To The Ground

young boy with mental health problems on a trip with his father and sister

They stayed in a large room with a window overlooking the front of the building and the narrow street which was usually quiet in the morning. The curtains were papery and sheer and did little to keep out the sun. The boy woke early and lay quietly in the bed as sunlight crept over the sheets and warmed them and the corner of the room.

He was the first to wake and when he did it was to the sound of whispers, though the room was silent. He bit his tongue until there was a break and when it came he let the quiet take him. Then he pushed himself up and sidled off the end of the bed without disturbing the girl.

He walked past the man who slept on the couch with his thin arm wrapped tightly around the pillow. As he walked he dragged his feet. The floor tiles were white and had thin black veins and milky-spots printed on them to imitate marble. They were peppered with gritty black sand and dirt and dust carried in from the beach and the street. He grabbed the dosette box from the glass table and walked to the bathroom and gently closed the door behind him. He placed the box on the corner of the bath. He washed his face. He turned off the faucet and toweled his face dry, holding the towel to his mouth and looking at himself over it. His hair was wet and hanged over his eyes. He swept it back. He picked up the dosette box and rattled the pills inside. He slid the second cover down and dropped the two green and yellow capsules into his palm. They sat there for a moment before he turned his hand and dropped them into the toilet. He put the box back on the corner of the bath and he urinated and watched the pills scoot around in the piss and the water. And when he finished he flushed them down. From the other room he heard movement.

He stayed in the bathroom for a few more minutes. It was dimly lit by a bulb on the wall fixed above the mirror and had a dirty plastic conch for a cover. The shower curtain depicted a jazz scene and was bright blue with black cartoons playing instruments with long bending arms. The mirror was fastened to the wall with concrete screws which split the glass. He picked up the box and opened the door.

The man was sitting, shirtless, on the couch. He was wearing pants.

“Mornin’.”

“How’d you sleep?”

“Good.”

There was a small chest of drawers by the bed. The man leaned down and opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a pair of grey tube socks. He pulled a sock onto his left foot. Holding the crease of his pants he hoisted his right leg up onto the bed and pulled the other sock onto his right foot. On top of the drawers lay room keys, credit cards, traveler’s checks, an itinerary, an inhaler, and two silver watches.

The man picked up the larger watch and fastened it around his wrist. The boy looked at the other with the alabaster dial and the flat crystal face with the scratches.

“Dream any?”

“Huh?”

“Did you dream any?”

“No.”

He stooped and opened the top drawer and pulled out a pale blue linen shirt. He pulled it on and pushed his arms through the sleeves and buttoned it down deftly with one hand, and tucked it into his pants with his thumbs, then rolled up the sleeves to his elbows. He scratched at his head and at the bristles on his jaw.

“Well suppose you dreamed some but you don’t remember?”

“Maybe.”

There was sand and dirt under the boy’s feet and he reached down to brush it off with his hand.

“You hungry?”

The boy shook his head.

“You’re bound to be hungry. I’ll start some eggs.”

He shrugged and sat down on the bed.

***

The man limped into the bathroom whistling and left the door open. His leg was always worse in the morning. The boy listened to him urinate and clatter the seat on the pan and flush the toilet, then run the faucet. Not singing now but humming. He picked up the watch. The nimble black hands covered the date and the milky dial made him think of a pearl heated and flattened and left to cool. When altered it would fit him just fine. His mother had bought it for him and he had carried it with him everywhere and his father had not remembered to have it re-sized. He turned it in his hand to let the light from the window touch it and show up its marks. He heard the man gurgle and spit and slurp water to sooth the burn of the mouthwash and turn off the faucet. The boy put the watch into his pocket.

The man smiled at him when he came out of the bathroom. He took a deep breath and narrowed his lips together and forced air out of them to play out the trumpet solo at the end of the song.

“Startin’ breakfast. You take your meds?”

The boy nodded.

“Good man. Want to help?”

“Sure.”

“If you don’t want to you don’t have to.”

“I’ll help.”

He roughed the boy’s hair.

“Think you can figure out the coffee machine for us? If you can’t, get your sister out of bed.”

Intently the man watched the boy open the lid of the plastic coffee machine and drop the brown paper filter inside and fill it with coffee.

