Swimmer Page 16

  Washington produced two clanking brown-paper sacks from behind his back, and said, ‘Champagne! Well, sparkling wine, anyhow! Let’s have a party!’

  Roberta Szredinski came forward with a large red box. Roberta was a plump, russet-haired girl who had struggled particularly hard with her reading during the year, because she had been desperate to qualify for a catering course. When Jim had first started to teach her she had scarcely been able to read the ingredients for a recipe. Now she was capable of writing ten-page essays on ethnic foods. She opened the box and displayed a huge white frosted cake with flowers and birds on it, and the message I thank you for your voices, thank you – your most sweet voices. TO MR ROOK FROM SPECIAL CLASS II.

  ‘You remembered your Coriolanus,’ said Jim.

  ‘I think we remembered most everything, Mr Rook,’ said Marcette Griffith, a pretty black girl with her hair threaded with thousands of colored beads, and a scarlet ruffled blouse. ‘You gave us the power.’

  Jim went into the kitchen and managed to assemble a motley collection of glasses, while Washington opened the sparkling wine and Roberta cut the cake.

  ‘How you going to beat this water-thing, Mr Rook?’ asked Nestor.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not too sure that I can, but I’m going to have a damned good try.’

  ‘Does this mean you won’t be going to Washington?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m supposed to be there on Monday morning at the latest. But there’s one thing you can count on, I won’t leave you guys in any kind of danger.’

  ‘You can’t put a hold on your whole career because of us,’ said Joyce. ‘We can take care of ourselves.’

  ‘I wish I could be certain of that. If you’d seen the water rearing up out of that swimming pool …’

  ‘It was truly frightening, man,’ said Washington.

  They filled their glasses and David called for a toast. ‘To Mr Rook, who introduced us to William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams … in fact more Bills than a pondful of ducks. But more than anything else, he introduced us to ourselves. Up until the day we walked into Special Class II, we didn’t believe that we could do nothing and we didn’t think that we were worth nothing.’

  ‘Double negative, stupid!’ called out Jewel.

  ‘Whatever, Mr Rook showed us that we had ability, and that we had value; and that’s what I want us to drink a toast to today.’

  They clinked their glasses, and drank; and if Jim hadn’t been so worried about them he would have been happier than he had ever been. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Jane Tullett’s watery face, and her voice whispering, ‘What happened in the pool that day?’

  One by one they stood up and read their poems. Shannon Karakatsanis’ poem was one of the tenderest.

  ‘The sunshine moves around the class

  And brightly measures out our hours.

  Today will be tomorrow’s past

  These seeds will be tomorrow’s flowers.’

  Nestor Fawkes read his poem with a deep frown.

  ‘I’m not too sure that I’m really ready

  To walk out of these doors and into the street.

  I can hear people outside there, laughing

  I hope at jokes and not at me.’

  When each student had finished reading, they all clapped – not just as a compliment, but with a feeling of mutual pride. When they had all finished, Jim stood up and said, ‘I didn’t think that I would be reciting anything to you ever again. But I’d like to leave you with one poem by Conrad Aiken that will give you all something to think about, and maybe something to guide you, too.’

  He took a book out of one of his packing cases and opened it.

  ‘… The mirage of spring

  shatters about us in a broken prism of rainbows

  never to be assembled again, or to be assembled

  only in the ironic despair of a dream;

  the false sunset has vanished under more than the sea:

  the stage is suddenly vaster, there are no wings

  for the off-stage voice of the pseudo-god – that’s me –

  instead, the silence and loneliness of self

  become a new world, of which the shores

  are faintly audible, faintly visible.’

  Jim paused and looked up, and took in one face after another. ‘We will go there,’ he said, and closed the book.

  Twelve

  Jim drove back to West Grove Community College later that morning, and parked his Cadillac, as usual, in Dr Friendly’s personal space – even though Dr Friendly had already taken his wife and two children to Oahu for their summer vacation and the gesture was only symbolic. The campus was deserted except for a team of pool-maintenance men emptying out the swimming pool and cleaners sweeping and polishing the corridors.

