Olympia

by Dennis Bock

  After about three hours, the boys began filtering up from the creek onto the bridge. One of them still had a live fish stuck to the end of his hockey stick, flapping sadly against the rain.

  I held my breath and looked down through the water and counted the drowning worms as they nosed their way along the bottom. When I raised my head again Alicia was balancing the other umbrella on top of the silver railing of the diving board. The red fabric domed over their heads. I relaxed again and looked down. The tinted goggles turned the dew worms’ dying motions a warm soft pink. All around me, the surface stuccoed with rain. When I floated face down, I felt its little fingers drumming hard against my back. I looked up and caught my breath. “Think this’ll last?” It sounded like I was talking about Ruby’s leukemia. “The rain,” I said, correcting myself.

  It’ll clear for sure. That’s what we’d all said the day we discovered she was sick, as if it was a question of filtering skunky water from a swimming pool. She sat under the beach umbrella with her knees tucked into her chest. My eyes were the same level as her feet. Five years without recurrence was considered complete remission. She’d been in remission under a year. But the doctors said her progress was remarkable. She was blessed. She seemed back to her old self. I watched her as she jumped up into another handstand under the overhang by the change rooms. Upside down, facing me, she held herself in position and smiled. Then she came back down and stretched her arms behind her and puffed out her chest like she’d done at the qualifying meet in Toronto.

  The trees around the pool drooped under the weight of rain, leaves turning a richer, darker spring green, the constant splashing playing on the surface of the water. A little boy, already soaked, appeared at the fence then and hooked his fingers into the mesh. For a time before he spoke, he watched the three of us intently.

  “Why are you in there?” he said.

  Months before, when Ruby had asked me why I wasn’t interested in breaking a swimming record, I told her that the Dead Man’s Float was a thinking man’s gig. We were sitting in the beanbag chair when I told her about my plans. I got up and turned off the TV. It was about endurance and hope, I said, not speed, and hope was something we’d learned while she was going through her treatment. There was all that time in the water to wonder about things while you waited for someone to rescue you, and there was no shortage of things to hope for in life. Especially now, after what she’d been through the last year and a half.

  “Only controlled proofing counts,” I’d said. “Harbour patrol pulling in a guy somewhere in the middle of the lake after three days is different. Verification is crucial.” I asked her if she wanted to be one of my spotters. “It’s for a good cause.”

  “What’s it for?” she said.

  “So you won’t get sick anymore.”

  Ruby helped me train that spring. Between the time I spent at the pool and going to class I looked for sponsors. I asked everyone at school for a dollar an hour, students and teachers. Most of them knew Ruby. By then they’d heard she’d been in hospital. My history teacher put herself down for five dollars an hour with the promise to double her pledge if I broke the record. Her son had died in a car accident two years before. After I’d asked just about everyone at school, I started knocking on doors around the neighbourhood and went to the two other Oakville high schools.

  After more than two months of organizing and pleading and scrounging, the Valley Park Public Outdoor Pool was the only pool in town willing to go along with my plan. Everyone else talked about liability. We couldn’t use our pool at home because there was some concern about neutrality. Plus, we’d never opened it before July. So I convinced the Valley Park people to throw open their doors one weekend ahead of schedule. At first they were reluctant. But my principal got involved and then someone told the March of Dimes that I wanted to raise some money for them and the Valley Park pool was shamed into opening early, as well as providing the services of the fat man with the whistle who left after only two hours.

