The Midegeville Pool
by George Slanger
The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies, but they have worn
away now, so people live on tough dark remnants of what was once a
proud mountain range. When they were higher, the mountains folded into
themselves acres of forest and turned it to coal which lay at the roots
of the mountains, absorbing and storing the pressure of the
overlying rock until the rock was worn away and the coal exposed, and
mined, and burned.
In the folds of those mountain roots lie gritty little towns full of
the people who once worked the mines. Now coal dust seems to have
worked its way into the pores of those people, so the strength of the
hills has become their strength. They have been bonded to the hills
through the coal. Its power has become their power, its loss their
loss. Coal dust darkens the pores of the red brick houses and also the
pores of the brick they used to pave their streets. They laid it down
in neat herringbone patterns, then later covered it up with
asphalt, though the covering is coming loose now, in patches, so the
old brick shines through like something authentic from another and more
honest time.
But the mountains have their dark side too--little pockets of
in-breeding, and all of its share of violence. Midgeville has a murder
every couple of years and over half of them go unsolved. One happened
just before one of my visits. The papers were full of it. A college
girl's body was discovered nude under a tree a mile from the campus.
The police admitted there were multiple stab wounds, denied what
everyone else believed--that Satanic "paraphnelia" was lying about,
that the body was mutilated in "certain ways."
I come to Midgeville to visit my son who lives there with his mother.
She teaches at the local university. She choose the town for solid
reasons, and I was grateful: it's close to the big cities, but fairly
small. when I don't drive, I come in on the train from the
west,down from Pennsylvania along the rivers whose Indian names purl
off the tongue: The Monegehela, The Susquehanna. The tracks are cut
into the sides of valleys and you can sit in the observation car and
drink coffee out of a styrofoam cup and look down into the stream and
see the coal dust swirling in the eddies along the banks.
This a story of Midgeville's swimming pool. Most of it was told to me
by my son, I could not check all the facts because I only came to
visit, but I have seen the pool and believe the facts are true.
On my visits, I often drove by the pool at night after it was closed,
when the underwater lights were on and the pool was a shimmering block
of blue mortised into the Appalachian night.
My son told me about the pool over a period of time, during my visits
which began when he moved there at the age of 12. After he told
me the story, I would ask for an update from time to time, and in
between updates, I would think about the pool, even dream about it, so
that what he told me and what I thought about it have run together.
My son is not sure just when the pool started to leak, but he has the
general impression it began before he moved there. In the beginning it
leaked at some fantastic rate, 75,000 gallons a day, he says. That
scarcely seems credible, since a pool 30 feet by 40 feet by 8 feet will
hold only 9600 cubic feet which is less than 75,000 gallons. If the
pool were really leaking at that rate, it would have to renew itself
every day and I doubt if the pumps could have kept it full. But my son
delivered that figure with a great deal of authority and I have no
doubt that is the figure he was given and the figure that was widely
believed. Whether it leaks still, neither my son or I know, but
whenever I look on it, or think about it, immediately it begins to leak
in my mind, and no amount of concentration will allow me to think about
it as the normal pool its builders thought they made.
The lifeguards were the first to discover the leak. A young man Chris
was officially in charge of the pool. My son knew him slightly, the way
a quiet outsider who comes late to a school system knows the handsome
lifeguard who has lived in the community all his life. Janee, his
girlfriend, was also a lifeguard. The word was that she made most of
the decisions, which Chris was happy to let her do. They had been
lovers a long time. Chris was utterly devoted to her, for the pleasure
she gave and for her beauty, and she was satisfied to have a man who
would do pretty much what she wanted. He accepted her authority with a
wide grin and good grace. Officially he had a room at one of the
college dormitories, but in fact, he spent most nights at Janee's
apartment, which she shared with two other girls. They accepted his
presence with a shrug, and looked up from breakfast table and
smiled at each other when the bed in Janee's room throbbed and
sighed in the early mornings before they had to go open the pool.
The chemicals were no doubt the first clue. Where normally a pound of
salicitate would do, he found it took a pound and a half and then two.
One supposes he told Janee.
"Are you sure you're running the test right?"
"Well, I run them the way I always do."
"I'll check it." Which she did but got the same results herself.
