The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  Paris became overly warm, nearly sweltering in the afternoon, so they got up very early to walk though most of the time Thad walked down to a kiosk for the Herald Tribune for Emily and walked by himself, always over to the Luxembourg Gardens for a natural world fix. At 10 a.m. when it opened Emily could manage the museum straight down the street to the river. Thad was amazed at the difference between seeing the actual painting rather than a print out of an art book. It was almost uncomfortable walking around a corner in the museum and there was an actual van Gogh. When they got home, had a modest picnic, made love, and peeled their bodies apart in the heat, he shyly admitted to her that he was thinking of learning to be a painter. It seemed to go with swimming. She liked this because she had no idea what he could ultimately do with swimming. Not that he needed to win her trust but she deeply sensed his suspicion of wealth in general. Since she was born with it she barely noticed it. When she was little they went to San Francisco on a private railroad car.

  The very next day Paris was a hundred degrees and she hastily bought train tickets for Marseilles and made some hotel reservation calls. Thad loved the TGV ride of over 150 mph, and all of the views of hills, farms, vineyards, the Rhône River. He was curious about the city of Lyon but she couldn’t help much having only been there once with her father on business. She said her dad had said it was the best eating town in France and the agriculture capital. Thad made a mental note to swim through the town at some point, also to run up the steep hill for no particular reason.

  In Marseilles they took a local train and rented a car in Arles, driving to the Nord-Pinus, a hotel in the city square where Emily had once stayed with her parents. Thad liked it because their room was so large compared to apartment rooms. In the relative cool of the evening they walked the few blocks down to the colosseum which was about two thousand years old and still in use for bullfights. In the middle of the arena two cats were making love and a group of young French students cheered them on. They had a light dinner at Le Galoubet and a long difficult evening in the room.

  “I don’t think you want to marry me” is how it began.

  “I’m almost eighteen and you’re nineteen, which seems to be jumping the gun,” is how he responded, a slight knot in his throat. He called the desk and ordered a double vodka on ice because Emily poured herself a glass of wine from a bottle she had packed in her satchel. It was a sixty-dollar bottle and he admitted to himself it was delicious. Why does the good stuff have to be so expensive? A stupid question probably. Things didn’t go well. The two vodkas made him argumentative. Out of the blue he said dramatically that he hoped to die alone in a small log cabin on a river. She broke into tears. It is a terrible thing when one’s love far exceeds the other’s. There was no way to comfort her. She was inconsolable. He had done violence to her fantasy life which clearly included him. He sat down at the window hearing her sniffling behind him. He viewed early marriage as banal as swimming the English Channel. He felt an absurd agitation. You go on vacation and end up sitting looking out the window. Her pillow actually became wet with tears. He finally couldn’t resist her rump in its summer skirt and making love slowed but didn’t abolish the tears. She said, “All I want to do is take care of you,” to which he couldn’t respond. It made him miss the caustic aspects of Laurie’s character, an extended schoolboy crush her father had destroyed. Girls readily ignored the spirit of adventure biologically invested in young males. He adored Emily but doubted that this constituted enduring love. There was a world out there to swim through.

  Close after a warm dawn they left the hotel, surprised how few French get up early. Armed with maps they made their way south. He swam across the mouth of the Rhône and back, drying off with a hotel towel. He was totally intoxicated with the Camargue and its virtual explosion of the natural. They hugged the Mediterranean heading west. Thad studied the thousands of birds through Emily’s opera glasses. He couldn’t have imagined this place with his preconceptions of Europe. They stopped on the road and watched a group of cowboys on white and gray horses with long poles with sharp points chasing a herd of cattle. Emily quickly figured out that the cattle were fighting bulls. One charged the sturdy fence where Thad stood. The anger of the bull made him feel good, bellowing, blowing snot, red-eyed, and obviously wanting to kill him. It exhilarated him as did the vast expanse of pasture, much of it subirrigated so that they were running through shallow water flushing birds. He swam all day while Emily sunbathed and read a Swedish mystery which seemed to hope to make up for the fact that not much happens there. Thad saw this as a good thing and hoped to swim in Sweden someday late in a summer when presumably the water would be warm enough. He loved those aerial photos of fjords. Meanwhile his intoxication with the estuarine area made him giddy. Should he ever become a hydrologist he hoped to visit all of the great estuarine areas of the world. Their fertility of life was miraculous, the gift of water.

  They found a little restaurant on the edge of an actual garden for lunch and at one table a dark man was playing guitar hauntingly. With her rudimentary French Emily found out from the waitress that the man was a gitane, a local Gypsy, and he was playing his people’s music which Thad thought was overwhelmingly beautiful, so much so that he felt teary. He held Emily’s hand. She was also overcome and he reminded himself that Emily could get him around to all the many estuarine areas on earth. Did it have to be a question of virtual captivity? If you are not jealous of your freedom who will be for you?

