Altar (3 page)

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 her 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.

Sarah, in a rage, stuck her finger in Ted’s face, said something, then stormed away from Abby and the boys.
Going
for help?
Gary thought, hoped. Abby watched Sarah leaving, a glimmer of concern on her face, followed quickly by a frown, a widening of her eyes. Ted’s hand was on her hip, another, like a striking snake, went to her chest. Ted was saying something to her and she paled...

The other kid, the big fat kid, looked around, as if making sure no one was paying too much attention to them. Abby took a step backward toward the boy’s locker room. The kids in the small water park area were laughing, running, their mothers transfixed by their activities, not seeing what was happening behind them.

Gary felt a spasm wrack his body when Ted grabbed his sister’s arm, hard enough for Abby to wince, to spit something at him, her face filled with fury and hate. Ted pushed her back
through
the locker room door. She disappeared and the big fat kid followed. The door smoothly settled shut.

Sam was suddenly standing next to Gary, and Gary noticed his small hands were clenched into fists, and, despite the horror of the situation, felt a surge of affection for his old friend.

“What should we do?” Sam said, his voice shaky. Gary tilted his head toward the sky. Far off in the distance, dark gray clouds were pushing their way toward them. It was strange, Gary mused, that the day would be turning, quite suddenly, into a storm.

“It’s okay,” he heard himself saying quietly, calmly. He touched Sam’s arm lightly. “I’ll check.”

Sam nodded, but stayed tight with anticipation, wired with a young boy’s fear of violence.

Gary walked toward the locker room, not caring about the day’s dimming sun.

Tyler felt something rising from underneath the water to meet him.

It pushed him upward
—
a firm,
rising
pressure.

He stopped kicking, lifted his head from the water, turned in time to see a bubble break the surface. A bubble as big as a beach ball. It swelled and burst, spraying him in the face with water. He saw that another boy, a much older boy, was also looking at where the bubble had surfaced and popped. Their eyes met for a moment, neither of them smiling.

The air became pungent. A sour waft of something earthy filled Tyler’s nostrils, as if the pool had passed gas and he was the lucky recipient of its foul discharge.

He shook his head with surprise and disgust, as if the smell were a mosquito that had flown up his nose and settled.

Curious as to what could have caused such a thing, he pushed his head under the water and opened his eyes.

Gary pushed open the door of the locker room. As he turned toward the bathrooms, two kids
—
one younger, one a little older, likely brothers
—
walked past him quickly, saying nothing but obviously hurried.

Otherwise the bathroom appeared empty.

Gary heard the showers going, just a little bit further back into the locker room area, even heard the low mumbling of voices, as if two adults were discussing a baseball game or the stock market while drying themselves with colorful beach towels.

There was a loud bang followed by a grunt Gary recognized as coming from his sister. He walked toward the sound, past the urinals on his right, the sinks with the scratched metal plates that served as mirrors on his left. To the stalls.

He saw the fat kid standing in front of a stall, his hands limp at his sides. He spun on Gary, his cow eyes screwing to find purchase on how to deal with the tiny intruder.

Behind the fat kid Gary saw two sets of bare feet under the stall door. There was another
bang
—
someone had hit one of the walls hard enough to shake the entire row of connected metal stalls.

The fat kid looked behind him, toward the stall, then back at Gary.

“Fuck off,” he said lightly, in a toneless, high-pitched voice.