Chapter one

 

     

            The Doberman climbed the hill ahead of Maxwell, its sleek brown hide catching the sunlight as if oiled, limbs moving in silent unison: two legs on the right side, then two on the left. The dog's rhythm started and stopped as the its long nose bent to sniff the ground.  At first, Maxwell didn't think it would turn into the park. The beast appeared to follow a trail up the bend from McBride Avenue's extension, along the green spiked fence, checking the scent at the first parking lot entrance, then the second, sniffing, moving sniffing again. To the right, passed the statue of Alexander Hamilton and the cracked bell burned in some historic fire and the red brick park building, the world fell into a dark abyss. This was not the falls, not yet anyway, but the crest below the face of the falls, a thick mist crawling up from where white water struck brown. The moisture in the air grew with every step forward, pressing against Maxwell's chest, and over his mouth. His brow dripped, not with sweat, but condensation.

            Maxwell followed the dog up onto the three-way concrete bridge, where the beast stopped, sniffed, and finally lifted its right rear leg, wavering with all the surety of a three-legged table. A thin stream of steaming liquid dribbled down the wall. The dog sniffed again. It appeared satisfied, then moved on -- over the bridge. To the right a huge wall of reddish basalt rock rose, massive and cracked, with an even larger red brick building cradled in its arms, like the child of a different color and race, adopted by the stone around it. City officials had installed a barbed-wire fence too keep children from wandering into the turbines. Signs posted at intervals warned of high voltage.

            The second entrance into the park had no driveway, but a rusted gate bore a lock and a sign, which read: NO ONE PERMITTED IN THE PARK AFTER DARK.

            The dog stopped midway across this gap, sniffing the air, shaking a little as a bread truck rolled over the second bridge – though Maxwell could feel a deeper vibration, something that also shook the ground and fence, one which did not stop when the truck had gone. Then, as if making up its mind, the Doberman raised its leg, sprayed, moved on, sprayed again, then vanished on the other side of the small fenced in lawn to which this gap led, over a small foot bridge.

            Maxwell crossed the lawn, the smell of ozone curling up from the brick building and the turning turbines. This was not a scent Maxwell recalled from his days coming here as a kid. Inspired by similar motivations as the city's founder, Alexander Hamilton, the city had installed the turnbines to take advantage of the Great Falls' power – something that could provide the city was desperately needed additional revenue at a time when its yearly budgets looked bleaker and bleaker.

            Two centuries earlier, Alexander Hamilton had stood here and saw this same water turning wheels that would turn the wheels of industry. Even the turbines were nothing original. The first went on line in 1838, bringing nearly 2000 watts per hour worth of electricity to the City of Paterson. In 1914, the city overhauled the turbines and brought them up to date, and the changes increased the output to 6,500 watts per hour. For 55 years those turbines turned, growing old with the city. Maxwell remembered the hum of their dying from when he was young, remembered the city growing frustrated enough to eventually turn them off. Power was cheap in 1969. Coal and oil could supply what the city needed then. Yet as oil shortages started and the prices went up, and eventually – after a decade of argument – the city council voted to overhaul the turbines again, shelling out a fortune to cover change orders, set backs and mistakes. In 1986, Mayor Frank X. Graves Jr. had the pleasure of pulling the switch that turned the turbines on, producing 14,775 watts of power.

            Maxwell crossed the lawn to the footbridge.

            To one side, the river flowed, flat and wide and deceptively calm, a man-made three-foot falls just below the roadway bridge, built at one point to warn river men of the doom that lay beyond, which from the river top could not be seen. From the river top, the Great Falls looked like nothing but a thin brown line. Men had crashed over it without warning. Men had lost their lives in the thrashing water and jagged stone below. Above this line, Maxwell could see a mist rising, a mist that hid the cracks and crevices of the far wall of the canyon. Along the river and above the chasm, laurel clung, green wreaths fighting to survive on the moon-like surface of bare rock.  The dog appeared on the far side, its snout poking through the bars of the fence there, sniffing at the falling water, before turning away towards other interests, climbing the larger lawn towards the Hinchcliff Stadium.

