Summer of Light

by W. Dale Cramer

  He flipped on the light. The hamper did bulge—it was full. The lid yawned back against the wall, trapped there by a limp mound of dresses and pants and bras and sweaters. Cotton blouses and silk nightgowns spilled in a tangle to the floor.

  “Just clothes,” Mick muttered, jacking up his courage. But he didn’t move. He shuddered, vacillating; they were a woman’s clothes.

  I can do this, he thought. Cotton, wool, polyester, colored, white. Ain’t no hill for a climber. I cook, I buy groceries—I even mop, for cryin’ out loud. I wash my clothes; I wash the kids’ clothes; I can wash a woman’s clothes.

  He got a laundry basket, plunked it down in the middle of the closet and started flinging things into it. He tossed the white stuff aside for the moment, smug in the lofty knowledge that white stuff, for whatever reason, had to be washed separately. Anything with the faintest trace of white in it went into a separate pile—underwear, a white shirt with a brown collar and pocket flaps, a white sweater with red stripes.

  An obscure bit of laundry lore nagged the back of his mind, something about the little tags. He stopped, straightened up and studied the tag inside the neck of a cashmere sweater, but the print was so tiny he couldn’t make it out. He started to go get his reading glasses from the desk, but thought better of it.

  You call yourself a man? Next thing you know you’ll be stopping at gas stations to ask directions. Buck up, man. Have you no pride?

  He would not be the slave of a care tag. Clothes is clothes. If it had not a speck of white in it, into the basket it went. The culling of the white stuff was the only taxing part of the process. The rest was easy: White stuff, hot. Everything else, warm. Piece-o-cake.

  He did everything right, he was sure of it, but the minions of the dark hamper ranged far in the absence of a woman, and evil was afoot. When the first load came out of the washing machine everything had taken on the same dark shade of pink.

  It’s because they’re wet, he told himself. This is just the color women’s clothes take on when they’re wet.

  The white stuff, when it came out of the washer, confirmed his theory. Everything was a much lighter shade of pink—except, for some strange reason, the red sweater, which had turned a sort of mauve. He was reassured by the fact that the white stripes were a very light pink, as they should be. He figured he needed to cook all the pink color out, so he dumped everything in the dryer, set the heat to High and the timer on extra long.

  But he really started to sweat when he took the first load out of the dryer. The pink hadn’t gone away. Must not have dried them long enough.

  He ran them through again.

  When he took them out of the drier the second time Mick learned that pinkness wasn’t the worst of it. While the clothes tumbled, some imp had spirited away some of Layne’s best dresses and left others in their places. They looked like Layne’s dresses but they were smaller. Much smaller. These might fit Toad.

  Still, he thought these dresses might actually be larger than they appeared because they were so deeply wrinkled, like wads of dark pink tissue paper. He figured if he could iron out all the wrinkles they might grow back to their original size. Maybe she wouldn’t notice. Maybe she’d just think she was gaining weight.

  Mick knew how to use an iron. He’d been ironing his own cotton clothes for a long time and considered himself something of an expert. Pour in a little water, turn the dial all the way up, and wait. When the iron gets hot enough to light a cigarette you’re good to go.

  He started with a cotton blouse, confident, self-assured. But none of the lines in the blouse were straight like a man’s shirt. Everything was bent and curved and refused to lay flat on the ironing board. Not only that, but the blouse had beads on it. All down the front of the blouse was some kind of artsy design made from a hundred little white beads, like pearls, and Mick couldn’t get the iron in between them. He mashed the iron down hard on the beaded section, pressed the Extra Steam button, and held it there long enough for the steam to do its work.

  When he lifted the iron the shirt came with it. He slung the whole mess up and down a few times, but the shirt clung tight, flapping like a signal flag. He lost his temper, grabbed a handful of shirt and ripped it off the iron. He heard a little “tsst” when the shirt lashed back and fused itself to his forearm.

