by Owen Thomas
A heavy-set boy in lime green trunks was chasing a girl that looked to be his sister toward the far end of the pool. They both walked stiff-legged, pushing the limits of restraint, trying not to run. They passed behind the staring woman and made their way towards Hollis’ end of the pool. The boy caught up with her just past the line of red and white floats that bisected the rectangle of water. He pushed and she screamed and they both went in with a splash and a shriek.
“Dustin! No rough housing or we go home!”
The warning had come from the nearest of three older women in matching white swimming caps and dark goggles who were clutching the side of the pool on the far side of the float line. They turned their heads back and forth and churned the water into a constant froth with their feet as though in an effort to either widen the size of the pool or to propel the entire building to some distant shore.
The woman from across the pool – she had to be a Sonia or a Sophia or a Sabine – had continued to smile. The wave lingered over the water. There was no one in the line of sight between them. There was no one behind him or beside him. The gesture was meant for Hollis. He sent back a smile and a wave of his own.
Did he know her? No. He did not know her. He would remember. One of Susan’s friends? One of the old hippie network? No. Way too young. Besides, he would remember. So, then, she was just…friendly. Hollis reapportioned the column of air inside his body from his abdomen into his chest.
He walked up alongside the diving board to the edge of the pool. He reached out and grabbed hold of the diving board for balance and stuck his foot in the water and stirred it around. He pulled it out again and shook off the water.
He glanced up.
Still staring. Still smiling. Maybe Marta was her name. She could be a Marta.
Facing her, Hollis pulled his arms over his head and did some stretching, first to his left – short left, medium left, far left –, then front, down, down, down, then back, back, back, then to his right – short right, medium right, far right – until the diving board limited his bend. It was not that he had particularly wanted to stretch his muscles. After his first workout in many years, his muscles quite preferred to be left alone. But he stood poolside and stretched anyway because he did not really know quite what else to do with himself. He had come to see the pool. This was the pool.
Left, left, left. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia.
He could leave. But did he want to leave?
Down, Marta, down, Marta, down, Marta.
No. No, not really. But why not?
Sonia, Sonia, back, back, Sonia, Sonia, back, back.
No reason. No reason. No reason.
Right, right, Sabine, Sabine, right, Sabine.
He could swim, but his swim trunks were still in the car. His new BOT-Body shorts would certainly not do. They were too small and tight around his thighs. After his mile on the exercise bike, the shorts were riding up in the back, cutting into his testicles.
Sabine, Sophia, Sonia, down, down, down.
And, not to be forgotten, there was the problem of the Peter-Built Jock frontal protuberance, which he could feel was only growing into a greater and greater problem. Truth was, he wished he could just strip them off and dive in.
Right, Marta, right, whack!
Hollis had done his best to ignore the fact that he had smacked his head on the side of the diving board, which was just at ear level. His hand instinctively found the point of contact but he had the presence of mind to scratch it lightly with his fingertips, as if trying to remember where he had left his watch, rather than clutching his entire head with both hands and shutting his eyes and howling, which is what he had really wanted to do.
His field of vision narrowed for a moment as brilliant sparkles appeared and disappeared and circled the room like little pool fairies. The children shrieked as if they too could see them.
“Dustin! I’m not telling you again!”
The fat boy in the lime green trunks was at it again. His sister squealed and jumped into the water on the near side of the float line. Dustin followed her in like a cannon ball.
Hollis’ head throbbed. He was ready to go. He had looked up at the woman sitting at the far end of the pool. She had been leaning back on her elbows, still looking, still smiling, lifting her legs out of the water together, pointing her toes his direction, working on her abdominals as if to give her something to do as she watched him. That she had likely witnessed him crack his skull on the side of the diving board like an egg against the side of a bowl had made Hollis less inclined to exit the pool area on such a poor showing.
That was when the impulse to try a quick set of platform pulls had, not unlike a pool fairy, flitted into consciousness.
