Young Swimmer

Winter wind picked up and darkness fell and Chris was preparing for his date with the young swimmer. He stood before the mirror buttoning his shirt hearing thin dry ticks at his back as the wind shot splintered ice against the windowpane. Trophies gleamed in the reflection beyond his shoulders. Using three middle fingers as a sort of trowel he dug deep into his freshly cleaned blue jeans to tuck the shirt there, then tugged it back out in even measure around the beltline. He was too long for the bed he’d grown up in and when he sat down to pull on his boots his knees stood high and far away like two proud peaks originating from beneath the floor. His boots were sleek and black, cut for a snug fit on big feet.

Chris had shot up early. Your flippers, Coach Vin told him years ago, looking up to Chris’s eyes and then pointing down long legs to the two broad pedestals at their bottom, your flippers were made for butterfly, not freestyle. There’s opportunity where others fear to tread, Chris. Butterfly if it does not break you will be your baby.

To get down to the zippers on the insteps he had to push his knees apart slightly. He pressed his palms along the length of his thighs, let go a slow exhalation.

That was twelve years ago, what Coach Vin said, before Chris had spent junior high and high school and college, until he left college, swimming in the steaming-hot indoor pools of Pennsylvania. Pools he came to see as primordial racking devices, waters stretching and pulling his body into wide fanning formation along his sides. So that by the end of thousands of miles logged, a waking life spent churning in the lanes, he had a swimmer’s radical triangle bearing and what was called a beautiful stroke but no hope of joining the ranks of the truly swift. 

Back at the YMCA Vin said, You were always the cleanest one in the race. You could help me on deck. These kids. They need help with their technique.

Kara Hennessy was one of them. Chris had decided to take her to the steelworkers’ guild. A length of ice-cold pipe would be the only railing to grasp on their way down a narrow stairway, passing between two crumbling walls rising on either side with dry dirt clumps and enterprising weedy shoots sprouting at their heads. The guild was a vast smoky basement, where the ceiling skimmed close over Chris’s head, where old-timers played pool and women sold paper plates of steaming bratwurst and sauerkraut with Double Colas. He thought he might order a beer. He thought Kara might like that. And the guild, which there was no way she had seen before. Then he wanted to drive them carefully over dark late-night ice to the edge of the abandoned quarry, where no one would disturb them.

Chris stood from the bed and in a series of subtle twitches and releases freed his clothing from where it bunched in the corners and undersides of his body. He was tall and powerful. His bedroom was jack-in-the-box small. When his father knocked on the door, swim medals hanging from shiny ribbons pinned to the wall banged softly against each other.

Granwinnie wants you to talk to her before you go, said his father.

I’ll see her.

Before you go.

I’ll see her, said Chris.

Will you be out awhile.

His father said the question the way Central Pennsylvanians do, the way an emphatic observation sounds. As if strung across the doorway his one hand held the knob, the other the frame.

I guess.

Nice boots.

Chris went still and silent.

Those. Are nice boots. He was nodding. Nice.

There was nowhere to go; Chris was enormous in this room. He made fists, shoved them into his pockets, and stood stiff-armed and exposed under the ceiling lamp. 

Maybe you can show me where you got those boots.

All right.

His father was still looking at him, at his feet.

Because I like them.

He took a step backward and closed the door.

Chris rested two wide palms on his forehead. Then he smoothed down his hair and fastened a short dark ponytail at the base of his skull. His thumb and middle finger ran in opposite directions as he pressed his mustache, then his eyebrows, down. He bent low to his bedspread and picked up a brown leather wallet crescent-shaped to fit him and slid it into the back of his jeans. He looked closely at his fingernails. Chris worked on his car as a practice, the painstaking restoration of a classic Alfa Romeo and its upkeep; he never went to a mechanic. He would need to drive flawlessly in tonight’s weather. He would need his leather gloves, a thick wool scarf, his heavy winter coat, his keychain with the silver coach’s whistle attached—these were downstairs, in the chilly anteroom to the family kitchen.

His jangling keychain with the silver coach’s whistle attached. Anything, anything at all, connected to Kara made his penis pulse and drip preliminaries.

Chris ran his hand along the wall to flick off the switch and ducked his head to get out. He closed the door softly behind him and took a light tread down carpeted stairs. Without pulling on the creaking lintel at the bottom he rounded the corner and advanced along the darkened narrow hallway and into the burst of bright kitchen light and meaty stove warmth at its end. In a moist and salty heat his mother moved, deftly crisscrossing the kitchen floor so that there was no way to avoid negotiation with her path. Through the oven window a broad dish showed, yellowly. Chris and his mother met at the center of the room.

Guess you’ll be having some fun tonight.

