Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  Then, suddenly, an overwhelming stillness. No motor, but the faint sound of the radio. Some tiny clickings of various metal parts. A trickling sound from somewhere. One headlight beam points at a thick tree trunk. I wonder how badly I am hurt. My neck is bent so sharply it is hard to breathe, my legs are tangled and numb. I have no language or thoughts, just a chaos of sensations that have stopped in real life but keep happening in my head. An accident, I think, a car accident. And then I feel the wetness beneath or on top of me, I don’t know which, it’s on top of my head, which is somehow beneath me, and I wonder if it is blood. I can move my arms, my legs, but the wetness, cold now, is spreading. Rising.

  Blackhawk Creek is in my car. Seat belts, steering wheel, my tie dangling in my face, I cannot disentangle myself, cannot call out through my bent neck, and the cold black water floods my eyes. I thrash and struggle as it rises toward my nose and mouth. I am completely disoriented. Everything seems at once hyperreal and unreal. The interior of the car tells me I am right side up, gravity that I am upside down.

  And then the water floods my face. And if I was scared when the car turned over, it is nothing compared to the terror that grips me now. I am gasping and coughing and choking and kicking, trying to lift myself up while my whole body is pressing me down. I push with my legs and wriggle frantically, panic exploding in me with a blinding white light. I somehow slip enough from the belts for my back to take my weight, not my head and neck. In the midst of my random flailing in all directions, I suddenly find I am able just to lift my head above the water, enough for a coughing, panting breath. And then I thrash some more and take another breath.

  This goes on for I don’t know how long. Minutes at least. Then I hear a frightened young person’s voice. “Mister! Hey, mister! Are you okay?”

  Two hands start to untangle me. Four hands help me out. A teenage boy and his friend are out by the creek digging up night crawlers to go fishing.

  Refusing a trip to the hospital, I get a ride home in a police cruiser, sitting on some folded blankets so I don’t get the seats wet. The officer takes some information from me, calls a tow truck, and tells me to come in to the station tomorrow to fill out an accident report. I am so cold and so shaken I cannot stop trembling.

  At home, even after two mugs of hot coffee and a long, scalding shower, I am still trembling. After a while, I dry off, dress, and with a shaky hand call a taxi.

  Those few people who know about my benders—Jeannie and Bobby and Laura, for instance—know they have occurred only because I mention them, and it is only Laura who worries at me about them. Those at Boyle Ferland et al. who have heard of my wandering from the straight-and-narrow look on it with tolerance as a harmless eccentricity coming from someone who is well-regarded in the firm for his productivity and discipline. I try to be good. But sometimes the flesh—or perhaps it is the spirit—is weak.

  This time I start on Sunday night. By the time I am able to look at a clock and have its numbers be meaningful, it is Tuesday noon. Monday is in a black hole from which it can never be retrieved.

  There is a funeral in progress at the little cemetery, though as my feet crunch softly up the pebbled path toward the slope I know so well, I can see the graveside ceremony is almost over. It is, I was told by the familiar attendant at the gate who waved me in, for a ninety-two-year-old man who died in his sleep at the Riverside Extended Care Facility. They would have buried him Sunday, he added, but the graveworkers do not work on Easter, and yesterday they were backed up.

  The weather has finally cleared, the sun-bright afternoon sky is a radiant blue and the air is fresh as a cold drink of water, though on my aggravated senses they all register like breaking glass. Even at a distance, the decks of flowers and wreaths and the bright green of the synthetic turf they use to cover the dirt glow incandescently in the sun. The spring smell of new growth mixes with an occasional breeze carrying perfume and aftershave.

  I wait for the mourners to leave before I pay my visit. I avoid glancing toward her gravesite, but its nearness and all its associations are enough. I begin to cry, silently. Perhaps it is the presence of another funeral and the sad faces, or the bitter contrast between the death of the old and of the young, or the existence of the sun-drenched day itself, but suddenly—in something I am aware of but altogether helpless to stop—I begin to sob, just like the drunk I have been for the last day and a half.

