The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  Out in the backyard there was a very large assortment of barbecue equipment similar to that of Laurie’s father Friendly Frank. John Scott had been slow cooking a fine-smelling brisket all day, a “Kansas brisket” he said. Thad wondered about this cultural pride in big barbecue operations when most of the nation managed with small Webers. It starts with boys insisting on the best bicycle and then moves on to cars he thought. He talked at length with Emily’s mother who was far too worried about crime despite living in a fortress. This seemed typical of rich people, the functional motto being “I must be completely safe.” He couldn’t remember feeling more out of place at a home. At the houses of his schoolmates and friends the odors were of kerosene from heaters, cow manure and milk from the barn and cream separators and always a trace of mud and chicken shit from the barnyard. When he would visit a girl he would take a bouquet from his mother’s flower garden which would delight everyone and was rare, as flowers were deemed impractical for a workaday farm. It was all hard work and fried potatoes.

  He drank too much wine but maintained his balance which was family tradition. To drink and pretend it had little influence until it was pretty much true. He had grown up with the habit of thinking about the cost of everything, typical of people who have to turn the soil into dollars and cents, people who are free of the abstractions money can twirl in our sorry heads. How many bushels of tomatoes or sweet corn will it take to get the house painted? We’re better off doing it ourselves in spare time that doesn’t actually exist. So you paint after dinner until summer dark.

  Thad was eating the delicious brisket and drinking goblets of French red wine and not listening to Emily talking with her mother Elisabeth who had just had a call from her sister who lived in Paris. This aunt wanted to trade with Emily her apartment on rue Vaneau for ten days in August for her quarters in the house that had been her own as a girl. Thad could easily see that the conversation was set up to get his attention and he would likely be expected to join Emily. Emily and her mother got up to clear the table and when they were out of earshot John Scott stared at Thad.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I have my court case that time in August.”

  “I know that. You should let me get even for you. I can floor that shitheel easily.”

  “It’s personal.”

  “You could fly to Paris four days late then spend some extra time in a hotel.”

  “I feel I’m getting in over my head. I need to go to work and earn some money.”

  “You’ll be working your entire life. You’ll be on salary for this trip. Why turn down a free trip to France?”

  “I’m not accustomed to this life.”

  “If you ever become the father of a daughter you’ll understand my request. She’s attractive, but also inattentive and innocent. I see her talking to strangers all the time downtown. She doesn’t understand the nature of predatory men. I worry myself to the point of illness about her. You could easily keep an eye on her. She told me that there are some rivers in France you want to swim. This is a perfect opportunity.”

  “Let me think.” Thad was wondering how he was ever going to get anywhere by himself. He had finally made Chicago but not New York, or the incredible new aquarium near San Francisco. Right now he could barely buy a ticket home without digging into his meager savings. “I’d have to be a few days late because of the trial.”

  “She can wait,” John Scott said with obvious pleasure that he had won.

  July moved slowly, with worries that came from phone calls from his mother about his father’s postinjury depression. The warehouse work was hard but he enjoyed burning up his body with exhaustion as many men do, as the fatigue modulated the worries. The first day of work he was tested by cleaning up and rebagging a pallet of sacks of fertilizer many of which had broken open in transit. He had to wear a gas mask and it was very hot. Everyone seemed to know of his relationship with the owner’s daughter but then Emily had dropped him off at work several times after they had disregarded the landlady’s rules against sleepovers.

  When they reached the place they had a little chitchat about perennials with the landlady, particularly peonies, her obsession. They went inside and quickly made love after which he rested his head on her lower spine and studied the flowers out the window through the crack of her ass, a lovely vision. His mind was a not unpleasant welter of water baby thoughts. From a classic naturalist’s point of view their survival was up to them. They seemed undisturbed by large fish themselves but maybe as human babies they came onto earth at seven pounds, much too large for trout food. A passing otter also didn’t make them shy and stopped a moment to play. However when the local osprey flew over the water babies they shied from his shadow and gathered under Thad’s body for protection. Perhaps the primitive avian intelligence didn’t recognize them as human babies. Thad questioned whether with his interest in the natural sciences he had the right to keep this momentous secret for himself. A number of academics came by to fish each summer but mostly of the literary type. Writers seem drawn to the grace and peace of fly-fishing. He liked one in particular, a poet and graduate student from Michigan State working in despair on his PhD because he needed money for a burgeoning family of three children. It seemed a mistake to Thad if it depressed him that much. He drank too much from a flask and occasionally tumbled in the water but had a wading staff and was strong enough to right himself. He had promised Thad he would send him an ancient Sufi essay called “The Logic of Birds and Fishes” but it never came and Thad couldn’t trace it through his own library or the Internet. He thought that the only angler to be trusted with a secret was an old professor emeritus of natural history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The poet would blab, but the old professor might be overwhelmed and still keep the secret. Like many he usually arrived for the grasshoppers in August. The more Thad thought about it he became slightly ashamed of himself for not sharing with the scientific community even if the secret was ultimately misused. He was sure he had observed vestigial gill openings under their chins but they also ascended to the surface quickly every few minutes for air like marine mammals. Obviously at the time they felt vulnerable as they would suck in quick voluminous breaths. The mystery was the origin and he doubted any spiritual aspect unlike Tooth. If they see an aborted fetus or an abandoned sick baby do they take care of it? It’s unlikely he would ever know.

