The Night Swimmer

by Matt Bondurant

  I’d die, he said. I’m not like you.

  I fell into his chest, my face on his neck. I remember my lips under his chin, the smell of lime and wool, the faint stubble on his face. I held his lapels in my hands, bunching them in my fists. I think his arms were around me, at least it felt like they were. I can’t be sure. I may have only imagined what I had played out in my mind a hundred times. It was quite familiar to me by then, so I would not be surprised if I was fooled by my own longing into thinking that Sebastian embraced me that night, rather than merely bracing himself against my lurching body or gingerly holding me off in a gentlemanly fashion.

  The next few minutes are unclear, but we were walking up the hill. I remember feeling the burn in my legs, and when I looked up the road, it seemed as if it pierced the night sky like a glowing arrow, as if it passed into the stars.

  Then we were at Nora’s gate and I was sitting on the stone wall, feeling sick and leaning my head between my knees. Sebastian was standing in front of me looking out over the fields.

  What the fuck is that?

  Sebastian pointed up the hill to Knockcaranteen and the wind turbine, his face screwed in confusion. I got to my feet, and I could see that he was pointing at a tall, loping figure, coming down the road toward us at terrific speed, a hundred yards and closing. It throbbed and contorted with unknown motion, but it came on fast and I clutched Sebastian’s arm and screamed, partly in terror but also partly in relief that this confrontation was finally going to happen and that someone was there with me. We huddled by the road as she came closer. But she was moving too fast, something was not right, the movement was too smooth and at twenty yards I could tell it was not Miranda. It was Finbar Cotter, shirtless, standing on his pedals, pumping his bike down the road like a ghoulish apparition. He flew past without a glance in our direction, his thatch of hair slicked back with sweat, his torso ropy with ribs, tendons, and blue veins, a steady creak creak creak of his crankshaft the only sound. When he hit the crest of the next hill, the road down to the Ineer, he folded into a tuck and dropped like a stone into the black void.

  Bloody hell! Sebastian said.

  I sat down on the wall and hid my face in my hands. I felt terribly sick.

  A light in the house came on, from the upstairs, Nora’s bedroom. My scream must have woken them.

  I have to go, I said. Thanks for the drinks.

  I went in the door without looking back and felt my way down the dark hallway with both hands, dragging my fingertips along the paneling, knocking down the series of framed Irish Tourist Board posters which fortunately did not shatter on the carpet. I locked my door with the skeleton key and got in bed, taking my clothes off under the duvet. I heard some creaking of footsteps in the house, the front door opening, more creaking of stairs, then silence. There wasn’t anything to do. I didn’t feel that I would be hideously embarrassed in the morning. Rather I was thinking that when I saw Finbar coming toward us I did not think of Fred. I did not wish he was there with me. In fact I wanted no one else there more than Sebastian.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fred was using a small cave along the southern cliffs that led to the old beacon as his smelting site to make the metal for his Time Travel Wish Fulfillment project. In the morning I made a couple bacon sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and brought it out to him. He spent most mornings at the site working on the project before the pub opened. At this point I didn’t even know what he was making.

  The cave he’d selected was really just a shallow depression a couple yards deep where Fred had located some veins of iron ore and he determined it would be easier to smelt it on-site using a small furnace he’d built with stones as opposed to dragging it off somewhere. The process also created a lot of heavy, rank smoke that wouldn’t go over well in town. You could smell it from a quarter mile away, and the black smoke swirled in the heavy sea winds, pushed against the cliff face and driven in every direction.

  That morning Fred was outside the cave sitting on a campstool, stripped to the waist, staring at the glowing furnace, his upper body striped with soot. Dinny Corrigan squatted on a stack of firewood reading a thick paperback novel. Pickaxes and hammers were propped against the cliff face with a wooden box of charcoal bricks, a stack of limestone rubble, and a small blanket with gnarled nubs of black rock.

  Fred stood and took the sandwiches and coffee gratefully, tossing a sandwich to Dinny, who acknowledged me with a nod before returning to his book. I sat on the ground next to Fred and watched the furnace while he ate. It clearly was not going well.