            Maxwell reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded wad of newsprint, fumbling as he tried to open it, the banner headline already a week old: LEAPER SAVED FROM FALLS

            The rest of the copy grew smudged as his wet fingers struggled to smooth out the wrinkles. The photograph – dark in the first place -- showed a faint pale figure poised against a background of nearly black stone. The firefighters stood to either side, holding ropes and balancing a net in which they to catch the girl if she slipped off the slick black stone and plunged towards the river. The photograph did not reveal enough detail for Maxwell to make out the face, but he knew who she was, even without reading the article.

    Jumper Suzanne (last name blurred) was rescued by paterson police and fire fighters on Tuesday after she attempted to leap from the viaduct bridge into the passaic river falls, officials said the daring rescue was achieved as result of new training offered by the state.  Miss (named blurred again, this time by the fold in the paper) was admitted to the psychiatric wing of St. Joseph's Hospital where she was expected to undergo evaluation. She was, according to a police spokesman, "shaken but not hurt." The police said they could find no current address though they believe she once resided in Paterson.

            The rescue marked the first thwarted suicide attempt off the falls in 50 years, although records show over a hundred people have taken the plunge since 1959. Mayor Frank X. Graves, Rr., vowed to put an end to the gruesome pattern, and has ordered the two bridges over the falls closed to the public.

            "I know this seems like a radical step," Graves said. "But I don't intend to let Paterson become the suicide capital of the world."  The mayor said the ban could be partially lifted in the city council comes to a consensus on hiring a tour guide. The post was vacated two years ago as a budget-cutting measure.

            "If the council refuses to hire someone, then those bridges will stay closed," the mayor said. "It is a public safety issue." 

            The newspaper, however, was wrong on two accounts. Creeley had quit, not been vacated. The city council simply hadn't been able to find anyone with his knowledge of Paterson history to take his place – at least, not for the pittance the council offered as salary.

            "It's a labor of love," Creeley told Maxwell more than once, explaining why he had done the job for so long while getting so little payment. "You don't need a lot of money if you love what you do."

            "But you need money to live," Maxwell protested.

            "You need love to live, too," Creeley countered, his gray cracked lips bleeding a little as he smiled. But it was the ragged front tooth most people noticed. "What if someone paid you to play your music or write your poems. Wouldn't you take it, even if the amount was small?"

            "That's different. That's art."

            "So is the history of Paterson if you look at it the right way, and the heart of that history is up here at the Great Falls."

            The other point the reporter missed was about the survivors. At least, one other person had taken a leap from these falls since 1959 and survived -- although according to official records, Puck Fetterland's body was never recovered.

            Technically, Puck hadn't been a leaper either. He hadn't come here with the intention of jumping all, and from the look of Puck when Maxwell finally found him – God knew how many years earlier -- rain seemed to have doused him, not a tumble off the Great Falls. Puck dripped, but lacked the lacerations and bruises the jagged rocks should have provided him.

            "I fell off the falls, man," Paul told Maxwell, leaving such a puddle on the doorstep,

            "Fell? What do you mean, fell?"

            "The cops, man, they saw me. I was walking along minding my own business, and they saw me and hollered and I got scared and ran."

             The next day's newspapers told Maxwell the truth, when reporting Puck's death.  Puck hadn t been walking anywhere, he'd run full tilt. He hadn't been minding his business, either, he had just robbed a man downtown, and the blood was still dripping from his guilty fingers. The police hadn't just spotted him, they had chased him directly from the crime scene, calling ahead for more cops to block the Totowa section side of the Great Falls bridge. Perhaps, Puck wouldn't have made it as far as the falls had his skin color been black. But white cops hesitated to shoot a white man, even if the man ran carrying a bloody knife in his hand, even when the victim moaned on the sidewalk claiming he'd been robbed. Instead the cops shouted for Puck to stop, and when he didn't, they gave chase, calling in the resources of the town to halt him. Police cars blocked the roadway across the bridge when Puck arrived, and these cops, too, standing behind the cars with guns drawn, ordered him to stop. He bolted into the park instead, intending to cross over the falls footbridge to the picnic area, passing the pump house, the overlook and into the parking lot of Hinchcliff stadium, from which he could reentered downtown via West Broadway. He apparently never expected to find cops charging down the hill from that direction, closing in on the narrow footbridge just as he reached it.

