The guys standing next to me cheered.
We waited. Mick gathered up the towels and his shoes. Sir hadn’t come up. People began to stare at us. I studied his socks stuffed in his shoes, then looked at Mick. He glanced away. Go find a lifeguard, I was getting ready to say, when Sir’s head shot up, hair flattened slick as a seal.
“The old torpedo dive!” he shouted. “Come on in, Perry! Don’t ever try the old torpedo unless you know there’s nothing sticking up underwater.”
Two Mexican guys who’d cheered raced for the water and torpedoed in on either side of Sir. They came up snorting and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
Sir sidestroked around them, laughing.
“Come on, sonnyboy!”
I’d never dived into deep water before. I was shivering and wasn’t sure I remembered how to swim.
A Mexican kid, not much older than Mick, stood beside me. He was drying himself off with his shirt and shivering too, except he was dripping wet.
“Cold?” I asked, gesturing at the water.
“Muy, muy.”
“Strong undertow today,” a guy with a mustache said. He looked like he could be the shivering kid’s older brother. “Somebody drowned this morning and they still ain’t found his body, man.”
I’d heard of the undertow off the Rocks, of people being pulled out into the lake, sucked under. I watched the bobbing swimmers for anyone being drawn away.
Sir was backstroking along the concrete edge, waves boosting him almost level with the walkway.
“Gimmie the soap!”
I got the bar of laundry soap and flipped it out to him. He floated on his back, lifting his toes and ankles high out of the water as if he were rocking on a hammock, and soaped his feet and legs, then rubbed the soap into lather in his black chest hair. I’d never seen anyone else bring soap to the lake, and for the first time a possible reason occurred to me: maybe when he was a boy they didn’t have a bathtub. Whatever the reason, he didn’t seem concerned that it looked weird to see a man washing while he was swimming.
“Perry, you’re not coming in?”
“How come it’s so wavy?”
“Must be the wake of that big ship passing by.” He laughed and pointed. “Way out there.”
There was a massive shadowy form against the dusky horizon, vaguely outlined by the light dying around its edges, and I recalled my uncle Lefty telling me about Blue Island, a ghost island Indian burial ground.
“Murciélago! Murciélago!” the Mexican guys started yelling.
Everyone was diving for the water.
“What is it?”
“Bat.” The kid next to me grinned, then jumped in.
It boomeranged out of the bug-clouded floodlights, leathery, soaring at forehead level, and I dove.
For a moment, the foam of my dive felt like crushed ice. When I shot up, a wave broke over my head and I snorted some water, but I was swimming. Sir’s head splashed up from underwater right beside me.
“Want the soap?”
I shook my head no. “It’s great! Terrific!”
“Sure, just takes making the plunge and a little getting used to.”
I felt used to it already, clean and hard, letting the cold wash away a week of sweat. The water seemed more and more comfortable so that, when a breeze skimmed over, I sank deeper, breaststroking, riding the waves. Like Sir had told me, it was easier to swim in deep water. I could feel it buoying me and practiced the crawl, lifting my arms high and rolling my face in the water, hoping Mick was watching. Sir streaked under me, the white soles of his feet gleaming like fish scales.
“How do you swim underwater so long?”
“Easy — the secret in water is to relax, don’t listen to little nervous voices. Never fight it and you’ll be all right. Take three deep breaths.” He demonstrated, huffing in and out slowly three times. “And when you dive if your ears start to hurt, swallow like on an elevator. Keep your eyes open.”
He flipped and speared down.
I inhaled three times quick and ducked under, trying to follow him. When I surfaced, he was still under. I knew I’d wimped out, and could have stayed down longer if I hadn’t listened to the frightened voice urging me to come up for air.
“Hey, Mick!” I hollered.
I slowly inhaled six breaths and dove. The water was silvery green, and my hands finned before me like two perch. I was drawing my body through layers, each colder than the last, my eyes blurrily peering through increasing dimness, and my ears starting to ache with pressure. I swallowed, which helped some, kicked deeper, and as I heard the inner voice begin prompting me to shoot back up, I saw bottom, the same bottom Sir had seen when he swam with Johnny Weissmuller. There were no Mastodon tusks. It was gray, littered with mossy rocks, rolling beer cans, swaying silty seaweed.
I kicked hard and wrenched a slimy rock out of the mud, and the bottom clouded up so that I couldn’t see. My ears were roaring, and instead of ascending, I was being carried along the bottom, my head near to exploding from holding my breath, and even though I couldn’t see I was suddenly sure that the ocean liner on the horizon was passing overhead, its enormous hull turning the water dark, diesel churning the shaft of the great propeller that swept me along the bottom until I dropped the rock. Within the dreamlike moment that breath-holding expands, I could feel the current along the bottom rushing into the cavern under the walkway and realized the undertow didn’t pull you out, it sucked you in, under the city, into the pipes, that was why they couldn’t find the bodies. I knew the boy who’d drowned was curled in a fetal position, ghastly white, hair swaying as he pitched under the Rocks. It was me. I was going to die choosing numbness rather than panic. My Adam’s apple swelled in my throat, forcing my mouth open. A hand was pushing on the seat of my suit, I opened my eyes, my father stared at me underwater, bubbles came from his mouth as he moved his lips like he was trying to tell me something important.
Stars were out over the lake. The bronzed dome of the Planetarium glowed otherworldly over the ridges of limestone. Mick stood at the edge of the Rocks waving and yelling, “Come on in … I wanna go home … mosquitoes!”
Behind him floodlights were enveloped in bugs. They landed drowning in kicking circles on the oily troughs of swells. The surface glistened, rocking with moonlit suds. Sir was surrounded by Mexican kids, all shampooing with the laundry soap, laughing, dunking, flinging handfuls of lather.
“Me Tarzan!” they shouted, howling ape calls across the water.
I was still coughing and spitting up, ears plugged and ringing.
“Don’t swallow too much water,” Sir said, looking at me. “People do their business in it.”
“I’m going in for a while.” I dog-paddled away, then hung in the water, letting a warm jet of pee run through my suit. Then I timed a wave and let it boost me up the rusty metal rungs sticking from the concrete. The sides went straight down, scarred with watermarks. It wasn’t hollow under the walkway after all.
I sat on the edge of the Rocks watching the beacons from Meigs field crisscross as winking planes cranked in for the night.
“How’s it goin?” The same young Mexican kid squatted down beside me. His lips were still chattering. He was dragging at a wet cigarette.
“I thought that big ship out there came in.”
“Those red lights way out there, man?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the pumping station,” he said, and before I could say I know he whirled and called something in rapid Spanish to his brother.
His brother came over, grinning.
“See that guy in the water?” I said quickly. “He swam all the way out there once.”
The kid passed me the cigarette, wet paper sticking to his fingertips. I glanced over at Sir. He was propelling on his back, holding the soap over his head while the others thrashed after him trying to catch it.