The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  “I’ll have to swim up there. I don’t have a car.”

  “I’ll pick you up or send a cab. Where you going to live?”

  “I’ve no idea. I’ll get a room.”

  “I like the way you talk. You don’t talk snotty like boys I know. Make sure you get a room in a nice neighborhood.”

  He deduced that she was a rich girl and he had only met a few and found them otherworldly.

  “I’ve never felt in danger.”

  “You have knuckles but they have guns downtown.”

  At dinner the other two girls acted catty that Emily had snared this available male. She enjoyed feeding him lots of small bites of rare roast beef and French potato salad that his jaw allowed. The bathroom mirror had revealed an appallingly purple cheek which made him think he would call the oncologist’s friend.

  It was just at dawn, 4:30 a.m., and he was hearing the first warbler when Emily covered him again. She certainly was eager but he was anxious to get started in order to get there before dark.

  “I’m a little sore,” she whispered.

  “Not my fault,” he joked.

  “Asshole,” she hissed.

  In the kitchen he gathered his stuff and drank a quart of milk. Oddly you could get dehydrated while swimming. It was a warmish dawn with calm seas on Lake Michigan. Emily waded in in her nightie and kissed him good-bye. She had engraved her cell number on his forearm deeply with a ballpoint pen. Though it was late he was feeling a tinge of guilt about Laurie back home but then what do you do when a lovely girl steps into the shower with you. He and Laurie had been close for seven years, since the fourth grade. Her parents, the mighty Frank and frowsy Barbara, were snobs and favored the son of a privately wealthy physician, Isaac, who was headed for Yale in the fall. The doctor was Frank’s partner in the pathetic wine business. Laurie’s conversation tended to be dominated by stories of her father’s bullying rages. Now in the water swimming south he waited for the rhythm of his strokes to disperse the embarrassing images of Laurie and Emily whirling together as if one couldn’t tell them apart which wasn’t fair to either he thought. So often Laurie was morose about her parents that it was hard to be with normal young people. To Thad, her father Frank was an all-out loudmouthed bully who had portrayed himself as having been a football hero at Notre Dame. How much was true no one seemed to know. He was very large and had played defensive end. It occurred to Thad that there were other examples in town and when he had asked his dad about it his dad had said Texas was full of “loudmouthed assholes” of that origin. He said that he and his oil roustabout friends liked to kick the asses of these college jerks in bars. In truth his family had come from a failed small ranch in the Panhandle and he and his brothers had moved to the oil fields. They were lanky and strong but purposefully soft-spoken. Early on he had taught Thad counterpunching and the loose chokehold to avoid bullying. A crisis had been Frank beating his wife on the butt with a board for ordering too many things from catalogs, which so humiliated her mother that she wouldn’t leave her room for three weeks. This was nearly inconceivable to Thad and made Laurie weepy and maudlin, but when asked why her mother didn’t leave him she couldn’t speculate other than she loved her home, a virtual mansion that Thad thought looked silly.

  He had underestimated his time and distance and still had quite a ways to go at twilight when the lights of Chicago sparkled to the south. He swam to shore and was lucky enough to find a smoldering beach fire that he stoked and a damp blanket he held up to dry out a bit. He recalled that recently while watching boxing with his father he had said authoritatively that champions never screw the day before a fight and he didn’t care to tote up how many times he and Emily had gone at it. He gummed at some soft cheese and bread from his pack despite the strong twinge in his jaw. He didn’t dare chance a pain pill because of its normally soporific effects. He slept hard and was back in the water before daylight. South of Gary he swam over the top of a huge ore freighter wash which was similar to an ocean comber. He was close enough to see clearly men on the freighter’s deck. He waved but they didn’t notice him. He was also alert to swim counter to the growing boat traffic and their fatal props. By noon he could see the Sears Tower clearly and was amazed at the plane traffic using O’Hare.

  By midafternoon he wobbily hauled himself up a rusty iron ladder at Meigs Field, the island airport. He slumped to the very warm cement facedown to absorb some heat for his cold body. It was only minutes before he looked up and saw a security car with flashing lights headed toward him. It stopped with the front tires not that far from his head. He heard a voice.