After a while the girl got out of bed and dressed while the man cooked, and they breakfasted on eggs and bacon and toast, which he cooked on the bent coiled hob in the kitchen area which was rudely lathed and varnished with cheap timber. There was only one frying pan and it was small so he cooked and plated the food for them individually. When the coffee had brewed they had that too. The man gave the girl her breakfast first then the boy and dismissed him so he could eat. He held the small sharp knife he was using to cut up the bacon in his hand as he handed over the plate.

The boy ate a little and moved the bacon around the plate, then got up abruptly from the glass table where they were sitting and went to the bathroom. He closed the door and locked it and sat on the end of the bath and spat between his feet and rubbed it into the carpet with his foot, then stood up and leaned on the sink and vomited. There was a caustic voice and it grew louder until it shouted with hate. He waited it out, leaning on the sink with his tongue in his teeth and keeping his eyes from the mirror. It lasted five minutes and he was relieved when it gave way to the scraping of the frying pan from the other room. He could taste blood.

***

It was their second day there and they were heading into the mountains. They were being picked up at a nearby hotel at eleven. They were showered and had left the room by half past ten and they waited outside by the fountain of the big hotel nearby in the heat. The girl wanted to sit in the lobby. The man would not let them stand inside because they were not guests there. The bus arrived early and a young man in a cap hopped out to greet them. He pulled open the sliding door and they climbed in, the man with difficulty, and settled in the leather seats. It was cool inside and the driver was polite and shy with them. He told them that he lived in the mainland which was much higher than the land at the coast, and he said that from his house he could just see the big hotel’s fountains and the palms, and that if he had binoculars he might even see them checking in and out. The father explained that they stayed in a little place nearby and that they were only there to be picked up. The driver smiled at him and did not talk any more about the hotel.

They met traffic when they left the hotel. Despite the coffee his sister fell asleep quickly and after swaying against the window a few times his father slept too. They soon broke from the traffic and turned onto the highway. It was a long drive to the coast and the boy was worried about it being a quiet drive. He stared out the window. He had taken no interest in the granite-faced condominiums and the chain-restaurants and the souvenir shops. The imported palms. The hidden speakers in the gardens of hotels imitating wildlife. But when they passed the airport the country opened and moved quickly near the road and slowly in the distance as they drove.

He liked driving because there was much to distract himself with outside. The road was poor and the driver steered to miss pot holes. They passed the cockfighting arena. He was fascinated by it but his father thought it was brutal so his going there was out of the question. It wouldn’t be good for him. The land was dusty and spattered with dry bushes and make-shift fences separating small wooden huts. No houses at first but many huts. A land flat and coarse and hard, and when it was lowest and where the bush was not so tall he could see the water wide and blue beyond it, darker than the sky. There were plots of land cordoned and raised for drainage, and thick green shoots stuck up out of the soil in places. And in the sky turbid clouds like clods of cotton torn and scattered moved quick and close to the ground, and the sun glowed brightly in their diaphanous edges. He imagined them falling to the ground. Touching and scorching the earth. He’d never seen them so low.

They passed villages of squat concrete houses with flat roofs, mostly painted white and peeling with the heat. They were doing seventy, seventy-five, maybe. He wandered briefly if anyone would survive if the bus veered off the road into the ditch. He pictured his father dead. His head crushed. The window on the other side faced towards the mainland. He saw his grandfather receiving the news back home. He felt bad but somehow it was natural for him to think that way.

On the other side of the road the land was bucolic and green and in the distance bottle-green mountains rose and fell like swelling water and faded into the distance. A few long flat clouds hanged high in the sky. The mountains closest to him were dark in the long shadow made by the clouds and brilliant where the sun broke through the gaps. There was little mist in the mainland and it was not difficult to see. He guessed that the mountains in the distance were probably taller because they were broader where they met with the clouds.

They left the highway. They drove towards the mountains and through a small town with rude houses, and they passed a row of shacks and a bar and turned right off the main road. They faced a steep hill. The bus climbed the hill and the boy thought it might be too wide to take the corners which were jutted with rocks and branches which reached down like claws into the road from above.

