Twenty-One Mile Swim (2 page)

AFTER almost forty-five minutes of tacking back and forth, running first a northerly course and then a southerly, Ross headed
the sailboat home. He maneuvered it into a position so that the sails lost the wind and went limp as it approached the buoy,
drawing up close enough to it so that Joey was able to hook the line to it.

“Attaboy, Joey,” Ross said amiably. “You’ve got the makings of a sailor — at least.”

He glanced at Paula as he spoke, a mischievous glint in his eyes, and Joey knew that Ross had added the last two words to
tease her.

She offered no comment but took off her life jacket, which reminded Joey that he had his to remove, too.

After the sails were lowered and fastened to the boom, the three got into the rowboat, and Ross rowed Joey to shore.

“Thanks for the ride,” said Joey, hopping out. “See you again, maybe.”

“Maybe by the next time you’ll have learned to swim better and won’t worry about falling out of a boat,” remarked Ross.

“Maybe,” said Joey.

He gave the boat a shove away from shore, and Ross took it from there, applying his oars in short, rapid motions that propelled
the little vessel along the shoreline northward toward Paula’s cottage. Actually, the cottage was both a winter and summer
home for her and her parents ever since they had moved here some eight years ago.

Coming down the wooden steps to the red deck was a contingent to greet him: his two sisters, Yolanda and Mary, and the youngest
member of the Vass clan, his brother Gabor. Yolanda was sixteen, the eldest of the lot; Mary was eleven and Gabor eight. At
five feet three and a quarter inch, Yolanda was exactly half an inch taller than Joey. He often thought that at the slow rate
he was growing, that half-inch might as well be a foot.

“Well!” exclaimed Yolanda, wisps of her dark hair blowing across her face, “The sailor’s back. How’d you rate a ride on Mr.
Cato’s sailboat, any way?”

“I have a hunch that Paula had something to do with it,” admitted Joey.

“Oh,” chimed in Mary, “you admit that.” Her black hair was cut shorter than her sister’s mainly because it could pack up easier
under her Softball cap when she played.

Joey, grinning, made a motion as if to cuff her across the ear. She ducked away from him, laughing.

“I’d like a ride on that sailboat sometime,” said Gabor, staring off dreamily at the boat lying anchored in the distance.
“Suppose Ross would take me, Joey?”

“Isn’t Ross a bit older than Paula?” Yolanda asked Joey, totally ignoring her younger brother.

“Why?” spoke up Mary. “Any particular reason why you’d like to know?”

“I’m talking!” piped up Gabor irritably, his small voice suddenly loud enough to suppress the other voices around him.

Joey looked at him, smiling. “I heard you, Gabe,” he said. “And the answer is, I don’t know. Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t.”

Gabor stared at him with his soft blue eyes. “What do you mean?”

Joey shrugged. “Just that. Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t. I don’t know him well enough yet to ask him if he will.”

“Maybe Daddy will buy a sailboat,” he said, his eyes suddenly shining as he looked at the sailboat.

“I don’t know about that,” said Joey. “Dad’s interested in fishing, and fishermen don’t go for sailboats.”

“Is Ross still in school?” asked Yolanda. “He looks about nineteen or twenty to me.”

“He’s in the eleventh grade, I think,” said Joey. “Which makes him about sixteen or seventeen.”

“He’s real tall, isn’t he?”

Joey tried to ignore that comment from Mary, even though he didn’t think she had said it to tease him.

“I smell smoke, Mary,” said Yolanda cautiously. “I don’t think your brother is interested in any further discussion about
Ross Cato.”

Mary giggled.

Joey, halfway up the steps, stopped abruptly and gave his sisters a cold stare. He started to say something, but changed his
mind and ran up the
remaining few steps. He’d be darned if he was going to let Ross Cato’s name bother him.

He headed across the immaculate green lawn toward the white, wood-shingled house. The house was fronted by a windowed porch
covered with Venetian blinds to use when the sun became unbearably hot.

Instead of entering by the front door, however, he went around to the back door and entered into the narrow foyer and then
into the small kitchen. Everything looked spic and span. He loved his mother’s tidiness. Maybe she wasn’t well educated and
spoke English with an accent, he thought, but she was tops in house cleaning and a darned good cook, too.