  After the little boy had asked that question, Why was I in here? he lingered by the fence for a time, kicking idly at the muddy ground like he was waiting for me to invite him in. I imagined myself as he saw me. It was a little crazy, I knew, bobbing up and down like this in the rain. Floating like a cadaver. I looked over to Ruby skimming the surface of the water and thought about what she’d been through. I took a deep breath and hung my head between my shoulders. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the skimmer break the surface of the water; my sister’s fractured reflection standing up on the deck, peened by falling rain. The legs looked bent and crooked. I turned my head down to the bottom and tried to remember the time before spinal taps and chemo, before tufts of blonde hair had begun gathering on Ruby’s pillow every morning. When I came back up, the boys who’d been killing suckers were standing at the fence, sharpened hockey sticks tossed over their shoulders like rifles. One of them still had a fish on the end of his stick but it wasn’t wiggling anymore. The little boy was gone. They just stood there watching, silently punching each other in the shoulders.

  The rain fell all morning. After four hours it started to bother me. I started to notice it. When I pulled my face out of the water to breathe, it tickled my face as it dripped between my eyes and rolled off my nose. But it wasn’t affecting what I was doing. A warm rain, cooler than the pool, but warm enough. Alicia and Ruby had changed and were sitting, warm and dry, under the overhang where the official had read his newspaper before he left.

  At hour five, when I saw my father appear at the fence, I thought he’d come to get me. He held a large green garbage bag in his right hand. Ruby came out from under the soffit carrying an umbrella. I edged over to the side of the pool.

  “Opa’s doctor called. His lungs have flooded. Catch.” He tossed the bag over the fence to Ruby. “Some things your mother threw together. Warm clothes.” He put his hands in the mesh. “We’ve got to go to Kingston.” Then he stopped, considering. “Where’s Mr. Kowalchuk?” He meant the official.

  “Bathroom,” Ruby said before I could answer.

  “Here’s the number of the hospital in Kingston. Room 504.” He passed a piece of paper through the fence, then touched Ruby’s face with an extended finger. “Stay out of the rain, sweetie.”

  Then he called out to me, “Everything okay?” I could see he was worried about his dad. My grandfather was alone in Kingston, the old sailor, fading now. I imagined my father standing by his sickbed, the old hand in his, fragile, thin as his breathing. My father grinned at me sadly when I gave him the thumbs up, then disappeared around the side of the building.

  At suppertime, after I drank a couple of bottles of fruit juice and ate some granola bars and trail mix, the night shift came by to relieve Alicia and Ruby. Mike and Susan brought a guitar and a twelve-pack of Carlsberg. They carried a picnic table from around the side of the building and sat under the umbrella they’d hooked up to it, the two of them, drinking and playing and flicking beer caps at me.

  “Get outta here, you guys,” I said, shielding my head with an outstretched hand. “Stop it. Play ‘Like a Hurricane.’’’ The flood lamps were on now, casting a dome of light over the pool. After he drank his first beer, Mike started playing. I watched the rain come down in sheets against the glow of light. I’d been trying to conserve energy the whole time. By now I could tell for what. I was starting to feel it. I was just barely past the halfway mark. The water level of the pool had risen flush with the deck. As he tapped his foot along to the music, small splashes rolled towards me out to the centre of the pool. When he finished singing I asked Susan to go into the pool house and turn up the heater a touch. The water was slowly chilling.

  For each beer they drank, I finished a bottle of orange juice. At midnight, Alicia and Ruby came back from the house. The rain was still coming down. I thought they’d come to wish me luck for the night. But they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

&nbs
p; “For as long as it takes,” Alicia said, holding the umbrella between them.

  “But Susan and Mike’re here,” I said. “You can’t stay up all night.”

  “I called Mom and Dad. Opa’s okay. But they’re keeping him in the hospital overnight. I told them I was going to bed. They’ll be home tomorrow.”

  Ruby climbed up onto the picnic table with Alicia then and sat snugly under the big umbrella. Mike strummed again. I hovered all the while, bobbing up and down in the water a few feet from the edge.

  Ruby got up and walked into the change room and came back out a minute later in her bathing suit. She stood beside the pool for a second, her hand out to the falling rain. She was drenched before she touched the water.

  “You’re not allowed to come in.”

  “You heard the doctors,” she said. “Exercise. Anyway, it’s chlorinated.”

