Johnny Hangtime by Dan Gutman

years ago, huge torrents of water formed the Niagara River connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Little by little, the pounding water created this seven-mile canyon called the Niagara Gorge. It’s still happening, actually. The falls has moved about seven miles upstream in 12,000 years. It was the nearby Indian tribes that named it “Niagara,” which means “thundering water.”
    I was looking across the top of the Horseshoe Falls, where my canoe would be destroyed the next day. It’s called the Horseshoe Falls because it’s shaped like a big horseshoe. There are two falls here. The river forms a border between the United States and Canada, with Goat Island in the middle. The Horseshoe Falls is in Canada, and the American Falls is in the United States.
    The Horseshoe is 176 feet high. That’s eight feet lower than theAmerican Falls, but it’s much more spectacular. Including the plunge basin beneath it, the total drop is 356 feet. It’s a long way down. As I stood there on the observation deck, more than 200,000 cubic feet of water rushed by every second.
    A freshwater gull flew by, and I imagined that she threw me a smirk. She wasn’t worried about going over the falls. Following her flight path, I saw a figure at the other end of the observation deck. It appeared to be a man holding a cane in his right hand. I pretended not to notice the guy as I looked out at the falls, but I heard his footsteps scraping toward me. Suddenly I realized he was alongside me at the rail.
    â€œJohn?”
    Everybody who knows me calls me Johnny. There was only one person who ever called me John. I recognized the voice. I had gotten used to the idea that I would never hear it again. I turned to look at his face.
    It was my dad.
    Somehow, it didn’t surprise me. We stared at each other for a moment.
    â€œHow’s Squirt?” he asked.
    â€œHe’s dead,” I replied. “I thought you were dead too.”
    â€œSo did I.”
    He wrapped his arms around me. He seemed so different from the man I remembered. So thin and frail. Dad used to have a crew cut, but now his hair was long and stringy. He was a little stooped over, and his hug didn’t have the strength that I remembered. But then, I’m stronger than I was when I was ten.
    â€œI nearly died,” he said, his head on my shoulder. “The boat bounced off the rocks about halfway down and threw me into the basin. It broke nearly every bone in my body. But I managed to getto the Devil’s Hole Ravine, a formation in the side of the gorge. I lay there for the longest time, thinking things over. It took about a year to get better.”
    So many feelings washed over me. Happiness. Astonishment. Exhilaration. You go through years thinking somebody you loved is gone forever, and then suddenly there they are, right next to you. It’s a shock to the system.
    â€œHow did you know I would be here tonight?” I asked.
    â€œNobody can sleep the night before they go to the edge of the falls.”
    â€œBut how did you know I was doing that?”
    â€œI saw an article in the paper about them shooting the movie here.”
    All at once another feeling washed over me, replacing all those other feelings. Anger . I pushed Dad away from me, almost knocking him over.
    â€œYou’ve been alive all this time,” I yelled, “and pretended you were dead!”
    â€œJohn, I owed money to some people,” he explained. “Bad people. I couldn’t pay them back. They were going to hurt me. They might have hurt you too. I figured that if I was dead, my problem would be solved.”
    â€œSo you just abandoned Mom?”
    â€œThe night before I went over the falls, your mother told me she wanted a divorce, John. We hadn’t been getting along for some time. She never got used to me doing stunts, I guess, and finally she said she couldn’t take it anymore. I figured that as long as we were