Altar Page 2

  Side-by-side the kids followed their mother, navigating to a clear patch on the far side of the pool, near the deep end.

  Tyler lifted his face from the water and waded, his legs cycling beneath him, his arms splayed outward. He looked around to get his bearings. He was closer to the deep end divider than he’d realized. He twisted his body, turning to look for his mother, who he was certain would be nervously scanning the pool for his whereabouts.

  He couldn’t see her. There were too many heads between him and where they had lain down their towels and one of the lifeguard towers was blocking his view. He wondered how deep he was and felt a snake-like cold squirming in his guts he didn’t recognize—being just a little kid—as the first signs of true panic.

  Something brushed his leg. He looked down and kicked, a small cry escaping his mouth. Water leapt inside and he coughed, spat. A slithering dark-skinned creature had swum by, a creature he recognized, after a beat, as a boy swimming the width of the pool underwater. Tyler smiled, thinking he was being—what was it—ridiculous. He looked again for his mother and was heartened to see a flash of the familiar red swimsuit.

  He began kicking his legs in that direction but stopped short when a large kid jumped in the pool just a few inches away. The splash covered his face and the wave from the impact tossed him off-balance.

  Thank god for the wings, he thought.

  He turned his head in time to see the big kid emerge. He was thick, pimply and ugly. He had long black hair, beady dark eyes and a thick eyebrow that ran from above one eye to the other with only the slightest thinning at the bridge of his nose. Tyler was staring at him, without realizing it.

  “The fuck you looking at?” the big kid said, his mouth carved into a scowl.

  “Nothing,” Tyler replied lamely. He looked around. None of the other kids were paying any attention.

  Before he could look back, something wet and flat and hard smacked him in the side of the face. Stunned, Tyler looked back at the big kid, who was smiling now, and touched his cheek gently with his own wet fingertips. Tyler realized, with no small amount of shock, that the big kid had slapped him. Tyler had never been hit before—not ever—and his mind could barely process what had happened. After a moment of staring at the kid’s snarling, poisonous face, he felt something shift. Deep down inside him, something had... dislodged, had slid out of place, passing through his stomach, his legs, and then... out of his body, into the water. Gone.

  What it was no longer mattered. Where it had lived, deep inside of him, was empty.

  The pain in his cheek flowered, distracting him from his shock. Tyler felt the heat of his face and knew it must be reddening. Tears burned at the back of his eyes and his bottom lip began to tremor, but Tyler held the wave of emotion back, knowing that crying now would be something he would regret for a very long time.

  The big kid looked even more amused.

  “Gonna cry, baby? Gonna cry?” He squealed and grunted like a pig, then tried imitating Tyler’s shocked face before finally transforming his ugly visage into that of a weeping child, rubbing at his eyes with fat-fingered fists.

  Tyler turned away, praying the kid would be done with him, that one of the many other kids and adults around them would notice, would scare him off. He dipped his face into the pool and kicked with his legs, pushing this time with his arms as well to create distance between himself and the bully. After a few moments, he stopped, lifted his head, looked back. The kid was gone. Tyler jerked his head left and right, waiting to be flanked, to be attacked once more, but saw no danger. Just more kids—so many kids—swimming around him. Laughing. Yelling. Oblivious.

  Tyler felt himself relax, the threat of tears now well put away. He looked toward the shallow end, saw his mother sitting on her towel, her face in a book. He looked up to the lifeguard sitting at the top of the tower and noticed he was staring right down at Tyler. Unflinchingly so, Tyler thought.

  Feeling safer, watched, Tyler sighed, knowing it was going to be okay.

  Not wanting to feel like he was running back to his mother after the bully had scared him, he just floated a while, kicking slowly. He tilted his face up toward the sun and closed his eyes.

  Beneath him, less than a foot from his dangling feet, a thin, crooked black crack drew itself along the pool’s bottom, stretching, within seconds, from one end to the other, length-wise, passing effortlessly through the tiled demarcations that lined the surface every five yards. Tiny fragments of old plaster along the length of the crack rose into the water and danced.

  Because Tyler was a practical boy, if he had seen the crack develop, he might have wondered if it was something the people responsible for such things should be concerned about, or whether he, himself, should be worried.

  As Martha, Abby and Gary settled onto their towels, Gary made a point of scanning the pool area, identifying as many kids as he could. The concrete deck was packed with families and small, tight groups of kids, usually all-boys or all-girls. The girls, Gary noticed, tended to be placid, sunning themselves with little interest in their surroundings. The boys, especially the ones in packs, seemed very aware of everything around them. Like Gary himself, they were constantly studying faces, hoping to identify targets for potential companionship or just to satisfy their own curiosity as to who was about. Perhaps to compare themselves. Most likely to compare themselves.

  Gary saw a few kids from his grade, but no real friends. He knew he would not see Jerry, who had been forced to go to summer camp, something Gary knew he hated. Last year had been Jerry’s first summer away. He had written Gary a few times, scribbled notes on the back of dingy postcards, the backs typically showing nature photographs, like a dense tree-line or a frigid-looking lake. One had shown a girl shooting a bow and arrow, a feather stuck into her headband as if part of the camp ritual was having the kids play Cowboys and Indians, killing each other ritualistically until only one group survived, the group that got to return home to their parents, to civility.

