“I’m sorry, Aunt Flo,” Jeff said. “I really scrubbed in there.”
“You know how I can tell it’s not clean?” she said. “When I run some water into the shower, like this.” And she turned on the cold, pulling her hand back quickly so as not to get herself wet. “You see what the water does when it hits the tiles? It just kind of spreads out. But if that wall were clean and shiny, the water would bead up into drops. Do you see any drops?”
“I see some,” Jeff said tiredly. He’d been awake since six o’clock, before the sun was even up. That struck him as awfully early for a twelve-year-old kid to have to face the world. Especially in the late summer, when there was no school. It would resume in a couple of weeks, and this was the first time Jeff could ever remember looking forward to going back.
Today was a Saturday, which, at one time, was a day when Jeff got to sleep in, and even when he did finally get up, goof off. But it had been a long time since he’d had that kind of Saturday. It was only ten in the morning, but Jeff felt as though he’d been up for days.
Saturday was the busiest day around here at Flo’s Cabins. Most people who came to his aunt’s fishing camp here on Pickerel Lake, at least in the summer months, stayed for a week at a time, and that week ran from Saturday to Saturday. So on those days, many or all of the eight cabins would be vacated, and new guests would check in. Turnover Day, Aunt Flo called it.
One of Jeff’s many jobs on any given Saturday in the summer was to get those cabins cleaned as quickly as possible. Calling them cabins made them sound pretty rustic. And while they were not exactly palaces, each cabin had running water and a proper bathroom with a shower. Of all the jobs Jeff had to do, cleaning the cabins was the one he hated most. You get a bunch of fishermen renting a cabin for a week, and it can be a pretty frightening sight by the time they leave. Scum-caked dishes, half-empty beer bottles with cigarette butts in them, fish guts in the trash can. An amended line from a musical his mom liked ran through his head: These are a few of my least favourite things!
But Jeff would rather vacuum a hundred carpets, wash a thousand windows, clean a million stoves, before having to clean one bathroom used by three middle-aged fishermen for an entire week. That was major GBI: Gross Beyond Imagining. Did none of these guys know how to aim? Did they actually wash their hands before using the hand towels? Did they even take their muddy boots off before stepping into the shower?
Aunt Flo was a neat freak, so no matter how good a job you did, she’d find fault with it. Like she was doing on this particular Saturday morning, looking into the shower stall of Cabin Four, which was the last cabin Jeff would have to clean today. At least he wouldn’t have to clean Cabin Eight, where there would be no turnover. It had been rented for the entire summer by old Mr. Green. He pretty much looked after the place himself.
The only good news was, even though Jeff had several cabins to clean, there were no new guests arriving today, unless someone without a reservation drove in off the main road. That was always a possibility. But it was nearly the end of summer, Aunt Flo explained, and that meant families were getting ready to go back to work and preparing their kids for a return to school.
“I don’t think fishermen really care if all the tiles glisten that much,” Jeff said to Aunt Flo as he continued to struggle with the shower. “As long as it’s pretty clean, I think they’re okay with it.”
His aunt sighed. It was her favourite sound to make. She’d quickly breathe in, then let the air out long and low, shaking her head at the same time.
“That’s your whole thing, isn’t it?” she said. “All it has to be is good enough. Well, good enough is not good enough for me. I want things perfect.”
One might have thought, listening to her, that she was running a Hilton hotel instead of a fishing camp.
“Many of these men,” she continued, “may not care if everything sparkles, but quite a few bring their wives and the rest of their families, and we don’t want any of them to think that a cabin rented to them by Florence Beaumont is anything less than pure perfection.”
“Fine,” Jeff said, getting out his sponge and bottle of green cleaning spray and taking another run at it.
Aunt Flo, satisfied that she had defeated her nephew, went off to inspect his work in Cabin One. As the boy scrubbed, the cleanser fumes started getting into his lungs in the confined space of the shower and he thought maybe he’d pass out. Which, he thought, might not be the worst thing in the world. It would be like a mini-vacation.
At least once he was done here, he’d be outdoors. There were plenty of other chores that would get him out into the fresh air.
Aunt Flo had half a dozen fourteen-foot aluminum boats she rented out, which were tied up at one of several old, wooden docks. Jeff had to make sure they were cleaned and respectable. After finishing with the shower, he walked down to the water’s edge, a short distance from the cabins, waving some mosquitoes away from his face along the way.
The first boat he looked at made him think someone had been killed in it. The bottom appeared to be filled with gobs of tiny intestines, floating around in an inch of dirty water. But Jeff knew they were worms, or as many of the fishermen liked to call them “night crawlers.”
At least the boat didn’t have any — oh, yes it did. Someone had cleaned his catch in the boat. Cleaning did not mean someone used some Windex and paper towels to make a fish all shiny. Someone had gutted the fish — sliced it open on the underside and pulled out all the insides and dumped them in the bottom of the boat.
This is a really great job, Jeff thought, if your hobby is barfing.
But it didn’t matter how sick this made him feel. He had to get into the boat and deal with it. There was an old, rusted coffee can tucked ahead of the seat in the bow that he could use to scoop a lot of the mess out.
He stepped in, placing his feet on the seat so as not to ruin his sneakers. He’d done this a hundred times, and was always able to keep his balance, even when the boat shifted beneath him.
But what he didn’t know was that there was one squirmy, slimy, slippery worm on that seat, and when his right foot landed on it, it was like stepping on a banana peel.
And before he knew it, he was in the air.
Jeff landed right in the bottom of the boat, thudding against the aluminum hull and creating a small splash. He was covered in dead worms, mud and bits of slimy fish guts.
Jeff shouted a word he was usually careful not to say around grown-ups. If his parents had heard him use it, they’d have chewed him out big time.
Wouldn’t that be great? To have parents who’d chew you out big time.
But instead, it turned out to be Aunt Flo, standing right there near the end of the boat launch, who heard him. She might not be happy to hear a twelve-year-old use that kind of language, but what was she going to do? Send him to his room? Who’d do all the chores then?
She stood and looked disapprovingly at Jeff, arms folded across her chest.
Jeff looked from her to his gross hands, a dead worm wedged between two of his fingers. At that moment, a mosquito landed on the tip of his nose, and instinctively, without thinking of the consequences, he slapped at it.
Now, all that stuff he’d been sitting in, including that dead, slimy worm, was splattered across his face.
Aunt Flo let out one of her trademark sighs.
She said, “Are you going to just goof around all day, Jeff Conroy, or are you going to get some work done?”
After Jeff cleaned up that boat, and himself, he had to go to the garbage dump. That meant loading up all the cans of trash that had filled up over the week, lifting them up onto the bed of Aunt Flo’s old Ford pickup and heading a mile down the road to the local landfill site.