Early Warning

He had found the book lying on the street outside of Kroger’s. He took it home, hid it in his room so that Mom would not make a big deal over him finally reading a book, then opened it idly, noted the print was small. The first sentence made no sense at all, but he laughed at the second, “The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles.” He half understood this when he realized that the Wart was a child, not a blemish. It took him half an hour to read the first two pages, they were so strange. But he saw that they were meant to be strange, and he felt like the author was making a puzzle for him — this many words I will give you to understand, this many words I will keep for myself, and then there are these words in the middle, which you can have if you work at it. Things popped out of the page and into his head, and he pictured them. He went on, although he had only the dimmest idea about Arthur and Gawaine from occasionally looking at Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. When he got confused by the words, the story stayed in his head, and drew him back.

He stretched his shoulders a little and turned the page. Now the story had turned to Lancelot and Guenever (which he pronounced in his mind to rhyme with “whenever”). He liked the line “Half the knights had been killed — the best half.” He read about the ones that were left, and saw that King Arthur was thinking about how, whenever you set out to do something, you use up the good stuff first, and then you are stuck with the bad stuff, whatever it is. This was kind of like Charlie’s experience on both the swim team and the diving team — they always did their best dives first, or swam the backstroke first and the breaststroke last, just to get so far ahead of the other teams that they maybe couldn’t catch up. But that meant that you had to do your worst dives when you were more tired, so that you got even lower scores than you might have. The next part he could only sort of picture — stuff about clothes people were wearing and how stupid they looked. But he understood perfectly the part about Guenever. All the good people were gone, and those that were left were like the kids at school — they mostly wanted to see her fuck up, not because they cared, but because they didn’t have anything better to do.

Charlie could not say that this section of the book was his favorite, even though he couldn’t stop reading. What he had really liked was the part about Merlyn turning the Wart into a fish and a hawk. Even though he had never been farther from St. Louis than Chicago, in one direction, and the Ozarks, in the other, he could read that part and imagine just what England was like — all the birds and castles and hills. There was also a place where he, Charlie, had cried, something that hadn’t ever happened before, even in a movie. When the kids — Gawaine and Gareth and the rest of them — killed the unicorn for their mom and dragged it home all dirty and wrecked, and their mom didn’t even let it in the house, he thought that was the saddest thing he had ever read or seen. He did not know why. But it looked like even sadder things were to come.

At four-fifteen, the book fell onto the quilt, and his head dropped back onto the edge of the headboard. He was perfectly comfortable — one of his skills was sleeping soundly no matter what his position. When he first went to camp on the Current River, the other campers would test him: Head out of the bunk? No problem. Feet on the floor? Feet tied to the upper bunk? Spread-eagled? If he was asleep, he was asleep, that was Charlie. The other kids came to respect that after he blackened a few eyes for them. And anyway, he was big — six foot three, 165 pounds, too big to dive anymore unless he faithfully lifted weights. But he didn’t mind that. He and Coach Lutz both knew he was coming to the end of his talents. Coach Jenkins had told him about a thousand times that Mark Spitz, who was six one, with an arm span of six two, weighed 170. Somehow, Charlie, six three, with an arm span of six four, could arrive at 182 pounds and win seven Olympic gold medals, or maybe only one. “You’re the hope!” Coach Jenkins said. But Charlie needed fear to keep him going, and breaststroke was a singularly unscary activity, unless maybe you were swimming to Cuba and there were sharks. He hadn’t done that yet.

When his mom came in at ten and woke him up by picking the book off the floor, turning it over in her hands, and then setting it on the bedside table without saying anything, they had a glance — one of those mom glances that said, “Now what?” Charlie smiled. His mom smiled. She knew better than to kiss him anymore, but she ruffled his hair and said, “Oh. The Once and Future King. I always wanted to read that.”

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