The Night Swimmer

by Matt Bondurant

  Wonderful, Sebastian said. I hope this person owes you money.

  We came down the hill toward the house. The windows were blazing with light, and I began to try to formulate what I was going to say. In the large window by the front door we could see a lamp on the kitchen table, a warmly lit scene that reminded me of the opening of a play. O’Boyle pulled out a chair and sat down, setting up a teapot and a couple of mugs. He was wearing a clean white shirt and smiling and laughing about something. He reached across the table and took hold of Ariel’s hands. She was wearing a strange kind of crown of sea nettles on her head, a simple green dress, her head bowed, a smile on her lips. The fire flickered in the background, and I could smell roasted meat and potatoes.

  They held each other’s hands across the table, and I thought of that moment back in Cork, before all this started, when the winner was announced. When Fred turned and knelt before me, seized my hands in his, his face afire with joy. It’s really happening! he said to me, we did it, this is really happening! The world spun around us like we were the only thing that existed, just for a moment.

  I watched the two of them in their small circle of light. The wind shifted and pushed the rain sideways, burning my eyes with sea salt. Sebastian cursed and held his arm in front of his face.

  Quaint, Sebastian said. We going to the door? Getting bloody soaked here.

  No, I said. I’m done.

  Seriously? Then let’s get back to the ferry.

  He took my hand.

  The black wall of clouds had now overtaken Fastnet, and the thin finger of light seemed pathetic under its immensity. What could I possibly say to Highgate? Would one more betrayal somehow assuage his grief?

  Okay, I said, let’s go.

  We cut back south to the rim of the Ineer, to follow the path that led to Kieran’s construction site and the Waist. The Ineer was frothing and rolling; sets of ten-foot waves thudded into the stone quay. The rock beach was already stripped bare to naked stone, and as we neared the cliff we could see the long black form of some enormous marine animal being pounded against the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

  Bloody hell, Sebastian said. That’s something you don’t see every day.

  What is it?

  I leaned into the hill, away from the cliff, clutching handfuls of grass. I was too afraid to get close enough to the cliff to look down. Sebastian crawled on his hands and knees to the edge and peered over.

  Not sure. Maybe a basking shark. Or pilot whale. The thing is huge.

  He lay down and hung his head over the cliff, using his binoculars.

  Christ almighty, he said. It’s a goddamn killer whale. Poor bugger is beaten up pretty bad. He’s gonna be torn to pieces in a few minutes.

  Fastnet cast its pale eye across us and I thought of that day in the sea, the girl scaling the side of the lighthouse. Fastnet would hold; it had been through many storms and surely some worse than this.

  By the time we made it across the Waist and to the North Harbor, the ferry was already docked and a few passengers were queued up to board. The Corrigans were in their bright survival suits, scrambling over the deck, and in the pilothouse Kieran was listening to the radio and eating an apple. He rapped on the glass and Conchur stepped out of the forward hatch. He was the only crew member without a survival suit, instead clothed in dun-colored overalls and a black watch cap. A fresh wound ran from his chin to one ear, a ragged tear of skin, crusted with dried blood. Conchur dropped the gangplank, and the passengers began to board. Sebastian and I joined the back of the line. The rain turned to sleet, sharp and painful, and a collective murmur rose from the small crowd and everyone cinched up their gear a bit tighter. I pulled my hood low, following close behind Sebastian, my face nearly into his back.

  I was hoping that they wouldn’t recognize me, or that perhaps they would just let me go. This was a foolish hope. When Sebastian and I reached the gangplank Conchur put a forearm in between us to block my way. I didn’t say anything, merely looked up at his face. Up close the wound along his jaw was gruesome, a deep, jagged furrow. Miranda.

  With a quick shove Conchur pushed me off the gangplank onto the quay, and I fell backward, sitting heavily on the wet concrete. On the boat Sebastian reached back for me and spun around in alarm as Conchur hauled up the gangplank chains in one fist, slamming the latch home. Kieran gunned the engines and the ferry lurched away from the dock.

