Something in the Water by Peter Scott

Author:Peter Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461741770
Publisher: Down East Books

“I call this hot.” Sitting on the merry-go-round in the schoolyard shade, his weight tilting the round wooden platform toward the men on the swings, Richard rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and pushed the gurried cuffs of his long johns up to his elbows.

“It’s nearly eighty by the school thermometer,” said Dickie, scouring his inky fingertips with a mixture of spit and sand, and wiping them clean in the grass.

Fuddy, holding the chains of his favorite swing with fists at chest level, pushed off gently with his feet, swung, and stopped himself by dragging his contemplative soles in the furrows beneath him. Taller now and gaunt, with thriving colonies of blackheads on either side of his nose, he did not look like the same schoolboy who sat in that swing twenty years ago. But Fuddy felt no different and was no more interested in the talk around him than he had been in the fourth grade.

“You wouldn’t be so hot if you weren’t wearing a winter undershirt,” said Dickie.

“It isn’t a undershirt,” said Richard. “It’s long johns, and I was damn glad to have them out on the water this morning. What do you expect me to do, stand up here in front of half the town and peel them off? Show my hairy bum to the summer people and the Coast Guard?”

Dickie did not reply. He knew that Richard, who loved a gathering of any kind, had hauled his traps early and hurried up from his mooring to be at the schoolhouse when the registration began at noon. He had been the first to come and would be the last to go, established on the merry-go-round to watch and listen, or—when he had an audience—to expound upon the fools who were running the war.

The Mattingly boys, armed with cap pistols and driftwood submachine guns, broke from behind the schoolhouse and ran, bent over, to take cover behind a green Pontiac. Ernest, his left arm in a sling bloodied by iodine, waited until Dwight and Doris Chafin were out of his line of fire, then opened up on the three boys holding the stone wall beyond the swings. What Ernest knew—and only Fuddy noticed—was that the Crowell brothers, led by Vince, were crawling through the bayberry and would soon flank the boys behind the wall.

Chief Petty Officer Irville Rich stepped out of the schoolhouse door, blinked in the sudden light, and sneezed. He held the screen door open for Gus, who blessed him and skipped aside as the door slammed shut. A squat, fidgety man, Chief Rich barely came up to Gus’s shoulder; he wiped his brow with his handkerchief, buffed his glasses, and blew his nose. Next to Gus’s T-shirt, which was bleached weekly by Leah, Chief Rich’s whites looked as if they had been rinsed in old dishwater. He offered a cigarette to Gus, who declined it with a comment that made the Coast Guardsman laugh.

“Here’s the man himself,” Richard said to the group in the swings.

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