Flip Turn

Joshua D. Wetjen

 

This is how I remember it.

My uncle Todd throws me into the farm pond and the water is so cold it’s like a shock from an electric fence, and I can’t breathe.

Then I’m under and really choking, water in my nose and mouth and throat, hard water like bricks and stones, like a wheel on a sixteen-wheel-semi-truck pressing me down, and the muddy bottom of the pond is rushing at me, my T-shirt and jeans heavy and thick. I’m run over, planted, and maybe dead, like a rock or a seed they forgot that’s stuck deep in the dirt of the pasture.

I scream into the water with a tiny bubble of air, all that I have. I try and pull myself up but everything is water pushing and pulling me at the same time. Spots in my eyes blink like a power outage.

I imagine my uncle’s face outside—his big laugh with his teeth showing.

But Grandpa is swimming at me—his round body naked with those tanned arms pulling him forward.

He grabs me around my ribs. We zoom up and get air and his warm breath is in my face. The sun’s on my skin and my body swallows as much of the air as I can. I cough and cough and cough.

Todd shouts from the bluff, “I didn’t know he would let go.” He holds a beer bottle. “Just playing in the mud, wrestling. Thought getting wet would clean him off a little.”

My mom frowns and slaps my uncle’s shoulder.

I’m flopped over Grandpa’s arm. The three fuzzy clouds and the trees on the north end of the pond look so good.

“Someday I’ll teach you to swim,” Grandpa says. He dries himself with his shirt, then pulls on his overalls and socks. He gives Todd a look and shakes his head.

Dad comes in his van to pick us up. He says, “Your uncle can be rough. But respect him. He works hard.”

From the back seat, my sister Caroline says, “I hate Todd.”

Dad turns the radio up on the rock station to the Foreigner song. It means he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

We pass Dad’s fields of corn, thick with white-yellow stalks bent in half from the fall harvest. You can tell he’s proud. That’s the thing about farming—everyone sees how you’re doing. On Sundays in summer we sometimes drive by the fields to check on them. But it’s not really a check—it’s to compare. It is a year Dad favors in the comparison.

“I bet we get another good year, dear,” Mom says from the front seat. She pats Dad’s shoulder.

We’re into town. No more fields and silos. The older houses look squeezed together, the clapboard siding coming off, some newer ranch houses like big matchboxes capped with folded cardboard, all a dirt and wood color.

Dad and Mom bop their heads to some loud guitar thing coming on. I see Caroline turn and roll her eyes with embarrassment. The song gets mellow for a bit.

Clouds rest like Santa Claus’s beard up over the roof of our town rec center. There’s talk of building a swimming pool there.

I hate the water just like Caroline, but I have to get back in.

▱

The next morning, Mom is crying. She says she’s happy. Dad says she’s all over the place because she’s pregnant again.

A week later I turn 11 and am one of twenty kids who get to sled down the hill behind school on the last freak snow day, the last year we can do it before they put in the new motel.

It’s the year when Grandpa dies from a farm accident, a month after bringing me back to the pond in the summer to teach me to doggy paddle. He had helped my dad with the first week of haying. The friction from the belt on the baler caught fire and blew the ramrod off. It hit my grandfather as he walked over to examine it.

▱

I’m 15. It’s night and from my bed I stare at our frosted upstairs bedroom window. Dad just got in—his way of jostling the doorknob and the heavy scritch his shoes make downstairs. The kitchen TV goes on with its zing and pop. There’s cheering and chatter on. Then the smush-sticky sound of the refrigerator door.

I kick off my blanket. A curl of blue static rolls across it. My little brother snores, loud tractor ties on asphalt. I get out of bed and walk to the top of the stairs.

I sit and look straight ahead. There’s a crack in the wall and it branches off in a couple of places. Looking closer, it’s like the Mississippi, what you see in books. I have a swim meet tomorrow. I imagine the crack is the target on the pool wall and I’m doing a flip turn. I do it successfully. I whoosh through water like a seal.