            Had the police recognized Puck, they would have been less confident of his surrender, and would not have been surprised when he climbed up on the rail. Puck's police record showed him capable of anything, of any violence, and reported a consistent trail of violence from when he was three years old and he pushed and old lady down a flight of stairs when she refused his request for candy -- and standing there with police rushing towards him from two directions, he did what only Puck was capable of doing, he glanced only once at the frightful chasm, at the jagged stone at the bottom, at the chipped walls, at all those elements which would have killed him if fate or luck had not been on his side, and gritting his teeth, he jumped.

            Hours later, he stood at Maxwell's door (then, Creeley's loft with Maxwell as a guest) begging him for a place to stay.

            "Just still I stop shaking," Puck said, the water smoothing down his hair so as to emphasize his rat-like features.

            "I can't," Maxwell said. "Creeley won't let me."

            "Why not?" Puck asked, his golden eyes flashing with quick anger.

             "He doesn't like you and says you're not good for me."

            "Oh, he does," Puck said, glaring around Maxwell into the loft. "Where is he? Why doesn t the old busy-body tell me that for himself?"

            "He s out. The police called after you jumped from the bridge. He knows the falls and the river and they have him searching the sides for your body."

            "How nice," Puck said, taking a more certain step into the apartment.

            "I said you can t come in," Maxwell said, barring the boy's way. They were both 16, but Maxwell loomed over the other boy, wide shoulders like a wrestler's -- in fact, he had wrestled during his brief stay in junior high school. But he had seen Puck fight, as quick and dirty as a rattle snake, always striking for the most vulnerable part of his opponent's anatomy. And even when Puck's opponents got their hands on him, he squiggled free, made more vicious for their audacity. Yet, at that moment, Puck lacked energy, no longer up to a fight, and was content in baring his teeth.

            "What the hell are you protecting that old goat for? Or has that old faggot been fucking you up the ass, too?"

            "He s not a..."

            "That s not what a lot of pretty little boys in the Youth House say," Puck said. "They say he got them started with his rump fucking."

            "Shut up and get out!" Maxwell said. "Before Creeley comes back and finds you here."

             "Wouldn t that be something," Puck laughed. "Instead of finding my body, broken on the stones in the river, he'd find me here alive and well, right in the middle of his precious cave. I'd show that interfering SOB about how to mind his own business."

             "Go," Maxwell said, aware of something odd in Puck's attack, and Puck's reluctance to push Maxwell too far, as if he didn't wish to ruin the one friendship he had won over the years, though friendship between the two boys was far too strong a word for what they had.  Both had met on the street, each wandering out into the dark world, searching for something neither could identify by name, something neither could find at home, two almost twins so lonely they eventually settled upon each other for company -- except that Maxwell had one other friend, Puck did not, one relative at the old house that had kept faith with him, made him feel wanted, shaping his early life when no one had shaped Puck's. And when Uncle Charlie vanished in Vietnam, Maxwell was old enough to move and take up residence with Creeley at the loft. And Maxwell had seen the envy in Puck s eyes, that mixture of desire and disdain, over something he didn't totally understand. When Charlie taught the 13-year-old Maxwell to drive, Puck was there, later saying he knew how to drive already. When Charlie took Maxwell up to the quarry to teach him how to shoot at 14, Puck said he already owned a gun. When Charlie took Maxwell to New York at age 15 to get drunk and get laid, Puck roared saying he had done plenty of both -- and didn't have to pay for either. But when Creeley took Maxwell in at age 16, Puck went crazy, a sputtering , cursing kind of crazy no one -- least of all Maxwell -- could understand.

            "I'm gonna kill that old son of a bitch," Puck said. "I'm gonna put a bullet through his fucking bald head just for the fuck of it!"

            Yet, standing dripping at the edge of the loft's living room, under Creeley's array of plants, and Creeley's walls of scholarly volumes, Puck looked incapable of hurting anyone, his black eyes missing their usual fire, as if the dunking had extinguished -- for that moment -- the immense rage that Maxwell knew time would rekindle.

            "Go," Maxwell said, surprising himself with the hardness of his own voice, suddenly disgusted by this slimy creature. "And don't come back, otherwise Creeley will call the cops."

            Puck turned, giving Maxwell a sharp, hateful sideward glance, then went, retreating back the way he d come, adding to his wet trail down the stairs. Maxwell followed him to the bottom door, then closed it, and latched it, then leaned against it for a moment, shivering as if he was the one that had climbed from the river. Finally, he climbed the stairs again, shut the upstairs door, latching that as well, then, crossed to the roof top door, locking that -- and still he did not feel safe. Sooner or later, Puck would come back, and maybe even fulfill his promise to kill Creeley. Puck was that mean.

