Control

They were five soon-to-be former law students partying on Lake Michigan near the Port of Chicago. Barry and his friends had passed their exams and stood facing a jobless economy. Both everything and nothing were possible. It was a glorious, unbearable time to be alive. One of them, nobody could remember who, had made the decision to celebrate, and the rest quickly agreed to be swept along for the ride. 

Fritz’s father owned the world’s smallest speedboat, and Fritz himself sat up front and steered them from the jetty toward open water. Downey sat in back near the motor and tried telling the others about his recent experience sitting second chair on a criminal trial, an opportunity granted to him through a clerkship with a private firm. I say he tried because the rest of them, who had never sat second chair on a criminal trial, kept interrupting.

“I had strict orders to be invisible,” he said. “No words, no gestures, not even a cough. Fly on the wall. That was my mantra. I kept whispering it to myself. Every few minutes—” 

“What were the charges, anyway?” said McGinty.

“Man two, DUI, and criminal trespass. Client was looking at forty years, easy. He kept pretty stone-faced, but up close you could see him drowning. Like it had dawned on him that his life was in other people’s hands.”

“Bet he was fidgeting like crazy,” said Fritz. “My dad says a defendant who fidgets, the jury assumes he’s guilty.”

“I heard it’s when they look at the jury box too much,” Barry said.

“Nope, fidgeting’s worse,” said Fritz. “My dad tells his clients, ‘Keep your hands hidden, and I might just get you out of this.’”

They all knew Fritz would have a job at his father’s firm in Winnetka. No doubt, jumpsuited workers were redoing the window vinyl at that moment, adding “& Fritz” in bold letters. As for Barry, he didn’t know what he would do. He’d been counting on a clerkship. In fact, he was the one who’d told Downey about the clerkship he was currently in possession of. He did it to be nice, fully expecting he’d be the one who got it. 

“It must’ve been awful just sitting there the whole time not being able to do anything,” Barry said.

Jodie sighed. “Will someone please take control of this story?” She wore a flattering two-piece swimsuit and gazed out over the rims of her sunglasses. 

She was Fritz’s girlfriend, though Barry had known her first. He was the one who’d introduced them. It often occurred to Barry that assembling this group of friends had been entirely his doing, and he never received proper credit. On drunken nights, Fritz and McGinty would grab each other by the shoulder and declare how lucky they all were, as if their coming together had been some act of fate, and Barry would swig his beer in silence, feeling like an outsider in his own life.

Once they passed the mouth of the Calumet, Fritz opened up the engine. The boat’s dagger prow poked at the waves, and the waves stabbed back. Yet when Fritz cut the throttle a few minutes later, in the center of the harbor, the lake became steady and rhythmic. Far up the coast, the downtown skyscrapers rose as a single hazy glimmer, like a distant castle to which they might quest. Somewhat nearer, set against the narrow breakwater, massive barges and container ships trudged past on either side. These immortal leviathans crept glacially despite the fervor with which they churned the water to heavy slop.

Chicago’s steel industry was dying, though you wouldn’t have believed it that day on the harbor. Ask the economists, the CEOs, the workers on the docks—they all thought it would go on forever. The steel ships marched along, oblivious to their fate, as if nothing could change so long as they put their heads down and kept working. 

Even the waves themselves, which smelled of rust and algae, seemed driven by purpose. These were working waters, and the law students, shirtless and in sunglasses, were idle trespassers at best. Still, it felt as though they’d entered a strange new land and declared themselves kings.

“Are we, uh, safe out here?” Jodie asked.

“The ships will go around us,” Fritz said. “And if they can’t, they’ll let us know.” 

He went about performing captain-like tasks while McGinty popped open the coolers, which were full of Schlitz and High Life and other drugs that I won’t mention here. But the greatest drug of all that day was the sun negating the water, burning off its blue and melting them into dreams and fragrant sweat.

Something about this place, the struggle and unashamed industry, had Barry feeling more at home than he ever could in stuffed classrooms, or at parties with the people he sometimes called friends. He’d grown up in humble flats around Chicago. His family was doing fine, completely fine, but far from rich. His father survived as a salesman, telling other men what they wanted to hear. They were working-class.

