It was the first dead body of the
season of boy swimmers. White
as chattering teeth, a mannish poise in its death glide, blue eyes
a sassy match with the color of the pool water, lips puckered up
into one last kiss, one last time. The janitor was driving
to fill his tank up, tapping the gas, coaxing the engine, a sucker
these past months for the a.m. deejay’s best summer heartache
voice, his hottest lovesick twang. He’d inched up a
few miles on the speedometer when the pool rose up on the side
of the road, the dead body opening up its wild blue yonder arms.
Afterward he almost couldn’t remember if the sight of it was
a dream or something whispered two stalls away in the train station
bathroom when he was taking a crap. All he knew was that a group
of men from city maintenance came and dredged the groundskeeper, Dale
Clemons, up from the pool at Bay Park. A group of men in greasy
caps and gray sagging khakis, murmurous and thin-lipped, speaking the
death language of abortive sentences. A group of men meticulously
scraping the rusted leaves off Clemons’ ashen cheeks the morning the
janitor discovered the plantation ledger in the back seat of his
new car.
He’d just gotten hired at the elementary school as head custodian. He’d
overheard some smart asses bragging around the school playground about
seeing the man floating like a sail at the shallow end when they were
walking to school in the morning. His body was sucked clean,
and his keys bobbed up from the water a few feet from his fingers like
he was going to reach over and grab them at any moment. The mortician
never could stick his face together in time for the funeral. His
artistry too modest, hands too shaky to tame the water-addled devolutions,
meet the challenges of cratering, palsied flesh. Ashes to ashes
he said, shaking his head, retiring his glue brush dolefully as he
turned away Dale’s dumbstruck mother from the closed casket
hours before the funeral.
Municipal closed the pool for a
week out of respect then drained it a few days later, a secret
admirer stealing in one night and laying a single lily by the ledge. The janitor had started parking in
the pool lot when he was fried and couldn’t afford to pay the
nightly for a room at the SRO on Main Street. Sometimes when
he went to sleep early he woke to the sound of white kids clawing at
the fence. Pacing, cussing, their summertime lives suddenly hanging
in the balance because of a rumor that the pool might be closed the
whole three months. In the rear mirror he watched them help each
other over the fence, dropping down onto the dark concrete in military
formation, quiet as death. Some of them brought their skates
and turned the bottom of the pool into a roller derby. Some
of them huddled together in conspiratorial pairs, staring up at the
stars tracing fake constellations, stirring the dirty pile of leaves
in the pool’s drain, reeking of imperial boredom. The
few girls who’d gotten up the nerve to sneak out of the house
loudly ringlead the boys. They had jobs helping their mothers
with the neighbors’ laundry or taking to-go orders at the roadside
burger stands. They had a little pocket money for cigarettes,
candy, wanting to bottle the stench of Dale’s corpse for scratch
and sniff revenge on the white trash gossips who flunked out of gym
and came to school just to instigate about their clothes, their sluttiness,
their rat tail inbred hair.
In the morning the bottom of the
pool would be filled with crushed lipstick stained cigarettes in
a butterfly pattern around the skanky etchings about the stick
up his ass teacher’s pet who’d
suck all night if you turned him loose and the snitch who went behind
the bungalows with Eddie for just a handful of black licorice, not
even red.
He started waiting for the white
kids, fantasizing about shooting off the bb gun he’d found in the principal’s box of confiscated
junk to scare them away. The kiddie visits starting to make him insomniac,
salt-craving. Keeping him wide awake devouring the day from rancid
cafeteria food he’d stolen till he exploded in turkey gravy all
over the backseat of the car. He started counting the kiddies
like sheep. Fat, thin, freckled, bow-legged, buck-teethed, Clairol
blond, brunette. Just as his lids spilled over they came dancing on
his skull, wolf packs of kids he’d never seen before, moving
wordlessly across the parking lot, sneakers crunching in the brown
grass. When the first few made it over the fence he would fall
asleep. A long winter’s nap. Snowflakes dotting
his forehead, melting inside his skin, floating ice hot through his
bloodstream, dumping in great white shit drifts in the backseat,
making milk of his arms and legs as he tried to will himself awake,
too heavy to move, his tongue turned to stone.
Towards the end of the night he
would hear the kiddies rooting under the hood of his car, siphoning
the gas from his gas tank with long thin soda jerk straws. One morning he woke up and the car wouldn’t
start. The gas pedal sat cadaverously under his foot. Antarctic
silence when he turned the ignition. In his mind’s eye
the kiddies waved at him in their omniscience, fat and deliriously
full.
