First Shift

Castellanos was wearing the T-shirt.

He came out of the trailer at twenty past nine on Monday morning in it, and stood at the bottom of the porch steps, and looked up at the four of them on the porch, and did not say anything, and dared them with his whole face to say anything; and nobody said anything, for a very long time.

It was blue. It was enormous. It came nearly to his knees, over his trousers, which were the same dark trousers he always wore, with the creases, and his shoes, which were the same black shoes; and on the front of it, across the whole of his chest, there was the sailing boat, and the sunset, and the fish leaping, and COVE POINT RESORT - GRAND LAKE in cheerful white letters in an arc, like a rainbow; and he had tucked it in. That was the thing. He had tucked it into the dark trousers, carefully, all the way round, so that it bloused out over his belt like a sail with no wind in it, and under the bloused part, at his right hip, where his jacket would have been, there was a shape that was not a part of the T-shirt and that nobody looked at.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“You look…”

“Sir,” said Castellanos, “I have been a police officer since before you were born. I have stood behind two Prime Ministers, and a Regent, and you, on the steps of the cathedral with a hundred thousand people in front of us.” He paused. “I am wearing this T-shirt because a woman in a visor told me to, and because she was right, and because it is going to be a hundred and one degrees today, and because I would rather die than frighten a child. If anybody on this porch laughs, I will put them in the boot of the car, and I will drive to Missouri, and I will not stop.”

Nobody laughed.

Behind him, by the corner of the trailer, Kimura was standing in the shade with a straw sun hat on and a novel in her hand and a canvas bag over her shoulder with a towel sticking out of it, looking at the oak, with her binoculars round her neck, and her shoulders, very slightly, very steadily, going up and down.

---

He was at the pool at nine fifty-two.

He knew because Kaylee told him. She was already there, at the gate, with a ring of keys, unlocking it, in the red shorts and the white GUARD T-shirt and the visor, without the zinc yet, and she looked at him as he came up the path from the car park pushing the blue bicycle, in the red T-shirt with STAFF on the back, too big, and the badge on the left, NEW GUY, and looked at her watch.

“Nine fifty-two,” she said.

“Is that all right?”

“It’s early.” She opened the gate. “Early’s good. Early means you get to do the bathrooms before anybody’s used them.” She held the gate for him. “After ten, somebody’s used them.”

---

The bathrooms were two concrete blocks behind the snack hut, painted white, one with a sign that said GUYS and one with a sign that said GALS, and each of them had three cubicles and two basins and a drain in the middle of the floor and a hose; and in the cupboard between them, behind a padlocked door that Kaylee unlocked, there was a mop and a bucket and a brush and a stack of yellow cloths and six bottles of things with warnings on them, and a list. The list was laminated. It was taped to the inside of the cupboard door. It said, in Bonnie Tackett’s quick round marker, under the heading BATHROOMS (ALL OF IT), twenty-two things, numbered.

“All of it,” said Kaylee. “In that order. Not the yellow bottle and the blue bottle at the same time, ever, or you’ll make a gas, and then you’re dead, and then I’ve got to do the bathrooms.” She looked at him. “You ever cleaned a toilet?”

“No.”

Kaylee looked at him for a moment, and her face did not change at all.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not hard. It’s just gross. You’ll live.” She gave him the yellow cloths. “Gloves are on the shelf. Shout if you find anything alive.”

She went away to the pool.

He stood in the door of GUYS with the yellow cloths in one hand and the laminated list in front of him on the cupboard door, and read it. All twenty-two. Then he put on the gloves, which were yellow, and too big, and smelled of rubber, and did number one.

---

He found that he was thorough.

He had not known. He had never had to find out. But he did the twenty-two things on the list in GUYS in the order they were written, one after another, without hurrying, the way he read an Act, all of it, to the end, because he did not know any other way to do a thing he had been given to do; and when he got to number twenty-two, HOSE THE FLOOR TO THE DRAIN, ALL OF IT, CORNERS, he hosed the floor to the drain, all of it, corners, and stood back, and looked at it, wet and white and clean, and smelling of the yellow bottle, and was surprised by the feeling it gave him, which was something like the feeling of the last George R. at the kitchen table at three in the morning, and not like it at all.

Then he did GALS.