  Water rolled over the deck when she jumped in. She came back to the surface and went under for a second and came back up at an angle to pull the hair away from her eyes, then swam out to meet me. “No biggy. See,” she said. “I’m still alive.”

  Together we floated like the dead bobbing on a shipwrecked sea. Music from Mike’s guitar echoed down through the water. Ruby blurred in the light from above, arms outstretched. We peered for the bottom. After she ran out of breath she brought her head back up.

  “It’s like floating in space,” she said, panting.

  She dipped her head under again and her feet shot up into the air and immediately slid through a slit in the water. I held my breath and looked down. She kept herself against the bottom, arms moving sideways to help her lie flat on her back. She smiled up at me, floating above her in the full face of the cratering surface. Then she pushed back up for air.

  Just then a muted roar came up out of the darkness from the gully to the left above the bridge where the boys had been killing fish. Mike stopped playing.

  “Listen,” he said. “You can hear the river now.” He flicked a beer cap at me. “Not a good sign.”

  Empty bottles were piling up over the deck. The cardboard beer case was soaked through, swollen like a sponge. I wondered if the drains built into the deck could absorb the water spilling over the sides of the pool.

  “Check this out,” he said. He touched one of the empty beer bottles on the deck with his foot. It didn’t clank against the cement. It bobbed, turning slightly, and floated a few feet before it got stuck on something. “The whole park must be under a foot of water.”

  “I think it’s time you all got outta here,” I said. The clock showed sixteen hours proofed. “Only halfway to go now.” It was just past midnight.

  “We’re not leaving you here,” Susan said.

  “We couldn’t get wetter than we already are,” Ruby said, floating off my right elbow.

  “Isn’t it time you got out?” I said. “Look. It’s slowing down,” Alicia said.

  The surface of the pool extended beyond the deck and the fence. But it wasn’t bubbling with rain as it had earlier. It was still raining, but not like before.

  For the past hour I’d been feeling a slight current pulling me from the centre of the pool in the direction the beer bottles had been swept. I guessed Ruby was still strong enough not to notice it. Down at the bottom, the water was as quiet as it had been from the start. But the surface was moving towards Lake Ontario. I felt it as clearly as a wind moving over my face. In the light cast out by the flood lamps over the change-room entrances, water was curling around the cinder-block corners of the building, the stems of crabgrass vibrating lightly under the pressure of the swollen river.

  “It’s for a good cause,” Susan said. “I’m willing to stick it out.” We all looked at Ruby.

  She hung there beside me on the flooding surface like a drowning tree, like a dead-head on a sleeping lake.

  When the sun rose that morning I saw a different landscape than the one I remembered from the day before. The rain had stopped. But it was all water and tree branches now. There was no grass, no pavement or roads or gravel walkways. The houses and cars up on the embankment were safe. But the single road that cut down from the embankment and passed over the bridge was covered. It was all under water. The tops of swing sets and monkey bars stood above the current, catching debris as it floated by. Silently, I’d watched the water level of the pool rise all night. Ruby had gotten out somewhere around one o’clock and gone inside the change room with Alicia and Susan to get some sleep. Mike had stayed to keep me company. I’d watched the river rise steadily against the cinder blocks of the change house until there was no swaying crabgrass left to be seen. Over the course of the night I’d been pulled down close to the south end of the pool, pulled slowly in the direction of the run-off. For hours now I’d been careful to pull back against the current. Just before light broke I’d heard a low grinding, then a snap. When the sun rose I saw the half-submerged skeletons of the merry-go-round and playground swings on the other side of the fence. That’s when I noticed where the snap had come from. The fence around the perimeter of the pool looked lower than I remembered it. Over the night the flood had deposited bundles of newspaper and sopping leaves and tree branches on it and bent it over a few feet in the direction of the flow. The building that housed the change rooms had acted as a breakwater for me, had slowed the current around me like a heavy rock in a stream. I knew that was the only reason I was still here.

