Night Swimmers Read online

  She stood for a moment in the doorway. The living room was a mess. The furniture was faded and worn. Newspapers and letters, some crumbled into fist-sized balls, lay on the rugless floor. The corner with the plastic leather armchair, her father’s corner, was littered with plates piled with cigarette butts, half-filled coffee cups, and empty beer cans.

  Retta was beginning to realize what a mess the house was, but she didn’t know what to do about it. “We need a vacuum cleaner,” she decided suddenly and felt better. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and began to leaf through the newspaper.

  “What are we going to do today?” Roy asked. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He was happy because there had been no further mention of diets. Retta had even fixed his favorite, peanut butter toast, for breakfast. He pulled his jeans up higher on his hips and walked into the room.

  “I’m looking for possibilities now,” she said. She paused to work out her horoscope.

  “We can’t go swimming tonight because it’s raining.”

  “I know that.”

  “So what are we going to do? I want to do something.” He forgot his good fortune about the diet and broke into a whine.

  “What you’re going to do, if you don’t shut up, is wake Dad and you’ll be very, very sorry.”

  “But what are we going to do?” he whispered.

  “Maybe we’ll go to Sears and play TV Ping-Pong.”

  “The salesman’s too mean.”

  “We’ll wait till he’s on his coffee break or something. Is Johnny up?”

  “I’ll wake him.”

  Roy loved to wake people. He had his own method, which he considered kind and considerate. He simply breathed on them until they opened their eyes. He hurried from the room, the legs of his jeans brushing together as he ran.

  He went into the bedroom and leaned on the bed. It sank with the pressure of his elbows. He bent over Johnny.

  Johnny stirred with irritation. “Get away from me,” he said without opening his eyes.

  “It’s me—Roy.”

  “I know it’s you, peanut butter breath,” Johnny snarled. He turned over. “Now get off my bed.”

  “It’s my bed too!”

  Roy hesitated. He was disappointed. He remained with his elbows on the bed, staring at Johnny’s back. A breeze blew in the window, and Roy glanced over at the billowing curtains. A heavy, sweet smell filled the room.

  The Bowlwater plant, Roy thought. His frown disappeared. A slight smile came over his face.

  To Roy, the Bowlwater plant was the most enormous bush in the world, something out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Any plant that could produce such a strong, fascinating smell, a smell Roy associated with the Orient, that plant had to have leaves as big as bed sheets and flowers like tubas. No one had ever explained to Roy that the Bowlwater plant was a factory that made chemicals, and when the wind blew from the southwest, it brought the smell of chemicals with it.

  Roy’s ambition was to see the Bowlwater plant, climb on it, slide down the leaves, and later—when he got a piece of paper big enough—to draw a picture of it.

  He looked at Johnny again. He said, “Want to smell the Bowlwater plant? Open your eyes and you can.” He spoke in the voice he used in kindergarten when Miss Elizabeth said, “Let’s use our indoor voices, boys and girls.”

  Johnny yanked the sheet up over his head. He flopped over, writhing with irritation.

  Roy was irritated too. He abandoned his gentle methods. He said, “You better get up if you want to go with me and Retta.” He stood up and waited, hands on hips.

  “Where are you going?” Johnny asked without removing the sheet.

  “We’re going to Sears and play TV Ping-Pong.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “All right, we just will.” He started from the room. “But don’t blame me if we have a good time and you don’t.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’m going. I just don’t want you to blame me if—”

  “Get out!”

  Roy was discontent. Even the mysterious scent of the Bowlwater plant could not soothe him now. “He won’t get up,” he told Retta. He waited in the doorway, watching Retta hopefully.

  Retta had always been his daytime mother. Even when his real mother was alive, it had been Retta who looked after him. He admired her most when she acted like the mothers he saw in grocery stores, mothers who shook their kids and said things like, “You touch another can, and I’ll can you!” That was mothering.

