Niagara

“I don’t see what it could possibly matter that I came with you,” she complained half-heartedly.

“It doesn’t.”

“Then why did you invite me, Rip?”

“Well, I know you’ve never been. And I didn’t want to go alone.”

“Why the whiskey barrel?”

“To go over the falls.”

Delores smiled. “You’re not serious.”

Rip gripped the wheel and grinned, looking ahead at the vacant highway. A road sign said 50 miles to Buffalo.

“Serious as a heart attack.”

“Well, that, you will have to do alone.”

“The only way to do it.”

“You’re not serious though.”

“I am.”

“That’s suicide, Rip.”

“No. Not really. People have survived going over without being in anything.”

“Crazy people. Crazy people always survive.”

“You said I was crazy, a time or two.”

“I said you acted crazy.”

“What’s the difference?”

She didn’t reply. She checked her phone and he peeked over at it. Her thumbs arched, prepared to fire back some response. He didn’t want to, but he looked over again. He knew what she was checking for. A text from the other guy. Rip didn’t know his name. He hadn’t known she had moved on and he had waited for her for four months after they broke up to come back to him. Sure she would. Hopeful, anyway. Love doesn’t quit and it doesn’t fail, he thought. Then she told him, after he had asked her the question, “Is there someone else.” Yes, she had said. I’m talking to someone else, Rip. It was then that he went over in the barrel. The perilous drop. Not tomorrow.

“You trying to make him jealous?”

“What?” she replied a little out of sorts. There was a hint of incredulous laughter. She grinned looking at him. The way someone grins when they’re in the awkward position of neither being in the wrong or the right. Feeling guilty for it. For something. For leaving him because he clearly still loved her. But she had every right to move on. She was single. Did it the right way, he supposed. But it still didn’t make it right. Not when the man who loved her most was waiting for her to love him again. Hoping. And she knew he loved her more than anyone ever would, but somehow it didn’t matter much anymore. She never would trust him again, she told herself enough times to nearly believe it. Everyone makes mistakes. Not those kinds of mistakes, she said. And magically, she was in love with someone else.

“You came because you want to make Ray Mysterio jealous,” Rip said.

“Ray Mysterio?”

“That’s what I call him. Since I never knew his name.”

“Do you want to know his name?” she asked. She was staring at Rip’s profile searching for the hint of an expression. Maybe another vulnerability. Something else to poke. Maybe the question was cruel, but she asked it anyway.

“No,” Rip said at peace, still looking ahead. “I don’t care to know his name.”

She sighed. He was right, but she wouldn’t admit it. That is why she came. Ray Mysterio had dumped her after a few months of dating. It was the kids, or something about compatibility, he said. It wasn’t good for her anyway. But being that he dumped her before she dumped him, she had a strong desire to get him back. That is the way things go. And being that she dumped Rip rather than he dumped her, she didn’t want Rip back. Not even if he survived the barrel drop tomorrow. Even though he was once her soulmate and the love of her life, or so she had professed. Even though he moved the parts inside her she once thought not even to exist. She had aborted those parts and their uterus was scarred and barren.

Rip thought to speak, but he didn’t say anything. Not wanting to push it. He was surprised she came. They hadn’t spoken in a few months. He had disappeared for a while, but came back. When she heard he was back, she didn’t call him. Pissed that he had left. While he was gone, she and Ray Mysterio ran the course of a relationship and split. He sped in her like a rental car. Left the carpet dirty. It was as though Rip went somewhere, out in the woods, to make that all happen. And he came back when it was done. It was something that Rip would do, she thought.

She put her phone aside, under her right leg away from him by the passenger door. Not that he would grab and check it. It was password protected, anyway. But there was nothing to hide anymore. And she could feel it vibrate, if she didn’t hear it. But he knew it was there, like a benign tumor that would eventually turn cancerous.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “When you were gone.”

“Nowhere.”

 “Were there other women in Nowhere?”

He smiled, shook his head no. She joined his eyes on the road and they both listened to the rubber of the tires vibrate along the worn-out interstate. Something like a lullaby without the radio on.

In Buffalo, they ate at a wax museum restaurant. Every famous person they could think of seemed to be there somewhere. Looking perpetually without blinking. Some looked better than others. Each table had one famous person seated at it, or standing by it. Theirs was Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe was nearby. Napoleon. Mr. T. So was Abe Lincoln and some famous movie pirate. It was fun and they had several drinks, but after the second she was blurry to him, though she sat right across the table. He rubbed his eyes, but still she was blurry. Like a faded picture or someone drowned in a sunlight of memory.

