by English, Ben
“Back from Australia, yeah, I remember. Oh, that’s right! What was her name?”
Jack sat and reached for the falcon. “Mercedes.”
“Yeah. Hey, you got anymore Foster’s?”
“In the fridge, behind the fruit cake-thing your mom sent me last Christmas.” Jack studied the crystal as Alonzo stood. Flashes of coruscant light played across his face, refracted from deep within the translucent falcon. “She was really amazing.”
Alonzo raised his head from the refrigerator in order to yell back. “Sheeze, Jack, my mom’s still alive, you know.” He took a bottle of springwater for Jack and a thick can of Foster’s for himself, then reentered the library. “Bad luck to speak of the living in the past tense, man.”
Jack snagged the bottle thrown at him. “Not your mom, you moron. Mercedes.”
Ensconced once again in the sofa’s cushions, the smaller man popped the tab on the can of beer. “That’s right. She was—Diane Bergstrom’s cousin, or something. You really had it going on that summer, amigo. State Champs coming up, you were finishing that chemistry assignment for Mrs. Riley for fall semester, working on your tan guarding pool honeys all day, then, wham, in walks this chick.”
“In walks Mercedes.”
Alonzo poured some beer into a glass, then drank straight from the can. “So what ever happened to her?”
Jack took a long pull on the water bottle. “I never told you the whole story, did I? ‘Bout how she showed up at the pool at four in the morning, and all that.”
Alonzo blinked. “Four o’clock? No way! What, when you were doing one of those crazy workouts under the spotlight? Why’d she come to the pool at four?”
“Couldn’t sleep, I guess. This was the day after she ran into Kyle.”
He sniffed again. “Dremel. That guy. So what happened?”
Jack set down his water and the crystal, so as to have his hands free. His hands are half the story, Alonzo thought, but he kept his mouth shut. It had been months since he’d seen Jack this animated. His friend leaned forward as he spoke, grinning unselfconsciously. Points of green and blue light gathering in the falcon found his face, and Jack paused, an expression somewhere between guilt and amusement rippling out of the silent, dark waters that made an island of his soul.
“First off, I about break my leg when I see her . . .”
*
Forge
5AM
He felt like an idiot, but he offered his hand anyway. “My name’s Jack.”
“Mine’s Mercedes. Nice to meet you Jack.” She had a firm, no, a hard grip; almost like she was trying to cement him to her. Her hand was calloused from much use. What is she, some kind of spot welder? Jack thought. No, not this girl. Couldn’t be.
He’d simply never seen anyone as beautiful as—what was her name, again?
“Mercedes,” he said agreeably, taking a step forward. Without warning, Jack went down hard, landing with a grunt on the concrete deck. Grimacing, he noted that his foot had become tangled in the black, ropy cords of the electronic time clock. Brilliant, he thought. Yeah, Jack, this is a great impression.
He untwined himself, stealing glances at the girl, who was trying valiantly to hide her laughter (and almost succeeding, he noted ruefully) behind a feigned cough. She was wearing an old denim jacket over white shorts and pink t-shirt. “How’d you get in here?” he pressed.
“You left the door open. Hey, you’re bleeding a little.” She pointed.
Jack looked down at his knee. Sure enough. It wasn’t much of a wound; merely an abrasion, and the chlorine and other pool chemicals would probably be antiseptic enough, but you never could tell. He kept his eyes firmly on the blond girl as he walked over to the shower and yanked the chain. “Not a mass-murderer or anything, are you?” he asked as he rinsed his stinging knee. “Come in here to, um, add another felony to your list of crimes, maybe strangle me?”
Her reply was quick. “I think you’re doing a good enough job of that on your own.”
Now it was Jack’s turn to laugh. He slipped a pair of cotton shorts on over his suit.
Mercedes continued. “My grandparents–do you know the Adams’?–live a couple blocks away, and I couldn’t sleep.”
