Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

  At night, Delores and Roy would tuck Westie into bed. Westie would sometimes cry and say he missed his mom. Delores would reassure him that she would come to visit soon, but often, exhausted by his misery, he would cry himself to sleep. The boy had such a sunny nature, it tore at Roy’s heart to see him so sad. One night, Roy got the idea that if he read to Westie at bedtime, he’d get distracted and have less time to fret.

  He had no clue as to what kinds of stories children liked, nor could he think of any adults who read books. When he happened to mention this to Rex, Rex told him, “There’s one book that I’ve read over and over since I was a boy, and each time the story reads in a way it never did before. It’s called The Jungle Book. It’s a children’s story, really, but I never get tired of it.” Rex told Roy it was about a boy, Mowgli, who was chased into a wolf cave by a tiger and brought up by wolves.

  “Sounds scary,” said Roy.

  “Not so,” said Rex. “He makes friends with the animals in the jungle and gets to know them not as a little boy would know an animal, but as one animal would know another. Tell you what. Borrow my copy and read him a story about Mowgli, the little boy. See how he likes it.” The next day, Rex handed Roy a brown paper bag. Inside was an orange book with a worn cloth cover and a painting of a little boy in a loincloth surrounded by a bear, a panther, and two wolves. The book was heavy, but the type was big and the lines had thick spaces between them. Roy held it in his hand as he would a can of baked beans. That night, he and Delores began to read to Westie about Mother Wolf and Father Wolf, and Tabaqui the jackal, and Shere Khan the tiger, and how, one night, Father Wolf went out to investigate a rustle in the bushes:

  He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.

  “Man!” He snapped. “A man’s cub. Look!”

  Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night.

  The Jungle Book became a nightly ritual. Roy and Delores took on the voices of the different animals, with Delores hissing to impersonate Kaa the python, or speaking in a high child’s voice when reading Mowgli. Roy growled when he imitated Baloo the bear, and made the deep hollow sounds of a tuba when he was Hathi the elephant. The book became the common language between Roy and his children. Roy and Delores took to calling Westie “Little Brother,” the name the animals called Mowgli, and Westie began calling Nehru “Hathi.”

  All families have their codes and their funny secrets. This wasn’t much, but Delores always liked the part when Baloo teaches Mowgli to speak the words “We be of one blood, you and I” in all the languages of the different animals. Despite all that had happened to the disjointed Walker family, this much was true.

  GAIL WALKER SAT in her cubicle outside the marketing director’s office at Cool. Her diploma from the Marcie Breitman Learning Center, still new and crisp, was tacked up on her bulletin board above her desk. The certificate was next to a note from Marcie Breitman herself that read: You, Gail, are a people person. Just remember to keep your sunny side up and your nose to the grindstone, and you’ll knock ‘em dead. It infused her with confidence and a sense of purpose. Today she was charged with finding someone to construct one hundred crossword puzzles whose clues would lead to the words “The solution is Cool”—favors for an upcoming event in September. She had already spent the morning calling around at party-supply stores and various puzzle companies. So far, no luck, but Gail wasn’t discouraged. This was her job. She was earning ten thousand dollars a year and she had her own chair with a gray, cushioned back and metal armrests. She wiggled her toes, feeling the soft leather that lined her strappy white sandals. Avalon worked just one floor up, and, by the end of the month, Westie would be back home living with her. Not bad, she thought, smoothing the pleats of her white Dacron skirt. Not bad at all.

  These days, she was allowing herself the extravagance of a daily long-distance phone call. Every night at six thirty, just after she’d get home from work, she’d dial up Dave Hanratty. Westie would be waiting to speak to her. On this evening, Hanrattty bypassed his usual greeting, “Hanratty’s Circus and Aqua Zoo, Spectacular and Amazing,” with “Hello, Mrs. Walker, how are you tonight?”

  He asked her about how she was doing on the new job, what was in the next issue of Cool, and the type of audience it was targeting.

