THE DEEP END
Breathless, Charlie floated toward the light.
He rose in silence with nothing to either side. No motion but his own. He lay as still as he could, rigid, legs together, arms stiff by his sides. A comfortable coolness surrounded him. He felt it on every inch of his body except the space around his eyes that let him focus on the light.
As he got closer, he could hear muffled sounds from above. Now there were dark shapes moving at the edge of his vision, but he ignored them. His goal was the light.
Closer…closer…
Suddenly one of the dark shapes moved directly above him. Instinctively, Charlie loosened his body and tried to float past it, but he was too late. He floated directly into it. A soft bump, a violent thrashing about, a sharp blow to Charlie’s chest, and the coolness and the quiet went away.
“Ow! Watch it, doofus!”
Charlie whirled on the surface of the pool, clutching his chest where the boy he had collided with had kicked him. The boy looked older, but Charlie’s diving mask had fogged up and he couldn’t tell for sure. He was certainly bigger. “Watch where you’re going! Jeez!” The other boy slapped both his hands on the water, giving Charlie what should have been a choking splash, but his mask protected his eyes and nose, and he had been splashed often enough to know when to close his mouth. Charlie fell back below the surface, flipped over, and swam away as fast as he could, scissor-kicking like his dad had taught him, left arm still wrapped around his chest.
Charlie followed the downward slope of the pool bottom toward the deep end. At the deepest point, directly below the diving board, there was a drain cover set into the concrete bottom. Just like the pool he swam in back home in Virginia, where it was trouble if anyone saw you getting too close. You want to get stuck if the pump comes on? (And rumors of much worse: I heard some guy sat in the drain when it was on and it sucked his guts out of his ass! Charlie didn’t believe that for a minute. Who would be that stupid?) But also like back home, the pump in this Kansas hotel pool was loud, and you could tell immediately if it was on. Right now it was quiet, so the pump was off.
Except the drain cover was pushed to one side, and in the space between the edge of the cover and the side of the opening, the water was swirling. Not the whirlpool of the pump in operation, but churning like the water was boiling. Like there was something thrashing around in the drain.
Charlie wanted to edge closer for a better look, but the collision had knocked out whatever breath he had stored up. He was out of air. Two kicks brought him to the surface, where he gasped, inhaled, and dove back toward the deep end.
The cover was still off, but the churning had stopped. He floated to one side of the drain and peered into the opening but could see nothing except, a couple of feet down, the beginnings of the pump hardware. Maybe it wasn’t as loud as he thought.
This time, as he made his way back to the top, Charlie made sure there was nobody above him. His chest wasn’t so sore now. He broke the surface and immediately began sweeping the water with both arms while pumping his legs beneath the water in the bike-riding movement his dad promised would keep him both vertical and above the surface. Your body wants to float. Unless something’s weighing you down, you don’t have to sink. Unless you want to, Charlie had thought, even back then, when he was little and first learning how to swim.
Charlie lay back in the half-tread, half-float that was his favorite way to stay on the surface. He bit down on the snorkel attached to his mask, exhaled into it sharply to clear it of water, and then took several breaths through it, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to. The mask and snorkel weren’t just prize possessions—they were the true signal of summer. When he pulled them out of the box that spent most of the year on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, that meant summer was here and it was time to go to the pool.
His big sister Katie made fun of him, as usual. So you need to see the sharks coming in the pool? Or is there treasure buried in the deep end? I know—you’re just waiting for a girl to lose her top underwater so you can get a good look!
Charlie ignored her like he always did. The mask and snorkel made him feel—connected. When he floated face down, all he could hear was the sound of his own breath funneled in and out of the snorkel. Then the dive: bending the top half of his body down, throwing his legs up as straight as he could, and letting their weight push him beneath the surface. He could see clearly, even if it was just bare concrete walls, and the closest thing to treasure was an occasional hair clip or pair of sunglasses. Every once in a while, when people crashed through the water after jumping off the diving board, as they hurled toward the bottom, they did almost lose their swimsuits, female and male, kids and adults. Charlie couldn’t help noticing the sudden curves of skin so much paler than the rest of their bodies—not that he would ever admit that to Katie. The mask and snorkel didn’t just connect him to this underwater world—they made it his world.
