Pharmakon (30 page)

The man who got out of the Cadillac had a stethoscope in his pocket. When he first looked at me, he seemed more lost than interested in lemonade. After a puzzled silence, he said: “You can’t be who I think you are.”

“I’m Zach Friedrich, Dr. Friedrich’s son.”

“Of course.” He fished a dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to me. He didn’t drink the lemonade, but he told me, “Keep the change.”

“My mom and dad are at the beach with Willy and Lucy.” Gray was on the porch, eyeing us as he pried the last kernels of corn off last night’s cob. Mouth full, Gray ruffled his feathers and called for the dogs.

“Spot! Thistle!” Inside the house the pointers jumped up on the couch, noses to the window, and barked ferociously.

“You here all alone?” He had a slow, calm voice, like the one my father used when he talked to you after a bad dream, or to explain why you needed “quiet time,” i.e., solitary confinement in your room.

“My sister’s babysitting me.” The man in the lab coat stepped into the shadow of the maple tree. “She’s in the basement with her boyfriend, Joel, but . . .”

“But what, Zach?”

“Joel said I’d be dead meat if I told.”

“I’m good with secrets.”

“Are you a friend of my dad’s?”

“Old friend. I know your whole family. Even Gray.” Unlike most grown-ups, with the exception of Lazlo, he seemed to be actually interested in what I had to say. “So then why didn’t you go to the beach?”

“I can’t swim.”

He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. He had fingers like my mom’s, long and thin and pink. “Want to learn?”

“I tried. I can’t. I’m hopeless.”

“That’s what they said about me.” He had a nice smile.

“No fooling?”

“No fooling. Everybody made fun of me. Wrote me off. It’s hard when you can’t do something that’s so easy for other people.”

“How’d you learn to swim?”

“Scientific technique. It always works. But it’s a secret. If I show you, you can’t tell anybody.”

“I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He looked at his watch, only there wasn’t one on his wrist. I guess he forgot to put it on. My father was absentminded like that. The dogs were still barking, Gray whistled. “I guess I can squeeze you in.” It was just what my father said when he talked to his patients on the phone. “Get in the car.”

“We better tell my sister.”

“Then they’ll know I know about Joel and we’ll both be dead meat.” We shared a laugh and I skipped toward the Cadillac. He opened the driver’s door.

I started to get in, then froze. “What about my bathing suit?”

“You won’t need it. It’s part of the secret technique.” Just before we drove away, he told me, “Put on your seat belt.”

We drove south on Route 1 with the radio tuned to a ballgame. The Yankees were playing the Dodgers. He knew more about different players’ batting averages and time on base versus at bats than the announcers. When I asked him how come, he said, “When I was in the hospital I listened to a lot of radio with the other patients.”

“You were sick?”

“Very. That’s where I learned how to swim.” When I said I was hungry he stopped and bought us foot-long hot dogs and orange pop.

After a while we turned off the highway and headed down a long dirt road. Yellow dust billowed up around us and the air smelled like Christmas trees on account of we were in the middle of a forest of stunted pine, and just when I was thinking we were an awful long way from home, he stopped the car. When the dust settled, up ahead, through a break in the trees, there was a stretch of water blue and glassy and smooth as a marble.

“What’s this place called?”

“It doesn’t have a name, Zach.” I liked that idea.

The small lake was deserted. I was relieved that there were no children to shout “Chicken! What are you scared of?” No grownups to offer encouragement. It was just the man in the white coat and me and a crow being chased away from a nest full of eggs by a songbird who had been sitting on them.

We walked around the edge of the pond and paused to sample wild blueberries. At the far end of the lake there was a long concrete dam, mossy and green with water flowing over the top.

“When are you going to teach me to swim?”

“When we get to the other side.” I thought it odd that he didn’t take off his shoes before he started across the spillway. From where I stood, it looked like he was walking on water.