Their hands rested on the table and ventured towards each other’s, as though on their own. That old familiar encroachment which predicated their past affectionate exchanges. It titillated the spirits and stirred up a libido in him he had thought to be defunct and unrevivable. But he withdrew and put his hands down to his sides and left hers alone which she looked at through blurry eyes puzzled by his sudden retreat. Maybe he didn’t want her so badly after all, she thought. And their romance was indeed over. She shot him an inquisitive glance, but said nothing.

The hotel was nice, the lobby full of flowers and tourists coming and going. There seemed to be a lot of Japanese tourists at Niagara Falls. Just a matter of observation. He left the barrel in his Mini Cooper and carried his bag in. He sat it on the bed and she showered while he read a book he always meant to finish. It’s now or never, Elvis sang in his ear. Elvis from the wax museum in a gold-sequined suit who came along for the ride. He wasn’t a very good likeness, Rip thought. He put the book down, realizing he wasn’t meant to finish it and he looked out the window which had a view of part of the falls. He spared no expense with the room.

She came out with only a bath towel wrapped around her. His jaw dropped and his eyes were two ostrich eggs about to pop from the nest of his face. There was nothing to say. How he desired her in every way was evident and had always been evident. He liked her best as she was then, out of the shower with no makeup and her thin legs and bare feet exposed. Knowing there was only a towel between him and all the warmth of her body. The depth of her, warm and wet, that he could practically feel and taste standing there. He stood by the window frozen and didn’t say a word for he had said everything with his eyes. She smiled at him. Maybe a little sympathetically. More so practically than anything. She dropped the towel and dried off, leaving nothing to the imagination. He was happy she never got the implants.

“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful,” he said finally. “I just wanted you to know that.”

She smiled, gratefully, but didn’t reply. She dried off and reluctantly got dressed in the tired way someone does after lovemaking. Her plan of seduction had worked well, but hadn’t amounted to the act of consummating their mutual thoughts. Her cellphone was on the dresser and at last it buzzed which immediately destroyed anything they had rebuilt. Ray Mysterio wanted to talk.

She got dressed, apologized, and quickly left the room. He stood in the window and a few minutes later watched her walk across a patio that was filled with large concrete planters and Japanese. They had nice cameras, he thought of the Japanese. He wondered what was so offensive about being called “Japs,” but then he let it go. Maybe they weren’t offended, he thought. It hardly matters. Elvis sung, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” as he stood there looking at Delores.

The planters were full of annual flowers of some sort. Bursts of purples, reds, and whites. He was unsure of the genus. He watched her talking on her phone, making dramatic hand gestures and pacing back and forth like he probably had in the end speaking to her. And though she was just outside the window six floors below, she felt a million miles away. Back in Ohio. He knew she would never leave. Nor would she ever come back. And he stood there and watched her until she completely faded away.

She didn’t return to the hotel room. Elvis didn’t stay, either. He put on his glasses and left, though the smell of wax hung in the air a while after he was gone. He had a few drinks and drove the car up the river and pulled into a parking lot where fishermen parked near a concrete landing of sorts. Several trucks were abandoned and the glow of lanterns speckled the banks of the Niagara where men fished and hoped not to fall in, but hoped to catch fish that probably would end up going over the falls if they didn’t catch them.

It wasn’t a good place, Rip decided. So he drove back closer to the falls. He knew all he had to do was get the barrel into the water so it didn’t matter who was there or what they thought. They couldn’t stop him once it was on the roll. He drove back and parked at a well-lit, large, and mostly vacant parking lot in a handicapped spot. Only a few people strolled around. Couples that made him feel queasy. Newlyweds like zombies. They say this is a popular place to get married. They sell millions of postcards. He wondered where his ex had gone. Back home to Ray. On a charter bus. Good for her.

It was after midnight and most people were in the casino. Their ears filled with the hypnotic melodies of spinning game wheels and their eyes full of the falsity of neon lights. He opened the hatch of the Mini Cooper and the smell of whiskey swallowed him whole. He pulled the barrel out from its snug fit and gently coaxed it off his bumper where he guided it to his ready foot. He pushed it from his foot to the pavement and then quickly rolled it down the walkway to the falls. The metal hoops scraped across the smooth concrete like wagon wheels and the wood staves of the body made a hollow and cheering sound like the murmur of a football crowd in a restless stadium. A few people stood and watched, but didn’t say anything. They smiled and looked at each other. Is he going to do it? Someone asked. Yes. I think he is. Oh, Jesus, he really is!

