Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle

by English, Ben

  She pushed away from the gutter and stroked past the turbulent children. The oldest, a freckled, blond imp with a face reminiscent of a happy crocodile, paused long enough to let her pass before slapping a spray of water into his brother’s face.

  Mercedes reached the deep end and began to tread water. The sky above was a perfect, cerulean dome framed by the spruces, Doug firs, and evergreens that limned the deep, wide valley. She glanced at the timing clock at the pool’s edge, and lifted her arms out of the water. One full minute of this ought to be a good start, she thought, kicking hard. She lashed over to where a small outlet valve would wash cycled water over her legs and keep them cool. Mercedes knew this pool well.

  As she surrendered to the habits of exercise she’d forced her body to accept, she found her mind wandering. That was one aspect of her programmed workout patterns she never had particularly liked; the tendency of her thoughts to occasionally ramble off by themselves instead of staying on the neat little paths she preferred.

  The Senator would be back in town later today and wanted her to call; she and the girls would have lunch with the old man and show him her latest batch of photographs. Mercedes counted herself lucky that her grandfather had been fishing buddies with one of the richest men in the region. When Sean Lyons had gotten fed up with the status quo and decided to run for State representative years ago, he’d asked a young Mercedes to take his campaign photos. She’d assumed he was just being solicitous, but the shots had turned out well enough. To hear old Sean talk, you’d think he’d won the election on her photographs alone, never mind the fact that the incumbent had conspicuously leached money from the county during his 16-year reign.

  Lyons had always shown a sincere interest in Mercedes, and when he campaigned for U.S. Senator, he’d irritated some members of his staff by asking Mercedes–an amateur, worse yet: a political nonperson--to coordinate the photography end of his campaign. Again, she’d done well–well enough that her candid pictures of the Senator-to-be down on his knees in his garden had caught the eye of a magazine editor.

  Such are the things of which careers are made.

  Nature shots weren’t her specialty, but no doubt she’d find more than one meadow or vista to capture during the drive out to his property. Northern Idaho was so pretty in the spring: stately trees lining the blacktop like twin colonnades, hidden lakes lying along arms of the mountains like huge shards of the sky fallen and come to rest. Deep, thick forest. She’d have to be careful, Mercedes reminded herself, to watch for deer and other critters on the road. The thing she liked best, the hallmark of Forge she thought of when she was on assignment for Conde Nast, whether on a llama’s back in the Andes or riding on a barge in the Yangtse River delta, was the profound, almost primeval quiet.

  Forge had sprung into its existence from a single blacksmith shop staked out in 1863 at the headwaters of the Clearwater River. The convergence of several small tributaries had been the ideal spot for trappers and prospectors to resupply, trade wampum with the Nez Perce Indians, and have their mules reshod. Alternately converging and forking rivers with their shoals and shifting sandbars had marked the furthest incursion of steamboats that had come up the Columbia River past Lewiston, the original state capital. Lewis and Clark themselves had been the first recorded white savages to winter on the banks of the Clearwater and carve out huge canoes from the great bull pines they found, nearly three quarters of a century before the first steamboat shattered its paddle on the rocky river bed and been turned into Forge’s first semi-floating hotel, just down the new street from the smithy and across Oro Fino Creek from the Chinese laundry.

  Forge had eventually been reincarnated from a gold-mining boomtown to a logging capital. Mercedes had often heard her grandfather tell about his first summer job as a poleman on a log drive. He and his friends had come up from California one spring and been dumbfounded to see the great Clearwater River nearly choked by a great, shivering jam of lumber. They’d lent a hand, prying the freshly hewn and strangely naked-looking logs off the banks of the Clearwater, and ended up riding the jam itself all the forty miles to the cedar mill. Max Adams and his companions were hired on and spent the rest of that summer and two succeeding on the river, herding tons of bobbing, new lumber toward its destiny in the various mills which dotted the wide banks. His last year before heading off to college in San Francisco, Max and his brother Harry had been assistant cooks on a floating chuckwagon, a prefabricated mess hall with a pair of outboards that traveled with the log drive from the logging camp all the way to the mill.