  They drove farther west toward Montpellier along the coast and Thad had a long swim in the Mediterranean itself. Afterward Emily explained that train travel tended to span out like a wheel from Paris and lateral movement tended to be more limited. If they wanted to see both the Guadalquivir and the Loire on this trip they’d have to do some driving rather than just take the train. That was fine by him.

  They returned to Arles fairly exhausted for one more night, a brief dinner at Le Galoubet, and a night of vivid dreams about death. He got up for a glass of water and watched a drunk stumble across the town square making a moaning sound. In periods of extreme loneliness we don’t know a thing about life and death and the reality of water consoles us. In school he had long thought that history, the study of it, was an instrument of terror. Reading about either the American Indians or slaves can make you physically ill. He wanted a life as free as possible from other people, thus simply staying on the island was tempting. The possibility of stopping people from doing what they do to other people seemed out of the question. Congressmen die in bed.

  In the clear light of morning with cool heads it seemed best to go to the Loire first, stopping in Saumur for Emily to see the horses, Thad to swim the river, then fly to the Guadalquivir from Lyon to Seville. Emily was a good driver and he liked staring out the window and dozing, sometimes jerked alert by his water babies, the primary fact of his life whether he wished to admit it or not. It seemed comic to him that people desire miracles but when they get them it adds an extremely confusing element to life. Maybe Lazarus didn’t want to come back to life.

  They reached Saumur in time for the scheduled horse event which pleased Emily. It was a strange kind of formation riding, very skilled, with lines of the horses weaving in and out of each other. Saumur is a military college and the riders redefined stiffness except they would jump the horses very high without stirrups and Thad was aware of the level of difficulty which was way up there. The horses and riders seemed to genuinely like each other which was critical. When he was a boy his mother who was drastically allergic to dogs bought him a small horse, really a pony, who acted like a dog, sleeping in the yard. Each morning when he awoke at dawn the horse was looking in the window and he reached out and petted it which the horse obviously liked. They’d hike around the island together and the horse who hated its saddle loved to be ridden bareback. Naturally it liked to swim and the curious feeling of swimming while riding the back of a horse stuck with him.

  After the Sau
mur horse event they drove down the Loire and checked into lavish rooms at the Le Prieuré ­Château-Hôtel in Chenehutte-les-Tuffeaux on a hill above the Loire. Thad was tempted to hike in the forest surrounding the hotel but on the parapet in front he was pulled by the river. On the way from Saumur they had a near miss with a Land Rover towing a speedboat. Thad guessed that the driver was drunk. They checked in and Emily asked about swimming. “Madame, there are no beaches in the area,” the desk clerk responded.

  Emily did a pantomime of driving and pointed to Thad. The desk clerk gave him an appraising eye as if he was nuts. Out the window you could see the Loire far below and she drew a little map. Thad was anxious to get in the water so they didn’t take time to unpack.

  Down on the edge of the river Emily could see the Land Rover launching the speedboat a hundred yards upstream and had the icy feeling she always had around drunks. It took off passing too close to a fisherman who shook his fist and shouted. Thad stripped and dove in heading toward the river’s middle in broad strokes. It was a warmish noon and Emily felt drowsy. She craned her neck and could see some hotel employees watching the crazy Americans from the parapet high above them.

  It didn’t take long. Accidents never do. There is a stop-time, slow-motion aspect to them whether it is automobiles colliding or airplanes falling from the sky or collisions on a football field that cause severe injuries. The speedboat was roaring at high speed in wide circles. Thad saw it heading toward him and so did Emily who pointlessly screamed. Thad rose up in the water and waved his arms but evidently wasn’t seen. The boat struck his body head-on with a horrifying thud and the two girls aboard began screaming and there was a scream from far up on the parapet of the hotel. The boat turned around and headed toward Thad in the water, hitting him in the head. More screams from the girls onboard. One grabbed his hair and they towed him ashore where Emily was running down the brambly bank. The angry fisherman was on his cell phone. Thad was in a dream state thinking he might have seen a water baby in the Loire. He was vomiting blood profusely because the bow of the boat had hit him in the middle of the chest. The blood felt hot and sticky on his chest and Emily knelt beside him. Now the fisherman was there and holding up Thad’s shoulders so he wouldn’t drown on his own blood. The desk clerk from the hotel arrived and yelled “vite!” into the cell phone. The two men manning the speedboat wandered toward their car and took off leaving their passengers behind. The green grass around Thad was wet with red blood. Emily was a mess from hugging him and then there was some dead time with Thad gurgling, the passengers sobbing. The ambulance finally arrived and the attendants’ main worry was Thad’s heart might be being compressed by his fractured ribs. Thad was unconscious and Emily was sure he was dead until he moaned loudly while being loaded. She rode in the ambulance and made a hysterical call to her father. At the small hospital in Saumur a military doctor determined that the injuries were too grave to be treated locally and included five fractured ribs, a burst spleen, a broken back, a slight skull fracture from when the boat rescued him and hit his head. Late that evening when he was somewhat stabilized a helicopter took him up to Lyon, partly because John Scott had made calls and with his connections the embassy asserted the best place for the time being to treat Thad was Lyon. Thad had lapsed into unconsciousness for a while but was awake when he reached Lyon where the first medical process was to relieve pressure on his heart. John Scott arrived in Lyon the next day with a consul of the government and the plan was perhaps five more days in Lyon and then a hospital jet would fly Thad to Grand Rapids, Michigan, an obvious advantage to having lots of money.

