The Pipe
Behind Garfield Elementary in Lorain, Ohio, past the backstop and the ditch where the softballs went to die, there was a concrete drainage pipe that ran under the access road to the bus garage. It was about three feet across and sixty feet long. It was dry most of the year. In wet springs it ran ankle-deep with brown water and smelled like pennies. You could see light at the other end, a little coin of it, if you crouched at the mouth and looked.
Dougie Ferro went through it in the spring of fourth grade and came out left-handed.
I want to be careful about this, because I’ve told it a couple of times at parties and people always laugh at that line. It sounds like the punchline to something. It wasn’t. Dougie was right-handed. I sat next to him for two years. He threw right, he wrote right, he ate his pudding cups with a spoon in his right hand. He crawled into the pipe one April lunch recess on a dare from Tyrell Means, and we all stood at the mouth and watched his sneakers disappear into the dark, and then we ran across the access road to the other end and waited.
It took him a long time. That’s the first thing everyone always remembered. Sixty feet, on hands and knees, should take a minute. We waited about ten. Tyrell got scared and started yelling his name into the pipe, and his voice came back strange, flat and short, like the pipe was swallowing it. Then Dougie came crawling out, blinking, with orange rust on his knees, grinning.
That afternoon in math he picked up his pencil with his left hand. Mrs. Kallas made a joke about it. Dougie looked at his hand like he hadn’t noticed. He tried switching back and couldn’t. He said his right hand felt “like a glove.” He wrote left-handed for the rest of his life.
It got to be a thing. It was the kind of thing that only kids could have kept going, because only kids would accept it.
Nadia Pashkov went through in May and came out with her freckles in a different pattern. I know how that sounds. She had a cluster on her left cheek that her mom called her Big Dipper, and it was on her right cheek afterward, and the shape was flipped. Her mom took her to the doctor. The doctor said freckles move.
Tyrell went through, to prove it was nothing, and came out unable to remember his dog’s name. He’d had the dog five years. He stood in the field after school and cried because he couldn’t think of it. His brother told him the dog’s name and he said, “No, that’s not it,” and he didn’t believe it for weeks, and then one day he just started using it.
There were others. A third grader whose hair came out parted on the other side and wouldn’t stay any other way. A fifth grader named Anjali who came out and walked home to the wrong house and stood on its porch for an hour, a house two streets over from hers where nobody lived. Each thing was small. That was the scary part, if you’re ten. It was never a monster. It was just that you came out slightly not yourself, and only the people who loved you could tell, and sometimes not even them.
The rule we had was: you don’t go through alone, and you don’t turn back. Once you’re in, you go to the end. Nobody knew what happened if you turned back. Nobody wanted to find out.
I went through on the last day of fourth grade.
I was the last one in our group who hadn’t. I’d been dodging it for weeks. That day it was hot and everybody was wild with summer coming, and they all stood around the mouth of the pipe and chanted my name, Cal, Cal, Cal, and I got down on my hands and knees on the cracked concrete apron and went in.
I remember the first part very well. The cool of the concrete, the smell of rust and old leaves. The circle of light at the far end, tiny. The sound of my own breathing, very loud. The coin of light didn’t seem to get any bigger. I crawled and it stayed the same size. I could hear the others’ voices behind me, getting fainter, and then I couldn’t.
Somewhere in the middle, it was completely dark. I don’t mean the light at the end went away. I mean I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me, and I couldn’t see the end, and I couldn’t see the way I’d come. And there was somebody else in the pipe.
I couldn’t see him. I could hear him, right in front of me, breathing the way I was breathing. Crawling the way I was crawling, the scuff of sneakers and knees on concrete, coming the other way. Toward me. I stopped. He stopped. I could feel him there, so close that if I’d reached out I’d have touched his face.
I said, “Who’s there?”
He said, in my voice, at exactly the same time as me, “Who’s there?”
And then I did the thing you’re not supposed to do. I panicked, and I turned around.
I don’t remember getting out. My next memory is sitting on the grass by the mouth of the pipe, the end I’d gone in, with Dougie and Nadia and Tyrell standing over me. They were pale. Tyrell said, “You came out the wrong end.”
I said I’d turned back. They said no I hadn’t. They said they’d run around to the far end like always and waited, and I’d been in there twenty minutes, and then Nadia had heard something back at the near end and run to look, and there I was, crawling out headfirst. Facing out. As if I’d gone in from the other side.
“You didn’t turn around,” Dougie said. He was holding his juice box in his left hand. “You came out forwards.”
I didn’t think anything was different about me. I checked. I was still right-handed. My freckles, my hair, my dog’s name. I went home, and my mother hugged me at the door, and held on a little long, and said I smelled like a basement. That was all.
The district filled the pipe with concrete that summer, after a kid from another school got stuck in a culvert in Elyria and it was on the news. When we came back for fifth grade it was just a plug of gray at each end. We forgot about it, the way you do.
I’m thirty-eight now. I live in Columbus. My mother died in March, and in April I went through her house and found a shoebox of photographs.
I’m in a lot of them. My birthday parties, Christmases, Little League. In every photograph before the summer of 1997, I have a scar through my left eyebrow from when I fell off the porch at four. I’ve always had that scar. I have it now. Except I don’t, because I looked in the bathroom mirror at her house and it’s through my right eyebrow. It’s always been through my right eyebrow. In every picture after that summer, it’s on the right.
I sat on the floor of her bathroom for a long time. Then I went back through the box, and I found the photo on top, the one she must have looked at last. It’s me on the last day of fourth grade, in the front yard, the afternoon after. She took it. I’m squinting in the sun. On the back, in her handwriting, it says Cal, June 6, 1997, and under that, smaller, in pencil, in a hand that shook a bit, she’d written: Is this him?
I drove to Lorain last week. Garfield Elementary closed in 2012; it’s a fenced lot now, chained, waiting on a developer. The access road’s still there. The ditch is still there, grown over with cattails. And the pipe is still there, under the road, plugged at both ends with concrete. I found the near end in the weeds. I crouched down and put my hand on the plug. It was cool.
I put my ear to it.
I don’t know what I expected. I sat there in the cattails for a long time, feeling foolish. And then, very faintly, through the concrete, I heard breathing. A child’s breathing, fast, the way you breathe when you’ve been crawling for a long time in the dark.
And a voice, hoarse, in a whisper, saying my name. Saying it the way the others had, chanting it, Cal, Cal, Cal, but tired, so tired, the way you’d say it if you’d been calling it for thirty years and nobody had come.
“Who’s there?” I said.
And from the other side of the concrete, at the same moment as me, a little boy’s voice said, “Who’s there?”
I’ve been back three times since. I bring a flashlight and sit by the plug and talk to him. He doesn’t say anything new. He just says what I say, at the same time, like an echo that starts before you do. I’ve told him I’m sorry. I’ve told him about my job and my wife and my mother. He tells me the same.
I’ve started looking up concrete cutting services. I keep thinking that if I can get the plug open, he can finish crawling through, and come out, and be where he was supposed to be all along.
I keep not calling them. Because I don’t know which end he’d come out of. And I’ve started to wonder, when he does, which of us is going to be the one that’s left in the dark.