Free A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson

church. My knees ached like burning rubber.
    I was under, then way under, and then up for air. Each time I cracked the surface my “Okay!” had more water in it, and finally I couldn’t even hear the word. This was not a hospitable environment. I went into my drown-proofing moves, but I kept going down too far and had to kick to mouth air. Something touched my toe, something small, but it was enough. I panicked. The antibodies were eating my tail. In a frenzy of side straddle hops, side strokes, leaping waves, I called “Whoa!” and went down.
    The water played a lugubrious synthesizer tone in my ears as I fell freely through the thermoclimes past two, three zones of colder water. Small hot squiggles crawled across the inside of my closed eyes. I was swaying back and forth wonderfully. It was like the time I was playing one on one with Billy Wellner at his house. We were playing around his pickup and I perfected a shot where I would drive around the rear of the truck and then lean back into the fence and throw a set shot up off the board and through the hoop. I made the shot nine times in a row and beat Billy 22–2. All he could say was, “You’re wrecking the fence.”
    Then.
    Then I touched the basketball, and it was in one hand, then both hands, and my knees closed around it too, as we bobbed past forty-six million stars in outer space.
    THE VOICE behind the flashlight said, “Get up.” It was our constable, Gill Manwaring, I could tell, and he was trying to sound real tough. Story herself had hired Gill as constable.
    “You better get up, fella.”
    I lay still, wrapped around the ball, in the same fetal position in which I must have washed upon this shore. He hadn’t recognized me. His boot ran up under my kidney. “Up!”
    In a voice I recognized as Raymond Burr’s, I said, “Hey, Gill.” I rose, not unlike a cow would, a piece at a time, and looked into the flashlight. “What time is it?”
    “Dan?”
    “Yeah.” I stood facing him, holding the ball nonchalantly in front of my private parts. He lowered the light and I came to understand there was a personage standing behind Gill.
    “You all right?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Late night swim got away from me. Can you take me around to my boat? It’s at the grove.” My eyes adjusted by steady, painful degrees in the starlight, and I could see that this was the three acre front lea of the Ballowells’, and that Annette Ballowell was backing steadily toward her dark and significant mansion.
    It wasn’t until I sat my bare ass on the seat of Gill’s Rover that I lifted the ball onto my lap and saw the disturbing and exciting truth: it wasn’t the same ball. It wasn’t my ball at all.
    SEVEN
    THE NEXT morning when I removed the thermometer from Story’s mouth, she looked up at me. “It’s the deep end you’re over, isn’t it.”
    I read the thermometer with new intensity. “Ninety-seven point seven.”
    “Why don’t you just paint household objects until it takes. You’ll get it. You’ll see it again. School will be out this week, and you can just take some time.”
    “I’m going to do that. I’ll be all right.” I nodded and heard the angry little tides inside my ears. “I’m going to paint everything.”
    When Story left for Town Hall, I burst into action. I didn’t have class until four, so I ran to the studio barelegged in my Sears robe and stretched three canvases, 60 by 60, my shrunken hands atremble. I could feel the heat. I was in motion; I couldn’t do it fast enough. I had one palette wet under cellophane and without changing it a bit, I started in.
    The volleyball that had saved my life in the confidential waters of Lake Mugacook ten hours before was a Sportcraft Professional Model manufactured in New Castle, Pennsylvania. In postal blue magic marker script along one seam was the name: Allen. Luther Allen was a retired broker who clipped coupons on his lakefront property in town. His children and grandchildren came up