  On the interior, this is the kind of injury that makes you think your life is over. He developed pneumonia and his frenzied and fevered nights were haunted by the water babies and severe chest pain. He was flown to Grand Rapids the last week of August and was home at the farm, physically a ghost of himself, in mid-September.

  On a warm day in late September his mother, Tooth, Dove, Emily, and Laurie helped him down the island to the water baby pond. They packed sandwiches and sat there on the bank on a day that was simply glittery and clear though a storm out of the west was predicted, the first Alberta Clipper that came out of the Northwest in the fall. He had been having a modest quarrel with Emily, insisting she should go back to Sarah Lawrence for the fall term. He obviously had plenty of caretakers.

  The women left him at the pond, a mistake, and went back to the farm to pick the remains of the bounteous tomato crop before the predicted frost that would come after the windstorm. The girls would return for him in the afternoon.

  He sat there staring into the pond and was delighted when a water baby rounded for air and then one stuck its face out of the water and stared at him, swirling in what he believed was a greeting. He had spent a great deal of time pondering suicide because of the pain and the fact that his life was in shambles. The athletic scholarship would be withdrawn from the University of Michigan. He had his grandpa’s .38 caliber pistol hidden in his room but he finally couldn’t bear to bring his mother grief. He couldn’t bear his big collection of pain pills because they made him feel loopy and lifeless. Pain itself was better than those. So he drifted with the pain, feeling also the maddening itch between his partial chest cast the doctor had somewhat reduced in size to help his mobility. Now that it was apparent that he would live and could walk however haltingly he hoped to go back to Lyon to see his main nurse. She was a farm girl just as he was a farm boy and they had talked in his fractional French and her pathetic English and when he left they kissed. In the French hospital Emily became the sister he never had. He didn’t know what to do about it but any sense of romance was absent. Since he was brought home he drifted far from the improbable accident to the future, which had become inconsequential, to the past that was equally so to the present, moment by moment, which utterly seized him. He suspected it might have been caused by the head blow but the merest filament of reality seemed to be livid and glittered.

  The pond beckoned him though he knew if the chest cast got wet the cast would disintegrate. He suddenly was bored by all things medical what with being overexposed. Sitting there he suddenly tipped over gently and rolled into the water. Being enveloped by water for the first time in a month utterly delighted him.

  There were thirteen to be exact. They smothered around his head and shoulders, kissing him, poking at his chest cast with curiosity, then pushing him toward the channel exit to the river from the pond. It occurred to him that they might have been waiting to migrate thinking he might wish to join them. Why stay here in the winter when the pond might freeze to the bottom like many bodies of shallow water in northern Michigan?

  They drifted along the bottom as if getting to know each other again but he was being pulled decidedly toward the channel exit. He knew it was wrong, that in a short time all of the women, including his mother, would return to guide his crippled body back home. But he couldn’t resist these otherworldly creatures any more than early disciples could resist Jesus in favor of supporting their families. When he was in critical care in Lyon the possibility of death became less then alarming. You sense that death is possibly near and on more than one occasion his farm girl nurse shook him awake. He had a trace of sepsis, blood poisoning, that the doctors thought came from the river water mixed with the severity of his injury. Sepsis is often fatal but his body was young and vital.

  Now he was thinking a sense of mortality was pervasive in the natural world. Is the inevitability somehow in the blood to the point that animals don’t bother thinking about it or fearing it? Years ago an old neighbor lady asked him to put down the very old sick dog she owned and the dog’s eyes seemed to comprehend the nature of the discussion. Farm families extinguished their own animals rather than going through the expense of a veterinarian. Thad had gone on walks for years with this dog. Whenever he passed the house the dog would run out and greet him from its lair under the porch then trot with him along the river or into
the forest. But when he looked the dog in the eyes the pistol in his coat pocket seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He simply couldn’t be the dog’s exit from Earth. They walked to town with the dog tottering along and for long stretches Thad carried it. He used his own money at the vet’s, an exorbitant amount, he thought, fifty dollars of money he had earned at fifty cents an hour. He carried the dog back to the old woman in a black plastic sack and buried the dog in a flower bed because her name was Flower. Thad’s mother was allergic to dogs so he never got to own one. The question was whether on the long walk to town if the dog had any idea what was going to happen to it? It had seemed particularly merry that day, by extension maybe they understand death better than we, a sense of beginning, middle, and end which they regard with passionless aplomb. It was all sedate as the migration the water babies seemed urged toward. Or maybe they were taking him to the veterinarian he thought with a smidgen of paranoia.