Chris turned shoulder first to get past her. A laugh came short and chopped in the direction of his back.

Bet she makes you hot, eh.

There was a manic rise and fall in the words. Her voice had broken near the end. Chris kept moving.

He took his keychain from the hook and, feeling its weight in his hand, crossed the anteroom to Granwinnie’s mother-in-law suite. Behind Chris the refrigerator was opened and shut forcefully, his mother’s footfalls hitting in accusation.

Out of sight for the moment Chris stood at Granwinnie’s door and closed his eyes to rehearse the route to Kara’s house. Shoemaker Lane to Hofstetter Road. Left on Litz Road. Pass Kreider Dairy, the Meyers’ tidy white farmhouse, their orange gate—Wilkommen—their horses’ fences icing over. Then slow, so slow, controlled, down a tight curving slope winding through woods, branches hanging frozen fingers over the roadway, leading out to the high crest of the cemetery overlooking town. Granwinnie’s parents and their parents, the Germans, lay here, in the plot. First gear now, descending an icy hill, then at the base a lingering, melancholy look east and west before venturing over the tracks. Beyond, brick houses set close together, and the town’s only stoplight. Left. Main Street. Easy does it. See the red rambling ivy-covered Victorian. Roll to a stop. Up the slick walk with care. Ring; listen for low bells tolling deep within.

Chris lifted a hand, knocked on his grandmother’s door. He stepped into the steady hum of an electric heater.

Your pop says you’re taking one of the Hennessy girls on a date tonight, Granwinnie said from the couch.

Guess so.

Going to that big old mansion.

Well. Yes.

Used to think they were gypsies. When they first showed up here in the nineteen-seventies. All those kids tumbling out of a beat-up hippie wagon.

With her hands flat on the crocheted coverlet and with visible effort Chris’s grandmother shifted her heft, then exhaled.

But then we realized. They’re Roman Catholics. That’s all.

Her thick fingers combed through the blanket’s fringe clinging to the slope of the cushion beneath her. Watching her hand, she ruffled the strands abruptly as if for fun, then palmed them smooth again.

You know. The mother always acted a bit bigger than us.

Granwinnie fixed on Chris.

Terrible what happened to her, of course.

Chris ducked his chin to break his grandmother’s gaze and landed on her waterlogged ankles, her flesh-colored lace-up shoes sturdy and flat-bottomed as barges, the rubber knob of her cane poking into the carpet. He thought of Kara, the Kara he knew, swimmer girl Kara. She was not the fastest one on the team but she could take anything he threw at her to the point of his own exhaustion. With Kara in the pool he was panting on the deck. He needed rests from his shouting. He had to pause mid-set and, with the back of his hand, wipe the spit from the corners of his mouth. At the hardest practice he had given her so far, he’d done a step-together step-together down the length of the deck, facing her as she swam, his voice a deep monster roar, looking for her eyes each time she turned her head to breathe. She saw him. She was barely halfway into the killer closer he’d ordered, a set of ten sprints getting faster in succession, so that before she’d reached the wall for one he was bellowing for her to take off for the next. The other kids were dropping fast, hanging limply from the lane lines, gasping, others popping off their goggles in protest and flopping with great wet slaps onto the deck. They lay splayed, blank-eyed, like fish shocked to the surface by a depth charge. 

But Kara kept on and at ten’s finish she was the only kid left in the pool. She was clinging to the wall with her chest heaving, head lolling low to the churned-up water, jaw hanging slack. 

Chris called out, Kara. Ten more. Kara.

This time he took a position at the end of the pool with his stopwatch, standing among the sopping littered casualties at his feet as Kara fought. She made none of the intervals. She did not look at him each time she reached the wall but only pivoted around, trancelike, to face the water and push off again. Sprint five her stroke began to disintegrate, arms flailing like broken wings. Sprint seven there was no trace of legs working, just two limbs trailing her torso underwater. Sprint eight her hands didn’t clear the surface, just dragged, pushing little waves. Sprint nine her ragged breaths were audible over the splashing. It didn’t stop when at last she grasped the wall the final time, becoming very small, bent arms drawn in close to her body and face sunk to her hands as if uttering a sorrowful private prayer.

Feeling weightless, Chris went over to her, lowered a knee to the tile.

Good girl.

He rose and watched her climb slowly out of the pool. She hauled herself to the bench and wrapped a towel around her shoulders and, hunched and clutching it closed at her chest, walked down the hall to the locker room. In the black ripped-up pantyhose swimmers wear for practice and wet hair straggling down her back, Kara looked like a bedraggled punk.

Hands at his sides, still holding his stopwatch, Chris stood for a time looking down the hall where she had gone, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. With Kara he had done too much; and he had not done enough. He understood this. She needed more. He swallowed, his throat scratchy. Then he went to sit in the coaches’ office with Vin.

