Flat Water Tuesday

by Ron Irwin

  Connor grinned. “A fine idea, Wadsworth. Let’s see if we can get the truck down there.”

  Perry was calmly drinking his beer. It hurt that they’d been up so long without me, drinking, but I also knew that this was a kind of induction. “It’s cool with me,” I said. Ruth just sighed and rolled her green eyes.

  Connor gave the directions and I drove down Bulls Run along the river for a few miles. The road to the bridge was impossibly narrow and dark and broken in spots, and I navigated it with the brights on, trying not to steer the truck into the water. The old heap rattled as we drove and I took a few of the potholes pretty hard. The seats were stiff, with sharp edges where the springs were working their way through. It was 5:00 A.M.

  We came to the covered bridge and I parked with the lights shining into it. I’d have to reverse out of there—the road carried on south, away from the school. The river was too shallow for the boats here. It was pocked with slimy rocks that poked through the flat movement of the water. The bridge was a single lane—you’d have to wait for the person on the bridge to drive through before you could drive into it yourself. Inside, it looked wet and dark and ancient. Sitting in the truck before the yawning entrance you could see fairly far down the river. You could see the hills near the school, but not the school itself.

  The five of us got out and stood in the rank darkness. Connor reached into the back of the truck and came up grinning with a leather backpack in his hands. Wordlessly he pulled out a bottle of champagne, then five champagne glasses. It was pathetic how good I felt to note there were five.

  “All right, the dude!” Perry yelled. “Now we’re talking.”

  Connor still said nothing. He shoved the bottle in one pocket of his baggy coat, the glasses in the other as we trooped into the bridge. He hopped up onto the rail and held on to one of the supports. The drop below him was fifty feet, maybe only forty, and the rocks snouted through the water with evil intent. Connor let go of the railing and looked at me. “I’ve come here every year since freshman year. If you look down, you can see the water is deeper than you think. Take a look. You could jump off the bridge and make it.”

  By way of reply, Perry looked over the bridge and spat a spinning yellow gob.

  “Gross, Jumbo,” Ruth mumbled.

  “Dude, I’ve told you before,” Wadsworth said. “There is no way I’d ever jump off this bridge. You always say you could make it. You couldn’t. You’d have to be crazy to try it.”

  Connor’s face went dark. “That’s not the attitude to have, Wads. You could make the jump. One, two seconds in the air…”

  I climbed up next to him, hooked an arm around the support and reached down to pull Ruth up. She hugged the bridge, her face red and chapped. Looking down between her boots, she shook her head. “This is silly. I’m getting down. We have to get back to the dorms.” She looked at me, then Connor. “Take me home.” Her voice was petulant and a little desperate. It sounded wrong coming from her.

  Connor ignored her, looked at me evenly, the wind whipping through his hair now. I look back on this and see him so clearly—that white, wispy hair, that red, narrow face, his eyes streaming from the wind. “I’ll jump if you do it. I swear to God I will jump on the count of three. You count, Carrey. Come on.” He smiled, and then he was not smiling. “Do it, Carrey.” He sounded almost serious.

  I looked down. In that dim early light you could only see the whitecaps on the rocks. The smell of the freezing water was all around me, and it seemed like the river was moving heavily enough so that you might survive the fall. I leaned over, holding onto the railing with one hand, and finished my beer. I cast the can into the waves and it was pulled under. Connor swung back and forth, the glasses clinking in his pocket. “For three years I’ve wanted to jump off this bridge, and these guys have never wanted to join me. I was sure you’d try it, Carrey. Before the river freezes. Come on, what do you think?”

  “What do I think? I’m thinking that before every dumb thing I’ve ever done, there was always that moment of knowing it was a dumb thing. You know what I mean, Connor?”

  “If we made the jump, we’d be legendary. The first kids to do it. Think about it, Rob. It’d be more amazing than winning the Warwick Race.”

  Perry leaned over. “He loves this stupid bridge. He seriously thinks he could survive the fall.”

  “I don’t think it, I know I could. I’ve come here a thousand times. I’ve seen it from the water. It’s at least twenty feet deep right under the bridge.”

