Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  “There’s a lot to tell,” he said.

  Maybe she read his face.

  “Let’s eat first.”

  A few embers still burned in the fireplace, and after breakfast it didn’t take much for Tacker to rekindle it. They kept drinking coffee and Kate listened as he told her about Samuel and the Ponies and the mammy wagons, Marxist Chukwu and the intellectual Israelis, UCI and the Osun festivities. He left out Anna Becker, who had gone native and painted his arm with henna and maybe gotten him fired. He glossed the dismissal.

  “It’s a shame you didn’t get to stay to the end,” she said. “But it sounds like you had a great experience. Just think how few people ever do anything like that.”

  The way she put it made what had happened sound wonderfully positive. Tacker wanted to kiss her in gratitude.

  “But was it odd at all being with all those black people?”

  “For about five minutes. It was odder coming back to all these white people.” He grinned at her but couldn’t tell if she understood.

  “But wasn’t it primitive?”

  “If you mean are there bathrooms when you’re traveling, there aren’t. And villages don’t have running water. But everything kind of works. The cities are a little crazy because there’s not much traffic control. I got used to it in a hurry. I liked it. That was the problem.”

  Outside the balance of light and dark shifted and Tacker could see the first faint outline of trees.

  “Do you have pictures?” Kate said.

  “Plenty.”

  “I’d love to see them.”

  “Sure,” he said, his blood whirring from too much coffee. “You’ll be okay today?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You need a plan.”

  “Like what?”

  “Come help me put up Christmas decorations at the store.”

  “Maybe. I’ll call you. All right. I’ll come.”

  “Thanks for breakfast,” he said, standing, shaking out his arms.

  On the street, jacket collar up, he turned the cycle and rolled down Glade. He parked in front of the foursquare and leapt up the stairs. As if Samuel was calling but he was running from him. Because if he fell hard for Kate, he might forget Nigeria. He didn’t want to forget.

  He slammed the door behind him. Da Vinci looked up from the couch, yawned, and stretched. “Hey, sorry, kiddo. Let me get you something to eat.” He threw his jacket onto the couch. The cat rose to all fours, stretched his spine, and resettled on the jacket.

  “Well, looky here,” Tacker said. A dead vole lay neatly at the threshold to the kitchen. Da Vinci could get in and out of the house. Tacker would have to find the hole and patch it. He’d been plugging holes for months, holes ominous and dreamlike, dark as night, abysses like the end of the world, which was why he hadn’t read Samuel’s letters. He had time right now, thirty minutes, to read one at least. After feeding the cat, he walked to the bedroom and pulled out the tackle box he’d made in Boy Scouts. The letters lay in order and he lifted the top one from the stack.

  Chapter Nine

  KATE LAY ON the sofa, pulling up the afghan Tacker had used, recalling the tents she and Brian had created over the dining table on rainy days. Their mother fixed jelly sandwiches and they camped and read and colored for hours on end. But her father’s letters came back, a rosary heavy on her heart. Then her head was hot with shame that she had opened herself to Tacker. Where was her solid backbone, the blade she had felt and counted on that night she’d held her mother? Janet always said that a man would interpret weakness as willingness in a girl. Asking someone to spend the night might fit the bill. She focused on the glowing embers in the fireplace until she felt cross-eyed.

  In her dream she was in junior high attending a family reunion. Brian wasn’t there. A cousin brought his fiancée to meet her family. Kate and her parents sat in a living room in front of a coffee table. The cousin stood on the sidelines, but the fresh-faced bride-to-be came directly into the circle and made herself comfortable. On the floor next to the sofa was a baby all by itself, untended. Kate woke to light pouring through the dining room window. She pressed the afghan to her face and smelled the faint scent of Tacker Hart’s aftershave. All at once she was violently thirsty. In the kitchen she drank straight from the faucet. The sulfurous smell took her to the summer following her father’s drowning. Kate’s reduced family of three had headed toward the mountains with Aunt Mildred, as far from the beach as they could get, their mother driving the Chrysler and smoking like a sailor. Every water fountain they had drunk from smelled just so.