            The Doberman reappeared -- or at least a glimpse of the dog did -- trotting through the trees just beneath the blue and white bulge of the stadium. It stopped, brown snout rising to catch some illusive scent in the air, a scene now beyond the boundaries of the park. Then, it padded on, down the gravel path and onto the streets of Paterson again, to vanish among the two-and-three-storied houses.

            Maxwell took a deep breath, moist air filling his longs as he turned to follow the dog, whose prints showed in the muddy patches, leading through the overhang of laurel and mulberry to the gate of the footbridge -- He took the incline slowly, feeling old, the long day at the Greasy Spoon wearing him down, making his arms ache and his knees, and his feet, leaving him breathing harder than his 36 years justified. Perhaps he had some undiagnosed disease? Perhaps, he was already dying?

            Through the trees, the sun glinted off some new metallic addition, Maxwell had not noticed during his last visit, and as he came up the path, he saw a new gate installed across the opening,. A huge silver padlock guaranteed the gate stayed closed, with an equally obvious sign saying: CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE MAYOR. Someone had already smeared this with spray paint, one of the local Latino gangs claiming this as part of its turf.  Maxwell could no longer see the Doberman. But he could now see the white froth of the falls, breaking over the lip of the 150 foot wide chasm, the narrow end to the left side of the bridge where the water tumbled and frolicked. The flow found every crack and crevice left by some prehistoric earth-moving calamity. Layers of history showed along the chiseled sides where patches of green proved life could grow anywhere, lichen and mold who fed off the water. The gray rock looked black where the water touched, the broken top like the cracked mouth of a street drunk, unable to hold back the vomit of pollution emitted from the factories up stream.  But remnants of the old beauty remained, contained in these awesome jaws the way a frail insect s fossil becomes entrapped inside a piece of foggy crystal, threads of white water gushing down the gray stone with the grace of silk, each an incredibly soft vision after the endless parade of roof tops and church steeples and factories elsewhere in Paterson.

            "It awes everybody, Maxwell," Creeley once told him. "It awed the Lenape Indians when they came here to draw fish from the pool, it awed the Europeans when a few of their bravest wandered up what they then called `the Third River.'  That was before anyone built anything here, when this place was only whispered about. The Lenape called it  Totowa Falls,  which in their tongue means: `to force beneath water by weight.  It was a sacred place."

            "So the white man came and took the falls from them?" Maxwell asked, standing there beside Creeley, 16-years-old instead of his now 36.

            Creeley's cavernous face crinkled with distaste, as he cast a glance at Maxwell, his gray eyes stirred with annoyance, outraged by the suggestion.

            "You talk like a hippie, boy," he said. "The Europeans weren't kinds to the Lenapes, but we didn't kill them every time we came into contact with them. Early on, only hunters and trappers wandered this far upstream. They were the first white men, as you put it, to glimpse the falls. They brought news of it back to the more civilized folks. They exaggerated things, as all men do, comparing this place to the Victoria Falls in Central Africa."

            "These falls aren't as big?"

            "Not by a long shot," Creeley said. "Yet the comparison wasn't totally inaccurate. The shape is the same, if not the size. Both seemed to have the same descending pools."

            Three pools, Maxwell thought, the sharp smell of mulberry trees interrupting the memory of Creeley's lesson, three pools like steps with a white carpet of water flowing down into each and over each until coming to the bottom channel, where the white turned brown again and swirled against the walls of the chasm until it reached the calmer and wider pool below the hydro house. But around each pool, and especially at the bottom, sharp stones jutted out like a giant's teeth. How Puck had managed to avoid these with his leap was anybody's guess. How Suzanne had managed to reach and cling to the sheer walls of the chasm side was yet another mystery.  Maxwell shivered, his shirt and pants moist from the wet air around him. He stared at the fence, wondering how the Doberman had managed to slip through the locked gate. Then, Maxwell saw the flaw in the mayor's plan. To the right of the footbridge -- away from the furious froth of the falls and towards the chasm -- someone had yanked out the bottom of the fence, the local Latino or the black gangs from the projects, making a crawl space for themselves. Paw prints in the moist ground showed that the Doberman had used this avenue, but the mud dissuaded Maxwell and he gripped the wire fence's links and yanked up. The metal, weakened by the gangs and the rust, broke free from the ancient post to which it was attached, leaving Maxwell a wider and high space to ease through. He pressed his shoulder under the loose lip of the fence and found himself on one of the two bridges that crossed the chasm. The other bridge, to the right and crossing over at a wider section of the gap away from the falls themselves, was never meant for human use, an older and decrepit hunk of metal which housed a two foot wide viaduct. Water dripped from the rusted joints and left red tears down its curved sides. Suzanne had made her attempted leap from this other bridge.

