Mount Pleasant, Michigan

by Jack C. Buck


​Frank had made the dive off the same tree into the same river every summer since the first time eleven years back when he was 12 years old. As then, when we were just young boys, and just as now, Thomas watched Frank make his way up the tree and bring himself out to the branch’s end. When there were girls with the boys Frank would perform by scaling up the old, large tree rooted on the embankment of the river with double-speed. In what seemed like careless route he would fling himself out as far as his body would go, wrapping one precarious leg around the horizontal branch with his other leg dangling 100 feet high and 30 feet out above the surface of the water.
 
Frank was recognized as the best swimmer and most courageous of his friends. However, he was inflexible in being talked out of a potentially bad decision if he had already made up his mind. Everyone in town who knew Frank or of him all knew this. On the riverbank Thomas and the two girls, whom they had met earlier that afternoon, waited for Frank to show how it was to be properly done. Frank would say they all do it wrong, you see, Frank believed there was a certain way one is to air oneself into a river. His way would vary slightly with each climb and plunge, but they all had a Frank quality to them.
 
The girls were putting their feet into the water. One of them talked for the other girl. The other girl Thomas thought was cute. Thomas had asked the other girl questions in hopes of beginning a further exchange, but she just quietly laughed and the other friend answered for her. Sometime a little after three in the afternoon Thomas had given up and only shrugged at the two girls. By this time Thomas had stopped noticing the girls and was looking out on the river. Every year, around this time, at the end of summer, Thomas would make a point to remember. Closing his eyes, with the warmth and pulsing geometric figures given by the late August sun his inner eye’s darkness would explode with movement, reels, and stills of nature’s offering before him.
 
It is then when Frank is letting go, knifing towards the river. Submerged, with the inside of the river around him, the ceiling of the river is shone with light, at the bottom, black.