Swim to Me (28 page)

“New York in August,” she said. “It can get as hot as here, only the air gets trapped and there's nowhere for it to go.”

“You forget, I like the heat.”

She remembered the first time he'd told her about how he was counting on the sun to cure his acne; he'd confided in her as if he knew she'd keep it to herself. And then he'd told her all about Thelma's history at Weeki Wachee. She'd never repeated a word of that, not to anyone. Lester was a true friend. He was on her side and meant the best for her. She couldn't even count on one hand the number of people in the world who made her feel safe the way he did. He'd probably even be nice to her mother. It wouldn't be so bad to have him come along. It might even be fun.

The night before, her mother had called her and told her how cheap the airfares were that time of year. There was a 10:20 Delta flight out of Tampa that would cost thirty-five dollars. The more she thought about it, the more she thought how Lester might be the perfect buffer between her and her mother.

“The airfares are pretty cheap,” she said. “You could stay with us—I'm sure my mother won't mind. It's not real fancy, to say the least.” She gave a little laugh.

“I'd like that,” he said.

She shook her head and told him to book the 10:20 Delta flight for the day after tomorrow. She hadn't the slightest idea what would happen once they got to New York, but the wave of relief that came over her was enough for the moment.

S
INCE HER FATHER
had shown up four months earlier, Delores hadn't known what to call him. “Dad” was too intimate; he didn't feel like a dad to her. It was too strange just to call him “Roy.” So she resolved it by calling him nothing. Whenever she wanted his attention, she'd say “Ummm,” until he realized that she was addressing him. On the morning before she was to leave for New York, Delores went down to the Springs just as Wulf and her father were taking the elephants to the water. She walked behind him saying “umm” for a while before he noticed her.

“Good morning,” he said, then kept walking.

She caught up with him. “When you have a minute, I need to talk to you.”

He looked toward the ground, took off his sunglasses, and wiped them with his T-shirt.

“Right now?” he asked.

“Pretty soon.”

“Walker, over here with the bucket. Now!” snapped Wulf. Delores could see her father get tense. She worried that there'd be a scene like so many she had witnessed at home. Her father looked down at the ground and kicked something in the grass. “In a half hour, at the snack bar,” he whispered to Delores, before doing what Wulf had asked.

Thirty minutes later, she was sitting at a wooden picnic table drinking a Tab when he came up and sat across from her. Between his Yankees cap and his wraparound sunglasses, she could see only the bottom third of his face but she knew without seeing them that his eyes were not meeting hers.

“Don't you think it's odd that we haven't talked about anything but elephants since you've been here?” she asked, as he sat down across from her.

“What else is there to talk about?” he asked, with a hint of a smile.

“That's a joke, right?”

“Really, I don't know what to say.”

“Hmm,” she played with her hair. “How about why you left us.”

He turned away from her and looked toward the water.

“I thought you'd take me with you. Then, when you disappeared, I thought you'd send for me. Here I am, more than two years later, and I'm still waiting. You could have at least written to us, or called. Sometimes we thought you might be dead or something. But the worst thing was that after a while, we didn't even care.”

He rested his forehead on his knuckles. She saw him swallow, and for a long while he said nothing, as if he were trying to digest her words. Finally, he looked up and turned toward the Springs where Wulf was working with the elephants. “Nehru,” he said. “She's sweet, don't you think?”

Delores shrugged, and thought:
That's it?

“The thing about elephants is that they can be so gentle, but they can also get so angry that they destroy and kill anything and anyone around them.” He took off his sunglasses and cleaned them again with the bottom of his shirt. “Your mother and me, we were always fighting, about money mostly. She'd tell me I was stupid, that I did everything wrong. And our
personal
life . . .” He put special emphasis on the word
personal.
“Well, no need to go into details about that, but when you don't have at least that, it can make you feel like you are nothing, a nobody.”

