Reunion

“Is someone going to say when to go?” I asked. “How will we know when to go?”

I stood nude on the block, shivering. The pool in front of me was a sheet of black mirror; twenty five yards in length, twelve and a half in width. The only light came from a slit of moon above and the nearby streetlamps. My clothes were folded in a haphazard stack over my shoes on the pitted cement deck behind me. The tie they put me in, a gaudy mix of red and maroon back when I bought it, lay draped over the white shirt and dress slacks. I would not have chosen to go under in that tie. Someone must have thought it went nicely with my pallor.

“This isn’t fair. How am I supposed to see the wall at the other end without the lights on?”

No one said anything. My muscles began to cramp in the cold.

“Isn’t someone going to say something?”

“Sure,” Coach answered as he stepped up onto the pool’s edge. “Like how about you shutting the hell up.”

“I’m ready.” Kenny got up on the block next to mine, loosening his arms, shaking out his legs. “Lane four, just like always. Remember?”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not sure about this anymore. I’m out of shape. I haven’t been in a pool in years. I don’t think I could even do a hundred yards now.”

I sensed someone behind me. A lane judge, maybe? I couldn’t tell who and had just turned my head to see when I heard the leathery whickering sound coming at me. I tried dodging it when the cold sting of the belt whipped across my back. Its buckle snapped against my shoulder blade, a white slash of pain. I jolted upright and lost my balance. As I fell into the cold water my right elbow barked against the dry grit of the starting block.

I flailed to the surface of the water. No danger of drowning, of course, we were all beyond that. But feeling pain, being broken, maimed, that was different.

“Pull him out of there,” Coach ordered. I was grabbed by the arm and hoisted out of the water onto the ledge. I rubbed my elbow, bending it slowly.

“Get up,” Coach ordered. “You’re not hurt. Besides, we’re all here because of you. Remember that. This is your big night.”

I climbed back up on to the starter’s block. The night air bit into me and my legs started shaking. I fought against a shameful loss of bladder control; something that surprised me.

Coach stepped up onto the ledge of the pool. “You think we can continue now?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice not to break in front of them.

“And don’t worry. We ain’t gonna count that as a false start,” Kenny said. “You were pushed.”

Coach held up a stop watch in one of his spidery hands. In the dark I could see the white of his shirt, split by his dark tie, supporting his clay-colored head. He’d shrunken terribly in the years since I’d seen him last. I’d heard that cancer had taken him.

“This will be 100 yards butterfly, gentlemen. That’s four lengths of the pool. Start at my signal. Swimmers ready?” He leaned forward. I nodded.

“Judges ready?” He raised a starter’s gun.

“Swimmers, take your mark.”

Kenny and I both assumed diving stances. My right arm felt stiff, my legs now visibly shaking. My belly hung in loose folds from years of rich food and a sedentary life. The water below lapped at the wall below me.

I tried to keep my balance on the tilting block.

A loud blast roared from the starter’s gun and my dive was pure reflex. As I hung in the air I saw that Kenny already had the jump on me. That prick jumped the start, I thought, not fair. I pulled up, waiting for the second roar of the pistol which signaled his false-start but it never came. Instead the water slapped against me like a wet sheet.

The first dolphin kicks under water racked pain from my thighs to my groin. I shot up, both arms swinging out, forcing my body into the long practiced hump-rhythm butterfly stroke. It had been so long and yet, unlike most things from youth, it never left me.

Kenny had a body’s length lead on me. He was in better shape of course. Still in the prime of his life. He wouldn’t have aged at all. I had to catch him and didn’t know how I would find the strength to do it. I saw him ahead of me, a frothy tattoo of bubbles in the dark gray water.

I managed to get four strong strokes in before taking my first breath. There was a time I was able to take the first 25 yards without coming up for air, needing a breath only at the first turn. If I could keep from coming up for air to at least every other stroke I might do okay.

After the first blind turn at the wall I was almost even with him. My lats, long dormant, stretched and moved into the familiar motions from so many hours of training. But that was all still too long ago.

I was already sucking air. I could see the wall ahead of me now. Black-tiled crosses broke up from below the surface of the rocking water, like grave markers ready for etching.

They’re supposed to be on the floor of the pool so you can mark your flip-turn. They were screwing with me, trying to make me lose. Some sick kind of way to psych me out. It seemed that even after all this time gone, Kenny still hated to lose.

Losing to me had only happened to him once.

Too bad. He should have tried harder. I beat him then and I made it to State finals. He didn’t.

I rocked up for another breath before grabbing the sticky tiled cross at the wall and turned.

Fifty more yards. Halfway done.

He was right on my ass. Peripherally, I could see him; a writhing mass of roaring bubbles. And I heard him screaming at me in the water. Ordinarily, you’d never hear anyone but yourself in the water. But I heard him.