  “Are you dead?”

  “Apparently not,” he answered. “I swam down from Muskegon in the last couple days.”

  “Oh bullshit!”

  “Okay, I walked on water!”

  “You can’t nap here. This is an airport.”

  “I’m looking for a room to rent.”

  “Here?”

  “In Chicago. A few blocks from the beach.”

  “My sister’s got a spare room up on Astor. A little expensive. For gentlemen only. You’re not a faggot?”

  “Apparently not. Isn’t that impolite?”

  “Sorry. The room is forty dollars a week.”

  “That’s doable.” Thad was thinking of the wad of cash Frank had passed him plus he had been saving for a trip to see the Pacific Ocean.

  He felt more than a tinge of anxiety getting up from the warm secure cement. Why couldn’t he stay there? His father had made much of his minimal ambitions: wanting to swim in the Pacific, planning to swim around Manhattan Island, Japan to the mainland, Havana to Key West, a project which others had failed at. But just why was he here other than the wonderful water between where he was up in Michigan and Chicago? He could not dismiss the hollowness in his stomach that stood for timidity or even fear. Chicago looked too large and unpleasant, much more so than Washington, D.C., or New York City both of which he had hitchhiked to the year before just to see what they looked like in real life, including the hole in the ground that was 9/11. He had long since recognized the wide stretch of sheer daffiness in his own character, including what his father called “tempting fate.” He could have called Laurie rather than making the forbidden stop while swimming. Frank had warned him that he would “kick his ass” if he tried to visit Laurie who would have met him anywhere. He had his jaw to pay for that stupidity.

  He slipped on trousers and a shirt from his fanny pack and off he went to look for a room halfway across town with the security officer named Bud thinking of his water babies back home. Did they need his protection? Did he need his own protection? Probably. The Astor neighborhood looked too expensive but the house was splendid with a big flower garden in the backyard. The meeting went well with a load of eccentric rules. No girls in the room unless related or you’re at least engaged. No hot plates. Coffeepot always going in kitchen. Any help in yard deducted from rent. She was a hefty woman who said he was a “cutie.” Lake Michigan was only a few blocks to the north. Her name was Willa and she had a slightly Irish accent. He paid several weeks ahead and when asked said he had no luggage because he had swum down from Muskegon. Her eyes widened and she said a distant cousin had swum the English Channel and had won an Olympic medal. His room had an outside door to the garden. He said good-bye and thank you to Bud then dozed on the spacious bed while reading a typed sheet which held the closest restaurants and places of worship. He still felt a specific hollowness in his stomach and brooded about both Laurie and Emily. He was going to have to bite the bullet and buy his first cell phone. He was the only one his age, seventeen, who didn’t have one. This was a matter of pride and snobbery and wanting to save what money he earned for his future dreams. But now for reasons of loneliness he wanted to call both Emily and Laurie and he owed his mother a call of explanation. She was used to disappearances of a couple of days but this was pu
shing it. And who knows what problems Frank would cause. He had looked at the inception of the cell phone like his father had that of the Hula-Hoop and the Frisbee.

  He took a shower and then a walk toward the business district. He bought a couple of Chicago Cubs T-shirts and then, feeling intimidated, walked into a cell phone store. However there was a pleasant young Mexican girl who walked him through the paces and he bought the simplest prepaid model with a hundred minutes, walked down the street, and sat on a park bench. First was Mother who was pissed off when he said he was in Chicago. She said she needed help on the farm because his father had gone on a rampage. Someone had slashed his tires at the tavern and he suspected it was Friendly Frank’s crew of mechanics. He said lamely, “I can’t stay there forever, I have to seek my fortune,” at which point she hung up. He then called Laurie which began unsatisfactorily because both she and her father were in the kitchen and she pretended she was talking to her friend Lisa. He said he was okay but also told her the tire-slashing story and she said, “Shit, that’s awful” and yelled it out to her dad who escaped the kitchen. They were at a dead end so he hung up and called Emily who said that her father wanted to meet him. He could get Thad a job. They could have breakfast at the Drake tomorrow which was near his office. She had told him that her father had grown up on a big farm in eastern Kansas. Thad could see the Drake in the distance so stopped in a clothing store and bought a lightweight summer sport coat for a modest price. Emily was working for her father for the summer so they agreed to meet at 5 p.m.