  Sebastian went to the rail and looked at me, astonished, and I saw him measure the widening distance to the dock, his hands tightening, one leg starting to come up, then relaxing as the gap quickly stretched six, ten feet. He began to search frantically through his pockets for something. I tried to smile at him, to show him it was okay, that he shouldn’t worry or cause any trouble, but I could feel my face sliding apart and I know I must have looked awful, sitting on the wet dock. Conchur took hold of his arm roughly, saying something to him, and two other Corrigans stepped up beside him. Sebastian held up his hands, saying something in reply. Conchur nodded, and Sebastian dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper. He held his other hand out, as if to say, this is all I’ve got. This is it.

  The boat was nearly twenty feet away now and Conchur released him. Sebastian balled up the piece of paper and stepping into the throw he launched it at me, a bug in the wind. It was knocked down a few feet from the quay, dropping into the tossing water. I crawled to the edge of the dock on my stomach but couldn’t reach it and without thinking I slid into the water. The water was cold, colder than I had ever felt before, zeroing in to my bones, and I flailed awkwardly at the paper. When I had it in my hand I turned and hauled myself painfully onto the dock.

  Sebastian grabbed Conchur’s arm and said something to him, pointing. Conchur shook his head and shrugged him off. Sebastian began shouting to me, pointing up the hill, his voice lost in the wind and sea. He was pointing toward Highgate’s place.

  I unrolled the wet wad of paper in my hand. It was a business card, a cloudy insignia and contact information already blurred beyond recognition. On the back something was written in pen but as I tried to wipe water off the card came apart and the wet lumps fell through my fingers.

  The ferry turned out past the protective wall and was immediately smashed with waves, driving it backward. In the steamy pilothouse I could see Kieran flailing like a marionette, steering and correcting. Once he pointed the boat into the waves and got on the throttle the ferry began to chug away, rising and falling in the swells, toward the lights of Baltimore. Sebastian was crouching in the back, clinging to the rail along the transom. He gave me a long wave, from the shoulder, insistent. I waved, again trying to tell him I was okay, his staring face shrinking as the ferry lurched toward the mainland.

  I was alone. Random debris flew about the harbor, empty wooden pallets skipping across the quay and crab pots and fish traps tumbling off their racks and into the sea. Froth from the water whipped up over the docks and mixed with the flying materials, creating a low, foglike layer of wind-driven flotsam. Whoever was left on the island would be battened down. I thought about Nora’s, or going up to Nell’s place, but it was Highgate who’d told me he’d take me in. I knew he wouldn’t leave.

  I would call Fred and tell him everything. I would tell him that I was wrong, and I would do whatever he asked. I only wanted to get off that island, out of Ireland. We would start over, start a family, and the sudden thought of a child filled me with a glorious kind of relief, like I was released from a net, like I was saved from drowning.

  When I reached the top of the hill I could see the glowing white farmhouse on the far slope of Highgate’s fields. I cut across the middle of the island, taking the footpath to the post office and the phone. The sky was roiling, black and skeins of purple, and in the darkness of the trees surrounding the post office I found the phone booth and slipped inside, the pines bending and cracking, pawing at the glass. I could barely see the numbers but I somehow made the call to the Nightjar. Fred answered quickly. His v
oice was thick and urgent. The static rose and swelled with the wind.

  Elly?

  Fred, I’m sorry! I’m still here—

  Why didn’t you get on the ferry?

  I couldn’t get on—

  Are you safe? I looked for you—

  I’m sorry, they wouldn’t let me—

  The phone line was fading in and out, and Fred was shouting something unintelligible. Sea spray was blasting through the cracks in the booth and shingles were ripping off the roof of the post office like playing cards.

  Listen to me, he said, stay where you are. I’m coming . . .

  No!

  We can make it . . . North Harbor . . . Bill and Dinny. Wait—

  Fred, don’t! You can’t!

  Get to high ground, he said. Just hold on.

  Then the line went dead.