He was incredulous. “Couldn’t sleep–what, in Greater Metropolitan Forge? Holy cow, Mercedes, that’s a first.” He sat, crosslegged, on the lower diving board. Watching her talk, Jack surprised himself by wondering if her mind was as flawless as the rest of her. Careful, buddy, he told himself. She was perfect for him at that moment. No nicks or chips marred his perception of her, which was only a few minutes old. Well, that wasn’t exactly true.
“I saw you at the pool yesterday afternoon. All those kids were with you?” She nodded. “Any of them yours?” She looked confused, so he added, “I mean, do you have any kids?” Now, why had he asked that?
He got another laugh in response, and she joined him on the board. “Are you kidding?”
Mentally, he backpedaled fast. What was wrong with him? He found himself almost wishing she’d go away, just vanish back into the soft summer night she’d conjured herself out of, or something.
On some deep level, Jack realized the longer they spoke the more he could very well be getting himself into, well, what?
She was saying something, something about walking to the pool . . .and Jack suddenly wondered what it would be like to sketch her face. If he had a good piece of charcoal and a little bit better lighting, he could probably capture her wide brow and straight nose. The full, sleek lips and strong jaw might be a bit hard for him, but he didn’t doubt he could do it, given a little time. She’s Italian, he thought abruptly, surprised at the flash of insight, despite her Nordic hair and body type. If he only had a pad of paper and a good pencil–
Jack brought himself up short. In his entire life, he’d never drawn a single thing.
This was getting a little too weird. He needed to move.
“—and then I saw you start your little race, Mr. Aquaman, and there we have it.” she summed up with a smile. Jack nodded amiably, sucked his eyes away from the dimple that had appeared in her right cheek, and lurched off the diving board towards the pool building.
“I need to do a few things to get the pool ready. Want to come? We open up for earlybird swim in about an hour.”
“Sure,” she said, following. Gesturing to the Ziplock bag with the CD player in it, she said, “So you’re not afraid of electrocuting yourself?”
Jack tapped the buttons through the plastic, then pulled the speaker off the pool bottom by its cord. “Not really. It’s insulated. I kind of made it myself.”
“Oh,” she said, and left it at that.
She followed him into the lifeguards’ lounge, which adjoined the front office. He stowed the CD player in a mesh basket on the wall with his name on it, then grabbed a handful of keys off a peg near the cash register. Jack was dying to ask her more questions, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what they were. “Ah, I’ve got to get some stuff out of the basement.” She nodded back at him, then continued to examine the pale blue room. Jack watched her gaze linger over the six shelves of swimming trophies. “A lot of those are left over from the old pool,” he said.
“They’re dusty,” she replied.
Not having much else to say, Jack nodded and walked past the dingy white linoleum counter and out the front door, then around to the lower side of the building where the combination of large white double doors and his keys gave him access to the machinery that ran the pool. He looked at the gray, chugging mass of pipes and tubes for a moment before checking the gauges on the surge tank and the canister of chlorine. Everything was covered in a dusting of fine white grit; concentrated around a stack of bulging brown paper sacks in one corner. As Jack was about to heft one of the hundred pound bags of soda ash onto his shoulders, he paused. It seemed he could finally think straight. His head was beginning to clear, despite the dust which filled the air and clung to the rumbling, churning esoter
ica of the filtration system.
As he crossed the threshold with the big sack, Jack started to laugh. The girl, Mercedes, had found a moth-eaten feather duster and pushed a chair over against the bank of shelves. She grinned down at him through a small cloud. “Regular dust bunny farm up here,” she said, squinting.
Again, Jack didn’t know what to say. He continued through the pool building and dumped most of the grainy powder into the pool, carrying the trickling bag along the edge to help disperse the soda. Now for the fun part, he shuddered. He’d already rolled back the other sheet of plastic insulation, and a thin layer of steam was beginning to rise above the water as Jack began his ascent up the diving platform. He kept his eyes riveted on the steps ahead of him and moved up the ladder gently, gingerly.
He took great care to only move one arm or one leg at a time, sliding his hands upward around the rails which led to the top.
There was already a growing pale of light along the eastern rim of the great canyon by the time Jack had worked through half the knots which affixed the spotlight to the platform’s edge and the adjoining aluminum rail. The sky had gone from velvet blue to pearl. He was sweating profusely in the cool breeze.