  Thad was now in a bit of a turmoil. There is an easygoing arrogance in seventeen-year-olds. They are either absurdly self-confident or involved in a withered state of mind. Now Thad was in between. He was out in the world wisely out of range of Friendly Frank and seeing what the actual world looked like, albeit a little bit prematurely. There was a bit of tentative trembling, the shuddering elevator that life presents without quite enough emotional scar tissue to solidify him. There was an unimaginable number of people on the streets which did not have a calming influence. The feeling was similar to the collective sensations between late fall and early spring when he couldn’t swim because of the cold. He’d spend days walking up and down the river staring at it, enjoying the families of otters he saw occasionally with their crazy chatter and squeaks and their great speed in the water.

  Now on the park bench he wondered if all water babies were born in spring because they certainly couldn’t endure midwinter. He was furious at Frank for driving him from the sacred place which he had to return to or die trying which was not out of the question. He sat there mute and a little despondent before the vast sweep of traffic, human and vehicular, the broad snake of cars heading north to where Emily lived. What was he doing here? Good question. He suddenly felt as if he was watching a goofy rerun of Twilight Zone which his father liked but he largely ignored. Who else among this man swarm had seen a water baby much less touched one lightly? He supposed that this somehow set him apart. Should he have stayed with them or was he justified in having fled? Perhaps this race of creatures had lasted forever and was good at it. He had never believed in ghosts, spirits, God or gods, except what Tooth had told him and they seemed to belong to her people. Once as a boy he had camped some after Tooth’s teenage daughter had died in an auto accident with a drunk boy. All night in her dreams Tooth called out to her daughter in the tent. It had been raining lightly and at dawn Thad, who was only ten at the time, was sure he had seen Tooth’s daughter standing out in the rain staring at him through the open tent flap. He told Tooth and she wailed and wailed singing her daughter’s death song. Another strange thing happened when he was thirteen and hunting ruffed grouse to eat with a friend. The friend who was a nitwit shot a large male raven with a shotgun. The raven fell wounded in the river and Thad thought it was staring at him accusatorily so he impulsively dove in the river and retrieved it. He held the raven in his arms until it shuddered into death, and he had also shuddered as it stared at him until it died. He told his friend never to mention the matter under the threat of pain. Thad’s dog Mutt was used to digging holes for dead creatures he found and dug a hole for the raven. Tooth claimed that the souls of dead infants entered birds and maybe the raven had entered him? He only saw its eyes when he was swimming far underwater. Thad was the ace junior naturalist of the school system and his oldest and best teacher had advised him not to say things were impossible in a universe with ninety billion galaxies. Einstein had said that it’s not for scientists to drill holes in a thin piece of board. All mysteries must be explored. Thad loved to read about the inconceivability of some bird migrations. One altruistic species flew twelve thousand miles without stopping. His mother thought the greatest human miracle was Mozart, about which he had no opinion. He preferred the outside and a warbler that landed on his knee in May while he was sitting, perhaps back from the Bahamas to northern Michigan.

  He sat there in his own alien stiffness and felt an itch to swim on seeing the blue lakeshore in the distance but then it was time to meet Emily. Still a block away, he could see her under the Drake’s canopy talking to a bellhop among the sparse arriving cabs and limos. When he reached them she turned with delight.

  “Lee, this is Thad. Help him out if he needs it but don’t introduce him to any women. He’s mine.”

  “Of course, Emily.”

  Thad felt like a clod, an ungainly farm boy, walking past the immense arrangement of flowers in the lobby of the Drake and into the elegant elevator. “Dad keeps these rooms for business reasons,” Emily said as if no one else were in the elevator. “Mom thinks otherwise.” She laughed. “Her ancestors were Boston Puritans which means they traded in spices, whales, and slaves. Her nose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Her relatives went to Harvard and Yale and Dad went to Kansas State.” When they entered the moderately large suite Emily threw herself on the big bed, opened her legs, and beckoned him.