  Kate stood at the sink and looked out at the bank of monkey grass, the white fence. On that very trip, her mother had wondered if her husband’s drowning had been on purpose, though Kate had thought the idea preposterous, and Aunt Mildred had assured her it was only grief talking. Kate had forgotten until just this minute smelling the faucet.

  Brian had slept while Kate gazed out the window of the backseat, dozing on and off. After a while she heard her mother’s voice. “At some point it may be too hard to come back. He’d already left in a way,” she had said. “Watch what you’re saying,” Aunt Mildred had said. Kate kept her eyes closed and listened. “Maybe he didn’t have the strength or will for it,” her mother said. Kate had felt her scalp prickle and had to clasp the armrest to keep quiet. “It’s not that hard to imagine letting yourself go. From so far out, the shore must seem insignificant. Poor man.” “Hush, just hush now,” Aunt Mildred had said.

  Kate was fourteen at the time. Her mother or Aunt Mildred, one had flipped on the radio. There was static and then something that sounded like what her mother called “that abominable hoedown music.” Quickly the static returned and then a voice came into the car that sounded like molten silver, a voice singing about a blue moon: “. . . blue moon of Kentucky . . . Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.”

  “I don’t know if I like that song or not,” her mother had said. The static came back and suddenly they were in the middle of the old hymn “Farther Along.” Farther along we’ll know more about it. Farther along we’ll understand why. Her mother sang with the radio, gleefully, a gospel song they would never sing in the Episcopal church they attended. Her voice rose and the car climbed the mountain. She did the soprano and Aunt Mildred came in on alto. As soon as the song was over, Kate pretended to waken. Right that moment the sun came out and her mother picked her sunglasses up off the seat and slipped them on. Kate peered out the window at the valley below, the sheer fall. Would she ever jump? Would their mother drive off the cliff? “Mom?” she had said. “Why, I thought you were asleep. Did I wake you? My grandfather loved that song. I haven’t heard it in so long. There’s a way station up ahead. Let’s stop and eat our sandwiches.” “That sounds like a good idea,” Aunt Mildred had said.

  Kate noticed a sign for a motel in Pineola up ahead. Her mother held the steering wheel firmly. “Brian, wake up,” her mother said. “We’re about to pull over. Don’t you just love it up here?” she said to everyone. “Those mountains put everything in perspective.”

  Are we all here?

  At the way station, Aunt Mildred pulled Kate aside. “If you overheard anything, I just want you to know that it’s your mother’s grief that’s talking—you hear me? Strong men drown. It happens all the time. Your father loved you better than the earth. Now, there.” She had shaken Kate’s shoulders slightly as if to see if she was solid enough.

  Last night, Tacker had almost talked her out of the idea that her father’s drowning was purposeful. Now, this morning, it rose like an evil plant in the garden, crowding out everything else.

  The clock struck eleven a.m., and Kate remembered her three o’clock appointment with the chair of the library board. What a relief. She had to dress and go somewhere and act normal. She called Tacker. “I can’t come by the store,” she said. “I have a meeting at the libr
ary. I forgot.” She didn’t explain.

  “Too bad. I mean, good luck with the meeting,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll give you a call later, check up on you.”

  “You’re very kind,” she said, which was true and could hardly be misconstrued as romantic, except maybe in a Jane Austen novel.

  For her meeting with Mrs. McCall to talk about taking her mother’s place on the board, Kate selected a soft gray dress. Rather than wear a hat, she put her hair up in a loose chignon and at the last minute selected a pair of her mother’s earrings, small garnets set in gold.

  The bus was only half full.

  In the lobby of Main Library, she asked for directions to Conference Room A. It was on the second floor. She could see Mrs. McCall through the glass windows as she came close. A square woman with a freckled face, sandy blond hair, and a permanent tan, Mrs. McCall could have been a physical education teacher.

  “Kate!” she said. “Don’t you look splendid! It’s so good to see you.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said.