  The reducing agent, he said, isn’t working properly. We need coke. This charcoal won’t cut it. I’ve already tried several types of peat. I’m changing the project, anyway.

  Yeah? How?

  Gonna make something else, something more practical. A firearm. A gun.

  Dinny chuckled, and we both stared at him for a moment. Fred shrugged.

  Easier to do, he said. Don’t have to worry about the electronics. I can’t build a circuit out of this shit. Better choice anyway. If you were to go back in time.

  The day was clearing, the sky rolling back to the east and creating a pristine expanse of sky over the Atlantic. A crowd of seagulls so thick it created a shadow bunched over the water just off the cliffs; a pod of whales perhaps.

  I’m gonna go back out to Clear, I said. While the weather is holding up.

  Sure, Fred said. I got things to work on here.

  Come with me. The weather is perfect. We’ll have a picnic.

  Fred gazed at his furnace. Dinny watched us carefully, his white flipper hands held as if in prayer. A few wispy ropes of scar tissue climbed out of his collar.

  That would be nice, Fred said. Dinny, watch the furnace for me? Another few hours, then just bank it down. Tomorrow I gotta locate some sulfur.

  Dinny nodded and went back to his book.

  * * *

  We ate cold pasta and drank two bottles of white wine on a grassy bluff overlooking Pointabullaun, my favorite view of the Atlantic and Fastnet. It was hard to pull my gaze away from it.

  I still can’t believe, Fred said, that you tried to swim out to that fucking thing.

  Can we not go back to Baltimore? I said. Just stay here?

  I wish, he said. He pried up a piece of shale and stood and whipped it off the bluff into the water below.

  So, he said, I called the police yesterday.

  What?

  I reached up and pulled him down by his belt loop.

  Yeah. I told them everything that you told me. I told them . . . we don’t think Patrick committed suicide.

  What’d they say?

  They said they’d create a file and look into it.

  Did you say anything about the Corrigans?

  Sort of.

  Was there . . . any reaction to that?

  Hard to say. Probably nothing will happen.

  He lay back on the grass and I rolled over and grabbed him around his middle.

  Hey, I said, I really appreciate that.

  I put my cheek against his and we watched the sky, the tall grass rushing around us like fire.

  You know how when you are a kid, Fred said, how it seems like life is just an unending series of moments like this?

  I’m not sure what you mean.

  You are always having to leave places, he said, to do something else. Whatever it is that you are doing, whatever it is that you want to keep doing, it has to end. And it ends for reasons that don’t make any sense. Like, why do we have to leave? Ever?

  The blue bowl of the sky was endless. Like lying on the bottom of a pool, a thousand feet down and looking up.

  People have jobs and things, I said. Responsibilities.

  Still. What would that be like if you were a kid and instead of being yanked away from everything you actually could just stay? If your parents just said, okay, we’ll stay? Always?

  That would be pretty excellent, I said, I have to admit. But you’d quickly be vagabonds. Hobos
wandering the streets.

  Fred propped himself up with one arm and looked at me. The wind tore at his shaggy hair.

  Seriously, Elly, how hard would it be? I mean for us to be able to always stay, and still lead some semblance of a normal life? You mean we couldn’t figure it out? Bullshit. It could be done.

  Well, that would likely be one spoiled kid.

  Maybe, Fred said. Or maybe he’d be the most well-adjusted kid in the world. One that never knew the constant, needless defeat of his desires. Instead of a long series of failures he would know only the joy of contentment? Is that possible?

  Maybe. It would help to be rich. Really rich.

  Exactly, Fred said.

  He lay back on the grass and put his hands under his head. I snuggled into his armpit and closed my eyes. I could see it coming.

  We could do that, Fred said. What if . . . if Ham comes through with that money, like he says . . . we could do it.

  I tried not to stiffen or give some sign of alarm. I thought of deep blue water and sky.

  Wouldn’t that be something?

  Yeah, I said. It would.

  I mean, if we had a baby.

  Yeah. We’d have to actually have the baby, first.

  Do you want to?

  God, I don’t know. I know that I don’t want to have a baby because Ham wants us to.

  Me neither. But I want to anyway.

  It’s not just the money?