  He walked through to the library, where he found Clarence the caretaker up a stepladder, replacing the fluorescent tubes.

  ‘Hi there, Mr Rook! Thought you’d taken off to Washington, D.C.!’

  ‘Hi there, Clarence. One or two loose ends to tidy up.’

  ‘You should have seen my cousin Hattie. She had the loosest end I ever saw! Hey, caught you on the TV news last night – that guy who drowned in his living-room. Soon as I saw it was you, I said to Charlene, “You can guarantee it … anything weird happens around here, Mr Jim Rook’s got his thumb in the pie someplace.”’ He climbed down the stepladder and said, ‘What was the story on that – drowning in his living-room?’

  ‘Kind of a psychic phenomenon, Clarence. Hard to explain.’

  ‘Hard to pronounce, too.’

  Jim found the serried ranks of West Grove Community College yearbooks, bound in green leather with gold lettering, and took one down from the shelf. ‘Tell me, Clarence, do you remember that first summer I was here, that girl who drowned? Jane Tullett?’

  ‘For sure, Mr Rook. How could I ever forget it? That was a sad, sad business.’

  ‘You were there, Clarence. Do you think we could have done any more than we did? Do you think that we could have been more vigilant?’

  Clarence took out another fluorescent tube. ‘Nobody saw what happened, Mr Rook. She dove off of the diving board, but there was more students in that pool than a bucketful of shrimp, wasn’t there, and when she didn’t come up – well, nobody took no notice.’

  ‘So you don’t think we were to blame?’

  ‘Mr Rook – that poor young girl took a heck of a chance diving into all of those people. She was showing off. It wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t nobody’s fault. She struck her head on the bottom of the pool and nobody saw her and that was all there was to it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jim. ‘Somehow I’m not convinced. When you think about it, she must have hit the water with one hell of a splash – how come nobody saw her floating at the bottom? How come nobody realized what had happened to her?’

  ‘What you trying to say, Mr Rook?’

  ‘I’m trying to say that maybe somebody did see her – and, whoever it was, that somebody was negligent, at the very least. Or actually wanted her to die.’

  ‘Oh, come on now, Mr Rook. Some of these students have blood-feuds against each other, that’s for sure – and we’ve had two guns confiscated this semester, haven’t we? – but I can’t believe that nobody would have seen Jane Tullett drowning and not done nothing about it, do you?’

  Jim opened the West Grove College Yearbook for 1990 and flicked through it until he found Special Class II. There – right in the center of the page – was a smiling photograph of Jane Tullett, her long blond hair swept back, her eyes sparkling. On her left was George Opal, the captain of the college football team – wavy hair, modest smile and a deeply-cleft chin. He looked like a young Jack Kennedy, but he had never had anything like the young Jack Kennedy’s brains. He hadn’t been quite illiterate enough to rate a place in Special Class II, but Jim had given him one or two private-tuition sessions. One of his knottiest pr
oblems had been telling the difference between ‘of’ and ‘have’, as in, ‘we could of gone to the football game, last Saturday’.

  ‘Come here, Clarence,’ said Jim. ‘Look at these two, Jane Tullett and George Opal. Didn’t they go steady for a while?’

  Clarence took his wire-rimmed eyeglasses out of his dungarees pocket and squinted at the yearbook intently. ‘Sure. I remember George because his old man was Carson Opal, who used to play football for the Bears. George looked the spitting image of his old man. He was always walking around campus arm-in-arm with Jane. She was a beauty, wasn’t she? They was always talking about getting engaged, but George had kind of a restless eye, if you know what I mean. He was always messing around with other girls, especially the sophomores, and then he and Jane would have a heck of a scrap, and then they made up and it was all quiet for a while. Until next year’s intake of pretty young trouble, anyhow.’

  ‘George wasn’t in the pool when Jane drowned, was he?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t. He was over on the basketball court. I remember that because Dr Ehrlichman had to send a student to run tell him what had happened.’

  ‘So … that rules him out, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t get it. What makes you think that Jane was drowned on purpose?’