Kaylee came at a quarter to eleven. She stood in the door of GALS and looked at it, all of it, slowly, from the left, the way Mrs Sixkiller had looked at the four of them by the well; and then she went in, and bent down, and looked behind the third cubicle, under the pipe, at the floor, where the pipe went into the wall.

“Missed a bit,” she said.

He looked. There was a bit. A small grey bit, in the angle of the pipe and the wall, the size of a thumbnail.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Do it again.” Kaylee straightened up. “The whole floor. From the top. Not just the bit.”

“The whole floor?”

“If you missed one bit,” said Kaylee, “you missed others. You just can’t see them yet.” She looked at him, and for the first time something moved at the corner of her mouth, very slightly, under the visor. “That’s not Bonnie’s rule. That’s my mom’s. She cleans the hospital at Vinita. Nights.”

She went away again.

He did the whole floor again, from the top.

---

The towels were in a hut by the gate, beside the pass window, where Bonnie Tackett sat in her headset doing three things at once; and in the hut there were shelves to the roof of white towels, folded, and two enormous canvas bins on wheels for the wet ones, and a counter with a hatch, and a card on the counter that said RESORT GUESTS - TOWELS - SHOW YOUR KEY - ONE EACH - BRING IT BACK OR IT’S ON YOUR BILL.

“You fold them in thirds,” said Bonnie Tackett, through the window between the pass hut and the towel hut, without taking off the headset. “Long way, then in thirds, then in half. Not in quarters. Quarters is for amateurs. Uh huh, no, I’m still here, Mrs Abernathy, I was talking to the…”

He folded the towels in thirds. There were a hundred and forty of them in the bins from Sunday, washed and dried and not folded, because the girl who had done the towels had gone to Arkansas on Friday to get married, which was why there had been a sign on the gate; and he folded all hundred and forty, in thirds, long way, then in half, standing at the counter of the towel hut with the hatch open and the sun coming in through it and the noise of the pool beginning outside, the first children, the first screams, the whistle; and gave them out, one each, to resort guests who showed their keys, and wrote the cabin number in a book, and took them back, wet, when they brought them back, and put them in the bin.

Nobody looked at him. He thought that was because he was in the towel hut, in the shade, behind the counter, in a red T-shirt, and that people did not look at the person who gave them a towel. He thought that this was probably true everywhere, and that he had never known it, because he had never been the person who gave anybody a towel.

---

At half past eleven Kaylee came to the towel hut with a box.

It was a plastic box, white, with a handle, like a box for fishing tackle, and inside it, in rows, in little slots, there were bottles, small ones, with droppers in their caps, and two clear plastic tubes, and a card with colours printed on it, two strips of colours, red and yellow.

“Chemicals,” said Kaylee. “You watch. You don’t touch.”

She took him to the edge of the pool, the deep end, where the water was calmest, and knelt on the hot concrete, and he knelt beside her, and she filled one of the clear tubes with pool water, up to a line, and the other, up to a line, and held them up against the sun.

“Chlorine,” she said, and put five drops from one of the bottles into the first tube, and it went yellow. “pH,” she said, and put five drops from another into the second, and it went red. A pale, clear, cheerful red, like Darlene’s wild plum jelly with the light through it. She held the tubes up against the card, against the strips of colour, one after the other, with her eyes narrowed.

“Chlorine two,” she said. “pH seven point six. Little high.” She looked at the red tube. “Pool’s got sixty kids in it and it’s a hundred and one degrees and the sun’s eating the chlorine as fast as I put it in. And the kids are…” She stopped. “Well. You did the bathrooms. You know what kids are.”

“What do you do?”

“Bring it down.” She put the tubes back in the box. “Bit of acid. Not much. In the deep end, by the return, so it mixes. Then test again in an hour.” She stood up. “Then do it all again. All day. Every day. Till Labor Day.”

“Why seven point four?”

Kaylee looked at him.

“Because that’s what you are,” she said. “Your eyes. Your tears. Seven point four, about. If the water’s the same as your eyes, they don’t sting.” She picked up the box. “Everything’s chemistry. People think it’s magic, and it isn’t, it’s chemistry, it’s just they never got taught it.” She looked down at the pool, at the children in it, screaming. “I’m the first one in my family who ever got taught it. At Northeastern. I’m going to be a pharmacist.” She said it the way Mr Baggett had said the premium sale, as if it were a thing that had been going since before the war. “In Vinita. At the hospital. On the day shift.”

She went away round the edge of the pool with the box.