  Since this was her first real business conversation, Gail tried her best to sound confident and authoritative. “Cool is a high-end fashion magazine with a circulation of close to five hundred thousand,” she said. “The demographics are women, twenty-five to forty-five, with a household income of thirty thousand or more.”

  “I’ll tell you my intention in asking you these questions,” said Hanratty. “On November sixteenth, we will introduce the most spectacular live show ever performed in these United States. It will feature mermaids and chimps and elephants and much more, and I can tell you this: no one has ever seen anything like it. In addition, there will be an impressive array of people here from every walk of life. Without tipping my hand any further, let me just say that it would behoove Cool magazine to send a photographer and a reporter to our opening ceremony. Were this to happen, I would be honored to bring you here as my personal guest—hotel and airfare included. Think about it. Perhaps you’ll have an answer when you call tomorrow. Just one moment, there’s a young man here who is eager to speak with you.”

  Westie told his mother about his day. “We swam with the elephants,” he said. “Delores and Lester and me are going to the movies on Saturday, and we read the part about Mowgli and Bagheera.” As they had in every conversation for the past two weeks, Mowgli, Hathi, and the panther Bagheera populated most of his conversation. Gail noted how his vocabulary was growing daily. By now, he was speaking in paragraphs. It made her sad that she wasn’t there to watch him say all his new words. She knew she should be happy to hear the excitement in her voice, yet it was painful to imagine the three of them there without her. She never asked Westie about his father, but every time he said “we,” she knew exactly who he meant.

  First thing the following morning, Gail ran upstairs to see Avalon. She told her all about the Aqua Zoo. “Dave Hanratty’s known for stopping at nothing to attract a crowd,” she said, trying to sound as if he were a casual acquaintance. “Do you think the magazine might consider covering it?”

  “Hmm, mermaids, chimps, elephants,” said Avalon. “You know, there has been talk around here about doing a mermaid winter-fantasy story, now that we have connections.” Avalon winked at Gail. “Maybe this is the moment. Okay, I’ll bring it up at the story meeting tomorrow.”

  “That would be great,” said Gail, trying not to get her hopes up. “By the way, have you ever heard of this book called The Jungle something or other?”

  “Umm, The Jungle Book?”

  “Yup, that’s it.”

  “It’s famous. Talk about your chimps and elephants, this guy literally wrote the book on them,” said Avalon.

  “Maybe I’ll pick me up a copy after work,” said Gail, who couldn’t remember the last time she’d set foot inside a bookstore.

  Twenty-five

  There was a movie playing inside of Hanratty’s head, which no one was privy to except for Hanratty. When people spoke to him now, he seemed to look past them, absorbed in words they could not hear. At odd times, he would burst out laughing or move his lips as if repeating something overheard. The details of his behavior became the subject of speculation: the ubiquitous yellow legal pad that he carried at his side the way a traveling salesman might clutch a Bible; the dozen or so colored pencils that were jammed into the inside pocket of his jacket; the way he’d snap his fingers and then jot down notes, or draw diagrams with arrows and arcs and cartoon versions of different animals on them. No one ever got close eno
ugh to decode his drawings, but Scary Sheila observed that each color seemed to represent something or somebody in his plan.

  The Aqua Zoo was what was playing in Hanratty’s head, the big picture that only he held of how the show would come together. He had told each of them how he envisioned his or her part, and he expected each to build from that blueprint. Two deeply tanned dolphin trainers, Sally-Ann and Tucker, had been brought up from the Seaquarium in Miami, and Hanratty told Lester and Delores that they would be working with the trainers and some dolphins. “Sally-Ann and Tucker will take your work to the next dimension,” he told them. “I want you to stop thinking of yourselves as mer-people and start thinking of yourselves as dolphins. Just remember: there are no boundaries.”

  Early each morning, Delores, Lester, Sally-Ann, and Tucker would board a motor boat and go out to the middle of the Weeki Wachee River where Sally-Ann and Tucker would teach the other two strange whistles and hand signals that would breach the world between them and the dolphins. The idea was to have the dolphins get comfortable enough with Delores and Lester so that they could touch them, ride them even. Sally-Ann and Tucker taught them to mimic the dolphins’ movements, to leap in the air, to arch and sway as though they, too, had dorsal fins.

