At eleven o‘clock Sunday morning, Roy arrived with his swimsuit wrapped in a towel. “Where’s your mother?”
“She’s at the gallery.”
“On Sunday?”
“Seven days a week.”
“I thought I’d get to see her in a bikini.”
“ ‘Fraid not.”
The house was what the real-estate people called “prime lease property.” Among other things, it had a sunken living room with a huge stone fireplace, three large bathrooms, a gourmet kitchen, and a forty-foot pool. Since they’d moved in, they’d used the living room less than two hours a week, for they’d had no company; they hadn’t entertained overnight guests and had no reason to use the third bath; and of all the fancy equipment in the kitchen, they’d used nothing but the refrigerator and two burners on the stove. Only the pool was worth the rent.
Colin and Roy raced the length of the pool, played with inner tubes and inflated plastic rafts, made a game of retrieving coins from the bottom, splashed, splattered, and finally dragged themselves out onto the concrete apron to bake in the sun.
It was the first time Colin had been swimming with Roy, the first time he had gotten a look at him without a shirt-and the first time that he had seen the horrible marks that disfigured Roy’s back. Jagged bands of scar tissue slanted from the boy’s right shoulder to his left hip. Colin tried to count them-six, seven, eight, perhaps as many as ten. It was difficult to be sure, for they melted together at a couple of points. Where there was healthy skin between the ugly lines, it was well tanned, but the raised scars did not take the sun; they were pale and shiny-smooth in some places, pale and puckered in others.
• “What happened to you?” Colin asked.
“Huh?”
“What happened to your back?”
“Nothing.”
“What about those scars?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You weren’t bom that way.”
“Just an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Were you in a car wreck or something?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Roy glared at him. “I said I don’t want to fucking talk about the fucking scars!”
“Okay. Sure. Forget it.”
“I don’t have to give you any reason either.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Well, you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” Roy sighed. “So am I.”
Roy got up and walked to the far end of the pool. He stood there for a while, his back to Colin, staring at the ground.
Feeling stupid and awkward, Colin quickly slid into the pool, as if he wanted to hide in the cool water. He swam hard, trying to work off a sudden overcharge of nervous energy.
Five minutes later, when Colin climbed out of the pool again, Roy was still at the comer of the concrete apron, but now he was hunkered down. He was poking at something in the grass.
“What’d you find?” Colin asked.
Roy was so intent on whatever he was doing that he did not hear the question.
Colin went to him and squatted beside him.
“Ants,” Roy said.
At the edge of the concrete lay a teacup-size mound of powdery earth. Tiny red ants were scurrying around and over it.
Grinning broadly, Roy mashed the insects into the concrete. A dozen. Two dozen. As he killed them other ants came out of the hill and raced into his shadow, as if they had abruptly realized that their destiny was not mindless labor in the hive but sacrificial death under the hands of a monster god a million times their size.
Roy paused now and then to look at the greasy, rust-colored remains that stained his fingers. “No bones,” he said. “They squash into nothing, into just a little drop of juice, ‘cause they don’t have any bones.”
Colin watched.