Cool air finds its way up the stairs. I sit on my hands. I stay where I am to hear everything as it happens with my parents downstairs in the kitchen.

“Up again?” Dad asks Mom.

“On the phone,” Mom says. “You know the neighbor across the section—thinks her husband is cheating with someone from the Farm Bureau. I can see why she might think it, but it’s just being paranoid, getting old.” She opens the refrigerator herself—her steps are lighter but also slower.

Then, “John,” Mom says. “Why can’t we?”

“You want me to sell it,” he says.

“They’re buying all kinds of acreages, the hog and chicken companies, developers,” Mom says. “Todd thinks you can do it no problem.”

“Todd,” Dad says.

“Todd says you can sell it easy,” Mom says. “Then we’ll do something big—Vegas. Florida.”

“You give Todd a lot of credit,” Dad says.

“Look. Some people do appreciate your brother around here,” Mom says. “John, you need to let the day go.” I hear Dad’s chair creak. “Or, I don’t know, maybe prices will be good this year.”

“Maybe,” Dad says.

▱

I’m back in my bed. The frost around the window glows a bit from the moon. The prairie in Iowa can be so empty, especially when it gets dark. But in the lonely feeling of it, when I was littler, when Keith was a baby, I used to hear Mom laughing with Dad downstairs sometimes, and I could sleep. I would think of the moon on the frost or the sun through the timbers. Instead of a big ocean swallowing me, the prairie was a big welcoming pond where I could swim and play—a bigger version of the one where I learned to swim, where I made good after almost drowning.

I keep my eyes on the feathery frost lines.

▱

The next night, a Thursday, my sister Caroline gives me a ride to our swim meet. I pretend to be late to the team bus because I like riding with her.

Caroline always tries to puzzle me with things. I like to go along with it. Also, she never cares what people in our town think, and everyone in our town cares about what people in our town think.

But this day there’s a bigger thing: the list outside the athletic office. I will be the anchor for the relay medley. I want to brag. Caroline can swim but Keith can’t. Mom can’t. Todd can’t. Dad can’t. It makes me feel special and strange—different than most of our town, where most swimming up until a year ago was in the creek, and was usually just wading into shallows to spear or handpick sleepy catfish.

We take the exit. The rec center is at the north end. The town is small and empty, so we get there quick and wait in the car in front of the building. The bus had to make a stop at another town and isn’t there yet.

Caroline looks at me, then puts on some dark purple lipstick. She does it with a lot of care, like she’s putting her thoughts together.

She drops the tube into her purse in the back-seat.

“Bus isn’t here yet,” I say. I tap the dashboard. This was once Grandma’s Buick. She couldn’t drive it at the end, her eyes were so bad. It has barely any miles and no wear, a car that never left town. I want this car when my sister is done. Then that makes me think of something.

“What time did you get in last night?” I ask.

“Who says I got in last night?” she says.

Good point, I think.

“But you’re not in trouble,” I say.

“Who says I’m not in trouble?”

“You still have the car. You’re not grounded. Or are you?” I say.

My sister rolls the window down and lights a cigarette she takes from the glove box. It’s cool and humid. She hits eject with her thumb, her black nail polish like a chip of highway tar. Her cassette copy of The Cure’s “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” pops out. Her weird boyfriend must have made it for her.

“I can’t figure it out,” I say, watching her flick the cigarette out the window. “Do you think Mom and Todd talk to each other when Dad’s not around? Dad barely talks to Todd.”

She looks at me. “I know Mom calls Todd at night.”

“Why?”

“We fought about it once. Can you keep a secret?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t shit me. Or I’m kicking you out.” She flicks her cigarette away. “She wants Todd to help with money.”

“What’s wrong with asking for help?”

“There’s help, and then there’s help,” Caroline says. “Here’s what I do know. But first—do you want one?” She lights another cigarette. She points the pack at me.

“Coach will be here with the bus and then I’ll be stuck.”