  A chunk of this rough, raw wilderness had settled solidly into Max’s soul. He’d fallen in love with the wide, green valleys from his very first summer, and Max twice made good on his promise to return. Once to marry Britta Bergstrom, the daughter of an immigrant Swedish farmer he’d stayed with when he wasn’t cooking flapjacks for the smelly, bristling loggers. Again when his last child, Mercedes’ father, had left the nest for college. Max and Britta had retired from California as fast as they could pack their station wagon, and come back to the quiet.

  As much as Mercedes was a product of one of the most boisterous, blaring, overflowingly Italian families of San Francisco, she had equally deep and reverberating roots here, in Forge, Idaho. A fact that she’d only begun to discover the summer she was seventeen, when the general course of her life and of everything else around her had nearly convinced her that life was over.

  Mercedes allowed her arms to drop back into the water and began sculling with her hands, moving her elbows and wrists in a snap-glide-snap that reminded her of the fake salutations of parading prom queens. Her calves ached. Slowly she began to turn, the jet of water velvet smooth against her flushed skin.

  The little boys playing at the end of the pool seemed to have reached the limits of pleasure that mere splashing could provide. She watched as the smaller one reached out and grabbed his brother’s goggles by the thin band of plastic that connected the two lenses, and soundly snapped them across the bridge of the larger boy’s nose. The older brother squawked and reeled back. “Ow, Donald!” Mercedes winced. The only kids she’d seen play like this had been Alice and Diane’s little brothers. The lifeguard on the tower across from them just laughed and twirled his whistle by its nylon tether.

  Mercedes switched her kick style, whirling her legs beneath her, twisting slightly from side to side. Maybe I should step in before one of the little tykes ends up in the hospital, she thought. As she began to move towards them, the older boy ripped the goggles completely off his brother’s head, then, jumping purely for height, threw the rubber-bound goggles over the smaller boy into the gutter. “There, that’s what you get!”

  Yelping, Donald pounced to the side of the pool, his arm shooting into the covered trough that gurgled greedily. The bright blue lenses sailed on, borne away on a wave from their owner’s splashy approach. He almost snagged the slithering end of the rubber strap before it slipped away down the drain. Red-faced, he aimed himself at his crocodile-grinning brother. Before the lifeguard could blow his whistle, Donald had surged over his snickering brother in a rush of miniature breakers and chlorinated froth.

  Mercedes looked up at Garret before turning back to the empty deep end. Better leave this to the proper authorities, she thought as she listened to the lifeguard’s dictates over the now-silent boys.

  During the brief show she had never stopped treading water, and as she lifted her elbows once again out of the water, Mercedes found herself looking towards the widest spread of the concrete pool deck, where she’d spread her towel earlier, between the fence and the Coke machine, next to the square blue trapdoor, locked now, that accessed the pool’s surge tank. Before passing through the entire filtration system, the goggles would no doubt go there, along with all the other detritus that was washed down the drains.

  The young lifeguard, Garret, had climbed down off his tower and was now quietly berating the boys, who stood shivering before him, bouncing on the deck, their arms firmly clap
ped around their tanned middles.

  Mercedes kicked the water with greater ferocity, groaning softly as she forced herself to work. Lines of white fire now drew themselves across her legs, winding from her buttocks down around to her inner calves. Thirty seconds more. She managed to lift herself out of the water nearly midway up the slopes of her breasts before she gave out, her arms collapsing into the water and immediately working to support her. A rivulet of perspiration ran into her eye, and she leaned back, dipping her face backwards into the cool, cool water before lifting her legs up as well. Gradually, Mercedes arched into a back float.

  She began to breathe deeply, letting her body know to begin its cooldown. Years of this type of exercise had thoroughly programmed her metabolism, had managed to educate the mysterious workings of a body that had so often and so thoroughly turned traitor to her. When it came to exercise, at least, her body now seemed to know precisely when to flex itself into something taut and hard and when to relax.

