High Dive by Bruce Jacobs

Ten-year-old Gordon screws up the courage to take on the high-diving board in front of his peers and the ravishing Mrs. Bellefleur.

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It was not a scent or a song that brought him back, but an image on a screen.

Gordon leaned in and lowered the drugstore cheaters from his forehead to his nose. A zoom altitude of about three thousand feet was as close as he could get without losing resolution. It was close enough. The lines on the tennis courts were still visible, but the surface was fractured like shattered safety glass. The clubhouse – with its meeting hall, locker rooms, vending machines, and sauna that had always reeked of hot urine – was now a bare concrete pad. A monolithic shadow just northeast of the tennis courts implied both an afternoon pass of the satellite and that the wall for the squash court still stood. Gordon could still picture the fluorescent orange cock and balls that some kids had spray-painted on the far side of the wall, probably the work of the same dorkwads who peed on the coals in the sauna.

It was astounding, the corruption that time had wrought. But what really made Gordon gasp was a tree that now stood at the bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool. There had been a drain down there, twelve feet under. Grownups always said it would suck your insides out if you sat on it, but Gordon knew it was a lie. Now a tree appeared to have risen from the drain, up through the exact point in space where, one late-summer day forty years ago, Gordon had sliced gracefully into the water, thus completing his shining moment of winged perfection.

Everybody knew the low dive was for wussies. So Gordon had always skipped it altogether and slipped in directly from the edge, near where the concrete was marked 12 FEET. He could swim just as well as anyone else, and could hold his breath longer. It didn’t bother him in early summer when the water was still cold. He just jumped right in. As a matter of fact, Gordon would have swum in a thunderstorm if Mr. Morgan let them. He sure would have. So they could call Gordon a pansy if they wanted to. He didn’t care.

It was easier when he was little. You had to be ten to do the high dive anyway. So, pool rules. But now some of the kids he knew from school were doing it. Like Jason Carper and Lenny Babke. Everybody saw. Not everyone knew when Gordon’s birthday was, but one way or another they’d figure it out. Still, he could shrug and pretend he didn’t care. Because he really didn’t – until that first warm Saturday in late June, when none other than Mrs. Bellefleur set up her collapsible chaise longue and claimed her place in the sun.

He’d known about Mrs. Bellefleur forever. Since first grade even. He’d seen her in the halls, in the cafeteria, and recognized her little red MG in the parking lot near where the buses lined up. She had long black curly hair, red fingernails, and smiled a lot. Gordon couldn’t say why exactly but all during third grade he’d secretly pined to be in Mrs. Bellefleur’s class the next year. And sure enough he was.

You could go up the ladder but not down the ladder. This was not on account of pool rules but because you just knew. Like when big Jack Green stood shivering at the end of the board forever then finally turned around and climbed back down. Everybody saw. They said he was chicken plus he would probably break the board. They were only half right but Gordon still felt sorry for Jack. They always saw everything Jack Green did. And they were always waiting to see what he would do next.

But Gordon was not like Jack. As soon as Mrs. Bellefleur kicked off her sandals, slid her thin white blouse over her head, finished slathering herself in oil, and settled into her lounge chair, Gordon swallowed hard and headed for the ladder.

He had tried the whole school year to be a standout in some way, to make some sort of impression on Mrs. Bellefleur. Every week he’d have the vocabulary list down pat by Friday but you couldn’t really raise your hand every single time and not be a brown-noser. So he raised his hand every third time but would get so busy counting that sometimes she’d catch him not listening to what the word was, or defining the wrong word, and that only made things worse. After a while he learned to keep his hands low and his mouth shut.