“I knew you’d never do it. People trust you, Casper,” she says. She smiles and puts the pack back in the glove box. “Here’s what I know—I have no boyfriend,” she says. “I just needed to stay away from Mom.” She inhales and smiles and lets the smoke out through her nose. She looks about a million years old.

“Can’t I wait with you ’til the team gets here?”

“Wish I could help. But no. I have to go.”

I lift my duffel bag from between my knees. I smile. She pats my hair.

“Get out. And don’t worry so much,” she says.

She drives off, the big Buick in its dark green looking almost shiny black in the dark, floating like a sailboat between the pines at the border of the parking lot as she heads out of town.

▱

I stand at the front of the rec center alone, waiting in the night for the team to arrive. Fluorescent lights shoot a haze through the windows behind me. The red bricks of the wall are surrounded by mulch and some brown stems, a couple of greened leaves here and there from the start of spring. There are some of those concrete slabs stuck down with rusty steel bolts to block vehicles from driving up too close when they park.

One has a crack threaded across it. I look for a crisscross part in the crack, like the one in the wall at our house that Dad says is from settling, the crack with the tributaries. Sure enough, it splits right down where my feet are. I see the crack as the target on the pool wall and visualize my flip turn, becoming a seal whooshing through the water.

Maybe I should be something more fierce, like a shark. But sharks can’t flip around as easy, from what I understand. I used to make theories about it and sometimes Caroline would listen. “Just pull a shark backwards—it has to keep going forwards to breathe.” This was an afternoon at the pond fishing, back when Grandpa was around.

And the thing I keep with me in every swim meet—Grandpa coming through the water, his tanned chest and arms pulling him forward, seal-like.

The bus shows up. There’s the team fumbling out. I go to meet Coach, a young guy from California.

Two of the guys on my relay team brush past as Coach opens the door.

“You’re here,” he says. He pulls down the hood of his team sweatshirt and looks me in the eye. Then he claps me on the back with his clipboard. “Change and warm up,” he says. “Let’s put ‘em to a closeout tonight.”

I take “closeout” to be California slang.

▱

We sit on the bench with our towels on our shoulders to keep warm, but really for show. The bench is cold aluminum you feel on your thighs, a test of toughness, so no one really is warm. I’m between coach and Pelt, a shorter kid. I decide it means Pelt is not one of the cool kids, and neither am I, I guess. But then I reassure myself—the whole swim team, jockish tendencies aside, is composed of nerds.

The rec center pool area is the color of silage, a yellow smudgy color. I like to see the water all blue and silky and still before the thrashing starts.

▱

It’s time. Pelt is crashing toward me, bouncing up from the surface in his butterfly stroke with the eagerness of a puppy rushing to a stick. The crowd noise presses down on us—all the yelling and pounding on the bleachers upstairs make everything a haze, like the noise of the tractor when I rode with Grandpa—when I would snuggle up behind him in the cab when I was little. He would put the radio on, but for no reason at all because there was nothing but rumbling.

My feet are on the blocks. I lock my eyes on Pelt’s fingers, stubby pink things straining toward me.

A few feet before he hits the wall I hear “Casper! Casper! Casper!” from the stands.

It’s Todd’s voice.

Dad is at the farm.

Todd is next to Mom. My uncle has his thumbs in his belt loops, the way he does during the pauses of a cow birthing, his way of showing he owns the situation.

Our event is one of the last, so I told Dad it would be no big deal. But I feel it.

I cut into the water. I am a seal again. But I feel a thing tugging me, like I cannot pull forward how I want. I think that thing is the feel of Todd looking down. Todd and not Dad.

I see Mom through the water spilling across my goggles, the red and gold of her Iowa State sweatshirt a smear in the water.

I should not look.

In the flashes when I am pointed forward I see the target.

There are no legs or arms to my side, another thing not to notice, but you do anyway. Right before the flip turn I decide that it’s a lie you never look to see who is behind or in front of you. A seal would do that, getting chased by a shark. Even if it knew that the only way to get the shark is speed without remorse, without looking back.

