A Golden Boy

I have three brothers. Well, one died when I was nine. But still at one time, I had all three.

No, I don’t mind telling.

My father was away for the summer. He was a baseball scout for the Florida Marlins. They were brand new then, an expansion team. It was a busy, bright time for him. This gave my mother all summer to drink and the income to do it. And I don’t mean this negatively. Just truthfully. She was a very fun drunk. We would have big parties, all the adults laughing into each other as I ran underneath them like eucalyptus trees erupting in the wind.

This summer my mom had a three week long party up north at a private campground. It was woodsy yet refined in a way. Like a more lonely version of the Catskills resort in Dirty Dancing. I say lonely because although there was a staff, there wasn’t any activities. My mom and her friends unsteadied the days with gin and tonics. Us kids pulled rough stones out from the grounds and swore they were arrowheads. We were desperate for an adventure.

The young woman, Nicki, who my oldest brother, Rick, tracked with his eyes every morning as she bent from table to table re-filling coffee for my comatose mother and friends, fell for us one night.

“You guys should check out the lagoon.” Nicki said, clawing out a roll from a bread basket with her tongs and setting it on my plate.

“You mean the pool?” Rick scoffed.

“No, the lagoon.” She replied. “When we built the cabins we needed a raised foundation, so they dug a huge, huge hole. All the flooding filled it. They won’t open it to the public because they don’t know.”

“Know what?” Rick asked.

“Just they don’t know about it. How deep it is. What’s in it. What we threw in there when digging it for the cabin foundations.”

“Will you take us up there?” my brother asked.

“No, you just follow the creek.” She said, looking over her shoulder.

But Nicki did lead us there. Rick convinced her sometime unseen to us. They held hands ahead of us. The creek bed was dry, my other brother, Colin, who was 13, threw rocks into the bushes to see if any animals popped out. I hoped none did. There was little kids with us. I carried my 4 year old brother Sean on my back.

We mounted the creek bed, Nicki tried to point out owl droppings. But our eyes dilated on  the lagoon. A dark stage. I wanted to dip my feet in just to prove I couldn’t actually walk on it.

Rick dove in first. Light and lethal. His body was like a rubber band, it darted. He invited us in. Nicki slid in. My brother, Colin walked in like the plank.

Sean and I lingered at the edge, where I could see the water actually bruise, and its blue shade away into black. It was too deep for Sean. Because it was just a hole there was no shallow end. Man-made had made it dangerous.

The dips lasted about a half an hour. Then Rick brought up flips.

“Collie, climb up and jump with me.” He said. Up he meant the rocky backdrop which had entertained us for the past half-an-hour by parroting back our “Hoots” and “Caws”.

“What about Sean?” I said.

Nicki volunteered to watch Sean. We climbed the rocks, having to stop after every big rock since the sun made them charcoals ready to tenderize our hands if we held on too long.

Finally, we made it to the summit. I screamed and waved to Sean. He just stared up, sitting on his blanket eating something. Nicki waved back.

“Alright. Collie. You wanna jump?” Rick asked.

I was the swim meet one. But Rick knew I would decline. He didn’t wait for my response before starting to jump up and down for his impending dive.

But before Rick could jump, Colin tore past us. Flinging himself into the empty sunlight. He seemed to linger there mid-flight forever. Golden, flying boy. Before God dropped him into the bruise, forever.

.

Rick and I immediately almost jumped as we crouched down to watch his descent, amazed at Colin’s sly recklessness. As Colin died, we laughed.

Then the stillness silenced us.

They say he hit his head on a boulder, two feet under water, paralyzed, he sunk to the bottom. My father’s divorce attorney told this story, of my brother sinking alive. I couldn’t listen in the courtroom without wanting to suffocate myself.  I imagined “Bohemian Rhapsody” playing while the sunlight kaldiscope that dazzled in front of him funneled away.

The short answer, after all the pain has been squeezed out, is that he drowned. But drowning is flailing, coughing, struggling.

After my mother tried to kill herself, I sat by her hospital bed.

“Colin didn’t drown.” I said.

“What are you talking about Colleen?” my mom whispered.

“He vanished.” I replied.