Night Swimmers (8 page)

She was breathing deeply, but she did not smell the scent of night flowers in the air. She was filled with the satisfaction that came from doing right. She was, at last, the mother she should have been all along—strong and purposeful. And it was not easy these days, she told herself, to be a strong and purposeful mother.

She lost Johnny as he went around the corner and she felt a quick anxiety. She walked faster. When she caught sight of him again, hands in his pockets, head up, she let out her breath like a horse.

She was walking quickly now, out in the open, forgetting that she might have to slip into the shrubbery and hide. Then suddenly Johnny turned up a walkway, and she stopped. She moved silently into the neighboring yard, pausing in the shadows when the moon came from behind the clouds.

When she was safely behind a hedge, she stopped. Johnny was waiting at the foot of the steps. He shifted impatiently, glanced up at the house, wiped his hands on his shirt. When the front door opened, he moved back into the shadows, then he came forward as he saw Arthur step out.

Arthur. Retta’s mouth drew into a sneer as she said the name to herself. At that moment she hated her brother and Arthur equally. The boys spoke to each other quietly, heads together. Arthur must be slipping out too, she thought with the same sense of disgust.

Suddenly the boys started walking away. Arthur shifted a bag of equipment from one arm to the other. Johnny offered to carry it. Arthur shook his head.

Retta was so intent on not losing her brother that she plunged through the hedge, coming out on the other side with swimming motions. She barely felt the scratches on her arms and legs. She scrambled to her feet.

Ahead, Arthur was talking and Johnny nodding in agreement. They won’t get away with this, Retta promised herself. Now Arthur was explaining something in a low voice. Johnny lifted his hand and waved it in a wide arc. He was almost skipping with excitement. He laughed.

Every movement, every word, made Retta angrier, and the more excited Johnny became, the more Retta wanted to ruin that excitement. It was all she could do to keep from running forward, grabbing his arm, and shaking away his joy.

“I’ll teach you not to slip out at night,” she would say. “I won’t have this kind of behavior!” She forgot that it was she herself who had taught him to slip out in the first place.

Johnny and Arthur did not glance back. Johnny was walking sideways now, facing Arthur so he wouldn’t miss anything Arthur said or did. Retta was moving through the yards, keeping close to trees and shrubbery even though she felt Johnny would not notice her even if she walked openly in the street.

The street came to a dead end, and the boys cut through a vacant lot. Retta moved closer. Without the street lights it was harder to keep them in sight.

Retta stumbled over a child’s lawn mower that had been left in the weeds. She fell forward. She remained face down for a moment, afraid they might have heard her.

When she raised her head, she saw they were moving up the hill, unaware of anything but themselves. “I could have broken my neck and they wouldn’t notice,” she muttered as she got to her feet. Her eyes were hard, her lips set.

Up the hill the boys were now in the clearing. They moved to the top of the hill and paused. Retta stooped and began to crawl toward them. There were few bushes and no trees, and she was determined not to be noticed until she was ready. Still stooping, she moved around the hill and came up behind them.

Arthur and Johnny were bent forward, backs to her, when she came over the crest of the hill. She eased herself onto her stomach and lay watching them.

Their backs hid what they were doing, but Retta did not dare move closer. They had some sort of plastic dry cleaning bag—she could see that—and Johnny was holding one end in the air.

“Is that right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Arthur was kneeling, striking matches, shielding them from the evening breeze with his hand. He was lighting something. Retta got to her knees. She had to see what he was doing.

In the opening of the plastic bag was a wire circle with narrow strips of wood across it. The strips of wood were covered with little candles. Arthur lit the candles quickly, lighting new matches from the burning candles. When all the candles were lit, the bag began to fill with hot air.

Retta stood. She was glad they were playing with fire because that was something no mother allowed.

The bag was filled now. The candles glowed eerily in the night. “It’s getting ready to go,” Arthur said. Johnny stepped back, hands clasped together with excitement.

Retta took one step forward as the bag rose into the air. Her shoulders were straight. The fact that what the boys were doing could be dangerous gave her extra strength. With her hands on her hips, she started across the clearing.