  He noticed his friend Billy Marks on the far side sitting with his parents. A couple groups over from him was his best friend from first grade, Sam Beck. They weren’t so close anymore, but still saw each other around, and Gary wouldn’t mind saying hello, maybe seeing if he wanted to buddy up for the day. He kept scouting, but didn’t see any other kids he really knew. He recognized many, if not most of them, but they were either younger than Gary or much older, and those social circles didn’t overlap.

  For now, Gary decided to play it solo. “Mom,” he said, “I’m gonna go in.”

  His mother was in her suit and sitting on her towel, rubbing lotion on her legs. “Okay, hon. You have sunscreen on, yeah?”

  “Yeah, we did it at home.” He turned to Abby, who seemed engaged in Gary’s previous activity of scanning the pool deck for accomplices. “You wanna go in, Abby?”

  Abby didn’t look at Gary, but stood and began walking toward what he assumed was someone she had recognized. “I’ll catch you later, Gary,” she said over her shoulder, and was gone.

  Gary didn’t like that they had camped by the deep end. He would now have to walk across the hot concrete the entire length of the pool to get to the shallower end where he liked to swim, at least to start. He sighed deeply, touched the goggles strapped to his forehead to make sure he hadn’t forgotten them, and began the long walk.

  By the time he made it past the 4 1/2-foot marker the bottoms of his feet were feeling the heat. He pulled his goggles over his eyes in preparation for his entry, transforming the world into brilliant blue hues, and, with joyous relief, did a two-step leap over the pool edge and plunged down into the cool water.

  Submerged, Gary let himself sink, deciding to stay under a few moments, relishing the feeling of his skin temperature dropping, the heat of his insides settling, cooling, relaxing his mind and muscles. After a few more moments, he pushed against the bottom and surged upwards, breaking the surface in a rush and sucking in a deep gulping breath of warm air. He wiped wet hair fro
m his vision and surveyed the area. A multitude of heads and arms broke through the surface of the water as if detached from any particular body, wiggling and laughing or gliding atop the water like dancing zombie limbs pushed through the sod above their graves. Gary shook off the image and began to swim, exhilarated by the exertion of each fervent stroke.

  He’d made it all the way to the other side when, breathing heavily, he broke upward and clung to the pool’s pocked concrete ledge. He secretly hoped Martha or Abby might have noticed his heroic crossing, and looked for them in the throng of sunning bodies along the wall.

  He saw Abby. She was talking to two other girls by the locker room doors, next to a play area designated for small children who weren’t yet ready for the large pool. A yellow, rust-tinged metal sign that read Kid Zone! in sun-faded red letters was bolted above a small gate that led into the cordoned-off toddler-friendly space.

  Gary had spent many hot days in the Kid Zone! and thought of it, for the most part, quite fondly. The fenced-off grid had a soft, plush flooring and harbored three large creatures that children could climb on top of or crawl beneath. There was the elephant, who shot water from a fountain in its trunk straight up into the air, a turtle that trickled water from its belly so that when you crawled beneath it you were given a light shower of warm water, and a giant frog who squirted a limp stream of water from a small hole set within its closed mouth. Gary loved the elephant and the turtle, but didn’t care for the frog. Likely because it was the frog he had slipped off of when he was small, hitting his mouth on one of its hard feet and chipping a baby tooth. It wasn’t that big of a deal, he knew that now, but at the time the pain and the blood had sent his innocent senses screaming through his brain. He recalled looking at the frog’s dumb mouth with its stupid stream of warm water and would have sworn the creature was smiling at him while he bled and cried. At the time, Gary was convinced the frog had enjoyed his getting hurt, relished the smear of watery blood that soaked into its porous wet webbed foot. For months afterward he dreamed of that accident, and every time the frog was there, impossibly turning its giant green concrete head, the water squirting from its mouth transformed into a black, saliva-dripping tongue. And it was always, in every dream, smiling.

  He turned away from his sister and the bad memory and swam back toward the middle of the pool. He almost knocked into a little kid with blue floaty wings on his arms but was able to quickly adjust his path and swim around him at the last second. He silently cursed the kid for being so oblivious to the others around him, noticing his face was stuck down into the water like a snorkeler, but then dismissed it. He floated, treading water a moment, then noticed Sam jumping into the deep end. Invigorated with decision, he lowered his head and swam toward his old friend.

  Martha tried to relax. The towel was a poor buffer between the prickly concrete and her bare skin, but she was enjoying the warmth of the sun and desperately needed a little tanning. Looking down at her old black one-piece and skinny white thighs she cursed herself for not wearing a bikini, and promised she’d buy herself something a smidge sexier before their next public outing. If she didn’t tone-up and tan a bit she’d never get laid, something that hadn’t happened well before Dan...