"We better take a look at the pumps," she said. So they went out
to the little house that sat just inside the woven wire fence and
shined a flashlight into the dark machinery which whined and throbbed
in their sumps of dark oily water. Chris winced inside when he
looked at machinery he did not understand, the way most people do when
they look under the hood of a car. I imagine him thinking that a pump
was not sounding right, was about to fail, would fail, and with some
terrible noise and great consequences. He never confessed his
fears to Janee, but he added the chemicals and fled, closing the door
gratefully behind him. But Janee clinically probed the bearings
and gaskets and pipes with the beam of the flashlight. Chris stood
beside her and tried to follow the beam of light, but what he watched
mostly were the wonderful bones of her face in the eerie light
reflected off the pumps, and the way her breasts swung under the
t-shirt when she reached this way and that with the flashlight. They
found nothing, they called the Park Superintendent, whose name my son
knew: Steve Ranteer. He had much on his mind and told them only to
"keep an eye on it."
They ordered more chemicals and life went on until the people in the
neighborhood began to complain. They were older, mostly, dark-haired
descendents of the the Irish who came to dig the B & O Canal back
in the 1890's, most unemployed since the mines closed, they
supplemented their unemployments c checks with vegetable gardens cut
into the green hillsides. They were happy at fist, that the
ground was moist and he had to water less. But then they noticed their
hoes were wet when they plunged them into the ground. A few days later,
so the story goes, the ground was so wet that mud balled up on the
blades so they could hardly lift them and all through the groves of
sycamore and ash and oak, you could see the earnest gardeners, their
feet spread wide and braced, the hoe-handles bending slightly against
their efforts to pull the blades out of the ground. Where the
tough lawn sod protected the ground, it must have been springy, like
walking on a too-full water bed. Then the plumbing began to go bad.
Toilets in the low-lying areas refused to flush. Instead, the water
bubbled up and turds slipped neatly over the porcelain lip like slim
fish and frolicked about on the wet floor.
Then the swimmers began to notice a change a
peculiar enervation that came over them as they entered the water.
The reputation spread until kids were coming from Midgeville and Sharps
Point, and Matalastket. Swimming in the Midgeville pool was, one of
them said, "like smoking really really good dope." They felt utterly
drained of energy but deliciously comfortable, as if all the joints in
their bodies were unhinged, and they had become a loose sack of bone
and organs being gently jostled about, rearranged in random
patterns, with every rearrangement producing a corresponding
rearrangement in the world outside them, so that they were their own
kaleidoscopes and the world was a series of shifting mandalas. If they
got bored with one arrangement of light and color and shadow, they
could, just with a merest flick of an ankle, send their own tissues
swirling into a different arrangement, which would then bring them
different news about reality.
That was most of what I heard on my first visit,
when the agony of the divorce was still laced with bitterness and I
never saw my son's mother when I came to visit. I did call once and
offer to buy her coffee, but she said she wasn't ready for that, a
response I appreciated. I would often come in the spring, when my
own university was on break. I would stay in the town's one motel and
wander up the street to the Black Diamond Restaurant in the mornings to
have eggs and hash browns. Then I'd then sit in the local library and
study local history till my son got out of school and could come over
to the motel so we could spend the rest of the day together. On the
weekends he could come over earlier and we could take the bus to some
historical site, or walk out into the hills around Midgeville.
The early Appalachian spring would still be misty,
and a fog would billow through the hills where the trees hid the
coal-pit scars. Most of the mines are dead and abandoned now and the
insatiable vegetation is beginning to reclaim the territory. Some of
the mines still take out coal, using simple equipment so as to keep the
cost down, and sell it locally, mostly to people who bring their own
pick-ups to the mines. We would talk up into these hills, my son and I,
with a hyperactive Husky puppy his mother had bought him. He
would want to show me things he had seen when had been there earlier,
alone, or with friends. Once it was the abandoned carcass of a bus
which had touched him deeply and which he wanted to share with his
father. I think he was alone a good deal in those early days after he
moved there with his mother who had taken a job with the university. I
suspect the bus had become some sort of complicated symbol for him of
the brokenness that divorce brings into lives, and he wanted me to see
it, perhaps as a way of articulating the pain he knew we both
felt. But one wooded hillside looks very much the same as
another and we could not find the bus though we poked around the
abandoned and decaying conveyer belts and rickety loading and sorting
structures for most of the afternoon. We finally stumbled across an old
D-6 Caterpillar. With chucks of mud he daubed the word "BUS" on
the scratched yellow paint, and I don't know that I have ever
felt such a moment of tenderness and agony as I did watching him
convert, by sheer act of will and language, that sullen mass of
iron into the shimmering object of his imagination.