No. A good flip could do it. If what I remember is true, sharks don’t understand flips.

My flip turn is good. I ignore the pull. I hear just the cheering as I touch the wall.

▱

Sunday night. We came in second, enough to qualify the team for State. I have to wait until practice tomorrow to find out if Coach will keep me on. Maybe I’m not fast enough. And I was late and missed the bus.

This is what I think about as I sit on my bed with my history textbook open to the chapter about the New Deal.

Then I think of Joanie on the women’s squad. We stayed to watch them. They had a bus, we had a bus, and the coaches let us choose whichever one we wanted for the ride back. So I sat next to Joanie, warm, smelling like chlorine that was like a perfume almost, like she was a beautiful mermaid. She had her arm in mine, and pulled it across her chest. I imagine the next part that never happened. I lift my hand up under her sweatshirt to feel her rib cage, her breath in and out, the very edge of her bra, the warm touch of soft skin underneath, my lips getting close.

I won’t see her either until tomorrow.

Then the roll of big pickup tires on our driveway gets me to look out my window. It’s Todd.

Looks like there are fifty grocery bags in the flatbed: plastic white ghost things in the spring breeze. Then Mom comes back out of the house and goes to get the cardboard box of milk jugs—three gallons of them. She can’t lift it. Todd gets out to help.

Mom looks up at my window. I duck to the side. I peer out again. She’s not looking now. My uncle has his arm around her and in a soft move, takes her shoulders in his hands and moves her to the side. He takes the cardboard box with all the milk jugs, sliding it off the tailgate and hefting it up.

Dad should be here.

Mom smiles as my uncle jokes around with the box. He looks back and reaches for her as she jumps away from him, like she said some joke and he’s teasing her. Then he loses his balance and one jug slides out and flips over the side, and explodes in our driveway.

Both my uncle and Mom look at the big glistening puddle.

Mom waves at my uncle and puts her hand on his shoulder. She’s telling him it’s no big deal. I can hear how she would say it, that she’ll clean it all up quick. He takes out his wallet and gives her a wad of cash, a lot more money than a jug of milk costs.

Then Caroline’s car pulls up to the driveway, home because she wants to borrow my graphing calculator, a small and stupid thing but she shares it with me and gets all her calculus homework done on Sundays.

She steps out of the Buick. Her stance is like Grandma’s was, a confident Iowa farm lady stance.

My sister starts to yell at Mom. I run down the stairs and out the door.

“Ask Todd,” Mom says as I step outside.

“Mom, you tell me,” my sister says.

“Casper,” Mom says, seeing me.

Todd walks toward her. She pushes his arm away, then gets into the cab of his truck, fixes her hair, and looks at me. My uncle looks at me too and smiles and shrugs like guys do at my school after they peg you in dodge ball.

My dad is in a field somewhere busting his ass for us.

Todd walks over and pats me on the back before leaving. “Great swim the other day. You should come work for me—you got a lot of fight in you when you want it.”

“I want to be with Dad,” I say.

“Keep your hands off us,” Caroline says. “Come with me, Casper.” She gets into her car with the door open.

Then I stop. I fall down to the ground and start to cry, then feel sick to my stomach, like the worst heartburn after eating corn dogs at the fair. And my palpitations—my heart practically beats out of my chest.

“No,” I manage to say. She frowns.

“I want to see Dad,” I say. I need to know my own father is still alive, still means something to someone.

“I get it,” Caroline says. “But you can’t wait forever.” She closes the door and drives off.

Then I see how lonely the driveway is and out past the tree line onto the prairie. And I imagine it as a big pool that Todd has been swimming in.

But he can’t swim in real water like I can.

▱

Dad goes in to tell Keith we’ll be back in a bit. I get in the van behind the wheel to see what it feels like. I jump back over to the passenger side before Dad comes back out of the house.

We take a turn right out of the driveway.

“Heading south?” I ask. Dad nods.

