The Sledding Hill
Chris Crutcher
IN MEMORY OF ZACH CLIFTON,
WHO SPOKE WHALE TALK
Contents
1 Death Does Not Take a Holiday
2 Life After Life
3 Billy Bartholomew aka Freddy Krueger
4 Sorting Out
5 Black Like Cain
6 Winter in the Middle of Summer
7 Dead Authors Beware
8 Protecting Impressionable Minds
9 The Universe Takes a Hands-off Position
10 Holy War Wholly Declared
11 Good Guys and Bad Guys
12 Jesus Loves a Good Book
13 Something about the Author
14 If the Game’s Too Easy…
15 Unedited Testimony
16 How to Prepare Your School for an Author Visit
17 First-Name Basis
18 Getting Published
About the Author
Other Books by Chris Crutcher
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
DEATH DOES NOT TAKE A HOLIDAY
When we were in grade school most kids thought Eddie Proffit was stupid because he would ask questions no one else would think of. It’s human nature to think if you weren’t the person to think of something, it must be dumb. But Eddie knows things.
I was Billy Bartholomew, smartest kid in class; arguably smartest in school, which was supposed to be a minor miracle because my father is the school janitor. It is also human nature to define a person by his or her job, which is a mistake when it comes to my dad. He doesn’t have a huge drive to get rich, so he’s considered ordinary. At any rate, I was supposed to grow up and rattle the world, and Eddie was supposed to grow up and run his father’s gas station. Everyone thought our friendship was odd; what was a smart kid like me doing hanging out with a kid with an IQ short of triple digits? Truth is, Eddie’s IQ turned out to be off the charts. His mind bounces from one thing to the other pretty much however it wants, though, and long before he should be finishing up one thought, he’s on to something else. Eddie doesn’t come to very many conclusions.
In fifth grade, when my dad discovered Eddie scored sixty-five on his IQ test, he asked Eddie what happened, because Dad knew that couldn’t be right.
“I was answering the questions,” Eddie said, “and then I started seeing what a neat pattern I was making filling in those little ovals, and before I knew it I was making neater and neater patterns.”
“You weren’t even reading the questions?”
“I wasn’t even keeping it to one answer per row,” Eddie told him. “Did you see my answer sheet? It looks way cool.”
So my dad went to the principal, who was about to put Eddie in special ed for every class but PE, and told her she can’t do that. “He scored a sixty-five,” my dad said, “without reading the questions.”
The principal was all into protocol and all out of taking advice from the school janitor and wouldn’t let Eddie retake the test. But Dad had a key to every room and file drawer in school, so he found a test, took Eddie to the furnace room, and had him answer the questions five at a time. Eddie added almost a hundred points to his IQ that afternoon. When the principal told Dad he was out of line, Dad took the test over to the Chevron station to bring Eddie’s dad up to speed.
Eddie didn’t attend any special ed classes.
The principal went ahead and recorded the sixty-five IQ on his permanent record anyway and no one knew the story of the second test, so it was generally thought I did Eddie’s homework for him when he started to get good grades. I didn’t do one of his assignments. He would go to the furnace room for an hour and a half after school every day, and my dad would break up his homework with little jobs to keep him focused, and Eddie did great. But he continued to ask strange questions and challenge teachers when they said something he thought couldn’t be true, and he was pretty much considered a pain in the neck.
Eddie and I used to run everywhere. We’d been winning the annual Fourth of July races as long as we could remember and had decided when we got into high school we’d be the heart of a stellar cross-country team. We were both too skinny to play football, and in a high school this small it is not considered cool to go sportless, so cross-country was it.
So it’s early summer, five days after Eddie’s fourteenth birthday, and he’s getting ready to bike out to the hot springs with me to spend the afternoon swimming and rolling in the warm mud. Eddie’s been working four hours a day, eight to noon, at his dad’s service station, the last full-service gas station in the solar system, to hear Mr. Proffit tell it. It may not be the last one in the solar system, but it’s definitely the last in Bear Creek, population 3,065, situated high in the Idaho panhandle, a few miles from the Canadian border. Anyway, Eddie has been helping his dad fix truck tires all morning and is ready to hit the warm water.
Bear Creek is a mess. Duffy Reed Construction has been hired to widen Main Street. They’ve got the pavement dug out from city limit to city limit along with another two feet of dirt below that, so if you step off the sidewalk without looking you could take a serious header. Proffit’s Chevron, which Eddie’s dad used to call Non-Proffit’s Chevron, is the only place in town that fixes truck and heavy-equipment tires, and Mr. Proffit has been doing just that twelve hours a day—four hours with Eddie’s help and eight by himself—to keep up with Duffy Reed’s sharp-rock punctures.
He’s got it down to a science. Air up four tires at a time to find the leaks, let the air out, break them down, remove the tubes if they have them, patch them, throw them back together, air them up, and roll them to the rack out back so the next driver with a flat can replace it with a repaired one and roar out in under six minutes. Four at a time. John Proffit’s a tire-fixin’ fool.