As it happened, we found the bus, quite by accident
as were were making our way down the mountain. Tipped partly on its
side, with its shattered windshield, it was haunting, and we sat in it
for a long time, watching the mist and waiting for the Husky puppy to
track us down.
When I came out again a year or two later, I asked
him about the pool, and he told me the park officials had finally
brought down a man from Pittsburgh, a pool expert named Troy. He stayed
in the same tidy motel where I stayed, and like me, took his breakfasts
at the Black Diamond. He was fairly young, fairly good looking. He wore
no ring. The female lifeguards, even including Janne clearly went on
the alert in the presence of a dark and handsome stranger from out of
town. He brought SCUBA gear and one morning before the pool opened, he
dove down to inspect the pool's cement lining. It is easy to imagine
Chris and Janee both there when he came out of the dressing room with
the tank strapped to his back, raising his feet high to keep from
stepping on his fins, Chris watching Janee's face carefully as the
stranger went over the side feet first, awkwardly, as divers do, like
three year olds holding heir noses shut. I can see Chris standing
sullenly in one place, but Janee following the underwater form up and
down the pool. watching his legs kick methodically, and catching her
breath once when he twisted over onto his back to get a look and she
could see his face, distorted by the mask, looking up at her.
Once when she passed close by Chris, he took
her wrist and held her.
"Should I be jealous, Bugs?" he said. She looked at
him for a long time and then raised her arm slowly bringing his with
it. She pulled steadily until he let go his grip and they stood
separated--hostile and uncertain. Then she laughed.
"I'm flattered, Chris," she said, "but not to
worry." In my version of the story, He turns, goes into the office to
work on the books and doesn't worry any more. Perhaps she had already
seen what rest of the town soon figured out, which was that the expert
was very much a loner. He would drink diet soda from the machine and
chat easily with the pool help, but when invited to the intense and
constant parties after closing, he always declined. Someone said he
began driving to Civil War battlefields which lay thickly
scattered about the landscape of in that area: Harper's Ferry,
Antietum, Gettysburg. Someone said he spent so much time out there that
someone finally called the Pittsburgh office and they called him and
told him to get focused on his work. I could see how that would happen.
He had found no crack, so he work wasn't going well, and there is
something addictive about old battlefields. The landscape lies there
looking as natural as anything. The grass ripples in the wind,
and the tidy paths run here and there with the neat markers beside
them. But that landscape is like a screen on which you can't stop
projecting the film footage of past carnage and suffering. You look at
the dirt and you can't stop seeing the bloodstains. You look up the
distant hills and they are still covered with smoke from the cannons
and muskets. You try to hear the soft wind as it is now, but you keep
hearing the din and cry of ancient war.
The local people suggested draining the pool, but
Troy said he'd never, in 5 years on the job, found a crack in a dry
pool that he couldn't find in a full one. No, he had other theories. He
thought the pool was hexed, jinxed. When he told the park officials,
they went through the roof and called Pittsburgh again, and this time
Pittsburgh sent a man down. They had a long chat, and Pittsburgh pulled
him off the job, told him to come back to the central office, take a
vacation. But he said he'd take his vacation now and stay there and
work on the case on his own time. They said he could take a permanent
vacation and wrote to the city saying he was no longer in their
employ. The city didn't bring anymore experts in, at least not
that my son knows. Maybe they had about had it with experts and wanted
to have a go on their own. Or maybe they thought, as long as Troy was
no longer costing them anything, they might as well let him go and see
how far he got. So Troy became a fixture in the town, moved out of the
motel, got a little apartment, took the company car back to Pittsburgh
and came back with a beat-up Austin Healey that had to have parts
ordered every time it broke down, which was often. He started
working on pools around the area, repair and maintenance, in
competition with his old bosses. He never happened to be in town when I
came to visit, or I missed him. I think I would have recognized him
from my son's description. He lived there several years and then one
day he said his work was done. Next day he was up and gone and no
one ever saw him again. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
In between my visits I'd work at my job in the west.