  * * *

  The rain came sideways, indistinguishable from the sea spray. The tall grass was flattened and slick, and I had to crawl over the low stone fences that whistled like a deranged chorus as the wind tore through the gaps. To the west, in the teeth of the storm, the ocean was firing over the cliffs of the Bill of Clear and Ballyieragh in tremendous walls of water and mist, the winds pushing it across the island, and seawater fell from the sky in heavy sheets. I came up along the northern cliffs, to my left Roaringwater Bay and to my right the broad ascending fields of Highgate’s farm. I cut up a goat path directly toward the house. When I came over the first rise I could see it, the white house glowing faintly, the windows now dark. The fence gates were open, the goat house door was banging in the wind, and I ducked in, figuring Highgate might be there hunkered down with his animals, but it was only full of whirling dervishes of straw, the packed dirt coming loose and spraying like a sandstorm. In the muddy yard there were a few black clumps on the ground, some kind of small animal, that definite inertness of death. I staggered over to one and nudged it with my foot, bending to see it clearly. They were ravens, six of them, crumpled in various poses as if they had been mashed in the air and flung to the ground.

  I found the door and pounded on it with both fists. I tried the handle and found it open so I pushed inside, closing the door behind me. It was near-total darkness inside, the smell of peat fire, human feet, and goats. I could see the faint gray outline of the door into the kitchen straight ahead and the steps upstairs to my right, and I waited a moment to let my eyes adjust.

  Hello? I called out. Anyone here?

  A low shadow moved into the kitchen doorway. A deep guttural growl, the flash of animal eyes. A bolt of lightning lit the room for an instant. Hector, the old dog, crouched, hackles raised, long teeth bared. I turned and my hand found the knob and I spun out into the roaring wind and slammed the door behind me, pulling it tight. I leaned against the door to brace it. There was a moment of silence and I had just begun to relax when the full force of Hector came slamming into the door. His muzzle smashed through the small window at the top, snapping savagely at me, and I stumbled back and fell in the mud. The door held. Hector stopped snapping, and as I watched, his snout poked around, sniffing hard, then withdrew.

  I picked my way back through the yard, stepping around the dead ravens. I stopped to rest on the stone wall, watching the water thrashing in the bay. A flicker of light caught my eye. Down the sloping fields, a figure stood on the cliffs at a small point that jutted out into the water.

  It was Highgate. He stood tall with his back arched, his toes right on the cliff edge. His cap was off and his white hair and long beard flowed over his shoulder. He stretched his arms out to the western sky as it roared, and great crooked spires of lightning thousands of feet long reached down and churned the foaming red sea.

  I ran for Ard na Gaoithe. I still had a key to Nora’s place and it was one of the highest points on the island. I passed through the top of Highgate’s fields and made the road at the base of Knockcaranteen, where there was a deep thrumming sound, cutting through the howling wind. The giant wind turbine at the top of the hill was lit with a hellish blue-white light, spinning with terrific speed. Water streamed from the blade edges, trailing in long glistening threads. The turbine groaned in great metered wails of screaming iron, bolts popping like gunshots, the blades beginning to wobble, oscillating back and forth, still rotating impossibly fast. Ripples began to wrinkle the middle of the tower as it twisted. The concrete blockhouse at the base seemed to vibrate, its windows flashing white, thick channels of blue electricity escaping and arching through the barred windows and door, where they climbed the tower like ascending snakes or corkscrewed themselves into the earth with smoking fury.

  To the west the stacked waves like rolling mountains stretched across the horizon. They reached Fastnet Rock, towering as high as the lighthouse, incredible waves a hundred feet or more. They swallowed the fist of rock and the finger of stone and the baleful light was eclipsed, then glowing faintly through the wall of water like an underwater eye. The wave passed and the light streaked again across the island, once, twice, three times, until the second line of waves swept over the lighthouse and Fastnet went dark.

  The next few minutes were a blur of slogging through grassy fields, pelting seawater rain, howling winds. I crawled like an animal over fence lines. My mind went inert, some kind of survival mechanism, and all I saw was the ground in front of me, the hazy outline of the hill, the spinning sky. I kept going.

  When I reached the top of the hill by Ard na Gaoithe, I looked back east, toward the mainland. A few lights winked in Baltimore. Somewhere out in the black among the churning rock and sea my husband clung to a boat, coming to save me.