Rip rolled it faster still, hoping not to see a cop. A Niagara Falls cop who had probably arrested many people for the same type of thing. To save their life. Or to prevent another daredevil for daring too much in his jurisdiction. The cost of searching for and finding an American body that had gone over was incurred by the city of Niagara Falls. You can’t just let them wash up someday for a schoolkid to see off the side of the Maid of the Mist. People care when you’re a rotting body that might suddenly appear before their eyes, but they don’t really care when you’re living dead with a broken heart. They care enough to dispose of what they never helped living. That is how society is. That much, Rip knew.

But he didn’t see a cop. Nor did he see his ex and he thought of how blurry she had become and how she had no bags and how he never touched her. And in thinking of it, he never could smell her, either. And so, if he could have imagined her then, he could imagine her now. She appeared one more time with her cellphone in hand. She looked as beautiful as ever and there was a desperate and lovesick look in her dark eyes that he made himself believe was only for him.

“Rip, don’t do it. I love you! Let’s go home.”

“What about Ray?” he asked her, still rolling the barrel towards the falls. She didn’t walk with him, but she disappeared and reappeared like a lightning bug along the walk. She took her phone and threw it as far as she could throw it out into the falls.

“There! That is what I think of him!”

“This isn’t our ending, Delores. I’m imagining it. I’m imagining you. You’re not really here, you know. You were never a story. You were you all along. I couldn’t write a happy ending for us.”

“Rip?” she plead weakly before fading away. And just like that, like a lightning bug swept up by an invisible bat, she was gone and she didn’t reappear anywhere else. The light he thought would never go out, was gone. The hope he thought would always be, was lost. All that remained were a few Japanese with fancy cameras taking his picture and the warm unrelenting summer wind that didn’t care one way or another about either of them. The sound of those shutter lenses was like a mocking laughter of some animal born in the tragedy of their loss. But he knew she had never been at all and she was probably in Ohio telling Ray how she had never felt this way before for anyone.

Some people have delusions of grandeur, Rip just had delusions. Delusions of what never would be, what never even was, hopeful in things of dead and buried hearts and love that eluded him. He had burrowed himself in their relationship, oblivious to the death or the lack of life, and he lived in a sort of oblivious parasitic coma. He loved her, but she didn’t love him. She never really did. Get over it, he told himself. It ain’t that easy, he said back.

He got to the edge with the barrel and realized he hadn’t taken the head off, nor had he brought a tool to help. He needed a crowbar, or a screwdriver. A thick flathead. But as dumb luck would have it, he suddenly lost his grip on the barrel and it rolled down the walkway and crashed against a concrete barrier where the head popped off and lied there like a wrecked flying saucer. It wasn’t broken at all, or busted up. The lid had just fortuitously popped off. But now the barrel was down a ways and in order to get it in the falls he would have to push it all the way back up the walkway incline and then lift it up over a black iron rail and onto the banks of the Niagara. From there he should be able to give himself a little push from inside the barrel and plop right over. He didn’t know how he would reattach the head. He just hoped it would pop back into place.

And he did. But not without garnering the attention of an attractive young woman standing by herself near the rail. He looked over and saw her and looked away, but then he looked back again, making sure she was not just another delusion. Then being sure she was not, he smiled at her, though it didn’t feel like a time or place to smile, so he looked away and the smile fell from his face.

“You some kind of daredevil?” she asked.

“No,” Rip said over the hum of the rolling barrel.

“Need help?”

“I’m fine.”

She helped him anyway, to get up the incline. He moved over so she could help him roll it. The McCartney song came to mind and played in his head. I want to tell you how I feel. My love is like a wheel. Let me roll it! Let me roll it to you! He hadn’t eaten anything all day and felt lightheaded and dizzy. She was very clear and even more gorgeous.

“I’m Ruby,” she said. She rolled with one hand and offered her other hand to quickly shake his.

“Rip,” he grinned, obliging.

“Like Rip Van Winkle?”

“No. I don’t really sleep.”

“Oh. Is this some fancy way of committing suicide?”

“No. It’s just going over the falls in a barrel. If I live, so be it. If I don’t, so be it.”

