Quarry

by bessie rubinstein

We christened the bloated, white fish Moby Dick. Sometimes he’d drift into our line of sight to float menacingly before moving on; sometimes he’d conceal himself among the discarded bike tires in the shallows of the quarry, as if giving us permission to ignore him. Though he had to be swimming--there was no current to send him on his way--it seemed almost unnatural that the hulking animal would have the capacity for movement. A current in still water made more sense. Either way, I wouldn’t leap off the rocks until he was out of sight. Out of sight meant I could forget about him at least until the next time I jumped, when I would again imagine his whiskers reaching for my feet through raw, green water.

Boasting graffitied rock faces, cautionary tales of drownings, and morbid animals like Moby Dick, the quarry had the air of borderline danger us small-town high schoolers hunted. Our fascination with the place only intensified when we, one day upon returning from a visit, heard a report of a body found at a quarry in the middle of Pennsylvania and assumed that we’d been swimming with a corpse. In retrospect, I was too disappointed to find out that we hadn’t--that the man had been found at another quarry a few townships away instead. The idea that I could have unknowingly backstroked above his body, some fifty feet below, thrilled me.

But Ronald Bettig wasn’t found in the water, anyway. A stone ledge kept him from reaching it, and so instead of drowning, his broken body lay there for 5 days after he was pushed to his death. Ronald had taken in a single mother, Danielle, and her son, tolerating her lingering ex-boyfriend. The pair had suggested that Ronald accompany them to the quarry to look at budding marijuana plants. They pitched it as a business venture; the three of them could sell the weed together, make a profit. Ronald believed them. Or maybe not; he, frustrated with her apathy about her own drug habits and distant parenting, had hounded Danielle to the point of contention before. Maybe Ronald imagined that a woman as removed as he’d accused her of being could be complicit in the murder of a 56 year old professor. In court, Danielle claimed that she never witnessed what her ex-lover did. She didn’t see him placing his hands on Ronald’s back, right between the shoulder blades where Ron carried the tension of an ex-wife’s death and a deteriorating academic career. She didn’t see Ron fall, didn’t see the rocky outcrop intercept his body and hold it there like a serving platter for the buzzards that would show up a few days later. The coroner’s report mentions, in the detached, sterilized manner of coroners’ reports, that Ron likely didn’t die for “one or two days” after the push. I wonder if he lived to see the buzzards circling. I wonder if they scared him as much as Moby Dick scared me, or if at that point, he welcomed them as a harbinger of relief soon to come.

I know all of this now, four years later, but at the time I didn’t bother to look into the details of Ronald Bettig’s death. I was 16, had smoked weed only twice, and mostly cared that I couldn’t add the story of swimming above a corpse to the arsenal of anecdotes I could pull from to make myself seem interesting.

Bessie Rubinstein | @downbessie