A storm blew in that morning, but had vanished by early afternoon. It left behind a cool breeze and the day’s heat had difficulty fighting it. Eileen said they should all go swimming and Dennis jumped at the suggestion. To his surprise, Mike was excited about it too, and they all changed into swimsuits and hit the pool.
It seemed the entire building was out back. Usually everyone was so quiet and private, but the respite from humidity brought them out in droves. A cursory head count made Dennis estimate that nearly thirty people milled around on the concrete patio. They were introduced to a new face every foot or so.
Carl Petrie and Kurt Hagen roasted hot dogs and burgers on the grill. Carl wore an ill fitting T-shirt and blue jean shorts, while rolls of fat hung over Kurt’s camouflage swim trunks. He smiled at them from under his ball cap. “Y’all hungry?”
Dennis laughed. “Man, I could eat that whole pack of dogs.”
“That’s what I like to hear, brutha. Carl, throw some dogs on there.”
“And why can’t you?”
“Shit, man. You been eating three-fourths of everthang I cook. Throw some dogs on now, will ya?”
Carl sliced open a package. “Alright. You folks see what I put up with here?”
Kurt smacked his back and winked at Eileen. “Don’t pay him no mind. He’s just trying to impress a pretty lady, but everbody done knows I’m the sexy one here.” Kurt patted his swollen belly.
“Whatever, Tubby.” Carl positioned the dogs to sizzle on the grill.
Patty Malone dragged the trio over to her cooler, chatting the entire time about how much the recent humidity troubled her bad knee, and sent them away armed with beer. Jason Teague gave them flyers to a show his band was having; Dennis didn’t like the long stares he gave Eileen from behind his black-framed glasses and filed him away in the mental Rolodex. Terry Crowley invited them to play cards with him, Jack the maintenance man, and Tony Parker. Tony’s teenage daughter Sarah pulled up a chair and studied the men as they played.
A Golden Retriever came trotting up to Mike, panting and wagging its tail. It sniffed his hand and rubbed its snout into his leg. Mike knelt down and petted the dog. It licked his face. He turned his head and wiped a long string of spittle from his chin. Dennis and Eileen laughed.
“That’s Lucy,” a young boy said. He looked to be about twelve, shirtless and wearing “Transformers” swimming trunks. “She loves everybody.”
Lucy turned her attention to Dennis, jumping onto her hind legs and placing her front paws on his chest. He scratched her behind the ears.
The boy patted his thighs. “Lucy.”
Lucy jumped down and ran over to him.
“I’m Joey,” he said. “Lemme know if you ever wanna play with Lucy.” Then the two of them took off running towards the grill without another word.
“I want a dog,” Eileen said.
Mike nodded. “Me too.”
They made it to the pool and slid in, the cool water forcing sharp breaths. The air above it had the subtle, acrid tang of chlorine and sunscreen. Dennis and Eileen held their breath and submerged, popping back up and pulling their hair from their eyes, as Mike held onto the wall and kicked his feet around. A group of children splashed in the shallow end, but they had the deep end to themselves.
Margot swam over not long after and introduced herself to Eileen. She wore a red swimsuit that did a worse job of holding in her breasts than most of her clothing. She crept across the wall, hand over hand, until she floated next to Mike. Dennis nudged Eileen under the water and flashed a wink.
“How you been, Michael?”
Mike’s face reddened and he looked down at the water. A grin tugged at the edges of his mouth. “I’ve been good. How about you?”
“Just so damn hot.”
Eileen turned to Dennis and rolled her eyes.
“You must live down here, Margot,” Dennis said. “I see you here all the time.”
“I love this pool,” she said. “One of the reasons I moved in here eons ago.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, well…guess I moved in here in the fall of ninety-five.”
Dennis whistled.
“I just love this old place. There’s a pulse to the building, you know. You may have felt it already. The people, the seclusion, the history…it all adds up to something special, I think.”
Eileen tapped Dennis’ shoulder. “I’m gonna do some laps.”
“Okay.”
She dove underwater and swam off.
Mike shook his head. “What about all those creepy statues?”
She laughed. “Honey, I’m the reason those things are still around.” They gave her a puzzled look and she went on. “Rudy, God bless him, hates those damn things. Says they’re tacky.”