I dated, of course. There are plenty of divorced women around, with two
kids 7 and 9. But desperation clings to them so thick you can't reach
to touch anything significant. After a couple of dates, I could
see the writing on the wall, but they couldn't, or wouldn't, and things
were plain miserable until finally I would take a bottle of Couvosier
up to the apartment and have a little talk and lave them sitting at the
kitchen table looking out the window. Most of my friends were divorced
or contemplating divorce. Directly or indirectly, they'd ask for
advice, and I wouldn't have any trouble giving it.
"If you are choosing between divorce and marriage,
no matter how bad, choose marriage," I'd say. "But if you reach the
point where you are choosing between death and life, choose life. If
you aren't fantasizing weapons, applied directly to your own skull or
your mate's, it isn't bad enough yet." Some people I took that too and
still married, but I can't say how much my advice had to do with it, or
whether they would have been better off to ignore it.
At my next visit, I asked how Troy was doing. Todd
said he had started hanging out at Duke's, a little bar and grill that
has been around for 30, maybe 50 years. Duke and Dolly ran it for years
until Dolly died. Then Duke made a little apartment upstairs and lived
there alone and ran it by himself until he got so crippled he couldn't
do it any more. Then his daughter Angela came home from a busted
marriage, with a 7-year-old daughter, and took over. She moved
Duke into a nursing home, moved into the apartment with the daughter
and has been running the place ever since. She was heavy then and got
heavier. I've eaten there myself and seen her, overweight and
good natured, moving easily through the crowd, which is a strange
mixture of college kids and bikers and assorted locals, dishing
up chili and potato salad, getting out the leather cup to roll for
drinks with the regular customers, though of course that's technically
against the law. When I've been there, she always wore one of those
nylon waitress' uniforms. You could see the bra straps cutting deep
into her flesh, and her ankles running over the tops of her white
shoes, so she should have moved slow and painful, but she didn't seem
to. Some people say that Angela and Troy had something going, that he
would still be there at closing time, that people saw them together,
with the daughter, picnicking at some isolated and broken down state
park, but my son thinks that just what people will say about two single
people in a small town. They just can't imagine lonely people not
drifting into the same orbit. But the planets do just fine.
Each time I came back to Midgeville, I was feeling a
little better. My dream life had begun to clear itself of the past, and
I no longer had terrible nightmares in which I dreamed I was a caged
bear with my divorced mate poking at me with a stick through the iron
bars. I sometimes wondered what she dreamed. I wouldn't have
asked here though, if I had seen her, and I didn't,not until much
later, when I was riding the bus between Appalachian towns, and a lady
got on. She was about my age and dressed the way middle-aged art
teachers dress on their days off, in kind of peasanty things with
dark blouses. She was carrying a small sack with the imprint of a
bookstore on it. I looked her over and then went back to my
reverie, and in my reverie I saw the woman I had married and saw she
looked something like that lady on the bus. I looked again, in utter
shock. She had aged so much I couldn't tell whether it was she or not.
I hadn't seen her face since she and I looked at each other down a long
hallway at her mother's when I dropped her and my son and her half of
the furniture off. "I'm sorry," she said, and I said I was sorry too,
and then I got back in the U-haul and drove 1200 miles back to my work.
Now she looked at me, and for all I know could have been wondering if
she recognized me too,, but you can't go up to someone and say, "excuse
me, are you my ex-spouse?" She finally spoke to me from across several
empty rows of the bus, beginning the conversation abruptly as if we had
been talking a long time.
"How does Todd seem to you?" If she hadn't used my
son's name, I still would not have been sure it was she.
" Yes. He seems fine."
"He's doing well in school. He seems to have a lot
of friends."
"Yes. He seems to have adjusted well."
"He's thinking about the University of Maryland."
"Yes. That's what he said." I couldn't stop saying
yes, stupidly. "Is there anything else I can do?"
"No. We appreciate the money you send. It helps."
