Michael Collings - The Slab

“How about swimming? Do you like swimming?”

There…finally, there was something.

The boy glanced up, for an instant his face a flash of eagerness. Then, as if afraid that he had given himself away, and that by doing so he had lost any chance of ever going swimming again, he looked down to the floor. His thin shoulders rose, lowered in a shrug.

But Daniel had caught the glimmer of interest. He swiveled around until he was sitting on the bench next to the boy. He was sweaty from the basketball game. His T-shirt clung clammily to his back and the nylon of his sweat-stained shorts felt sticky and uncomfortable. But he sat there for a few moments anyway.

Finally he glanced up at Marty and nodded. I’ll take it from here, the gesture said. Marty left.

“I liked swimming a lot when I was your age,” Daniel continued, as if there had been no break in the one-sided conversation. “But I didn’t get to go very much. We lived in Maine and it was pretty cold most of the year. And we didn’t have heated pools back then. My mother didn’t let me swimming out much-she was always afraid I’d get polio or something from the water.”

The boy looked at him questioningly.

“Polio,” Daniel said, “that was a real kid-killer when my Mom was younger. They had a vaccine for it by the time I was born, but Mom still worried. You know how Moms are.”

The boy nodded gravely.

“Anyway,” Daniel continued, “sometimes I would sneak away to a creek a couple of miles away and my buddies and me would strip down and go skinny-dipping. It was great.

“Now I can swim anytime I want, though. There’s a great pool back there.” He gestured to the doorway that led through the changing room and from there to an indoor pool.

The boy stared at the floor.

“Want to try it?”

Again, there was a slight movement.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go in for a swim. We just played a hot, tiring game, and a cool dip sounds perfect right now.” He stood and walked a few steps toward the changing room. “Come on if you want.”

Daniel didn’t bother to look back, but by the time he entered the changing room, he could hear the boy’s soft tread only a few steps behind him. Daniel reached into an open cabinet just inside the door and pulled out a suit. Boy’s medium. He tossed it to the kid. The kid caught it with one hand, his fingers snapping like small wires around the fabric.

“You guys change over there.” He pointed to a partitioned section of the changing room. “We older guys have to use that side. Meet you right here as soon as you’re dressed.” He grinned at Miles, and for the first time Miles grinned back. It was fleeting, but it was an authentic grin.

“Okay.” The kid’s voice was a little deeper than Daniel had expected. “Okay…Mr. Warren.” He disappeared around the partition, already tugging at his jersey top.

Daniel went to his locker on the adults-only side of the partition and changed into his trunks. He moved quickly, stuffing damp gym shorts, T-shirt, and socks into the basket at the bottom of the locker, then slamming the door and spinning the combination. He grabbed his towel from the bench and hurried back to the center of the room.

The boy was already there waiting. He looked even thinner in the trunks, which were large on him, barely hanging on his narrow hips, it seemed, and so full in the legs that they made Miles look as if he were perched on two knobby stilts instead of on legs. But the kid was still smiling, and in his eyes Daniel saw intelligence, eagerness, and interest.

“Come on, Miles. Last one in’s a rotten egg.”

They swam for nearly an hour, doing laps at first, then just horsing around in the water, ducking and splashing each other and playing a kind of two-man tag in which Daniel always seemed to be ‘it’, leaping in the water and trying to tackle Daniel, who would twist and spin and swivel away. To Miles, it seemed like only moments before Marty came in to yell at them through the noise that Miles’ mother was waiting in the foyer to pick him up.

By the end of February, Miles Stanton and Daniel Warren were officially partners at the Helping-Hands. They swam together for at least an hour two or three times a week. They played basketball and racquetball and handball. They went on an all-day field trip to the L.A. Zoo on one Saturday that was unseasonably warm and too perfectly glorious not to be doing something outside. They had shared hamburgers and fries at McDonalds and pizza with everything at Straw Hat.

And sometime during that interval, Daniel Warren had met Miles’ mother, Elayne.

Divorced for eight years, Elayne was bright, vivacious, intelligent, witty. And beautiful. Once free from a husband who had turned alcoholic and vicious at the same time, she had struggled hard to provide for her son and herself, and had done a remarkable job. She had waitressed at half a dozen restaurants, sometimes working two shifts to bring back enough money to keep their small household going. She had taught Miles self-reliance and responsibility-he had to have both in unusual concentrations, she knew from the beginning, because sometimes she had to be gone for hours at a time, even when he was only seven or eight years old.

He was self-reliant and responsible, all right. He also had no friends to speak of. He preferred staying in the apartment and reading or watching TV to rough-housing with other guys his age. Guys who had Dads that blustered through the door in the evenings and gave them hugs and tickles and took them neat places. Guys who had Moms that baked cakes and cookies and played games with them when it was too rainy to play outside or when they didn’t feel good.

In spite of Elayne’s best efforts to be both a Mom and a Dad, Miles effectively had neither. He was a true latchkey kid, and he responded to his enforced isolation by withdrawing into his own world of imagination. It was safer there than on the outside. No one could hurt you there.

For a long while, Elayne Stanton wasn’t particularly aware of how withdrawn her son was becoming. When she did finally notice, she didn’t know quite what to do. She was working double shifts again-the rent had spiraled another $75 a month, and the car was making funny noises that in her limited experience with mechanics usually translated into major bucks, and Miles was starting to outgrow his clothes almost before she could get them home from the store. He needed help, she realized, but she couldn’t give it to him.

Then, just after Christmas the previous year, she heard about Helping Hands. She checked it out, was pleased with what she saw, and decided that the Club might be just the thing for Miles. But it took a while for her to convince Miles to leave the apartment and try it out

When he went into the Helping-Hands building that first afternoon, his eyes were fixed on the ground and his shoulders were slumped so much that it looked like his raincoat would slide right off and lay in a bright orange puddle at his feet. To Elayne’s worried mother-eyes, he didn’t look like a little boy on his way to an exciting afternoon of male bonding; he looked like a condemned prisoner on his way to be involuntary guest of honor at an electrocution.

When he came out that night, though, everything had changed. His hair curled damp and tousled against his head. His cheeks flushed red with excitement. His eyes snapped with an electricity that she could not remember ever having seen before. And all he could talk about was Daniel Warren.

Daniel did this. Daniel did that. Daniel said this. And Daniel said that. Miles chattered so constantly about Daniel Warren that by the time they entered their tiny apartment that night, Elayne had both a headache and an frighteningly yearning desire to meet this man who had so abruptly become the solitary focus of her child’s universe.