Gas was bread with melted butter,
grilled onions on a cheese steak, rare roast beef sliced thin with
gravy. It was chocolate ice cream on a sweaty summer night. Homemade birthday cake just out of
the oven. The greatest smell in the world. Sweet freedom,
sweet deliverance from the molten armpit heat of the crowds of the
trolley, the beady raptor eyes of the whites gingerly squeezing past
him. New gas stations shimmered from every corner in Dealey. He
got a chill down his spine every time he put the nozzle in the tank
of his first car. The gas sniffing jones roared to epidemic
even though the war had ended and rationing had been discontinued.
Some of the little kids at his school had started to pick up the habit,
the bang, the buzz. His first semester at the school he watched
the elementary kids dither around the playground, blissing out on the
swings hours after a contact gasoline high, the teachers mystified
by their manic-depressive edge at playing hopscotch at P.E., the janitor
left cleaning up a million squashed pieces of chalk that they’d
left behind.
The janitor worked his shift crack,
professional, bathrooms at 4:30, auditorium at 6; swearing to himself
that it was going to be different this time from all the other
jobs he’d gotten fired from. He
had wheels now so he could be on time everyday. He’d make
the rules. Work quadruple hard to silence the ofays, talking
to himself some mornings just so he could hear a human voice, see his
words hanging in the cold wet air. Tall as a beanstalk, flat
feet size thirteens, his hands dug deep into a pair of gloves as he
made his rounds through the schoolyard. He’d taken lately
to lying to himself about who loved him to pass the time, chanting
their names in wreaths that bound his beanstalk body tight as he scrubbed
the eleventh toilet of the morning. He’d taken lately
to writing their made-up initials, casual strangers, men whose faces
blinked out at him from the train, scribbling them into the seat
of his car, a green Pontiac with a vinyl interior scratched up and
pecked out from years of the previous owner transporting her roosters
to cock fights.
In mad love with the car; in mad
love with the green vinyl smell of every inch of it; in made love
with how it could go from 0 to 110 in no seconds flat. The
magic of it sucker-punching him every time he drove down the street
in a flow so smooth he imagined the audience of train strangers
watching him as he went by, admiring his technique, the way he
could brush his teeth with his fingers with one hand, comb his
hair with the other, wipe the sleep crumbs out of the corners of
his eyes in time to catch the first diamond rays of sunrise.
He bought the car from a woman
named Wilkie. She raised cocks
and sold cars for a living. Every month a new car turned up on the
lawn in front of her trailer. She’d kept the engine of
the Pontiac in near mint condition, pitching it to the janitor reverently. She
bragged that it would run into the next century if he babied it, chronicling
the history of each ding on the body for him in dripping detail. The
night I took a rooster with a broken neck to the slaughterhouse, the
time I stopped practically in the middle of an intersection to ream
some drunk country bastard for cutting me off. In between breaths
she knocked back a swallow of brandy to dull the evil throb of a rotting
tooth, her mouth devastated by a hardcore butterscotch candy habit,
a festering wonder to behold when she smiled which was seldom. He
had always wondered about the inside of her trailer, watching the lone
window floating like a jack o’ lantern in the night from the
road. She’d had an on again off again affair with shiftless,
shiny-headed Dale, because he was dull and easy, given to spouting
dirty limericks he could never finish. She did ten laps a day
in the pool when it was open and had been summoned to the police station
to give a statement when they found out that he’d been seen
drinking with her the day he drowned.
--Hell if I know how his ass got
down there, she’d told the
police. –Yeah it was the booze, but then he was real
dumb about certain things too you know, like he wouldn’t put
on the overhead lights when he was cleaning up. Or on his days
off he would eat that greasy crap at the Bledsoe’s and try
and swim right afterward.
When the janitor finally agreed
to buy the car she went over the tires for nails then had him start
it while she checked the oil. After
her inspections she retired to a card table on the grass, haggling
with him down to the last penny, her filmy eyes fixed on his chin as
though she, like everyone else in Dealey, couldn’t be bothered
to raise them to look in his face.
He’d discovered the trove of candy she kept in the back seat
the first night he slept there. He dug through the candy wrappers
and stored them in one of the boxes that he kept in his trunk, classifying
them by flavor, odor, viscosity, by which was popular with the kids
hanging out on Main. It wasn’t until he’d gotten
to a reserve of lemon jawbreakers that he found the plantation ledger,
buried deep in the rump of the cushion smelling like Halloween trick
or treating, its spine hard as white knuckles. There were entries
on every other page, written in a wandering hand that paused for dinner,
to open a window, to straighten a petticoat, to inspect the underside
of a pot, to lunge the tip of a poker into black branded flesh. A
lady’s hand, mindful of proper penmanship, mixing ink with
spit to make it last longer.