The conversation collapsed. The grey limestone
cliffs raced by the bus windows until we came to a shopping mall and I
got off, saying something stupid like "See you." But I never did and
that seems as well. I have known couples who broke up but stayed so
friendly that I could never figure out--if they could get along that
well, why did they get divorced?
My son thinks Troy was picking Angela's brain about
the local occult scene. If he were on the track of something dark,
Angela would be the one to go to. All sorts of people came into Duke's
and the people that Duke didn't know, she did. There was plenty of dark
stuff around Midgeville, plenty of that in Appalaachia, plenty of it
anywhere, I guess, if you want to go looking. In the eastern mountains,
it tends to to be centered in little in-bred tribes that live in old
ramshackle farm houses tucked away back in the woods.
It's not hard to imagine Troy sitting in one of the
unpadded booths in Duke's on a slow night. Angela would open two beers
and slide into the booth opposite him.
"How the case of the missing water going, Honey?"
she might say.
"Still pretty murky."
"Well, I notice the kids keep swimming, and that's
the important thing, ain't it?"
"That's the important thing."
"Folks say you ain't you ain't getting paid no more,
since you got off on this here witchcraft kick."
"It's personal now, Angie. Money doesn't matter."
"People round here are choosing up sides, Troy. Some
are saying you ought to back off, some just as soon you broke something
open. Been waitin' for somebody to crack into this devil stuff, but
nobody round here got the guts to look very deep into it."
What do you know about witchcraft around here,
Angie?"
"More than I want. Less than people think."
"Tell me where to look."
"Lucy might talk to you."
"Lucy?"
"Heads up a tribe that lives back in the woods not
half a mile from the pool. Bad teeth, long straight grey hair. Walks
past the pool a couple times a week. Carries an empty string bag goin'
in. Carries it home full of odd stuff: onions, writing paper, candles,
clothing from the Good Will, laundry soap."
My son knew about Lucy already. Some of the high
school students claimed to have visited her and to have paid her to
cast spells on opposition football teams. They described the rites in
terms so vague my son thinks they made them up, and it didn't do much
good anyway, since the local football team kept losing just as they
always had.
"Lucy lives odd, but I don't know that she does any
harm," Angela told Troy. The video games would be humming and clicking
in the background. Angela might have to go get more change, or bring
out another cauldron of potato salad and Troy would sit quietly,
nursing his beer, swirling it round and round in his glass.
"Who does she live with," Troy would ask.
"Couple of bikers. One comes in here once in a
while. Tattoos all over every part of his body that anyone here has
ever seen, including parts you only see in the john. At least one old
man who can't walk. Welfare goes out sometimes to be sure he's getting
a bath. Seems he always is. Mountain people of various ages. Flock of
kids the truant officer is always after. Lucy claims to have some
education so the law says she can teach the kids herself, but no one
wants to believe her. I suspect the weirdness comes from in-breeding as
much as it does from the devil."
"Anybody every try to root them out? Get anything on
them?"
"Yeah Sheriff Anderson makes noises."
I'm conjuring up that part of the conversation,
naturally, from what my son told me about the sheriff. He had run a
series of articles in the paper and given talks about Satanism in the
county, mostly to show he had things under control, in Todd's analysis.
Todd and I used to skirmish a bit about authority, though we both
worked hard to keep our discussions from becoming an argument. The
non-custodial father never argues with his children. Having lost so
much, he would not risk losing more and is happy to leave that duty to
his mother. But Todd had set his face against all authority, starting
with obvious figures such a police and extending down to the subtler
manifestations, such as CEOs of MacDonalds. Who can blame him,
having at the age of 9 seen two authorities in his life deteriorate
into wretched creatures who could not exchange a good morning without
lapsing into accusations stretching back into the mists of time.
I took the time to look up some of the sheriffs
prose, working in that tiny small town library.. few things are more
pleasant than a small town library. The open about 11:00, and the
day-time staff is a pateient-looking lady who wanted to go to college
but fell in love with a one of the hardware store owner, who never
really wanted to go to college and dropped out as soon as he could, and
then the family began, and the sensible thing to do was take over the
hardware store and she cold run the library and get her reading that
way, and actually probably did. The new book displays are full of books
about weight control and and the latest health scare, but the shelves
are so dense with classics you become guilty at all you haven't read.
