Middle Age Read Free Page A

Adam for several days, she has a question to put to him. Yes. I love you. But no, I can’t.
    Don’t make more of me than I am. Forgive me!
    It’s then that Adam begins to hear screams. Not certain at first what he’s hearing, the noise of waves and wind. For a moment his brain fails.
    He sees the terrible fire leap. The first flames, and the soft explosion. Liquid flame flowing from his outstretched fingers rising to the low ceiling of the trailer, like lightning in reverse. And the screams. The screams! His mother, his six-year-old sister Tanya. Trapped by fire you scream, scream until you have no more breath to scream. Strangulated cries of pure agony, animal agony. Help! Help us! Save us! Don’t let us die like this! Adam is dazed, his consciousness gone, obliterated. He’s telling himself he can’t be hearing screams, not here, it’s firecrackers, chains of firecrackers like gunfire.
    But no. These are human screams. Children’s screams, on the river.
    About thirty feet from The Albatross, which is rocking in the wake of a careening speedboat, there’s a small orange Day-Glo sailboat rocking more dangerously, violently, the boat is swamped and capsizing. A boy of about twelve, skinny, in bathing trunks, and two younger children, helpless, screaming, suddenly in the river.
    Adam, squinting, sees, or thinks he sees, that the children are not wearing life jackets.
    Within seconds, Adam Berendt is in the water.
    Swiftly, without taking time to think, to register wariness, or caution, or
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    J C O
    fear, Adam dives into the water and begins swimming. His dive is a slap-dive, clumsy, awkward; he’s an overweight out-of-condition middle-aged man; in the adrenaline-rush of the moment recalling his young self, a vanished self, a boy lithe and wiry-strong and as expert in the water as a water rat, and as reckless. Now, he has time to register only Something’s wrong .
    The water is damned unyielding, thick and sinewy as snakes, resistant, surprisingly cold, Adam senses he’s in trouble, he has overestimated his strength. Lifting his head, tries to keep the children’s sailboat in sight.
    Glaring fluorescent orange, the mainsail floundering in the water. He tries to shout, “Hang on! I’m coming—” but swallows water, sputters and chokes. The other men on The Albatross watch in alarm, but only watch.
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    A   what a damned good swimmer. In the swift-flowing creek behind the trailer camp, after heavy rains. Rising to the girders of the bridge.
    The cattle and lumber trucks rattling past into Helena, over that plank bridge. The raw smell of water and sewage mixed. But you didn’t mind the sewage, didn’t give it a thought. Just breathe through your nose. Don’t swallow.
    Though Adam weighs now possibly one hundred pounds more than he weighed then. Aged eleven, twelve. The angry animal-happiness of that time. Before the other, the time to come. As a boy he’d been afraid of nothing. His name was Frankie: he was admired, he was feared, even older kids respected him. Certainly he hadn’t been afraid of the water, of swimming. Of diving from the bridge. A boy had drowned in the rushing water but not Frankie, who dodged and swam like a water rat, his limbs suffused with a powerful radiant strength, his sleek glistening combative soul shining like reflected light on the mucky, mud-colored water.
    Always you believe you will live forever. Though others may fall away from you, and sink into death, oblivion.
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    A   in the direction of the capsized sailboat, arm over arm as always he’d swum, a pulse beating in his good eye, his blind eye useless. No reason for his sudden fear—is there? He can’t drown, that’s impossible. He’s wearing a life jacket, he can’t drown. But it’s difficult to Middle Age: A Romance
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    swim with the life jacket on, it’s difficult to swim (he knows now: this is a mistake)