He was halfway across when he turned and looked back at me standing on the bank. There was a six-foot drop on the other side of the dam. The water was dark, the concrete slimed slick with algae.

“Are you scared?” His voice echoed across the emptiness.

“A little bit.” I was following him out onto the spillway now. It was less than a yard wide. The pond’s overflow rippled over the tops of my sneakers, then cascaded down into a deep pool. From there, a fast-moving river disappeared into a scrub forest I did not know was called the Pine Barrens.

Suddenly struck by the emptiness of the place and the sky overhead, I stopped and called out, “I think I want to go home now.”

“It’ll all be over soon.” I heard him tell me that twice on account of the echo. “Once you make friends with what you’re scared of, it’s not scary. Letting go’s half the secret . . . of swimming.” The lesson had begun.

“What’s the other part?” I was hurrying to catch up. I kept my eyes on his back to keep myself from looking down. I was halfway across the dam and feeling brave.

“Of what?”

“Your secret.” The crow cawed and swooped low and close over my head. There was a tiny speckled egg in its beak. I waved my hands thinking it was going to fly right into me. The crow lost its grip on the egg. As I watched it fall, I made the mistake of looking down.

My sneakers skidded on the slime. There was nothing to grab hold of. Gravity did the rest. As I toppled back off the dam, I caught a glimpse of my swimming instructor staring at me, eyes wide and blank like he was watching a commercial on TV.

I hit the water with a quiet, relaxed splash. Gasping for air, yanking my head from side to side, I looked up at the spillway— my instructor was nowhere to be seen. My head was underwater now. My eyes were open. The water was freckled with sediment. The pool was deep. I was sinking, and the bottom was a terrible darkness that wanted me. Even though I was underwater, all my mind could tell me to do was, “Run away!”

Sinking deeper and deeper, feeling the chill of the water, panic setting in as my bloodstream ran low on oxygen, no one to listen to but myself, I began to run, run as if I were on dry land. Arms pumping, legs stretching out with nothing to push off but fear, I gagged on pond scum and brown water as I broke back to the surface. My instructor was kneeling on the spillway, smiling down at me. When I screamed, “Help,” all he said was, “You’re swimming.”

Arms flailing, legs pedaling, still running—I was swimming. Sort of.

I closed my eyes and swam/ran faster. I made a few feet of headway. But when I got near the dam and tried to grab hold of the concrete lip, the overflow pounded down on me. The current was pulling me back. I was tired, I couldn’t hold on. At the last minute his hand reached down and grabbed hold and pulled me up next to him.

He took off the lab coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. The sun was hot on my face. I forgot I was ever scared, which seemed the same thing as being brave to me. Without any warning I shrugged his white coat off my shoulders and slipped off the edge of the dam into the pond, and gleefully swam/ran/doggie paddled in a small circle.

“You really taught me how to swim,” I shouted with pride and disbelief.

“I did . . . didn’t I?” Cleaning his glasses on his necktie, he looked as full of wonderment as I felt.

It was just after six when we got back to Greenwood. The sunset torched the horizon a happy shade of pink, as warm and soft as a stuffed animal. My father’s friend let me off two blocks from our house. He said he had “things to do.” He shook my hand quickly, then told me, “Thank you for today, Zach.”

It seemed odd, him thanking me. I was the one who learned how to swim. As he put the car in gear, I called out, “When are we going to go swimming again?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be around.” As he drove off, he shouted out the window, “Tell your father I’ll be in touch.”

I cut through two yards and jumped a hedge to get home as fast as I could. It was getting dark. Just as the chimney of our house came into view, I saw our neighbors combing their bushes with the beams of their flashlights and calling out my name. I ran in the backdoor, eager to tell my father the good news.

I found my family huddled around the dining room table. My mother was crying. Fiona wailed like Homer, “I’m sorry.” Lucy was praying, Willy was eating a Mars bar. My father was on the phone. I didn’t know a police car was parked outside. They didn’t hear me enter.