“I can see that,” Dennis said.
“You hush up now. Those things are wonderful. Sure, they may be a little bohemian, but that’s what makes them special. Anyway, Rudy has tried to get them removed about once every other year since he took over as manager in ninety-six. Every time he does, I get the tenants together and organize a letter writing campaign. Works like a charm. It’s kinda become a fun little game, our tug of war. I look forward to it and suspect he does too.”
“One man’s trash…”
She shook her head. “It’s not just that. It’s the history behind them.” She splashed a bit of water into Mike’s face and giggled.
Dennis held his breath.
If ever there was a recipe for a historic Mike freak-out moment…
Mike laughed and wiped it off.
Dennis smiled.
Man, has she gotten to him.
“What history?”
“Oh, no one’s told you the story?” Her eyes grew wide and sparkled. She leaned forward. “Honey, this place is chock full of history. Back in, oh…I guess this had to be around 1922, when this was the Sanatorium—”
“Sanatorium?” Mike asked.
“Just a fancy word for ‘tuberculosis hospital,’ sweetie. Anyway, there was this doctor by the name of Whaley. More than a doctor, really. He married into money and sat on the Board. Back in those days the doctors would live at the hospital for weeks at a time, on account of how far out it was and all. So, getting lonely and needing to satisfy those needs a man often needs to satisfy—” She nudged Mike and he blushed. “ he set his eyes on a nurse, beautiful young octoroon girl named Calliope.”
“What’s an octoroon?” Mike asked.
She grinned. “I feel like a schoolmarm.
Octoroon
was a polite way of saying
mixed
in those days. Lot of the nurses came from a hospital in New Orleans and Calliope was one of them. Half-white, half-black, probably some Indian in there, too. She was a stunning creature, beautiful in every regard. Graceful and bright, too. They say her smile could light up an entire building. But what really attracted Whaley to her was her intellect. It was so rare for a woman to have a good education in those days, especially a non-white woman. But at some point in her short life she had learned to read and write and had taken an interest in poetry and the classics.
“Her and Whaley used to sit around on the porch and talk about Greek mythology or philosophy or what have you and his lust gave way to love. He finally convinced her to go to bed with him and they became, for all intents and purposes, husband and wife during Whaley’s long stays here.
“Now Calliope lived in one of the bunk houses out behind the hospital, about where them old ratty stores are today, I guess. So when Whaley would go back down to town to spend time with his family, she was stuck up here on the hill. That didn’t sit too well and they started fighting. Nothing too big, I reckon—their love was too strong for that—but enough to put a strain on them. She wanted him all to herself, you see, but for him to leave his wife would have been unheard of in those days. His money, his career, his status—POOF!
“But Calliope was a proud Catholic girl and didn’t like living in sin. So when she became pregnant she didn’t know what to do. She went to Whaley for help and he convinced her…well…”
“To have an abortion,” Dennis said.
Margot nodded. “He did it himself, somewhere up on the third floor. Poor girl bled to death during it.”
Dennis and Mike shared a look.
Margot didn’t seem to notice. “Whaley never forgave himself. He spent more and more time up here, slept in her old room in the bunkhouses, stopped eating. Just wasted away without her. His wife took the children and moved back to New York. They didn’t divorce—people didn’t do that back then—but the marriage was over. He still had access to the money, though, and hired an artist to come up here, a Creole fella from New Orleans, Calliope’s cousin as some stories say, and a renowned sculptor. Other stories say he was also a Voodoo priest, but who knows? What all the stories do agree on is that Whaley had him sculpt each and every one of them statues as a monument to the passion he and Calliope shared.”
Dennis realized he had drifted closer during the story and pushed back a foot or two. “That’s why they represent Greek mythology, huh?”
“Mmm-hmm. Those statues over there?” She pointed to the hedges that hid benches and the near-obscene satyr and nymph in the fountain. “That’s supposed to be exact images of the doctor and his octoroon. Minus the horns, of course.”
“So,” Mike said, “they’ve stood here all these years?”
“God, no. Whaley committed suicide after they were carved—slit his own throat at the foot of the fountain, they say—and the Board had the statues removed. They sat in the basement all these years until this place was turned into apartments. Rudy’s father put them back in their original spots, God only knows why. I’m glad he did, though. Wish his son appreciated them as much.”