  For a moment I felt as if I could summon up everything inside of me, all the love, the hope, the regret, the forgiveness, that I could use all of this to burn hot and bright, like a beacon splitting the sky. I watched the water and dreamed him going back, turning around, at the quay and hustling up to the Nightjar, soaking wet and grimly concerned, but not really worried, thinking of a nice drink to shake off the cold. I would survive. He had to know that.

  The island shuddered as the mountains of water crashed into its foundations.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself flaring up, rising like a column of fire. I prayed to the sky, the earth, the sea. I sent everything I had into the world.

  Epilogue

  In June the sky above southwest Ireland cracks wide open like a bowl of endless blue. The winds that just a month before held the icy sting of the Northern Atlantic now seem to carry the warmth of the Gulf Stream and all the wafting scents of the flora of the islands, a sharp, clean smell of distant lands. The fields of Cape Clear explode into green, the ground still saturated by the deluges of spring, and the gorse sheds the rusty sheath and goes gray-green, growing a few inches a day. You can almost see the island swelling up, rising out of the water. The tourists, Irish and English mostly, the whole decidedly western European, arrive with the fresh air and sunshine, and the Ineer becomes crowded, the stone quay lined with pale Scandinavians swathed in sunblock, children swimming in the blue-green water, the visibility so acute in the sunlight that you can see to the bottom, forty feet down. So much laughter. Even the strands of kelp that wind up from the depths seem to twist with delight.

  * * *

  They found Bill Cutler’s body on the rocks under the western bluffs that lay just below his house, as if his body was trying to return home. There was a service at the church. I didn’t go. I couldn’t face it. In my mind I can see Nell’s small lined face, stricken with anguish. She would never come back from it, and for her final years she would shut herself up in the house that Bill built, the draft whistling through the stone walls, looking out over the western reaches that claimed her husband.

  Dinny Corrigan was found the next day clinging to some boulders along the western cliffs, naked and blue, but alive. He was transported to a hospital in Cork and was never seen again.

  Fred’s body was never found, and some part of me is glad for it.

  * * *

 
When I returned from Ireland I moved in with Beatrice in Arizona. Our apartment complex has a pool and I float in it at night, staring up at the stars until Beatrice comes out and starts throwing things at me: balls of paper, bottle tops, empty beer cans. She is pregnant again, and she doesn’t sleep much at night. It’s the gunsmith’s baby, but he split to Alaska to build a log home on a homestead and trap game. When I come in I fix large bowls of heavily buttered popcorn and Beatrice and I watch sitcoms together on cable while the crickets tune up and the night closes in with its warm blanket.

  I never swim in the ocean or any other natural body of water. I spend a lot of time in the pool here in Phoenix, swimming endless laps at the YMCA, listening to the dull crunch and hum of my body under the blazing sun.

  In America everyone seems to be shouting at each other through a globe of thin glass, a muted, distant feeling. Everyone seems so angry and suddenly vital, but you can’t hear what anyone is saying. I go for a lot of walks through our part of the city. The lights are dimmer, fewer people on the streets, and in the evenings the bored waiters lean against the windows and smooth their aprons.

  I have a job at the community college teaching literature classes, but it is only a matter of time before I am fired. The faces and gazes of the students, which used to be like figures in a painting, now come off the page, right at me. They really see me. I assign them nothing but Cheever, and they respond with some curiosity but mostly indifference. I ask them to write about their experiences with the stories, but they have realized that I don’t care if they ever turn anything in, so I get little. Despite this, they all show up for every class. I don’t know why they come. I mostly have them read passages aloud, which they seem to enjoy. I read aloud too, and I cry sometimes. I am not ashamed of this.

  Fred’s father gave me all the money anyway. I was floating in the pool one afternoon when the shadow of his plane came rippling over the water in a dark flash. I knew it was him before I even opened my eyes. I watched it go into a steep bank, circling around, a little red plane with jaunty white stripes on low-slung wings, like an old crop duster. I stood up and waved as Hamilton Bulkington came low over the apartment buildings and palm trees. By the time I dried off and changed clothes he was waiting in the lobby of our building, wearing a rumpled suit and carrying his valise, a deep set of creases above his eyes and a damaging turn of mouth. He was the closest thing to Fred left on the earth. I held him for a long time, and he patted my back and murmured into my hair.