  She shook her head, took a few deep breaths and closed her eyes behind her large dark sunglasses, trying to empty her mind. She didn’t want to think about her asshole husband, or her kids, or a drink. A drink.

  She forced the thought away and took another deep breath, let it out. She tried to zone out the sound of children screaming, splashing. The warm sun caressed her skin, and she let it.

  Unbidden, thoughts of Dan came rushing into her mind like a cold wave. Thoughts of Dan with her. Martha shuddered and tried to block the onslaught of imaginary visuals that flipped through her mind’s eyes like a scrapbook of sex. The two of them together—in a motel; in the teacher’s house; in the teacher’s classroom, the kids watching... in her house, in her bed, she being forced to watch...

  “Fuck it,” she said, rubbing her eyes beneath the sunglasses, forcefully ripping the thoughts from her brain. Her breathing quickened, her mouth instantly devoid of saliva, her dry tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, her teeth feeling loose, brittle. She sat up, found the can of Coke she had stashed in her basket. She pulled the tab, took a long swallow.

  She kicked herself for not bringing a shot of something. An airplane bottle of rum would really hit the spot with the warm soda. She looked for the kids, but couldn’t spot them. Well, the lifeguards were on duty, weren’t they? That was their job, to watch out for all the brats in the pool, right? Martha sighed, put down the can and laid back down, closing her eyes once more.

  It was her damned imagination. Always percolating unwanted images and ideas into her mind, creating nonexistent worries and delusional situations for her to fret over. Dan had called her—what was it—touched with fire. A mad artist. Except she wasn’t an artist. She was a housewife on the aging curve bending downward toward forty, a failed writer, a lazy piece of shit was what she was.

  So she drank, and forgot. And then he forgot her. And her world became one of forgetfulness, a misty blanket of malaise that covered everything around her. The opposite of rose-colored glasses, she thought. Blood-colored more like it, a bit of black mixed in...

  “Jesus,” she said out loud, and laughed at herself. She forced herself to “zero-out” as her therapist put it, to create a white page in her mind on which no writing was allowed. She breathed deeper, slowed her mind, closed her eyes. After a few moments the screams became static, the images slowed their hectic pace, the mist in her mind thickened into a comforting blanket, and she drifted away.

  Gary splashed toward Sam, who was now sitting on the edge of the pool, looking off toward something that had captured his interest.

  Gary grasped the rounded edge and pulled himself out far enough from the water so that his elbows rested on the warm concrete.

  “Hey,” he said, lifting his goggles onto his forehead. Sam continued to look away from Gary, distracted. “Sam,” Gary said, a little more loudly.

  Sam turned, looked down at Gary, a strange look on his face.

  “What’s up?” Gary continued awkwardly.

  Sam looked away, then back. For reasons Gary did not yet understand, Sam looked... nervous. “Gary,” he said. “Ain’t that your sister? Ain’t that Abby?”

  Gary lifted himself a little higher to peer around Sam’s legs toward the locker room entry doors where he had last seen Abby.

  He saw her standing with just one of her friends now, a brunette girl named Sarah who was wearing a white bikini. Gary knew Sarah, she was the one that would always tell Gary how cute he was when she came by the house. She’d pinch his cheek and pretend to kiss him, but slide her own hand between their mouths before making contact. He knew she would never really do it, but he still enjoyed the game. It excited him being so close to a girl’s mouth, to smell her skin.

  Gary focused his attention on Abby. She was still wearing her cotton pullover, so she hadn’t gone swimming yet. Sarah, he noticed, looked angry, but Abby was smiling. Not a normal smile, though, a sort of mean smile. It was then that Gary finally registered the two boys standing in their dripping swimsuits next to his sister. One of them was very fat and pale, but tall, and Gary thought his eyes looked dull, stupid. Gary didn’t recognize him at all.

  The other boy he did recognize. The one with the long black hair, small black eyes and menacing eyebrows that met and arched downward above his nose, a malicious ‘V’ that gave his face a pointed, serpentine look. That was Ted Mattola, a senior at Abby’s high school who even Gary knew was an A-plus asshole. Ted had a reputation for terrorizing the younger, smaller students at the school, and last year things had turned ugly when he had been arrested for stalking one of the sophomore girls in Abby’s class. The girl—Betty or Betsy, Gary couldn’t remember—had accused Ted of some horrible things. There was a restraining order, which he had violated by following her and h
er sister into a mall and harassing her at the food court. After that, Ted had been held by the police for a couple days and the school had suspended him. The girl, Betty he thought it was now, had moved away. Some thought because of Ted, others said it had to do with her father’s job. Either way, everyone went from thinking Ted was a bully to thinking he might be something far worse.

  Gary watched him as he stepped closer to Abby. He saw Sarah say something, really pissed now. The other kid, the big fat kid, put a hand on her shoulder and she slapped it away.

  “Geez...” Sam said, watching the scene play out along with Gary.

  Gary pushed himself out of the pool, stood and watched, his body tensing, shaking from the chill of the cool water dripping off his skin and suit, ignoring the slow heat pushing up through the concrete to tingle the pads of his bare feet.