He knelt by the deep end on the hot concrete for a moment longer, and looked at the water, very blue, with the light on it, and sixty children in it, and the high white chair at the end of it, empty, because Kaylee was not in it, because Kaylee was teaching him the pH of his own eyes.

---

The skimmer was a net on a pole as long as a flagstaff, and he spent forty minutes of the afternoon walking round the edge of the pool with it, very slowly, among the children’s feet, skimming the surface of the water for leaves and insects and the paper from a hot dog and a single pink flip-flop, which he returned to a small girl who had not noticed it was gone; and at the shallow end, by the steps, in the corner, there was a frog.

It was a small one, green, the size of the top of his thumb, floating on its front on the surface with its legs out, quite still, and he thought it was dead, and skimmed it up into the net, and it was not dead. It moved. It sat up in the wet mesh of the net and looked at him with two gold eyes.

He looked at it.

The pool was full of chlorine at two parts in a million, and the pH was seven point six, which was a little high, and the frog had been in it for he did not know how long, and was alive, and was looking at him; and he carried it in the net, very carefully, held out in front of him on the end of the long pole, all the way round the edge of the pool, past the high white chair, through the gate, past the towel hut, across the car park, and down the bank through the trees to the edge of the lake, where the water was brown and warm and full of fish and nobody had put anything in it; and tipped the net, and the frog sat on the mud at the edge of the water for a moment, and looked at him again, and went in.

When he came back up through the trees, Kaylee was on the high white chair with the whistle in her teeth, watching him come.

“That was eleven minutes,” she said, round the whistle.

“It was a frog.”

“I know it was a frog. I saw it.” She looked at him over the sunglasses. “You took a frog to the lake.”

“It was alive.”

Kaylee looked at him for a long time.

“Huh,” she said. Then: “Snack hut. Now. Bonnie’s on her own and there’s a line.”

---

The snack hut was the worst.

It was a wooden hut, painted white, with a hatch on the pool side that propped open on a stick, and a counter under the hatch, and behind the counter a space the size of a small kitchen, with a griddle, and a pot of something red, and a machine that made ice into snow, and a row of bottles of syrup in colours that did not occur in nature, and a refrigerator full of cans, and a till.

The till was the worst thing in the hut.

It was an old one, grey, with keys, with a drawer that shot out when you pressed the right one and hit you in the stomach; and there was a queue at the hatch, nine people, children mostly, wet, in towels, with money in their fists; and Bonnie Tackett, who had been working the hatch alone since half past one with her headset on, took one look at him in the door of the hut and said you’re on the till, hon, I’m on the griddle, a hot dog’s two pound twenty, a chilli pie’s three fifty, a snow cone’s one seventy-five, a can’s one pound, prices are on the board, don’t let ‘em short you, and turned to the griddle.

He stood at the till.

The first child in the queue was a boy of about eight. He had goggles pushed up on his forehead and a towel round his shoulders like a cloak, and Frederick knew him. It was the boy from the fence, from Wednesday, from adult swim, who would have hated being the King.

“Snow cone,” said the boy. “Blue. And a can of orange.”

Frederick looked at the board. A snow cone, one seventy-five. A can, one pound. He added them up in his head, and got two seventy-five, and was pleased.

“Two pounds seventy-five,” he said.

The boy held out a five-pound note.

Frederick took it. He looked at the till. He pressed the key that said CASH, and the drawer shot out and hit him in the stomach, and he looked down into it, at the money in the drawer, in its trays, the notes under their clips and the coins in their cups, and the five-pound note in his hand, and the boy in front of him waiting with his hand out; and did not know what to do.

He had never given anybody change.

He had never been given any, either, except by Royce Pettit, and that had been the whole of it, counted into his hand, twenty, forty, forty-five. He looked at the coins in their cups and tried to work out what you took away from five to get two seventy-five, and got it, two twenty-five, and then could not work out how to make two twenty-five out of what was in the cups, because there were so many cups and they were all different and some of the coins looked the same as each other; and the queue behind the boy was getting longer, and somebody at the back of it said come on, and Bonnie Tackett at the griddle had her back to him, and his face was going hot.

The boy with the goggles looked up at him across the counter.

“Two pound coin,” said the boy, patiently. “And a twenty. And a five.” He pointed into the drawer, over the counter, at the cups, one after another. “That one. That one. That one.”