I had an idea why he screamed. It wasn’t just that I’d beat him once before. It was because of his girlfriend Andrea and the night she spent with me in that ratty motel room at the State Finals. That she was with me that night, while he stayed home.

Another thing that never left me: that vision of her lying next to me, our clothes tumbled into the sheets and on the floor and the door chained to keep my roommates out. She and I were seniors then. And I thought she would leave him after that night.

That she’d stay with me.

Be my girlfriend and not his anymore.

Forever.

You think you know what forever means when you’re young like that.

You don’t know anything.

Someone grabbed at my ankle from behind. One of the judges? The goon with the belt, maybe? I kicked free, feeling the slick fingers break loose. I surged forward, my arms like leaden sponges, heavy with exertion and cold. Snot ran into my mouth as I tried taking in air. There were things in the water now, too. Somebody was pitching waste into the water at me. And I needed a breath every stroke now, like a sorry old slack-assed loser. Only losers sucked air like a vacuum as they watched everyone else pull ahead of them.

A wad of hair, slimy with snot, wormed into my mouth as I took another breath. I tried spitting it out but stubborn strings of it ran down my chin, into my mouth tickling my throat.

Less then a length of the pool left. Coming up at each breath I saw the crosses wavering at the end, telescoping away from me between the lane ropes. My lungs burned. My calves knotted, holding my feet below the surface. I was too near the finish now to give up and I could no longer see Kenny. More debris floated in front of me. Limbs with nubby, dimpled fingers clutching spastically at my face. Ropey entrails bobbing up and around me, tangling in my arms. And, there on the ledge by the cross ahead of me, Andrea waited, cheering for me to finish.

I could win her back.

That was why I chose this chance again.

For her.

With a last gasping lunge I slapped both hands against the tiled wall. The tiled crosses were back in their normal places, embedded into the plaster floor of the pool.

I turned and watched Kenny gracefully glide in the last few yards behind me. He was doing freestyle. Not a care in the world about what I’d gone through to beat him again.

“That wasn’t fair,” I gasped for air. “We were supposed to do butterfly, not freestyle.”

He slapped the wall with a splash and turned onto his back to me, sweeping his long hair out of his face. He looked over at me and spit out a mouthful of water. He didn’t say anything.

“I still beat you anyway.” I pushed the words out. “I still beat you and I’ll always beat you…”

He ignored me. He kicked away on his back, treading through the gruesome debris floating around us.

Andrea grabbed my hand and helped pull me up. “I knew you would win,” she said. “I knew it.”

She looked exactly as she did at our graduation banquet. That was what now, forty or more years ago? She wore a short backless dress which showed off her powerful shoulders and legs. A swimmer’s body. As warm as that last long summer out of high school. She had her hair pulled back and her eyes shined like they did that night so long ago when she broke my heart. That final night when I watched her climb into the passenger seat of Kenny’s Torino and leave with him after the banquet. She waved at me through the window before he peeled out of the lot. I ended up following them in my car. The distant lights of the Causeway Bridge blurred up ahead of us and I felt like I was dying inside. I could picture her rubbing his thigh as he drove. I could hear the things she promised to do for him later.

That was the last look she gave me, from the window of his car.

Until tonight.

“I knew you would do it,” she repeated as she held me. I dripped against her, soaking her black dress with the foul smelling water.

She let go and I went down on my knees. I fell over onto my back out of breath. The bleachers around us empty, yawning into the dark trees like steely webs.

Everyone was gone.

There was only Andrea left. She knelt down next me, the hem of her dress riding up her thighs. They were white, almost translucent. She was as beautiful as I remembered her.

It seemed too easy. Too good to be true.

“We have to go Andrea,” I said. “We can’t stay here. I think they’ll be upset that I won.”

“There’s no one here,” she whispered. “We’re alone.”

“What about Kenny?” I sat up and looked around. The deck was empty except for a pace clock that waited, frozen, in the corner. A coil of lane ropes sat spooled against the backdrop of fence. The water had settled again into a smooth sheet that reflected the low moon back up at us.

“It’s okay.” She said. “You don’t need to do this anymore.”

“My clothes.”

“Here.” She handed them to me. Jeans and a t-shirt now.

Why not?

I put on the jeans and unrolled the shirt. It was one of my favorites back then. I got it at the YES concert in Lakeland. It had faded with time and the logo had cracked and peeled. I pulled it on over my head and felt it stretch across my shoulders. My back still stung from the belt lash.

“You ready?” she asked.

I could see the deep color of her eyes, even in the dark. She was shaking out her wet hair and looking for somewhere to put her swimming cap. The black dress gone now. The Lycra fabric of her swimsuit clung like glass against her wet skin.

