Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 23

The gate to the walkway is chained; your father said that when he was a kid there wasn’t a gate at all, that anybody could go out on the dam, and even when they locked it up it was easy-Japaneesy to climb: but now there’s an added roll of barbed wire at the top. Shit, Tim says, hooking his fingers into the fence and shaking it.

Jason, plucking the fence links like guitar strings, grins at you. Guess you can’t join the club, boss, he says.

You never did it, you say to him.

The hell I didn’t, he says. I went with my cousin Matt before we moved.

You don’t like Jason. Mostly the fire kids do what you tell them because of your father’s position at the station, just like the fire wives listen to your mother – but Jason hasn’t grown up with all of you and he has no reason to listen, and for the first time you see what that’s like and you don’t want it around. But in the meantime it can’t be allowed for them to have a thing that you don’t, no matter what it is so you go to the fence’s end, where the chain-link frame extends out eight feet in mid-air on either side of the dam, the edge of it just touching the placid river on the high side while on the lower it’s a twenty foot drop into the wash below where beer cans and dead birds and coil of rope covered in weeds tumbles. You reach around the end of the fence.

Don’t, Tim says, and you hesitate – and Jason starts making noises like a chicken.

Go to hell, you say to him, causing him to blanch, and you swing your foot around the end of the barrier onto the cement lip on the other side. It’s not that far to the walkway, not really: you say this to yourself as you shuffle along, the water below you at the base of the dam frothing and loud. Tim is calling for you to come back but you’re not listening to him, looking at your fingers that are grabbing the links so hard that they look like chalk pieces as you progress one hand at a time, finally reaching the catwalk and gratefully dragging yourself over the railing and standing, raising your arms in victory.