Frederick took them out. A two-pound coin. A twenty. A five.

“Now say it,” said the boy.

“Say what?”

“You got to count it. Into my hand. Like this.” The boy held out his hand, flat. “Two seventy-five,” he said, and pointed at the five-pound note, which Frederick was still holding, and then at the coins. “Three. That’s the twenty and the five. Five. That’s the two.” He looked up. “Then it’s right. Then you know it’s right, and I know it’s right, and nobody’s got to argue.”

Frederick counted it into his hand.

“Two seventy-five,” he said. “Three. Five.”

“Good,” said the boy, and closed his hand over the coins, and took the blue snow cone from Bonnie Tackett over Frederick’s shoulder, and the can of orange, and went away across the hot concrete with his towel cloak and his goggles, eating the snow cone, without looking back.

Frederick stood at the till with the five-pound note still in his hand.

Behind him, at the griddle, Bonnie Tackett said, without turning round:

“That’s Tucker. His mama does my books. He’s been counting change since he was four.” She flipped a hot dog. “Put the five in the drawer, hon. Under the clip. Next.”

---

The woman from Tulsa came at three.

She was the fourteenth person in the queue at the hatch, and he had been doing it right for an hour, by then, two twenty, three, five, counting it into hands, under the clip, next; and she came up to the hatch in a white sun hat and a swimsuit with a sarong over it and a large pair of sunglasses, with a little girl by the hand, and said two snow cones, cherry, and then looked at him.

Then she took her sunglasses off.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh my God.”

He held out his hand for the money.

“Three pounds fifty,” he said.

“You’re… aren’t you… oh my God, you are. You’re…” The woman put her hand on her chest. Her voice went up. “Oh my God. Kayla, look. Look who it is, baby. It’s the…”

“Would you like syrup on both of them?” said Frederick. “Or just one?”

The woman stared at him.

The queue behind her had gone quiet. Not all of it. The front part. The part that could hear. A man with a towel over his shoulders. Two girls in bikinis. A father with a baby. And they were not, he could see, the town; they were not Ketchum, or Vinita; they were people from the cabins, from Tulsa and Joplin and Kansas City, people who had come to a lake resort for a week in July, and they had not been at the Cove Café on Sunday, or in the queue on Wednesday, and nobody had told them anything, and they were looking at him with their mouths open, and somebody at the back was getting out a telephone.

“Are you working here?” said the woman. “Like… actually… oh my God, can I get a picture? Can we just get one picture? Kayla, baby, stand next to the…”

The whistle went.

It went right over the snack hut. One long, shrill, furious blast. Every head in the queue turned. Every head on the terrace. Every head in the pool.

Kaylee was standing at the foot of the high white chair, not on it, on the concrete, with her sunglasses on and the whistle in her hand, and the zinc on her nose, looking at the queue at the snack hut. At the woman in the white sun hat. At the man at the back with the telephone.

“Ma’am,” said Kaylee.

She did not shout. She did not have to.

“He’s working,” said Kaylee. “Cherry or what?”

The woman in the white sun hat looked at Kaylee, and at the whistle, and at the zinc, and at the high white chair, and at the sign on the fence behind her, which she could not have read from there but which, Frederick thought, she somehow knew the last line of.

“Cherry,” she said, faintly. “Both of them.”

“Three fifty,” said Frederick.

She gave him a five-pound note. He counted the change into her hand, carefully. Three fifty. Four. Five. She took it. She took the two cherry snow cones from Bonnie Tackett. She looked at him once more, over them, with her mouth still a little open, and then she put her sunglasses back on and went away across the concrete with her little girl, who was looking back at him over her shoulder the whole way, with enormous eyes, like Kaylynn at the Cove Café.

At the back of the queue, the man with the telephone put it away.

---

He had a hot dog at half past three, for lunch, because there had not been time before, sitting on an upturned crate behind the snack hut in the shade, with his back against the hot white boards and his legs out in front of him; and Kaylee came round the corner of the hut with a small notebook and a pencil, and looked at the hot dog, and wrote something in the notebook.

“One twenty,” she said. “At cost. Out of your Friday.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s coming out of your Friday.” She looked at the notebook. “Bonnie says you did the till right after Tucker.”

“Tucker taught me.”

“Tucker’s eight.”

“I know.”

