The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  There was only the sound of waves, gently lapping at the shore. I turned away from the ladder, toward the picture of the cabin and the fire in the forest.

  “Did you tear this from a book?” I said.

  “Tear what?”

  “This picture of the fire.”

  “My husband must have—it’s from before we were married. Here.” Suddenly she was closer, tossing clothes from the loft, then stepped back out of view again. “These should fit you, close enough.”

  I bent down and picked up the clothes, then stepped under the loft, kicked off my wet suit and pulled on the pants, buttoned the shirt.

  In a moment, Mrs. Abel returned down the ladder. She wore a long white nightgown; when she stood close to the lamp I could see her body, a dark shadow—her slender legs, the bend of her knees; the points of her hips pushed out against the fabric, and the fabric along her shoulders was wet from her hair, translucent, her skin shining through.

  “It’s strange,” she said, “seeing you in my husband’s clothes.”

  I just stood there. I almost said how awkward I felt; I wasn’t sure if saying it would make me more or less anxious, if it would speed or change what was going to happen.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Your face,” she said. “Your expression. The clothes are clean—it’s not as if they’re the ones he died in or something.”

  The kerosene lamp whispered a crinkly sigh, went silent again. I set my wet swimsuit down on the floor atop the towel. Mrs. Abel was combing out her hair; when she was done, she began to braid it. She stepped closer to me, closed the distance, and I was uncertain if I was supposed to move closer, as well. The pants she’d given me were khakis that were too short, the waist too wide so they slid down. The denim shirt was scratchy, its shoulders narrow.

  And then she walked past me, sat down at the table. “You remind me of him, a little,” she said. “My husband. It’s not just the clothes. But you said you didn’t know him?”

  “Not really,” I said. “If he drove past on the road, we’d wave.”

  “He liked to tell stories, too,” she said. “Sometimes he wrote them down, sent them to me, back when I was a girl.”

  “I thought you hadn’t known him very long,” I said.

  “Why did you think that?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “I knew him a long time,” she said. “It’s true that we weren’t married for long, but we knew each other for years, since I was a girl.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Sit down,” she said. “You’re making me nervous.”

  I sat on the couch and she turned her chair, slightly, to face me.

  “I was what, fourteen?” she said. “I was a teenager, I know, and swimming. I don’t know why I was so far south, but I was far offshore and I could hear a boat coming, the propeller through the water. When I looked up, I could see it coming. A small, low speedboat with a pointed bow, headed right at me. And so I took a deep breath and dove deep, and held myself there, looking upward, waiting for the boat to pass over me.”

  I watched her, ten feet away, listened to her tell her story; her eyes faced me but they were turned inward, not watching me. She was traveling back to that time.

  “I waited underwater and the boat tore the water, the surface above, and slowly began to circle. I held my breath—I stayed down there as long as I could, but at last I kicked my way up.

  “He was there, standing alone in his boat. A fishing net in one hand, binoculars in the other. I was gasping, treading water, and he was reaching out with that net like he might scoop me up.” Her voice rose and fell, just higher than a whisper, her face tilted as if she was in the water, looking up at the boat. “He cut the motor so I could hear what he was saying, and he was telling me to grab the net. He threw a lifejacket and I let it drift away.

  “At last, at last he understood that I was swimming, that I didn’t need saving. He relaxed and let his boat drift alongside as I floated on my back, and we talked.”

  She paused. In came the wind, the waves.

  “I wouldn’t tell him my name,” she said. “He was shirtless, with a farmer’s tan. He made a joke about mermaids, and I kicked my legs to show I didn’t have a tail.”

  I wondered if Mrs. Abel had been wearing a bathing suit, that day. I tried to imagine Mr. Abel as a younger, middle-aged man; I could only recall him as older, talking to my grandfather as they walked along the road, both wearing cardigans, tweed driving caps on their heads. I remembered him laughing with Mr. Zahn, once, at a party, cocktails in their hands.

  Now Mrs. Abel leaned forward, the sharp tips of her braids dripping water on the floorboards. “I remember that he used the word ‘beguiled,’” she said. “He said that mermaids couldn’t be caught, only beguiled. They had to come to a person of their own accord. He wore sunglasses, a wide hat. He pointed to the shore, pointed out his cabin, so I’d know where he lived.”

  “This cabin?” I said.

  She looked at me, startled, as if she’d forgotten I was there. “I liked that he left me there,” she said, “that he didn’t try to make me come with him, take me to shore, that he didn’t ask my name again.” She smiled. “He put on a jacket, standing there in his boat, watching me, and the jacket was inside out so he took it off and fixed that and put it on again. Then he started the engine and sped away.”

  “And then what?” I said.

  “After that?” She waved one hand in the air, her voice tapering off, speeding up, growing quieter. “He found out my name, somehow, and he wrote me letters, and then, much later, we were married, and then he died.”

