Hum: Stories Read online

  Gradually the men began taking their boats out of the water and drying them off in their careful, tender way. I could tell they were disappointed, but they couldn’t very well go on racing their boats while one of their own was in a dire situation. The new guy pulled his yacht past the finish line and yelled, “I won!” but no one paid him any attention.

  “Why don’t you jump in there and save him?” I said to the new guy. “After all, you’re the one who pushed him in.”

  “I did no such thing,” the new guy said, pulling his baseball cap low on his forehead and frowning at me in a threatening way. He probably would have pushed me in too if I hadn’t been so pregnant. He looked around furtively, then took his monster yacht out of the water and walked away.

  The fellow in the lake, who had drifted out about fifteen yards, said, “Might someone lend me a hand?”

  “Can you swim?” asked one of the men of the model yacht club.

  This seemed to strike the fellow with the white gloves as a novel notion. “I’ve never tried.”

  Someone else offered, “This isn’t the time to find out. Just float. The human body can float for an indefinite period of time. The key is to relax. The moment you panic, you sink.”

  “You could try standing up,” said a man with a tattoo of an eagle sprawled across his right arm. “It may not be very deep.”

  “What if it is?” asked the floating man.

  “You’re right,” another man said. “The safest bet is to just keep floating until something happens.”

  The men of the model yacht club deliberated for a minute, and finally agreed that yes, floating was the safest option. So we stood and watched as the gentlemanly fellow drifted farther away from us. In his plaid shirt, bright white sneakers, and white gloves, he looked like some unlikely freshwater creature hailing from another world.

  “How long do you think it will be before the situation improves?” the floating man asked. I detected a note of concern in his voice, but overall I thought he was being very dignified about the whole thing.

  “Don’t worry,” I called. “We’ll wait here until you float to the edge or until help arrives.” I was surprised to hear my own voice. I wasn’t in the yacht club, after all. If I wanted to, I could simply walk away.

  “Who was that?” asked the floating man.

  The men of the yacht club looked at me. “It was the pregnant lady,” said one. He uttered the word pregnant in a whisper, as if it were some divine condition deserving of respect.

  “Oh, of course, I’ve seen you here many times. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy.”

  “That’s wonderful,” the floating man said. “I have three grandsons myself.”

  We all sat down and waited, making conversation with the floating man.

  “It’s only a matter of patience,” someone called out to him. “By and by you’ll float back over this way, and we’ll pull you out.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Just concentrate,” said a man who was wearing very yellow socks.

  “On what?” came the reply from the middle of the lake.

  “On your favorite food or a beautiful girl you had a very long time ago.” The man in the yellow socks glanced at me. “Sorry, I’m just trying to help him focus.”

  “No offense taken.”

  It was a funny thing about being pregnant, everyone just assumed that I was both physically and emotionally delicate, not to mention prudish. In the weeks before my husband left, he had become solicitous, plumping my pillows at night and fetching things from the kitchen, holding on to my arm when we walked as if I might trip and fall at any moment. Although the hormonal changes made me lustier than usual, he refused to have sex with me, convinced he would harm the baby or me. He even tried to stop cursing, and when he slipped up he would apologize profusely.

  The gentleman continued to float. The sun went behind the clouds. No one came by. It was just us out there—me and the old guys and the floating man, and the wildlife, of course. The lake was a gathering place for fowl of many varieties, and I was always amazed at how well they got along: the pesky pigeons with their drugged-looking red eyes, the mallards with their emerald necks, the seagulls with black and white tail feathers resembling piano keys. A pigeon was resting on the floating man’s stomach and a black baby duck was perched on his forehead. It was all very peaceful.

  As I sat there I began to think about my grandfather, who had been known throughout the Southeast decades before as The Great Amphibian. He earned this title by way of a special talent he had for disappearing into the water and reappearing hours later, completely unharmed. The first person to witness this particular feat was the girl who would become my grandmother. She was a student at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, at the time, and she was rowing with her roommate on Foster Lake when she spotted an attractive man in his early twenties on the far side of the lake. He waved to her. She waved back.

  “I’m coming out there,” he shouted.

  “Don’t,” she said, “it’s deep. We’ll come to you.”

  Then he stepped into the lake.

  The strange thing was that he did not swim, he just stepped in and started walking. He was wearing all of his clothes—a seersucker suit with a white shirt and pale blue tie. His knees disappeared, his waist, his chest, his neck, and finally his head. She and her roommate thought it was a nifty trick until more than a minute passed, and he did not emerge. They scanned the lake and saw no sign of him. There weren’t any bubbles or ripples on the surface to indicate where he might be. They began to row in the direction where he’d been standing, but neither girl was skilled with the paddle and they ended up going in circles. My grandmother went into a panic, thinking she had just witnessed a drowning. Then, about seven and a half minutes after he had stepped into the lake, my grandfather bobbed up beside their boat.