He saw from a quick glance at the electric clock above the sink that it was almost two-thirty. He started into the living
room, smelling the familiar odor of fresh tobacco smoke, when he heard footsteps and met his father coming toward him.

“Well, hi, Joey,” his father greeted him, taking a curve-stemmed pipe out of his mouth. “We watched you ride on that sailboat.
It looked like a lot of fun.”

“It was,” said Joey.

His father backed into the living room, and
Joey followed him. He was slightly taller than Joey, but heavier. His hair was brown, cut short. “Come in here. Your mother
and I have come to a decision.”

Joey saw his mother sitting in an armchair, working on needlepoint. She glanced up at him, her round face breaking into a
smile.

“Yes, sure,” she said. “We have come to a decision. Ha-ha! He means he has. I just approved.” She pronounced “we” as “ve.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” said Joey, smiling. “What’s Dad decided that you approved?”

“He wants to buy a boat,” said his mother. “You know that. For weeks he has been talking aboutit.”

“Yes, but —”

“I saw an advertisement in this morning’s paper,” interrupted his father. “The boat is for sale for seventy-five dollars.”

“Seventy-five dollars?” Joey echoed. “It can’t be too big at that price.”

“It’s big enough for what I want,” said his father. “It’s ten feet long. The oars are included in the price.”

Joey smiled. The boat was less than half the length of Ross Cato’s sailboat. But, as his father had said, it was big enough
for what he wanted.

“Have you called the person?”

“Yes. I said I’d be coming over sometime this afternoon to see it.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

They drove to the opposite side of the lake where the seller of the rowboat lived in a small home with a dock leading some
fifteen feet out into the water. A sixteen-foot Chris Craft outboard, resting in a hoist near it, captured Joey’s eye.

“That’s what we ought to have, Dad,” he said.

“Maybe someday,” said his father, hopefully. “Today, though, we’ll settle for a little rowboat.”

It was an old one. How old Joey couldn’t guess. But the paint on it was peeling and the sides were rough from a lot of use.

“I’m sorry,” said his father to the man selling the boat. “It looks pretty old. I don’t think it’s worth seventy-five dollars.”

“How about seventy?”

“Make it sixty,” said Joey’s father.

“You play a hard bargain,” said the man. He was tall, gnarled looking, and in his sixties.

“Take it or leave it,” said Joey’s father with finality.

“Okay, I’ll take it,” the man said drily.

“Thank you,” said Joey’s father and wrote out a check.

They were able to tie the boat on the roof of the car, and then they drove home and parked alongside a gray two-door Ford
parked in the driveway.

“Aunt Liza’s here,” observed Joey.

“I see,” said his father. “And I can already tell you almost everything she has told your mother about my buying a boat.”

“Why? Doesn’t she like boats?”

“She likes nothing to do with water,” said his father, turning off the ignition. “Ever since her boy Janos drowned, just thinking
about water scares her to death.”

Joey wondered what she would have thought if she had seen him riding in the sailboat, especially during those moments when
it had heeled at such a precarious angle that it seemed it might tip over.

They got out of the car as the other children came running out of the house. Joey and his father took the boat off the roof
and, with the other children’s help, carried it down to the lake.

“Where you going to keep it, Daddy?” asked Gabor.

“When it’s not in use, on shore. Right here, far enough from the water so that the waves will not get to it and maybe work
the boat down into the lake. Anyway, it will be tied so it won’t get away.”

Gabor put an arm around his father’s waist and hugged him. Then his father picked him up, and Gabor gave him a kiss on his
cheeks.

“I love you, Daddy,” he said.

“And I love you, Gabor,” said his father.

“Oh, boy,” said Joey, grinning. “You know what
that
was for, don’t you?”

They returned to the house and found Aunt Liza’s reception just as lukewarm as Joey expected it to be. She was his father’s
sister, a dark-haired, plump woman in her early forties, who, like her brother, had been born in Hungary and immigrated to
the United States before she was in her teens.

