A Stranger in This World (14 page)

Just as she is finished saying them, the tires plow into the lunch, shoving the cooler across the asphalt with a horrible grinding sound. The blond family all break out in peals of foreign-sounding laughter.

“Dumb son of a bitch,” the Indian chief says.

Evan sips his water. The wind breaks the surface of the lake into coarse ripples, dispelling the reflection of the mountains, but the sun still shines warmly on the water, on the granite peaks, on the weathered brown logs of the porch and on Evan’s arms. The mountains are beautiful but, now that nothing else is left, this beauty is terrifying to him, everything he doesn’t know, everything he hasn’t done. Evan feels enormously tired, afraid to start. He closes his eyes and struggles to open them again. He scans the sky: hours of daylight left, and then the long drive home.

“Tourists,” Evan says softly. “They’re just tourists. They don’t know any better.”

HIGH ON HIS ALUMINUM STAND
,
STONED AT TEN-THIRTY IN THE
morning, Kenny studied the day’s crop of girls and women from behind his dark glasses and waited for Mrs. Jordan to arrive.

The usual moms were spread out with their kids and Garfield towels on the grass next to the patio. They always had this scatter of crap around them, Kenny noticed: toys and clothes and radios and suntan lotion. And the kids were always trying to crawl away and drown themselves. Some of the moms were not bad, the ones who had zipped their bodies back into shape. They wore the sexiest bathing suits so everyone could see their tight little trampoline bellies. Something slightly frightening about them, though, pretending that their kids didn’t exist. Something better about the regular moms in the one-piece suits with the weight they couldn’t quite hide. Better, Kenny thought, but not sexy.

The other side of the pool, next to the snack bar, was for the girls, the “teens,” as they were known around the country club. Teen dances, teen Ping-Pong tournaments. These girls were Kenny’s age but that was as far as it went. They saw right through him when they bothered to look at all. Lack of money made him invisible. So he watched them instead, their hard, smooth bodies like car fenders, straight hair and good teeth. They were trying to be sexy but really they weren’t and Kenny, staring at them, couldn’t figure out why. They lay face-down on their towels on the concrete deck in tiny unstrung bikinis, never moving a muscle, not even lifting their heads to talk to their friends inside the shade of the snack bar. Everybody was friends here, everybody had money except Kenny.

This lifeguard job was a going-away present from his girlfriend. Her dad was on the board of the country club. It was as easy as that. Two days into the summer, everybody figured out that he didn’t belong here, Kenny included. He lived in a yellow-brick apartment with his father, near downtown, a thirty-minute
bike ride from here. This summer his father had taken to falling asleep on the couch every night with the TV on and a last highball on the floor beside him. Kenny would find him in the morning and cover him up, like a piece of furniture. Some of these girls must have problems, he thought. He wondered what they were, hoped they were serious.

Invisible in his dark sunglasses, part of the patio furniture, Kenny spent his days imagining what it would be like to fuck all the wives and all the daughters of the country club. The only thing they would let him have was skin, and he stole as much of it as he could. He loved to see the pale side of a woman’s breast as she lay stretched, top undone, arms over her head, or the pale skin at the edge of her swimsuit bottom, like a promise. He lived for the revealing moment, accidents of skin when a bathing suit was being adjusted or a T-shirt put on, or when a woman would emerge from the water, blind and dripping, and if her suit was made of a certain kind of material, Kenny would see her outlined in every detail, as if she stood naked in front of him. I got you, he thought. Kenny stared and stared.

Not that any of them were possible. Not the girls, not the women. This was just something to do while he was stoned in the big lifeguard chair.

One in particular, though. Her name was Mrs. Jordan and she wasn’t a mom and she wasn’t a daughter. Every morning at eleven o’clock, when the last shade of the trees was passing from the deck, Mrs. Jordan would arrive alone, press her blond hair into an aqua cap—the exact shade of the blue-tile bottom—and swim fifty laps. Kenny counted, every morning. When she was done she would towel herself carefully dry, then coat
herself with sunblock and lie down on one of the lounges, loosening her hair so that it shone different shades of gold and silver in the morning sunlight. Kenny knew it was fake; he wondered sometimes what color her hair was really, but he didn’t mind. This was beautiful. This was sexy.