  Oh, Elly. Of course not. That’s just extra. That just makes it easier.

  You don’t even know where he is, I said.

  Oh, I do, Fred said. I can see him right now. He’s swimming in a pool of water in the sky. He is tall and beautiful. A redhead like you.

  I meant Ham.

  Oh.

  I mean, we don’t know what is going on, with Ham. Where he is.

  True.

  Or if he’ll have any of that money. It seems to come and go for him, right?

  Yeah, Fred said. Probably a bad idea.

  The sun was warm on my face and I closed my eyes and let them soften to fiery orange. The waves crashed on the rocks. The wind twisted the grass into insistent shapes. I held on to him.

  * * *

  When Fred and I first moved to Burlington I taught swimming lessons at the YMCA as something to do and a way to augment our income. It was Fred’s idea, trying to help me use my natural talents for some kind of potential career. Teaching small children, the Water Babies classes, was the most unnerving and difficult for me. Not difficult in that they had trouble learning to swim, as they often took direction and were less afraid of the water than older kids or even adults, but there was always that desperate fragility in their persons that I could not shake. I would hold them on the surface with one hand, their glistening bodies twisting and thrashing, their enormous bean-shaped heads, brawny little torsos, and spinning red limbs. I didn’t know how to talk to them so I mostly gestured and demonstrated by pantomime, which seemed to effectively hold their attention. Perhaps they were mesmerized by the odd sight of this woman, gesticulating and moving her arms, like some kind of silent clown act. I have never known how to deal with small children, but it was more than that. Their innate density and power, like a small sun, a compression of so much life, seemed to me like a dangerous, weighty package. A baby seemed like the opposite of space and broadly disseminated life, like the inverse of the open sea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kieran’s guesthouses and the new pub were nearly complete. The grounds were churned with thick black mud, the builders skulking around smoking cigarettes in the shadows of the various construction vehicles that were scattered like the husks of dinosaurs. They watched me walk by with an unsettling concentration. I gave them a tight wave but nobody blinked. The tall, narrow guesthouses formed a line that nearly bisected the Waist, the pub and restaurant abutting the road and cutting off the North Harbor from the Ineer. They were painted the bright colors favored in rural Ireland—deep reds, a royal blue, lemon yellow—and they were staggered at different heights and with different façades to give the impression that they were built in different decades, with tall casement windows, heavy oak doors, and faux slate roofs. The pub had a wide, double-door entrance, and there would be a large restaurant area, a wooden deck that overlooked the Ineer and also had a vantage over the North Harbor for cookouts in the summer. A gazebo in front would hold an ice cream stand for tourists. They wouldn’t have to trek all the way up to Highgate’s farm.

  Nora stayed upstairs or in the parlor, not greeting me at the door. In the morning we had painfully cordial exchanges as she served breakfast.

  Why don’t people like us here? I asked her. I mean Fred and me.

  She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen and I immediately regretted asking. She was one of the few islanders who treated me kindly, and I didn’t want to lose that. I owed her for what she did for me the night I found Patrick’s body.

  You don’t know, Elly, she said. That’s not how it is.

  Nora maintained something like a smile. She kept looking back into the kitchen, as if checking something on the stove.

  You’re right, I said, I don’t know anything. I’m just trying to understand.

  You shouldn’t worry about this, she said. I’m afraid I’ve got the kettle on the hob. Do you need more toast?

  I can’t seem to get a straight answer, I said. Only a couple of people will talk to me. Some people are real friendly, like you of course, but still, there’s this feeling. I can’t explain it. It’s bad in Baltimore, with Fred. Nobody comes to the pub.

  Her face worked and her eyes drifted away to a spot over my head. She didn’t want to say what came next.

  We keep to our own kind, she said. Just the way of things.

  But you helped me before. You know me.

  Please don’t ask me about this. There are some things that cannot be explained. There are things about this island that even we don’t understand.

  She turned away and went into the kitchen.