            Yet in the growing dark, Maxwell could not pick out the exact spot where she might have stood, feet slipping on the slimy metal surface, nor the spot on the chasm wall to which she leaped and clung and cried out from, a cry witnesses later said, sounded more like disappointment than fright, as if she had had just enough courage to jump once, but now, with fate having saved her, could not jump again, and clung instead. But clung to what? Even the chiseled sides looked smooth and black, a single dark all pervading face that haunted Paterson with its stare, and with the reminder of better days when the city had served the country as one of its key manufacturing centers.

            "Even after the falls had been found, Europeans didn't settle near it right away," Creeley had told Maxwell. "They settled south of it, near where Passaic is -- on an Island called Dundee. The Lenape called it Menechenicke, and sold it to the settlers for a few chickens. They didn t understand the European's logic. They thought the settlers were crazy for thinking they could own an island. To them, it was like someone saying they could own the sky. There was no sense in it. That was the Indian's great problem. They just didn t see what the Europeans were about until way too late.

            "Speculators came, trading coats, blankets, kettles, powder and trinkets for land. They ate up every inch from Newark to the foot of these falls, and they still wanted more."

            Maxwell edged to the right side of the foot bridge, searching the dark surface, the light failed him and had he had now was the flow of the water, and its roar, rising up louder and more distinct out of the darkness, like some furious beast set loose among the stone. He could almost hear the cries of those who had passed this way over the two centuries since the American Revolution, ghosts whose living selves had slipped or tumbled from this bridge or the rocks, voices swirling around with the bubbling foam, whispering for Kenny to join them. At once time, he might have listened, after Charlie, before Creeley, in that confusing chasm when he d stopped hoping in anything or caring about anyone, especially himself.                  "What happened to the Indians when the settlers came?" Maxwell asked Creeley.

            The old man snorted.

            "What always happens. When the Dutch came, the Lenape lived side by side with the white man for a while. Not that there were many Indians in this part of the world. The Delaware's, as some people call them, lived near here -- a good tribe that called themselves the Sawhicans. They have no grievance with the Europeans. Their war was with the Manhattans over near the Hudson River, with whom they were almost constantly at war. Some old books says there was a great friendship between the Sawhicans and the Dutch, and much less with the English who flooded in here later, a greedy and more ruthless lot, who had no sympathy for the Red man's s ways.

            "In 1648, there were about 2000 Indians in all of Northern New Jersey, 200 hung under two main chiefs, the rest scattered among numerous petty chiefs. They hunted elk, bears, deer as they wandered from one valley to the ..."

            "Hey you!" a voice boomed from the darkness at the end of the bridge. Maxwell turned and squinted and could just make out the features of a pale and pudgy face floating on the city side of the gate, a man looking more like a ghost, but sounding like a cop. The man sounded like a bulldog.

            "Can't you hear me, boy! I told you to get out of there!"

             The water -- or Maxwell's day dreaming -- had kept him from hearing the cop's initial shout, and he was struck by an irrational urge to run. He glanced over the side and wondered if he would have the same miraculous fortune as Puck if he dove. Yet even without seeing them, Maxwell knew where each jagged rock lay, and saw them as gnashing teeth waiting to gnaw at his body.

            "Boy!" the cop's voice roared again, accompanied by the rattle of his night stick against the close-knit links of the gate. "You'll be in a heap of trouble if I have to come in there and drag you out."

            Maxwell let out a slow sigh and eased back towards the gate and the waiting cop, the shape of the man growing more firmer as he neared, the details of the fat face becoming more distinct as the haze from the falls fell away, a face so thick with wrinkles the man might have been a pumpkin. Then, to Maxwell s amazement, the face came back to him from some distant memory, a face now fatter and older, but one just as mean as he remembered, one ghost calling up another in a long trail.

