There
had been a drowning at a small community pool in Nebraska. It was 1944.
The pool manager was a woman, Mrs. Fisk, hefty in her one-piece black
woolen swimsuit. She had plunged right in, attempting a rescue.
Perhaps the young man had had some sort of
seizure; the cause of his death remained unclear. In the heat of summer,
people still went to the gathering place of the pool. Some were uneasy
now, on their guard; not everyone could forget. But the ice cream still
melted down the sodden waffle cone over your fingers, zinc oxide was still
smeared across your nose.
It was a month or so after the drowning.
The small boy in the locker room was only six. He had gone to the
pool with his mother, who couldn’t come into the changing quarters with him.
But then all he had to do was remove his clothes and pull on his tiny
suit. He could manage that by himself.
When the small boy froze, at first no one
noticed. Then the men became concerned, even the tanned toweling-off
teens, their skin surprisingly white where it had been hidden by their
swimsuits. They all looked at the small boy, still immobile. For a
moment they attributed it to fear, which must have taken firm hold after the
drowning. But when they called out to him, the boy realized he was being
watched and tore himself away.
I was still only six, but something deep inside
me had just been awakened. It was the first time I had ever seen older
boys naked, in all their splendor. I was so spellbound by the sight I
simply could not move.
***
Eric Wilson had a Fulbright Grant to Berlin and taught
German and Swedish at UCLA and Pomona College. He’s worked as a freelance
translator, as well as an escort-interpreter for the State Department (my
assignments included members of the German, Austrian and Swedish Parliaments
and a poet from the Faeroe Islands) and for the German FBI (Bundeskriminalamt). For just over
30 years he taught fiction writing workshops at the UCLA Extension. My
work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Epoch, Carolina Quarterly,
Witness, Boundary 2, German Quarterly, and the O. Henry Prize Stories
anthology.