  It was silent for a moment, only the gentle lapping of waves. Out the window, the moon glowed on the lake. Turning back toward Mrs. Abel, I saw a shape hanging in the air behind her, over her shoulder. Suspended from a wire, swinging from the underside of the loft. I stood, stepped closer. It was a roughly painted little airplane, carved from driftwood, with two propellers made of empty wooden thread spools. Atop the airplane’s wing stood a wooden bird, painted blue and standing on legs of rusty nails.

  “A friend gave it to me,” she said. “He carved it.”

  “Oh,” I said, uncertain what to say next. I kept staring at the bluebird as I felt her watching me, waiting for something. It was as if the wind had suddenly dropped away, as if the waves had all suddenly fallen calm.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem so nervous.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “I heard a funny story about you,” she said, after a long moment. “About a summer a couple years ago. I heard you came back from college with beautiful long hair, and all the women on the shore envied it, and you got so much attention, but your girlfriend—a girl from Little Sister Bay—made you cut it off.”

  “She didn’t make me,” I said. “She, that was a while ago. A long time.”

  I was still standing there, underneath the loft; I reached out and touched the wooden bird and the airplane swung back and forth, the raspy sound of the wire in its hook.

  “So you’ve had other girlfriends, since then?” She said the word girlfriends as if the term was one she found funny.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A lot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve forgotten?”

  “A normal amount.”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Just a regular number.”

  “Sounds passionate!” She laughed at me again. “Serious girlfriends?”

  “Now it doesn’t seem like it.”

  “But then it did.”

  “I guess so. Yes.”

  “But not now?”

  “No,” I said.
“Not for a while.”

  Mrs. Abel stood and walked around the table. She looked out the window, over the lake.

  “That girl,” I said. “I talked to her last year and she told me she still had my hair, the ponytail that was cut off, that she kept it in a jewelry box.”

  “How romantic,” Mrs. Abel said. “Unless she’s planning on putting a hex on you.”

  “I was still in college when all that happened,” I said.

  “And now you’re grown up?”

  “No,” I said.

  Around us, candle flames flickered in the draft. The kerosene lantern glowed atop the piano.

  “But you’re twenty-six,” Mrs. Abel said. “You’re out of college.”

  “So what have I been doing?” I said, anticipating the question. “I moved to Montana to work on a ranch, and then I moved to New York because I had a girlfriend who went to graduate school.”

  “But not the same girlfriend who kept your hair?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And where is she now, this graduate school girlfriend?”

  “Canada,” I said.

  “Canada,” Mrs. Abel said. “You think she’ll return?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think that’s really going on anymore.”

  I could see the shape of myself, standing there awkwardly, in the reflection of the window. Mrs. Abel leaned close to the glass, then, her hand up to block the glare, so she could look out at the lake.

  “It’s late,” she said, turning toward me.

  There was only the faint sound of waves, wind in the trees.

  “Okay.” I nodded at her, moved toward the door. “I’ll bring back these clothes.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t know why I’ve kept them—they don’t even smell like him, anymore.”

  I stepped out, onto the porch, and closed the door behind me. Before I had crossed her driveway and entered the shadows beneath the trees, though, I heard the door open again.

  I turned; she stood there in the moonlight, reaching out for me, but as I came closer I realized there was something in her hands—my swimsuit, still damp.

  “You wouldn’t want to forget this,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Goodnight.” She turned, closed the door behind her.

  Walking away from her cabin, into the woods, I paused, half-expecting her to be watching me, or to call me back again. The glow in the windows diminished gradually, as she blew out the candles, one by one; and then the windows disappeared, the cabin a dark silhouette against the night. For a moment I wondered if I should go back, if she had actually wanted me to leave (I guess you should go, she’d said).

  What did she want me for? To push back her sadness, to be another distraction, like walking the highway at night, swimming through the dark water? I could do that, I thought; I could be that. Still, I didn’t quite have the nerve to turn, to return to her cabin that night.

  - 11 -

  Notes toward stories, from the summer of 1994:

  —I wanted to part the ground and swim just beneath the surface.

  —Treating physical objects that caused injury as injury itself (e.g. bandaging knife).

  —Riding my bicycle, I rode over a snake and its head jerked up to strike as my tire rolled over its body, but it missed and I pedaled away, hard. When I circled back, I saw that the snake was long dead, dried and flattened, not alive at all.

  —Stories where initial crises lead to long digressions that never really return to the opening but the motion subtly bears on possible implications of opening.

  —Her skin felt smooth and tight around her bones, crisp, her temples rang. Surfacing, she whooped and it echoed along the cliff, traveling up and down the beach. She brought her hands in close to her body, back through the straps of her bathing suit, and peeled it down, slipping it off as she swam, letting it slide down her legs and leaving it to float behind like a strange jellyfish.

  —A person who sits in their house and practices different expressions; coupled with someone who lives nearby and watches, drawing conclusions.

  - 12 -

  A year or so ago, one August afternoon, I walked through those woods with my daughters, visiting the forts and hideouts from the stories I’d told them. The girls followed me to the Red Cabin, seeking to find a canoe paddle or bicycle—it’s mostly used for storage, now. And while we still call it the Red Cabin, several years ago it was painted a flat, dark gray.

