Ronald Kovach worked in newspaper journalism for many years, then held editorial positions on three national magazines. His first published story, “Easterly,” placed in a Glimmer Train contest and appeared in Adelaide. He lives in Milwaukee.
Will could have remained a mere spectator in the water, looking on with a dozen other swimmers at Olson Falls with traces of worry etched in their upper brows as they waited silently for the muscleman to return from the deep and break the polished-glass surface on this perfect sun-kissed day. The muscleman who had ignored the big yellow “Danger” sign. It was eighty-four degrees and windless, the dark water so baby-soft and warm that it beckoned the skilled swimmers in the group to dive down, down, down until they could gently tap the jagged rock bottom out by the high ledge, making a mere love pat that respected the damage those rocks could do to one if misjudged. But standing still and watching, Will thought, took no effort, presented no risk, and showed a passive concern that let events play themselves out without challenge. “Floating around mindlessly like a jellyfish”—one of his father’s pet phrases—was not the family tradition. Anyone could watch with their thumb up their nose, he thought, echoing his Scout instructor, but few could act.
Waiting for the reappearance of the muscleman, who had surely been injured making his ridiculous high dive into a depth unknown, Will, at sixteen, felt ready for a test that mattered, and passing it suddenly seemed to him like the most important thing in the next ten minutes of his life. All he needed was the opportunity—to take control and, just like his father, his mother, his brother, perform under pressure, like an adult. If later, a slice of heroism and eternal gratitude came along with the rescue, the embarrassing gushing thanks of the muscleman and his family and friends, fine. (Briefly, Will imagined the gratitude.) If the muscleman’s knockout girlfriend looked at Will with admiration—for just one precious moment—that would be fine, too. If they wanted to put his name and photo in the local Falls Register, no problem. But first, he had to pass the test—save a life. That was the thing.
Thanks to growing up near the Falls and endless hours spent in the water in the hot Ohio summers, Will was now as strong a swimmer as any adult he had yet seen, except for his father, Ted, who, when his courtroom schedule permitted, swam at the downtown athletic club on his lunch breaks—at forty-two still a precision machine churning the water, lap after lap, adding the nifty somersaults at the end. Regular weightlifting sessions in the cramped cinder block basement at home had begun to build Will’s body—quads, biceps, deltoids, triceps all starting to bulge—and he had regularly begun wearing sleeveless muscle shirts and tight jeans when he went out with his buddies. He’d learned some lifesaving basics in Scouts. It was time. Really, what good were muscles and knowledge if you didn’t put them to use?
One thing for sure, his father—who seemed fearless to Will—had put himself to the test in a courageous way, performing underwater demolition and much more in one of the Navy’s elite Seabee construction battalions during World War II. His training had included jungle warfare, weaponry, bayonet drills, and hand-to-hand combat. But the best of his dad’s many war stories, in Will’s view, was about being in one of the first units ashore on D-Day and tasked with blowing up the array of steel and concrete barriers the Germans had deployed in the water and on the beaches of Normandy. While trying to plant their charges, the Americans came under withering fire, and a few times some of the enemy bullets ignited their explosives, wiping out entire demolition teams. “Just another day at the beach,” his father would say. Now he was an assistant city prosecutor in Elyria, occasionally taking on what he described to the family as “the worst of the worst.”
Will’s brother, Trevor, six years older and already growing in self-confidence as a young policeman in the same city, was no slouch either, taking control of people and situations that were spiraling into violence. And for fifteen years, his mother, Sue, had worked as an intensive care nurse at the biggest hospital in the area, regularly handling the pressure of treating the badly sick or injured and, with lives in the balance, not getting it wrong.
In Will’s mind, the rest of the Simpson family all had had their opportunities and met the challenge. And then there’s me, he thought: the pimply teenager, hanging out with my buddies, lifting weights, competing in swim meets, heeding my hormonal urges, wrestling with my algebraic equations, enjoying (like a true geek, he thought) the logical beauty of geometry, trying to plow through Faulkner in honors lit. Big whup. He was ready to hunt bigger game.
. . .
