My mother and father let out a shared sigh.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Ethan.
Damned if our parents didn’t look a little regretful too.
“All right,” Daddy said. “Give us about half an hour to get settled and take stock, and we’ll meet on the patio.”
“You can use Cabin Three,” the Bitch said.
I backed away from her and Ethan, staying between them and my father until I could get behind him and concentrate on retrieving our trunk from the back seat.
Ethan and the Bitch just stayed by sat the mobile home steps, watching us.
Measuring me.
Cabin Three turned out to be surprisingly well-preserved, given that so many of the others had either burned down or collapsed. I’d expected cobwebs, scorpions, and an inch and a half of dust. We got a freshly swept wooden floor with a pair of bare box-spring mattresses with fitted white sheets. There was no air conditioning, which meant that the temperature was stifling, but the walls seemed solid enough, and the fresh screening on all the windows promised some protection from the local flies. There was no toilet, but there was a note to the effect that Ethan had dug a fresh outhouse for us, a short walk into the desert. For a sink we had a porcelain basin and a gallon jug of warm bottled water.
Daddy and I had lived in worse during my endurance training in the Sierra Nevadas, one long summer about three years earlier. That place had been so rickety that my last task, on the last day, had been to demolish it with my bare hands. By the time I was halfway done my knuckles bled and my fingers were studded with splinters. He had called me his best girl.
Without a washroom, settling in amounted to little more than dumping the bags on the unmade beds, so I took care of that, changed into a fresh white t-shirt bearing the name of a dojo I’d attended in Seattle, and then went around back to inspect the empty swimming pool. A leftover from the roadside cabin days, it and the cracked, weed-ridden patio surrounding it were the only paved things in the Bitch’s entire homestead. It was kidney-shaped, three feet deep at the kiddie steps and thirteen feet below the rusted brackets that had once anchored the diving board. The bottom was pitted and streaked with years of windswept sand; there was also the corpse of a little black bird in the deep end, buzzing with flies. The air shimmered. Without any water to cut the sunlight, the walls had nothing to do but reflect the glare at one another, turning the entire bowl into a natural reservoir for heat.
Lifeguard chairs sat on both the concave and convex sides of the pool. They looked new, or at least recently wiped clean. So did the long and narrow tarpaulin, a few yards into the desert, there to keep the sun off a cylindrical shape three feet high and thirty feet across.
I asked, “That the chain-link?”
“That’s the chain-link.” Daddy licked his lips as he surveyed the deep end. “Check out that grate.”
I dropped to my knees, grabbed the lip of the pool and hopped in, landing on my feet. The grate Dad had seen was a rusty square a half-meter on each side, covering the ancient water filtration system. The metal was so hot from the sun that I recoiled from my first touch, but I swallowed my pain, slipped my fingers through the holes in the mesh, and pulled it loose. It weighed maybe thirty pounds. The drain beneath it narrowed and curved out of sight, marked only by more sand and the skeletal remains of a mouse.
“Nothing hidden there?” Daddy asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
It had been worth checking out. There could have been anything in that little well. A knife. A gun. Even a big rock. Any number of possible hidden weapons.
“Better get up here, then.”
“All right.” I didn’t replace the grate, but instead used it to scrape the dead bird from the bottom of the pool, and hurl it over the side and into the desert. Not that I’m all that squeamish about having dead things around, but I prefer not to smell them when I don’t have to. After a moment’s further thought, I tossed the grate itself onto the patio, a safe distance from my father. “It’s pretty solid. It probably qualifies as a weapon.”
“It shouldn’t be an issue,” Daddy said. “Neither one of you will have arms free.”
“You know. In case.”
“Not saying it’s a bad idea, hon. Besides, it’s done.”
I grabbed the edge of the pool with my fingers and climbed back up. The temperature was well over a hundred on the patio, but even that was a relief after the sizzling conditions in the oven down below; my t-shirt was already so saturated with sweat that the cloth had gone transparent over my breasts. I peeled the material off my belly and fanned myself with it, once or twice, just to get some cooler air in there, but it didn’t help.
Daddy kneaded my shoulders. “Are you ready for this, Jen?”
“I guess I have to be.”
Wrong answer. “Are you ready for this, Jen?”
“Yes. Yes, Daddy, I’m ready.”
“You’re not scared?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Good. It helps to be scared. Fear is a survival trait. I wouldn’t let this go any further if you weren’t scared. But you’re also ready?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? There’s no room for any doubt here.”
“I’m sure. I know why this is important.”
He really was proud of me. That was the main thing, which had carried us through all the years of hard work. He had invested everything he had in me, and I had invested everything in living up to what he wanted. I was still feeling a glow when his hand moved to the side of my head, and tugged at a braid. “What about this? Now or later.”
“Later’s fine,” I said. “We can do it last thing.”
“Okey-Dokey,” he said.
A few minutes later Ethan and the Bitch came around, and we set to work on the arena.
The chain-link was a high-quality, thick mesh, lighter than it looked but still a bitch to work with at the quantities we needed. It took all four of us, working in grim concert, more than an hour to unroll it from its resting place over the desert sand, past a section of patio, and over the pool itself, until it covered the basin entirely. Pronouncing the effects good, Ethan then went away and came back with the aluminum braces and steel bolts necessary to secure it against the patio. By the time we were had finished lashing it down, our shared mother and father had exhausted themselves and had retreated to their opposing lifeguard stations, eyeing each other over the construction with the resigned air of nations that had always been, and would always be, at war.
By then, of course, I knew that turning down the day of truce had been a good idea, not only because our parents wouldn’t have ever gotten this job finished, but because all this time working with Ethan had provided me an excellent opportunity to gauge his strength, his speed, his endurance, his dexterity, and most of all, his eagerness to begin.
Like me, he was hungry for this.
He might have dreaded it once, but his years of training had like my own worn away any of his own dreams and ambitions, and left him eager for nothing but the moment that we’d enter the pool together.
At about four o’clock, the sweat pouring down our bodies in waves, my brother and I used a pair of wire cutters to peel a three-sided flap away from a section over the steps leading to the shallow end. Descending, we explored the territory in the wader’s area on hands and knees, testing the feel of the concrete against our bare skin, determining just how close we could come to standing before chain-link scraped against our backs or the tops of our heads. My smaller size and greater flexibility gave me an advantage here. I could run about in a doubled-over crouch that still gave me several inches of clearance, in places where Ethan could only struggle along in a hunchbacked, half-crippled lurch confined by the low ceiling. That advantage vanished as we both moved on to the Deep End. In the Deep End, where we could both stand fully upright, unimpeded by any low ceiling, the advantage of weight and strength was entirely his own. The gaping hole left by the removal of the grating presented the only equalizer. Either one of us could stumble into that one without warning, if not breaking bones, then at least crippling us long enough to cede advantage to the other.