How It Was: The Boy, The Water…

[Not The Boy’s dangerous swimming area]

Many people, I know, actually look forward to mid-summer. It reminds them of easy childhood days (it has that effect on me, too), and suggests the prospect of recapturing some of those moments. You laze around a house or porch or beach, maybe with a book. Maybe board games are involved. Certainly, food cooked (or at least consumed) out-0f-doors will figure into it somehow. You swat at mosquitoes and siblings, while the ones stab at your skin and the others, at your psyche. Cicadas buzz at twilight, and fireflies ignite a little while later. (Maybe the cicadas were just the power generators kick-starting themselves.) The smell of newly mown grass perfumes the air. The moon rises in a star-speckled night sky; from a couple of back yards away, you can hear the laughter of adults discussing who knows what…

Memories of mid-summer also fire off in your head, almost inescapably, when the day is hot, the humidity high, and you hear from somewhere nearby a good, solid splash. I’m not talking the plain old splash of a spoon into dishwater, either, or even of an ice cube into a glass of tea. I mean the splash of a good-sized living creature into a substantial body of water: a pool, a lake, a river, even (between waves) the sea.

For some of you, no doubt, this splash makes you all wistful and nostalgic. Even the grown-up version of The Boy appreciates this sensation, vicariously. But the grown-up version of The Boy can’t help associating this splash with another, decades ago…

—

The Boy lived a mere two blocks from a great and beautiful body of water known to insiders as, simply, “the river.”

You could go down to the river on a hot summer afternoon, clamber down to the bank from the concrete wall erected (legend had it) by laborers during the period known as The Great Depression in order to hold back the mighty flood tides that they had had back then, when the Ice Age was ending and there was suddenly more water than the world could cope with. You could find flat stones, slimy mollusk shells, and (if you were willing to dare having your fingers slashed) shards of green Rolling Rock bottles to skip across the surface in the direction of the mansion on the far side, whose white pillars and especially whose windows gleamed invitingly a mere half-mile distant.

Yet perhaps it was the river itself that was the source of the discomfort The Boy had always had with the notion of buoyancy.

The Boy had many years ago been warned away from the river by his parents. His father had threatened him, as was his wont, with a sentence beginning, “If I ever, ever catch you down there…” and ending with a phrase the exact contents of which did not matter, since all such phrases always promised total annihilation. “A dragon lives there,” said his mother, more fancifully.

This dragon, The Boy imagined, was long and undulant, its silver skin scaly and iridescent; its head looked like an automobile hood ornament, steely and unforgiving. There would be a splash as it surfaced when adults (but never their children) were present, and it would glare at them with its red, hungry eyes, projecting telepathic thoughts at them like Bring me your children. It would look at The Boy’s own parents and add, Yours first.