They pulled up by the visitor’s center and stepped out of the bus. His sister was groggy. The driver was their guide too and he stood in front of the map which was fixed to the wall of the center. He was shy again now that they were not in the bus.

He spoke to them. The boy did not meet his eyes.

“We make three stops today friends; the falls, the tower, the trails. But first you watch the movie. It is a half hour. Then I take you up the mountain. The movie starts in ten minutes, so feel free to walk around and I come find you when it starts.”

They had ten minutes, so they walked back into the car park and around the rockery. The rocks were arranged in rows and were broken up with bromeliads and turned soil, and tiny green lizards darted across them. A wild flower leaned from the rockery into the path. When the man passed it he stooped and picked a leaf from it, put it under his nose to smell it then bit a piece off and chewed it. It was sapid but he did not know what it was. He smiled and passed a piece to the boy and the girl and the boy tried it. They passed what looked like a long, brown, flat leaf which turned out to be an iguana, and headed into the visitor’s center to the theatre.

They watched the movie. It was beautifully shot and put together, the boy thought. It was narrated by an actor whose name none of them could recall. When they left the theatre they got back into the bus and it wound up and around the path, slowing to pass other buses making their way back down. Some of the drivers blared their horns as they passed them.

The boy was rocking back and forth in his seat. The girl had moved to the other side of the bus.

Tall knuckled trees vied for light in the land beneath the road. They were shielded from the road by rows of bamboo. Through them the boy could see the green tree tops spanning for what seemed like miles.

“I didn’t expect to see bamboo,” said the man.

“The rangers, they bring the bamboo for the tabanoco. If a car falls off the road, it gets stuck in the bamboo.” The man did not reply. The guide looked up into his rear view mirror to smile at his joke and he met the boy’s eyes. The boy saw two scowling pits. He looked out the window and his thoughts of the wrecked bus were lurid.

“Has that ever happened?” asked the girl.

“Not when I’m driver,” he said. He winked into the mirror.

“Are they for the wind?” the man said. He was curt.

“In part. They give the bigger trees something to lean on.” He raised his hand and pointed his thumb back the way indicating the road behind. “That is as high as you’ll see them.”

They pulled over into a shoulder where another bus was parked. They picked up their things and left the bus and crossed the road to where a crowd was gathered and where people climbed the rocks to the falls and took pictures of themselves and of each other. The river above them cascaded down into a tributary shaded by the canopy of nearby trees, and by the great arms of a twisted black tree which leaned over the water; and the surface of the water was lambent with light as the odd clear ray broke through the gaps in the canopy.

The man stood next to the guide and slung the backpack over his shoulder.

“Is it safe to climb up?”

“It is safe. I will hold anything you don’t want to take up with you. One thing that is good to know; the tree that is in the falls is an old Ausobo. Often when there is a storm it gets struck with the lightning, and every time it is charred or made ugly. It never seems to die though”

“It looks dead,” said the man. He turned to the boy and the girl. “Fancy it?”

The girl shook her head.

“Son?”

“Sure.”

“Alright if he goes up alone?” he asked the guide. He motioned to his leg.

The guide did not expect this. He said okay.

The boy worked his way along the wooden fence which spanned the base of the falls and served as an entry. He looked up. The water fell like sheeted glass for twenty feet, slickening the jutting rocks and moiling the brown water as it crashed into the tributary. There were wide, dark, flat stones at the edge of the tributary and there were fading dark marks where the water had bled into the rocks when the water was turgid. On the left, people were climbing the rocks to a cantilevered stone platform which was held fast on one side by a second flat stone, and seemed spliced into the bark of the colossal broken tree. Blackened by the lightning, the boy thought the tree looked like wrought iron or a charred corpse, and it reached up to the ridge with limbs rigid and cracked and shaded the trail and the water below. As he climbed he passed people coming down, and a woman slipped and put her hand into the wet mud on the mountainside to keep her balance. The boy was a good climber. His thighs burned when he reached the great rock and he rested against the twisted, deformed old tree.

Below, the man and the girl and the guide were watching the boy up on the rocks.

“It’s like something out of the Last of the Mohicans,” the man said.

“Your boy is brave!”

They watched.

“You cannot climb?”

The man motioned to his leg again. “Hurt it in a crash. Lucky to be walking I guess.”