This particular morning she came as usual at eleven and swam her fifty laps and then laid her body carefully down on the chaise lounge. She would stay there, face-down and unmoving, until one-thirty, when she would rise, swim thirty more laps and leave, as she did every day. Every day the same. She lay as still as any of the money kids but she was thinking something, there was something going on inside her head, and Kenny wondered what it was. He made up special stories about her while she lay there. She was waiting to go to prison for drugs, for a long time, and she would be old when she got out. She was dying a slow and painless death, some made-for-TV disease without symptoms, and in her hours on the chaise lounge she was remembering the good years of her life, all spent at poolside. She had time for a last romance, a poolside lover, and Kenny, with his sun-blond hair and his flat, tanned stomach and his vague eyes, would …

Suddenly she startled straight upright, looked everywhere, rose to her feet and dove headlong into the deep end of the pool.

This sudden dive filled Kenny with fear: things were happening, things were changing, had he been caught? He looked around the pool and saw only the usual scatter of moms and
children and teenage girls; looked into the deep end, following the movement of Mrs. Jordan’s dive and saw, tiny and self-contained, bundled into itself, a small child sleeping on the bottom of the water. It can’t be sleeping, he thought. It looked so blue through the lapping water, the little bundled child, like an Indian papoose. He watched the broken, refracted line of Mrs. Jordan’s body in her black bathing suit.

Before Kenny could move, before he could make up his mind, she was wading out of the shallow end with the drowned child pressed to her chest.

“Jesus!” yelled one of the mothers. “Oh, Jesus, Johnny, what happened to you?” She ran to Mrs. Jordan, screaming, eyes of a wounded horse, while Mrs. Jordan patted the child on the back, as if it had a little cough.

“Johnny!” yelled the mother, ripping him from Mrs. Jordan’s arms.

Kenny, who had somehow come to life, took the boy from his mother’s arms. He probed the boy’s throat, as he had been taught, then laid the blue boy down on a blue-striped towel, tilted his head back, pinched his nose shut and began to try to breathe life back into him. A kiss, he thought, feeling the tiny cold lips against his own. Nothing.

Nothing.

And then, a slow stirring, water boiling out of the boy’s lungs, a slow convulsion, then Kenny tasted chlorine, and a gout of water spilled out of the boy’s mouth, staining the concrete dark in a spreading pool, and the boy began to breathe again, and he began to sputter and wail. Kenny handed him to his mother. All the money kids were watching, all the moms. The wind was shaking the tops of the trees, showing both the
pale undersides of the leaves and the deep green, glossy tops, casting scattered shadows at the edge of the concrete deck. The manager was shouting as he half-ran down the hill from the courts in his hard black shoes, a money kid fluttering behind him.

“Should I call the firemen?” the manager shouted. “Should I call the police?”

“Everything is fine,” Mrs. Jordan called out to him, the first words Kenny had ever heard her say. He was startled to hear that she had a Southern accent: Texas? Tennessee? The boy subsided into quiet sobs, pressed against his mother, little pigeon-sounds.

Kenny broke through the circle of watchers and started toward his stand again. His knee hurt deep inside. What did he do to himself? When he looked down it was bleeding freely: he must have banged it on the lifeguard stand, or when he knelt down on the concrete. He couldn’t remember how he got from the chair to the boy. There was a slice of time missing. The marijuana haze had left him, and everything was very clear. He sat on a bench near the fence at the deep end and watched them tell their stories to the manager, each in turn, with gestures: headshakes, swooping movements of the hands. In the center of the circle stood Mrs. Jordan, her hair turned dull brown by the water, scattered streaks of fool’s gold. She stood flat-footed and troubled in her wet black bathing suit, trying to understand. Her eyes were soft, tired-looking, and the line of her chin was looser than it had once been. Kenny felt his heart pull toward her for reasons he didn’t understand. She wasn’t perfect anymore. I could hurt her, Kenny thought. I could touch her.

The manager clattered toward him in his black shoes, and the others trailed behind, leaving a group around the mother and child. “What’s wrong with your knee?” the manager asked.

