Night Swimmers (3 page)

“They
didn’t.
They
hate
me, and I hate
them.”

Shorty Anderson’s eyes were still closed. He was thinking about his song again. He wanted a hit recording more than anything in the world. The closest he had ever come to success was with a song called “My Angel Went to Heaven in a DC-3,” which he had written and recorded just after his wife died.

His wife, Mavis Lynn, had been a singer too, and she had been killed in a plane crash on her way to a state fair in Kentucky. Shorty wrote the song the next night, and within a month it had risen to number thirty-seven on the country-western charts.

Shorty Anderson had been much in demand during that time, and he had had a black satin cowboy outfit made up for his appearances. Within another month the song went off the charts, and Shorty went back to wearing the reds and pinks and purples that he preferred. People still remembered the song, however, and every time he started singing it, there would be a little applause of recognition.

Watching “My Angel Went to Heaven in a DC-3” move up the charts had made him happier than anything else in his life. In his opinion “You’re Fifty Pounds Too Much Woman for Me” could go all the way.

Johnny noticed the faint smile on his father’s face, the same smile that had been there when he first came into the bedroom.

“Dad!”

“What’s wrong now?”

“You’re going back to sleep. You aren’t even listening to me.”

“I’m listening. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!”
He stamped heavily out of the room.

“Johnny!”

Johnny paused in the hall. “What do you want?” he asked in a dejected voice. He did not bother to turn around.

“Is there any coffee?”

“Retta
drank it all,” he said in a hard, accusing voice.

“Well, would you make some more?”

There was a long pause. “I guess,” he said. Shoulders sagging, he went into the kitchen.

Behind him Shorty Anderson began to sing aloud. “If you get eatin’ off of your mind, I’ll get cheatin’ off of mine. I don’t want no extry woman in my aaaaaaarms.”

He sat up and swung his feet off the bed. They did not touch the floor. “Hey, Johnny-Oh! Make me a piece of toast while you’re at it.”

In the kitchen Johnny let his shoulders sag even more. With his mouth turned down as sad as a clown’s, he reached for the instant coffee.

R
OY WAS SITTING AT
the kitchen table making men out of Pillsbury refrigerated dough. He had worked over them so long that they had a gray look. He was now rolling a piece of dough between both hands.

“This man’s going to have a tail and it’s going to be soooo long that you won’t believe it.”

The dough was hanging out the bottom of his hands, swinging back and forth.

“Well, don’t make them too funny looking or Dad won’t want to eat them.” Retta glanced at him. “Roy, did you wash your hands before you started?”

“Yes, I washed my hands before I started,” he said, imitating her tone and wagging his head from side to side.

With great care he attached the tail to the dough man and curled it upward. When the angle of the tail was perfect, he rubbed his hands proudly on his shirt.

“I get the one with the tail,” he said.

He was still looking at his dough men with a fond, pleased smile when Johnny came into the kitchen. “Want to see what I’m making?” Roy asked.

“Nope.”

“I’m making dough men.”

“I’m not going to eat any of them. They’re filthy.” He crossed to where Retta was working at the stove. “What’s for supper?”

“Spaghetti.”

“You call what you make spaghetti?” Johnny asked. “It’s nothing but tomato soup poured over noodles. Real spaghetti has meat in it and onions and a lot of other stuff.”

Retta was never hurt by criticism of her cooking because she herself was always pleased with the results. She got a lot of her ideas from the school cafeteria and from Kraft television commercials.

“Where did you go?” Retta asked. She took a sip of soup to check the flavor, then turned to Johnny. “We came back to get you and you were gone. We found an extra coupon and—”

“And,”
Roy broke in, wanting to tell the important part himself, “since you weren’t there, I got your ride too.” He patted his dough men happily. He wished they wouldn’t keep rising. “Now, stay down,” he told them.

“I went out,” Johnny said in a casual way.

“On
my
ride I got on a giraffe,” Roy said, “and on
your
ride I got on an elephant.”

Johnny remained at Retta’s side. He wanted her to ask him exactly where he had been because he was eager to tell her.

She glanced around him. “Are those ready for the oven?” she asked Roy. “Have you now made every single one as dirty as possible?”