The bag was rising rapidly now, shooting up into the cool night air. Both boys’ faces were turned skyward.

Retta moved toward them. She was not running. She had all the time in the world.

“Look how high it is!” Johnny cried. At that moment Retta reached him. She paused a moment, watching him. His hands were clasped beneath his chin, his face turned upward.

Abruptly Retta grabbed him by the upper arm and spun him around. “What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped.

Johnny’s mouth fell open. He drew back instinctively. Retta clutched his arm tighter.

“I said what are you doing?”

Johnny had no answer. His mouth had gone dry. His knees were weak. He drew in a long, shuddering breath as if it were his last.

Retta pointed to the hot-air bag. It was descending now down the hill. It hovered over a tree and then rose as the candles reheated the air. Retta had a renewed flash of anger that the candles had not set the tree on fire. That would have really proved her point.

Arthur moved toward them then, and Retta turned back to her brother. She shook him as fiercely as an animal shakes its prey. Johnny did not struggle. He allowed himself to be shaken.

Suddenly Retta wanted to make his actions look as bad as possible. She leaned forward, including Arthur in her dark glance. “What are you trying to do?” she yelled. “Burn down the whole city?”

“I
DON’T SEE WHAT
you’re so upset about,” Arthur was saying. The three of them were walking down the sidewalk with Retta in the lead. “We didn’t do any harm.”

“You almost caught a tree and a house on fire,” Retta said. “You don’t think that’s harm?”

She had been determined at first not to speak to Arthur at all in order to show her contempt for him, but she had not been able to do that. She was condescending to answer his questions now, but over her shoulder, as if he were a servant.

“I don’t get it,” Arthur went on. “It’s all right for your brothers to slip out at night with
you,
but—”

“I
don’t start fires,” she said.

“I don’t either. Did I start a fire?” When Retta did not answer, he directed the question to Johnny. “Did we start a fire?”

He turned to look at Johnny, who was trailing behind them, but Johnny did not look up.

“You did not start a fire,” Retta said in what she considered a mature voice, “because you were fortunate enough to have the candles burn out in the air.”

Johnny was walking slower now. With each step he fell farther behind. His head sank forward in misery. The backs of his legs had a weak feeling that made walking difficult.

Retta’s appearance at the very moment of his triumph had been as shocking and sudden as that of a wicked witch. Indeed, she had been so witchlike in her actions and voice that it had seemed a remake of that scene in
The Wizard of Oz
when the Wicked Witch of the West appears in a puff of red smoke.

He had a helpless feeling. It was as if he were a puppet, and his sister would always be there, pulling the strings, spying on him, waiting for just the right moment to leap forward and spoil his life.

Ahead, Arthur was saying, “I don’t see why you have to treat your brothers like prisoners!”

“You
wouldn’t,” Retta said over her shoulder. Then, realizing she had made a mistake, she added quickly, “Anyway, I do
not
treat them like prisoners.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I do not!”

She swirled suddenly to face him. Caught off-guard, Arthur almost bumped into her.

“I happen to be in charge of my brothers,” Retta said. Her hands were on her hips now. She felt strong enough, mature enough, to be put on a Mother’s Day card. “I cook for them and I wash their clothes and I see that they go to bed and I even do their homework for them, and they are not prisoners!”

“And do you think for them too?”

Retta turned abruptly. She began walking rapidly down the sidewalk.

“Look, I didn’t mean to upset you,” Arthur said.

“You couldn’t upset me.”

“It’s just that we really weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“Huh!”

“Anyway, what we were doing wasn’t any worse than swimming in somebody’s pool without permission.”

“That’s
your
opinion.”

Johnny was lagging even farther behind. As soon as he had heard Arthur use the word “prisoner,” he had realized that was what he was. Tears stung his eyes, and he was grateful for the dark and for the distance between him and Arthur.

He realized that his friendship with Arthur was ruined—it had been too good to be true anyway—but he did not want Arthur to see him cry. To see him treated like a baby was bad enough. He began to drag his feet on the sidewalk, pausing every now and then to stand, arms hanging, and look at the ground.

