False Memory

Usually, Skeet’s eyes were honey-brown, intensely luminous, but now they were so watery that a portion of the color seemed to have washed out, leaving him with a dim and yellowish gaze. “You think I’ve failed you, huh?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. And that’s all right. Hey, I’m okay with that.”

“You can’t fail me,” Dusty assured him.

“Well, I did. We both knew I would.”

“You can only fail yourself.”

“Relax, bro.” Skeet patted Dusty’s knee reassuringly and smiled. “I don’t blame you for expecting too much of me, and I don’t blame myself for being a screwup. I’m past all that.”

Forty feet below, Motherwell came out of the house, single-handedly carrying the mattress from a double bed.

The vacationing owners had left keys with Dusty, because some interior walls in high-traffic areas had also needed to be painted. That part of the job was finished.

Motherwell dropped the mattress on the previously positioned tarpaulin, glanced up at Dusty and Skeet, and then went back into the house.

Even from a height of forty feet, Dusty could see that the security guard didn’t approve of Motherwell raiding the residence to put together this makeshift fall-break.

“What did you take?” Dusty asked.

Skeet shrugged and turned his face up toward the circling crows, regarding them with such an inane smile and with such reverence that you would have thought he was a total nature head who had begun the day with a glass of fresh-squeezed organic orange juice, a sugarless bran muffin, a tofu omelet, and a nine-mile hike.

“You must remember what you took,” Dusty pressed.

“A cocktail,” Skeet said. “Pills and powders.”

“Uppers, downers?”

“Probably both. More. But I don’t feel bad.” He looked away from the birds and put his right hand on Dusty’s shoulder. “I don’t feel like crap anymore. I’m at peace, Dusty.”

“I’d still like to know what you took.”

“Why? It could be the tastiest recipe ever, and you’d never use it.” Skeet smiled and pinched Dusty’s cheek affectionately. “Not you. You’re not like me.”

Motherwell came out of the house with a second mattress from another double bed. He placed it beside the first.

“That’s silly,” Skeet said, pointing down the steep slope to the mattresses. “I’ll just jump to one side or the other.”

“Listen, you’re not going to take a header into the Sorensons’ driveway,” Dusty said firmly.

“They won’t care. They’re in Paris.”

“London.”

“Whatever.”

“And they will care. They’ll be pissed.”

Blinking his bleary eyes, Skeet said, “What — are they really uptight or something?”

Motherwell was arguing with the guard. Dusty could hear their voices but not what they were saying.

Skeet still had his hand on Dusty’s shoulder. “You’re cold.”

“No,” Dusty said. “I’m okay.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Not cold. Just scared.”

“You?” Disbelief brought Skeet’s blurry eyes into focus. “Scared? Of what?”

“Heights.”

Motherwell and the security guard headed into the house. From up here, it appeared as though Motherwell had an arm around the guy’s back, as if maybe he was lifting him half off his feet and hurrying him along.

“Heights?” Skeet gaped at him. “Whenever there’s anything on a roof to be painted, you always want to do it yourself.”

“With my stomach in knots the whole time.”

“Get serious. You’re not afraid of anything.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Not you.”

“Me.”

“Not you!” Skeet insisted with sudden anger.

“Even me.”

Distressed, having undergone a radical mood swing in an instant, Skeet snatched his hand off Dusty’s shoulder. He hugged himself and began to rock slowly back and forth on the narrow seat provided by the single-width cap of ridge-line tiles. His voice was wrenched with anguish, as though Dusty had not merely acknowledged a fear of heights but had announced that he was riddled with terminal cancer:

“Not you, not you, not you, not you…

In this condition, Skeet might respond well to several sweet spoonfuls of sympathy; however, if he decided that he was being coddled, he could become sullen, unreachable, even hostile, which was annoying in ordinary circumstances, but which could be dangerous forty feet above the ground. Generally he responded better to tough love, humor, and cold truth.

Into Skeet’s not you chant, Dusty said, “You’re such a feeb.”

“You’re the feeb.”

“Wrong. You’re the feeb.”

“You are so completely the feeb,” Skeet said.

Dusty shook his head. “No, I’m the psychological progeriac.”

“The what?”

“Psychological, meaning ‘of, pertaining to, or affecting the mind. ’Progeriac, meaning ‘someone afflicted with progeria, ’ which is a ‘congenital abnormality characterized by premature and rapid aging, in which the sufferer, in childhood, appears to be an old person.’”

Skeet bobbed his head. “Hey, yeah, I saw a story about that on 60 Minutes.”