It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of flooding — as we had seen — it was also the safest. “You didn’t know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?” he asked me. “Real estate’s about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location.”
Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We’d get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we’d think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we’d both end up shrieking like hyenas. The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad’s opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of Little Hobart Street. One of his friends came up with the phrase. “health epidemic,” and they were going on to the parents and lifeguards that we needed to be ejected to prevent an outbreak at the pool. Brian and I decided to leave. As we were walking away, Ernie Goad came up to the chain-link fence. “Go on home to the garbage dump!” he shouted. His voice was shrill with triumph. “Go on, now, and don’t come back!”
A week later, with the heat still holding, I ran into Dinitia Hewitt downtown. She had just come from the pool and had her wet hair pulled back under a scarf. “Brother, that water felt good,” she said, drawing out the word. “good” so it sounded like it had about fifteen Os in it. “Do you ever go swimming?”
“They don’t like us to go there,” I said.
Dinitia nodded, even though I hadn’t explained. Then she said. “Why don’t you come swimming with us in the morning?”
By. “us” I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time — technically, at least — but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was.
I surely wanted to get back in that water, but I couldn’t help but feel that if I took Dinitia up on her offer, I’d be violating some sort of taboo. “Wouldn’t anybody get mad?” I asked.
“’Cause you’re white?” she asked. “Your own kind might, but we won’t. And your own kind won’t be there.”
The next morning I met Dinitia in front of the pool entrance, my thrift-shop one-piece rolled inside my frayed gray towel. The white girl clerking the entrance booth gave me a surprised look when we passed through the gate, but she said nothing. The women’s locker room was dark and smelled of Pine-Sol, with cinder-block walls and a wet cement floor. A soul tune was blasting out of an eight-track tape player, and all the black women packed between the peeling wooden benches were singing and dancing to the music.
In the locker rooms I’d been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness and wrapped towels around their waists before slipping off their underpants, but here most of the women were buck-naked. Some of them were skinny, with angular hips and jutting collarbones. Others had big pillowy behinds and huge swinging breasts, and they were bumping their butts together and pushing their breasts up against each other as they danced.
As soon as the women saw me, they stopped dancing. One of the naked ones came over and stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, her breasts so close I was terrified her nipples were going to touch me. Dinitia explained that I was with her and that I was good people. The women looked at one another and shrugged.
I was going on thirteen and self-conscious, so I planned to slip my bathing suit on underneath my dress, but I worried this would only make me more conspicuous, so I took a deep breath and stepped out of my clothes. The scar on my ribs was about the size of my outstretched hand, and Dinitia noticed it immediately. I explained that I had gotten it when I was three, and that I’d been in the hospital for six weeks getting skin grafts, and that was why I never wore a bikini. Dinitia ran her fingers lightly over the scar tissue. “It ain’t so bad,” she said.
“Hey, ‘Nitia!” one of the women shouted. “Your white friend’s got a red bush coming in!”
“What did you expect?” Dinitia asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “Collar got to match the cuffs.”
It was a line I’d heard Dinitia use. She smiled at it, and the women all shrieked with laughter. One of the dancers bumped her hip up against me. I felt welcome enough to give a saucy bump back.
Dinitia and I stayed in the pool all morning, splashing, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly. She flailed around in the water almost as much as I did. We stood on our hands and stuck our legs out of the water, did underwater twists, and played Marco Polo and chicken with the other kids. We climbed out to do cannonballs and watermelons off the side, making big geyserlike splashes intended to drench as many people sitting poolside as possible. The blue water sparkled and churned white with foam. By the time the free swim was over, my fingers and toes were completely wrinkled, and my eyes were red and stinging from the chlorine, which was so strong it wafted up from the pool in a vapor you could practically see. I’d never felt cleaner.
THAT AFTERNOON I WAS alone in the house, still enjoying the itchy, dry feeling of my chlorine-scoured skin and the wobbly-bone feeling you get from a lot of exercise, when I heard a knock on the door. The noise startled me. Almost no one ever visited us at 93 Little Hobart Street. I opened the door a few inches and peered out. A balding man carrying a file folder under his arm stood on the porch. Something about him said government — a species Dad had trained us to avoid.
“Is the head of the household in?” he asked.
“Who wants to know?” I said.
The man smiled the way you do to sugarcoat bad news. “I’m with child welfare, and I’m looking for either Rex or Rose Mary Walls,” he said.
“They’re not here,” I said.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“Can I come in?”
I could see he was trying to peer behind me into the house. I pulled the door all the way closed except for a crack. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t want me to let you in,” I said. “Until they talk to their attorney,” I added to impress him. “Just tell me what it is you’re after, and I’ll pass on the message.”
The man said that someone whose name he was not at liberty to disclose had called his office recommending an inquiry into conditions at 93 Little Hobart Street, where it was possible that dependent children might be living in a state of neglect.
“No one’s neglecting us,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure, mister.”
“Dad work?”
“Of course,” I said. “He does odd jobs. And he’s an entrepreneur. He’s developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal safely and efficiently.”