  “Unless you hit a rock,” Perry pointed out. “Then you’re pretty much dead.”

  “You can see the rocks, Jumbo.”

  Wadsworth grinned. “Don’t do it, Connor. You can’t tell where you’ll fall.”

  Newly energized, Ruth leaned over the bridge. “Even if you survived the jump, you’d still have to get out of the water. It’s a pretty good swim to the shore in this cold.” She took a long drink from her can, cast it in. She jumped up on the railing between Connor and me, extended her arms, balanced, her eyes on Connor. For a second I saw something flash between them. Perry climbed up heavily, stood awkwardly on the railing, his feet misshapen and clownish. Finally Wadsworth jumped up, surprisingly agile. The five of us stood on the rail. Connor turned, lost his balance for one moment and flexed his legs. An artist on the high wire. He pulled the bottle from his pocket and dramatically twisted off the cork. Champagne fizzed over onto the bridge.

  Slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, Connor took out a glass with a flourish, filled it with champagne, and passed it to Ruth, who carefully passed it to me, who just as gingerly passed it to Perry. And so on, Connor not missing a beat, pouring, passing the drinks, until we all had a glass, and we were all balanced over that churning water, the sulphur smell of French champagne mixing with the foamy smell of the rapids under the bridge. Connor took a gulp from the bottle, belched, and flung it into the river.

  He held up his glass. “I propose a toast. To those heinous losers at Warwick.” And we drank to it, all of us, the best champagne I’d ever taste. Connor finished his, dropped the glass into the rolling foam, belched again. “Looks like Carrey’s one of us now.” I had to force myself not to grin. Ruth tipped her glass into the waves, pirouetted on her railing, then jumped into the safety of the bridge. Two more glasses smashed on the rocks below and Wadsworth stepped back into the darkness with Perry flopping down after him.

  Connor was still not holding the support. He balanced like a bird of prey, poised to fly. I stood only a few feet away, willing myself not to touch the supporting beam. I drank my champagne down, flicked the glass into the river, waited for Connor. The others started walking to the truck. Ruth finally glanced back, “We need to go, guys. It’s time. Stop being jerks.”

  Connor grinned, bayed into the morning. It was getting bright out. The water was blue in the channels beneath our feet now, much faster than when we arrived.

  “Jump, Carrey. Let’s do it.” I knew he’d follow me down if I accepted his dare.

  A breeze howled down the river, caught me, and I grabbed the beam, swung around and leapt down to the road. The impact jammed hard into my heels.

  Connor chuckled, shrugged and lightly sprung off the bridge to the cement. He followed me to the truck. I felt his eyes on my back and he was grinning when I turned around. Just before he got into the truck, behind the wheel, he mouthed, “You’re a wicked loser, Carrey.”

  I poked my head into the driver’s side. He stank of beer but he had sobered up on that bridge all right. “Are you going to smash this thing, Connor?”

  He shook his head and flashed me that lopsided crazy smile. Then his dark eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, where I could see Ruth sandwiched between Jumbo who was staring drunkenly out his window and Wadsworth, who was, incredibly, fast asleep like a freakish baby. She examined the two of us from inside the protection of the upturned collar of her ski jacket. Her eyes were red.

  “Are you okay, Ruth?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “Carrey, we have to get this truck back. She’s just pissed off, as usual,” Connor said.

  “I want to hear it from her.”

  He regarded me evenly and then raised his hands from the steering wheel in a gesture of exasperation. “Have it your way.”

  I poked my head in and asked her one last time. She looked at me and simply said, “I’m fine, Rob. We need to go back.”

  Connor smiled at me. “See? She’s fine. Let go of the door. Get in.”

  “I’ll run it.”

  “Oh, God. How virtuous,” he spat out contemptuously. He lurched the truck into gear and was off in a haze of vapor and sand from the shoulder where he’d spun the wheels after dropping the clutch too hard on that shoddy first gear. I could still see the small figure of Ruth hunched in the back, staring vacantly out at the riverbanks which were covered in a crusty, windblown layer of snow. I wondered if I would ever find out what had gone on between her and Connor that night.