A platform pull was an exercise – a pull-up – performed by one who was hanging by his fingers from the end of a diving platform. A platform pull – in the singular – was a pure fiction. Platform pulls came in sets of no less than twenty-five and usually in sets of fifty. It was an exercise conceived by Coach Darcy Davis of the UNOH Fighting Dogstars as a form of constructive, motivational punishment. Coach Davis liked to assign a set of platform pulls to the person who finished last in the final race of any given practice. If you were unlucky enough to hear three tight whistle bursts at the end of a race and to look up to find Coach Davis pointing down at you – your chest heaving violently for oxygen, your muscles burning from a race at the very end of a full practice – then that meant that you owed Coach Davis a set of platform pulls.
Hollis had never been the fastest individual swimmer on the Dogstar squad. In four years of college he completed more platform pulls than any other member. The triple whistle so frequently blew for him that he began to anticipate the extra duty at the end of each practice, finishing the race and then heading for the platform end of the pool without even waiting for Coach Davis to issue the order. Before the other swimmers had caught their collective breath, Hollis would already be dangling in the air, making his way, hand to hand, along the side of the platform to the end where he would hang for a moment to control his own breathing and then pull himself up until he could rest his chin on the upperside of the platform. There was no allowance for fractions of a platform pull. Hollis, you put that chin on the shelf like a cup of goddamned tea, Coach Davis would yell, or so help me God you will do another ten! When Hollis had completed twenty-five or fifty repetitions, he would release his grip and drop into the water, drowning the applause and playful jeers of his teammates.
So, even forty years later, the impulse to try a few platform pulls at the new Columbus First Family Health Club swimming pool had some basis in history. It was partly a conditioned impulse, not entirely without explanation. But it was still an impulse, which meant that Hollis had acted without entirely thinking things through.
He did not consider, for instance, that a diving board is not the same as a diving platform. The board was a flexible narrow plank rather than a wide stable concrete shelf. The narrowness of the board had allowed him to advance beneath it from the edge of the pool to the end of the plank, monkey style, one hand on each side, body swaying from one side to the other, facing forward, which was simply not possible with a four-foot wide diving platform.
When he had reached the end of the board, Hollis realized that he was facing the wrong direction; he needed to be facing the end of the board if he wanted to lift his body by his fingertips and put his chin on the shelf like a cup of goddamned tea. Instead, he was trapped beneath the board looking out over the pool. He could see that Sophia-Marta-Sabine-Mocha was sitting erect now, the black triangle taught upon her form, her ankles submerged, watching him with interest.
He hung there for a moment considering his options. He could not simply let go of the board. Swimsuits Only, the sign had said. He did not have swim trunks and he was still wearing his new and sweaty yellow BOT-Body muscle tee. Besides, it would look as though he simply did not know how a diving board was intended to function; as though he did not understand that it was ma
de to be walked upon.
So…what then?
He could monkey walk backwards to the edge of the pool and come back the correct way but, again, this would likely be taken as a concession that he did not know what he was doing and would bring his judgment into a sharp, uncharitable focus.
No, he could not go down and he could not go backwards. He had to go forward. He knew exactly what he was doing. He did. He was Hollis Johns, the all-time champion of platform pulls.
Gripping hard with his right hand, Hollis flung his left arm over the top of the board. The length of his body responded to the change by slanting sharply off to the left side of the pool as though his feet had been caught by a strong wind. He flexed his left arm, mashing the side of his face up against the underside of the board so as to relieve the rapidly growing strain of his right hand. His neck painfully resisted its sudden ninety-degree orientation to the rest of his body. The underside of the board was rough against his cheek and every micro-adjustment in his grip had unpleasantly abrasive consequences to his face. The bottom edge of the board bit into his left bicep like glass. He let his right hand drop, almost costing him everything, and shook it vigorously for a second or two until the cramping stopped. He flung his right arm over the top, found his left wrist and clutched it tightly so that his arms formed a full loop around the board.