  Mrs. McCall was thoughtful enough not to go on too long about how lonely and heartbroken Kate must be. Instead she invited her to sit and then she interlocked her fingers and rested them on the table in front of her.

  “Our primary mission is to make the library the best resource it can be for the community. I’m sure you know that. We raise money and we decide how to spend money and we decide on future directions for development. A bright mind like yours will be an asset for next year’s campaign. It will be a new decade and we’ve been batting around ideas for a slogan.”

  Kate leaned forward to take a look at a mimeographed sheet of paper Mrs. McCall had placed in front of her.

  LAUNCH THE FUTURE WITH BOOKS

  “What do you think?” Mrs. McCall said.

  “Like the space satellites,” Kate said. The concept seemed chilly. To Kate’s mind, reading was a warm activity, undertaken in comfortable environments. Reading wasn’t going outward. It was going inward. “I can see how it could appeal to some people,” she said, not wishing to offend. “I wonder if I can think more about it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. McCall said. “I knew you were the right person to enlist. I don’t like it myself.” And she laughed, throwing her head back, a large laugh. When she composed herself, pulling her lapels back into place, Mrs. McCall turned to Kate, who could now see that the woman’s eyes didn’t quite match. One was a little sleepy, and immediately Kate felt endeared to her, not only because she didn’t like launching into books but also because she was marked by a flaw that she had likely carried all of her life. What one loved about literature was all of the flaws, not in the writing, but in the characters.

  When Kate got home she had a letter from James.

  Hello darling,

  Your card arrived today and nothing could have made me happier. I think about you up in Winston and it seems half a world away. Still, early in the morning when I’m leaving the hospital so sleepy I can hardly stay on my feet, I know I could drive eight hours to see you for ten minutes if I knew you wanted me to. I hope you get whatever it is you need to do there taken care of so we can be together. I long for you.

  Love,

  James

  Kate clutched the card and threw herself across the couch in the library. She was reassured and newly fearful. She’d been home almost six months and still she didn’t know what it was she needed to get “taken care of,” nor how long it would take. James was reignited in his desire for her and she was responsible, but did she really want that, want him, a life with him in Atlanta? Who would she be? She wondered if the cool lozenge in her heart had made her fickle and ruined her for love. Maybe she was the one who should move to another country, and not to Europe but someplace more distant, as Tacker Hart had, a place where she could feel everything again as she once had felt it in the backyard with her father when the world was whole.

  Chapter Ten

  TACKER ENDED UP reading all of Samuel’s letters sitting on his parents’ old couch in the foursquare. What froze him was learning—in the last letter he read but the first Samuel had written—about Joshua. Joshua who had invited him to his compound and believed Elvis Presley was an emissary of the devil, who eschewed even the mildest palm wine and didn’t douse himself with the waters of the Osun. He stared at the letter blankly.

  The week the team was in Osogbo laying concrete block for the high school, the week Anna painted his arm with henna and showed Tacker her surreal sculptures in the forest by the Osun, Joshua had offered to mail a postcard Tacker had written to his parents. He’d read the card and then taken it upon himself to place a call to Lionel Fray. He’d reported that Tacker had gotten himself involved with a pagan priestess who happened to be European but was married to a Nigerian and it was going to cause big trouble for the project. Apparently, Joshua had been an eager reporter of Tacker’s misdeeds, including his moving out of the faculty house, taking Samuel’s bed and forcing him to sleep on the floor, challenging local authorities on matters of religion, even drinking beer with local high school students.

  Tacker’s head reeled. Someone—was it Abraham?—had offered him a Star beer when they were sitting under a tree on the high school grounds one evening after the day’s work was done. The best thing about the beer was that for once it was actually chilled and the bottle felt good in his hands. He hadn’t shared it with anyone.