  “Hello,” he said.

  His head rose so calmly over the surface of the water that he did not even seem to be moving his hands or feet. It was the strangest thing my grandmother had ever seen, and that very moment she fell in love. He climbed into the boat and shared the girls’ picnic lunch. Seventeen days later, the wedding ceremony was held on the front lawn of the campus. My grandmother begged her new husband to reveal the secret of how he had disappeared into the lake for seven and a half minutes without coming up for air, but he only said, “Most folks put too much store by oxygen.”

  Ten months later they had a son—my father—and soon after the birth my grandfather lost his job. Deciding that her husband should put his aquatic talents to use for financial gain, my grandmother started printing flyers and calling friends, one of whom wrote a column for the Macon Star. On my father’s six-month birthday, twenty-nine skeptics showed up on the banks of Foster Lake, deposited a quarter into a cookie tin my grandmother had brought along for the occasion, and waited to see my grandfather walk into the water. The promise made in the newspaper column and on the flyers was that he would stay underwater for six minutes without coming up for air, but he astonished everyone by staying under for nine minutes and forty-seven seconds. He repeated the trick for a larger audience a week later, only this time he made a different promise: he would walk all the way from one side of the lake to the other. It took thirteen minutes and twelve seconds; when he emerged on the other side a newspaper photographer took his picture. In the photograph my grandfather is wearing a seersucker suit and pale tie which hang dripping from his body—likely the same suit and tie he wore on the day he met my grandmother—and his hair is slicked away from his face. He is smiling. The headline above the photograph reads, simply, “The Great Amphibian.” Thus he embarked upon a lucrative new career.

  “How do you do it?” a reporter once asked. My grandfather is said to have tipped his hat and replied, “It’s simple, really. I just put one foot in front of the other.”

  I never knew my grandfather, because
he disappeared before I was born. But as a child I often heard about him. My father would always tell the story with a sort of awe, and after my father left my mother began telling it. I think both of them wanted me to know that I had greatness in my blood, that the path leading to my birth was paved with golden sand. “The water was his calling,” my father used to say, rocking me in the big white chair by the window overlooking the wharf. “What is yours?”

  I never knew how to answer the question; I felt called to nothing, by no one, and I feared that I would live out my days without knowing my true purpose.

  From my bedroom window in those days I could see the bay, stretching out cool and blue, and the swaybacked length of the Golden Gate Bridge, half obscured by fog, and far in the distance the lonely island of Alcatraz. I knew that my grandfather had always dreamed of walking underwater the entire distance from San Francisco to Alcatraz. He had tried several times, and failed. In the family album there was a newspaper photo of him being rescued from the frigid bay waters by a Coast Guard boat, just three tenths of a mile from his goal. According to my parents, it was a failure that he always regretted, and though in his lifetime he walked hundreds of miles beneath dozens of bodies of water in all kinds of weather, he always saw San Francisco Bay as his great defeat.

  The legend was that my grandfather had met some dire fate in Lake Michigan during a family vacation, but there was no proof; his body was never recovered. Because no one could say for certain what had happened to him, I believed he could have gone anywhere, and he might very well still be alive. I imagined that he had returned at some point to San Francisco, that alone and without fanfare he had made the dangerous underwater trek to Alcatraz. As a child I spent many afternoons staring out the window at the bay and imagining my grandfather, The Great Amphibian, stepping into the frigid water, walking and walking until he came to that eerie, abandoned island. In my mind, he had finally succeeded—without an enraptured audience, without a fanatical wife to cheer him on. I imagined him living alone on the terrible island, roaming the empty prison cells, walking to the city whenever he became bored or lonely or needful of supplies. Sometimes, strolling along the crowded downtown streets hand in hand with my father—and later, after my father had left, alone—I would watch for a thin, graying man in a drenched seersucker suit. For many years, I believed without doubt that I would one day run into him in Union Square or along the waterfront, and that he would immediately recognize me as his own, blood of his blood, granddaughter of The Great Amphibian.

  ***

  Hours passed. There was the sound of ducks squawking and the men of the model yacht club chatting and the cars passing on Fulton, beyond the line of trees. By and by everyone began to leave. One had to go teach an adult education art course at UC Berkeley Extension, another had a dinner party to attend, another had a grandchild to babysit. I, being single and on maternity leave from the law firm, was entirely without obligations, so I stayed.

  It grew darker. Sometimes the floating man and I talked, and sometimes we remained silent, listening to the wind in the eucalyptus trees. No one came by the lake. The Giants were fighting their way to the playoffs at Pac-Bell Park, a presidential debate was being broadcast on TV, the Dalai Lama was giving a speech at Yerba Buena, Bruce Springsteen was playing at the Great American Music Hall. It was one of those San Francisco days when everyone had somewhere else to be, leaving the streets and parks deserted. I always liked San Francisco best on those days, because one had the feeling of living anonymously and alone in a great, unpopulated city.