The muscleman who had yet to surface at Olson Falls, amid the beauty of towering red oaks bordering the sand-colored ledges and a small but charming twenty-foot-high waterfall, was a man who seemed to Will to be in his late twenties and whose name he had caught as Frank Juric. Until this day (Will learned later), Frank had not attempted a single dive off the forty-foot ledge, let alone three. A few years before, Will, still a slender reed at this point, had seen the guy in the park’s changing room and thought, That is exactly the body I want when I grow up, but I’d like a brain, too, to go along with it. (He understood that his streak of sarcasm had come directly from his dad.) They did not know each other, but Will, a mostly straight-A student, had seen Frank around enough to gain an impression of dim-wittedness, though he also thought he heard a European accent, which made him think there might be more to Frank’s story than he real- ized. Will didn’t know Frank’s two regular buddies either, nor the three girlfriends who had recently been accompanying the men to their swims at the Falls. He found Frank’s blonde girlfriend, whose name he overheard as Linda, jaw-droppingly attractive. In fact, in describing her to his buddies, he once stole, word for word, a line of his dad’s, who in commenting on a beautiful actress on television, once sputtered aloud in the living room to Will’s mom, “Sue, I’ve just got to say this—please forgive me: There’s no quit in that body, not an ounce of relief anywhere.” When the group of six was at the Falls, Will often had to tear himself away from gawking at Linda and resume his long laps and power sprints to prepare himself for his upcoming swim tryouts at Tyler High.
In truth, he didn’t understand the appeal to the women of any of the guys, least of all Frank. He knew, just knew, that if his dad had met them, he’d quickly (perhaps too quickly) dismiss them as “knuckleheads,” a word thrown around often in his prosecutorial world. Sometimes Will, acting like he was doing stretching exercises in the water, hovered close to the three men when they were on shore, trying to pick up some tips on chatting up girls, and never heard a single thing of interest from any of them, unless, he thought, tales of truck deliveries, and lottery ticket purchases, and boxing matches on the tube, and beer-soaked weekends qualified as interesting. The women mostly talked among themselves, though sometimes Linda and Frank lay side by side on an orange beach blanket and kissed for such a long time that Will wondered when they’d come up for air. Wide-eyed, he saw how they sometimes covered their groins with the blanket.
Until this day, Frank and his buddies had stuck to the five-foot ledge, repeatedly executing good-looking dives, and obeying the yellow hazard sign prohibiting them from continuing up the steep one-foot-wide path near the side of the ledges to the tiny forty-foot-high parapet. The sign stated, “DANGER: FOR YOUR SAFETY, NO CLIMBING OR HIGH DIVES PERMITTED PAST THIS POINT.”
Before that warning had gone up in midsummer, Will made a key discovery. On slow, cooler afternoons when he was nearly alone at the Falls and tempted by curiosity, he had, in fact, started doing the steep climb and making the high dives. True, breaking the rules violated all of his Scouting instincts, but he was about to quit the Scouts anyway, start expanding his world.
He had his first steady girlfriend now, one Trisha Fairbanks, who felt so comfortable and engaging, and he had his new muscles and reasonably good looks (minus the acne), as well as his smarts and a crazy group of friends, and parents he could actually talk to (most of the time). Life was good. Even the world of adults still seemed, by and large, to make sense to him.
Once at the dinner table, he mentioned the forty-foot ledge in a tone of wonder and his father immediately snapped, “Only a complete idiot would dive there without knowing what’s below. Trust me, Will—just hitting that water can be like hitting concrete. And that’s not to even mention what’s waiting for you down deep.”
Didn’t matter, though. Will wanted to know what that high ledge felt like, and if he could even do the dive. He’d had a little practice, after all—during a family vacation to Cancun the year before, he’d bungee-jumped off a cliff and nearly wet his pants from fear. Yet he’d survived to tell the tale to his buddies. (It grew in drama with each retelling.) Really, how hard could it be to just dive off a high cliff into water? Of course the water would be plenty deep there, Will assumed; there’s no way there’d be shallow water out by forty-foot ledges, didn’t make geologic sense. And if the fear was too much, he could always just turn around and walk back down, he told himself. It’s not like there was a law saying he had to take a dive once he got up there. He’d keep the whole experiment to himself, remember not to blurt out his secret at the dinner table.
On his first few tries, his knees started shaking, and he had to gather his wits in the worst way. He bent over carefully, his hands on his knees and his eyes closed, trying to control his breathing up on the tiny parapet. He hoped no one was watching, for there was no way he was not looking cowardly up there. But it was astonishing how far down the water looked from that height—he might as well have been leaping from the top of a skyscraper. It took him long minutes before he steeled himself for launch.