  Hanratty spent most of his time with Wulf and the elephants, just watching and taking notes. Sometimes, Roy would bring all the elephants into the water. Hanratty would observe how the elephants naturally followed behind Nehru. He would have one of the clowns sit on the elephants’ heads, just so they could all get used to it. Hanratty liked having Westie around at rehearsals, at first because he used the boy as a barometer, his giggles and fidgeting prompting more scribbles on Hanratty’s pad. After a while, though, he saw how at ease Westie had become with Nehru. She seemed to view him as another young calf and became protective of him around the other elephants, and even around the clowns. “You and Nehru are friends, aren’t you?” he said to Westie one morning. The boy looked up at Nehru, who was looking down at him while chewing on some long grass stems. “Nehru is my friend,” he said. “I like her.” Hanratty patted Westie on the shoulder. “That’s excellent.”

  Thelma, of course, was in charge of the mermaids and their routines. All she knew was that Hanratty had asked her to choreograph “a routine for a world where animals were the humans and humans were things that occupied the air and filled the waters.” As he said those words, he rushed to write them down on his pad, then continued: “I can tell you this, your girls will be used to their full advantage. I am considering how to maximize all of their talents.”

  Thelma knew she was no Dave Hanratty, but she was beginning to understand how he operated, how he pushed away all constraints and barriers and was unfazed by the impossible. She began to take notes as well. Thelma had already lost Delores and Lester to Hanratty’s schemes, and she’d be damned if she’d let him come up with anything for the rest of her girls. She watched her girls swim and considered how she could “maximize their talents.”

  Two weeks before the opening, Hanratty brought in an engineer from Georgia Tech named Oliver Turch, a tall man slightly stooped, as if he’d hovered over too many textbooks. Turch was there to help figure out how all the elements of the show would come together so that there would be no collisions and no surprises, other than the ones Hanratty had planned. The most memorable thing about Oliver Turch was that he was the only person who ever said no to Dave Hanratty. For years to come, Turch would dine out on stories about the man who invented the Aqua Zoo. “Get a load of this,” he’d tell his buddies. “He wanted to know if it was physically possible to have dolphins jump in formation over an elephant’s head. I had to convince him that if he flew in penguins from the Bronx Zoo, they’d be dead in the heat within two hours. I had to tell him ix-nay on building a floatation device that could hold one elephant while another towed it down the river.” Then Oliver Turch would shake his head and say, “Of course, that guy is now a famous millionaire, and now I’m teaching high school in Valdosta, so what do I know?”

  NO ONE KNEW what to make of the Aqua Zoo. Those who saw it with their own eyes couldn’t stop talking about the dolphins who took to the air with Delores and Lester riding on their backs, or the aerialists, like fireflies, who skittered across high wires that stretched from one side of the Springs to the other. Those who read about it were captivated by the pictures of a little boy riding down on the Springs on the head of an elephant. The Orlando Sentinel dwelled on the little puppet that the boy held in his hands: “Its rhinestone tears picked up the glimmer of the sun and shot it back to the water,” the reporter gushed.

  The local news shows kept showing footage of the opening number: a magnificent white Arabian horse, carrying a woman with short champagne-colored hair and wearing a bright red gown, galloping toward the crowd. The woman turned out to be Peggy Lee. She sang “It’s a Good Day” like ice cream melting, and there was no end to the shots of the audience swaying to the sultry rhythm of her song. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that Peggy Lee had starred in Disney’s animated hit Lady and the Tramp. And here she was, appearing in a rival attraction in Central Florida. The news shows had a field day with it.