  I turned and started out at an easy lope. I kept pace for a couple of miles, until I was only a sprint away from the school and then I started a flat-out run. The more I ran the more I felt my life coursing through me and I was electric. I could have shot into that school like a meteor. Man, I must have been something to see.

  * * *

  And when I got to the school road, out of breath, my hands moist, the taste of no sleep and beer and coffee and champagne in my mouth, there was Channing against the steel sky, walking toward me in his flowing black coat. When he saw me he didn’t wave or smile. I waited for him to cross to my side, my red, moist hands on my hips. I was pretending to catch my breath. He was on the walkway beside the bridge, and I was standing in the middle of the road.

  Finally he acknowledged me. “Oft I have run o’er meadow an’ vale, t’ward what tho’, I know not.”

  I thought for a second. “Wordsworth?”

  “Charles Channing. Not damned bad, either.”

  “The little known poet.”

  “What brings you out on such a foul morning, Carrey?”

  “Don’t know. Fresh air, maybe.”

  “You look terrible. I don’t advise fresh air today. But maybe you have a better excuse than I for needing it.”

  “Which is?”

  “Old men are cursed with morning.” He looked over the fields at the sleeping school, then at me. “Did you know that there is no verb ‘to crew’ as it applies to rowing? You may crew a sailboat, but the word only has use as a noun when one rows. Perhaps this use emphasizes the camaraderie of the sport.”

  “It’s called teamwork.”

  “I don’t see my team anywhere near. I often see you work alone, Carrey.” The snow was in his hair now. It seemed to be getting colder out as the morning wore on. I stamped my feet. I was getting stiff, standing there and talking to him. He turned and gazed up the black furrow of road breaking the white rise of land before the town. The single light hanging above the mouth of the bridge idly changed from green to yellow. “There might be more to all this life than rowing,” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “But then again…” He held a finger up for silence, and then cocked an ear. We listened to the morning around us, cold as it was. “The ink painting blowing through the pines. Who hears it?”

  “Another one by Charles Channing?”

  “No. Should have been, though.” He looked back down the road. “Tell that damned Connor Payne to leave his hands off the school’s vehicles. Remind him that if he’s caught drinking we’ll throw him out of school, no matter who his father is.” He glanced at me significantly. “The same applies to you. And the others.”

  He trudged on. Nobody had shoveled the sidewalk and there were crazy pits in the snow leading from the main road to the bridge: his own footprints.

  18.

  Carolyn had the framework of the shark documentary up by the end of the day. She went through the script with me, showed me some scenes she had put together that would make up the introduction. I wondered if we should find a music track for any of this. The scenes looked good, the piece had begun to take shape, but it was not how I had imagined it. The sharks I filmed needed saving from thrill-seeking sport fishermen. Yet the thrill seeker I had chosen to interview, a woman, looked bright and cheerful on camera. She sounded too modulated and sincere. Of course her sport didn’t affect shark numbers, she claimed. Commercial fishing was responsible for that. People pay hundreds of dollars to fish these waters, she pointed out, why should they get a marlin and not a shark? The marlin were nowhere near as plentiful, she was at pains to add, particularly black marlin that tourists from Australia and the UK caught and posed beside like Hemingway.

  Carolyn had done a good job. The Natal Sharks Board was indignant enough, the aerial shots we had of the ocean, where you could see the sharks coming in to feast on the school of sardines that ran down the coast at that time of year, were magnificent. The work clearly put Carolyn in a good frame of mind. She opened up a bottle of wine and downed a glass, then another, toasted me and then the sharks while she devoured most of the dolmades and salad we had ordered in. We were now practicing the professional relationship we were meant to cultivate from here on in.