They eye strangers, of course, especially single males who the probably
think are going to do something funny. The life of a single male is
much overrated. When you are married, you may imagine intense liaisons
with semi-strangers, but you soon find out that semi-stranger women are
damned wary of men they don't know, thinking, I suppose, that there
might be something wrong with us, which, of course, there is. I suspect
that women are far more attracted to married men who they can fantasize
with safety. In such situations, I usually begin pretty soon to feel as
lonely as I am and to look as lonely as I feel. I actually begin to
feel like the mad pervert I suspect they suspect I am, and it's hard to
get any work done.
But I persevered, brushing past the classics to get
to the slim volumes of county history that tell about when the Begonia
festival started and how the early settlrs had trouble with the
Indians, the ones who had all that time to think up lovely names. At
4:00 the hard-hipped daughter comes in so mom can go home and fix
dinner. The daughter leafs through Good Housekeeping and visits on the
phone and the library closes at five and if Todd hasn't come over to
get me by the, I head for the motel, walking alone down the street,
carrying my briefcase, as incongruous a sight as one is likely to
see.
I had to agree with Todd that the Sheriff had a
pretty good line going, and it was hard to believe his heart was in it,
though he couldn't have been entirely insincere
either The series had pictures of Satanic symbols
including the peace symbol, the Masons' square and compass, and some
tings with Greek letters Todd said was the insignia of a local
fraternity. The peace symbol was supposed to represent Satan's cloven
foot. I checked the letters to the editor to see if the series had
gotten any response, but it hadn't, at least not in that forum. My son
thinks city was happy to have Troy checking into the situation, maybe
harrassing the witches a bit, especially if it wasn't costing them
anything.
Troy might have done the same research I had. Those volumes of the
papers were sticking out of the pile in the tiny library as if they
might have been pulled by a strong person and and put back by a
the librarians daughter, who didn't have a lot of time or a lot of
strength. But I suspect he did some direct research too. People said
they saw him walking past the pool, headed out of town in the direction
of Lucy's farm.
I've tried hard to imagine that scene, but it keeps
coming out like something from Erskine Caldwell, Troy sauntering into
the yard, leaving the Austin at home so as to expose himself, show that
they had hm where they wanted him if they wanted him, that they could
boil him and eat his fingers if they wanted and probably no one would
complain except some people whose pool he wouldn't show up to clean so
they'd have to get someone else. The kids would be peeking out from
behind doorways, their browned feet in strapped sandals that used to be
white. Someone might be working on a Yamaha under a shadetree, some
pieces spread out on a plank, and others soaking in big pan of
solvent.
"Howdy," Troy would say to the mechanic. What else
could he say but Howdy?
"Howdy," the mechanic would say.
"Hot day," Troy would say.
At that point, silence.
"Lucy home?" Troy asked.
The mechanic gestured toward the house which would
be big affair, the yard overrun, but the house in good enough shape. No
one would answer his knock, but the door would be open and the screen
unlocked, so he'd go in though the living room which would have an old
rug and dark furniture but be otherwise unexceptionable. He'd go into
the kitchen which would be surprisingly clean. Stranger's houses are
always cleaner than we expect, and the houses of our friends are always
dirtier. Lucy would be standing at the stove, cooking something, for
even witches have to eat.
"Sit down," she might say. "I've been expecting you."
He'd sit, in a wooden chair, with intricately turned
rungs in the back and between the legs. painted white
"What are you making?" he'd ask, falling back on
small talk, but sensing that it was inappropriate.
"Chokecherry preserves," I think she'd say,
startling him with the housewifey answer.
Beyond that, my imagination simply fails. Everyone
thinks there are dark secret worlds where the rules don't apply.
but When I used to go looking for places like that, but I
couldn't find them. I was looking for the place where degeneracy and
mystery became one. But the degeneracy I found was prosaic and boring,
and mystery turned out to be not a thing you could go looking for but
just a side of every ordinary event. Of course, as soon as I stopped
looking, I saw the edges of such places beckoning me from every corner,
but I turned and went on my way. They still might exist.