And there he had hung, like a strange Christmas ornament. A crucifixion upon the cross of perpetual fitness at the First Chlorinated Church of God.
He had hung like that, looped around the diving board, for a full minute, his arms burning, his neck breaking, his left cheek growing raw, trying to game out the combination of maneuvers that would reverse his position.
He had hazarded a look at the end of the pool. The Mocha Maiden was hugging her knees in rapt attention. There were a half-dozen people now walking on one side of the pool or the other. All of them seemed cognizant of his struggle, but were trying not to stare. The women in the white bathing caps were still kicking the water into froth, but they had stopped turning their heads from one side to the other. They were all watching.
He was suddenly conscious of the free and open feeling around his midsection. His bright yellow BOT-Body muscle-tee, which had seemed of adequate length in the locker room, had now bunched up around his shoulders, the fleshy folds of his contorted neck pinching and holding the fabric so that the hem of the shirt had risen to expose his navel like a small puckered lifeboat floating in a pallid, swelling sea.
In his position, face mashed up against the underside of the diving board, eyes directed out across the water to receive the incredulous stares of nearly a dozen dripping aqua enthusiasts, Hollis could not have seen his blue, lycra, hip-hugging BOT-Body short-shorts, even if he had wanted to see them. From the shoulders down, his body was cantilevered slightly behind and away from his head, as though his feet harbored secret hopes of reaching back for the edge of the pool, a good twelve feet away. As if they were magnets, pulling for true North.
Now that his shirt had retreated for higher ground, Hollis was intensely conscious of every inch of personal real estate between his exposed belly button and the middle of his thighs, all of which was now shamelessly on display. He could not see his shorts, but he could feel them. They felt too tight and too small, gripping him like a child’s glove. He should have tried them on at the store. His equipment felt … pyramidal. Like his genitals had been structurally reinforced or cast in bronze. Quite obviously, BOT-Body shorts were functionally incompatible with Peter-Built jocks. It was like stretching a thin blue nylon tarp over the Eiffel Tower. It seemed, suddenly, so obvious. But the little pixie at the Athletics Emporium had neglected to clue him in on issues of compatibility – had let him mix and match with reckless abandon – and now here he was, twisting and bending in the air like a priapic weather vane.
The fat boy shrieked girlishly and there was a slap and a splash. The little puckered lifeboat and the pallid sea and the yellow muscle tee were all suddenly wet.
Hollis twisted his body counterclockwise in repeated violent thrusts until his right elbow cleared the end corner of the board. His body slipped dramatically, legs flailing as his weight redistributed itself unevenly between his left hand and his right forearm, the latter having only elastic skin-friction to compensate for a lack of fingers. He let go of the board with his left hand and grabbed the opposite side sending his body swinging wildly in the opposite direction. His right hand found the right edge of the board just as forearm was giving up the fight.
The pool was now behind him. She was now behind him. He was finally in platform pull position. His cheek felt like it had been sand blasted. His neck felt broken. The muscles in his arms and hands were liquid fire. He knew he did not have a set of fifty, or even ten, platform pulls in him. Maybe five, and he was beginning to doubt that he could put his chin on the shelf like a cup of goddamned tea for even two of those. But whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it now before his strength was gone. He pulled, flexing his back and his arms with the memory his muscles had never abandoned.
When his eyes cleared the top of the diving board, Hollis was prepared to settle for a sense of relief, leaving triumph for another day. He was not, however, prepared for the ant’s-eye view of a large boy in lime green trunks inches from stepping on his face.