  So he worked hard and became well liked by the other employees. When John Scott visited he paid Thad no particular attention, knowing that it would make things harder for him as in teacher’s pet. If he showed up at lunch he would buy a sandwich from the cart out front just like everyone else. It was operated by an old Polish lady who made grand sandwiches and sometimes plastic bowls of pierogies with butter and sour cream. If you’re truly hungry from hard work a liver sausage on rye with onions and hot mustard would take you through until dinner if the sausage quantity was ample. The ease of lunch hour reminded him of the best times with his mother talking at the kitchen table with taciturn Dad eating on the porch if weather permitted. He had that “thousand-yard stare” of many Vietnam veterans as if he were struggling to balance a past that was still too vivid to be truly the past. Thad and his mother would chat away about what they had been reading but go back to work outside promptly at 1 p.m. Often lunch was his favorite, a grilled sharp cheddar cheese with raw onion. In season they would eat a pile of fresh radishes and tiny green onions dipped in butter and salt. When Dad got home from the hospital Dove fixed him soups because he had lost teeth in the attacks. He told Thad one day that what he missed most in Vietnam was the Mexican food he had grown up on in Texas. He concluded by saying that when you’re shooting at people and getting shot at food can be a big morale item, something that anchors you on earth in the horror and absurdity of war.

  He returned to the theme of what happens to people who are witnesses to the miraculous? Right now in late Jul
y in Chicago he was terribly homesick without knowing what it meant. He knew he could never marry Emily because it meant a lifetime of being bullied by John Scott. Having no impulse to push people around himself he had no real understanding of bullies. Right now while moving more pallets hither and yon with a forklift he was homesick for weeding tomatoes though they likely didn’t need it because they had put down a lot of straw mulch. There was definitely a lump in his throat and a deep need to see his water babies and he doubted whether he was able to get on a plane for Paris. When people ready their minds for their first trip abroad they often speculate if they’ll ever get back home.

  At the end of the first week in August he was in a courtroom and could not imagine a less pleasant place except a hospital. The young lawyer who advised them said that Friendly Frank and his lawyer would likely go for a longish delay but doubted that the left wing judge would allow it because the accusations against Friendly Frank had piled up and public opinion had turned resoundingly against him. In fact the courtroom was jammed as they say and early on in the testimony when Friendly Frank said he struck Thad with a club because he caught him “molesting his daughter,” Laurie screamed, “Dad, that’s a lie, you’re the molester,” which was stunning. The judge absurdly enough told the jury to ignore what Laurie had screamed. Their lawyer did his job and even got a hold of the doctor Thad met fishing at the river mouth who described in lurid detail Thad’s balloon face. After three days of blabber Friendly Frank was sentenced to thirty days in jail which was immediately appealed.

  When Thad talked to the doctor that evening the man asked if he was willing to go to Ann Arbor to try out for the University of Michigan swim coach. Thad felt obligated and Mother drove him down early the next morning. Before they left they walked upstream until they reached the pond. Thad stripped, dove in, and quickly met nose-to-nose with a water baby which he gently lifted up for his mother to see. He heard a shriek and lowered the baby back to the water. When he came up his mother was pale and he slowly repeated what Tooth had to say. She shivered though it wasn’t cold and began to cry. “I can’t handle this,” she said, and they walked to their makeshift ferry and the car. They were a half hour into the trip before she could talk rationally. He said he had no real idea about anything, not being a spiritual creature himself. He had to somewhat believe Tooth because he had no other choice. We are rational creatures and he readily admitted that it somewhat limited us. What were they? He had no idea except that they were water babies, like the old story. He imagined that they finally and slowly left this area and crawled up on the beach where they could be picked up by the many people desperate to adopt.

