Ventura, a place owned and operated by Hells Angels.

My father stormed into my room that night. I was lying on my bed. It was a Wednesday in October. He stood in the doorframe, his bald head, his prescription glasses, wearing a tucked-in baby-blue collared shirt like always. His beige Dockers had that crease down the front, crisp and perfect, like the twenties I stole. His pale blue eyes gaped at me and I remember having that feeling like, You’re not my dad. I’m not your son. There’s been a mix-up.

“Son,” he said, adjusting his glasses. Then he took the glasses off entirely and cleaned them with his collared shirt. Grooves remained in his skin from the glasses. He put them back on. “Did you steal from me to get your tattoo?”

I stared at him for what felt like a very long time. He’d been the most conflict-avoidant man I’d ever known. I felt like crying, so I said, “Get the fuck out of my room.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that,” he said.

I swung my legs off the edge of the bed, rose, and approached him. We stood inches away. I thought of the camping trips; I thought of the time he bought a board and wetsuit just to go surfing with me when I was 12. Those days were long gone.

“I said, get the fuck out of my room,” I repeated.

We ogled each other. I thought he might actually hit me. Or maybe I’d shove him. But neither of us said or did a thing. We just stared at each other. Time passed. And then he looked down, at my fresh ink, back up at me, and in his eyes I saw the most righteous pain. It made me want to hold him. It made me want to be six years old again, being read Dr. Seuss by him while I laid in bed, feeling safe and warm.

My father said nothing. He turned around and walked away. Once he was gone, I closed the door and locked it. That was when I made the decision. That was when I promised myself I’d never let emotion get the best of me. I would protect myself. World be damned.

*

I was off the ledge, in the air. I saw the extended lip, the second one, and, thankfully, I passed it safely. Then it was just this non-stop air drop. My heart fell in my chest; it was like being in a free-fall elevator.

And then, suddenly, boom! I crashed into the water. I plummeted down, deep, hard, into the heart of the emerald green. Almost to the bottom. Then I slowed, my momentum was softened, and I swam easily back up.

I broke through the surface.

“You crazy fuck!” Jared yelled. “Jesus Christ, man! I can’t believe you did it!”

I shrugged, swimming nonchalantly for a moment. I saw Dane poke his head out from the second jump-off rock.

“Dude, are you alright?” He yelled down.

“Just fine,” I yelled back.

I swam over to the boulder and climbed up, losing my balance on the slippery surface several times before finally succeeding. I lay on the cool hard surface. It felt like hugging God. All of the world seemed to be hugging me back.