“How’d you rig up the light?” she asked from thirty feet below.
Jack started and nearly swore, clutching at the grainy surface of the platform. He brushed a sheaf of hair out of his eyes and peered cautiously over the edge. The girl was standing, arms akimbo, at the edge of the pool. He wondered if she’d really dusted all the trophies.
“I mean, how did you get it to make a narrow beam?”
Jack stretched his fingers, and continued working at the knots. “Easy. I borrowed a scrim from the high school drama club before school was out. Here, catch this and I’ll show you.” He lowered the heavy spot by its rope until she caught it. Then, as cautiously as before, he walked backwards down the long ladder.
Mercedes was moving the adjustable shutter over the light. “I see how this works. Hey, why don’t you just dive off?”
He was more than halfway down. Half-a-dozen quick responses came to mind, but as Jack jumped the last few feet to the ground, he decided to stick with the truth. “I never really learned,” he said. “I’ve mostly stuck with swimming. You were pretty impressive yesterday, though. I thought you were going to hit your head when you did that, um—”
“Inward dive? You saw that?”
“Everybody saw it.” He indicated the spotlight, pointing to the hinged shutters. “This is a scrim, so you can sort of shape the light.”
They stood there for a few seconds, smiling at each other. She’d coiled the nylon rope they’d used to lower the spotlight. Jack could see thoughts racing, shark-like and shadow-quick, behind her eyes. He wet his lips. “Think you could teach me that sometime?”
“Teach you what?”
“Inward dive.”
“Right! Um, sure.” She looked down at herself. “I’ll need to run home and get something to wear.”
Jack took the spotlight from her hand. He’d left it turned on too long; the black metal was hot. “I can loan you a suit of mine,” he said, forcing himself to keep a straight face. “You know, we could get started right away.”
She blinked, then her eyes widened. “I think I need a bit more . . . comprehensive coverage, if you know what I mean.” A snatch of cloud over her shoulder, above the valley’s lip, blushed a rosy red. The sun generally came up quickly out of the mountains around Forge.
Jack let his smile break through. What had gotten into him, he wondered. “Could you come back at noon? That’s when lessons get over, then there’s an hour break before open swim, when all the kids get here. Just some ladies doing water aerobics and one or two triathlon maniacs, but we can dive. If you’re not busy.” Quite a speech there, Jack. You’ve got a great future marketing pre-driven automobiles.
“I’ll be here at eleven–my cousins have lessons.”
The sun trembled at the edge of the world. “Great, that’s my break. I’ll try and be ready.” She followed behind at a distance as he carried the spotlight and coiled rope into the lifeguard’s lounge. Jack turned to catch her yawning.
“Guess I’d better go,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble, or anything. For having me in here.”
She paused in the doorway. “See you in a few hours, Jack.”
“See you. Mercedes.”
She looked like she was about to say something else, but just smiled and then was gone. Jack listened for a moment to the sound of her tennis shoes on the wooden deck, then grabbed a pair of goggles from his mesh basket.
He hung his loose shorts on the back of a chair near the timing clock, and lobbed his goggles far out towards the middle of the pool. The sun breached the wall of trees arrayed along the eastern frontier, and shadows were born into the new day shadows. One sprang into existence, elongated and pincerlike in its exaggerated proportions, clawing across the smooth water toward the tiny ripples made by his goggles. I can’t do this, he thought, staring with more than a little trepidation at the diving platform. It dominated the pool, a gleaming gargantuan poised in mid-lurch like some existential Godzilla as written by Orson Scott Card.
The door banged shut behind him, and John Gessner ambled out onto the deck, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee. “What, here again?” he muttered in Jack’s general direction, wincing even behind his sunglasses. The older man, tanned even darker than Jack, blew gingerly at the cup’s steaming rim, then took a sip. “Too early. Going to stunt your growth, Jack.” He sat in the chair recently vacated by Mercedes.