  Holding his arm under cold tap water, he didn’t worry so much about the geometric pattern of tiny blisters on his arm as he did about the flat plastic beads on the front of Layne’s blouse, now garnished with hundreds of little arm hairs.

  He tried ironing out one of the balled-up dresses, but it just melted and stuck to the iron. By then Mick’s sanity was ratcheting close to the brink. He was defeated and he knew it. He threw away the worst of the evidence and put everything else back in the hamper like he found it. The dark hamper, with its lid thrown back, looked for all the world like it was laughing at him.

  Dylan was standing in the bedroom when Mick flipped off the closet light. A breeze from the open window pushed against the closet door and swung it slowly shut. The hinges squeaked and gave off a long, high-pitched giggle. Dylan picked up the sound and mimicked it perfectly.

  “Wiiiiii-imp,” he said, with a little cry in his voice, dropping from high to low just like the hinge.

  “Shut up,” Mick muttered. “Just shut up.”

  38

  * * *

  Games.

  THEY did a lot of shopping over the next few days. Layne had already begun buying new school clothes for the kids, and now she needed to pick up a few things for herself, to replace the items her “nearly departed” husband had washed. She bought everything from a new cashmere sweater to Autumn Russet hair coloring with built-in highlights and moisturizing conditioners for that fuller look. He tried teasing her about it, tried to lighten the mood by telling her that all this time he thought she just dyed the roots gray. She was not amused. Lately, since he’d violated the Hamper, it had been hard to make her laugh.

  They took Layne’s Explorer to the superstore that night because they couldn’t all fit in Mick’s truck. He didn’t drive her car often, and she never noticed when something was amiss. The engine didn’t sound quite right. He cocked an ear, frowning, and Layne asked him what was wrong.

  “Not sure,” Mick said. “Could be the timing chain.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said. “What does it sound like?”

  She wouldn’t have heard it. In the first place the kids were making too much racket in the back seat. Second, as Mick was well aware, the part of the male brain that processed engine noises had been assigned other duties in women. Maybe it was the part that slapped a mother awake at two o’clock in the morning at the sound of a single muffled cough in the bedroom across the hall.

  He tried to explain. “You know how your car sounds when it’s running right?”

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound like that.”

  “I don’t see how you can tell,” she shouted, glancing over her shoulder at the source of the blood-curdling screams, machine-gun sounds and gurgling, theatrical, death-rattle noises.

  She was getting that look. He’d seen it a lot in the last three days—that tight-lipped, slit-eyed look.

  “What?” They always played out the ritual the same way. He’d see the look, ask what was wrong and get a terse “Nothing” in reply. They’d usually repeat this pattern until he stopped asking, and then she’d tell him. This time he didn’t have long to wait.

  “It’s that game,” she growled. “Can’t you hear what they’re doing?”

  “FROG LESS A PIN CORE!” Ben belted out.

  Dylan answered with a perfect impression of a Mark–9 rocket launcher being primed and fired, then screamed, “I’M OUT OF AMMO!”

  Toad shrilled, “KILL ME!”

  He knew she disapproved of the video game, but the kids didn’t play it often, and then only while sitting on his lap. But such games had gotten a bad rap as the favorite pastime of dar
k, brooding teenagers who daydreamed about shooting real bullets at their classmates.

  “Games don’t kill people,” Mick mumbled. “People kill people.”

  “Right. Games just teach them how much fun it is.”

  He could hear his father’s voice in his head. “Son, you need to sit down and shut up.” This once, discretion got the better of him, and Mick shut up. The game had never been particularly important to him. It was a minor amusement, and not worth fighting about.

  The kids were their usual manic selves in the superstore, grabbing things off the shelves and begging. Their behavior normally would not have bothered Mick a whole lot, but on that particular night it seemed important for them to calm down, just once, and show their mother what little angels he was raising. Mick tried giving them “the look,” but they watched TV—they knew that if he beat them in public he’d be arrested. As soon as Layne turned her back he got their attention, narrowed his eyes and drew a forefinger across his throat, but for some reason they thought it was outrageously funny and started doing it to total strangers in the aisles.