  The screen door opened with the exact same sound, that terrible shriek. By the door, a bike—my Schwinn Cruiser, from college—hung upside down. It’s still there, its whitewall tires off its rims, its seat half eaten away. And the sails are still there, unused for years, far away from the wind of the lake. And the Montana license plates from my long ago truck.

  Tacked to the wall above the desk, yellowed slips of paper:

  A passage from the journals of Albert Camus (“It is only in order to shine sooner that the author refuses to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.”);

  A rejection letter from C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic (“July 6, 1994: Still no luck, but thanks for the look.”);

  A passive-aggressive quotation out of a letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald (“Summer’s a discouraging time to work—You don’t feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.”);

  A postcard photograph of a weathered Cormac McCarthy, sent from a friend whose first book was being published, who had his picture taken by the same photographer as Cormac. She’d given him the postcard. Glad to hear you happy, friend. It eludes me, it does, but we still have time don’t we?

  My daughters—bored with all this musty detritus, the spider webs everywhere—spilled back outside, began playing on the dangerous balance beams my father had set up, so long ago, and climbing on the small stone table we’d built, once, in honor of Aslan and Narnia.

  Standing in the Red Cabin, surrounded by the artifacts of that other person, by my old things, I felt a sense of dislocation, caught between times, in two times at once.

  My daughters laughed and shouted, impatient beneath the cedars. Before I opened the screen door, I leaned close to the wall, to look into another faded piece of paper tacked there:

  It’s a photocopy of a photograph of a handless, blind boy reading Braille with his lips—I always had this with me; there are rusted holes along its top border, from the various tacks and nails that affixed it to the walls above the tables and desks where I wrote, as I moved from place to place in those years. I wanted my writing to be worthy of such a boy, a reader who would kiss every letter of every word.

  Was I oblivious to the pretension of this gesture, blind myself to the insensitivity it displayed? I fear I was. I suspect that perhaps this picture was as much for other people to see—to be disturbed and impressed—as it was to inspire me.

  - 13 -

  One night in that first week of swimming with Mrs. Abel, I was walking through the woods. In the darkness I felt a familiarity, an awareness of all my childhood forts and hideouts (Chipmunk, Bat, Porcupine) around me, a sense that I was in tune with the mysteries. Again I crossed the road and headed up the old cow path, slanting along the bluff. Again, near the top of the path, light spilled out of Mr. Zahn’s screen porch. I slowed as I passed. The old man was still out there, and as I began to shout hello I realized that he was in the exact same position as he had been, several nights before. Sitting there, slightly slumped, that knife in one hand. He had not moved at all.

  I stepped closer, I reached out and scratched my fingernail against the bristly screen, hoping to rouse him.

  “Mr. Zahn?”

  There were stone steps, a screen door around the side of the porch. I let myself in. I did not get very close to him; I did not touch him, and yet I was close enough to see his pale scalp through
his white hair, the strands of gray tangled in his long white beard. His blue eyes were open, milky, but they weren’t seeing anything. He wasn’t breathing, didn’t seem to be. His body was perfectly still.

  The house creaked, startling me. I glanced through a doorway, into a dark room. It was silent again.

  Wood shavings covered the floor around Mr. Zahn’s heavy boots. A half-carved bird was clutched in the hand that didn’t hold the knife. His plaid shirt, his suspenders, liver spots along the edge of his face. A breeze shifted through the screens and then I could smell him.

  Turning away, I stared through the doorway, into the dark room, silhouettes I couldn’t decipher.

  When I turned on the light, the creatures leapt up—birds and deer and skunks and raccoons. All carved in wood, roughly painted. A carved deer with real antlers, with wooden birds along its back. Birds. Woodpeckers, bald eagles, sparrows, orioles. Deer with blue eyes, human-like, made of cloudy beach glass. Weathered sea captains, woodsmen with red caps, people with nails pounded into their wooden heads, to look like hair.

  I didn’t step into that room; my hand was still on the light switch; I kept Mr. Zahn in my peripheral vision, sitting where he was sitting, that knife in his hand. Near my feet, a carved badger with what appeared to be dentures for teeth, bottle caps for eyes. Snakes, coiled and straight, but mostly it was birds—legs of wire, beaks of glass, wings bent from tin cans that reflected the light until I switched the switch.

  I left Mr. Zahn with his light on, sitting there in the porch like I’d found him. Carefully I opened the screen door, stepped outside again. By the time I reached the cow path I was already running.

  I don’t know how much time passed, or even if I went there directly, but I found myself standing in Mrs. Abel’s rutted driveway. Candlelight flickered in the windows and the sound of the piano—a simple, repetitive melody—faintly slipped out around the cabin, under the trees where I was standing. I think I called out, but I didn’t want to raise my voice, really, to draw anyone else’s attention. So I moved closer, to where I could see her inside, sitting alone at the piano.