  Samuel had defended Tacker when he learned of the allegations—after Tacker had been put on the plane in Lagos. The other fellows agreed with him. But Joshua was somehow related to a higher-up at the U.S. embassy in Lagos and Fray took his word over the others’. Plus there was actual evidence—the postcard and the student paper interview. Tacker knew he’d been accused of practicing “native witchcraft,” along with a bunch of other things, some worse, in the report he had skimmed on the plane coming back, after which he had vomited into one of those little bags. The woman next to him had blanched. He’d had to crawl over her and go to the bathroom, and then he spent the rest of the flight to New York facing the window, hollow as a tin man.

  What he had not known until he read Samuel’s letter was that Joshua had betrayed him. He leaned against the back of the sofa and howled, an enraged laugh that startled da Vinci, sending him off in a low dash for the kitchen. The whole episode of that morning with Fray ran through Tacker’s brain one more time. A hot brew of anger and disbelief filled his chest. Why had Joshua twisted it all up? What had he ever done to Joshua? He might have believed such a betrayal coming from Chukwu, who had little affection for him.

  So maybe he had been naïve, stepping into situations he knew nothing about, like idol burning. Doubtless he had been a know-it-all talking with the Shell Oil man. But he had experienced something close to conversion. He had been ready to stay in the country, even give his life to it. Or at least now that the opportunity was gone, it seemed that way.

  Dazed, Tacker read the rest of the letter. Samuel’s brother had lost a leg after a bad accident with a hatchet led to infection. All of this months ago. Guilt settled over the anger and shame as Tacker thought of Samuel and how he hadn’t written back and how his silence misconstrued his own feelings.

  In one letter, Tacker learned that Samuel had been hired by Godwin and Hopwood Architects and moved to Lagos. He described himself as a “small boy” in the firm, but Tacker knew he’d work his way up.

  He stepped into a cold shower. “Shake it off,” he whispered to himself, lathering up, rinsing off, jumping out, and toweling off. “Shake it off. Shake it off.” But a cool blue anger mastered all other feeling, and he rode the anger into the store and it was just as well Kate couldn’t come in. The butcher was late, not arriving until afternoon.

  “Nice of you to show up,” Tacker said.

  “I always do,” the man said.

  “Hell, is everyone out to ruin me?”

/>   “I had to leave my car at the shop.”

  “So drop it off in time to get here when you’re supposed to.”

  “Dear God in heaven,” the butcher said, pulling off his white apron, walking toward the door.

  Tacker had to follow him down First and beg him to come back. The man was built like a barrel; he had a huge beard that he covered with a net while he worked. He’d served in World War II and was no one to mess with. “I’ve got plenty of work and I don’t need a boy lecturing me,” he said to Tacker, looking him in the eye.

  “I understand and I apologize,” Tacker said. “I was angry about something else. We can’t run this store without you.”

  “I won’t come back next time.”

  * * *

  • • •

  TWO DAYS LATER, Kate dropped by for a loaf of bread. She was quick with a smile but that was it. On Sunday afternoon he rode the Indian east toward Kernersville, hooking off and onto country roads, down a stretch beside an old wood fence. He smelled a section of pinewood before he saw it. At dusk he circled the bike around and sat. He heard an owl. It sounded to be right above him and it was, sitting out on a dead branch, blinking its huge eyes. A cold mist hung in the air like a fine screen so that it seemed to Tacker he was immersed in the place and partitioned from it all at once. What the hell had he done to Joshua? His anger at Fray had been nicely focused. Now it bled in more than one direction.

  Back home, he rolled the bike into the garage and set it back on its stand. Inside, he started a fire in the fireplace. He opened a can of pork and beans, emptied them into an old pot, then held the pot over the flame, heating the beans as if he were in Nigeria, where fireplaces were built into an indention in the mud wall but without chimneys so the smoke hung around the ceiling and glided out the open windows. He tried to put himself in Joshua’s place. The guy was overweight. Maybe his dad gave him a hard time, demanded too much, was overly critical; Joshua could never do anything well enough to please him. Maybe he’d been bullied. Tacker ate straight from the blackened pot. The beans tasted better cooked this way, smoky and dense.