Falling Read Free Page B

coursed over the Falls. It furled in vivid green, a constant wave that seemed to stay in one place, thick as a muscle. Just at the edge, the water became a froth of white.
    The lip of the waterfalls made a long, rounded curve. In the middle distance was Goat Island, separating the American Falls from the Canadian. The American Falls were less impressive, with piles of rocks below. Lisa had told him that they’d once stopped the Falls for several monthson that side, as if they’d been turning off a tap. They’d wanted to get rid of the talus at the base, though in the end they’d decided to leave it. But in halting the flow they’d found things they didn’t expect. Bones. Twelve quarts of coins. More bones. All those people, Lisa had said, had thrown themselves in. They’d killed themselves.
    How did she know that?
    She’d done a project on it. The one she’d done for Mr. Craig.
    A whole project on how many people killed themselves at the Falls?
    He was stupid, she told him. He was a
stupid
idiot.
    He remembered the tone of her voice.
Stupid
.
    She’d always wanted to see Niagara Falls. When she was little, she’d had a paperweight that their Uncle Roger had sent to her one Christmas: if she shook it, little flakes of white fell over the miniature Falls. There was some looping white script on the top of the paperweight:
Niagara Falls, Canada
. Because she liked it so much, more things had arrived from their uncle, in mailing tubes, until she had posters of the Horseshoe Falls in Icy Glory, An Aerial View of the Falls, the
Maid of the Mist
Near the American Falls, the Spanish Aero Car Offers Thrills Over the Whirlpool, the Spectacular Blossom Festival, and Roger Hockridge Challenges the Falls Again. The poster of Roger Hockridge, Canada’s Number One Daredevil With His Bomb Barrel, had been put up on the ceiling of her room. She liked looking at the round barrel, decorated with red maple leaves, bobbing at the edge of the Falls – a barrel that held Uncle Roger, the uncle they’d never met. It was the very poster Damian had ripped down and put up in his own room, because he didn’t get the same one.He’d got one of his uncle being carried on the shoulders of some grinning men, but not one of the Bomb Barrel.
    Lisa also had pens with
Niagara Falls
scrolled along the sides in silver lettering. There was one made with clear plastic: when it was turned upside down, a spurt of blue-green liquid descended. When the pen was turned the other way, the blue-green waterfall drew back, up, and over the edge. Lisa took it to school when she was in grade seven and promptly lost it. Another pen was sent, but it didn’t work as well as the first, because the liquid representing the Falls merely dripped when the pen was turned.
    She knew the history of the Falls. She knew who had lived and who had died among the daredevils; she could rhyme off the names and death dates of the ones who hadn’t made it. She’d read about how the Falls had been before the Europeans came, and after they’d arrived, when Father Hennepin knelt at the sight, his portable altar strapped to his back. She told Damian how the Iroquois had seen wolverines reaching out to snag carcasses of dead elk from the river, how rattlesnakes had sunned themselves on Table Rock when it hadn’t been named Table Rock, back when it had been a huge, unbroken shelf, and how eagles had wheeled over the water in great flocks, lost in mist, almost as if she saw it exactly as it had been hundreds of years before. A sacred place – wild, fearsome, untouched.
    Damian turned away from the railing, steadying himself by putting a hand on the top of a Hi-Spy Viewmaster II. It cost fifty cents for a minute, so he dug a couple of quarters out of his pocket and dropped them into the slot. He looked through the viewer into darkness. Nothing. He stayed where he was, listening intently, aware of the roaring that filled his ears. The sound of the nearer current was layered over therush