The first time, he pushed far out into the humid air and, to keep a semblance of control, fell feet first into the water, thinking this somehow might give him a better aim, less chance of sailing off the mark, until he could scout out the underwater topography. In his explorations, he found that the depth of the rock bottom changed radically about eight feet from shore, abruptly dropping off from a mere five feet to something like ten or eleven feet deep. He understood that this was crucial knowledge. Land too close to that shoreline and you’d be in a world of hurt. Once he knew what to do, and how incredibly lucky he’d been not to smash himself up in his initial experiments, Will began executing perfect exhilarating dives, feeling like an eagle soaring through the air, while concentrating the whole time on his aiming point below. His explosions into the deep forced rapid, hard-kicking returns to the surface that scared him with their feeling of endlessness.
Then, one day, the yellow sign went up. Somebody had seen him, or heard him screaming with delight in mid-air, the young eagle nailing his landings. He understood.
. . .
On this perfect swimming day, just before Frank did his foolish dives, Will could see the group of six stealing sip after sip of beer, which was breaking yet another park rule. Their chatter got louder and louder. Finally he heard Frank say, “Watch this.”
Frank ignored the high-diving sign and began to climb, a tanned chiseled figure with a V-shaped back and enormous pecs and biceps, wearing red swim trunks with gold vertical stripes down the sides, carrying a bottle of Budweiser. His friends clustered together, eyes trained skyward. Will stole a look at Linda’s shapely rear. He thought he should say something, warn the guy, but he stayed silent.
On the clifftop, Frank, looking, in Will’s eyes, like a Greek sculpture from his art class, flew out far on his first dive. He landed beautifully, with a perfect entry that, in Will’s estimation, could have been telecast on the Summer Olympics. Frank’s group erupted in cheers. Other swimmers heard the commotion and started approaching the landing area to watch the daredevil. As he surfaced, Frank shot his arms up in triumph. He made his way to shore and climbed back up to the forty-foot height. At the top he took a big swig of beer. “Frank, that’s enough,” Linda yelled up. “You’re gonna kill yourself!”
On his second dive he took a sloppier approach, not fully gathering himself and concentrating before launching himself and entering the water about nine feet from shore. It looked to the onlookers like another perfect dive, and they applauded. Frank’s group cheered again, but Will heard his girlfriend say, louder this time, “That’s enough, Frank! No more. Someone’s gonna call the cops.”
“Nope. One more, Linda,” Frank said. “Watch this one. This is for record book.”
Will heard the European accent again, the missing article.
Frank made his final climb, and at the top took two long swigs of beer, setting the bottle down gently on the narrow foothold. For a moment he was unsteady on his feet, and it seemed like he might fall off the cliff instead of dive. Will knew now that he would have to shout something or the guy might indeed kill himself.
“Frank, Frank, Frank!” he shouted at the form so high up. Frank looked down at him for just a moment, then shooed him away with a hand gesture. Will might as well have been an insect. (Years later, it was this single demeaning act that pissed off Will as much as any other aspects of that day.) Will shouted, “Frank, you have to land at least nine feet out or you’re gonna smash your head! It’s not deep enough any closer!”
Frank waved him off again, this time with his arm, and launched. It was clear to Will, in retrospect, that whatever powers of intellect Frank could muster had gone into executing a single somersault that he programmed into his last dive, the acrobatics drawing all his focus, such as it was, away from hitting a safe landing point in the water.
The perfect somersault drew oohs and ahs from the spectators as Frank slammed into the water and disappeared. Then he stayed disappeared for way too long, somewhere out near the soft deep water. The sun glistened on the water, it was such a beautiful day for swimmers.
The spectators held their applause. “Is he coming up or isn’t he?” someone said. Another voice said, “Can anyone go looking for him? What the hell.”
Twenty more seconds passed. And now here came Frank’s head breaking the surface and there was something very wrong with it. “Holy shit,” Will said. A savage red gash over Frank’s forehead was sending rivulets of blood all over the front of his face and, oddly, his eyes were closed, making him look like a bobbing corpse. (For a second, Will remembered his mom, the nurse, once talking about how all the blood vessels on the scalp could make such an ungodly mess of even a minor cut.) Frank’s head never fully surfaced before he disappeared again into the deepest water, sinking below the surface like a dead weight.