  He wanted Retta to put her maternal skills to use now. He wanted her to pull Johnny out of the bed by his ear. “You’ll play Ping-Pong or I’ll Ping-Pong you!”

  Retta remained on the floor. She began to tear a coupon from the newspaper. “Hey, there’s a merry-go-round at the mall. With this,” she waved the coupon in the air, “and a sales slip from Murphy’s you can ride free.”

  “But do we have a sales slip?” Roy took two steps into the room.

  “We’ll fish one out of the trash can, if we have to.”

  Roy’s excitement rose. “Let’s don’t tell Johnny, all right? And when we get home you can say, ‘Listen, you wouldn’t get up when Roy called you,’ and he’ll say, ‘I didn’t know there was a merry-go-round,’ and you can say—”

  “Come on. The rain’s stopping.”

  They walked out the door and paused on the top step. Roy inhaled deeply. “I smell the Bowlwater plant,” he told Retta. Visions of the plant rose again in his mind, the trumpetlike blossoms blowing out odor like music. “Can you walk to the Bowlwater plant?” he asked.

  “No, it’s too far.”

  “Can you go on the bus?”

  “I think so.”

  “Someday,” he promised himself, “I’m going there.”

  JOHNNY LAY IN BED. He heard the front door slam, and he threw back the sheet as if he were going to get up and run after Roy and Retta. Instead he lay staring up at the ceiling.

  He felt a deep resentment at Retta and Roy for going off without him. Even though he had said he didn’t want to go, they should have begged him. The thought that if he hurried he could still catch them made him even angrier.

  He got up slowly and walked into the living room. He could see Retta and Roy waiting at the edge of the porch. “I thought you’d gone,” he said, drawing his mouth into a sneer.

  Retta turned. “The rain’s stopped. You want to come to the mall with us? There’s a merry-go-round.”

  “But we’ve only got one coupon,” Roy said importantly. “So only one of us gets to ride and that’s me, isn’t that right, Retta?”

  “We can get another coupon if—”

  “Only babies ride on merry-go-rounds,” Johnny said.

  Roy’s mouth fell open. He was stung by the insult. He turned to Retta. “That’s not true, is it? He’s just saying that, isn’t he, because he doesn’t have a coupon and I do?”

  Johnny started into the kitchen. He was aware that Roy was probably making a face at him through the screen door but he did not turn around.

  “We’ll be back soon,” Retta called.

  “I don’t care if you never come back,” Johnny grumbled. He opened the refrigerator door, took out the milk, and drank directly from the carton, something Retta did not allow them to do. Then he walked into his father’s room.

  He looked down at his father. Shorty Anderson was lying on the bed in his underwear. There was a faint smile on his face.

  “Dad?”

  Shorty Anderson did not move. He was half asleep and he was dreaming about the new song he had written and recorded the week before. It was called “You’re Fifty Pounds Too Much Woman for Me.” In his dream he was singing the chorus at the Grand Ole Opry. “When 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 sang to himself.

  “Dad?”

  Shorty Anderson heard Johnny’s voice, and the Grand Ole Opry began to fade away. He was not there on the
stage in a red satin cowboy shirt with the lights picking up the glitter of the rhinestones. He was here in bed in his dirty underwear. He let the air out of his lungs in a long sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked without opening his eyes. Usually he played a game when the kids came into his room in which he pretended to get their voices mixed up. Roy would become so agitated when his voice was mistaken for Retta’s that he would pry his father’s eyes open to prove his identity. Shorty Anderson wasn’t up to games this morning.

  “Nothing,” Johnny said. “I was just wondering if you were going to get up.”

  “In a little bit.”

  Johnny continued to stand beside his father’s bed. “Retta and Roy went to the mall.”

  “They did?” Shorty Anderson said without interest.

  “Yes, they didn’t want me.” Despite Johnny’s efforts to keep his voice normal, a tremor of self-pity ruined the sentence.

  “They wanted you.”

  “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.

  ROY 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 n
ow!”

  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.