Sometimes when she returned the homework assignments there would be a message in red ink that said See Me. Gordon wasn’t the only one but it happened a lot. His desk was by the window, next to the radiator. There was always something to look at outside but in winter, when the steam was up, it was so hot that it was hard to concentrate. He almost asked to move but didn’t because nobody likes a whiner. So when Gordon, as instructed, went to see Mrs. Bellefleur after class, he found her disappointed but not mean. She patiently explained his mistakes and omissions, and said he wasn’t performing up to his potential. Gordon didn’t understand how Mrs. Bellefleur automatically knew what his potential was, but she sure did smell nice.

He’d also discovered that he couldn’t look at Mrs. Bellefleur directly for too long because his eyeballs would overheat and then he’d have to long-blink to cool them back down. Not wanting Mrs. Bellefleur to think he was some kind of blinking idiot, Gordon would try looking out the window or at his shoes, but Mrs. Bellefleur would only admonish him for daydreaming or poor eye contact. Then he’d be stuck.

Impulsive was a vocabulary word that might have served Gordon well the day he approached the ladder for the very first time. It seemed like any old ladder so up he went. Even at the top it was no big deal. He’d climbed higher in the tree behind his house. Way higher. So no big deal.

His vision narrowed as he eased along the slender plank towards the open space beyond. The surface was grippy beneath his feet, like sandpaper, so he wasn’t worried about slipping. But the way the board flexed got his attention. In the back of his mind was Jack Green. Could this thing really break? Gordon tested it by thrusting a little at the knees, through the balls of his feet, but the board responded in unpredictable ways so he stopped doing that. When the board kept bouncing he locked his knees and started to stumble. He reached for the fat metal handrail, but that was several feet behind him. He was on his own. Somehow it occurred to him to take a few steps back, to loosen up, to crouch a little. This seemed to help.

At that moment he heard the whistle.

“One at a time on the ladder,” Mr. Morgan hollered, a familiar summertime refrain.

Gordon glanced down to see the line that had formed at the bottom, with Jason Carper at the lead, orange hair and perpetual sunburn, squinting in the sun.

“Aw, c’mon,” Jason cried. “We don’t have all day, doofus!”

Jason Carper could go blow. Same with Lenny Babke. Gordon gave them the finger where Mr. Morgan wouldn’t see and shuffled carefully back to the edge. The trees on the other side of the clubhouse were still higher than where he stood, Gordon saw. Same for the trees along the creek, near the parking lot. And the telephone poles, too. Even the top of the squash court wall was higher, pretty sure.

Meanwhile, life continued below. Detecting the tinkling music from an approaching ice cream truck, Neil Lohmeier leapt from the kiddie pool with his water wings and streaked across the hot concrete towards his mother’s chair, leaving a trail of chlorinated footprints in his wake. On the tennis courts, Mr. Mullinax, having prematurely rushed the net in an attempt to keep the ball in play, widely missed an overhead slam from Mr. Lucchesi; the latter thrust his hands in the air while the former whacked his racket against the net and hollered, “Dammit!” And under the awning near the clubhouse, Hugo Wirth was yanking the levers on the cigarette machine, hoping for a freebie.

From Gordon’s vantage point it was easy to pine for the simplicity of life at the surface. At the same time, he found it surprisingly peaceful up there, once he got used to it. Not so bad at all. Even better, he imagined, would be if that dream he kept having came true – the one where there was some kind of nuclear apocalypse and the only one left was him. He could stay up there as long as he wanted because Jason Carper wouldn’t be in such a hurry anymore. Jason Carper would be a pile of cinders at the bottom of the ladder, that’s what.

And what if Gordon could choose one other person to share this post-apocalyptic dream? It was his dream after all, wasn’t it?

Of course he’d seen her there the whole time, lying in her lounge chair. With her sky-blue bikini, wide-brimmed straw hat, and oversized sunglasses, she was impossible to ignore. A paperback lay face down on the concrete, folded open. What would his teacher be reading on her summer break? Next to the book there was a can of soda with a straw poking out. What was her favorite kind? Gordon imagined lipstick on the straw but really that was impossible to see. He could imagine lipstick though. He could imagine a lot of things.

