LOM Chapter 5: Buttwad
Despite my job, my summers were mostly a vacation. I worked because my parents said I had to, and also so I would have a little extra spending money during the school year, and also because I liked hanging out at the pool with Kelly and Nick. Due to school and water polo I was too busy to work except in summers, although school was only a priority because my parents wouldn’t let me play water polo unless I had a B+ grade point average. Water polo was what I liked best about Boeme—pronounced “boom”—High School. Boeme was the oldest high school in town; back when schools were segregated, it was called Orlando High School and every white kid in town went there. The school mascot was the Bomber; the Orlando airport was a base for strategic bombers in the early part of the Cold War, until the Cuban Missile crisis sent the Air Force packing. Our school’s traditional cheer at sporting events was to shout “Boeme Bombers” and clap hands twice in what was supposed to sound like sonic booms, but everybody was always just a little off and so it just sounded like applause. It was still mostly a white school.
Part of the reason that I started playing water polo was that Boeme was a boring place if you weren’t involved in sports. There just wasn’t a lot else to do. The typical sports—the ‘balls—were beyond me because I was kind of small and not a fast runner. After we moved to the new house with the pool, I discovered that I liked to swim and was good at it, but the flip-turn at the end of a swum lap was tricky and disorienting. I once did the turn and knocked my head against the side of the pool hard enough to nauseate myself. Water polo seemed safer; it was also a new sport at most schools in central Florida, so I had no trouble making the team. Even though our team wasn’t great, we were still competitive with the other not-great teams in the area.
Having a pool at home meant I could get extra practice on my own. Our pool was too small to swim laps, but just fine for treading water and tossing a ball. When water polo was out of season, I would have a few teammates over for pick-up games, and wound up spending a lot of my free time in the pool; after a summer of this, my dad decided I should be the one taking care of it. That’s how I got the job at Gravlin.
The filter cartridges at the Gravlin pool were large cylinders of corrugated cellulose that had to be hosed out to remove any grit or debris. I also had to maintain the chemical levels, which meant sampling the water with dual test tubes and adding a few drops of indicator solution to the tubes. One solution told me whether there was enough chlorine in the pool by changing the water to the color of urine. The darker yellow the more chlorine, and comparison scale was built into the side of the tube. The other solution told me the water’s PH in shades of red. The PH was fine, but it looked like the chlorine was a little on the low side. I put more tablets into the chlorination system, and then remembered that Kudafer had said I might have contracted my illness from the pool. Well, to hell with that, I thought. I added more tablets to the chlorinator. I figured it would be a little on the high end, but at least nobody else would get sick.
I finished fifteen minutes before the pool opened for the day, as the other lifeguards were arriving to begin work.
“Good mornin’, Wesley,” Kelly greeted me. “Any ducks today?” She was keeping a tally, a number I would have not otherwise remembered. I chalked her interest up to naivety, likely the product of her virginity times the poverty of sex education in our schools—not that I came out much better on either count.
“Nope, no ducks,” I told her. “All clean.”
“Good,” she said. “You ever wonder if it’s someone you know? Leavin’ the evidence to rub your nose in it?”
“I don’t think whoever it is cares that I have to clean it up.”
“If it’s not some kinda message, why do they keep doin’ it in our pool? It doesn’t make sense. Course, I say that, but I’ve never tried it.” She winked at me.
I struggled for the nerve to ask her out. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I will ask her out and she’ll say yes because obviously she’s interested in me as I can plainly see—
“Not that I’m in any hurry to try,” Kelly said, snapping me out it.
“We’ve got six minutes,” I grinned. “That’s just enough time, I guess.”
“Too late—the swimmers are already lining up,” she said, with an exaggerated frown.
I looked over at the gate and saw a small crowd of early risers—mostly overweight women in knee-length jerseys, many of them attaching float cuffs to the chubby little arms of their larvae. They came to the pool to ignore their kids, making the lifeguards de facto babysitters.
“You think they’d mind?” I asked.
“Probably,” she said. “At the very least, you’d have to clean the pool all over again.” She started walking towards her chair for the morning shift.
“Could be worth it,” I mumbled.
The pool opened at 9 AM, and by then the cool of morning was already burned off and the sun begun its relentless assault on exposed flesh. I slathered on sunscreen before climbing into my chair. Even after a month of lifeguarding, I was still pale by pool standards. The three college kids were all a rich deep brown, and even Kelly—the blondest person there—was tan. Then there was me, with brown eyes and brown hair and skin still peachy-taupe. I never tanned, but only reddened until my skin flaked off in translucent sheets. Mom made sure I always had plenty of sunscreen on hand, and I wore my t-shirt and a hat during my pool shifts.