Which was why when Mom had talked about packing as efficiently as possible for the trip to Kansas, he campaigned to take his mask and snorkel for the hotel pool he and Katie had been promised. The fact that he knew he couldn’t take his swim fins—both heel straps had torn off—gave him some leverage, and he looked on in triumph as his mother wrapped the mask in his swimming trunks and laid them in his suitcase. He laid the snorkel by them himself.
Now, after a few more satisfying breaths, he spat out the mouthpiece, took off the mask, and clutched its strap tightly while he looked around. This pool was never as crowded as the one back home, but today there were a lot of people, both in and out of the water. He looked for his mother and saw her reclining in the glaring white lounge chair that was twice as big as any of the folding chairs they normally took poolside. She was reading a magazine and sipping through a straw from some big drink in a plastic cup. He turned a full circle in the water, looking quickly past the kiddie pool. (Ick! Might as well go swimming in a toilet.) He had never been happier than when, three years ago, when he was six, his rapid progress as a swimmer had convinced his parents to let him go in the regular pool. He saw some older girls talking with some older boys and noted that one of the girls was Katie, taking full advantage of Dad being in meetings all day. The lifeguard was sitting in a wooden chair built into the top of a narrow platform that rose above the diving board. The lifeguards back home were sometimes not much older than Katie, but this one looked almost as old as Charlie’s dad. By the diving board there were three boys talking. He thought one of them might be the boy he had bumped into when he floated up from the bottom of the pool and he quickly looked past them.
There were a lot of things Charlie just didn’t get about this trip, beginning with why they were supposed to think it was a vacation to travel from their home in Virginia to Kansas City just to hang out at a hotel while his father attended yet another one of the conferences he had been sent to with his new government job—a soldier in President Johnson’s War on Poverty, his mom had said, and this time we’re going with him to the front. Or why he had to share a room with Katie instead of having his own room (and if it was too expensive like his mom said, then why not just all of them stay in one room and save even more money? Grow up, little boy, Katie had snorted—her answer to pretty much everything.) The trip out had been exhausting, although the parks in the mountains were fun, and Katie and he had found it equally funny that Dad had made such a deal about their having breakfast in Paris when they stopped in Paris, Kentucky. And there was the pool. Not as big as the one back home, which was a lot nicer than either the scuzzy old club house or the tiny golf course that went along with it. But he had a pool to swim in here, and that was enough for Charlie.
People swam differently out here, though. They spent all their time on the surface. Few of the other kids back in Virginia were underwater as much as Charlie, but most of them spent at least some time beneath the surface, diving, floating from the bottom to the surface, seeing how long they could stay under, how close they could come to swimming from one side to the other while holding their breath. Some of them had their own masks, although Charlie was by far the youngest who did. Sometimes a couple of the older boys who didn’t care about lifeguards or parents or rumors about losing your guts would grab the drain cover and use it to help them stay submerged.
But here in Kansas everyone was either splashing around in the shallow end or just swimming back and forth from one end of the pool to the other, stroking and kicking like they were in the Olympics. Charlie wondered if it had anything to do with being in the middle of the country instead of near the coast where he lived, but truth was he just couldn’t figure it out.
That was why he’d bumped into that guy. He wasn’t used to everyone being there on the surface. It wasn’t his fault.
Charlie put his mask back on, left the snorkel hanging, inhaled and exhaled three times, held the last enormous breath, and dove beneath the surface. Yesterday he had gotten halfway the width of the pool underwater with no problem, so today he ought to be able to make it. He knew he was supposed to empty his lungs rather than filling them if he wanted to stay submerged, but the extra time he could stay under made up for the extra effort.
He could tell there were people passing above him and kept pushing forward, deter-mined there would be no more collisions. Between strokes, he looked down. The drain cover was now completely off, sitting on the bottom to one side of the opening. He tried to turn and push back down toward the deep end, but his momentum had carried him farther than he realized. When he bumped against the wall, scraping his right shoulder, he forgot about the drain cover and popped to the surface.