But whatever deal Troy cut, or didn't cut, the leak
in the pool did get drop to 17,000 gallons a day, which was evidently
considered a bearable number. Some people swear that about the time the
leak got better, they saw Lucy and Troy inside the woven wire fence, in
the middle of the night, swimming, naked. They swore they couldn't
mistake the grey hanks of hair, or Troy's mustache, but her body looked
like that of a 17-year-old lifeguard, like Janee's. They say that after
that Troy was even more of a loner, that he stopped showing up to clean
and repair pools, that he walked with a stoop, that his hair turned
white, and on and on. All anyone knows for sure is that he stopped in
at Duke's one day to say good buy to Angela. He said he was headed west
where there were more pools.
The last time I was in
Midgeville, Todd was a junior in the university there, and doing fine.
His prejudice against authority had mellowed into a kind of Thorovian
conservativism, so that he was prepared to argue against gun control on
the grounds that fewer laws were better, and it took a law to ban guns
and no law to permit them. He hadn't been to the pool for a long
time. He'd found other places to swim. One of them he called the
Quarries. It's a pit cut in the limestone rock up in the hills. The
east is like that, full of surprises hidden in all those trees. I live
now in the west which was once as full of surprises as Santa's bag, and
still feels that way to a newcomer, though after you live there a
while, you feel you know your way around.
We parked the car at the locked gate and walked the
last 3/4 of a mile up the old road. The sun was hot and we were
sweating when when we got to the lip. It was nearly as big as a
football field, and cut into a hillside, so the water could have been
80 feet from the rim on the high side and 40 on the low side. It must
have been spring fed because Rainwater would have turned stagnant, and
this water was clear. No one knew how deep it was. There was a story
that no one had every been able to find the bottom, but I think that's
just more local lore. Todd said someone had dumped detergent into
it once, and it cleared itself in two weeks.
There's only one place where you can ease yourself
down to the water, around blocks of limestone that never got taken out.
The water was wonderful. You could swim the length of the quarry, twist
your body and push off with your feet from the great shaggy stone, or
float on your back and look up at the huge square of stone framing the
eastern sky which is always white with moisture. There were places you
could climb up onto the wall to varying heights and jump down, if you
could find the courage. Jumps I would have taken with joy twenty years
ago scare me now, but I made a few jumps from successively higher
ledges. We hadn't done anything physical together for years, and Todd
was delighted to find he had more courage and skill than I did. He kept
climbing and jumping from higher and higher places in the wall and
finally announced he was going to go off the top, at the high end.
It looked dangerous to me, and in any earlier time I
would have stopped him flat, or tried to argue him out of it. But I
knew those times were gone now, that he had to make this leap as
a way of saying goodbye forever to the fatherly ties would hold him
back.
I sat at the bottom on a huge block of limestone
while he walked along the rim to the high end. He walked up to the rim
and back several times, running the script in his mind. The high
wall tapered back from the water some, though not too much, and there
did seem to me some chance his trajectory might not carry him clear of
the stone and he could be killed. Still, I watched with absolute calm,
the way you watch another car sliding into you on an icy street.
Something terrible may happen, but you have pushed the last pedal and
hit the last lever, and now you can only watch iron laws at work which
are almost magnificent in their impersonal power.
He braced himself about 30 feet from the edge, ran a
kind of spread-legged sprint to a mark he had scratched in the dirt,
hurled himself into space and pulled his knees hard into his chest.
From my angle, I couldn't tell until the end whether or not he was
going to clear the wall, but he did and with room to spare. He swam
underwater for a long time and came up grinning.
Afterwards, we spread our towels on the limestone
and baked in the Appalachian sun talking about things we'd never
talked about before, including the divorce.
"Whose fault was the divorce?" he said.
I was ready for that one. I'd thought about it a
long time.
"It takes two to make a marriage, I said, and two to
make a divorce. Part of it was my fault. I can't say how much or which
part.
"It's been rough on both you."
"I can't say about your mother, but whatever way's
it's been rough on me are OK. It's better to suffer for your mistakes
and know you live in a just world. It would be worse to get away with
things and have to admit you live in an unjust one."
"Most people think they could handle it."
"They may be stronger than I am."
That night, on our way to get fast-food, we drive by
the pool, which shimmers its electric blue, as lovely as ever.
"Hear anymore about the pool?" I ask.
"I haven't heard anything for a long time," he says.
"I don't know anyone who goes there anymore."