Overflow

ON THE DAY MY MOM got her last chemo treatment, I fished from the dike of the Intake Reservoir. I wasn’t supposed to be fishing. I was supposed to be delivering the Hawthorne Pennysaver. My summer job was to place a crisp Pennysaver at each of the 465 doorways of the Pleasant Pines Apartments once a week, but I hadn’t done that for months. The Pleasant Pines was a creepy hellhole with moldy carpets and half-naked toddlers and thumping stereos and college students throwing empty Schlitz cans at you from their porch. Also the Pennysaver was not a real paper. It was twenty-four pages of ads and bogus articles on the beauty of aluminum siding. People did not appreciate having it left at their door. They glared at you like you had just left a flaming dog dump for them to stomp out — which is how I realized that they would not miss the Pennysaver if it never showed up on their mat. So instead of hauling my sack of papers up and down those nasty stairwells, I went fishing at the Intake. Then, after the Pleasant Pines rental office closed for the day, I hiked through the woods and pitched my papers into the dumpster behind it. Sometimes I poked at them with a stick, scattering them into the puddles of disgusting brown vegetable goo and moldy cottage cheese so it would look like the residents had thrown them out.

My bobber drifted toward the overflow, a concrete chute that dumped excess water down into Fall Creek. A little shack sat on top of the dike, covering the chute and the flood controls. I knew the waterworks guys hid the key behind the “No Trespassing” sign, so I sometimes got it out and stashed my fishing tackle inside the shack while I lugged my undelivered papers to the Pleasant Pines dumpster.

The bobber swirled down hard. I pulled in a bluegill and tossed it into the high grass behind the dike. My plan was to fish out the bluegill that would pull your bobber down like a huge bass but then only be one of the crappy, suicidal bluegills that would let you catch and release them six times in a row. The dike was starting to stink of rotting fish.

I dug my watch out of the Pennysaver sack. If I was home late one more time, my father was going to put my head on a pike outside our front door. My mom’s so-called treatments actually made her sicker, and when she got home, I was supposed to keep Sean and Mary out of her hair — which usually meant taking Sean in the other room and thumping him for being an ass. Then Mom would beg us to get along, and Dad would blow his volcano. Then, later, Dad would feel sorry for losing it, and he’d make us hold hands while he led a prayer. We’d pray for Mom while she lay next to us on the sofa, rolling her eyes and telling us to cut it out.

It was illegal to fish in a town reservoir, but I didn’t see how my worm polluted the water more than the slimy fish did. I reeled in another bluegill and lobbed it over the dike. I checked my watch. I was now cruising for a bruising, so I tossed the worms into the reservoir and packed up my gear. If I hoofed it to the Pleasant Pines, I’d still beat my parents home.

When I got to the top of the dike, though, something caught my eye. Down in the tall grass on the other side a strange animal thrashed — except it was too big and too white to be an animal. Was it an insane person? A runaway convict?

The grass parted. It was two people making out. They were really going at it. And they were old! The guy had wavy gray hair and wore a white oxford shirt. The woman had a handful of his butt. They rolled around some more, then sat watching the creek flow into the little gorge at the bottom of the meadow.

This deserved a better look. I loped back along the edge of the dike and came up behind the overflow shack. I set my papers down and fumbled for the key. Inside, dusty lines of sun shot through cracks in the siding. I edged around the concrete overflow shaft to where I had a view of the meadow and the creek. When I put my eye to a knothole, my gut dropped a foot. The man in the grass was our neighbor Mr. Romer! Who was a music professor and the choir director at Trinity Episcopal! Who’d played the trumpet at my aunt’s wedding! Whose kids were friends with my little brother and sister! Mr. Romer golfed in my dad’s league. He showered in the locker room next to my dad. And now he was lying on the ground beside some chunky college girl with a scraggly nest of black hair and pale skin.

