False Memory

onto one more incline.
    When at last Dusty reached the final peak, Skeet was neither surprised to see him nor alarmed. “Morning, Dusty”
    “Hi, kid.”
    Dusty was twenty-nine, only five years older than the younger man; nonetheless, he thought of Skeet as a child.
    “Mind if I sit down?” Dusty asked.
    With a smile, Skeet said, “I’d sure like your company.”
    Dusty sat beside him, butt on the ridge line, knees drawn up, shoes planted solidly on the barrel tiles.
    Far to the east, past wind-shivered treetops and more roofs, beyond freeways and housing tracts, beyond the San Joaquin Hills, the Santa Ana Mountains rose brown and sere, here at the beginning of the rainy season; around their aged crowns, the clouds wound like dirty turbans.
    On the driveway below, Motherwell had spread a big tarp, but he himself was nowhere to be seen.
    The security guard scowled up at them, and then he consulted his wristwatch. He had given Dusty ten minutes to get Skeet down.
    “Sorry about this,” Skeet said. His voice was eerily calm.
    “Sorry about what?”
    “Jumping on the job.”
    “You could have made it a leisure-time activity,” Dusty agreed.
    “Yeah, but I wanted to jump where I’m happy, not where I’m unhappy, and I’m happiest on the job.”
    “Well, I do try to create a pleasant work environment.”
    Skeet laughed softly and wiped his runny nose on the back of his sleeve.
    Though always slender, Skeet had once been wiry and tough; now he was far too thin, even gaunt, yet he was soft-looking, as if the weight he had lost consisted entirely of bone mass and muscle. He was pale, too, although he often worked in the sun; a ghostly pallor shone through his vague tan, which was more gray than brown. In cheap black-canvas-and-white-rubber sneakers, red socks, white pants, and a tattered pale-yellow sweater with frayed cuffs that draped loosely around his bony wrists, he looked like a boy, a lost child who had been wandering in the desert without food or water.
    Wiping his nose on the sleeve of his sweater again, Skeet said, “Must be getting a cold.”
    “Or maybe the runny nose is just a side effect.”
    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 naturehead 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’