“This is a weird building,” Mike said.
Margot laughed. “Yes, I reckon it is. Full of stories. But that’s why I love it.”
Dennis nodded. “What about the ‘Blue Boy’ I heard you guys talking about the other day? What’s that story?”
A jagged grin ripped across Margot’s face. It reminded him of the smiles carved into the nymphs’ faces and he shuddered.
“The Blue Boy,” Margot began, “is another sad tale.
Back in, oh, I guess this was eighty-two or eighty-three, about a year or two after the Crossroads Killer was caught—oh, don’t tell me you boys don’t know about the Crossroads Killer? I swear I oughta write a book. The Crossroads Killer was a sick, twisted young man who killed young ladies in the late seventies and early eighties. He’d leave their bodies, all tortured and defiled in the most grotesque ways, tied to trees at crossroads all around here. Killed about thirteen or fourteen girls before they caught him. Bastard lived up here, though now he’s rotting in hell I dare say—hung himself in prison. Police thought he tortured the women somewhere in this building, but could never find any evidence.
“But I’m rolling off the rails, as my daddy used to say—he was a railroad man, of course. Anyway, the Blue Boy. He was six or seven. Smart boy. Cute too. His momma was teaching him to swim. She’d bring him down here every afternoon in the summer after his father had gone to work. Well, one day he was in the midst of a swimming lesson when he asked his momma if he could try the deep end. She of course said that he could not. But just as she was getting outta the pool to dry off, one of her neighbors comes out and asks her to help with a broken faucet or something—or maybe she had a phone call—whatever it was, his momma went inside for just a moment and left him to dry off.
“But the boy, being such a smart and driven child, knew that he could swim from the shallow end to the deep end and back. He thought his momma would have been so proud of him when she saw he could do it on his own. So he dove in.”
“And drowned,” Dennis said.
Margot nodded. “His momma had told him to meet her back up in their apartment. By the time she was done with whatever had called her away and had scoured every inch of her apartment for her son, she came back down here to find him floating face down, right about here.” Margot swirled her hand around the water in front of her. “They pulled his pale, blue body from the water, all swollen and bloated. Some folks say he was in there for hours before she realized he was missing.”
“Poor kid,” Mike said.
“Well, story don’t end there. See, on some nights, when there’s no one out here, you can hear the boy splashing around in the pool, crying for his momma.”
Dennis recalled the splashing he and Eileen had heard when they’d gone out to examine the supermarket. He looked around the deep end of the pool, imagining that poor boy thrashing around as he drowned.
“Some folks even claim they’ve
seen
him swimming under the surface, his face as blue as the night. That’s why they call him the Blue Boy.”
Mike glanced around the water and shivered.
Eileen emerged with a splash next to Dennis. She pulled her hair back and blinked. “What’d I miss?”
“Long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”
Margot had wedged closer to Mike and shifted her torso, her breasts within inches of him. His face was as red as her swimsuit.
Dennis turned to Eileen. “Hey, wanna get a hot dog?”
She glanced over at them. “Uh…yeah. A hot dog sounds great.”
“I’m hungry, too,” Mike said.
“You stay put. I’ll bring you one.” Dennis swam over to the edge and climbed out. He lowered a hand and helped Eileen over the side and they walked toward the grill.
“What,” she asked, “is
that
all about?”
“I’m pretty sure that Margot chick has got the hots for our little Mikey.”
“No? You think? I mean, why is an attractive older woman after Mike?”
“Beats me.”
“I’m not trying to sound like a bitch or anything. He’s not a bad looking guy. He’s just so—”
“Childish?”
She shrugged.
“Maybe she’s just horny. Ya know, likes them young and virginal.”
Eileen laughed.
“That way she can teach them what she likes.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Well, I hope he sleeps with her.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I think it’ll be good for him. Help him grow up.”
“Hmmm…we’ll see…”
They had reached the grill. Carl was nowhere to be seen, but Kurt sang
Burning Love
to himself while he grilled. He smiled, threw some dogs on buns, squirted an ocean of mustard onto them, and handed the plate away. Dennis looked around for a good place to sit, but didn’t see one.