We escape the town proper, passing the grey Purina silos and office, and then up the hill onto the old highway, where things are less lit. Tall lamps and blue circular reflectors mark gravel driveways with houses often a mile apart or more, just visible between the oak, maple, and evergreen trees. The dark brown fields melt into the horizon.

Dad flips from the country station, then to rock. Steve Miller’s guitar ambles around the chorus to “Jungle Love.”

We pass Joanie’s house—a brown brick one with large windows built on land Grandpa had sold to their family. Her father works for the phone company and commutes to Des Moines. A light is on upstairs, and there’s a figure that could be her behind the curtain. Some night I would put myself up there if I could. Maybe that’s jungle love.

Dad turns the radio dial again and now it’s pop and Paul Simon doing “Graceland.” He leaves it on for a bit.

Then he says, “Your mother loves Simon and Garfunkel.” A few moments pass, the bell-like guitars chiming their chords through the intro. “Usually I think quiet is better than all of it,” Dad says. He turns it off. He’s calm now and he shouldn’t be. He has the look of a deer hunter when he pulls the gun to his shoulder.

We pass another mile of fields lined with bleached-out stubble from cornstalks, little fingers poking out of the ground.

And then we’re really out of town. The highway turns to gravel and Dad takes a right to head straight east on another gravel road, a narrower one that I recognize.

The double-wides show up now, right after a sign that says, Sunny Pond Acres in red letters that are curly and old-fashioned. I see a couple of stray dogs.

Then it isn’t long before I spot the red gate between the black raspberry bushes, the NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a fence post, rusty at the edges and slightly askew. Dad puts the van in park and gets out to twist open the rusty wire with his fingers and pull up the gate to open it. All is quiet except the buzzing of the insects and some frogs croaking. A yellow-orange haze rises from the crest of the hill, beyond which is the old pond. My uncle’s F-150 pickup is on the crest, the back of it facing our direction.

It’s a bumpy ride up to the top of the hill where we park. We get out. The pond is large for an old farm pond, larger than I remember. My uncle has let the renters fill it with fencing and barbed wire and other farm trash. There’s a fire behind where my uncle sits on a lawn chair—the big silhouette is his.

“This once was the pride of Grandpa’s properties. Him and his buddies could fish for bass and pike, rare fish for Iowa,” Dad says. “You remember.”

Then, “He gave it to Todd because the pace of things got bad back then. He couldn’t keep up. I tried to help.” Dad looks at me as we walk down the hill to where Todd sits. “Turns out I can’t help for shit.”

We’re getting eaten alive by the season’s first horseflies as we walk. Swatting away, then staring up at the two Dippers and Cassiopeia, I overhear a loud argument, notes ringing off the dark glass of the pond surface.

Mom’s there. She’s standing next to Todd and they stop arguing as they see us approach.

“I wish I was smarter,” Dad says.

I look up at him. I understand now that things will change. Down at the chair, lit up by a bonfire, Mom and Todd are holding each other.

▱

So here I am again. The afternoon is hot. Hot for spring in Iowa. I’m swatting mosquitoes and the occasional horsefly, just like all those years back. I take one swig of water before I head up the steep hill.

I’ve returned to the place eight years to the day, parking my Honda hatchback by the pasture gate. I’m on the Iowa State swim team now. And I major in classics, the kind of thing that means I escaped the town, but to them I’m a fruitless asshole.

My classmates have gone to Florida and I could have gone to New York with a girl on the swim team who loves what I do—not Joanie but someone like her. But I felt pulled home. Since my dad died, I still come back here looking around for something. I stay with Caroline at our house in town. She got it after Dad passed. She still has Grandma’s Buick, but it mostly stays in the garage. That’s fine. I no longer want it.

She has two kids and is married to a guy who works in Des Moines and commutes. I still ask her questions about Dad and Mom. But lately she’s said she’s done talking about them. A few years ago she wrote some poems and took some classes in literature at the University of Iowa. But those dreams are buried now. I get it. Sometimes it’s better to live with what is.