“You must be crazy, Gabor,” she exclaimed, talking to him in Hungarian. “After what happened to Janos, I thought you would
think twice before you bought this place by the lake. Now you go and purchase a boat. Wasn’t Janos’s drowning lesson enough?”

“Accidents can happen no matter what you do,” Joey’s father replied tersely.

“But you need not put yourself in a place
where you know it could unexpectedly happen,” she came back at him. “Janos was a good swimmer, yet he —”

“Enough, Liza,” her brother cut in sharply. “I like to fish, and I like to fish from a boat. I won’t be swimming while I fish.”

Joey, understanding the language better than he could speak it, sympathized with his aunt, although he could not agree entirely
with her. What’s more, what was done was done, and trying to change his father’s mind now was like trying to change the course
of the sun.

Aunt Liza made some comment in Hungarian that Joey didn’t catch. But apparently his father did, for a grin suddenly laced
his face as he said, “That’s not nice, Liza.”

Both Liza and Joey’s mother laughed, easing the situation somewhat. Sometimes he wondered about some of the words that they
deliberately said in such a way that they were difficult to hear. Perhaps they did it purposely so that certain ears couldn’t
catch what they were.

It wasn’t until noon on Monday that Joey saw Paula long enough to talk to. They sat in the school cafeteria, and they lingered
over their lunch.

“Thought any more about learning to swim better?” Paula asked.

She was wearing a blue jumpsuit which, Joey thought, complemented her green eyes perfectly.

“Oh, sure,” he said.

“I’m sorry about the way Ross talked to you,” she went on. “He’s not the most modest guy in the world.”

“He’s a good sailor,” said Joey.

“And a better swimmer,” Paula said. “He knows it and shows it. He hasn’t lost a meet in the three years he’s been competing.
But you know what I wish?”

He looked into her large eyes. “What?”

“That someone would come along and beat him. His head will never shrink back to its normal size until that happens.”

Joey shrugged. “Something I can’t understand,” he said. “You talk like that about him, yet you go with him.”

“Wrong. I don’t
go
with him. Riding with him in his sailboat now and then doesn’t mean I
go
with him.”

“Sorry.”

They ate in silence for a minute.

“You know that Gatewood’s going to build a new school, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes. In a year or so, isn’t it?”

All he had heard about it was some talk among the kids in school.

“Right. My parents are going to have a meeting at our house in a couple of weeks. I think your parents are going to be invited.
At least I heard their names mentioned.”

“Probably,” said Joey. “Since we live only a few doors away from you.”

“Three,” she said, to make it definite. “And a new swimming pool is going to be an issue.”

He frowned at her. “A new swimming pool?”

She smiled. “Yes! Wouldn’t it be
great
to have a brand new school and a brand new swimming pool? I can hardly wait!”

“I just hope that I can swim better by then,” said Joey calmly.

JOEY, Yolanda, Mary, and Gabor — all wearing new swimsuits — went in the lake that following Saturday afternoon. The June
sun was hot and bright, but it was still too early in the year for it to have warmed the water to a point where swimming was
comfortable. It would take another two or three weeks yet before that would happen, providing the weather didn’t turn cold
again.

None of the four knew how to swim well. Their father had bought Mary and Gabor flotation vests, and of the four children,
they were having the most fun. Yolanda was struggling to keep afloat by dog paddling and kicking her feet.
Joey worked at the crawl, the freestyle method of swimming, a little of which he had learned before, and which he preferred
over any other. The backstroke, breaststroke, and the other styles of swimming could come later.

Most of Sunday, and then every day after school during the next week, he put on his trunks — a bright red pair with white
trim — and went into the water. He found that each time he went in was easier than the time before. He was becoming acclimated
to the temperature of the water, and, more important, he was determined that he’d become an expert swimmer as soon as he could.

He had been thinking about why he was so anxious to do so, but wanted to keep the reason to himself for a while. One thing
he was able to admit, though, and that was that he owed this new ambition of his to the person he couldn’t care less if he
ever saw again. Ross Cato. Ross had done nothing
against
him. On the contrary, Ross had done something
for
him; he had given Joey a ride on his sailboat. But Ross had also humiliated him by implying that just because he was shorter
than most other boys his age, he would be a born loser when it came to swimming competition.