  Armando Lozano, who was covering the pageant for WGUP, talked about the midgets riding on turtles and the clowns and elephants having water fights. “This is a show that will go down in Florida history,” he boomed. And he was right. People started to call Dave Hanratty a genius—what else could you call a man who had mermaids standing on elephants and twirling batons that were blazing at both ends? The press took to calling him Mr. Florida, and the sobriquet took hold.

  For weeks afterward, the crowds on Route 50 were headed west toward Weeki Wachee, not east toward Orlando. Rumor had it that the day the Tampa Tribune had run a front page rave about the Aqua Zoo with the headline “Live Magic at Weeki Wachee,” Walt Disney himself had walked into a conference room filled with theme-park executives, slammed the newspaper down on the conference table, and said, “Why don’t we have anything live around here?”

  IT WAS NEARLY dark before Gail made her way to the elephant house where Roy was washing down Nehru, and Delores and Westie were sitting on a bench nearby. Westie was the first to notice his mother. As he stood up to run to her, he dropped Otto, who was on his lap, onto the sand. “Mommy,” he shouted. “Mommy’s here.” Delores watched her father’s eyes shift down to the floor as her mother stepped closer. She moved toward her mother warily, wondering if she’d come to take Westie home. “Hi, Mom,” she said. The two women held each other by the elbows and drew their heads together, as if they might kiss. Delores’s hair was still wet from the show, and Gail’s makeup was fresh and skillfully applied. Afraid they’d rub off on each other, they didn’t kiss.

  Gail was first to speak. “That show was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I’ve already called Avalon and told her about you and the dolphins, and Westie—oh Westie, you were such a big boy, and so brave on top of that elephant.”

  “I wasn’t scared,” Westie said, still flushed. “I was so high up, but I wasn’t scared at all.” As Westie went on about Nehru and the other elephants, Delores studied her mother. She was wearing a short, sleeveless magenta dress that emphasized her big breasts and went well with her black hair. She wore her hair up in a twist and a pair of sandals made out of see-through plastic. Very va-va-va-voom, in an Annette Funicello kind of way, she thought.

  Just then, she saw her father glance up at her mother. Gail must have noticed as well, because her body stiffened and she stood at attention. “Hello, Roy,” she said. “Hello,” said Roy, still not looking her in the eye. “You look nice.”

  “So do you,” she said.

  The four of them stood in a knot of silence: Mr. Chatty and the three Walkers.

  This is the best it will ever be, thought Delores. But she was not going to let that weigh her down on his day.

  She picked up Otto and dusted him off. She had used her remaining silver dollar
s to have his skirt remade and his face repainted and he looked as he had when she first got him.

  “Hey, Little Brother,” she said, handing the puppet to Westie. “I have an idea. Let’s go.”

  They walked down to the Springs and sat down on the shore next to a rubber clown’s nose that someone must have lost earlier in the day. Westie took off his shirt and they both pulled off their shoes. Delores waded into the water; with the sun down, it was cooler than usual and she splashed some on her wrists and then on her face. “Don’t forget to hold on tight,” she said, as she crouched down.

  Westie held Otto in one arm and wrapped the other around Delores’s chest. He climbed on her back and they floated on the surface like that for a while. Delores thought about the last time they had swum together like this, and how light—almost weightless—Westie had felt then. Now he was substantial; she could feel his strength in the way his feet gripped around her ribs. They really were of one blood, she and he.

  “Come on, Westie,” she shouted, just before she dove under the water. “Swim. Let’s swim away.”

  Maybe a turtle swam with them, but maybe not. By then it was too dark to be sure of anything.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My world is a saner, happier place because of Kathy Robbins. I am grateful to Elisabeth Scharlatt for always knowing what needs to be done, and to Brunson Hoole, Cheryl Nicchitta, Liz Maples, and everyone else at Algonquin for their care and fine work. Rachelle Bergstein at the Robbins office asked tough questions and made brilliant suggestions. I can’t wait to read her novel.

  Barbara Wynns of Weeki Wachee Springs is the real thing, and I am indebted to her for all of her help. Becky Okrent, Danielle Perez, and Kathy Rich cheered me on and gave me great advice.