  Mercedes felt like she was weightless, floating almost without effort, and she could imagine the pool bottom more than twenty feet behind her and below, herself buoyed above.

  This was the best part, she thought. She wondered if her doctor had known he would turn her into an endorphin junkie by prescribing such a rigorous exercise schedule. A gentle warmth was spreading through her entire body. It filled up the hollow, aching chambers in her legs and lower abdomen. Overflowed the bounds of her body. Wrapped her in a tender heat.

  And there, floating, almost levitating blissfully on a wave of buoyant emotion, Mercedes found her thoughts once more spiraling in reverse, down through the history of Forge; not that dry commentary friendly to any museum chronicle, but the story of her own first coming to Forge. That miserable, torturous, deliriously happy summer when she was seventeen.

  Forge

  When she was seventeen

  Mercedes leaned back into the leather upholstery and closed her eyes, trying to listen to her grandfather whistle through his teeth in syncopation with the jazz piano gliding from his CD player. She could feel him glance her way occasionally as he drove the white LeBaron through blades of sunlight and shadow cast by the pine trees lining the sides of the road. The top was down, and the tires themselves were singing on the blacktop, a monotone background note to the music from her grandfather’s CD player.

  She could smell Grampa Max’s cologne. Her whole life, the scent of Brut aftershave had been one of the fine constants she marked time by. To her it was the essence of her grampa, of summer afternoons hiking with him in the hills, of her first memory of being pushed gently on a toddler swing and then turning to recognize the raw, handsome Swedish masculinity of her grandfather. To her, he’d never changed. She recalled the sheer delight she’d felt as a young, young girl when she realized for the first time that her eyes were exactly the same shade of green as those of Grampa Max.

  Eyes closed now, she imagined her surroundings: the wide, green Clearwater River slipping by on the left, headed in the opposite direction. Beyond it, the steepening, boulder-studded cliffs that reached up to the sky. On her right, greener hills with miniature valleys of their own; wooded and rolling hills that eventually led (she’d seen from the airplane) to a bright yellow prairie, and then more mountains. It would be nice to capture the view somehow.

  So far, Idaho wasn’t that different from the hills and parks north of Oakland, where her grandfather had taught her how to fish when she had been a little girl and before he and Grandma Brit retired.

  He was looking at her again, stealing glances away from the unwinding black ribbon of highway. “Merce, you’re being awfully quiet on me. Hardly said a word since you got off the plane.” He tried to sound jovial, but Mercedes knew him well enough to hear behind the forced gallantry of his concern. She might be losing a father, but the old man next to her was losing a child. Maybe. Not for sure. Even the doctors didn’t know for sure.

  “Sorry, Grampa.” She managed to smile. “I was just thinking ‘bout Dad.”

  “Me, too, plum.” His thick finger stabbed at the CD control, and the sharp-edged, opening chords of a rolling blues piece filled the brief pocket of air in the convertible. “But I’m sure glad you could come up and see us. I ever tell you you’re my favorite granddaughter?”

  Mercedes laughed. “I’m your only granddaughter.”

  “That’s right! Uncontested champion of that department.” He leaned slightly as they rounded a tighter, sloping corner. “Say, you don’t think your aunt Sylvia will have any kids and upset the apple cart, do you?”

  Sylvia was her father’s older sister, a professor of English at Berkeley and a pronounced feminist. Mercedes didn’t know how to respond to that one. She’d never been sure exactly what her grandparents thought of their outspoken daughter. It had upset them terribly when Sylvia had decided to become a Mormon a few years ago, which was odd, since their daughter had already swung along the complete pendulum of radical, left-thinking politics. Once Mercedes overheard the neighborhood gossip chattering on and on about how Max and Britta were leaving the state so they wouldn’t have to spend their retirement money bailing their daughter out of jail. “Such an irresponsible dreamer, that girl. An embarrassment to her family.”