Jack grinned. He’d often wondered if fifteen more years would turn him into the man now stretching languorously before him. Mr. John Gessner--pool manager, high school biology teacher, local basketball coach, single parent--but just plain John to a few lucky students during the months they were employed at the pool. He was the ultimate authority within the boundaries of the pool’s fence; a benevolent monarch in Jack’s experience, but one who was able to conjure up visions of formaldehyde and partially preserved corpses of cats or frogs in the minds of any potential rulebreakers. He wore his usual early-morning uniform: a purple and gold Lakers tanktop over baggy shorts and Tivas. Even in the weak light under the pool building’s shadow, the steel bracelet around John’s right arm–a memento from Peace Corp days in India--matched the glint off his reflective Randolph Aviator sunglasses.
John shuffled one foot out of his faded, laceless deck shoes and prodded the deck, shivered, and swore at the chill. He took a too-deep sip of the steaming coffee and swore again. Jack turned away before his boss could see his widening smile. The things some people have to do just to wake up.
He should probably tell the older man about the diving lesson he was scheduled to receive in a few hours, but there was just no talking to Gessner until he was nursing at least his second cup of coffee, no cream, extra sugar.
She was something else, though, wasn’t she? Oh, man. And one look at those eyes and you knew she was thinking fiercely, nonstop, and there was no telling what was going through her head.
Jack knew he should have felt intimidated by her beauty. He’d watched yesterday, amused, as no less than three of Diane’s and Alice’s friends–guys he’d run track with the past few years–had struck up conversations with her poolside, then quickly retreated under the frank combination of her emerald glare and turquoise swimsuit.
But he couldn’t wait to see her again.
He ran to the edge of the pool and launched himself across it, into the angling sunlight, keeping pace with his phantom reflection on the water below—
*
—and Jack hit the water hard, harder than anything he’d imagined. He’d tried to aim for the reflection of the sun, which hung almost directly overhead, but something had gone wrong, he’d over-rotated too much or something during his ten meter controlled fall, and the water slapped his back brutally. He swore and choked underwater, cringing at the sting. Breaching the surface
, he clawed his way feebly toward where Mercedes hung on the edge of the pool. She guided his hand to the wall.
Grimacing, Mercedes touched his shoulder. “Mi scusi–I mean, I’m so sorry, Jack. Are you okay?”
Jack gasped for air. “Feels like somebody’s been using a sander on my back. Is all my skin still there?”
She looked. “Ouch. Maybe we should stop for a while. It’s like you keep going over too far. You’re getting better, but—this can’t be good for you. Do you want me to go again?” Mercedes bobbed in the water next to him, a hand on his arm for balance.
Jack had almost gotten his wind back. “No, that’s okay. Just give me a sec. Catch my breath.” He dragged himself up the aluminum ladder. The pool area was mostly quiet; Gessner and another lifeguard were herding a Mom’s & Tots class around in the shallow end. Straightening up to catch Jack’s eye, John smirked and shook his head. Kate, who had worked at the pool as long as Jack had, assumed her patented pained expression and turned back to her class, which included at least two of Mercedes’ little cousins. The pool was otherwise vacant, all the other guards at lunch. Aside from a cluster of little girls left over from Jack’s last class, he and Mercedes had the diving well entirely to themselves.
One of the little girls, her face nearly covered by an oversized pair of wraparound sunglasses, solemnly handed a towel to Jack. “Thanks, Thea,” he said, wiping his eyes. He could see the redness of his chest and shoulders in the funhouse reflection off her eyewear.
But the sting was fading fast. “What did you say a sec ago?” he said to Mercedes. “‘Me skew-?”
“Mi scusi, it means I’m sorry in Italian. It’s what I am. Italian.”
Jack sat on the edge of the pool. “But aren’t the Bergstrom’s Swedish?”
“That’s right, I’m a mix. A real mutt. A Swedish wop–that means thug.” She pushed off the wall and started treading water.
“You should meet my best friend, Al. He’s Swedish-Mexican, but could pass pretty much for Swedish except he’s only about 5' 5'. Kind of a thug himself. He’s coming home in a few weeks–he did the exchange student thing last year.”