Free Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle Page A

engine was gently cooking. Turning, he saw Diane through the upstairs window of the cabin, her stomach huge in front of her. She moved slowly and carefully, and he knew that she was going to exactly the clothes she'd planned on, finding them just where she wanted them. His own life was a bundle of clothes flung in all directions, shoes dancing in unlikely places, nothing where he could find it.
    He went back in, joining her in the bedroom. 'How're you feeling?'
    'The contractions have begun.'
    'What are they like?'
    'I can't describe it.'
    He helped her down the stairs to the door, and looked around the kitchen. She's got everything in place, there's no more to be done here. He locked the door behind him and led her to the truck. She slid inside and he covered her with a blanket.
    The truck was warm and moved easily up the snow-packed lane, through the tall pine trees. At the top of the lane he turned onto the narrow road. They'd walked it all winter long, and they'd played a game, pretending that the baby had already been born and was swinging along between them like a little trapeze artist holding onto their hands, and they'd swung him that way, up and down the road.
    The road went past a vast snow-covered field, in which an old wagon appeared, on its own journey to nowhere, rotting away, its spoked wheels half-buried in the snow.
    'I'd feel better if you didn't go so fast.'
    He slowed down. One minute, ten minutes saved, makes no difference. We know how long the first stages of labor last.
    There was ice beneath the snow, and the wheels of the truck did not have perfect traction, but he knew how to play the road, easing through the turns, never using much brake. Both sides of the narrow road had been deeply ditched to carry away the waters of the spring runoff, but now they were covered with snow and it would be a simple matter to slide into the ditch and be there all night. Every winter he'd helped pull travelers out of the ditch, with much swearing, skidding, heaving, and hauling. It was great fun; but not tonight.
    At the bend in the road stood the one-room school-house, forgotten in the moonlight. He geared down, taking the turn in second, thinking of little boys with caps and knickers on, and little girls in gingham dresses, long ago, coming up the hill toward the schoolhouse. Then he was through the turn, leaving the old ghosts behind him, on their endless walk through a buried century.
    The road went straight through pines which formed a high wall on both sides. 'Old Ben is up,' said Laski, nodding toward a ramshackle farm-house in the midst of the trees. Most of the windows were broken out and it was like all the other abandoned farmhouses in the settlement, except for a flickering light inside, from the one room the old lumberjack had sealed off against the elements.
    Diane looked toward the light. A hermit herself, she liked old Ben. He had a bad reputation in the village, living as he did, so contrary to the ways of the world. But he could make anything out of wood—fiddles, boats, snowshoes—and he'd spent a lifetime in the woods. Laski saw a shadow moving in the darkness—old Ben's dog, sniffing around in the snow. Then the truck was into the next turn, near the river that came out of the darkness, its icy skin shining in the moonlight. Laski followed the river until it slipped back into the trees, where it wove a silver thread through the dark branches.
    Another clearing appeared, and a small broad shack. It was a camp for 'sports,' as the backwoods Canadians called the Americans who came to fish and hunt and rough it for a week. Laski remembered a time, a long time ago—he and his father were fishing in Canada, steering a motorboat along on a bright morning over a wide and winding river. Laski had suddenly felt like he was the river and the trees and the sun and the wind.
    He touched Diane gently on the shoulder. She was trembling inside her heavy coat, and he knew enough not to ask her how she felt.
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