“Just leave it,” I said, taking the wet cap from her. “Do you see my flip-flops anywhere?”

“There.” She pointed to the edge of the chain link fence by the gate. “You left them over there.”

My shirt stuck to my back and chest and water dripped freely from my long hair. I pulled it out and let it balloon back in against my cool skin.

“How many Pink Floyd shirts do you have?” She punched me in the chest.

“It’s not Pink Floyd,” I said. “It’s YES.”

I looked down at the iron-on “Dark Side of the Moon” logo that I had once picked out at the mall.

“Oh…that’s weird. I thought it was my YES shirt.”

“Are we going back to your house or are we going to stay out here all night in the cold.” Her suit was a dripping bundle on the deck at her feet. She was pulling jeans up over her hips; droplets glistening on her skin. Then she rolled a white t-shirt over her hard breasts and shook her damp hair free. Watching her as she did this made me miserable. It shouldn’t have but it did. I burned the image of it into my mind but knew it would never be the same.

She looked around for a moment. “I guess I don’t need my suit anymore.” She shrugged.

We held hands as we left through the gate by the diving boards. It was really cold now. I couldn’t wait to get into my old Mustang with her and get away from this place.

When we stepped over Kenny’s body lying on the pavement by the car I knew I’d lose her again.

She’d go away, just like before. He lay there, a deep gash across his face and head, his limbs twisted, mangled, as the black blood pooled around him. It lapped up around the car’s back tire.

If I refused to think about what had happened to him; who had done this to him, then maybe she and I could stay together.

But what I did that night always came back.

I remembered my dad telling me in the hospital that Kenny had died in that wreck on the Causeway. That Kenny and his girlfriend Andrea were both dead at the scene and how lucky I was to have survived. How their lives were snuffed out in a stupid drunken flame-out of youthful glory that almost took me with them.

He didn’t know about my part in it.

No one told him. No one saw me, how I rammed my car into the back of Kenny’s Torino on the bridge. It all happened so fast and anyway we’d all been drinking, like teenagers do. I was lucky.

Oh, I was lucky. I kept that in mind in the years that followed. The rehabilitation, then college, marriage, divorce, the girth of age, graying hair, lined skin and the days of light and shadow, until the last shutter click of my life in a freeze frame.

Then just the long black night.

I was the lucky one.

It could have ended there on that bridge for me too. I was just 18 years old, broken hearted, drunk and in love with a girl who wanted someone else. Maybe that would have been easier, ending my own stupid life then instead of theirs. Instead death came later, late into middle age. A heart attack, alone in a dirty kitchen, breakfast burning on the stove. My last breath played out leaving the needle bumping and snapping against a worn and smudged label on a forgotten side of an over-played record album.

“Andrea,” I reached for her as she stepped over Kenny. “Wait. Let me hold on to you.”

“Why?” She stopped and looked back at me. I wrapped my arms around her and pressed my face against her hair. I was weak and tired and I could feel myself changing, aging again.

“I’m sorry,” I cried. “God, I’m so sorry…”

I opened my eyes and saw the pale gray dawn lighting across the parking lot, reflecting against the windows of my Mustang and heard the choking, gasping sounds coming from the thing in my arms. Its skin blue, eyes wide, lidless, blind, glass orbs of black. Its mouth opened and closed and the sound that came from deep within the veined throat was wet and raw. Lips pulled back over toothless gums. I tried to cover the tortured sounds with my hand while trying to keep the blue skin from slipping apart.

It took only a few moments before she was gone. So was Kenny’s body. A stain on the paved lot marked the place.

The door to the car opened.

“You gonna stand there all day, guy?” The driver asked. “We got to get going.”

“I tried to keep her,” I answered him. “When am I going to get to keep her with me?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, man. I’m just the driver.”

I got into the passenger seat.

The driver showed me a papery colorless face. His black eyes, expressionless, anchored into the veined skin stretched taut, regarded me. “Hey, at least you won your little race again. That’s something isn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You should see some of the things folks want to re-live. Most go for the obvious; the best lay they ever had, a great hunt, a wedding ceremony, things like that. And there’re others who don’t really have anything. At least you got something you can feel good about. You won your race.” He started the car. “Better than nothing.”

“I didn’t win anything,” I grunted at him. “I lost.”

I pulled my door shut and turned the mirror so I wouldn’t have to look at my own face rotting; eyes drying up, skin flaking into dust. The bones of my knuckles were already showing and I could feel the ligaments and tendons slipping loose.

I leaned back to rest.

I earned it, I guess.

While still able to control my tongue I spoke, “Let’s roll. Better luck next time, right?”

My voice sounded like the dead leaves crunching beneath the tires. My suit started to wrinkle and my tie flipped in the blue breeze. The driver said something again but I wasn’t listening anymore.