I’ve decided that I blame my uncle for her, for Dad, for Mom leaving. For Keith having trouble in school and mixing it up with the tweakers in town. I know this makes no sense—that Dad’s heart condition was simple genetics. Is genetics fate? I think so. It didn’t help that my uncle took everything Dad had.

I hear the buzzing from the insects in the timber down by the car, the quiet that makes a roar of sound in itself, if you listen for it. I hike over the cloddy tufts and tread bent down, parting the stems of switchgrass near their roots with the toes of my sneakers. Grasshoppers leap up when I walk. Not a cloud in the sky. When I get high enough to see across the hills, it looks like a painting of something—a big quilt. I’ve only been in an airplane once—a swim meet when we got to fly to Chicago, where Mom lives now with her new husband, a fat cat lawyer. I remember lifting off the ground for the first time and pulling up over the fields that looked like a patchwork quilt. The cliché is true. The emptiness of it is striking, even though I spent time out in the emptiness like all the other kids around here.

I get to the bluff above the fishing pond and I stop. There he is, my uncle, facing the water, unaware of me.

The surface of the pond is half lit by the sun, half dark purple and green in the shade of the trees.

It looks calm down here at this one pond, and it is the opposite of what I feel. Because I picture this pond at night, a dark swirl under the spread of stars, shining black, this pond where Mom left and my uncle wrote the check to buy the land.

And Dad lived one more year.

Sadness doesn’t kill anyone literally. But Todd doesn’t care what kills people.

I’m close enough now to shove him into the deep, dirty water. I feel an airy, floating feeling, the whoosh. I’ll rear up to give him the craziest smack I can.

He feels me there, sensitive to a shift in the breeze, like a housefly, and kneels and turns my way. He grabs me, then bear-hugs my middle. I gasp, emptying my lungs, and he puts me in a headlock.

He flips me down, my head smashing into a half-dried turd, the smell rotten and grassy. I seal my lips against it as flecks go into my nose. He kneels on my back, pushing hard with his knees. I close my eyes. He says nothing.

“No,” I want to say but the wind is knocked out of me. I sit up, catching my breath in coughs, and see that his pickup is near the trees, keys in the ignition most likely.

Todd stands, solid as oak, arms like pistons. I should never have tried this. I’ve been hitting the weights, but you can’t beat nature. I’ll be the one pushed into the pond. It’s only a matter of time.

He tosses the worm he has for bait into the water, almost to the other side.

The insects make a buzzing sound, and a fish does that flicking splash they do.

“Don’t worry,” Todd says. “I could’ve finished you quick if I wanted to.”

He takes another worm and pulls his pole up by the hook and threads it on. I see a dab of worm blood swell on his thumb.

“You’ve gotten stronger,” he says, patting my back. “But keep your eyes on the bobber for shit’s sake.” He hands me the pole. I look out but I’m staring at the trees on the other side, and the corner of the old hay wagon sticks up out of the water since it’s been a year of drought.

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” Todd says. He leans back and stretches out his legs. “And what the hell were you doing just then?”

I raise the pole like a javelin and toss it into the pond. It sticks in for a second, floats, then sinks, making bubbles as it goes.

“Get it—that’s a good pole,” Todd says.

We’re standing over the water that’s mostly still. His heavy brow and mine look similar. And there are other things—the sharp width of our shoulders. Mom used to always defend him, even before it seemed like she was doing it. But then I remember the day he threw me in.

“You’ll have to,” I say. And I put my arms around his middle and whip him into the water. He falls down and slips back and sputters. There’s a dip there, and he slips in. Then it looks like quicksand—he keeps slipping backwards, further in.

I stand, out of breath. My heart is pounding hard. It’s not a heart attack. But I feel my chest thrumming along with the splashing in the pond, the splashing and thrashing like sharks feeding on chum, something I once saw on TV. Something I still remember.

 

Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not working or chasing his two children, he likes to practice jazz guitar and sample new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing and The Cleaver and is forthcoming in Oppossum.