The lifeguards rotated so that three were on the pool, one was working the gate, and the other was on break. Nothing ever happened at the pool; mostly, we kept rambunctious summer camp kids from drowning each other. If they were too rowdy, they got a sharp blast from the whistle and a stern warning. Another infraction took them out of the pool, to sit on a bench for fifteen minutes. Mostly, I just sat there and watched the girls who came to sunbathe.
The pool was L-shaped, with two lifeguard chairs at either end and one on the outside of the bend. Kelly took the shallow end—she liked little kids—and I took the bend. That meant Kelly and I faced each other for our shift, giving me the chance to ogle her through my sunglasses. She wore a red one-piece bathing suit that did nothing for her small breasts, but was strangely fascinating where the fabric curved from just beneath her slim hips down across her thighs and under her groin. This part of the suit only showed when she stood up to yell at a swimmer or stretch, so I found myself glancing at her every time she stirred. I decided definitely to ask her out the first chance I got the next day, but beyond that I had no idea. My past brief romances had been tense and chaste, and in none of them had I come close to doing it in a swimming pool. I was not even sure I could bring myself to do it—it—on the grounds that my religion had informed me that I simply didn’t believe in it outside of marriage. The truth was that I found her innuendos intimidating: I was worried she actually meant it, and then I’d be stuck. But the flirting was exciting, and I found myself getting more excited about the thought of us in the pool late at night. I had a key, so we wouldn’t even have to climb the fence.
A sharp whistle blast woke me up. “Hey, Wesley—wake the duck up!” yelled Nick, who was sitting in the other deep-end chair.
I looked down to see four pre-adolescent boys playing chicken, one pair wrestling from the other pair’s shoulders. It was a gross violation of the pool rules.
I started to stand but realized my shorts might show my excitement, which was definitely not okay at a pool full of kids. I leaned forward in the chair and put an arm across my lap. “Hey, you guys,” I yelled, “out of the pool. Take fifteen minutes on the deck, and ask my permission before you get back in.”
The kids climbed out of the pool. “Buttwad,” one mumbled, as if I couldn’t hear him.
I looked over at Kelly, who had her hand over her mouth; I think she was giggling. I smiled back, then tried to focus on my job.
When we switched shifts—it was my turn at the gate—Joey pulled me aside.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“I need you to take some time off,” he said.
“How long?”
“Indefinitely,” he said.
“Am I fired?” And of course, my mind flashed to Piglet.
“No – you’re not fired,” said Joey. “I’ve had a bunch of kids come to first aid today, crying because their eyes are burning from the water. I had a woman complain that the water bleached her t-shirt where she got it wet, and she wants the pool to pay for it. I checked the chlorine and it’s too high. Do you know anything about this?”
“I did add some extra tablets,” I confessed.
“Why?” asked John.
“I’ve been having a little stomach problem, and my doctor thinks it might be something I picked up here at the pool. I saw that the chlorine was on the low side and thought it might be a good idea to bump it up a little, to make sure everything gets killed. I didn’t realize it was that high.”
“Yeah, it’s that high,” he said. “Diarrhea?”
“Yeah,” I blushed.
“I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, and I appreciate you taking our swimmers into account, but I have to ask you to stay home until you’re better. If you’re sick, I can’t risk you contaminating the pool.”
“Am I fired?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “you’re on unpaid sick leave. Just come back when your doctor says you’re all cleared up.”
“So I’m not fired?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no,” he said. “You’re the only other person I trust to clean the pool. None of those bimbos out there can do it, so I’m stuck with it until you get back. I want you here, but for now you have to get well. The last thing I need is an epidemic of the shits here at the pool, ’cause then the county really will fire you and me both.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take some time off.”
“Great,” said Joey. “You can start by taking the rest of the day.”
He said “you can” in a tone of voice that made it clear that he meant “you must”. I went to my locker and gathered my things. While I was there, Greg walked through the locker room.
“Heard you got the shits, mon,” he said. He sang as he walked past me: “When you’re sitting in a class, and something squirts out of your ass—diarrhea! Diarrhea!”
“Yeah, thanks for that,” I said, adding a mumbled “buttwad” as he walked away. When I had everything out of my locker, I went home. Kelly was still on her chair by the pool, but I was too embarrassed to tell her I would be gone.
League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a
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