  Layne stopped to look at pantyhose, dozens of little boxes of different shades and sizes of pantyhose. Dylan appeared beside her for a second, staring at the pictures of underwear-clad models on the boxes.

  “Lookin’ for fribble covers?” he asked. He meant bras. She ignored him, bent on examining each and every one of the hundred or so boxes before deciding not to buy any of them, then moved on to the fingernail polish.

  “Listen,” Mick said, “I’ll just take the kids over to the magazine section, okay? They like looking at magazines. Keeps ’em quiet.”

  Layne nodded. “Okay. I’ll catch up in a bit,” she said, distracted.

  Mick browsed the racks while the kids flipped through magazines on the floor. Dylan loved to look at pictures of grotesquely over-muscled superheroes in weird paint schemes, so he picked a wrestling magazine. Toad picked out a comic book with a snarling T-rex on the cover and Ben flipped through Popular Mechanics because there was a picture of a bizarre machine on the front and he thought it might be a time machine.

  Mick’s eye always went to the do-it-yourself magazines, all about how to build everything from your own house to your own airplane. He was looking through one of those, mostly at the pictures, when he ran across a picture of a guy in jungle fatigues riding a zip line across a river gorge. It caught his attention, and the next thing he knew he was completely absorbed in reading an article on how to build a zip line—everything from optimum fall rates to detailed instructions on what size cable to use, how to clamp it and how to build the trolley.

  As Mick was reading the article, picturing angles and distances and fall rates in his mind, it came to him slowly that the tree house—Andy’s House, the kids called it now—was right in line with the swimming pool, about forty feet straight out from the shallow end. Dead center at the back of the tree house stood a good stout white oak tree, and at the far end of the pool was a diving board, fastened to the top of a heavy steel pedestal, which was bolted into the concrete. The plan came together in his mind, whole and complete, and he could see it—an eightyfoot cable from the top of the tree house over a short stretch of grass, traversing the deck, sloping down the entire length of the pool to the deep end, and anchored at last to the diving board pedestal. He knew for a fact he could scrounge up all the parts he needed and fabricate a trolley in Hap’s shop.

  It was a beautiful plan, and he was so caught up in it that he actually jumped when Layne tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Where are the kids?”

  Mick had been so absorbed he hadn’t noticed the alarming quiet. He glanced around and saw no children. Their magazines were spread out in the aisle, but the kids were nowhere in sight.

  Layne panicked. She bolted screaming to the end of the aisle, skidded to a stop, and tried to run in two directions at once. Mick caught up with her and took her by the shoulders to calm her down.

  “Sometimes they play hide-and-seek,” he said smugly. “It’s all right. Watch.”

  He threw his head back, cupped his hands around his mouth and boomed out, “FROG LESS A PIN CORE!”

  From two aisles over, among the housewares, came the shrill cry, “I’M OUT OF AMMO!”

  Somewhere in the candy section a high voice piped, “KILL ME!” and another yelled, “THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”

  The lady with the two little girls in her cart laughed so hard she almost dropped a porcelain lamp, but Layne was not amused. She didn’t say much until after they were home and the kids had gone off to their baths. Mick turned on the TV to catch the baseball game and she turned it back off.

  “We have to talk,” she said. She sat facing him with her elbows on her knees, her fingers tented against each other. She was calm, the way a space shuttle is calm during the countdown.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  “I don’t want the kids playing those shooting games anymore. There’s evidence games like that played an important part in all these school shootings.”

  “There’s also evidence that the alleged shooters wore athletic shoes at one time or another but I don’t see anybody banning sneakers.”

  She paused and took a deep breath, but she pressed on. “Those first-person games put a weapon in your hand and make you the shooter. They normalize violence and justify it as a means of conflict resolution.”

