The bros turn before they’re at the exit, though, and head into the steam room. I hear the crank of the knob, the clink of the heater, the whoosh of the steam.
I walk toward the entrance to the pool area and lay my hand on the doorknob. I push it, and head into the chill, chlorine-tanged air.
The bros are mere smudges of pink and orange behind the small fogged window of the steam room. If they looked toward the window, I think they might see me, but I’m also sure that they won’t. I can hear the barks of their drunken laughter.
Darren’s waiting for me back at the room. I can almost imagine him here next to me, the stew of desire and self-consciousness he would be feeling.
I place my hand on the looping handles of the steam room’s double doors, consider opening them, enjoying the shock of the bros as I confront them, as I lay into them with my fists until they turn the tide on me.
How would I explain the blood and black eyes to Darren?
Instead I look to the pool, to its painted scenes of meadows and vases, and finally to the bug net lying along the tiled wall. I pick up the net, test its metal pole between my hands. Hollow, but strong.
The pole passes right through the handle loops, holds there at an angle, one end pitched into the wall.
Unaware that they’re trapped, the pink and orange smudges continue their jostling and laughter. Drunk as they are, the bros will probably stay too long before they try to leave. Before they find that they can’t leave.
I want to see it happen, want to see their shock at their sudden powerlessness. But I also want to get out of there, get back to Darren, watch whatever horrible show he’s found on the room’s greasy TV, lie there in quiet in our shared space.
I give the steam room door a kick.
The bros go silent, and the smudges near, resolve into shirts below red faces. Voices shout, but I can’t make out the words. I back up, in a horrible kind of awe at what I’ve done, what I’m doing.
I head to the exit, give one last look at the steam room door, at the narrow rectangle of the window. Pale arms beat at it, like wings.
The Bite
by Colette Bancroft
Rattlesnake
These days it has some sunny upscale name focus-grouped by developers, but when I was a kid there the neighborhood was called Rattlesnake.
Back in the 1930s, some guy opened a rattlesnake canning plant in Tampa, off Westshore Boulevard near the Gandy Bridge. The suburbs hadn’t sprouted there yet; the land stretching south toward Port Tampa was a couple of miles of pine and palmetto scrub with a hem of mangroves along Tampa Bay, perfect habitat for the plant’s product. Locals caught the snakes by the bagful, pygmy rattlers and big diamondbacks, and sold them to the plant to be skinned and cooked. Around the South roadside gift shops sold the cans, labeled with an illustration of a coiled snake with its fangs bared over the slogan Tastes like chicken! It doesn’t.
By the 1960s, when my family moved to Rattlesnake, the east side of Westshore was lined with streets of neat, new little two- and three-bedroom houses with carports. We were civilians, but lots of our neighbors were military families. MacDill Air Force Base was so close that the howl of fighter jets taking off for training runs was as ordinary as birdsong.
Our next-door neighbors were the Mendozas. He was a staff sergeant in the military police on base, and she was a nurse at the base hospital. They had two little girls, Julieta and Luisa, and sometimes in the afternoon when their shifts overlapped I’d babysit the kids.
Sergeant Mendoza would come home in the evening, unstrap his holster, and set it on the kitchen counter, gun and all. He’d point at his two little daughters and whatever other kids might be around and say, “Don’t touch that,” then make a little clicking noise.
The summer I was twelve, a new family moved into the house across the street. The tenants were a woman and three girls, the oldest about my age, the youngest a toddler. The woman seemed older than my stylish mother, who went off to her job at a downtown bank every day in a smart suit, every hair in her blond chignon in place. The new lady was so skinny and pale she looked like her own ghost, and she never wore anything but faded housedresses (a wardrobe item my mother disdained).
The carport across the street was usually empty, but once or twice a week I’d see a gorgeous 1955 Thunderbird parked there, with gleaming deep burgundy paint and a white convertible hardtop with porthole windows. My dad ran an auto paint and body business, so I knew cars, and I knew a ten-year-old car that looked that cherry was pampered like a princess.
I also knew it was a two-seater, which seemed odd for a family’s only car.
I met the oldest girl when I walked out of the Mendozas’ house one afternoon. She was standing across the street on the sidewalk in front of her house, hands on her narrow hips.
“The colonel would have a fit if he saw us near those greasers,” she said to me.
I wondered what that meant, but she went right on: “I’m Brenda Howard. That’s my sister Nancy.” She tipped her head toward the carport, where the middle sister stood. Brenda had her mother’s sandy hair and angular face, but her brash attitude was her own. Nancy was softer, rounder, blonder, and gazed off to the side of me like she couldn’t quite look at me directly.
As soon as I introduced myself, Brenda invited me in to watch TV. My parents wouldn’t be home for a bit, so I followed the sisters through their front door.
The neighborhood was made up of typical Florida suburban houses, concrete block with terrazzo floors and a picture window in the living room. Ours was cozy, with my mom’s pride-and-joy Scandinavian modern furniture in the living room and, in my bedroom, a pink-and-white chenille bedspread with the figure of a ballerina (although I was the least balletic of girls).
The Howards’ house looked like they were camping. In the living room were one big corduroy recliner, an old black-and-white TV, and three folding chairs that did double duty at the scuffed dining table. Mrs. Howard was sitting there in one of them, playing solitaire. Her eyes widened when she saw me, but she said hello warmly in a twangy voice, not quite Southern.
“That’s our mama, Mrs. Howard,” Brenda said, and led me off on a tour of the house, which didn’t take but a minute. Mrs. Howard’s room had a double bed; in the other bedroom, Brenda and Nancy and the third sister, Susie, slept on a mattress on the floor, where the toddler was currently immersed in a sweaty nap. Old sheets were tacked over the windows.
Mrs. Howard went out to hang laundry on the clothesline as we sprawled in front of the TV. Talking over the dialogue of some old Western, Brenda said she and her sister had been born near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where their father was posted. “Me and Nancy’s dad died and Mama got a job keeping house for the colonel.”
“Our daddy was in a car crash,” Nancy said, her eyes filling with tears.
Brenda’s eyes rolled. “He was a drunk,” she said, closing that subject. “At Tinker the colonel had a nice big house and we all moved in. So him and Mama got married.”
For just a second, I thought Nancy looked surprised. “Then Susie was born,” Brenda continued, “and then a couple months ago the colonel got posted here. He’s in temporary base housing until they have a big enough house for all of us.”
“How come he doesn’t just live here?”
“He has to be available for duty at all times,” Brenda said. “Military officers have very demanding schedules.”
That wasn’t what I’d heard eavesdropping on enlisted men while they were drinking beer at block parties, but I let it go. “Where’s your car?”
“The colonel drives the car. Mama doesn’t drive. If she has to go somewhere, he drives her. But she never goes nowhere.”