Could she see him? Was she even awake? It was hard to tell.

Just then an elegant, languid hand reached down, grasped the can, and brought the tip of the straw to her lips. A tiny little sip was all, but it was everything. Gordon could not believe his luck, to share the same air, the same sun, the same Saturday afternoon. It was all too much.

He tipped his head back for a long-blink.

“Don’t be scared!” Lenny Babke howled, to general laughter.

When Gordon opened his eyes and saw the puffy fair-weather clouds scooting along – so close, it seemed, that he could rake them with his fingers – it was like the first time he’d hugged a skyscraper. So strong was the vertigo that he went rigid, as if to brace against the weight of the sky. The flexy board started to do that weird wavy thing again and there was no way to stop it, he was tipping, tumbling, going over. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

It didn’t. But all summer long, Gordon would wonder if it would have been better if it had.

“What a doofus! Hey, Mr. Morgan? Can you please make Gordon get down?”

Gordon found himself bear-hugging the end of the diving board, with all four limbs wrapped around it and his right cheek pressed against the gritty surface. Life was definitely more complicated now that he was ten.

In the days and weeks that followed, Gordon strove to embrace solitude, to foster an air of indifference. With his hand-me-down wooden racket, he hit a bright yellow Penn 5 against the cock and balls on the far side of the squash court wall, over and over, until his arms glistened with sweat. He spent entire afternoons catching tadpoles in the creek. He explored the trails in the woods behind the tennis courts and then retreated to the sauna, to endure the reek of steaming piss in exchange for the indulgent idea that he might emerge as from a chrysalis, rarefied and pure.

He set up his chair on the perimeter, just inside the fence, with a view of both the high dive and the sacred area of concrete where Mrs. Bellefleur lay. He wore a t-shirt and a hat, and his father’s old sunglasses. He applied sunscreen and hydrated regularly. He kept a book about Indians in his lap, which he consulted from time to time. But mostly, he watched.

Every day somebody new was doing it. Ted Sanchez. Jeff Shaheen. Dennis Lutz. Gordon watched them with cool detachment, how their bodies interacted with the board. Driven by adrenaline and fear, some were only up there for seconds before making a beeline into the void. Others were more deliberate. Dennis Lutz was most at ease, taking the time to familiarize himself with the play of the unstable surface beneath his feet, and using this knowledge to his advantage. Even Lenny Babke, that oafish bowling pin, would pump several times to propel himself to ever greater heights before stepping out into space, arms windmilling the whole way down.

The windmill, Gordon decided, was not for him. Nor the cannonball, the can opener, or the jackknife. More important, Mrs. Bellefleur seemed equally unimpressed by such theatrics, a figure of lassitude basking in the sun. If Gordon was going to make this gift to her, and if there was any hope she would accept it, he would have to do better than some goofy stunt.

The book said that the warriors of the Plains knew it was best to attack with the sun at their backs. Gordon cultivated an awareness of his cardinal points and, all through July and into August, watched the sun’s progression. He noted the way the sunbathers repositioned their chairs to take full advantage of its rays, and concluded that early afternoon would offer the best chance for success. Any later and she might be blinded. Or she might see the thunderheads that often arose late in the day as reason enough to join the exodus to the parking lot.

It was one such afternoon in late August when, out of nowhere, Jack Green once again clambered up the ladder. Imposing clouds obscured the sun and a cool wind arose, but Mr. Morgan stayed his whistle. The sounds of leaving predominated: the ratcheting of portable chairs, the lazy flip-flopping of the sun-smacked outbound to the parking lot with their coolers and totes and tennis rackets. Gordon stood and removed his father’s sunglasses. A glance confirmed that the little red MG was already gone, but he remained standing to watch the day’s last action on the high dive.