“Wow. So, kind of like Russian roulette.”

“No. Not really.”

“You want to know why I am here, Rip?”

“Sure.” They were getting close to the summit, but he had time for one last story.

“My boyfriend left me for a cocktail waitress. I thought he brought me up here to ask me to marry him. But he left me for a damn cocktail waitress named Kayla. So, I got to find a way home, but I threw my phone into the falls and well, I’m stuck. I figured I’d stand up here all night and call someone from somewhere in the morning. I don’t have a room. My purse is in his car, so I have no money. I got to clear my head. But the thing is, I don’t think I was even going to say yes.”

She laughed at her own words. Rip stopped for a moment and looked at her. There was something compelling in her eyes. “Where did he meet the waitress?”

“At the casino. He was drunk.”

Rip shook his head.

“So, what about you? Any significant other?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?”

“No,” Rip said. “I think I just stopped believing in love.”

She looked gorgeous standing there in the warm wind. Lean, with bright eyes and a beautiful but reluctant smile. She was afraid to smile, but she wanted to very much just as Rip was afraid to live, but wanted to very much. A few people snapped more pictures, having no idea of what they were snapping, and Rip and Ruby finished the roll.

“Well,” Rip said with an air of finality, looking down into the dark water that thrashed over the bald heads of rocks leaving only white foam hair, “This is me.”

Ruby looked at him and down at the ominous, choppy water. “Is it?”

“Yes. It is.”

“What in your life has happened that this is you,” she thought to herself. But she grinned the thought away without further expressing it. He sat the barrel upright and slowly climbed inside. He realized he hadn’t ever been inside and the odor was intoxicating. His head popped out of the top and he held the lid in his hands, figuring out how he would fasten it. He handed it to Ruby and asked her to put it on top. Tourists appeared around them and watched, trying to keep their distance, yet still see everything as it unfolded. The death of someone else was always a big deal.

He popped out the bung stave and looked out through the bunghole. “Say goodbye to my mother for me,” he asked.

“Who’s your mother?”

“Ms. Helen Jenkins of Peabody, Ohio.”

“Okay.”

Rip then secured the hatch. “Now push me in,” he hollered through the bunghole.

“Oh, I can’t do that,” she called back.

“What? You can! I can’t do it myself it turns out. It’s too tight in here to topple myself over. I have no momentum.”

“I can’t. I’d never forgive myself if you didn’t make it,” she said carefully through the bunghole.

“Okay well, I’ll get out and sit it on its side and you can just kind of let go of me.”

She didn’t reply. He climbed out and the tourists seemed to multiply. They stood up on the ridge and looked down from a safe distance. It was well past midnight, but he figured it was probably noon where they were from. He sat the barrel on its side and again climbed inside. Ruby held on to the barrel as he fastened the head.

“Ready!” he called up through the bunghole.

She looked down inside then spoke into it like it was a microphone. “I can’t let go,” she said softly.

“Ruby! Come on! Just let go!”

“I can’t!”

He caught a glimpse of her through the bunghole. Vision poured through where whiskey once flowed. “Let me go,” he plead softly. She could see his one pleading eye.

A few minutes later, the barrel rolled down the river bank and plopped into the river, bobbing immediately up and down as it crashed into the violent water. The tourists looked on in excitement as it approached its inevitable end. They wouldn’t see what happened to it after it fell, but they would watch it all the way there. Ruby scooted back behind the black rail and watched it go. Her eyes didn’t leave it. What a night, she thought. What a turn of events. Such is life, as her mother always said. It punches you in the face when you least expect it.

She looked beside her and Rip leaned against the black rail. She smiled at him. “I'm glad you're here and not there.”

“Me too,” he said softly.

The barrel washed over the falls never to be seen again. Maybe someone found busted bits of the wood, or the metal belts torn loose of the frame, or who knows, perhaps the barrel whole, maybe stuffed with a very poor likeness of a wax Elvis Presley. Rip wouldn’t know. Neither would Ruby. He took her hand in his and it was warm and real. And they walked back to his hotel room and went to bed. And in the darkness of the room, the warmth of her arms, and the anonymity of night, she pressed tight into him and said with a slight gasp as she took what he had to give, “This is me.”

And all he could do was to finally put into someone else what he had left of love to place. And part of him died, but another part was reborn, and the thud of a door closing hard in the hallway was the only sound, but for their breath.