I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t stop. I had never seen ugly people kiss. Every few minutes they tore into each other, groping like lunatics, like it was no big deal to feel each other up a mile from where Mrs. Romer was probably on her hands and knees scrubbing her kitchen floor. I cupped my ear, but all I could hear was the metallic pounding of the water in the overflow shaft. I began to feel dizzy, like I might tumble down the shaft myself. I felt like the guy in a movie who uncovers a terrible secret, an assassination plot or illegal weapons lab right under everybody’s nose. Because who was going to believe that Mr. Romer was playing tonsil hockey with some heavyset girl in the Fall Creek Wetland Preserve? I could hear my father: Professor Romer is a respected musicologist and an upstanding family man. And who was I? A thirteen-year-old who couldn’t even be trusted to deliver a crappy paper. I was like one of the freaks who claim to see flying saucers. I could see myself explaining how I was taken on board and seduced by naked blue aliens who cut me open and replaced my organs with the innards of a dog.

I looked at my watch. It was getting late. To get to the Pleasant Pines dumpster, I would have to hike right past their little love nest. No way was I doing that. I needed to stash the papers and come back later to ditch them. Or maybe I could unload them somewhere closer, like the Dairy Fart dumpster. Then again, what if the Dairy Fart manager saw me and called Mr. Hofstadter? He’d rip me a new one back at the Pennysaver office. My job would be transferred to some shiny-eyed sixth-grader who dreamed of working from paperboy up to reporter to whatever is higher than reporter. Hofstadter would call my dad and tell him to sit me down for a big heart-to-heart.

But my dad didn’t believe in heart-to-hearts. He believed in whaling me with Grandpa’s razor strop. The strop had some sick sentimental value for him. He referred to it with an evil slant in his eyebrows, like he secretly hoped he’d get to whale us with it. I had met with the strop once, and I wasn’t looking for a rematch.

Now something really amazing was happening down below. The girl closed her eyes and turned her face up toward the sun, and Mr. Romer traced her big red cheeks and her eyebrows and forehead with his fingers, like a sculptor smoothing clay. It was quite a sight.

Then again, it was pretty clear no one was going to be getting naked, and I didn’t have time to sit around watching two weirdos act out some cheesy love scene. I needed to scrap my papers and get my butt home. Suddenly I had a genius idea. I peered down the concrete overflow shaft. Talk about a place the sun don’t shine. I circled back to the door, dragged in my satchel, and poured all the Pennysavers down the shaft. I watched them boil and churn in the dark water. I didn’t feel bad. The papers were made of trees. Soon they would turn to pulp, destroying the evidence and making nice food for all the worms and crayfish downstream.

When I went back to the knothole, Mr. Romer and the girl were gone. I blew a sigh of relief, gathered my gear, set the padlock, and headed across the dike.

But now there was a new problem. Some of the newspapers had floated out of the overflow pipe into Fall Creek. Half a dozen clung to rocks and weeds in the stream. If someone spotted them, they would call Mr. Hofstadter to complain.

I skidded down the back of the dike and fished at them with my rod, but they only twirled into the shallows. I had to take off my shoes and tiptoe through the cool mud where Sean and I had once seen a snapping turtle. Each time my foot touched a rock, I pictured the turtle’s filthy beak severing my toes, and I chicken-leaped backward. Eventually I slipped and fell into the slime.

I was soaking now, so I waded to the mouth of the stream and threw the runaway Pennysavers deep into the corrugated overflow pipe. But a dozen more had already gone downstream. Wads of them surged in the pipe, getting ready to make the journey. There were nearly five hundred Pennysavers in there. What was the penalty for littering five hundred newspapers? Was it fifty dollars or five hundred times fifty? I pictured my father’s hair catching fire as he did the math.

When I turned to chase down the runaways, someone pushed through the brush at the far end of the meadow. It was Mr. Romer, heading back home. His white shirttails hung out, and he hummed to himself like it was normal to saunter past a spot where he had just made out with someone half his age.

As he came alongside the stream, he saw a paper float past. His head tracked back upstream to where I stood, the big orange sack that said pennysaver hanging on me like a prison uniform. What could I do? I splashed out of the stream and sprinted into the woods toward home.

MY FATHER WAS ON THE PATIO waiting for the charcoal to get hot. He set his drink down and looked me over. “What the hell did you do, take a mud bath?”

“I fell,” I said.

He shook his head and lit a cigarette. “Don’t go tracking that through the house. Your mother’s in agony.”

“OK,” I said. I started taking off my shoes.

“I don’t understand why you can’t get home on time. We’ve got enough to deal with here.”