  ‘I’ve talked to her.’

  ‘You’ve talked to her? Come on, Mr Rook. She’s ten years dead.’

  ‘That guy who drowned in his living-room was a medium, a psychic, somebody who can talk to people who have passed over to the other side. Or not quite passed over, in this particular case. We held a seance … and Jane appeared and I talked to her.’

  ‘No shit. And she told you that she was drowned on purpose?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But she kept asking me what happened in the swimming pool that day – like there was something that I’d missed.’

  Clarence slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Mr Rook. I was there just like you were that morning and I never saw nothing untoward.’

  Jim looked at all the faces in the yearbook. Eager, expectant, all on the very edge of adult life. Except for Jane, who had never grown to be an adult, and seemed to be taking out her bitterness on those she had left behind.

  He sat down at one of the library desks and wrote out the names of everybody in Special Class II. ‘What you doing?’ Clarence asked him, as he climbed back up his stepladder.

  ‘I’m doing the only thing I can do: finding witnesses. If Jane was really drowned deliberately, somebody must have seen something, even if they didn’t understand what they were looking at. It’s like being a passer-by, and seeing some guy walk into a building. What you saw isn’t important unless you know that somebody was killed in that building only a few minutes later.’

  ‘If you say so, Mr Rook. I just hope you ain’t barking up some blind alley.’

  He found Piper McConnell working in a bar called the Black Velvet Alligator, on San Vicente. The bar was pitch-dark after the glare outside and the air-conditioning was set to ‘igloo’. A worn-out sound system was playing syrupy orchestrated versions of old Monkees hits. ‘Well, hey-hey-hey … I’m a believer … couldn’t leave her if I tried …’

  Piper looked so different from her yearbook picture that he hardly recognized her. The neat brunette hair had been replaced by masses of highlighted blond curls. Her nose had obviously been surgically bobbed and given a little tilt, and her lips were so plump with collagen that she seemed to be permanently pressing them up against an imaginary toy-store window. She was wearing a black velvet bustier to match the dusty life-size alligator which was suspended on the wall behind her.

  Jim sat up on a bar stool and she came over and asked him, in a deeply bored voice, ‘What’s it to be?’

  ‘Draft Bud would be good, thanks, Piper.’

  She frowned at him through her sooty eyelashes. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘You should do. You and I spent nearly a whole year together once, bickering with each other.’

  She peered at him even more intently. ‘We weren’t married, were we?’

  ‘No, we never had the time. We were too busy arguing about the relevance of Paradise Lost to a career in the modern catering trade. You said you never saw the point of learning Milton if you were going to work for Burger King.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘“Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars – white, black, and gray, with all their trumpery” – and two double cheeseburgers to go.’

  Piper clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Mr Rook! I can’t believe it! This is amazing! What are you doing here? It’s so good to see you! I never had the chance to say sorry for the way I was always talking in class and saying what’s the use of English and all. You taught me so much! Do you know I can still remember some of that Paradise Lost! “My fairest, my espoused, my latest found, Heaven’s last best gift, my ever new delight.” That sends chills down me, these days! Mind you, my husband thinks I’m talking, like, Korean or something.’

  ‘So you’re married?’

  ‘Number four, would you believe? I always found it difficult to stick at anything for long. My psychiatrist said I have the lowest boredom threshold of anybody he ever knew. I can get bored crossing the street.’

  ‘I remember. So what’s your name now?’

  ‘Mrs Piper Bogdanovich. No – not that Bogdanovich! I wish! But I’m very happy. Well, I’m not unhappy. Ray’s into audio-visual. He sets up public-address systems for weddings, business meetings, stuff like that. You know – “Testing, testing, one two three …”’

  ‘How about kids?’

  ‘Only one. He was a little boy. Stillborn. Well, you know. But I can still remember Paradise Lost. Don’t ask me why. He would have been five next Tuesday.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well … you can’t be sorry for ever. I don’t even remember who his father was. But I was going to call him Kenny, if he’d lived. After my father.’