He stopped talking and used Delores's napkin to wipe the sweat from the back of his neck. She nodded. “God, she can be such a nag sometimes,” she said.

“Sometimes it would really get to me,” he continued. “The
thoughts I had. I can't describe them, but they were ugly. I was afraid that I'd do something I couldn't take back, something really bad.

“And then, do you remember the night I left?”

“The night of the liver?” said Delores. “How could I forget that?”

“Yeah. I went out and had a couple of beers, then drove to the Chinese restaurant to get some food. It was dark out. I stopped for a red light and there was this family crossing the street right in front of me. The wife was wearing a brown wool coat. I remember that; it was very windy. I couldn't make out her face, but she was small and I guessed she was very pretty, and the sleeves were too long for her, which made her look even smaller. The husband put his arm around her to protect her from the wind, and he held her close like she was a teddy bear. She was pushing a carriage with a baby about West's age in it, and their daughter, who was a little younger than you were then, was holding her father's hand. They seemed happy, as if they were one piece instead of four separate ones—or so it seemed to me.” He stopped talking and shook his head. “I'm talking too much,” he said.

“You?” She laughed. “Never.”

He closed his eyes and clasped his hands in front of him. “This awful feeling came over me, like I was going to step on the gas and run them down, all of them. I could feel what it would be like to do it, could feel the bumps underneath the tires, could hear the cracking sounds. I got so scared that I turned off the ignition. When the light changed, I was still sitting in the car with the ignition shut down. People were honking, and I guess I was crying or something because some fellow pulled up next to me, and he asked me if I was all right. I finally got myself to the Chinese restaurant. While I was waiting for my food, I thought about what I had just done—or not done. I stayed at the restaurant a long time. I was too scared to get
back in the car. I drove home real slow thinking about that family, about what it must be like to come home to them. By the time I got to our house, I had this fantasy that she—your mother—would be happy to see me, that maybe you'd all be happy to see me. Well, if you remember how it was, just the opposite was true.”

The awful memory of that night made Delores wince. “Yeah, there was a lot of screaming and food throwing, I remember that,” she said.

He nodded. “West and your mother were crying. You yelled at us that we were both crazy, and she and I had an awful fight. That's when I shoved a fistful of the Chinese food into your mother's face and she smacked my hand away. There were bad thoughts racing through my head, things that I might do. I said to myself, Roy, you are acting like a crazy man. If you don't get away from here, surely you will hurt someone, or even worse.”

“You mean like you'd kill us or something?” Delores sat up straight.

“I'll tell you this,” he said. “That night I saw how a man can cross the line, if you know what I mean. I never want to see that possibility so clearly again.” He shuddered as he said this. “I had to get out of there, so I got back into the car and started driving south, the same way we did when we went to Florida. That's how I ended up here, and then I found this job.”

“But you didn't even write or call or anything. Even if you hated Mom and wanted to kill her, what about me and Westie? We didn't do anything wrong.”

“How could I explain this to you or West? You were just kids. So I took the coward's way out. To tell you the truth, I don't like myself very much. The best I can do is to try and make up for it in the way I live now. It's a quiet life. I like it; I like working with the animals and, for the most part, people leave me alone. I'm not as angry as
I used to be. Don't you see? If I wrote or called you, there was the chance I'd get dragged back there. I just couldn't do it, couldn't go back. So I stayed hidden. And now look what's happened?” He threw his hands up in the air, the way people do when they check to see if it's raining.

“Yeah, what's happened is that we had a father, then we got used to not having a father. Now he shows up and what are we supposed to do? Pretend that we have a father again? Oh, and by the way, we call him Westie, not West,” said Delores, her voice flat. “He walks now and he looks a lot like you. Weren't you a little curious about how your children were growing up?”

“Yeah, always,” he said. “But I guess not enough to risk it.”

That was how it was. Her father, with the bulky arms and flash-flood temper was a scared, guilt-ridden man trying to make up for what he'd done by sweeping up animal shit and taking orders from people like Wulf.