At the mention of the crash the girl looked up at the man and stared.

“Oh my. I’m sorry.”

The man smiled. “It’s okay. Just don’t go talkin’ about crashes, if you can help it.”

The guide smiled awkwardly.

The girl took out her camera and pointed it up at the scene. From the base of the falls by the fence the boy heard his name being called.

“Smile!”

The boy was facing them but he quickly turned his back on them. The girl took the shot and put the camera into its sheath.

“Great pictures here,” said the guide.

Water from the falls sprayed the boy gently. He was still leaning on the cold black trunk looking through the film of falling water. He noticed that a few yards above him the water thinned and spread like a fan as it ran against a salient rock. He leaned forward to look into the distorted water and, staring, he fancied that some awful thing squatted behind it and beckoned him.

Below, for the first time in a long time, the man’s guts turned cold. He thought the boy was going to jump into the falls.

The boy turned and looked down at them, down at his father. They waved at him and he did not wave back.

He seemed to have read his thoughts.

He heard the voice and he began muttering back at it. He knew it was best to keep moving and not to stare into the pit he believed was behind the falls. Using the tree for balance he worked his way down the rocks being careful not to catch on the charred roots which were strewn across them. Half way down it was shouting and he bit and he dug his knuckles hard into the stone as he lowered himself. When he reached the bottom he leaned against the wooden fence up at the falling water and the rocks and the great misshapen tree which leaned into the falls. It seemed to him as though the tree was in limbo between life and death and he wandered how a thing so horrid and disfigured could stand so stolid and assured in the living falls and not look out of place.

They turned and headed back to the bus where the guide and the others were waiting. The man noticed the scrapes on the boy’s knuckles.

***

The bus climbed the road and the trees grew denser. The guide pointed out to them the Sierra Palms and other trees, but they could not tell the difference. It grew quiet in the bus. The boy was staring out the window. They soon arrived at a stone observation tower with banana trees standing outside and impatients scattered on the ground. They followed the guide up the stone staircase stopping to look through the slit-windows to glimpse the massive deep green sprawl of the treetops on one side and the sparkling sea on the other.

The man and the guide reached the top. The guide walked to the end of the deck and turned to smile at him.

“Holy hell,” said the man.

“Yeah. Is something, no?”

“Yeah.”

He leaned over the side. The canopy reached for miles and rose and fell with the mountains.

Trailing them, the boy and the girl made it to the deck.

“Kids you’ve got to see this.”

They joined him and they looked out over the canopy together and down to the sea which was calm, and they could see faintly the islands which stuck out of the water. The guide stood by them and pointed to them and gave them their names in Spanish then their translations in English.

The boy walked to the other side of the deck which faced the mountains. They rose into the clouds in three bottle green peaks hiding elfin trees which he knew, from the video, were thick and squat and mysterious in the mist. It was very hot on top of the tower but the tops of the mountains looked cold, and he thought the mist looked like a veil of dry ice hiding the secret forest. He wanted to be up there. He saw in his mind the leaves on the trees there frozen and crisp and cool, and covered with small icy beads. He imagined it a silent place.

The man walked over to the boy.

“Some view.”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine those tiny trees.”

The guide joined them and stood between them looking up at the mist.

“Do you ever tire of coming up here?” said the man.

The guide thought about it.

“Sometimes I do. I tire more of the visitors, not the mountain.” He smiled quickly to show he did not mean them. “I do not tire of the view. It is a very good view.”

The boy walked to the opposite side of the deck. He hated the guide.

“How’d you mean the visitors?”

He was reluctant but he felt obliged to explain.

“When I start doing this job a few years ago, I have this family for the day. It is silly really.” He looked up at the man. “Well they stay at the big hotel, the other big hotel, I mean. Our tour, you see, is not very expensive. Other tours are much more expensive. But we are a small company. Well not a thing on the tour was good enough for them.” He shrugged. “The bus is dirty and cheap, the guide is just a boy, the roads are bad, the country is run down and poor. And so on. They did not think much of my English too and I hear them say the people here are lazy.”

“They sound awful.”

“They were. And they had a boy too, and the boy he spit into the ground when we walk by the impatients and I say to him not to because it looks disrespectful. Well his mother she raise her voice and tell me how I dare to talk to her boy and so on. The whole day was bad with them, you know.”