  But it had been Sylvia who’d paid for Mercedes’ plane ticket to Idaho, and Sylvia who’d moved in with her brother to help him take care of his wife during her final months. Just over a year had passed since illness killed Mercedes’ mother in tiny, quick degrees, grinding her down, shredding the delicate protective sheathes around her nerves. The doctors couldn’t even agree on a diagnosis of the symptoms, aside from terminal myelin degeneration.

  Neither her fierce Italian blood nor the resounding adjuration of a thousand Hail Marys had stemmed the tide inexorably turning against Mercedes’ mother.

  Sylvia arrived on their doorstep–broken into the house through a window, actually–and took charge. By that time, Mercedes was accustomed to staying home from school three days out of five to care for her mother. Even with Sylvia’s timely advent, Mercedes barely made it through the semester.

  Now it was Sylvia who stayed by her father’s side while he was recovering (he was recovering) from the removal of some kind of cyst or growth that had attached itself to his intestines. Sylvia would take care of him long enough to give Mercedes a kind of vacation. Sylvia had a good heart.

  “I hope she has kids, Grampa,” Mercedes said, squeezing his knee. “But we both know who’ll always be your favorite, right?”

  He smiled and patted her hand. “That’s right.” Max tapped the volume on the CD player, and driving, focused piano filled the car. The music was upbeat, seamless, and Mercedes simply couldn’t imagine anyone’s fingers moving that fast across a keyboard. During a measure’s worth of drum solo, Max said, “Can you name the piano here, Merce? Remember anything I taught you?”

  “Let’s see. Sounds a little like Duke Ellington, but more . . . careful about his notes.” She thought. “Smooth, like Michel Petrucciani, but--”

  “Listen to the tone.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Benny Green!”

  “Good girl.” Max slapped the steering wheel. She could tell he was pleased. “Okay, honey, we’re coming up on the town. Tell me honestly if you’ve ever seen a prettier sight.”

  The trees had begun to thin out somewhat, and Mercedes had noticed the occasional house nestled in among the lush, leafy green boughs. The valley itself had widened out, as if someone had scooped a miniature plain out of the smooth, lime-colored hills. The mountains themselves began to look more sculpted, more graceful, though occasionally the ridges were broken by craggy outcroppings of rock that looked like an exposed backbone of some great prehistoric beast.

  They crossed a bridge, then another, then a third, and then, as Max pointed, Mercedes saw the great white dam, far up one of the canyons, extending almost from peak to peak. “Water in the reservoir is almost high enough,” Max said. “Spring runoff was good this year. Anoth
er week or so and she should be warm enough to ski in. You ever waterski?”

  Mercedes shook her head.

  “That reminds me,” Max said. “Your grandmother and I take turns taking her sister’s grandkids to the city pool, but today we’re both strapped. They’ve got lessons at eleven, and then we usually let them swim the whole afternoon. Would you mind?”

  “Taking them to the pool? Easy.” Mercedes looked out at the widening valley. Whole neighborhoods now stretched from the highway to the foot of the mountains, and not a mini-mall in sight.

  “Are you sure? Not too tired from your flight?”

  “No problem, Grampa. How old are they?”

  “Alice is seven, and the twins are, oh, I don’t know—nine or ten. Oh, and you’ll want to meet Irene and Diane; they’re your age. Diane gets her license in the fall, and Irene–who usually drives–just had her’s suspended for the summer. Broke her heart.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Mercedes, in a town like this, a teenager without a license is like a blindfolded parachutist–frustrated, irritable, but with a vague idea that something exciting is just about to happen. You’ve got to have freedom in a place as little as Forge, but a little discipline, too. The kids here can go crazy from boredom if there’s nothing to do. Poor Irene. That girl’s got a mischievous streak—reminds me of you. Are you sure you want to be a chauffeur? You’re supposed to be relaxing up here. If your dad knew we’d put you to work right away, he’d give me hell.”

  “S’ alright, Grampa. I can’t just sit around. Wouldn’t want me turning into a blindfolded parachutist, now, right? Hey, what’s that?” She pointed at a rambling two-story building across the river, about halfway up the rolling hills. It had been painted a stark, jarring blue, unnerving against the dun hillside.