That day Eddie’s dad stops only once to have lunch with Eddie’s mom—her name is Evelyn—and he’s back to fixing tires, somewhat disgruntled and distracted because he got chicken salad instead of tuna, and he forgets to let the air out of one of the tires before breaking it down.
Eddie’s mom catches Eddie and me just as we’re about to head out to the hot springs, and she gives Eddie a monster hunk of chocolate cake and some milk in a thermos to take to his dad.
But his dad is lying in the middle of the wash bay next to an exploded truck tire, nose plastered onto the side of his cheek like he was maybe painted by Picasso, his blood trickling into the drain, deader than a doornail. No chocolate cake and milk for John Proffit today.
Eddie stands there staring. This can’t be. His dad has told him eight jillion times how dangerous the lock ring on a truck wheel is. You always make sure the air pressure is zero before breaking it down. When it’s repaired you place it inside the wire cage before airing it up or, in the absence of a cage, turn it facedown on the concrete. If the lock ring isn’t locked, it might just as well be a bomb. It will take your head right off your body. Eddie knows that as well as he knows to brush his teeth before bedtime. “It’ll take your head right off your body, buddy.” Eight jillion times.
I’m waiting outside by the gas pumps, so Eddie just walks back and gets on his bike and we pedal off to the hot springs. He doesn’t tell me what happened because he knows it isn’t real. He’s had dreams like this; not about truck tires, maybe, but dreams where you come home to find the house empty and no sign of your parents. Shoot, even I used to have that dream. It freaks you, but when you finally wake up, there they are.
“Hey, man,” I say when we’ve pedaled about a mile, “hear those sirens? Let’s go back and see what it is.”
“Naw,” Eddie says. “Probably just Mrs. Madden set her hamburgers on fire again.”
I’m ea
sy to convince. We’ve been planning to bike to the hot springs for a week.
Flash forward three weeks. I’m trying to hook up with Eddie to hang out or bike back out to the hot springs. I have been way cool, doing everything I can to help Eddie back to his regular life after his dad was suddenly gone and his mom’s brain got kidnapped by the Red Brick Church. Since the day his dad died, ask Evelyn Proffit any question and the answer will include God’s Plan, which, by the way, you seldom hear about unless something awful happens or one person escapes death in a situation where nobody else did. Eddie’s been attending church with her Wednesday nights and Sundays, but it doesn’t help much. For one thing, he can’t keep his mind on Reverend Tarter’s sermons for more than thirty seconds at a time, and for another, he’s mad at God. Eddie figures if God’s Plan included his dad taking a bite out of an exploding lock ring, well, God can plant a big one on Eddie’s keister. Also, he ran out in the middle of his dad’s funeral and the Red Brick Church people have taken to treating him like one of the lepers to which the Reverend Tarter so fondly refers in every third sermon.
I was one of those dweebs who loved having information other people didn’t care about, so I hated it when Eddie got thrown out of class for talking out of turn or for not stopping after the fifth or sixth time the teacher said, “That’s enough, Eddie.” On his worst days he spent more time in the office than in class. I loved how he’d just tell a teacher she was wrong or ask questions at a machine-gun clip without raising his hand if she said something he thought was suspect. So I started working with him on ways to stay in class. Once we pooled our money and bought one of those electronic dog collars you can use to shock the dog by remote if he starts to pee in a corner of the living room or tears after a mother pushing a baby stroller. Eddie wore the collar on his ankle and sat directly in front of me in class. Every time I’d see him start to speak out of turn or do something that clearly indicated he was fixin’ to make an unplanned exit, I’d give him a jolt. Most of the time it worked, but if I didn’t catch him before he blurted, he’d get out about three words and a scream as the shock hit him. The idea was solid in theory, problematic in execution.
Then I started noticing when we’d ride our bikes, Eddie could stay on any subject, and the harder we rode the more focused he was. Since we both liked to run and bike, I started holding most of my important conversations with him on the move, and he seemed like a way different kid. I tried to tell our teacher that if she’d just let him pace the perimeter of the room at an accelerated gait, he’d be the smartest kid in class. Again, easy theory to formulate, harder to sell.
Eddie discovered I was right, though, and started running and biking everywhere he went, whether I was with him or not, which created a demand for deodorant until he started carrying fresh clothes in a backpack and people got used to him showering at their houses whenever he came to visit. The more he exercised, the calmer he got.
So, biking is what Eddie is doing while I’m trying to catch up with him on this day, and when I can’t find him I realize I’m so bored I might as well go help my dad with summer maintenance on the gym up at the high school. Only Dad’s out running an errand, and for some reason that really hacks me off and (this was a real lapse) I kick a stack of Sheetrock leaning precariously against the stage and turn around to stomp out. The operative word in that last sentence is “precariously.” Four of the sheets fall forward as I walk away, and the upper edge catches me at the base of the skull, knocks me down, and snaps my spine.
Guess who finds me.
Around noon, after a ten-mile bike ride to the radar site on West Mountain, during which he has some choice words with God about who goes and who stays on this stupid planet, Eddie pedals over to my place. My dad is eating lunch and says if Eddie will run up to the school to see if I’m there, he’ll feed us, which sounds to Eddie like a better plan than lunch with his mother because he’s really hungry from riding so hard and at his house saying grace now takes longer than consuming the meal and turns into a way bigger deal than simply asking God to make sure the food isn’t full of botulism. Eddie whips up to the school and there I am; only we have had our last lunch.