            "What the hell's the matter with you, boy?" the cop snarled, small black eyes pressed into the pudgy face like black marbles pressed into sticky dough. "Don t you have any sense wandering out there in the dark -- get out from there before I call the station for a squad car."

            "I'm sorry," Maxwell mumbled.

            "Don't be sorry. Just do what you re told. How the hell did you get out there anyway? Fly?"  Maxwell showed the man by pushing out on the section of fence, easing out as easily as he had eased in.

            "Damned clever trick," the cop said, scratching at the back of his head, just under the brim of his hat.

            "I didn t break the fence, I found it that way."

            "Yeah, sure," the cop said, then squinted at Maxwell, his black eyes registering something short of recognition. "Say! Do I know you?"

            "I don t think so," Maxwell said, staring down at his shaking hands, though he could just barely seen them in the dim light.

            "Sure I do," the cop said, easing closer, twisting his head one way then the other like a pigeon's, the small eyes squinted to make out the details of Maxwell s face. "You had long hair last time I saw you, and wore all that hippie clap trap."

            "That was a long time ago, if you did," Maxwell said. "I cut my hair short in 1970."

             Still, the cop squinted, struggling to reshape Maxwell's current state to fit with the one preserved in memory, painting in the long hair around Maxwell s high cheek bones and strong jaw, painting in the stereotypical images of what hippie meant to the cop back then: flag burning, bomb-planting, spitting-upon-the-graves-of-soldiers hippie.

            "Zarra!" the cop howled.

            "Hello, Officer Wilson," Maxwell said, trying to sound innocent, though he clearly did not convince the cop.

            "What the hell were you doing out there?" the cop said, glancing at the bridge as if he expected to find a bomb taped to it.

            "Looking."

            "For what?"

            "I wasn't looking for anything. I was just looking at the falls."

             "Don't give me that shit. It s too dark to see the falls now, even if you weren't facing the wrong way."

            Maxwell sighed, a lump of fear rising into his throat again, something he'd not felt in nearly twenty years, since that time when Wilson had confronted him in a similar fashion, but down in front of city hall, rather than here, the then-not-so-pudgy cop pulling his blue and white patrol car to the curb, his badge still shimmering with the spit and polish of the academy, taking on night duty in 1967, as if he could cure Paterson's nightly insanity all by himself, questioning at the 16-year-old Maxwell from the seat of the car, after the desk sergeant had laid down the rules about no cop getting out his car in the dark for any reason short of an invasion from the Soviet Union, and then, only to run like hell for an air raid shelter -- And Maxwell, stepping deeper into the shadows, the moment he saw the cop car, the ping of the pennies still ringing in the stone canyon of Central Paterson, town hall, the First National Bank, New Jersey Trust and the probation office, forming the pillars of Paterson society.

            "Come out from there," the younger Wilson had ordered, hand moving towards the invisible region below the window, as if to grab a set of cuffs or a gun, Maxwell easing into the light, from the dark circle between the metal statues.

            That cop squinted as the fatter cop had, not so young as many of the rookies Maxwell had seen, coming not from high school and college, but from a bout with the marines, skin taunt from several tours in Vietnam, and his eyes hard as if staring not at a slightly wild boy of the streets, but at an enemy. Maxwell had heard talk of this hot shot rookie cop who plagued the streets, kids offering warnings even as far as Paterson's mostly white Southside. But Maxwell had expected someone young, softer, despite the rumors, something more akin to the macho idiots from Clifton who roared through town in their fast cars, brave enough to rev their engines and beep their horns, but too scared to ever stop.

            "Come closer," the cop said, crooking his finger to draw Maxwell farther from the shadows, and neared to the little hard black marbles the cop used as eyes. "What exactly are you up to, boy?"

            "Nothing."

            "Don't hand me that shit, boy," the cop exploded. "People don't stand around in a dark downtown doing nothing. Are you stoned?"

            "No."

            "Then why do you smell like pot?"

            "Pot?" Maxwell said, taking a sniff of himself, then laughing. "That's incense."

            "Don't like to me, boy. I ought to know the smell. I spent two tours in Nam."

            "Two?"

            "Where did you get the pot, boy?" the cop said, making a move to open his own door, yet no move, as yet, to climb out.

            "They said it was incense," Maxwell mumbled. "And I didn't smoke it, they did."

             "Who?"