“Want to know where I went?” Johnny asked.

“They’re
not
dirty,” Roy said defensively. He gave each one an extra pat.

“They are too. They’re gray.”

“They’re supposed to be that color, aren’t you, you guys?” He leaned over them.

Retta said, “If you start kissing them, nobody’s going to eat them.”

“I wasn’t going to kiss them,” Roy lied.

In the pause that followed, Johnny said, “In case anybody is interested in what I did this afternoon, I went to the park and helped a boy set off rockets.”

Roy looked up. His mouth fell open. He could not bear it when Johnny or Retta did something without him.

“And
he also makes and flies model airplanes.”

Roy’s mouth formed an O. He was suddenly so jealous of Johnny’s afternoon that as he straightened, he pressed down on one of his dough men, flattening it, and didn’t even notice.

“He flies these airplanes with”—Johnny paused to give importance to his next words—“radio controls.” He now had both Retta’s and Roy’s attention. It was the most satisfying moment he had known in a long time.

“And next time I go over there, he’s going to show me how to work the controls.”

“Johnny,” Roy wailed. “Why didn’t you wait so I could come too?”

Johnny shrugged. Smiling slightly, he turned and started for the door. Even his walk was new and important.

Roy had been kneeling on the kitchen chair so that he could work more efficiently on his dough men. Now he scrambled to the floor. “You’ll let me go next time, won’t you, Johnny?” He followed Johnny to the door. “You’ll let me see the airplanes and the rockets, won’t you?”

“Roy!” Retta’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I thought you wanted to watch your dough men cook.”

Roy paused in the doorway. His face was twisted with indecision. Retta was putting his dough men into the oven. He had intended to press his face against the oven window and watch the entire process, but now he abandoned the idea. This was more important. He ran after Johnny.

“Roy!” Retta called.

“Not now!”

Roy followed Johnny to the front porch. His excited pleas floated back through the house to where Retta stood at the stove. “Please take me, Johnny. And if you do, you can have the dough man with the tail.”

Retta slammed the oven door shut and leaned against the stove. After a moment she began to push at the noodles with her spoon. The water boiled up around the edge of the pot. Retta felt as if her mind were boiling too.

Her change in mood had been seesaw quick, so abrupt she couldn’t understand it. A moment before she had been happy and satisfied with her day, contentedly letting Roy ruin the biscuits. Now, in some odd way, a balance had shifted and she was down.

She slapped the spoon against the noodles. She felt her bad spirits deepen.

This had nothing to do with the fact, she told herself, that Johnny had gone off and made a new friend. And it was not that Roy was out on the porch, begging and pleading, turning Johnny into some kind of supreme being just because he had a friend who made airplanes. It was that she wasn’t appreciated, she decided abruptly. No one in the whole family appreciated her.

On the porch Roy was making one of his solemn promises. “I’ll do anything in the whole world if you’ll just take me with you.”

Retta lifted a spoonful of noodles and let them fall back into the water, not noticing that they were done. It seemed like a long time since Roy had begged
her
for anything other than food.

Shorty Anderson came into the kitchen doing a clog step. In his high-heeled boots he was two inches taller than his daughter; without them, an inch shorter.

“Supper ready, honey?”

“Almost,” she said in an unhappy voice.

“Mmmmmm, looks good.” Shorty Anderson was always cheerful in the evening when he was shaved, showered, dressed, and ready to go to his job at the Downtown Hoedown. He opened the oven door and glanced at Roy’s dough men. “What are them things?”

“Dough men.”

“Hooey! How many dads in this whole world are lucky enough to be having dough men for supper?” He danced around her.

She did not answer. Holding the pot with dish towels, she carried it to the sink. As she drained the water, she spilled a few drops of boiling water on her hand. Her throat swelled with tears.

Shorty Anderson looked over her shoulder. “I could eat that whole thing,” he said.

“You always say that—”

“I mean it too.”

“—and then you take about three bites and get up and leave.”

“I have to, hon. Short people can’t eat like other people.”

Retta dumped the noodles in a bowl and poured the tomato soup over them. She stared at the dish disgustedly.

