Jeff Ewing
THE OTHER DRUMMER
Muriel’s already at the site, waiting for me. I drop my gear on the ground beside hers. The heat is oppressive, the sun’s fist bearing down. Why the festivals all choose summer is beyond me. Kids are out of school, sure, I get that, but for God’s sake find a place farther north. Where the sun has some mercy, and there are no rivers to dive into and never come out of.
“What’ve we got?” she says. “Bass player?”
“Drummer,” I say.
She shakes her head with a complex mixture of affection and resentment. As a teenager, she’d fallen in love with a drummer passing through, the laconic anchor of a closing band chosen by the festival for their ability to clear a crowd. She told me about him one night over beers at Cleveland’s—his swan dive from the bridge, the long fruitless wait for him to surface—her eyes going glassy with a lovesick sheen that reflected the Hamm’s sign in distorted spiegelschrift. I leaned in toward her, and she laughed me off.
She’s always the first to answer these calls. Sometimes she cries. I’d like just once to comfort her the way I’ve seen actors and priests do, but instead I turn away, shuffle my feet and fill out the transport form with undue concentration as she drags a sleeve across her face.
She spits into her mask, dips it in the river. Her wetsuit hugs her cetaceously. She raps the tank’s pressure gauge convivially, as if tapping an old friend on the shoulder. A guy she maybe had a thing with, nothing serious, who turns to her with a big fat smile, says: How you’ve changed! She’s easy about it, natural. Haven’t we all, she says.
I cross my arms, slap each with its opposite hand.
“All set?”
She goes in first, and I follow close behind, catching up in a few strokes so that we’re side by side. We move in unison as if we’ve always done this, turning together to face upstream, letting the current push us slowly down.
The sounds beneath the surface are tauntingly percussive—rock tumbling against rock, bubbles hissing and warbling. The drummer’s fairly shallow, maybe ten feet down. His right foot is wedged tight in the V of two large rocks, a common tragedy. A lamprey hangs from his grotesquely overdeveloped right forearm, the one that rides the cymbal all night. His hands are open and empty, stickless.
We tie a line around his waist, loop it across his shoulders. Muriel braces her foot against a rock and pulls, but the current’s holding him fast. I slide my pry bar in and lean into it, hear the snap of his tibia. Muriel’s eyes go wide behind her mask. She points toward the surface and we rise together.
The outline of her mask is visible around her eyes when she raises it.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I’ve left the radio on in the truck, and Stephen Malkmus coos shrilly behind me, “Look around, around…” I’m tapping my foot, which I can see bothers her.
“Nothing,” I say.
“I think you’re wrong about that.”
She flips the catch on the winch, begins dragging the hook and cable back to the water. I watch her go in, disappearing a little at a time. To her knees, her waist, her shoulders. Her ponytail floats for a second on the surface, waggles briefly side to side before going under.
In the distance, at the festival grounds, the fireworks have already started. I pull my dive hood back to listen for the delayed explosions, turn Pavement up a couple of notches and wait for Muriel to surface. When she doesn’t, I hoist my tank back on and go after her.
She’s sitting on a boulder watching him, searching his vaguely familiar face for her other drummer. I watch the bubbles rise from her regulator in staccato bursts. She’s talking to him. The words ascend in a translucent stream, lost in trivial explosions at the surface. I try to read them, to understand what she’s trying to tell him.
“I’m right here,” I say, releasing my own burbling column.
The drummer’s arms move alternately in the current, one rising as the other falls. Muriel sees, I’m afraid, a loss beyond the ordinary in this tragicomic pantomime, detects life in his dull, bulging eyes. I want to tell her to shake it off, that the world’s mostly water and our work will never be done. That she’s wrong to believe our job is saving people. We recover them, that’s all.
I yell her name. She glances over at me. I’m a minor rumble lost in the larger pulse, the anthropocene call and response. She puts her finger to her regulator, and so to her lips.
Jeff Ewing is the author of the short story collection The Middle Ground, published by Into the Void Press, and the poetry collection Wind Apples from Terrapin Books. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Willow Springs, Subtropics, SmokeLong Quarterly, Zone 3, Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, ZYZZYVA, and Cherry Tree. He lives in Sacramento, California.
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