Anyone else who bothered to notice Jack Green would have been disappointed by the complete lack of drama. He simply climbed the ladder, took a few steps to the edge, held his nose, and leapt. Gordon wondered if Jack had been watching and waiting too, had carefully chosen the time and conditions that were best suited to his own purposes. Regardless, it was the most dignified thing that Gordon had ever seen.

The whistle blew before the spray from Jack’s plunge returned to the surface. Gordon sat back down as the first drops of rain hit the hot concrete and instantly evaporated.

One afternoon the following week a figure approached with the sun at his back.

“Jack Green says you’re a pussy.”

Gordon looked up from his book to find Jason Carper looming over him, haloed in orange, his shadow made big by the low angle of the sun. Of course Jack Green had said no such thing. This was classic Jason Carper.

“I thought you should know,” the little twerp added, lingering long enough for a single drop of pool water to fall from the tip of his sunburned nose to the open page in Gordon’s lap. Then he turned and departed.

Gordon had exchanged his Indian book for one about Olympic champions. He returned his gaze to the image that had rendered him oblivious to Jason Carper’s approach. There, in grainy black and white, a man was shown in flight, his compact body horizontal to the frame and his arms spread wide, as if they were wings. There was nothing else, no other reference points – just man and sky. Yet, as Gordon studied the photo, he saw that there was something else, something in the diver’s face: open and eager, joyful in the moment, certain of the outcome. The man knows what he has done – it is already, in mid-flight, preordained – and it is good. There was no need for Gordon to read the caption to know the result. There could be no doubt.

And just like that, Gordon knew what he had to do.

Days of cool rain followed. Housebound, Gordon hooked up the Atari to the color Zenith in the living room and played Breakout for hours. Next he built a dune buggy from Legos. When he got bored with that, he rigged an alarm system to his bedroom door using a junior electronics kit, a spool of wire, a few coat hangers, and some parts from an old Erector Set. Then he rewired the system as an FM transmitter and broadcast his name, location, and a plea for help. Gordon found comfort in imagining that others were trying to respond through the field of static that he heard in return. And if anyone out there heard him confess his feelings for Mrs. Bellefleur, they had nothing to say about it.

The morning papers were stuffed with back-to-school sale flyers. A city crew appeared between showers to repaint the crosswalk at the end of the street. On the calendar in the kitchen, a warbler of some kind was featured as the songbird for September, shown perched against an autumnal display of color. Gordon estimated that it was getting darker at least an hour earlier than when summer began. But he had not seen the sun for days. With his new awareness of its diurnal movements, this made him profoundly uneasy.

Before returning the Olympics book to the library, he carefully traced an image of the diver and tacked it to the corkboard in his room, right next to the glossy photo of Mrs. Bellefleur and her fourth graders. One of the many things about Mrs. Bellefleur that compelled him was her smile, those captivating little divots in her cheeks. Dimples they were called. But in the photo, Mrs. Bellefleur looked surprised, like the picture lady had tricked her and taken the shot on two instead of three. There was also a weird shadow behind her head that made her hair look messy, like she’d just woken up. Smitten as he was, even Gordon could appreciate that this was a lousy photo of Mrs. Bellefleur. But it was the only one he had.

The book he got in exchange was about astronauts. Inside, he found a portrait of three beaming men, NASA jumpsuits and crew cuts and all, posing behind a little table covered in green felt. On the table was a model of the Apollo 1 command module. Soon after the photo was taken, Gordon read, all three men were consumed in a launch pad fire while sitting in the real thing. As horrible as this was to contemplate, Gordon found himself staring into the eyes of the men in the photo. He knew something they didn’t, but had no way of telling them. It was a nasty trick for time to play.

Gordon closed the book and placed it on his desk. Then he picked up his Magic 8-Ball, shook it, and turned it over to watch the message emerge from the blue liquid within. It said ASK AGAIN LATER. With a sigh he turned the ball back over and placed it on top of the book.