He can’t lift the Sheetrock high enough to get me out, but he does get me turned over partway, and sees what you could only call a ghastly expression on my face.
Let it never be said that Eddie Proffit doesn’t know what to do when he finds a dead body. He pedals straight out to the hot springs, sheds his clothes, and buries himself in the warm mud right up to his neck and sits there the rest of the afternoon, trying to make what he’s just seen into a fantasy, like he was able to do with his dad for a few hours before his world caved in on itself.
Only he can’t pull it off; he has recently had the experience of it not working and because his mind is bouncing like a Super Ball in a racquetball court. So he rinses off and pedals back to my house, because one thought that finally scoots across his brain is, he better tell my dad. Of course by that time the whole town is humming with the news and half of it is looking for Eddie, because my dad told them he must have seen me because of how the Sheetrock was moved. What a guy. In the middle of his crippling hurt, he thinks of Eddie.
Eddie is seriously glazed over. Rollie Mount, the county sheriff, catches up with him riding down the mess that is Main Street, loads his bike into the trunk, and drives him home, where Eddie doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid of what he might say if his mother mentions God’s Plan. But Mrs. Proffit is out looking for him, so Rollie stays.
Rollie says, “Hey, man, I know you’re messed up, but I have to ask a few questions.”
Eddie nods.
“You found Billy, right? Under the Sheetrock?”
Eddie nods again.
“Did you try to pull him out?”
Another nod.
Rollie takes a deep breath. “Was he still alive, when you were trying to pull him out?”
Eddie’s mind explodes. He never thought of that. What if he killed me, trying to get me out from under all that? He opens his mouth to speak, but the answer weighs on his chest like an anvil and suddenly he can barely breathe. Coherent thoughts won’t form, and his mind spins. It will be awhile before anyone hears another word from Eddie Proffit.
2
LIFE AFTER LIFE
When you first die, you don’t know you’re dead. You know something is way different, but you’ve been playing the game with such intensity, it’s hard to realize you’ve just stepped out of it. The good news is, there’s no pain. First I’m pinned to the floor and there is no physical sensation except I can’t move, and then I look to a spot on the floor right beside me and suddenly I’m at that spot looking back at a seriously expired Billy Bartholomew, and I’m thinking, Dang! That was dumb. I’m on the bleachers by the time Eddie finds me, and I try to holler at him before remembering that when you weigh only twenty-one grams—the difference between the weight of a live body and that same body croaked—you have no room for a voice box. So I watch and root for him as he tries to pry my body from under the Sheetrock, which is just too heavy. And I think, Eddie just went into a dark room in his Earthgame; two important guys dead in one month, and he found them both. And then he is out of the gym and out to the hot springs, and I keep trying to get his attention to let him know it’s okay, but I don’t remember how to do that yet.
The longer you’re dead, the clearer you become about what the deal is: that your Earth life, which lasted what seemed like a long fourteen years, was not even a subatomic blip in eternal time, and that you just hit TILT! You also remember instantly that emotions are for the living and you don’t need them anymore, and in fact they aren’t available. There is huge joy—not the emotion of happiness, but the pure joy of knowledge—and a sense of coming home. The knowledge itself is monstrous, huge and expanding at warp speed, and you laugh in wonder at all the crazy considerations you had while playing the Earthgame because you were so focused you thought things were important. You immediately understand
what the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff book was about. You know that in the blink of an eye to the minus one billionth, universe time, when all your friends will also be dead, you can bump into any one of them you want to, so even if you could feel emotion, it wouldn’t be sadness.
I could take right off, but once I see my friend struggling so hard to get my abandoned body out from under all that weight, then fleeing to the hot springs, curiosity and my sense of connection to him draws me to stay. I wonder if I can help; not to get my body free, but to deal with what seems to him like a hurricane of calamity in his life. He looks so freaked out.
So I hang around a second, universe time.
In case you think that’s some big sacrifice, you should know that once you’re dead again—which is like being truly alive—you can haul yourself around eternity at soul-boggling speeds. Earth scientists consider the speed of light to be the ultimate speed. We travel at the speed of imagination. Light speed is to imagination speed as the forming of the Grand Canyon is to NASCAR. Times a zillion. Hard to explain in the relative language of Earth. You have to be here. The point is, I can hang around a second and at the same time whip back and forth rediscovering the knowledge of eternity, which I left at the doorstep when I entered Earth. You did, too. So did Eddie Proffit. But the unique thing about Eddie is, he brings the ghost of a memory for his life before life to his Earthgame. That’s the good news and the bad news—more accurately, the advantage and the challenge—for him, because while it gives him incredible insight, it also makes him touchy, as in sensitive, and his bouncing brain doesn’t allow him to focus on any one thing for too long. Eddie can light on a truth and be gone before he ever knows he was there. What I know now that I’m dead is that there is a microminisecond when his brain is in mid bounce, when I can bump him.