Non-fiction: short story

Oak Mountain

Jordan, Maria, and I sat on the cobblestone dam at Oak Mountain, our feet red and blistered from the burning rocks. We watched a brown-breasted nuthatch flit above our heads, sailing through the clear sky, his reflection swimming in the lake below. Behind us, a waterfall beat on the Pampas grass, moss-colored rocks, and water oaks below while a squirrel dug in the brick-colored mud, fishing for treasure. Maria jumped into the water, and a swell of emerald green pushed over the lower part of the dam and joined the waterfall. While I waited for her to reappear, bubbles popped on the surface and crickets screeched to their mates.

There were times when I wasn’t really sure she would come back up. The sun would beat in rhythm with my heart, waiting on her head of black hair to break the plane of the water and hear her gasping for air. I knew how cold the water was beneath the surface, despite how warm the sun made the water on top. It always paralyzed you when you went under, left you struggling to remember which way was up. She always remembered though. She always came back up.

That summer when we were sixteen was days upon days filled with Oak Mountain and that dam. Sometimes we would visit the petting zoo and play around with the baby goats and pet the horses, their coats polished to a brown luster, their tails swishing to disturb the flies that landed on them. In Alabama, though, the summer hits a sweltering ninety-five degrees and you can see heat rising from the ground, hear the throbbing rays from the sun like they are pulsating in your eardrums. Staying at the petting zoo for too long would leave your throat dry and the back of your neck sticky with sweat. Jordan ignored his discomfort most of the time, stroking the chestnut fur on the horses’ noses. He cooed to them and cracked a smile when I snapped a picture. He had one of those gaps between his two front teeth that you could stick a quarter into but you never did because you knew it’d taste bad.

Maria always drove us to Oak Mountain in her BMW, which sounds nice except that it was black and the seats were leather, and her air conditioner was broken. We had to roll down all the windows so no one would pass out. We’d stop at the Chevron just a couple streets away from the entrance and I’d buy us Cherry Coke or pre-made sandwiches they keep in those freezers. I was the only one with a credit card and since my account was connected to my dad’s, it never ran out of money. I took advantage of that a lot. Other times, we’d pack lunches to bring with us—Maria would make turkey breast sandwiches with mustard, mayonnaise, and cheese. She’d throw some bottled waters in there, and maybe a couple of cookies. She was the motherly one. When we got to the dam, Jordan would scarf down all of his sandwich and half of mine before taking off his clothes and jumping in. It was hot on the ride over. Needless to say, we always ended up back at the dam, eager to feel the cold water on our skin, forgetting for a while how cold it really felt when you jumped in.

The dam was something we alone discovered, or at least that’s what we liked to believe. To get there, you had to crawl over a bar that clearly suggested no entrance into the woods behind the parking lot. At sixteen you ignore things like that. We’d climb over that bar and star the trek to the dam. There was a slightly worn pathway through those woods. One time Jordan even spotted a rattlesnake and sent Maria and I screaming into the Bermuda grass, which hadn’t been cut in years because no one ever ventured through there. Jordan stood nearer to the snake, examining it as Maria and I screamed at him to leave it alone. He laughed at us and called us wimps, poking at the snake with a stick as his black curls fell in front of his eyes. I finally resorted to begging for him to drop the stick and let the snake be. You don’t taunt snakes, especially ones that had to come equipped with warning devices.

That Bermuda grass was waist-high and itchy. A few weeks after Jordan spotted the rattlesnake, we were stalking through the grass when we noticed a swarm of hornets hovering and buzzing right in the path. There was no way around them, so we held our breath (as if that would somehow keep them from stinging us) and ran through them, up the hill, and onto the rocky hiking path. The path led straight to the dam. A sign on a tree near the dam clearly stated “NO JUMPING,” but we ignored that like we did all signs, straightforward or not. That dam was our getaway. No one ever came walking down that hiking path either, so no one ever saw us there. We could go there and just sit and think if we wanted to, but we never did. We just jumped.

It wasn’t always easy to get back up to the dam once you jumped off of it. There was a much lower part of the dam that the water ran over, so we’d swim to that and stand on it like a sandbar in the middle of the ocean. Then, the lowest platform was about seven feet in the air. Jordan always stuck his foot in a big crack in the brick wall and pull himself up onto the platform with his arms. Maria and I weren’t strong enough to do that, so we’d climb onto the lower part of the dam and wait for Jordan’s slippery, prune-like hand to reach down and grab ours. He could always pull us back up, though not without injury. I scraped my knee on the brick a couple of times, but quickly forgot about it as I took another bite of my cookie before Jordan pushed me back in.

That summer was four years ago.

I always thought swimming was our forte. That’s what we did. We swam at the dam. When I got the phone call that shattered that naïve reflection, I’d been having a really bad day. My purse had been stolen at some podunk bar in Montevallo that had been a garage for coach buses early 1940s. I was just sitting down for a Jack and Coke when Maria called me and told me that Jordan had been the one who hadn’t come back up. He’d been at the beach and just hadn’t come back up for air.

I felt like I was sixteen again, jumping into that water in the ninety-five degree weather, forgetting it was freezing under the surface. I couldn’t breathe either.