  I looked at the video and thought of the weeks it had taken to get it. The time in the water, waiting for the sharks to come out of the gloom in that dense quiet, the feel and taste of the rubber breather in my mouth, the chemical taste of the O2. The never-ending mist on my diving mask and on the camera’s eyepiece. Frankly, it was the easiest part of the entire shoot, not that I looked forward to it. When I was twenty-six, underwater filming was a charge. Now it was routine, it was mundane, hours of work you did on top of the hours of work you did putting together the proposal, getting the interview subjects on board, then getting the equipment and the boat rentals and the crew and then driving to the shoot in a 4 × 4 or in a van; endless driving, eating out of fast-food restaurants and saving the receipts to work into the expenses—including the receipts for the coffee you gave the crew. The hotels that awaited you were the fleabags that small seaside places excelled in, or else overly quaint bed and breakfast houses run by overly concerned proprietors who never had enough space to stow all the gear. I was getting tired of sleeping off filming days under flowery quilts on lumpy beds with Old Mother Hubbard skirting.

  In the last year I had taken on more and more shoots inside South Africa, which was comfortable, in many ways easier to navigate than the States. I had quietly turned down shoots in Russia (tiger); India (tiger again); and most recently, one in the Himalayas (tahr) purely because getting myself there with all my equipment, working out the visas and the food and the overland travel was just too uncomfortable. I had been doing the hardcore assignments for a while and I’d had enough.

  Instead, I took on pieces like the sardine run off of the very developed city of Durban (really just a more run-down version of Miami), a shoot I could have easily outsourced to a South African crew but May in Durban was far nicer than May in rainy Cape Town. My next shoots were going to be on Table Mountain (kwagga) and maybe—maybe—in the Kruger National Park (an elephant relocation that would take place not far from the clean, air-conditioned chalets they offered visitors). It was easy work. Dream work. But watching Carolyn edit the shark footage, I felt no yearning whatsoever to be anywhere but where I was. With her, steps away from a shower and a comfortable bed. Our bed.

  My current self would have disgusted my younger self.

  But I wasn’t about to tell Car any of this, just out of pure, dog-stupid stubbornness.

  * * *

  Fall term was suddenly over and it was time to write the first exams of the year. The mood on campus shifted and everyone became preoccupied and brooding. Connor holed up in the Rowing Cottage desperately trying to pass all his courses. Even if he was a quadruple legacy to Harvard and a Junior National team member, they could not take him if he was actually failing classes, and his board scores were a complete joke.

  I spent thi
s down time studying, sleeping, running and studying some more. The exams were harder than any of the tests I’d taken back at home and I wasn’t taking any chances. After I finished the last of them—AP chemistry, an upgrade of the course I had taken in Niccalsetti Senior School—I wandered into town, hoping I’d find somebody on the team to hang out with. I hit it lucky. Ruth was in the Station Shop, alone and reading. The Station Shop was Fenton’s idea of a café: it served all the usual coffee concoctions and also ice cream and snacks for the tourists. Most of the kids preferred the Pizza Garden, where they could get away with smoking if they were careful. At this time of year the teachers were too swamped to come into town and patrol the place. For all they cared we could be ordering shots and shooting up in the corners. I knew better than to look for Ruth there.

  A jagged row of icicles outside the Station Shop window dripped and sparkled in the weak, white sun. I could hear the fat, melting drops slapping the wet snow. I came into the shop wet from the cold and Ruth turned away from me when she saw me. She was poring over a black-spined Penguin paperback. The Brothers Karamazov. She was actually reading it on her own steam. I knew this because our English exams were over. I sat down in front of her and she tried to ignore me, then looked up and sighed. “Can we please, please, please not talk about crew? Or the team? Or training?”

  “Okay … Are you done with all your exams?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about them either.”

  “What are you doing over Thanksgiving break?”

  “Definitely not a good topic for discussion.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know about you then,” I said in exasperation. “You know all about me. I don’t know anything about you.”

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at the square of light on the floor. “Like what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Just sit there for a second, Rob. I’m busy reading this. I have one more page and it’s over.”

  I liked watching her read. She looked pale and exhausted and she moved with a quiet deliberation. I wanted to reach out and touch her but resisted the impulse. After a few minutes she closed her book, slipped it in her bag, then took a breath. “I think I love my father more than my mother.”