“Sorry.”

He walked over to where the handyman had just put in the new sliding glass door. I’d cracked the old one with a foul ball. “After dinner,” my dad said, “you and I are going to move these steps back where they were.”

“OK,” I said. They were huge concrete steps. I already knew I couldn’t lift them because my friend Mitch and I had tried, but I put on a good face about it because the new door had cost a fortune.

I hosed myself off and peeked in the window. Mom was dozing on the family-room sofa. If I went in through the back door, I could change in the basement without her seeing me.

Suddenly Mr. Romer walked around the side of house, clutching a wad of wet Pennysavers. A horrible dread flooded my gut. Mr. Romer eyed me as he shook my father’s hand. I lowered my head and scrubbed my legs.

“Casey, get over here and say hello,” my father said.

I walked over and shook Mr. Romer’s hand.

“While you’re here, Don,” said my father, “maybe I can get you to help me move these concrete steps.”

“Happy to,” Mr. Romer said.

While they looked at the steps, I quietly let myself into the house and slipped upstairs to my room.

I was putting on a pair of shorts when my little brother came in wearing a huge grin. “You’re in deep doody.”

“How do you know?”

My father emerged from the stairwell. He set a hand on Sean’s shoulder and said, “Shove off.” He looked in at me. “Don’t bother coming to dinner.” He shut the door.

Then it was the typical routine. They made me eat after they were done. My brother and sister poked their heads into the kitchen and made faces at me. When I was done, my parents called me into the living room and made me confess. They took turns, working me like cops, except that my mother had to lie on the sofa.

“I’m pretty disappointed to come home to this,” she said softly. “What are those people at the paper going to think?”

“Why do you put us through this when you know we’re having a rough time?” my father said.

I shrugged.

“A lot of people know who delivers those papers,” said my mother.

“You know what it means to collect money for something you didn’t do?” said my father. “That’s called theft. People go to jail for that. Is that what you want? You want a criminal career?”

“And of all things, to pollute the water supply,” said my mother.

“It wasn’t in the reservoir,” I said. “It was in the stream.”

“I don’t care if it was in the Dismal Swamp,” said my father. “It’s still pollution.”

“I’ll clean it up,” I said.

“You’re damned right you’ll clean it up. That’s just the beginning of what you’ll do.”

They kept going like that until they had me crying and saying how sorry I was. I could see my brother’s shadow on the dining-room wall. In a few minutes he’d tell every kid in the neighborhood.

Usually once my parents broke me, they eased off, but not this time. My father wanted to hear the facts over and over.

“It was an accident,” I blubbered. “I was rushing, and they just fell in.”

“They just fell in,” he said.

My mother closed her eyes. “How come the sack didn’t fall in?”

“Because I grabbed it. I didn’t want to lose my fishing rod.”

“You didn’t want to lose your fishing rod,” said my father. “What a miracle that you lost all of the papers, but not your fishing rod.” He shook his head. “You know what bothers me the most? It’s not that you would cheat and steal and pollute. It’s that you would lie to us. Especially on a day like this. You don’t seem to understand what’s going on around here.”

“Let’s not bring that in,” said my mother. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It’s not about that.”

“It is to me,” said my father. “He does it on purpose every single time.”

I was sobbing hard now. My mother sighed.

“You tell us the truth,” said my father.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” I said.

“Don’t lie to me!” he shouted.

I coughed it up in bits between the crying. “I was fishing. And then I left to deliver the papers. And I saw Mr. Romer down in the grass with this girl, and I was afraid to go past him. I didn’t want to be late because I knew you’d be in bad moods.”

They looked at each other. “What do you mean you saw Mr. Romer in the grass with a girl?” said my father.

They were . . . you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“You know. Making out.”

“Oh, this is rich,” my dad said. “This is beautiful.”

My mom closed her eyes and shook her head.

“When are you going to learn?” said my father. “You’re not talking to a couple of your buddies here. We don’t subscribe to The Weekly World News.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“Get up,” said my father.

I knew what was coming next. “I swear to God it’s true!” I shouted. “I swear to God!”

He marched me into the basement and took the razor strop out of the old bureau. “Let’s go,” he said, running the leather through his fingers. “Move it.”

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