[Fiction] The Ring by Will Evans

The Ring

by Will Evans

When I was a senior in high school, my best friend was Jimmy Reed. He was a lanky boy with sad, brown, hollow eyes, and he grew up in Tennessee and had a soft Southern drawl. We lived near the falls of a river and went there to swim after school. We’d strip down to our Jockeys, run off the edge of a big flat rock, fling our arms over our heads, and do front flips and gainers.

Anyway, Jimmy had this ring, and you could see it was special to him. It slid around on his finger, and he was always secretly touching it, as if to be sure it was there. It looked like your ordinary high school ring until you looked closer, and then you could see it wasn’t. It was a Marine Corps ring that’d belonged to Jimmy’s father. His father had been killed in Afghanistan when Jimmy was a little kid, and Jimmy had never really known him. Except for that ring and some debts from loans, Jimmy’s dad didn’t leave much behind.

One day after school in June, two weeks before graduation, we drove to the river to swim. Jimmy went first. He ran off the edge of the rock, flung his arms in the air, and flipped his legs backward neatly over his shoulders. He came up shaking his head, water spraying off his hair, and swam to where I was standing on that big flat rock by the falls. But when Jimmy got back to the rock, he discovered he didn’t have the ring. It’d flown off his finger during the dive and landed somewhere in the river. Jimmy dove down to look for the ring maybe ten or fifteen times, until he finally found it in a deep pool under the rock. He could see it glinting there in a faint patch of sunlight, but he couldn’t quite get to it before he ran out of breath.

“Too far down,” he said in his soft Southern drawl. “That old pool there under the rock, it’s like swimmin’ into a cave.”

Jimmy hauled himself up on the rock and stood next to me, gulping for air. And then he got an idea. “There’s that rope in your daddy’s Jeep.”

He ran back to the Jeep for the rope.

And as soon as I saw that rope, I said, “This is a bad idea.”

But Jimmy wanted that ring back. I mean, he had to have it. “No way I’m leavin’,” he said. “Ain’t leavin’ without that ring.” And before I could say another word, I was tying the rope to his waist.

Then Jimmy jumped back in the river. He came up and treaded water. And then he took one big breath and dove down into the pool.

I could see his legs and the soles of his feet kicking way down through the pool and into that deep-green water, where they disappeared in a shadow near the edge of the big rock. The rope was coiled at my feet, and I paid it out as he went. I paid out a lot of that rope, maybe twelve or fifteen feet of it. Then the rope went slack all at once, and I waited, but he didn’t come up. I stood there a long time holding on to that rope. And then I got scared and pulled on the rope till I felt Jimmy’s weight at the end of it.

He didn’t come up right away. When he did, it was just his back, the bony white wings of his shoulders, his head face down in the river, and his arms floating out by his head. I dragged him up onto the gravel shore, and then the rest is a blur because it happened so fast. The EMTs told me Jimmy had drowned, but as it turned out, he hadn’t.

Graduation came and went, but Jimmy Reed wasn’t there. I was shipped off to work at a summer camp, and then I left for college. Every week, I wrote to Jimmy, but Jimmy never wrote back. I tried calling him once, but his mother answered the phone. “He ain’t able to talk to you”—that was how she put it. Then over Christmas vacation I heard he wasn’t the same anymore and wouldn’t be ever again. Not enough air to his brain when he almost drowned in the river.

That spring, I drove over to see him. He lived in a tiny rental, a block from the packing plant. His mother came to the door, a rough woman with squinty eyes, and looked at me as if to say, What are you doing here? I knew I wasn’t responsible for what’d happened to Jimmy, but I was the one who’d held the rope and tied it around his waist. The screen door was ripped like a cut. His mother banged it aside.

“Now just you follow me.”

Then she led me down the hall to a room at the back of the house.

I stood in the doorway a moment, not ready for what I saw. The shades in the room were drawn. Jimmy was slumped in a wheelchair, playing a video game. One side of his mouth sagged, and he’d lost a lot of weight. He looked like those pictures of prisoners from a concentration camp.

I knocked, and Jimmy looked up. Then he looked back at the game. His fingers curled like claws as he pushed the stick around, and he slurred when he talked, kind of like his mouth was full.

“This is all I do anymore. Where you been, anyway?”

“College.”

“College,” he said. “So what’s it like, college?”