“I don’t know,” Kenny said. “It hurts a little, probably nothing serious.” He straightened his leg out experimentally and winced at the grinding inside his kneecap. Something was loose in there.

“Do you want to see a doctor?”

I ought to, Kenny thought, I seem to be damaged. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He said, “I’m all right, I think.”

“Why don’t you take today off?” the manager asked. “We can cover for you.”

Mrs. Jordan had disappeared somehow.

“Am I in trouble?” Kenny asked.

“I don’t know,” the manager said. He didn’t really want to talk about it. “I don’t think so,” he finally said. “Why don’t you just go home? We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

“He saved that boy’s life,” one of the money kids said, just like she was on television. “That little boy would have died.”

“Right, right,” the manager said, then turned back to Kenny. “I’m not saying you didn’t do the right thing, I’m just, you know, I’m sure you’re a little keyed up. We’re all a little keyed up. Why don’t you go?”

“All right,” Kenny said, though when he thought of his father’s apartment, he didn’t want to go there. The wing of the angel of death has brushed my shoulder, he thought. I don’t want to explain to my father.

He felt the eyes of the swimmers on his back as he limped into the locker room. He sat on the bench and looked at his
knee, which didn’t tell him anything. He was still bleeding from the scraped skin but the real problem was someplace inside where he couldn’t see it. He stared at it, waiting for something to happen, but it kept on being his knee, incommunicado. And then he remembered that he had saved a baby’s life, and also that he’d almost lost him. Mrs. Jordan, at least, knew he’d almost missed the whole thing. The boy should have died. Who else knew this? But it seemed to matter so little, next to the memory of those cold, tiny lips, the porcelain emptiness of the boy’s dead eyes.

In the dim employee’s locker room, he showered the chlorine off and changed into his street clothes. He looked around the room and wondered if he would see it again if he was fired. It was a nothing place but Kenny was superstitious about saying good-bye. Too many things in his life—his mother, New Jersey—had disappeared without warning. Good-bye, dead place, unloved rooms. I have fucked your daughters for long enough, or maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.

“You’re bleeding,” Mrs. Jordan said.

“It’s nothing much,” Kenny said. Then wondered what she was doing there in the driveway of the employee entrance, where his bike was locked to the fence. She wore white loose shorts, a purple top that emphasized her deep, even tan, and tiny gold-strapped sandals. Her hair was nearly dry, beginning to sparkle again. She had a little lipstick on and something to make her eyes look bright and Kenny liked the artifice, though it put her out of reach. Kenny was an inch or two taller but she was looking down at him.

“I think you ought to see a doctor,” she said. “I saw you were limping.”

“I just banged up my knee a little.”

“You don’t know what might be going on in there,” she said. Her tone implied something reprehensible, a wild party or a Communist cell meeting. She said, “I damaged my knee six years ago from trying to run a marathon and it has never been right since.”

“This isn’t that bad,” Kenny said.

“I didn’t feel a thing at the time it happened,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Didn’t feel a thing.”

There didn’t seem to be any place for Kenny to put his eyes: he looked down and there were her legs, looked up and there were her breasts under the purple silk and her eyes, which were soft and dangerous. Kenny thought of the dozens of times he had fucked her, and the dozens of ways, and he was ashamed of himself, standing this close. He wanted to escape, wanted to be rid of her.

“I tell you what,” he said. “If it still feels bad tomorrow, I’ll get to the clinic.”

“Rice,” she said. “Rest, ice, compression, elevation. The important thing is to ice it down as quickly as you can to keep the swelling down, because the swelling is what does the real damage sometimes. How were you going to get home?”

What did she want from him? Kenny wished he could snap his fingers and she’d be gone, click the heels of his sneakers together three times and poof! He liked her better as a body, a place for him to put his thoughts, but there she was. “I’ve got my bike,” he said.

“Where do you live?” she asked. “How far?”

“Look, I’m going to be fine,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Jordan said. And for a moment they were the same. It was the blue baby, Kenny thought, remembering how she looked by the side of the pool with her hair down in wet strings and her face naked and worn. He felt a little surge of sympathy for her, though he knew it was misplaced. Adults didn’t need his sympathy, at least adults with money. Still there she was.