For this reason, too, he’d felt an instant connection with Jodie. He’d spotted her on the first day of seminar, and they’d started talking. Her father was a truck driver, a rank-and-file Teamster. They were both pursuing labor law to help people at the bottom. They spoke about important things, all their views aligned, and his mind raced into the future. It’s why he couldn’t understand—and also could—why she chose the rich kid.

Barry had brought them all together at someone else’s party. All the other people present, and she could feel, it seemed, all that he wanted to say to her but wouldn’t. It was too soon, he’d thought. He’d had it all planned, a vague timeline in which everything would proceed perfectly. Yet whenever Fritz held Jodie in his smug crosshairs, Barry felt it all slipping. The more he thrashed against his fading control, the faster it left him. Even Fritz noticed. “You can’t try so hard, man. Just let it happen,” he said, pulling Barry aside near the bathroom. Not right away they started dating. It took a few months. 

Those moments stacked like bricks, convincing Barry that he was living someone else’s story. A sidekick, an accessory. He wore an oozelike film that he couldn’t wash off. Was it his kindness, his willingness to give and not complain? Everything people said they loved about him, yet if they loved him so much, why was he always finishing second?

Blank afternoons in his painful ecstasy, staring across a room or out a window, watching sunlight splinter the world—and the sun was just now doing that same thing over Lake Michigan. Across the boat, Jodie raised a beer bottle to her mouth, and he desired her fiercely.

She and McGinty were listening to Fritz talk about juries. “It’s no secret they don’t want to be there,” he said. “They’re starving for a leader, someone to make things easy. And I don’t mean the foreman. He doesn’t want to be there either. They want to be shepherded to the Promised Land, but you can’t insult their intelligence getting there. That’s the trick. Leading with breadcrumbs. They want to be led but feel like they got there on their own.”

Downey ignored Fritz’s bloviating. He stacked empty bottles into a pyramid until the sway of the boat knocked them down. Then he calmly regathered them and started over. He was the only one not wearing sunglasses, and he squinted painfully at his task.

Music was playing. Someone had brought a portable radio, and instead of interfering with the signal, all the ships and shoreside factories seemed to amplify it. Hypnotic chords draped over them like silks. Jodie reached across the boat and pulled Downey up to dance. They worked their hips against each other and shook their shoulders. Downey closed his eyes, and a careless little grin spread across his face.

That clerkship was really the only good thing Downey had going for him. His family was South Side poor and drowning in debt. His mother was sick, and her doctors had no idea what ailed her. Every couple weeks, they called her back for more tests, then they scratched their heads at her chart and sent her home again. Barry knew all this and understood. He’d lost his own mother two years earlier. Maybe that’s why he’d passed along the clerkship opportunity. But right then he wasn’t exactly bubbling with sympathy.

“Quit rocking the damn boat,” he said.

Fritz agreed. “You can’t both dance at once. You can dance one after the other, but not at the same time.”

The music kept playing. But if you sank down low enough, you could hear instead the soft wet steady slap of the lake against the hull. It sounded like a meek, tireless boy begging to come in.

And to answer your question, yes, they were all thrown from the boat. Not right at that moment, but later, as they were returning to the docks. Fritz was steady enough to guide them back up the river mouth, but apparently too drunk and high to tie up properly. They capsized three feet from the pier.

To Barry, going into the greasy water felt like being born. The swirling and tumbling, light and dark trading places. A tangle of ropes and former personal objects fell around him as the water’s filth rose like dust motes. 

The water was impossibly loud. It blasted and bellowed inside his ears. Except, he realized, it wasn’t the water making noise. A passing ore hauler was gifting them with its wake. Barry broke the dark green surface only to be sucked back under. None of them wore life jackets.

Eventually they made it out and stood dripping on the warped, mossy pier under Coast Guard blankets as the officers took their statements. All of them except Downey, who smacked his head against the hull, passed out, and drowned. Technically blood loss could’ve gotten him first. Point is, he died down there in the water.

Often, Barry thinks of that day. Guilt and horror, his cowardice riding him like a stain. Yet, beneath all that, a secret thrill. There in the water—tumbling blind, lungs burning, waves exploding over and through him—he made a choice. He decided that he would make it out. Knew he’d been given the reins, that it was up to him. What a glowing sense of purpose. To scramble and struggle, willing oneself onward. He yanked against the water until his hands found the riverwall, a barrier of concrete and flaking steel. He clawed and scraped until his fingers bled. Hung on until a ladder appeared. He pulled himself up.