  “You can go home if you need to,” the floating man said. I could tell he was just trying to be brave, he didn’t really want to be left alone.

  “That’s okay. It’s pleasant here.”

  “Won’t your husband be worried?”

  “He died,” I said.

  “My condolences.”

  I felt guilty for lying to the floating man, but it was so much easier to say my husband had died than to say he had simply departed. What a shock it had been the day I came home from work to find a note on the dining room table: “You and the baby will be better off without me.” His leave-taking came without warning; there had been no foreshadowing, no aberrant behavior that appeared in retrospect as a series of telltale clues. I was four months along, and we were presumably happy. I waited for him to return, certain that he was simply afraid and would soon realize his mistake. A month passed, two, three, and gradually it began to seem inevitable. Of course he had left, of course I would raise this child alone, wasn’t that in keeping with family tradition?

  My grandfather, The Great Amphibian, had left his family, after all, just stepped into Lake Michigan one summer during a vacation to Chicago and started walking. My grandmother thought nothing of it, being used to his underwater escapades. She waited for him all morning, then through lunchtime and on into evening. By suppertime she had to pack up; the children were hungry and sunburned, the lake at night was no place for a respectable family. She and the children waited in their hotel room for a week and finally went home, immersed in the cold grief of uncertainty. Her husband was never heard from again. My father left my mother and me as well; a week after my tenth birthday he went on a business trip to Atlanta from which he did not return. His sister, my aunt, left her husband and three children for a career in dentistry. It was the way it went among our clan, and the trick was to be the one who left rather than the one who was left behind.

  “How did it happen?” the floating man asked. “How did your husband die?”

  “A tragic hunting accident,” I said. It was the first thing that came to me.

  For a while neither of us spoke.

  At some point I checked my watch and saw that it was 8:15. The fog had moved in, shifting through the green treetops and hovering over the green lake. The air was cold. “How are you doing out there?” I asked.

  “I’ve felt better.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help take your mind off things?”

  “Tell me a story,” he said. “A very long one.”

  So I told him the story of The Great Amphibian, how he became famous and made a good living for many years by going from state to state, lake to lake, walking underwater. I explained how my grandfather’s celebrity earned him enough money to buy a house in Atlanta and another in San Francisco, where he tried and failed to walk to Alcatraz. I told the floating man about my grandfather’s disappearance in Lake Michigan, and his strange reappearance some years later on page sixteen of the Bay Guardian. It was a small item in the News of the Weird column, and I would have missed the story altogether were it not for the intriguing subhead, printed in bold letters:

  “Man or Fish?” I read the paragraph over and over so many times it was etched permanently into my memory:

  Two campers from New York City whose fishing boat capsized in Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks were rescued Friday by an unidentified man. The drunken campers were flailing about in the water when a fully clothed man appeared beside them in the middle of the lake and escorted them to safety. Following the rescue, the man bowed cordially and disappeared once again into the lake. A witness at the campsite corroborated their story. Both campers were treated for hypothermia at a nearby hospital and released.

  When I saw this piece I was a junior in college, majoring in pre-law, and I had just met the man who would one day become my husband, a graduate student in musicology. My courtship with this tall, thin man who played saxophone and didn’t own a car was the first thing that had ever struck me with the sort of intensity that might be described as a calling. Evenings, we would have burnt coffee and soggy hash browns at a diner in the Mission, and as I sat across from him, listening to his inspired rants on the roots of the blues, I felt as if my long years of indirection had finally come to an end.

  What intrigued me most about the story in the Bay Guardian was the word “escorted,” which implied a certain casual grace, very much in keeping with what I knew of my grandfather. The fact th
at the rescuer was fully clothed, combined with the strange circumstances of his departure from the campers, convinced me beyond doubt that The Great Amphibian was alive and well. Was he living somewhere along the banks of Big Moose Lake, or had he merely been visiting? Was he in New York State by chance, or had he taken up permanent residence there?

  “That was eight years ago,” I told the floating man. “For several months afterwards I tried to locate my grandfather. I called all the campsites around the lake, but no one knew a man who could walk underwater. Then I called directory assistance for every town and city in the state of New York, but there was no one listed by his name. Eventually I gave up.”

  At the end of my story I heard a strange sound coming from the middle of Spreckels Lake. The floating man was snoring. I checked my watch. It was almost nine p.m., I was hungry and I had to pee and I wanted to go home. I did not know what to do. I could not let the gentleman stay out there on the lake, floating through the night, but I could not leave him to find help. I realized that it was up to me to save him. But swimming was not my thing, I had never liked it. I remembered sitting on the steps of the shallow end of a dirty pool at Kinder Kare when I was six, refusing to get wet above the waist. For an entire summer, day after day, I ignored the exhortations of my teacher to go in. Finally, she told my mother that I could no longer attend classes, as I was demoralizing to the other children.