Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [132]
And this is why Conor believes she is asking him to join them, right this minute, and to be his old self. And this is why he steps into the river, smiling that smile of his. It’s not a wide river after all, no more than sixty or seventy feet across. Anyone could swim it. What are a few wet clothes? He will swim across the Chaska to Merilyn and Jeremy and Jeremy’s girlfriend, and they will laugh, pleased with his impulsiveness and passion, and that will be that.
He is up to his thighs in water when the shocking coldness of the river registers on him. This is a river of recently melted snow. It isn’t flowing past so much as biting him. It feels like cheerful party ice picks, like happy knives. Without meaning to, Conor gasps. But once you start something like this, you have to finish it. Conor wades deeper.
The sun has come out. He looks up. A long-billed marsh wren is in a tree above the bank. He cannot breathe, and he dives in.
Conor is a fair swimmer, but the water is putting his body into shock and he has to remember to move his arms. Having dived, he feels the current taking him downriver, at first slowly, and then with some urgency. He is hopeless with cold. Tiny bells, the size of gnats, ring on every inch of his skin. He thinks, This is crazy. He thinks, It wasn’t an invitation, that wave. He thinks, I will die. The river’s current, which is now the sleepy hand of his death waking up, reaches into his chest and feels his heart. Conor moves his arms back and forth, but he can’t see the bank now and doesn’t know which way he’s going. Of course, by this time he’s choking on water, and the bells on his skin are beginning to ring audibly. He is moving his arms more slowly. Flash-card random pictures pop up in his mind, and he sees the girl in his studio the day before, and she says, “I don’t like you.”
He doesn’t want to die a comic death. It occurs to him that the binoculars are pulling him toward the river bottom, and he reaches for them and takes them off of his neck.
He swirls around like a broom.
He pulls his arms. It seems to him that he is not making any progress. It also seems to him that he cannot breathe at all. But he has always been a large, easygoing man, incapable of panic, and he does not panic now. His sinking will take its time.
The touch of the shore is silt. The graspings of hands on his elbow are almost unfriendly, aggressive. Jeremy is there, pulling, and what Conor hears, through his own coughing and spitting, is Jeremy’s voice.
“Dad! What the fuck are you doing? What in the fucking … Daddy! Are you okay? Jesus. Are you … What the fuck is this? Shit! Jesus. Daddy!”
Conor looks at his son and says, “Watch your language.”
“What? What! Get out of there.” Conor is being pulled and pushed by his son. Pulled and pushed also, it seems, by his son’s girlfriend. Perhaps she is simply trying to help. But the help she is giving him has been salted with violence.
“What do you think?” Conor asks, turning toward her. “Do you think he pulled at the nails?”
Conor’s trousers are dripping water on the grass. Water pours out of his shirt. It drains off his hands. Now in the air his ears register their pain; his eardrums are in pain, a complex aching inside the ravine of his head. And Merilyn, the source, the beneficiary of his grand gesture, is simply saying, with her nurse’s voice, “He’s in shock. Get him into the car.”
“Merilyn,” he says. He can’t see her. She’s behind him.
“What?”
“I couldn’t help it. I never got over it.” He says it more loudly, because he can’t see her. He might as well be talking to the air. “I never got over it! I never did.”
“Daddy, stop it,” Jeremy says. “For God’s sake, shut up. Please. Get in the car.”
Jeremy opens the door of the old clunker Buick he bought on his sixteenth birthday for four hundred dollars, and Conor, without thinking, gets in. Before he is quite conscious of the sequence of one event after another,