  It is not just grief that overcomes me but also a sensation, all at once and in every part of me, of coming apart. Just as I fear I am about to drop to my knees, an arm shoots across my back and props me up. It is Manfred McMasters, Bobby’s old law partner and hometown acquaintance, here, he says, for his great-uncle’s funeral. My sunglasses have fallen askew.

  “Easy there, old guy,” Freddie says.

  People leaving the now-concluded funeral are trying not to stare. I see someone lift a hand with an imaginary shot glass in it and knock it toward his mouth, a succinct gesture to explain my conduct.

  I pant a few times, smelling the rotten fruit of my breath, straighten my sunglasses, and work to compose myself. Removing myself from under Freddie’s arm, I look at the ground and lift my shoes, pretending I have somehow lost my footing on the uneven ground, this earth where so many are buried. I am stiff and sore and have a large bump on my forehead that has not yet begun to discolor.

  My face burning with shame, I thank Freddie for his help, and as I glance at him, it occurs to me I have seen him somewhere unexpected in the last day or so. Sometime after Brendan’s exhibition. Frustratingly, like a word I know perfectly well but cannot for the life of me summon, the memory will not come back. I watch him rejoin his family, and then I make my way to Becky’s plain, gray stone, its engraved letters and numbers as strange, and as familiar, as my own face in a mirror.

  I try to come once each season and make sure everything is properly tended. Twice there has been some defacing and destruction of nearby headstones, but not of hers. Having failed to take due care once when it mattered, I have become a faithful custodian now when it is too late. I remove my glasses, stare into the dark, smooth surface of the stone, and today find I am wondering whether it was some unacknowledged insecurity in me, passed along like a virus, that made her so anxious about her toys and her clothes. So anxious to please. So anxious altogether.

  Responsible but not to blame, Gail said. It is a formulation that means nothing to me. I cough, my chest and throat raw from inhaling some of Blackhawk Creek.

  Out of nowhere it comes to me when and how I saw Freddie.

  In the obscure corner of a darkened bar, he was talking with Clive Sanford, Congressman Richard Wheatley’s chief of staff.

  I knew Clive Sanford. I grew up with him.

  It may be that the way a person acts in ninth grade does not tell you the whole story of his character, but it does give you a special perspective. About once a week, it used to gratify Clive to shove me on the chest, tilt his head so he could look down his nose at me, and call me Jewboy. Lacking the courage of his prejudices, he said this only after making sure no one else was within earshot.

  Freddie McMasters was a few years ahead of Clive and me in school, a space of time that later came to seem inconsequential. But in high school, two years seemed as far as the moon, and three years was as far as Alpha Centauri. The last time I saw Clive and Freddie together was in high school, and they had a far less friendly encounter than the one they had in the obscurity of the bar.

  It is an unusually hot May afternoon. I am traipsing home with my books in one hand and bouncing my basketball off the pavement with the other, each bounce making its usual satisfying poing. I am feeling relieved because the school day is over and the warm weather reminds me that the end of the year is in sight. Even in my freshman year I do not like school much. It is not very interesting. I am not very popular. The teachers are mostly old and catarrhal. Since I do not get especially good grades and I
am not good in gym, what is there to like? I am tall and gawky and homely. Big ears, big jaw, clumsy hands, eyes that look owlish even though I don’t wear glasses. Among some of my classmates, because I remind them of an illustration in one of our old storybooks, my nickname is Ichabod Crane. Today I am walking home alone.

  I bounce the ball fifty times with my left hand and fifty times with my right. On our backyard patio, I am able to make eight hundred out of a thousand free throws. So now I am trying to get better at dribbling. I begin to sweat in the heat. I stop and smell my armpit. There is a leathery scent there, vaguely familiar, but new on me. My mother has assured me that as I get older I will “grow into my face” and the proportions will straighten out. I think that if she is right, perhaps it will happen soon. I lose count of my dribbles and I don't hear Clive Sanford slip up behind me. He suddenly jumps forward and steals my ball.