  “Okay. I can understand that, for girls, but boys are born thinking of violence as a way to resolve things, and speaking as a man, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Games like that didn’t exist when I was a kid, so me and my brothers went out in the yard and shot each other with toy guns—every day. When we didn’t have guns we shot each other with sticks. It’s genetic. We must have killed each other ten thousand times, but we still managed to grow up knowing the difference between real and pretend.”

  Her eyes flashed. “But your brother always got back up, didn’t he. Shoot somebody in one of those games and you get to watch him splatter.”

  Normally he would have given up at that point, but he’d seen this argument coming and he’d had time to think about it.

  “The point is,” Mick held forth, “we need to calm down and look for the real cause and effect. It’s not about game control, or even gun control. The truth is, these kids who end up on the six-and-eleven are being raised by cell phone, and I personally think that when our kids are sitting on my lap playing a game on the computer the lap time outweighs any negative impact the game might have.” He was getting pretty good at lawyer talk himself.

  “You don’t know that,” she said flatly. “And what’s the price if you’re wrong?”

  With lawyer-like precision, she had punctured Patrick Henry and let all the air out of his carefully constructed argument. In the end he had to admit she was right—he didn’t know. And some things just weren’t worth the risk.

  “All right,” he said. “If you feel that strongly about it, no more shooting games. I think I can probably find more constructive ways for the kids to spend their time. We’ll find something else. Something that involves fresh air and sunshine. Okay?”

  He didn’t tell her what he had in mind. He wanted it to be a surprise.

  39

  * * *

  The zip line.

  IF HE’D heard it once, he’d heard it a thousand times that summer.

  “I’m bored.”

  Boredom was one thing that hadn’t changed a lick since the old days. Back in Mick’s day they had sticks and rocks, maybe a bike and a ball glove, and they got bored in the summer. A generation later, his own kids had a dog, a goat, a hamster, a parakeet, a yard full of chickens, a swimming pool, bicycles, board games, a million toys, a hundred and twenty-nine channels, video games, computers—and they still got bored in the summer.

  In the middle of a Georgia summer the hot, humid, white days pressed down so hard he could feel it in his knees, and not a breath of wind. A kind of lethargy worked its way into everything and ev
erybody. It made Mick want to take a nap, but the kids, since they were entitled to a nap and probably needed one, wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They’d just plop down next to him, prop a chin on a palm and say, “I’m bored.”

  They’d been doing that to him for the last two weeks, all three of them, but they would not be bored this day.

  That morning, as soon as the kids were all up and fed, they all went straight over to Hap’s shop. When he told Hap what he had in mind, Hap got so excited about the idea he stopped right in the middle of fixing Mrs. Hardeman’s washing machine and started right away digging in his junk pile. It took him less than an hour to find all the parts, cut a couple triangles out of eighth-inch sheet steel, sandwich two ball-bearing pulleys between them and thread a pipe handle through the bottom. Mick found a spool of stainless-steel cable out behind the shed and some industrial-strength clamps in the tool bin of Hap’s tow truck.

  He didn’t tell the kids what they were doing, and they didn’t pay much attention until he and Hap started cutting the roof off the back of the tree house. Then all three kids got up under them and bombarded them with questions. The tree house got a little crowded, what with Ben, Toad, Andy, Mick and Hap all up there at the same time, but it didn’t shake. Like most of the things Mick built, it was earthquake-proof.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Dylan said. Only then did Mick notice that Dylan, who had just turned five and had always been terrified of heights, was up in the tree house with everybody else. He hadn’t been up there since the day it was built. The goat bleated at him from the ground.

  “We’re buildin’ you a zip line,” Hap said, holding the little platform in place against the tree so Mick could fasten it to the tree.

  “What’s a zip line?” Toad asked, staring at the spool of cable by her feet.

  Ben answered her. “It’s one of those things where you slide down a wire. You know, like they did on Fear Factor last week.”