Will took off, swimming at full speed toward the forty-foot ledge. He reached the spot where Frank had gone back under and began diving for what seemed to him like a full minute at a time, reaching out all over the deep for any piece of bloody Frank. He could see about two feet through the dark water, though occasionally golden yellow shafts of sunlight broke through the speck-filled murkiness. With Will’s lungs bursting as he surfaced, he’d shoot vertically out of the water, take huge gulps of air, and go back under.
On his third deep dive he found Frank’s left ankle in the sunlight and immediately moved to approach him from the back and start cradling him to the surface. Will remembered the feeling of elation: Yes—I can do this. I will save a life this day.
But he was suddenly shot through with searing pain when Frank kicked him hard in the nose and, in his panic, immediately started trying to pull with him, bear-hugging him into the deep. Will registered in an instant that his nose had probably been broken, but that he must, once and for all and very quickly, grab Frank in a hold he couldn’t squirm out of, or they both would die. He broke Frank’s grip and wrapped one arm around his neck and the other around both of Frank’s arms. In a body-length embrace that felt like a death grip, Will kicked vertically with every bit of strength he could muster, squeezing Frank into stillness. They broke the surface and by then, other swimmers were on hand to help, and a siren in the distance signaled that an ambulance was on the way. They carried Frank and his bloody head out of the water. Frank’s group gathered their things and dashed to their cars to follow the ambulance.
Ols0n Falls was quiet again, and its warm inviting water beckoned new arrivals, who had no idea what had just occurred.
. . .
When Will got home, his mother, who had the day off, offered to make him a toasted cheese sandwich and asked how his swim had gone. “Remind me again when the swim tryouts are,” she said, bustling around the kitchen.
Will could not gather his explanatory skills for the big storytelling because his nose hurt too much. “Mom, I think I broke my nose at the Falls,” he said. “A big knucklehead kicked it hard. By the way, I think I saved a guy from dying just now.”
His mother dropped a sandwich plate. Together they heard its high-pitched shatter.
At the hospital emergency room, Will saw Frank’s group gathered just outside a curtained-off area. They looked over at Will for a moment, then went on talking about how gross it was to get stitches in the head. What was the deal, Will wondered, did they not recognize him?
Two hours later, as Will was leaving the hospital with his parents, having escaped the worst of the broken-nose possibilities with just pain meds and ice, a deputy sheriff approached them in the lobby. He’d been at the scene of the diving accident, interviewing witnesses, and understood from two of them that Will, too, had ignored the yellow sign and done high dives off the ledge earlier in the summer. It seemed he might have to cite both Will and Frank. The cop said he was still thinking over what to do about Frank, since he was a recent immigrant from Croatia, spoke little English, and didn’t understand what the sign said or the warning Will had shouted up at him.
“Look, Simpson, from what I hear, you did something pretty amazing out there today in the water, saving this guy, and I’m sure he’ll forever be grateful. But we can’t let this kind of thing go. Then everybody will be crawling up there and breaking their heads open.”
“Will had fucking rocks in his head, deputy,” his father snapped. “We talked about that goddam ledge!” His wife put her arm on Ted’s bicep. “We didn’t know a thing about this.” He turned back to Will, asking, “Are you pleased with yourself now?”
Will thought he’d better not answer that one. He thought his father, the heroic war veteran, would at least have admired his son’s success at underwater hand-to-hand combat with Frank.
“Take me home,” he said.
. . .
It was almost the end of swimming season when Will next saw Frank and his group lounging at the Falls. Frank, whom Will learned from his mom had suffered a concussion along with the gash, was moving slowly. A dark blue zipper of stitches ran up a freshly shaved portion of his head.
Pretending to do his warm-up exercises in the water, Will edged closer and closer to the group, in case they wanted to say anything to him, or perhaps ask about his broken nose. They looked briefly out at him then kept talking among themselves.
Will moved in a little closer, until he was just a few feet from shore. Finally he shouted out, “Frank, how are you doing? Are you healing up okay?”
Frank gave him that dismissive hand gesture and looked away.
“You know, that’s a good look on you, Frank,” Will hollered. Under his breath he said, “Fuck all of you.”
He got out of the water and began the climb to the top. That got the group’s attention. With all of their eyes now upon him, he thrust himself, yet again, far off the forty-foot ledge.
•