I wouldn’t say that she’s. Vin paused. Eager to please.

No, said Chris. Not exactly.

He drove home from the Y on empty streets, past the old steelworkers’ row houses and over railroad tracks, and he slowed when he came to Kara’s high school. It rose up from the sidewalk, its facade of dark heavy brick so broad and high it seemed to advance upon him. He shifted into second, got down to a crawl. Tall black windows scaled the front. Now came the massive oak doors, kingly, self-assured, as if hewn from the forest of the dawn of time. Chris followed their line up and up to see, lit by dim yellow streetlight, a pale stone Mary set into brickwork with blank eyes and hands folded to pray. And it was Kara, again, clutching the towel closed; Kara, he thought, forever hauling herself, shivering, forever exhausted. He had hot tears in his eyes and he was hard, and in his jeans in the driver’s seat it hurt like a smothered throb battened down cruelly. The dreadful effigy and these heavy walls, cold and quiet now, seemed meant to house and hide; what happened inside, the old-timers would say, was repugnant, as if this were a container for a secret frenzy, by daytime the inside teeming with kids like Kara the kid, hundreds in blue plaid jumpers and clip-on ties, splish-splashing in blood running in rivers down the corridors. The old-timers were ridiculous—yet Chris could see there was confidence here where none should have been; the pitch was wrong, all wrong, medieval. And parked at the doorstep to this cultish glamour all Chris could see now was Kara’s body, pale and naked to the waist in a swimsuit ripped down hard.

He had come to a stop, the engine a throaty idle. He was leaning close to the glass, neck torqued, chin angled up to look. Then at once he realized. The looming walls. The stone praying woman. The long dark knowing windows. The place—it’s looking at me. His breathing stopped and his heartbeat reared up, electric, arms taut on wheel and shaft; he shifted hard into first and floored it, tearing down the street, eyes darting to the rearview. He did not slow, not until he was well outside town, not until he was near the familiar, turning onto the gentle country lane leading through cornfields to his family’s house.

The space heater thrummed. The room was hot. Granwinnie was talking again, startling Chris’s eyes from the carpet back up to hers. 

Course the woman could have shown up at a swim meet wearing a gunny sack. And still she would have stopped everyone in their tracks.

Chris faltered. You mean.

The mother. Of course. She had a look like no one else around here.

Of course.

Granwinnie’s hands flew up as if about to clap, froze mid-air.

But you were always too busy swimming your races to notice anything like that. Oh! She clasped them together. You were a fast boy. Fast.

She settled her hands in her lap and looked down at Chris’s boots, then up the legs of his jeans, up his fly, his belt buckle, his buttoned-up shirt, its opening at the base of his neck. Then his beard, mouth, mustache; met his eyes.

Now you are big.

Chris pushed his free hand flat into a back pocket, regretted it. His skin was prickly hot. Granwinnie pursed her lips and inhaled through her nose and let out a low exhale deep in the throat. A slow blink. A swallow.

Anyhow. Chris. I’m glad you visited your old grandmother tonight. And I hope you have a nice time out.

Her out rhymed with shot, an accent which Kara did not share and which Chris had been trying to lose of late. He left through the back door.

Set on a treeless rise, the house—a contemporary rancher with electric candles in the windows—took a lot of wind. Chris stepped out into the freezing night and as the land sloped down all around his sense of exposure was exhilarating, as if he had stepped onstage and the firmament above were applauding him. The raining ice splinters were a bright shatter, complete and high in his ears, taking the place of the air, as if from the sky showered affirming silvers and a matching acclaim rose up from the dry dormant cornfields all around—and Chris, the pole between the two, at last found his height in its proper space. Without turning his head he could see his shoulders plowing darkly outward, east and west, as if his crown were the high mountaintop and these the flat reaching stone formations dropping off at the edge. Light shards sprinkled his beard as he tipped his face up to the falling and he felt their cooling crystal spray across his front. His chest, two plates, expanded widely with deep cold nourishing breaths like cream.

Now it was snow.

Looking up, the underside of snowfall had rounded form, white, soft, and descending improbably to his face, as if he were the tallest, most deserving point of interest on this plane.

Chris did not walk to his car but rather reduced his distance from it gradually, raising his knees high to land each foot flat as a platform on the icy driveway. The frozen-up car door creaked and groaned as it opened like pond ice buckling under a man’s weight. 

Catholic Kara. Could. He set the engine to a steady pulse, waited for it to warm up all over.

MARY BYRNE 's fiction has appeared in Epiphany and Carolina Quarterly (online). She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and teaches writing and reading in New York.