  This is a brand-new tactic on his part, so I do not know what to make of it. He scampers toward a nearby basket that is hanging over someone’s garage and shoots a layup. He misses. Seizing on the tiny chance he wants to play, I put down my books and wait for a pass. He fields the ball and sticks it between his forearm and hip. Then he looks at me, his weight slung onto one leg. I see an uncomfortably familiar expression crawl over his features: a lizard considering a fly.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asks.

  I see that shooting hoops is not what he has in mind. “My ball,” I say.

  “This your ball, Ick?”

  For years I have been shorter, skinnier, and less coordinated than Clive. It occurs to me as I look at him standing across from me that at least I am no longer shorter. And I am not so sure I would have missed that layup. Emboldened by this thought, I decide to pretend we are playing keep-away. I have the suspicion that, though not fleet of foot, I can still run faster than Clive. All I need to do is get the ball. I shrug, sigh, pretend indifference, and make a sudden lunge for the ball. He pivots like a matador, but I just succeed in knocking the ball away. I scoop it up, feint left, then right, then dart past him. I stand at the foot of the driveway, dribbling the ball and trying not to grin. He walks over to the side and picks up my books.

  “Forgot something,” he says. He dangles one of the books between two fingers. “Gimme the ball, dickhead.”

  I keep dribbling and muse for a few seconds. I shrug. “Screw the books.”

  One book at a time, he shakes all the papers out. He collects them in a fist. “Screw the papers?” he asks. I muse for a few more seconds, then nod. He starts to tear them up, then begins to toss them. I think if I can retrieve some of them, I can save myself several hours of homework. Keeping an eye on him, I begin to pick up a few half-pages that have blown my way. As I am bending down, he makes his move. I am ready, but my first step lands on a piece of folded paper. I slip to one knee. Before I can recover, he careers into my side, knocking me onto my back. He sits on my chest, using his superior weight to pin my elbows under his knees. The ball, having bounced off a fence post, rolls idly toward us. Clive picks it up and bounces it on my forehead, banging my head painfully into the pavement. I turn my face away and he bounces it off my temple.

  “Wanna play games, Jewboy?”

  “Get off me!”

  “Say please, Ben.”

  “Get off me, please.”

  He bounces the ball on my head again. “No, Jew-Ben, I won’t. Say pretty-please.”

  I struggle to get him off me, but I cannot.

  “Hey! Getting feisty, aren’t we?” he says. He lets a huge gob of white spit collect on his lips. He lets it dangle above me for a while and is just about to let it drop on my face. Suddenly I see a head appear behind his. It is Manfred McMasters. We have been in his driveway.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” he asks.

  “Uh…” Clive says, drawing up and swallowing the spit. “He took my basketball.”

  “It’s mine!” I say.

  I see a hand reach down and grab Clive by the back of the shirt. Suddenly he is off me. Fred has him turned around and is pressing his face close to his. “If it’s your ball, why are you bouncing it off his head? Why are you tearing his papers up?”

  “He’s always after me,” Clive protests.

  “He is? And does he call you names, too?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Good. Let me give you some advice, you little shit. I don’t like it when somebody makes fun of somebody else’s religion. You ever do that to him again, I’ll personally drill you a new asshole. Got it?”

  Clive nods.

  And except for one time a year later when Freddie was off at college—and I got angry enough to offer to beat the shit out of him myself (the fear of which, despite his size advantage, was enough to make him back down)—that proved to be the last incident I ever had with Clive. Some few years back when Freddie and I were both teaching courses at the law school, I mentioned this face-off from long ago. He got a mildly puzzled look, obviously not remembering much about it. To him, we must have been nothing more than two little kids making trouble in his driveway.

  It’s odd that all these years later he has propped me up once again, and done it within hours of having very likely tried his best to undermine Bobby, his old friend and former law partner.