He took off his sunglasses and stared at his daughter staring at him. Whoever she thought he was, he knew that he had just scrambled the picture. Did she understand what he was trying to say, he wondered; would she ever forgive him? He squeezed his eyes shut a few times, then wiped under them with the back of his hand.

“The silver dollars . . .,” he said.

“Yeah, I found them. I used some of them to get down here. I never told Mom about them. I still have a bunch left over. You want them back?”

“No, what would I do with them?”

“Did you leave them for me and Westie on purpose?”

“Wish I could say I did, but honestly, I'd been collecting them for years.”

“Why?”

He smiled for the first time since they'd started talking. “I liked how heavy they were. Money should feel like money—something with purpose, not just a flimsy piece of paper. I collected them for years. Money for a rainy day. I guess that rainy day came around.”

“I guess,” she said.

He looked at his watch. “Gotta go,” he said.

“Sure,” she said.

They got up from the picnic table. She still didn't have it in her to call him Dad or Roy.

“Ummm, good-bye” was the best she could do.

On the flight from Tampa to New York, Lester wore a blue suit, a white button-down shirt, and a red tie with blue stripes. When Delores asked him why he was so dressed up, Lester said, “My father says you should dress for an airplane ride the way you'd dress for church.”

“Have you ever been on an airplane?” she asked.

“No, never. Have you?”

“Nope, this is my first time. But obviously, I've never been to church either,” she said, looking down at her tie-dyed shirt and denim bell-bottoms.

The stewardess came around and offered them a drink. Lester chose hot chocolate, Delores ordered a Tab. The drinks arrived on separate little trays, each with a cocktail napkin and chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in cellophane. They exchanged smiles that said, “Can you believe this?” and unwrapped their cookies. Lester took a sip of his drink, which was so hot that he spit it back into the cup. Then he looked up at the nozzle over his head that was hissing out a stream of cool air. He held his cup underneath it. The cold air blew into his drink causing the hot chocolate to spray over the sides of the cup like a fountain. It splashed onto Lester's face and all over the front of his white Oxford shirt. At first, he seemed stunned,
so Delores began dabbing at his shirt with her napkin; a ribbon of chocolate dripped onto her arm.

“Willy Wonka,” said Lester, referring to one of his favorite recent movies.

“Augustus Gloop,” said Delores, remembering the name of the boy in the movie who nearly drowns in chocolate before being spit out by one of the candy factory's machines.

Lester started laughing; Delores started laughing. Lester never laughed with the others because it turned out that when he did laugh he made a kind of braying sound. Delores laughed wide open for once, baring her overbite.

That laugh was the most eventful thing that happened between them on the airplane. Delores soon lost herself in the newest issue of
Teen Girl,
and Lester pulled out a paperback,
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Delores glanced over and noticed how small and jammed together the type was. “You read a lot of books?” she asked, interrupting him. He looked up at her. “Yup. That's what I do when I'm not working.” She didn't know anyone who read books. Lester was what her mother would call “a queer duck.” That's not exactly how she'd describe him, but he was different—she'd give him that.

Later, she interrupted him again. “So, you sure you don't mind sleeping in Westie's room? It's small, I mean, it won't be the most comfortable place in the world.”

“You've seen me sleep on the rock. It can't be smaller than that, can it?”

The size of the room was the least of it. “You've never really met my mother,” she said.

“No, but I saw her when she was at the park. I thought she was pretty—kind of looked like you.” Lester stared down at his book again.

His comment gave Delores pause. Why should she bother telling him that her mother was a phony, and a whiner, and an egomaniac? Let him find out for himself. When she had called home to ask if she could bring Lester, her mother had made a harrumphing sound. “How do you like that?” she'd said. “My daughter, coming home with a strange man. That'll really give the neighbors something to talk about.” The way she said it made Delores wonder if the neighbors already had other things to talk about.