“Dad, Mom, you’re never going to believe it.” It was the best moment of my life.

“Thank God,” my mother shot out of her chair and grabbed hold of me so hard it hurt.

“The boy’s here. I’ll let you know what I find out.” My father hung up the phone.

My mother was kissing me and my father was madder than I’d ever seen him. “Where the hell have you been?”

“We went swimming.” I thought he’d be as excited as I was.

“You don’t know how to swim. This is serious, I want to know the truth, goddamn it!”

“It is the truth. I
can
swim.”

“You’re scaring him, Will.” I was scared, my father was terrified.

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“I’ll stop being mad if you tell me exactly what happened.”

“Your friend taught me how to swim in a gigantic pond.”

“What was his name?”

“Casper.”

“What?” my mother shouted in my face and pulled back in horror.

“His name was Casper. You know, like the friendly ghost.” I was more than disappointed that my father didn’t congratulate me on my victory over fear.

“What did this Casper look like?”

“Like a doctor. He had a white coat and a stethoscope.”

“What did he say to you exactly?”

“He said, ‘Thank you.’ ”

My father crouched down next to me, his face inches from mine. His voice was calm but his hands trembled. “For what?”

“For letting him teach me how to swim.”

My mother shot my father a look. “What’s that mean?”

My father held up his hand for silence. “Did Casper say anything else?”

“He said to tell you he’ll be in touch.”

Dinner was cold cuts and potato salad. As I ate, my father asked me questions. His manner was casual and friendly. He wore the same smiley face he put on for my birthdays. He worked hard to make it clear to me he wasn’t mad. I knew he was something because when my mother interrupted his warm, fuzzy de-briefing to ask me if I wanted more chocolate milk, he slammed his hand on the table and shouted, “Nora, for God’s sake, will you shut up and let me talk to the boy?”

He started off asking questions about the swimming lesson. Did Casper help me take off my clothes? Did he try to touch my penis? Did he ask me to touch his penis? Between mouthfuls of potato salad I explained how I had swum in my shorts and T-shirt because I had fallen in.

Satisfied I wasn’t sexually molested, he focused in on how I’d come to fall off the spillway. When I told him about the crow almost flying into my head and slipping, he acted like he didn’t believe me. He kept asking me, “Are you sure Casper didn’t push you?” He made me repeat the part about Casper’s pulling me up out of the water three times.

Finally I protested, “You act like you think I’m making it up.”

“I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”

I remember my father made notes on a yellow legal pad as we talked, while I spooned my way through two scoops of butter pecan ice cream. He asked me questions about the car ride. From my description of the hot dog stand’s green awning and cheese fries, he knew that Casper had taken Route 1 south. He drew our route on a map in a black wax pencil. When I told him about the dust and the Christmas trees, he circled the Pine Barrens.

A little after eight he told my mother to put us to bed and got up to go outside to talk to the state police. When Fiona complained that she wasn’t sleepy, my father cocked his right hand back as if he were going to slap her. My mother called out, “Will, don’t make it worse.”

My father put his arm round Fiona’s shoulder, as if he’d forgiven her. “If you’re not sleepy, I suggest you lie down and think about what your afternoon of mutual masturbation almost cost this family.”

My mother tucked me in after she read me a story and kissed me good night. She fixed her gaze on me and told me with strange, dry-eyed determination, “I’m not going to permit anything bad to ever happen to you, Zach.”

Tired of explaining that nothing bad had happened to me I yawned and said, “I love you.”

She whispered, “I love you more,” and went back downstairs to my father and the police.

My night-light glowed in the darkness. Lucy tiptoed into my room first. Fiona followed, then Willy. That’s when my sisters and brother whispered their version of what had happened to our family. I heard about Dad’s being on the top of Casper’s death list, how he came to kill us on a stolen motorcycle but drove off and murdered Dr. Winton instead.