His mother was still sipping her drink and reading her magazine. That was another thing weird about the trip—how she kept to herself. At the pool back home, she was always with a bunch of the other moms, working on their tans, talking almost nonstop, ignoring him and Katie except when, at least once each visit, she made him get out of the water and lie out on a big towel by her folding chair. I know you’re half fish, but that doesn’t mean you have to look like the belly of one. Now stay put and get some sun. So he’d lie there, dying to get back in the water, and listen to her and the other moms talking:
—Just look at old Jerry Stallings, strutting around like he’s cock of the walk with that new wife of his. —I know, it’s just a sin, with Marla barely in the ground. —He sure didn’t make things easy for her, did he? —And those trunks! What is that, French? —Not like he has anything the rest of them don’t…—That boy of yours loves the water, doesn’t he? …—What about that boy Katie’s been dating? —Oh, Don doesn’t have much use for him. —Honey, Donald McGuire isn’t going to have any use for any boy coming around after his daughter and you know it…—Sons are not one bit easier, believe you me. I swear I’d rather he went to a whorehouse every Saturday night than spend one more minute with that Creel girl…—The doctor said it wasn’t anything to worry about, but I’m just not sure. At least I can count on him for the Valium…—All right, Charlie, you can go back in.
But here, she just lay out with her magazine and kept sipping on her drink.
He threw his arms over the rounded stones that outlined the sides of the pool and took off his mask. Despite all the water splashing over them, they felt hot. “Hey, mom!”
She looked up, smiled, and said something he couldn’t hear over the splashing and yelling. Someone’s radio played “Summer in the City.” Katie loved that song. On that, they agreed.
“What?”
He half-heard, half read on her lips, “You’d better go see your friend,” and she pointed to an unknown spot behind him.
He turned around, keeping an arm on the hot stones. Gail, the girl he had met at the pool the first day they were here, sat on the edge of the other side, kicking her legs in the water and waving at him. He realized she was calling his name: “Chaaar-lie!”
He looked up at his mother, wanting to say something grown up like, “Gotta run,” but she had already turned back to her magazine. So he braced his feet against the side of the pool just under the water, pushed off, and dove down at the same time. He looked down to his right and saw that the drain cover was still off. The water in the opening looked like it was churning again, but from this far away he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to swim down and check it out. But he also wanted to swim to the other side completely underwater and surface right in front of Gail. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough air to do either.
When he came up he was more than halfway across. Gail was a blur through his mask, but he could tell she was still kicking her legs in the water. He went back under, and before he could decide which direction to take, he found himself on the other side, still underwater directly below her. As much as he wanted to reach out and grab her by the ankles and pull her in the water, he still remembered their conversation on their first day at the hotel and contented himself with popping up at the wall right by her.
She looked down at him accusingly. “Hey! Didn’t you hear me?”
“Sorry. It’s pretty loud around here.” It was. As the day got hotter and more people poured into the pool, the noise level rose accordingly. There was a radio on this side, too, playing “Easier Said Than Done,” which was an old one—he only ever heard it back home on the Sunday night oldies show. And here it was the middle of the week. They even did radio different around here.
“I guess,” she said. Her kicking slowed but didn’t stop.
He still had his mask on. The first time he had it on in front of her, Gail said that with his nose covered he sounded like he had a cold. He thought it made his voice sound deeper. Not that he would tell her that. “So are you ready to try it?”
“Try what?”
“You know.” Now he did reach out as if to grab her ankle.
“No!” She pulled her foot away and then brought it back through the water, splashing him. “I told you I’m not ready.”
“I thought you said you liked to swim.”
“I do! But I’m not ready to put my head under.”
“Sissy.”
“I’m a girl. I can’t be a sissy.”
“Can too.”
“Can’t can’t can’t can not!” She splashed him again. “Besides, Mama just fixed my hair.” He thought Gail’s hair was probably really long, but he didn’t know for sure because she always kept it wrapped around her head, held in place by a huge hair clip. “And there’s nothing to see, either. It’s not like it’s the ocean, with fish and stuff.”
He had had this same conversation with her each day since their families arrived, and it always stopped right there. Charlie’s home in Virginia was less than an hour from the coast. In the summer they went to the beach at least once a month, and while Katie couldn’t wait to get there, Charlie was less enthusiastic. It was kind of exciting being in water that was always moving, but in the shallows, which was as far out as his parents would let him go, the water and the sand were constantly churning into each other. Even on a sunny day the water was grey, and if there was anything interesting beneath the surface it didn’t matter because you couldn’t see two feet in front of you. The pool was better.
“Besides, you told me it took you a long time before you could duck your head.”
