He wanted for nothing. Joe owned six tailored suits, a couple of the kind of white T-shirts that came in packs, two stained pairs of blue jeans, and a pair of swim trunks he had been told were “alarmingly tight” by a lifeguard at the city pool where he swam laps. As the days melted into weeks and months, and the years bred like jackrabbits, and his stature in Raymond’s organization grew, he was offered a lot of other things—money, houses, new cars—but he couldn’t see or feel the appeal in any of it. He politely declined and kept right on flowing down the same path he had worn for himself in the world.
Until the day Raymond took him by the wrist and walked him outside to meet the Super Bee. He was told he couldn’t keep driving that piece-of-shit Buick to and from work. Stay at the Riverview if you gotta, wear the same six suits until the crotches wear outta all of them, but you are taking this car. Don’t insult me by arguing. Don’t even start.
Turned out the warning wasn’t needed. It was love at first sight.
She was the deep blue of the sky right after sunset and just before moonrise, a sapphire cut like a predatory animal. Like a river with jagged rocks just below the surface. You’d most likely die if you were stupid enough to jump in, but it might be worth it to get your skin wet. It reminded Joe of something. Something like—
a homesick ache, gone, gone and never the same
—an emotion he had forgotten. Want. Maybe it was the shape of the old muscle car. Maybe it was how no modern build held itself like that, ready to tear the road to pieces. He had opened the door with something approaching reverence and crammed himself inside while Raymond chuckled, just like he always did when Joe had to angle his limbs into a driver’s seat. He turned the key and the engine roared snowmelt and flash flood. It was like someone saying his name. His real name. The thought swirled by and was gone, inexplicable, a dead tree headed for the ocean.
He became a little more himself the moment that ignition rumbled to life. That was the end of it, really. The end of Raymond Sturges, Big Joe Gabriel, and, unfortunately, the end of the cobalt-blue 1970 Dodge Super Bee.
There was a pool in the Riverview’s central courtyard, surrounded by a rusting wrought-iron fence and a handful of patio tables with listing umbrellas. As apartment pools went, it was a decent size, long enough that you could get a good workout doing laps from one end to the other. Raymond hadn’t seen fit to budget for a pool guy when he acquired the place, though, and so the water was a murky take-your-chances green. In the spring it collected jacaranda blossoms. In the summer it got a nice furring of dead leaves and ash from distant fires. Every other season it was mostly dust, pollen, and the occasional drowned possum. In another kind of complex, it might’ve been a thing to complain to the landlords about. The Riverview was not that sort of complex. Folks came and went as car engines, low-wage jobs, and arrest warrants allowed. Neighbors did not exchange gossip or meatloaf recipes or anything other than sidelong glances.
Not long after he got the Super Bee, a strange interest in the state of the pool awoke in Joe. Swimming had always been the one thing he allowed himself outside of his job. Something about being in the water felt right in a way he could never recapture on land. He wasn’t a big son of a bitch underwater. The water was just part of him, like a bird’s feathers or a horse’s legs. The other swimmers gaped at how fast he was. Lifeguards looked up from their magazines or mobile phones in wonder. Kids scampered up to ask him how he did it. It seemed like the funniest question in the world to Joe, like being asked to give lessons on how to breathe or grow hair. He always smiled and shrugged apologetically. “Dunno,” he’d say softly, if pressed. “I just . . . do it.”
Joe didn’t talk much. He had very little to say with words that couldn’t be said with actions. Other people talked too damn much as it was.
He had noticed the Riverview’s pool before but hadn’t given it much thought. Then one fine spring morning he was walking to the parking lot and he smelled it. Algae and frogs’ eggs. Waterlogged purple petals. It smelled familiar in a way that made something in his chest twinge painfully. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the dirty pool like he’d never really seen it before. Maybe he hadn’t.
All day he thought about that moment, through the usual daily grind of fingers snapped and kneecaps crushed into eggshell fragments through surgical use of a baseball bat. When he got off work, he went to the local library branch, signed up for a card (the biddy behind the front desk looked him up and down dubiously), and checked out every book he could find on pool maintenance. They stayed in a neat stack beside the stained, bare mattress where he slept until he’d pretty well memorized all the ins and outs. Then he returned them, much to the palpable relief of Front Desk Biddy.
Some fellas kept gardens, or goldfish. Raymond had a few of those gnarled little mini trees you could sculpt into weird shapes. Joe had his job, his car, and the pH balance of the Riverview’s pool. It was more than he had started out with, naked and blank-eyed in a parking garage.
Under Joe’s care, the water grew glossy. He bought nets, chemicals, skimmers and suckers, all the other filthy-sounding devices one needed. Pretty soon it started looking like something you’d see in a brochure for the kind of apartments where the rent bought you a gym and a doorman. Summer rumbled to a halt at the curb. Joe didn’t bother renewing his membership to the city rec pool. Swimming outside felt better, especially early in the morning and late at night. Grackles squabbled over predawn turf disputes in the oaks. Warm yellow light shone down on the pool’s surface through smeary rectangles of sliding glass. He could always feel eyes watching him as he rippled through the water, but nobody ever came down to chat.
Nobody adult-sized, anyways. Eventually he gained a single admirer: a black-eyed, black-haired kid, couldn’t have been older than six or seven. The way he crept closer every day reminded Joe of the stray cats who hung around the complex. First he watched from the door of his family’s apartment. Then, when his babysitter presumably wasn’t looking, he sneaked down to the wrought-iron fence, where he played with matchbox cars and pretended to do anything other than pay attention to the big man in the water. By the end of the week, the toys and the ruse were both abandoned somewhere in the bleached-grass jungle of the courtyard. The boy sat with his face smashed between the fence’s bars, watching the oily ripple and flow of Joe. He never said anything or tried to get any closer. Watching was apparently enough. Occasionally whoever was looking after him that day would notice he was gone and call him from the balcony, and he’d run on back upstairs, brown cheeks smeared with lines of rust.
Kids weren’t supposed to get in the pool without adult supervision, but the kid had never even come inside the fence, so Joe didn’t bother scolding or ratting him out. He also didn’t bother latching the gate behind himself as securely as he maybe should’ve. Those two facts didn’t connect at first when he heard the mother screaming. That came a few seconds later, stepping out of his apartment to see her crouched by the poolside, fully clothed and dripping wet, boy laid out unconscious in front of her. Puddles of water from the both of them stained the concrete in slowly widening circles. The pool gate creaked lazily in the breeze.
He covered the distance between his front door and the pool in record time, the faces of other tenants peering cautiously from their windows blurring as he passed. The woman didn’t look up at the sound of Joe’s footsteps. She just squatted next to her boy, wailing like a coyote. Water trickled from his nostrils. His eyes were closed. Joe pushed the mother out of the way as gently as he could—she barely seemed to notice, eyes locked on her child—and took the boy in his arms. He didn’t know what to do. The kid looked tiny and breakable cradled in Joe’s big mitts. He also looked dead. His chest was still, black hair slicked to his head like motor oil.