Yet he pulled on. Then he opened his mouth too early and caught a swallow that rocketed down him. The cough racked up through him, seizing his body, but still he clung to the rope. Just a little farther, he thought. He managed to get two more pulls on the rope in before surfacing for air. / must be nearly there, he thought.
But he made the mistake of turning to look at the far shore, which he assumed must be but a few feet away; he could barely see it. He wasn't even halfway.
The depression of it hit him like a sledgehammer.
Give it up, he said. Give it up.
But he fought on, blindly. It was a long, groping night walk; the world resolved itself into the roar of the water and the exhaustion in his arms. He ached to surrender. At one point, he did, and ordered his hands to release him. But they would not. He found it in himself to go another few pulls and then another. A good, sweet lungful of air got him over his worst despair. Onward, he pulled.
It was going to take forever. But at the next sighting, he was astounded at how close the shore was. And with a mighty pull, he got himself into the shallow waters. He saw them in the brush a few feet back from the river's edge. His feet touched. He let go of the damned rope. He stood to raise himself and wave.
And then the current had him.
“Richard,” said Lamar, almost conversationally. Richard was so close, he was coming out of the water, then he just seemed to sit down and the water scooted him along.
His face had a silly half-smile, as if he couldn't believe what was happening, as if this were some damned joke.
“Richard,” said Lamar, irritated.
“Git your ass out of—” But he was gone. The water had him, and as Lamar watched, the silly look melted into one of sheer terror and weakness. Richard panicked, began to flap, lost control, and was out of sight in seconds.
“Wi-chud,” said O’Dell.
“That boy's gone,” said Ruta Bern.
“Water took him.”
Lamar just watched. He felt something like disappointment.
Then he was angry. Goddamned stupid Richard, come all this way, and-"Shit,” he said.
“Lamar, it's over. Let it be,” said Ruta Beth.
“Let it be.”
Richard sank. The world turned dark and liquid. There was no light down here. Weakly he kicked and waved against his fate, but there was no mercy at all, anywhere.
He fought for air, but the water beat its way into his lungs.
He gobbled for air, but there was only water. He closed his eyes in the gray light.
He thought of his mother.
Mother, he wanted to cry.
His mother was a beautiful woman. She drove his father away with all her "friends.” They were a rich, aristocratic crowd from Tulsa, third-generation oil money long removed from the smell and sweat of the fields, and his father preferred the old boy network of kick-ass riggers and up-from penury scalawags like himself, who’d made their fortunes on guts and nerve. All these puffy people, all of his mother's friends with their Eastern pretensions, they finally drove the poor man away, though Richard didn't think there'd ever been a divorce.
Richard's mother told him he could be an artist. She took him to art lessons so early and surrounded him with artistic people. He went to Europe when he was six, nine, eleven, and fourteen. It wasn't her fault he turned out so disappointingly.
She had done everything she could.
Somehow, things were always set against Richard. She would arrange for "introductions” to various prominent men in the East when they traveled there, but the men were always disappointed in him. He had a gift but not a great one, that was clear, and he was so much less interesting than Mother, he was a wretched conversationalist, he didn't have her buoyant charm, her vividness, her confidence. And she told him that, not in subtle ways, but baldly and to his face.
“Richard, you could do so much better if you weren't so meek. You will not inherit the earth that way, I promise you. You have to learn to project. People don't find your self-doubts attractive at all. Reach out, open up.”
But the more she pushed him, the more he sealed up. It was as if he was blossoming inward, becoming more retarded and pitiful and self-conscious and crippled with terror.
He was afraid of everything!
On the day it happened, he returned home and found her with a friend.
Eventually the friend left, and she came downstairs and mixed herself a drink, still beautiful at sixty-one, and asked him how the newspaperman had liked the exhibition.
“Uh,” said Richard, aching with dread, "Mother, he didn't show.”
“He what?”
“He didn't show. Mother, I don't know what happened, maybe he got lost.”
“Richard, I have over four thousand dollars invested in that exhibition! What do you mean, he didn't show?”
He stood there, thirty years old, quavering like a child.
He hated her almost as much as he hated himself.
“Call him,” she said.
“I did. He wasn't there.”
“Call him again.”
~ "Mother.”
“Call him, Richard, call him now. You silly little fool.
You cannot let people simply walk on you. It's why you always end up with nothing and why I always have to bail you out. I pay for everything, Richard. You get everything for free.”
He made the call.
The man was there.
“Uh, Mr. Peed, sorry, I told you I'd come by if I could.
But the art critic thing is only part of my job; I also have to read all the Sunday feature copy and we got a little behind and I just couldn't make it. It's not The New York Times, you know. It's just the Daily Oklahoman.”
He hung up.
“Call him again,” his mother said.
He was never sure, not then, not in the immediate aftermath, not in the months of meditation, why it happened the way it did when it happened.
Why that day, that minute? It could have been any other day, any other minute.
It was the maid who called the police.
He tried to make them see, he wasn't trying to blind her.
He was really trying to kill her. But the knife was short—it was a butter knife, quite blunt—and somehow she had proven so much stronger than he thought; she'd gotten down beneath him so he couldn't reach her heart. After the first pitiful blow, she'd sort of curled up, so he had to un peel her, but she was very strong. The only place he could stab her was the face. The eyes? Well, the eyes are on the face, aren't they? It wasn't his fault.
Richard suddenly broke the surface of the water. He was way out in the river. The trees were hurtling by. It was much lighter.
A flood of sweet oxygen poured into his lungs. He smiled, but the water sucked him down again.
Richard yielded to death.
It embraced him and he embraced it. He felt its strong arms pull him in, smother him. There was no pain at all, only a persistent tugging that broke through the numbness in his body. He had a last dream of Lamar, of all things:
pitiful, crude, powerful, violent Lamar. Odd that he should think of Lamar here at the end.
Lamar had him up on the surface. Richard choked on air.
“Calm down, goddammit, Richard,” screamed Lamar, "don't fight me.”
He was upside down in somebody's strong arms. The sky was bright and blue, the clouds rushed by. A helicopter should have come, but it didn't. Nothing came. The roaring had ceased. He felt as if he were in one of the swimming pools of his boyhood and wanted to spit a gurgle of water to see if he could make Mother laugh.