“Isn’t that your house?” Retta asked Arthur over her shoulder.

“Yes.”

“Well, shouldn’t you go in? We would like to walk home by ourselves, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. I’m not one of your brothers, you know. You can’t boss me around.”

Arthur stopped and waited for Johnny to join him. Johnny, head down, said, “Go on in. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Well, I just don’t feel right about what happened,” Arthur said, lowering his voice.

“Me either.”

“If only your sister would listen to reason.”

“She won’t.”

“It’s not like we did anything wrong.”

“I know, but that’s the way she is.”

“Stop talking about me,” Retta snapped. She was standing apart from them, waiting. She kept her back to them as if they were too unimportant to notice.

“Well, that
is
the way you are,” Johnny said. Arthur’s presence at his side made him feel stronger.

He glanced up at Arthur for the first time since his sister’s arrival. “Everything always has to be her way. She always has to be the boss.”

“I got that.”

“Nothing we want matters.”

Arthur glanced at Retta’s unyielding back. He said, “Well, maybe she really cares about you guys, only she just doesn’t know how to—”

Retta spun around, eyes blazing. With the moonlight shining on her, she looked taller than either of the boys. She looked at Arthur with such loathing that he moved back a step.

“Don’t you dare say anything nice about me!” she yelled.

R
ETTA KNEW SOMETHING WAS
wrong as soon as she rounded the corner of her block. The porch light was on, and a strange car was parked in front of their house.

“Something’s happened,” she said. She began to run up the hill toward the house.

Behind her Arthur and Johnny sensed something too. They moved faster, closing the distance between them. The three of them reached the porch steps at the same time, but Retta beat them through the front door. It was she who saw the colonel first.

She stopped so abruptly that Johnny bumped into her and shoved her to the center of the room. Then Johnny saw the colonel too and drew back, leaving Retta standing alone. He had only had a brief look at the colonel before—and the colonel had been wearing shorty pajamas at the time—but he knew this was the colonel. He let out his breath in a long, uneasy sigh.

The colonel sat with his hands on his legs in a pose that looked military. Beside him, crumpled into a ball, lay Roy. He had cried himself to sleep and now lay still, wrapped in one of the colonel’s flannel shirts, drawing an occasional shuddering breath.

Roy had been, from that first illegal swim, afraid of the colonel. It was the kind of unreasonable fear usually saved for ghosts and wolves and two-headed giants. And in his one dramatic meeting with the colonel tonight, the colonel had seemed to live up to expectations.

The colonel had been so big, so stern, so all-powerful as he stood above Roy that Roy had quivered with fear. His hands, reaching for him, had looked as big as hams, and his eyes seemed to glow red.

At the same time Roy himself seemed to be shrinking. It was as dramatic a sensation as something out of science fiction. He could actually feel himself getting smaller. He half expected to disappear.

This miracle had not happened, however, and he found himself forced into the colonel’s house, forced into dry clothes (that was how he thought of it), forced to tell his name and address. Then—this was worse than being arrested—he was driven home.

As the car had pulled up to the curb in front of his house, Roy had had a brief hope that the colonel would let him go with a stern warning. He tried to get out of the car with a strangled, “Thank you for the ride,” but politeness did not work.

The colonel unbuckled his seat belt. He got out of the car. On the way up the walk the colonel said the most terrible words Roy had ever heard in his life: “I want to talk to your father.”

Now Retta looked from the colonel to Roy. When her eyes met the colonel’s a second time, she straightened her shoulders. “What happened?”

“Are you his sister?”

“Yes. I take care of him.”

“You weren’t taking very good care of him tonight. He almost drowned.”

“What?”

“He came swimming alone. He jumped into the deep end of the pool and he can’t swim. If I hadn’t been there, he would have drowned.”

“Oh, no.”

Retta stood in the center of the room. She felt as if the middle part of the room had suddenly shifted, leaving her off-balance. She reached out for something to steady her, but she felt only air.