  * * *

  Standing in the road in front of Nora’s I saw a man perched in a window in the old lighthouse up the hill. He was wearing a long coat, and what surprised me most was that I didn’t think you could get inside the lighthouse as the entrances were all gated and locked. His face was behind a giant camera lens levered on a hunk of stone, pointing in my general direction. I figured that he was a birder, likely trying to get long shots of Fastnet. I waved to him. After a moment he raised his head from the camera and held up a hand. We stood there for a few moments, our hands raised. I turned and went down the hill.

  Clear had always felt lonely, but now I desperately wanted to see a kindly face. I crossed the western plateau and through the boglands to O’Boyle’s caravan. His new house now had three standing walls, a washbasin, an old bureau, an expensive-looking leather armchair, and a gleaming stainless-steel gas barbecue grill in the yard. But still no roof. Smoke puffed from the chimney of the caravan so I took the path down into the gentle depression in the bog. Across the way by the northern cliffs, toward Dún an óir, I saw another figure, standing in the waist-high bracken, a black silhouette against Roaringwater Bay, watching me approach. Another birder? It was not Miranda, I could see that right off. When I stopped and shaded my eyes she quickly turned and I could tell it was a young woman. She disappeared behind the rise toward the northern cliffs.

  O’Boyle was lounging on the couch in a pile of blankets and drinking tea, sleepy and content looking. There was the close, sweet aroma of bodies.

  I saw a girl up on the hill, I said, to the north. Wearing a cloak?

  O’Boyle leaned forward to pour me some tea. He was a bit sweaty.

  Ariel, he said. Havin’ a cuppa wit me.

  Really.

  Yah. Nice lass. Known her since she was a babe.

  How old is she?

  Oh, she must be something like thirty-five by now.

  That’s impossible, I said. She can’t be a day over twenty. She look
s like a teenager.

  Clean livin’ I suppose. Island living.

  Wait, how old are you?

  O’Boyle grinned and stood up, slapping his belly. He was wearing an old flannel shirt and gym shorts, and his erection was painfully obvious.

  Thirty-nine, he said.

  I stood up and stared at his face. It was worn, but unlined, the skin taut, his eyes rounded and bright. I didn’t believe him and I told him so. He shrugged and scratched himself and ambled into the kitchen. Perhaps his sense of time had become warped because he never left the island. Perhaps an island year was a different unit of measurement.

  Ariel was born here too?

  Oh yah, O’Boyle said. She goes back, well, back as far as I do, that’s for sure. Our people . . . have known each other for many centuries. More tea?

  He was taking something that looked like dirt out of a small pouch and pressing it into a tea diffuser. The kettle was whispering on the hob. The caravan rocked with buffets of wind. I looked into my cup. There were bits of flotsam and I could dimly discern a small pile of twigs on the bottom.

  No thanks.

  Your man Fred still in the cave, working at the forge?

  Yeah, how’d you know?

  Dinny told me.

  Really. Didn’t know that guy even spoke.

  Not much, O’Boyle said. But he comes around, has a can or two. He’s a good lad all considered.

  What happened to him? I mean his hands, the scars.

  O’Boyle slouched on the couch and frowned into his sagging belly. A thin patter of rain rang on the sheet metal roof of the caravan.

  An accident, he said. On the salvage boat.

  Conchur’s boat?

  Yeah.

  Was there a fire?

  O’Boyle shrugged and stared into his teacup. We sat there for a few moments listening to the rain.

  Dinny used to be a talkative chap, O’Boyle said. Talked plenty. Sometimes . . . he talked too much. He used to work the ferry, other jobs on the mainland.

  For Kieran?

  Yeah. One day, ’bout four years ago, Kieran puts him on Conchur’s crew. They head out the first day. They had a couple boats then, smaller ones, and Dinny was driving one of them, him being Kieran’s nephew and all. That night his boat comes floating into the South Harbor, all afire. A ghostly sight. It just drifted in, full of flames, and beached itself on the rocks. Dinny was still on board, alive. They didn’t find him until after they put the fire out and drug the boat up. He was badly, badly burned. I was there when they pulled him out, blackened and arms and legs drawn up. Looked like a burnt spider. Hands, legs, most of his body. A real mess. His boots were melted to his feet. Some kind of accident. The rest of the crew got off on Conchur’s boat, but Dinny was trapped belowdecks.