I shrugged, and my throat got thick. I could barely get out the words. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s all right, I guess.”

Jimmy didn’t look up. He pushed at the stick with his fingers. Then after a while, he said, “Well, get me out of this place.”

“To where?”

“Back where we used to. Before this,” he said.

It was a warm day in June, and I rolled him back to the same spot where I’d dragged him up onto the gravel, and he sat looking out at the rock while we listened to the roar of the falls. The snow had melted late that spring, and the river was pretty fast. I’d never seen it so fast or heard it roar so loud. Then Jimmy got an idea.

“Strip down and find me that ring. I can see where I must’ve dropped it when you was haulin’ me up.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“You ain’t even tried.”

I shrugged. Glanced away. I didn’t admit I was scared because of what’d happened to him or that I still had dreams about that day and didn’t like thinking about it.

He turned his head and looked up at me with his sad, brown, hollow eyes sunk way into his head. And then he turned back again. He was looking out at the river.

“You remember about my daddy…” Then he paused for a moment and said, “That ring out there in the river, that ring there is all I got.”

Well, of course, I remembered. But it was the way he said it. It was, I don’t know, with this kind of desperate longing. I’d never heard Jimmy call him daddy before, and it hit me then real hard how young Jimmy was when he’d lost him and what it must’ve been like to lose him and grow up without his dad. And how all he’d ever had was that ring, and that ring was lost. And how it wasn’t so much the drawl I’d heard as the ache in his voice.

So I did. I stripped to my Jockeys. And I inched out into that cold water till it rushed around my crotch, and I stroked out into the current and dove after the ring. But after a bunch of tries, I came up with nothing again, coughing and treading water and gasping for breath. It hurt like heck to do it, but I called to him on the shore.

“Jimmy! I can’t find it! It’s not here!” I called.

He kind of waved at me with his fingers curled like claws. “More over that way,” he said, and I swam against the current to where I thought he was pointing.

“Here?”

“No!” He waved. “More that way! In front of the pool!”

I was sure the ring had washed away or was covered with silt. But I dove where he was pointing, down deep in front of the pool. The current was swirling there. The water beneath the surface was flocked with spokes of sunlight that filtered into shadows and then away into blackness. I came up spitting and rubbing my eyes, and then I dove again, way deep in front of the pool, but I came up with nothing.

I treaded water, stalling, trying to shake off the cold. And then I yelled back to him, “Not here! Can’t find it!”

Jimmy looked at his knees, and I thought he was starting to cry. So I tried again and again, way down as deep as I could, coughing and spitting and gasping, and gulping air down into my lungs before each time I dove, but I still came up with nothing.

Just couldn’t find it.

I looked at him back on the shore, at his eyes sunk into his skull, his body limp as a string, slumped to the side in the chair, and I thought about him losing his daddy and how, if I didn’t find that ring, he would lose what little he’d known of him, and his dad would be lost for good; and then I pictured leaving without it and wheeling him into that tiny house, where he sat in that room all day in the dark, pushing the stick around in front of some video game. It would feel like the day he’d lost it, only worse this time.

“No way I’m leavin’,” I said to myself. “Ain’t leavin’ without that ring.” And I sucked in the deepest breath I could, and I dove down into the shadows deeper than I’d ever been before, way deep down into the pool, and then…and then…

Well, I guess I just got lucky.

Before I knew it, I was dripping beside him, Jimmy suddenly beaming and rocking and bobbing his head as I rolled open my fist and held out the ring in my palm. It glistened there in the sunlight, and no worse for wear, just like he’d never lost it and nothing’d ever happened to him and he was still the same Jimmy with the soft Southern drawl.

Then I worked the ring over his finger, and we sat on the gravel shore, watching the river pass, till the fiery circle of sun lit up the peaks of the mountains and flamed down into the pines and a clean slice of the moon rose above us over the falls.

I turned my head and looked up at him in the soft silver light. He looked down at me and grinned, looked back at the river, and sighed.

“Y’know?” Jimmy slurred. “That old river water that day, it’s halfway to China by now…” And he secretly touched the ring, as if to be sure it was there.

Bio: Will Evans has recently published stories in FLASH FICTION MAGAZINE, THE WAVE, FRIDAY FLASH FICTION, NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, and others. In 2021, he retired from Johns Hopkins University and has also taught at Harvard, Cornell, and UNH. He lives in Baltimore, MD.