“When I was six. Gah.” He looked past her to the people sunning on the patio beyond the pool. Katie was still there, still talking to the same group of boys. She looked in his direction, smiled and waved. Smiled? Waved? Something else that never happened back home.
“So you’re just going to sit there and not come in?”
“Maybe in a little bit.” She kicked her legs in the water again but this time without splashing him.
“Ok,” he said, and pushed off toward the deep end. He paused to let the teenager on the diving board do her cannonball into the water. When she surfaced, shrieking happily, he bent at the waist and dove. As the water covered him, he felt a sting where he had scraped his shoulder on the side wall of the pool. Halfway down, he looked back up and saw the blurred image of Gail on the other side of the water. He thought she was smiling at him, but he wasn’t sure. He also saw a small dark blob suspended near him. His shoulder must be bleeding. He’d need to get a band-aid when he got out of the pool.
The water still swirled from where the girl had cannonballed in. It looked like she had almost hit bottom before she shot back up. Charlie moved through the turbulence and went deeper. He wanted to see what was up with the drain cover. He wanted not to be talking with Gail and trying to think what to say next. He wanted, he realized for the first time since they had arrived, to go home where things were as he knew them to be.
But right now he just wanted to look at the drain cover. As he pushed himself toward the bottom, the pressure started against his ears. There was no nose clip on his mask, but he pushed its lower lip hard against his nose and blew until his ears popped. He kept moving down until he reached the bottom.
The cover still lay by the drain opening. It was coated in something that looked slimy. The water around the opening was still, and there was no sound. It was safe to approach.
Charlie pulled himself along the bottom with his hands. The chlorine was making his shoulder sting even more. His breath was ok, but the air in his lungs kept pushing him up. He peered into the drain.
The water in the opening started to churn and an arm reached for him.
It had a hand and fingers, but it wasn’t a regular human arm. It was something else. The wrist was too thick for the rest of it, and it was all covered in the same slimy stuff that covered the drain cover. The hand touched the front of his mask.
Thirteen feet underwater, Charlie screamed. All the air went out of his lungs and bubbled in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the drain or the arm that reached out of it. He backpedaled on the bottom like he was on land and felt the concrete scrape his feet. Then he pushed and shot himself back to the surface, kicking and thrusting as hard as he could.
When he broke the surface he choked and sputtered and gasped for breath, but before he could refill his lungs an arm pushed his head back under the water. He screamed again, thinking the arm had come out of the drain after him.
But when the arm quit pushing and he came back up, gasping, he saw that it was attached to the boy he had collided with earlier. There were two other boys with him.
“Hey, squirt,” the boy said. He motioned to one of the others, who reached out, ripped Charlie’s mask off, and tossed it away. Charlie heard a small splash where it fell, through the noise of all the people in the pool who weren’t paying any attention to what was happening to him.
The other two boys were the same size as the first one. They were all older than Charlie, maybe in junior high.
“You know what this is, little boy? This is traffic court,” the first boy said. “We need to teach you the rules of the road. You can’t just be running into people.”
Charlie sputtered and tried to tell the boy what he had seen, but the boy splashed water in his face, which started him choking again.
“Shut up, punk! I’m doing the talking here.”
“Don’t be looking for the lifeguard,” one of the other boys said. “He’s on break.”
“Taking a leak,” the third boy said.
“Getting laid,” the second said, and they all laughed.
Charlie hadn’t even thought to look for a lifeguard. He never paid attention to the lifeguard. He didn’t need a lifeguard. He was a good swimmer. He looked around frantically for his mother, for Katie, but he couldn’t see them anywhere.
“What’ll we do with him?” the first boy asked.
“Take him and toss him in the ladies’ room!”
“Take his trunks off!”
“Take his trunks off and then toss him in the ladies’ room!” They all laughed again. Charlie splashed and circled and looked for a way out, but they circled with him.
“Let’s drown him for a while first and then we’ll figure out what to do.” The first boy moved toward him, followed by the other two. Three sets of arms moved in and pushed him back under the water.
The arms, and then their whole bodies, pressed down and kept Charlie under the water. He had been able to take a breath before they pushed him under, but not much of one. He swirled and punched and kicked and tried to get away. One of his kicks connected with something that felt like a swimsuit that had something soft and bulging beneath it. Suddenly there was an opening as one of the boys pushed away. He yelled so loud when he broke the surface Charlie could hear him under the water.
