Nearly Complete Fiction by Howard Lawlor

Author:Howard Lawlor [Lawlor, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

SCOOTER was next to be touched with the idiocy.

A scream from Peggy next morning brought me to my feet with a jerk. Life in the country, where we’d hoped to find peace, was rapidly becoming a nightmare. Leaving Ma Costello in the middle of a garrulpus, valiant speech, her head bloody but still unbowed as it were, I raced for the stairs.

“Jay Chase, will you look at this child? What in the world—!”

Our nearest neighbor, Myles Slavitt, was standing in the hall, and in his arms was Scooter, dripping wet. Now that the initial sensation was over, Scooter seemed a little bored with it all.

“I faw inna fiss-pool,” he announced matter-of-factly, albeit with a slightly apprehensive eye on me.

We had no time to question him in the ensuing confusion, while we got him upstairs, and dried him, and Called the doctor. When the doctor came, he said there was still a little water in Scooter’s lungs, but not much.

“Someone did a little excellent life-saving work, here,” the doctor observed, “and got the rest of the water out promptly.”

Naturally we thought it had been Slavitt. And though Peggy and I had never liked the man—he was too oleaginous, his manner too ingratiating—still we felt we owed him a debt of gratitude.

The doctor finally left, after putting Scooter to bed.

“And stay there, see?” I said at the door. “I hear you out of that bed inside of an hour, I’ll come up and annihilate you.”

Scooter smiled at me seraphically. And fell asleep. It had been just another incident in his crowded days.

Slavitt was still waiting downstairs.

Well, Scooter, as it transpired, hadn’t fallen into a fishpool. He’d fallen into Myles Slavitt’s swimming pool, near the diving board, where the water is twelve feet deep. And thereby hung a tale, according to Slavitt.

He seemed deeply puzzled by it all. “I didn’t see him fall in. I was shaving in the upstairs bathroom, and I just happened to look out the window and see the little fella come up for what must have been the second or third time. Now I’m a heavy man, as you can see, and the pool is a long roundabout way from the house. There was no one else in sight. I thought the little fella was a goner, sure. It must have been all of ten minutes before I reached the pool, though I ran as fast as I could.”

Peggy shivered, and moved closer to me.

“Well, sir,” Slavitt said, bewildered, “When I got there, the kid was sitting on the edge of the pool, dripping wet and coughing a little, but otherwise okay. Now the water is low, and it’s a good two-foot reach to grab the edge of the pool from inside. There’s an overhang and it’s quite a little job for a full-grown man to drag himself up. And the ladder out of the pool is ’way off at the shallow end. Besides, the kid couldn’t swim, could he?”

“No,” I said. I was feeling kind of peculiar, and doing a little puzzled thinking myself.

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