“I can imagine. Did they tip you?”

“They give me three dollars, for all three of them. And you know what, I hear them talking in the bus on the way home about how they could even manage to spend money in such a place.’”

“That’s awful cheap of them.”

The guide smiled.

“The tips are nice but it not important. I get paid fair. I would rather be happy when I work than get a tip.”

“That’s good that you think so. Because we’re not tipping you.”

The guide was puzzled but when the man started to laugh he laughed with him.

They were silent for a minute or so.

“Your son, he is okay?”

The man turned and looked at the boy from across the deck. He was standing alone looking down to the sea.

“He is fine.” He said.

The guide nodded and was sorry that he had asked.

***

The guide drove them up to the mountain trail and told them they could only go in one direction and he’d meet them at the other side lower down the mountain in an hour. On the drive up to the trail the boy was bombarded with hissing and screaming and it was all he could do to keep from screaming himself. He was a beast and a murderer and he should kill himself. He could not distract himself when they set off along the decking and stepped off of it onto the trodden down dirt path which wound through the forest. The father led the way and pointed out to them the birds high up on the branches and the huge grey mushrooms which grew at base of the trees. There was much to see and to hear and he wanted none of it.

They passed a brook which roared and crashed through rocks making its way down the mountain. The water was clear. A couple ahead of them stopped the man and asked him to take their picture, and when he did the couple offered to take a picture of all of them to return the favor. He said it would not be necessary.

They walked for another twenty minutes or so, passing birds and lizards and frogs, and the tall Sierra Palms which competed for the sun and kept the forest ground gloomy and damp and gave it its musky smell. They came to a second fall where the brook emptied into a basin that was wide and open. There were people swimming in the water. They walked by them and across the damp wooden bridge and leaned over the side where the water rushed further downstream. It was murky and brown as the water disturbed the dirt on the bed, and they watched the water drop from the brook in an constant rush. An older man was swimming by the falls, only his head above the water. They followed the trail around and stopped on the long wooden bridge which passed over the river where the water ran from the falls.

“Anyone getting in?” said the man.

“It looks cold,” said the girl

They decided not to go into the water but they stopped for a while to watch the people swimming.

There were a few children in the water and they competed to see who could stay under for longer. Each time they broke the water they gasped and looked up for approval from their mother who stood taking pictures of them from the rocks. There was a young couple too, the woman holding onto the man with her legs wrapped around him trying to kiss him romantically, but he was aware of the kids and kept giving side looks to their mother, who didn’t really care. And there was another family on the bridge too who had stopped to look but who did not want to get into the water.

The boy took it all in like a sketch. He watched the old man wade in the deep water near the waterfall and watched him disappear behind it and appear in the middle of it hunched over like a sloth as the water raked on his back. His wife was watching him and laughing from where she sat on the flat rock by the water’s edge.

The old man dove and waded then entered the shallow water, and crawled along in it so only his head was showing. And when he stood up in the shallow water his wife reached down and handed him a towel, and as he clambered up next to her on the rock the boy noticed that where his left arm should have been there was a dent covered taught with a flap of skin. The old man noticed the boy and the crowd looking down from the bridge and he smiled and waved up at them.

***

When they met with the guide at the end of the trails they were tired and ready to get back to the condominium. The boy slept on the drive back through the mountain and across the country as the sun lowered behind them. The man sat in the back with his children on either side of him. The windows of the squat concrete houses were bright orange squares against the darkening sky and the black sea which he glimpsed through the trees.

The man was tired. He had been acting for the sake of his children and it was enervating. The boy was muttering in his sleep and his voice was growing louder. The man knew that he was not taking his medication. He was languid and slow and numb when he took it. He was none of those things right now. He was afraid for him because he was young and he carried so much and he did not carry it easily. He had never missed his medication when his mother was alive. He knew that the boy missed her. He was worried and his leg was starting to hurt. He hated whatever it was that whispered and screamed at the boy in the day and through the night. He wished it dead and he felt sick at not being able to help. His arm was around the boy and he held him tightly. Above them the stars were bright in the sky and clouds gathered over the sea.