  At seven that morning Mike passed me a granola bar and some juice. He joined me for breakfast and looked out over the park. “This is incredible,” he said. “The whole valley’s under. I must have dozed. You okay?”

  I released the juice bottle in the water and watched it float out of the pool, over the deck and through the broken section of fence. It rode the current like a toy boat and met up with more junk: bundles of newspaper, an old chair, plastic bags, branches, and a dead seagull. I saw Ruby’s clock caught against a tree a hundred yards downstream, just before the bend in the river. It was too far away to make out what time it was set at.

  “Without the change house, I’d be gone.”

  “I’m sorry for dozing,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Just let me finish what I started, that’s all.”

  Junk drifted past on the current just outside what was left of the fence. Mike waded over the deck and woke up the girls. They walked out in water up to their knees, speechless, rubbing their eyes. They climbed onto the picnic table. After breakfast Ruby went back into the change room, came out again in her bathing suit, and jumped in with me.

  “How are you doing?” she said, swimming up close.

  I told her I was okay. She swam to the side and paddled back holding some trail mix above the water.

  “Think it’ll count after this?” I said. “The record, I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “No one other than us is here.” Our feet and hands were spreading in calm water-pushing circles below us. “There’s no neutral bodies.”

  “They’ll believe us. Four witnesses.”

  “But we’re a bunch of kids,” I said. There was a pause.

  She was considering that when Mike yelled some obscenity about his guitar floating away.

  “The clock, too,” Susan said, pointing to where I’d seen it wedged up against the oak. I let another bottle go and Ruby and I watched it spin in the current and leave through the hole in the fence. I pushed back against the current again, up closer to the change house. Ruby came up behind me. “Has it been pulling you like this all night?”

  “It’s getting stronger,” I said. I was breathing short breaths. “Time check.”

  “Seven-thirty-five,” Susan called out. “That’s about six more hours to tie. Anything after that’s gravy.”

  As the dimmed sun rose I saw the colour of the pool had changed. The water was brown now, not the perfect ch
lorinated blue of yesterday. I could still see the bottom, but it was murky. Colder, too.

  “Are you up to it?” Ruby said. We were drifting faster now. I could feel the water pulling us. On the deck, the water was almost as high as the picnic-table seats. Mike brought out three chairs from the men’s change room and stacked them against the eaves-trough spout that ran up the side of the building. First he climbed up onto the roof. Then he lay on his stomach and reached his arm down and helped Susan up, then Alicia.

  “Don’t think we’re abandoning you,” he called down.

  “Lifeguards have to have a superior vantage point.”

  “Ruby, you should get up there, too,” I said.

  But she just lifted her arms above her head and went under. For the first time I followed her all the way down, still careful not to touch bottom. I didn’t want to disqualify myself. I hovered down there, inches from two bent beer caps and a knot of drowned worms, cupping upwards to keep myself under. Ruby arched and tilted back her head and rolled upside down. She did a one-arm handstand. I clapped in slow underwater motions, my cheeks puffed. Then I felt myself bump against the bottom, pushed and dragged. There was a sudden shift. Ruby lost her balance and went over. We looked at each other as we kicked for the surface but the pool had suddenly deepened. The distance to air had lengthened in an instant. We were deeper than we’d been hardly seconds before, as if a great sluice had been opened at the top of the valley. We grabbed each other’s hands and fought upwards, spinning and twisting. I felt my back scrape against cement and we were carried out over the broken fence, out beyond the perimeter of the pool, hanging together as we were pulled into the broad sweep of the river until we came up gasping and clutching. “Keep holding,” I said. My mouth was grainy with river water. In a moment the current had driven us out to the middle of the flooded park. I felt for the bottom but there was nothing. Houses sat up on higher land, unaffected by the flood. There wasn’t anything we could swim for, just a Javex bottle and small planks of wood and bundles of garbage.