  “Not in your father’s room,” he said.

  “Chicken shit,” she hissed, “then where?” She got up and went to the living room and took little opera glasses from her purse and aimed them at the street. “Look, he’s standing by the door talking to a politician we support. We bought him a fucking Escalade.” He was standing right behind her and she wiggled her butt into his crotch which he couldn’t resist and he lifted the skirt of her business suit and she pulled down her panties. In like Flynn, there was a knock on the door and a voice calling “room service.” He was out, her skirt fell, and the door opened.

  “A snack your dad sent up,” a black waiter announced, “a white burgundy and lump crabmeat, your favorite, and your dad’s bourbon. He’ll be up shortly.”

  “Thanks, Harold,” Emily said touching his arm.

  Harold glanced at Thad with a trace of “you lucky white prick” and left.

  Emily quickly bent over the sofa so they could finish. Thad felt pleased but jangled. He had intermittently been thinking of his grandpa and a curious deathbed scene where he and his mother sat up all night as Grandpa was fading. His old friend the country doctor had been there a couple hours the evening before but then Tooth took him back across the river. When Tooth returned she sat in a straight-back chair against the wall near Grandpa’s head. Everyone knew they had been lovers for years. A half dozen miles east into the woods Grandpa and Tooth had a deer hunting cabin. They waited for snow in mid-November and hauled the meat onto a toboggan. The doctor had left in the evening when Grandpa had said, “Please let me go.” His heart was fluttery like a wounded sparrow’s and he thought such panic was inappropriate for one saying farewell to the beautiful earth. From his windows he saw the frost-yellowed willows bordering the river. He told Thad over and over, also his mother, not to spend their lives working as hard as he had. Like his father Thaddeus, Grandpa felt that twelve hours was a proper workday, longer in the summer when the available light would allow it. He was a gnarled mass of arthritic muscle known all his life for
his strength as certain men are in rural areas where such talent is of actual value. Grandpa was the only member of the family who was all-out enthused by Thad’s swimming and they also fly-fished for brown trout in the river a great deal. For his parents Thad was expected to go to a nearby lake for wonderful-eating perch and bluegills which his parents preferred over trout.

  Thad sat there on the sofa in the suite rather glumly nibbling on the crabmeat and sipping the wines which were both delicious, a tad depleted from the sex, but reviving as Emily showed him a tiny incision scar from a knee operation. Her skin was slightly olive because she said she had been adopted from a Chicago Italian from Friuli. His glumness came from the idea that the suite must cost as much or much more than their farm must make in a day but then he had read so much about the financial misbalance of the culture he was nauseated. Obviously the suite cost more than the farm made in a day despite their brutally hard work.

  He slid back into his consciousness, his hand on ­Emily’s. He was spooked by the fundamental change in his view of life made by seeing the water babies sipping the polliwogs in the pond. The world, simply enough, wasn’t the same place it had been previous to that date.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Emily said refilling his wineglass when he could have used the glass of bourbon waiting for her father, he was that disjointed.

  “When I was little, before kindergarten, I wore a leather harness so I wouldn’t drown in a little spring pond behind the farmhouse. One day Grandpa became superstitious when he saw me cuddled with a baby beaver in the grass near some cattails with the ordinarily wary mother beaver swimming by close to her child unconcerned. Tooth calmed Grandpa down saying it wasn’t that odd while Grandpa worried that they were losing his grandson to the animal world. A few months later when my mother was picking blackberries for jam she saw little me walking along the riverbank with a bear and stopping to roll and wrestle followed by the big sow mother. My mother shrieked in fear and then the she-cub alarmed rolled down the bank into the river. I went in after it and handed it back wet. The sow nipped me for carelessness growling in anger. I swam across the river to my mother who had wondered why my pant legs had been torn lately. Playing with a bear cub Grandpa was worried about the sow but knew if he shot it the cub would die in the coming winter. Tooth said leave them all alone. She had made friends with a cub and they were still friends fourteen years later. A bear will let you know when it’s pissed by its eyes and a growl. You don’t approach them, you let them approach you. Creatures want companionship but on their own terms so I was warned rather than forbidden contact.”