Drake’s as wrong about the camp as he is in the head. The other boys don’t seem all that troubled to me. Mostly just bored guys who’ve taken to slouching since their foreheads went greasy. I’ve only seen one switchblade and two Playboys and for the most part, the humidity keeps everyone in the shade talking about tits and carburetors. Most days we just get out of running laps by hiding behind a broken-down Partridge Family–looking bus and smoking butts we find crushed in the tire treads. Sometimes we dig a hole for what they say’ll be a new pool. Sometimes we kick a ball around that’s as soft and useless as an old udder. And the farm animals are nothing more than some goats that’ll ram you if you don’t give up your Doritos fast enough.
I play like I’m interested in the things the guys concern themselves with: pacing out a baseball diamond, bragging on how to hot-wire a car, claiming I’ve seen a girl’s privates in the light of day. But the old swimming pool’s what calls my name, even though it’s got a thin slime of slippery green all around the vinyl liner and no slide to speak of. I spend most of my time there, under the charge of a fatty named Troy, who’s got a glass eye and a goiter and shows me how to clean the filters.
“Gotta pull them leaves up and out, up and out,” he says, like it’s some kind of calculus problem. “Reach in there good, Mickey, and pull them leaves up and out.”
I’m there mostly for the rodents. I found a bloated weasel one day, a slick chipmunk the next, a waterlogged squirrel like a girl’s wet ponytail down by the drain yesterday. As interesting looking as they are drowned, I prefer to find them alive. To reach in with that long, rusted net and strain them out like macaroni, flip them over a fence where they can dry out in the ragweed and catch their breath. Nothing worse than thinking about them swimming all night. Treading water by the light of the moon, scraping their tiny claws against the green sides. That really gets to me. So, I try to find Troy first thing in the morning. Last Thursday I gave my Cheetos to a rabbit that’d been doing laps for who knows how long.
Troy’s as ugly as they come. His one good eye is as dumb as a cow’s, and his fake one just stares out at nothing like a swirly planet I should know by now. Sometimes he takes out his glass eye when he swims. Just pops it out like a little wet saucer and puts it in a groove on the picnic table. I watch the eye while it watches Troy while Troy watches the backs of boys playing Wiffle ball as he floats around like a colorless turd in the Oklahoma sun.
My father had a green thumb. “He could grow anything,” my mother sometimes says. “Except a pair,” Drake always says back. In our backyard, you can still see where the old tomato plants laced themselves around the wire fence, the black vines of last year snagged like dead snakes. My dad could grow tomatoes as big as grapefruits, as red as blood. “They’re just like people, Mickey,” he’d say. “The more bullshit you feed them, the stronger they end up.” Sometimes he’d eat them straight from the garden, like apples. He carried a saltshaker in his pocket from July to September and when he saw a ripe one, he’d just pluck it right from the vine and start tapping out some table salt on it before a rabbit or squirrel could beat him to it. “Your dad is weird as hell,” a friend once said, looking out my bedroom window. “You’re weird as hell,” I repeated that night to my dad. “Everyone says so.” My mother had cried at that. Right there at the dinner table, with her face in her palms like I’d finally learned the truth. But my dad didn’t flinch. In fact, he apologized. He said sorry, plain and calm, then ate the rest of his meal in peace. Then he said it again as he washed the dishes and again before bed. My father said sorry enough times that night to convince me he was wrong and everyone else was right.
Drake asks me how everything’s panning out over at Bar None. I don’t tell him the place’d be better named Bar Nothing-to-Do ’cause he’d quit paying the fifteen dollars a day to send me there. I just tell him we’re digging an Olympic-size pool and that I’ve learned to lasso a heifer. I tell him my counselor makes us eat dirt if we cop out on our push-ups. I tell him I had to run a mile with a cement block duct-taped to my back. I probably shouldn’t exaggerate. It just makes Drake think he’s the best thing since sliced pizza and it makes my mother fill that beanbag ashtray on her knee with one half-smoked Misty after another. But I like going. I like getting up every day at six and walking to the 7-Eleven where the sawed-off bus comes to pick me and a bunch of losers up. I like the early morning, the way the creeping heat feels like a word on the tip of my tongue, the way a Lucky Strike goes with powdered donuts, the way no one says a thing as the bus bounces through the cottonwoods like a rusty mattress.
Troy’s studying to get on Jeopardy! He keeps trivia books in the screen house and when the sun gets to his neck and the twelve noon heat rash breaks over the collar of one of his two Hawaiian shirts he starts up with the flash cards.
“Did you know George Washington had a dog named Sweet Lips?” He puts bug spray on his toes, says that’s where a vampire bat would bite if it had the chance. His breasts hang low like a woman’s. “Or that Teddy Roosevelt had a guinea pig named Father O’Grady and a snake named Emily Spinach?”
Troy pinches himself into an old lawn chair, lets his swim trunks ride up tight around his groin in a way that looks like torture. He licks his thumb to peel through the cards, sweats like he’s breaking a fever. Something about him is too damn kind. I eat Raisinets slow in the shady stench of sunscreen and wonder if Troy has ever been laid.
“Calvin Coolidge,” Troy offers, “had his head rubbed with Vaseline while he ate breakfast in bed.”
I don’t clue Troy in that this sort of bullshit isn’t on Jeopardy! “What else?” I say.
He tells me that rats and horses don’t vomit, that rubber bands last longer if refrigerated, that during an hour’s swim at a municipal pool, the average person ingests a half liter of urine.
“Is ours a municipal pool?” I ask.
“No,” Troy says. “And don’t make it one.”
I look out at the other guys playing football. It’s supposed to be touch, but all I see is tackle. One kid’s face has been rubbed in the dust so he looks like the kind of person Drake would strangle. Troy takes a dainty sip from a thermos. I bet my chocolate raisins he knows how to knit.
“And believe it or not,” Troy continues, “the closest relative to the Tyrannosaurus rex is the common chicken.”
I snort, flick three candies out to melt on the concrete like rabbit pellets, hope to attract some ants that’ll have Troy spraying Raid like a nervous housewife. “That’s a crock,” I respond.
“No,” Troy says, holding up a card. “It’s true.”
“Who gives a shit?” I ask.
“Language,” Troy reminds. “And I do,” he adds. “I give a shoot.”
Drake says I look awful pale for a boy who’s outside all day. I tell him we’re painting the inside of a barn. That I spend all my time up in the rafters with a can of whitewash trying to breathe through the bird crap. That I’m lucky I haven’t died from histoplasmosis. He says that sounds productive, but then he frowns; something in his eyes glints a warning at me, a flash of minnow on muddy brown. “And who’s teaching you big words like that?”