“Something got stuck in the pump, man,” he said. “I don’t know why these assholes just let their kids leave toys in the pool.”
“Yeah, that’s really inconsiderate,” I muttered as he ran back. They were making an unbelievable amount of noise, and I wasn’t surprised when the lights in the house next door came on. “We need to get out of here,” I said, pacing around the car, trying to figure out how long it would take for everybody to pile into the vehicles and clear out of here. “Can you make the baby cry or something?”
“I am trying,” Irina said.
All she was doing, from what I could tell, was jiggling Psyche up and down. I paced over to her and shook the base of the sling. “What are you doing? Pinch her or something. Pinch her!”
Irina swiveled around, her back to me, and scowled over her shoulder. “She will cry in a minute. You keep away from her.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling myself flush. “I’m panicking.”
Next door a middle-aged man in gray sweatpants and an NMSU T-shirt came out, squinting into the dark street. He looked to me like he was trying hard not to act frightened. I imagined his wife inside, goading him to see what the trouble was.
Irina didn’t bat an eye but ran right up to him, Psyche cutting loose with an angry screech.
“Excuse me, sir,” Irina said breathlessly, “I am having troubles. Can you help me please?”
He took one look at her pretty face and her crying baby and his expression softened.
I ran around the other side of the house into the backyard, hissing to Wylie that people were waking up. Angus was holding a long hose, from which enormous quantities of water were gushing out onto the lawn. The air stank of chlorine.
“We’re almost done,” Wylie said.
“We don’t have time.”
“Go back and start the car.”
“Hurry up,” I said.
“The pump only goes so fast,” Angus said, not even bothering to whisper. He looked completely unconcerned. I could hear Psyche in the front, sobbing now, and Irina’s voice rising alongside hers. I hoped she was a good liar. Then I heard the neighbor say, loudly, “Maybe we should call the police,” as Irina protested—“No! Please, no police, I beg you!”—and I turned to Wylie again.
“I’m leaving,” I said, “in the car. And unless you want to get arrested, you’ll come too. Time’s up,” I said, “ now.”
Everybody scurried into the cul-de-sac. Irina said to the neighbor, “No, the police cannot help us,” and her voice was as vexed and fretful as any wife’s; then she spun around, hurried down the sidewalk, and ducked into the shadows beside me.
Somehow I drove — suspended in a kind of adrenaline calm — and fifteen minutes later pulled into an empty strip-mall parking lot, with Wylie, Irina, and the baby in the backseat. The car reeked of chlorine and wet clothes. Psyche had stopped crying, and everything was silent.
My heartbeat was loud in my ears, but I let out a long breath — it felt like the first I’d taken in a long time — and then I started to laugh. “That was crazy,” I said. I glanced at Wylie, expecting to see him laughing too, but he was fidgeting and looking back and forth from Irina to me, his eyebrows twisted in thought.
“Okay,” he finally said, “let’s go back.”
“What? Wylie, come on.”
“I’m serious. Let’s keep going. We can do a country-club pool, maybe. We’ll break into the poolhouse and use their drainage system. It might take me a couple of minutes to figure it out, but it’ll drain faster than with the submersible pump, so that’s an advantage.” He was almost panting. “Listen, I understand it’s a suboptimal situation, but flexibility’s the key to our success.”
“Wylie,” I said, “no way.”
Irina, in the back, kept silent.
“There is absolutely no reason we can’t do this,” Wylie said. Instead of slouching, he was straight and serious now, making eye contact with each of us. “We can be in and out in five minutes, tops. Once I get it draining, we can leave. Really, we can do it.”
“No, we can’t,” I said. His expression told me that if I didn’t put it in his terms, he’d never speak to me again. “Wylie, the plan’s inherently flawed. We don’t know what their system’s like or even where it is. And instead of three other men you’ve got me, Irina, and a six-month-old baby. For a much larger pool. It’d be so much better to regroup and revise our tactics rather than risk everything for this.”
“She is actually seven months,” Irina corrected.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, I am not offended.”
Wylie was looking down at the seat and smoothing the duct tape over a tear in the upholstery.
“There will be plenty of other opportunities,” I said. “But for tonight I say we retrench and, well, analyze the suboptimal nature of events. Then we can, you know, figure out how to do it better next time.”
We sat in the dark, the Caprice’s engine idling like a smoker’s cough, while Wylie thought it over. When he met my eyes again I was almost sure — not a hundred percent, but nonetheless — I saw a flash of gratitude.
“It could be that continuing tonight isn’t the most efficient use of our resources,” he said.
I smiled. “I think you’re right.”
Psyche cried relentlessly as we drove back to the apartment, which made conversation impossible. Wylie was slumped sideways against the door, and I could see him turning over the night’s events in his mind, evaluating and analyzing and formulating alternatives for the future. You could say this much about him: he was always thinking. Irina, her round face ducked close to the sling, shushed and sang to the baby, but to no avail. Above us, clouds skittered across the face of the moon.
For some reason, I thought of Harold Wallace drinking alone in his well-manicured, beige-and-white house, and then about my mother, wondering where she was and what she was doing.
It was almost three o’clock when we got to Wylie’s place. Irina disappeared into the back room with Psyche, who was still crying. Angus, Stan, and Berto were lying on the floor drinking beer by candlelight, looking sleepy and stoned. Angus smiled and gestured for me to come over, but I shook my head. Something about him was bothering me, starting with the way he’d laughed when things went wrong, as if none of this really mattered to him; it didn’t mean that much to me, either, but it did to the others, and he was, after all, one of them. He stared at me hard for a second, then shrugged and turned his attention to Wylie, who was pacing in a tight circle.
“That,” my brother said, “was a disaster.”
Stan nodded his head. “It was fairly hideous.”
“You got that right, man,” Berto said. “Maybe we should go back to the stuff everybody else is doing? Like the demonstrations and all that shit.”
“Fuck demonstrations,” Angus said, keeping his eyes on Wylie.
“No need for harsh language, man,” Berto said.
“Hey, if you want to start a letter-writing campaign, go right ahead,” Angus said, smiling at him.
“Unforgivably disastrous,” Wylie said, still pacing, and now clenching his hands into fists. “Completely fragmented. We’ve got to do a major overhaul of our planning process. This can’t happen again. It’s a waste of time and resources.”
“Listen, it was only an experiment,” Angus said. “We tried, and it didn’t work out. Next time we’ll do better.”
Stan and Berto looked back and forth, expectantly, between Angus and Wylie. I had a feeling they’d been witness to these debates before.