            "Down at Stop the World," Maxwell said with a vague wave of his hand, not sure exactly which direction himself, as if someone had turned him around a dozen times and let him loose again, and he had come upon this place by accident, after many hours of walking up and down and around the streets, each seeming as strange to him as an alien planet, yet each bearing landmarks he'd known all his life, confused by the hours of sitting inside the headshop with the owners, watching them smoke their incense, sitting with them to listen to their music: Bob Dylan and Beatles easing into more unfamiliar voices like Jimi Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge. From one of those songs, Maxwell had come up with the idea for the pennies.

            "You mean you've been hanging out down at that Hippie shop on Main Street?" The cop asked, his eyes collecting information about the still-staggering Maxwell as the mind behind them made a mental note about the facts.

            "Yes," Maxwell said, still inexplicably confused, his head swirling with the images of black light posters and strobe lights.

            The cop's frown deepened as he sniffed again.

            "Are you trying to tell me you sat in a room with a bunch of fucking potheads and thought they were smoking incense?"

            Maxwell's nod came slowly as did a sudden revelation about his own stupidity, and a memory of the laughing, glassy eyes of those people around him in the room. His cheeks grew warm and red, and he closed his eyes once, opening them to the more solid vision of the disbelieving cop.

            "Get in the car, boy," the cop said, reaching across to open the passenger side door.

            That night became a prelude to a nearly two-year odyssey of harassment, Wilson dedicating his life on the force to busting Maxwell, convinced that no one could be so stupid as Maxwell had let on, and by lying to Wilson, Maxwell hid a deeper, even central role in the local drug scene.

            "Nobody can be that stupid, boy," Wilson told Maxwell when he had finally brought him down to the station. "And I'll be damned if I'm going to let you hippies run wild down here and make a mockery of my brother s death."

            Maxwell later learned that the cop's younger brother had followed him to Vietnam and had died the year before, part of a proud military tradition that both shared with their father, grandfather and great grandfather, each who had fought and survived previous American wars. Maxwell heard about the death later, but never the details, only that Wilson had refused to sign up for a third tour in Nam after the event, returning to the states to become a cop, pulling every string he could to make sure some department somewhere would hire a man of 30.  No one, not Wilson, nor Maxwell's cousins to which Wilson eventually transported Maxwell, asked why Maxwell had picked City Hall to hide, nor knew about the winos who'd found hundreds of pennies scattered around the front of the building the following morning.

            But now, the facade of the marine had fallen away, and though the hard eyes remained the same, all the rest of the man had changed, the fifty-year-old-man puffy where he had once been lean, his big belly tumbling over his belt.

            "After all these years," the cop mumbled. "and now I get a shot at you again."

            "I'm not doing anything wrong," Maxwell said.

            "I can charge you with trespassing to start," Wilson said, as he reached to his belts for his handcuffs.

            "All right, all right, so I didn't come just to look at the falls," Maxwell said.

            "So now the truth comes out. Out with it, boy? Why are you here?"

             Maxwell glanced towards the second bridge and green streak of fungi where the water dripped out, like green tears flowing down rusted metal, both nearly invisible in the dim light.

            "I knew the girl who tried to jump," Maxwell said softly.

            Wilson's thick brows rose slowly, his eyes growing slightly less hard.  "You knew that loony?" he asked.

            "From school, a long time ago," Maxwell said, pulling out the newspaper clipping from his pocket. "I lost track of her until I saw her picture in the newspaper."

            "And you expected to find her here?" the cop asked. "Why didn't you go over to St. Joe's where we bring all her kind of loony."

            "I did. They let her go."

            "They what?"

            "They gave her some pills and sent her on her way."

            "After what she did?"

            "They said she didn't have insurance. So they threw her out."           "But that girl's out of her mind. They ought to have locked her up and thrown away the key."

            "They said they'd treat her. But as an outpatient, on a pay as you go basis."

             "They're as nuts as she is. She ll just go and take another leap."

            "Which is what I figured. That s why I cam here. That s why I come here every night. She's bound to show up one night."

             "Not on my beat, she won t," Wilson growled, glancing around, half expecting to see her pale form charging towards the gap. "No one's going to take any leaps now that I m on duty here."

            Then the cop stared at Maxwell. "And nobody's going to hang around here after dark neither," he said. "On your way before I change my mind and run you in anyway."

 

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