He might have simply let go, succumbing to exhaustion and gravity. But muscle memory was firmly in control. He had not completed the platform pull and he did not want Coach Davis to blow the whistle and assign him another set of ten. Instead, as the giant lumbering preadolescent separated from the diving board in his last step to the end, Hollis began to re-extend his arms to their full length, lowering his head from view. He felt the end of the board beneath his fingers bend sharply down. His toes nearly touched the water. Just as rapidly, the board began ascending and his body rose again as though he was weightless. The upward momentum caused an unsettling and unfortunate feeling in his stomach. Unsettling because flying is alien to our nature. Unfortunate because it was this feeling that convinced Hollis it was finally time to let go of the board.
Even as Hollis dropped his arms, his body continued to rise. The tip of the diving board, having reached the limits of its engineered camber, returned inevitably toward the pool, spanking Hollis sharply on the top of his head on its way down and bringing an abrupt end to his own upward trajectory.
He hit the pool, feet first, eyes closed and limp, holding the top of his head. As the water enveloped his ears, he perceived sounds of anguish, which he knew to be his own thoughts, screaming expletives from inside his own brain. He let himself sink. He was not in danger of losing consciousness, but his head was spinning and he was disoriented and he needed a moment to compose himself as the pain coalesced into an angry knot at the top of his skull. He kept his eyes closed and his hands on top of his head as he waited for his feet to reach the bottom.
But the bottom never came; at least, not the bottom he was expecting. What should have been smooth concrete beneath his feet, was soft and rubbery like a submerged pool toy, shifting and rolling and generally threatening his equilibrium. His descent came to an abrupt halt, the strangely inflatable, insubstantial floor absorbing his weight. Hollis pushed off forcefully for the surface.
He broke above the water, back into the cavern of bouncing sound, with his eyes closed and one hand on his head, the other hand already reaching blindly for the edge. He kicked until he found it.
He opened his eyes. The fat boy was just hoisting himself out of the water.
“I didn’t do anything!” he was protesting. The three white-capped eggbeaters were also scrambling out of the water
The girl surfaced seconds later about five feet away from him. Thrashing. Screaming. Crying. Coughing. Gasping between words.
“I … can’t … breathe! I … can’t … breathe!”
“Shawna?!” One of the eggbeaters was yelling. Come to the edge, baby! Swim!”
“I … can’t … breathe! Mom!”
>
“Swim this way! What happened?! This way, Shawna!”
“He… he… he” the girl sputtered, trying to swim and cry and breathe and point at Hollis all at the same time. “He jumped on my back!”
“Who? Your brother?”
“No! Him! He…he…he jumped on my bottom and pushed me down to … he jumped on my bottom and stood on me. He stood on me on the bottom of the pool!”
It took a moment for Hollis to put everything together. It did not help that he was largely preoccupied with whether his head would explode before it fell off of his neck entirely. People all around the pool were walking briskly for the place where the eggbeaters had gathered to haul sobbing Shawna out of the water. Her brother pounded around the end of the pool past him, steering a ridiculously wide berth as though Hollis might reach out and grab his ankle and drag him into the water to eat him.
A buff, mustachioed man in white button-down shirt burst through the door and hustled over to the side of the pool just in time to help pull the girl out of the water. She was fine, of course. Scared and hysterical maybe, but fine. Her little operatic lungs were working just terrifically. There was certainly nothing wrong with her respiration.
Still clinging to the side of the pool, Hollis could see the girl telling her story. She pointed to her brother and to the diving board and then to Hollis and then to the bottom of the pool. Her words came in small convulsions and hiccups of distress. She was nine or ten years old, Hollis decided, maybe a young eleven. Her mother gave her a hug and patted her on the back and told her she was alright. But she was not alright, or she did not want to be alright, and there was another round of tearful apoplexy. Mother eggbeater spoke intensely to the man in the mustache, pointing over to Hollis.
Hollis knew he needed to express his concern and to plead his innocence. He let go of the pool edge and kicked off across the water in the direction of the gathering. Mr. Mustache put two fingers in is mouth and whistled and caught Hollis’ attention. The man pointed and directed Hollis back to where he had been. Hollis complied and the man met him at the edge.