Shorty watched his daughter. He knew something was making her unhappy, just as he had known that morning that Johnny was unhappy. However, he never interfered. After all, he hadn’t interfered with Johnny, and now, only eight hours later, Johnny was on the porch, problems solved, happy as a bug. Besides, if he asked Retta what was wrong, she might tell him.

“Dish me up a great big plateful,” he said, hugging her. “Even if I can’t eat it all, it makes me feel good to have a lot.”

He sat at the table and began to spread paper napkins over his purple cowboy suit to protect it from spills. It took eight napkins. If he only used seven—he knew this from experience—he would spill something on that one uncovered spot.

“Boys,” he called cheerfully, “soup’s on!”

Retta slammed the bowl on the table. The noodles trembled. “It’s not
soup!”
Retta said. The tears moved up from her throat to her eyes. “It’s
spaghetti!”

Shorty looked up in surprise from the safety of his paper napkins. “I know that, darling.” He began to serve himself, taking more than he wanted. “Hmm-mmmmm,” he said as the steam reached his face. He tucked his napkins more securely around him and began to eat.

“And what’s more, I need
seventeen dollars!”
Retta said, leaning over the table toward her father.

“Well, hon, you can have it. I get paid tomorrow.”

At that Retta burst into tears, ran from the kitchen into her room, and slammed the door. The door didn’t catch and opened again, banging against the wall.

Through the open door she heard Shorty Anderson say, “Clean your plates now, boys. Retta’s touchy tonight.”

This time when she slammed the door, it stayed shut.

“S
OMEBODY’S SPYING ON US
,” Johnny said in a low voice. He reached across the water for Retta’s arm.

It was the next night. The Anderson kids were in the Roberts’s swimming pool. They were floating in the black inner tubes Retta had gotten, and they were holding on to each other so that they made a three-leaf clover in the center of the pool.

“Isn’t this fun?” Retta had been saying as they turned in formation. “Don’t you like your inner tubes?” She was trying to be especially bright and cheerful tonight to hide the fact that she was miserable. Also she wanted the evening to be a special success because Johnny hadn’t wanted to come. “Aren’t you having a good time, Johnny?”

“It’s all right,” Johnny had answered. He
was
enjoying himself, but he was not going to let Retta know that. For the first time in his life he felt superior to his sister. He had
consented
to come—that was the way he thought of it.

He certainly was not going to jump up and down like Roy, screaming, “Inner tubes! Inner tubes!” After all, inner tubes were just old tires.

“Do you like your inner tube?” Retta had asked.

“I said it’s all right.”

Johnny could hardly believe that just getting a friend—even a fascinating friend who made rockets and airplanes—could make such a difference in his life.

Johnny had been seven years old when his mother died, and he had mourned her more than anyone. He would go into her closet and sit for hours hunched among her high-heeled boots, his face buried in the folds of her western outfits. He would dry his tears on her skirts before he crawled out.

After those first terrible weeks he had started clinging to the only person available—Retta. He had clung as tightly as a person in a storm, but now, some how, he felt the storm was finally over. He felt he was stepping out into a world that actually welcomed him. It was while he was enjoying his inner tube and this new security that he had noticed a figure by the garage. With his words, “Somebody’s spying on us,” the good feeling left him. He was, once again, a skinny kid in a patched inner tube, swimming illegally in the colonel’s pool.

“Where?” Retta asked. She glanced up immediately at the darkened windows of the house. “I don’t see anybody.”

“Not there. There!” He pointed with one dripping arm to the garage.

“I still don’t see anybody,” Retta said.

There was a light that burned over the garage doors, casting a pale light on the driveway and bushes. Moths, drawn by the light, flitted around the bulb.

“Well, somebody was there a minute ago,” Johnny said. “I saw them.”

“Let’s go home,” Roy wailed. Being spied on, something he had never even thought about before, suddenly became the scariest thing there was.

“Oh, Johnny’s just seeing things,” Retta said. “Let’s go around in our inner tubes again, want to? And this time—” She broke off because she, too, saw the figure moving behind the shrubbery. She paused in the water. Her long legs, which had been trailing behind her, sank like weights.