Timothy Raymond grew up in southeastern Wyoming. Currently he studies contemporary American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he also teaches writing. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, The Owen Wister Review, The Battered Suitcase, Word Riot, and LeafGarden.

The Fountain (September 21, 2009. Issue 9.)

Dillon caught me in another talk about jumping. He swore that he had seen a cat fall five stories and survive. More than that, the thing had landed on its feet and then strolled off to a nearby tree to preen. I listened to him talk. I can hand it to Dillon—he talks like a true candidate.

I said, “But that’s not exactly jumping. Falling is not jumping.”

“You’re saying the cat didn’t jump,” he said. “You’re saying that the cat slipped or was pushed.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Nick,” he said, serious. “Let me tell you something. That cat jumped. Jumped like it could fly, only to decide last minute that it was too pretty to fly.”

I have learned not to argue with someone who is passionate. From what I know of Dillon, as far as he is concerned falling and jumping are more or less the same. Any fall that we take is due to our own stupid mess. We, he would say, may not have meant to fall, but ultimately made ourselves fall anyway.

Dillon said, “That cat was a long-hair. You should have seen the way its hair flew up behind its body as it came down. Like a meteorite.”

Every few weeks Dillon and I talk about jumping. I think I was the one who started the first conversation, but that was at least a year ago. Dillon picked up on it like a bird alighting on a branch. Then he just couldn’t let it go.

I remember how it started.

I had said, “Some young kid fell off of the Edna Harris Memorial Bridge while he was walking home. What kind of kid has to cross a giant bridge to walk home? I’m asking you.”

I sipped some coffee.

I said, “He just fell.”

Dillon had said, “I’m willing to bet you’re mistaken.”

***

Ours is a house of deep feelings. Ours are heartstrings rooted far under flesh, deep and strong like turnips. We know this.

The house Dillon and I live in is roomy, but not very large. It’s roomy because we don’t have a lot of furniture. We say that it is minimalist, that that is our motivation for the roomy house, but sometimes I’m sure that we don’t know what minimalist means exactly, like the aesthetic behind it.

If people come over and have nowhere to sit, we don’t apologize. Instead we just act like standing is where we want to be.

Not a lot of people come over.

***

I met Dillon in a library. He was stacking newspapers in the periodicals section. I thought that he was a clerk there, so I asked him to help me find the newspaper from the day I was born. Without really knowing why, I lied to him twice in that first interaction. First, about my age. Second, about wanting the newspaper in the first place.

Dillon got me the newspaper with the date I asked. I just held it. Then I asked Dillon about how he liked working for the city.

He said to me, “I don’t work here.”

“Why were you stacking the newspapers?”

He looked straight into my face.

“They fell down,” he said.

The next month we found the roomy house and moved ourselves in.

***

The clock. It needed fixing.

Dillon finished his story about the cat jumping from the heavens and took the clock off the wall. As he maneuvered his big fingers through cogs and wheels, I looked around the walls. They looked so naked. Without the clock, there was only one decorative piece. This being a spoon hung between two small nails, just above the kitchen sink.

On the spoon’s handle was a portrait of Buffalo Bill. Neither of us has ever been to Wyoming: Dillon found the spoon in a parking lot somewhere and brought it home.

He had said, “Let’s start a collection of spoons.”

“My mom’s friend does that too,” I said.

“Oh, it’s a very popular hobby,” said Dillon. “But I don’t just want these tourist spoons, these spoons with paintings and landscapes. Don’t get me wrong, I want those. But I also want utility. Let’s put some spoons up that have been used.”

Like I said, we have two things on the walls. One clock, one spoon.

It’s not that we don’t have taste. I think that Dillon and I absolutely do have taste. What we don’t have is money. That, we don’t have. Dillon has some nerve damage from an operation he had on his lower back. The surgeon nicked something or other and fixed the problem but caused another.

The upside is that Dillon has some settlement money to live off of for the time-being. The downside is that he can’t really do much work.

Meanwhile, I work at a bowling alley bar part-time, serving drinks to the same bowlers who play the leagues every week.

We get by.

***

Dillon looked up from the clock.

“We need a new clock,” he said.

“You can’t fix it?”

“I don’t have a clue how to fix a clock,” he said. “I was just checking it out.”

“Male intuition,” I offered.

“Don’t say it like that,” he said. “That’s stupid.”

He could really find a way to say things.

***

At the hardware store Dillon and I found a section with clocks.

“What happened to the old one?” I said. “How exactly does a clock stop working?”

“Something jars the clock into spinning its wheels too fast or too slow.”

“So it isn’t just low on batteries or something?”

Dillon said, “No.”

Dillon said, “Anyway, I think we’re all a little low on batteries.”

We picked out a real nice clock with a wooden frame and a nice polish. It was a big clock that reminded me of one that my parents used to keep in the basement. Dillon just liked it because there were birds on the white surface of the clock’s face. One bird for each number of the day.

At the counter we realized we hadn’t bothered to check the price. The cashier told us the number, then turned his digital screen a bit so that we would also have a clear view of the same number. We can see deeper than you would ever think, I wanted to say.

Instead I said, “Can you put the clock back on display for us?”

Just before leaving empty-handed.

***

What you do. There is a giant clock-tower downtown in the square. Benches surround a fountain in the same square. If I were a painter, I would paint a place like that. Dillon says that if he were a painter, he would paint the moon.

Actually Dillon can draw. After the hardware store we went to a convenience store and bought a pencil and some large paper with the money that we did have. At the square Dillon drew the clock in great detail. I watched teenagers skateboard and smoke on the other benches.

The fountain there is of a large man on a boat. He is the only one on the boat, arms out and head high. There isn’t even a sail. The guy just stands there, day and night, wishing the boat forward but remaining locked in stone. That’s what you do—stand tall and feel like you know you can. Realize you have something of use. Aim for the horizon and hope. And in the end, be a statue for someone else.

***

We put the drawing of the clock-tower on the wall above the dining room table. Both of us signed it. We like to think that, in theory, we had it made together.

Really everything freezes in time anyway. The clock-hands in our drawing say noon, the time when things are halfway there and halfway over.

There must have been a moment when that cat fell, if it ever did, when it could believe that it wasn’t moving at all. It could believe that it never jumped and it never fell. Instead it had simply found a space in this life where time doesn’t matter. A calm would come over the cat then, giving it what it needs to land on all fours.

I hope that it savored that moment.

I try to savor these moments too. Yet I feel that Dillon and I have been stuck in the same moment for far too long.

Dillon blames himself for the nerve damage. He says that if he didn’t chicken out he would be fine now. What happened was, he was trying to cross the street. He was running late to meet someone.

At the curb he started to cross, then froze when he realized that cars were coming his way. If he didn’t freeze, if he had just kept running across the street, that car wouldn’t have just barely clipped him.

It is, all things considered, a jump he at once could and could not take.

He supposes he would have fallen either way.

***

Dillon and I watched the rain as it came down. Dillon and I, like the fountain. We stood at the window, our new clock behind us, and looked at the water.

“It hasn’t rained like this in a long time,” I said.

It was true. It was raining like it hadn’t done for months. Pools formed in the street. I imagined all the green growth that would come from this downpour.

And Dillon, the man who could talk, just mesmerized.

He said, “Rain. Rain rain rain rain rain.”