emily m. danforth

Escapes

Six of the boys from the high school track team took their lifeguard course together in late spring, all of them lean and muscular and happy that once changed into their swim trunks, they each had the same track-practice tan -- brown skin midway up their thighs and to the tops of their shoulders, then milky strips where their uniforms had covered -- strips so straight and even they appeared painted on with Wite-Out.

They huddled in one corner of the pool (it was filled only two days previous and felt like swimming in snow-cone slush) arms clenched across those white chests, heads twitching and shivering, while they learned and repeated the cross-chest carry, the hair-tow, the dreaded spinal injury back-boarding and removal from water, and their favorite, submerged escapes.

The course instructor, Sigrid, a frail woman in her sixties who painted her eyebrows on, had once trained with the Olympic Synchronized Swimming Team and regarded herself as an authority on all things aquatic. She explained that in a real-life situation the active drowning victim would be very aggressive, and would see a lifeguard’s head as a buoy and try to grab hold. Because of this, she said, it was good for the students to really challenge each other on the escapes, to be realistic victims when they acted out scenarios.

Jim was the best swimmer in the class, with crisp, smooth strokes, and rescues so assured that, when forced to partner with him, his friends drowned ferociously, whip-kicking their legs to rise up out of the water and climb on top of him, trying to push him beneath the surface while they rode him, a human life raft.

They never succeeded, because Jim liked to sink. It came naturally to him, like easy sleep after a long night. He brought the boys down to the pool’s bottom with him, all the way to the smooth tile base, blue and white squares flecked with silver in the darkness of the diving well, calmly waiting until their lungs first tickled, then itched, then finally demanded air. Screamed for air. Always, they would loosen their grip on his neck and shoulders and launch toward the sunlight, their mouths pointed upward, leading, lips gaping and sucking as they broke the surface.

Sometimes, when he was tired of proving himself each and every rescue, Jim would grab an ankle as it shot up past his nose, grab it and hold it for several seconds, right to the point where the ankle’s owner, sure he was going to pass out, would shake and kick, unable to free himself. And then Jim would let go. He liked the feel of their muscles in his grip. But he liked best the way he felt when he loosened his grip: in control, powerful, the one who both set the trap and released it.

emily m. danforth holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Montana and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has been recently seen in Willow Springs, font and on her parents’ fridge -- the one in the basement where they store bulk items.