Charlie twisted, turned, and plunged through the opening. This was his chance.
But instead of getting to the surface where there was air and his mom and Katie, and his dad somewhere, he felt his body bend at the waist and push itself back toward the bottom. Toward the drain.
He knew he was out of air, but somehow he was able to keep moving. He had to keep moving. Something was pulling him down. His head knew he should be drowning, knew he should resist, but his arms and legs kept pushing him down to the bottom and his lungs amazingly did not complain. He swam out of the churning water where the boys had corralled him into the clean transparency of the bottom of the pool. It was like looking through a telescope. It was like that song where the singer said he could see for miles.
When he reached the drain, the arm was still there. Now it was attached to a shoulder, and through the telescope view Charlie thought he saw a head emerging. It had eyes and teeth. It looked like the monster they had watched in that movie about Florida, then it looked like pictures he had seen of sharks, then it didn’t look like anything he had ever seen at all. The eyes didn’t change. They stared at Charlie and made him want to go closer. If he could just go a couple more feet things wouldn’t be strange anymore. Things would be just as they were supposed to be, and he’d never have to get out of the water again.
The creature in the drain reached out, and Charlie felt as if he could breathe normally if he wanted to. He extended his own hand.
Then he felt another hand grab his left ankle, and yet another grab his right. He tried to kick them away. He didn’t understand anything that was happening, but he knew where he wanted to go.
The hands on his ankles held firm. As they pulled him away, he could see the eyes and the teeth and the head squeezing back into the drain through water that was churning and bubbling again. Then the shoulder and the arm followed, and finally the hand that, before it disappeared entirely, grabbed the drain cover and pulled it back in place with a clunk Charlie could hear as clearly as he had ever heard anything. And now the water was still. He felt his feet hit the air, and then the rest of his body, and finally his gasping, crying mouth and chlorine-burned eyes.
They laid him by the side of the pool. The sun filled his burning eyes, but he squinted and saw it was Katie. And Gail. Gail’s hair was wet and hanging in tangles down beyond her shoulders. It really was long. Katie was yelling at him, and Gail may have been crying, but Charlie wasn’t sure. His mother appeared, pushed the girls aside, and knelt down to see after her son.
Later Katie told him that Gail had seen the boys circling Charlie and had yelled for help. Katie heard and jumped in after him, and Gail followed her. When Charlie asked her what it was like to finally stick her head under the water, Gail said, “It was awful! It burned my eyes. I couldn’t see hardly anything.” Then she punched him in the shoulder, right where he had scraped it, and told him how scared she had been, using a word that Charlie had only heard other boys use.
His mother insisted that they go home. Dad wasn’t too happy about missing the last day of his meetings—He’s all right, isn’t he? Just keep him out of that goddamned pool—but Mom just stood there and stared at him, and Katie, who, like Charlie, usually got as far away as she could from their parents’ arguments, stood right there by her. So Dad tracked down the lifeguard who hadn’t been there and yelled at him, and Mom found the parents of the boys who had gone after Charlie and yelled at them. The lifeguard just said something about boys being boys and didn’t seem too concerned. Two of the boys’ parents said they were sorry and would punish their boys. The third boy, the one Charlie had run into, only had his father with him, and his father just said the same thing the lifeguard had said. Katie said they ought to sue the hotel but Mom gave her the same kind of stare she had given Dad and Katie didn’t say anything else.
Just before they left the hotel, Charlie’s mom asked him if he had packed his mask and snorkel, and it wasn’t until then that Charlie realized he had never gone back and gotten it from wherever the boys had thrown it. Katie went to look for it, but couldn’t find it.
Charlie didn’t say anything immediately about what he’d seen coming out of the drain. He thought about it for the whole long drive back, and when they got home he decided he wouldn’t say anything. He almost wrote to Gail about it after she started sending him postcards, but he didn’t do that, either.
How could he explain to anyone that when he had moved toward the creature in the drain, he had felt safe, and when he had looked into its eyes, he had seen himself?
He couldn’t tell anyone that. Ever.
When they got home Dad bought him a new mask and snorkel, and new fins that were full-foot and didn’t have a strap that would break. Charlie put them in the closet, but it took him until almost Labor Day before he could stick his head under the water again...
Even then, he didn’t dare open his eyes.