  ✳

  I plan to go back to work after my visit to the cemetery, but do not feel up to it. By nightfall, I am sick. Fevered, weary, and unable to think clearly, I go to bed early but wake repeatedly in the night with chills, headache, diarrhea, and stomach pain. I take some medicines, fight a hacking cough, and wonder if some of the water I’ve swallowed has made me sick.

  By dawn I feel more ill than I have ever felt in my life. I am panting, have drenched the bedclothes, and am so weak I can barely lift my head. Just when I don’t think I can possibly feel any worse, new awful waves of sick-sensation congeal and send me down to a whole new level of misery.

  The room starts to spin, slowly at first. Lacking the energy to lean off the bed, I turn my head and vomit all over my pillow. Then, still panting, my chest feeling packed with razors and twisting knife blades, I call 911. I am unable at first to speak loud enough to be heard.

  Dr. Tyler, my longtime family doctor, peers at me through the bottom half of his bifocals. He is wearing a mask, so I cannot determine his expression. Threading a hand past the IV and oxygen tubes, he gently thumbs up one of my eyelids.

  “Some jaundice,” he remarks to the nurse.

  Exhausted, I close my eyes. I feel a stethoscope on my ribs. I hear pages turning on a chart.

  “Can you hear me?” Dr. Tyler asks. I nod. “You feel pretty horrible, don’t you?” I nod again. Every part of me hurts, including my skin and the roots of my hair. “You rest. I’ll be in later.”

  “What…”I manage to get out in a hoarse whisper.

  “Pneumococcal pneumonia.”

  I drift off.

  Two days and many hundreds of thousands of units of penicillin G later, I am sitting up in bed. I feel quiet, still, washed out. Except when I cough in painful paroxysms, I stare at the walls and ceiling. My fever is down, and they expect to be able to release me tomorrow or the next day. They bring me a basin, mirror, and disposable razor. My skin color is like the inside of a cucumber. I have red spots around my mouth. The whites of my eyes are the yellow color of a pad of legal paper.

  Various Parrishes come in and out, as do a few members of my law firm. They are all cheerful, solicitous, and sympathetic, bearing food, magazines, and newspapers. Jeannie tells me she has authorized the auto-body place to do the repairs on my eight-year-old car. Only the roof and windows have much damage. Mechanically, it is fine.

  “You could get a new car,” she suggests.

  “I don’t want a new car.” While I don’t like, or dislike, my present one, I do not want a new anything.

  No one expects me to do much t
alking, particularly not once they have heard me cough, and this suits me.

  Just before I am to leave, Jeannie says she has left the materials I’ll need for Erickson Bruce at my house. He subpoenaed them yesterday.

  “Why not bring them here?’’

  “They’re not exactly something I want lying around.”

  “Can we talk about it here?” I am in a semiprivate room with no roommate, my reward for having had a dangerously infectious disease.

  She shuts the open door. Jeannie crosses the room, and, staring steadily out the window, she explains in a monotone what has happened.

  She bought a piece of land for $60,000. Eight months later she sold it to the state for use for a new interstate bypass of the capital. For $510,000.

  I ask her to repeat the figures. As she does, I calculate that she has made a nearly 900 percent profit in less than a year.

  While there is nothing wrong with this legally, she says there is still a problem. As executive director of MidwestPIRG, a public-interest research group with a special interest in environmental impact, she testified before the governmental agency that decided on the exact route this bypass should take.

  She recommended the route that led through her land.

  That is the problem.

  “And Bobby doesn’t know?”

  “Not a thing. Not then, not now.”

  I pause for a while before I ask this question. “Why did you do it?”

  She looks away from the window and at me for the first time. “I wanted the money. For Brendan and Andrew when I die. We don’t have much money, you know. No life insurance. I can’t change jobs and keep my medical coverage, and in this economy people are not looking to hire forty-year-old women lawyers with MS. Or in any economy, for that matter.”