  Jim took hold of her hand. ‘Piper … can you remember when Jane Tullett drowned?’

  ‘Jane Tullett? How could I forget it? That was so awful! That was the last day of the summer semester, wasn’t it? I liked Jane. We weren’t close or anything, but I liked her.’ She blinked at Jim, and said, ‘Are you asking me all of this stuff for a reason?’

  ‘That day when Jane drowned, I wonder if you saw anything unusual, that’s all.’

  ‘Like what? The pool was so crowded and everybody was splashing.’

  ‘Were you close to Jane when her body was discovered?’

  ‘Sure, pretty close. Me and Rachel Mendosky were splashing water at Dick Ramon and some other guy.’

  ‘Who else was around you?’

  ‘I don’t know … I can’t really remember. I know it was Jennie Bauer who first saw Jane lying under the water. She was screaming like you couldn’t believe.’

  ‘Who was Jane’s closest friend at college, would you say?’

  ‘Oh, Mary Weiland, of course. Do you remember Mary? Very frizzy hair, like one of those big tumbleweed things you see rolling around in cowboy movies. They were so close, though, she and Jane. They even shared lip gloss. Yeuch! I wouldn’t share my lip gloss with anybody.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Jim. ‘You don’t know where she is these days, do you, Mary?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But Rachel would know. I’ll give you her number.’

  At that moment, a fat man in dark glasses came out of the rear of the bar and said, ‘Come on, Piper! Quit gassing! You got work to do!’

  Jim turned on his stool and looked around the bar. Apart from him, there were only three people in there, two men and a blowsy woman in a leopard-spotted leotard who was smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder and arguing with one of the men in a voice as harsh as a nutmeg grater.

  Piper picked up a ballpen and wrote Rachel’s number on the palm of Jim’s hand. The fat man said, ‘Hey! Dates you can fix up after hours!’

  ‘He’s my teacher, not my date,’ Piper retorted. ‘He
taught me all about Milton.’

  ‘Milton? You mean Milton, North Dakota? What the hell for?’

  As Jim left the Black Velvet Alligator he was almost blinded by the bright sunlight. But as he unhooked his sunglasses from the front of his polo-shirt he noticed a quick, semi-transparent flicker on the far side of San Vicente – like the wavering heat from a midsummer barbecue.

  The sidewalk opposite was jostling with people, which made it difficult for him to distinguish what he had seen. But as his eyes became more accustomed to the glare, he picked out a barely visible figure moving through the crowds. It was no more substantial than a bending of the light, but as it passed it created a ripple in the air that Jim found that he could just about follow, if he shaded his eyes.

  He kept pace with the figure as it made its way eastward; and then he crossed San Vicente at the next intersection and kept it in sight as it made its way northward on Hauser. The sidewalk here was almost deserted, so he could follow it much more easily. As it walked by a restaurant window, it appeared to distort the glass; and when it passed in front of a mailbox the letters US MAIL wavered as if he were looking at them through running water.

  He began to catch up with it, and now there was no question in his mind who and what it was: Jane Tullett, in her spirit form. But what was she doing here? She must be following him, because the odds of him catching sight of her by accident were far too remote. Yet what did she want? And if she wanted to know where he was going, why was she hurrying away from him?

  At the intersection of Hauser and Olympic Boulevard she stopped and turned around. Jim slowed up. He was close enough now to see that she was glistening, as if she were wet, and her hair was stuck to her scalp. He could see right through her to the opposite side of Olympic. He could see automobiles passing to and fro, and a man walking a brindled dog – yet he could see Jane quite distinctly too.

  As he came nearer, he saw that she had an expression of terrible coldness on her face. He glanced around to see if there were any readily accessible sources of water close by. A few yards further down Olympic there was a flower shop, Blooming Miracle, with large green buckets of fresh flowers outside; and there was a man outside a Mexican restaurant hosing down the sidewalk, but that was all. Cautiously, he walked right up to Jane until he could have touched her with his outstretched arm, if she had possessed any physical substance. Her expression didn’t change. She continued to stare at him as if she were willing him to drop dead on the spot.