The next day the weather broke bright and clear, and Gordon sat dangling his feet at the edge of the deep end. It was early; Mr. Morgan had not skimmed the pool yet and the surface was littered with leaves, dead horseflies, a piece of a foam cup, and a stray Band-Aid. The creek ran a turbid brown, water puddled on the tennis courts, and the wide expanse of concrete in the pool yard had been scoured white by all the rain. Gone were the stains from ice cream mishaps and overturned ash trays. And he could instantly tell that the water was a degree or two cooler.

Gordon took a deep breath, pushed off, and went right straight to the bottom. When he got there he sat cross-legged, a few inches from the drain. Looking up, he watched his own ripples propagate outward and slowly settle, until he could clearly make out the wavering edges of the pool, and the blue sky above. This was his favorite time, early on a weekday. Later he would have seen dozens of feet kicking, arms flailing, bodies plunging in like torpedoes. He would have been able to hear them laughing and screaming. But now, at twelve feet, all was serene and blue.

When his breath began to run out he pushed off and flutter-kicked towards the light, leaving a million tiny bubbles as he went. Surfacing near the edge, he reached for the lip of concrete, shook water from his head, and was preparing to heave himself out of the water when he saw a pair of sandaled feet with chipped red nail polish.

“Well, hello Gordon,” Mrs. Bellefleur said, smiling down at him.

Gordon released his hold and settled back into the water, a head bobbing just above the surface.

“How’s the water this morning?” she wanted to know.

Mrs. Bellefleur wore gray terry shorts and an oversized Adidas t-shirt and had obviously just arrived. Beyond, Gordon noted, she’d already staked her claim on the clean concrete, where her collapsible lounger leaned against an overstuffed canvas tote.

“Fine.”

“And you’ve enjoyed your summer?”

“Fine,” he repeated.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said with a wink. “You deserve it.”

Gordon spit out the pool water that had been collecting in his mouth. “I’m getting out now,” he announced.

“Well, I hope we have a few more glorious days. It was nice to see you, Gordon.”

“Thank you.”

Gordon spent the rest of the morning in his chair, wrapped in a beach towel, long-blinking like an idiot. And shortly after noontime, he stood poised at the end of the high dive.

There would indeed be a few more glorious days before they drained the pool, took down the nets, and locked the gates. Perhaps she had been the one who willed it so. But Gordon would have no way of knowing this. Nor could he have known that on those remaining days, until the summer was finally over, they would insist that he’d been practicing in secret. That he’d climbed the fence at night, or had honed his skills elsewhere. Or that it was luck. They would demand that he do it again. Even Mr. Morgan got in the act.

“Where the hell did you learn to dive like that?” he said, forgetting himself in his giddiness as he met Gordon by the side of the pool. “That was amazing! You’ve been holding out on us. Let’s see what else you’ve got!”

Gordon shrugged and walked to his chair to dry off. He had no intention of doing it again. They could say whatever they wanted. Because it hadn’t been for any of them. It was for Mrs. Bellefleur.

“Diving is for wimps, anyhow,” Jason Carper would declare, before demonstrating his own – presumably less wimpy – cannonball.

Walking that plank, Gordon could not have foreseen any of this. Not that it would have mattered. The sun was high, conditions perfect. A single glance confirmed that she was right there, in her usual spot. He tested the board, flexing his knees with it, arms loose, light and limber. It responded exactly as he’d imagined. Much better now.

There was no point in taking the time to appreciate the scene below him. He’d been sitting in that chair all summer. He knew what the pool yard looked like.

And he refused to risk a second look, to be certain that she was still there, that she hadn’t gotten up to get a soda or to make a phone call. That she hadn’t rolled over on her tummy, reached behind her, and untied the strings of her bikini top, just so. He couldn’t think about any of that. She would be his witness, the only one who counted. He just had to believe.

Plus, the Magic 8-Ball had said it that very morning: IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.

And Gordon knew that it was so – that it was, in fact, perfect – the moment his feet left the board.