  Ann Arbor was a no-brainer. They met with the swimming coach, went over to the pool, where Thad’s perfect swimmer’s build was admired. Thad swam the hundred as best he could and the coach and gaggle of assistant coaches were ecstatic and offered him a full scholarship because he broke the Big Ten record by several seconds. He felt nothing other than being relieved of the onus of John Scott’s bullying. “Free at last,” he whispered to himself. Of course it wasn’t Emily’s fault any more than Laurie’s father was her fault. Who knows why men become bullies? It likely starts young. He had told Bone that he couldn’t hit Pudge because she was female and he yelled, “Bullshit,” but then she frequently beat him into the ground. Of course there are also female bullies though not as many.

  His mother drove him out to the airport to save money and he flew to Chicago first class. He had never flown first class and couldn’t see the difference except the seat was wider and a drink was free. In Chicago he met Emily at the American Airlines Admirals Club. They had a crappy fast-food lunch and boarded the Paris flight, taking the train out to the international terminal in late afternoon. They flew business class which embarrassed Thad when he found out how much more expensive it was than tourist class. “That’s Dad,” Emily said. “You can’t stop him from trying to spoil me.”

  They ate a mediocre meal, and Thad slept several hours from fatigue after the extreme exertion of his test swim.

  The flight seemed to take forever though he was still surprised when he saw France below him out the window early in the morning. After customs the driver John Scott used in Paris picked them up. He was amused that rich people had to arrange everything. You couldn’t just land in a city and take a cab or subway, it had to be a very nice Renault sedan. On the way in to the apartment they stopped at the Bon Marché food court on the ground floor of the building and loaded up on what Emily called picnic food. Her aunt’s apartment looked down into the prime minister’s gardens and you could easily have the illusion of eating outside. The thing Emily always dreaded most about being in Paris with her father was his penchant for semiformal lunches and dinners at the best restaurants in town. She didn’t want to be intimidated and had appalled her father years before in her midteens by saying she “loathed” Le Taillevent. Consequently she shopped like a maniac buying wine, veal chops, a dozen cheeses, and showed Thad the herring where he grabbed ten kinds. They were exhausted and silly because the bread looked so good they bought several kinds.

  The apartment was large and airy with a wall of windows looking down in the garden in back. It was on the third floor and the furniture looked delicate and expensive to Thad. The bedroom was somewhat absurd with a canopied bed and Emily said that her aunt dealt in French antiques she shipped to New York and Chicago and occasionally to Los Angeles. He was hungry after the pathetic airline breakfast and busied himself unpacking groceries. To a totally inexperienced man all of the cheeses stank but were delicious, especially the Vacheron and Époisses. After some herring and ham he threw himself facedown on the bed and woke in two hours with nude Emily beside him. She made coffee and then they took her favorite walk through the Luxembourg Gardens, stopping to see the lovely dwarf fruit trees, then way down to the Jardin des Plantes for the flowers, back up Montparnasse, stopping at Café Select to split a bottle of Brouilly, an excellent summer wine. It was a soft, sunny afternoon and he couldn’t comprehend his melancholy except for the recurrent image of the way the water babies rose slowly from being nestled on the bottom to the surface for air. They couldn’t be true but there they were. They especially seized him when he and Emily sat in the little park across Raspail from the Laetitia Hotel where city employees were busy transplanting flowers. What a fine job, he thought. Why should everyone want to be a big shot? Why not just plant flowers in cities for likely low wages and make everyone with eyes happy. On the way home he bought a map of France from a kiosk and spread it out on the living room floor with the thought that there might be water babies in the Seine but more likely in a trout river in his Rivers of Earth book that was down in an area called the Massif Central. He made notes on a half dozen rivers he might want to swim in and asked Emily how they could get around. Right away she said “car and driver” and this irked him because he noticed that the receipt for picnic supplies was nearly four hundred euros including sixty bucks for a single bottle of wine. She sensed his irritation and said when he made up his mind precisely they’d go to a travel agent and get train tickets. She wanted to throw in the Guadalquivir near Seville, Spain, her favorite European river because of the poet Federico García Lorca. She loved his work and read Spanish well. She had visited Seville, Barcelona, and Madrid with her parents when she was twelve and was quite swept away, especially by the music and art museums.