Kaylee looked at him, sitting on the crate behind the snack hut with the hot dog in his hand, in the red T-shirt with STAFF on the back and the badge that said NEW GUY, sweating, with the yellow-bottle smell still on his hands under the mustard.

“That woman,” she said.

“Thank you for that.”

“Don’t.” Kaylee put the notebook in her back pocket. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it because she was holding up the line and there’s a kid in it with sunburn who needs a can of something cold.” She turned to go. Then she stopped, at the corner of the hut, and did not turn round. “And because you’re working,” she said, to the corner of the hut. “And when you’re working, you’re working. That’s all. Doesn’t matter who.”

She went back to the chair.

---

At five o’clock she came down off it for her break.

She had to. She had been on it since ten with only the ten minutes at a time she came down to test the water and to blow the whistle at the queue, and she called Bonnie on the radio on her belt, Bonnie, I need ten, and Bonnie said ten-four and came out of the pass hut in her headset and stood at the deep end with her arms folded and her eyes on the water, which was the rule, somebody watching the water every second; and Kaylee went away to GALS, which he had done twice.

He was at the foot of the chair with the skimmer.

He had not meant to be. He had been skimming, all the way round, and he had come to the deep end, and there it was. The high white chair. Empty. Its ladder going up, six rungs, white, to the seat at the top, with the umbrella over it, and the red float on the hook beside it, and the view from the top of it, which he had never had, and which nobody had, but Kaylee: the whole pool, every corner of it, all at once, and the gate, and the lake beyond the fence, and the whole sky.

He stood at the foot of it with the skimmer in his hand and looked up.

He thought about rule one. You don’t climb my chair. Ever.

He thought that nobody would see. Bonnie was watching the water. Castellanos was at his table under the blue and white umbrella in his T-shirt with his iced tea, which he had not touched, looking at the gate. Kimura was on a lounger at the shallow end with her straw hat over her face and her novel on her chest, apparently asleep, which meant nothing. Kaylee was in GALS. He could go up six rungs and sit at the top and see the whole pool, and the lake, and the sky, for one minute, and come down, and nobody would ever know.

He put his hand on the ladder.

Then he took it off again.

He did not know why. He stood at the foot of the chair with his hand by his side, and the skimmer in the other, and looked up at the empty seat at the top of it under the umbrella, and found that he did not want to go up it, not like that, not when she was in GALS and could not see; that if he went up it like that he would have been up it, and it would not have been anything. It would only have been a chair.

He went on skimming.

When Kaylee came back, nine minutes later, and climbed up the six rungs and sat down at the top under the umbrella and put the whistle back in her teeth, she looked down at him, at the deep end, with the skimmer, for exactly one second, over her sunglasses.

She did not say anything. He did not know if she knew. He thought that Kaylee always knew everything that happened at her pool, and that she probably did, and that she was not going to say.

---

At six the whistle went for the end of the day, three short blasts, and the pool emptied, and the gate was locked, and he stood in the car park beside the blue bicycle in the red T-shirt, which was dark with sweat from the collar to the hem, with his arms hanging down by his sides and his feet hurting in a way that the trailer and the fourteen miles had not made them hurt, a flat, deep, aching, all-day way; and Castellanos came out of the gate in the blue T-shirt and stood beside him, and they looked at each other.

“Long day, sir,” said Castellanos.

“Long day, Sergeant.”

Castellanos looked at the pool behind the fence, empty, blue, the water going still in the evening light, and the high white chair at the end of it with its umbrella folded.

“Eight hours,” he said. “On your feet. In a hundred and one.” He paused. “In the Constabulary, sir, that’s a shift.”

“Was it a good one?”

Castellanos thought about it, honestly, the way Theo thought about things.

“You took a frog to the lake,” he said.

---

Theo was at the refrigerator with the short pencil when he came in through the screen door at seven, and did not wait for him to say anything.

He licked his thumb, and rubbed out, carefully, the small pencilled (Mon) beside number four, until there was nothing left of it but a grey smudge; and then he made a tick in its place. Small and neat.

“Number four,” said Theo.

Frederick sat down at the kitchen table. He did not say anything. He put his head down on the oilcloth and closed his eyes, and heard Felix, at the stove, with flour on his arms to the elbows from a day at the blue door, say he’s dead, and Marcus say he’s not dead, he’s employed, it looks the same, and somebody put a glass of water by his hand.

---

Dame Margaret rang at nine.

She rang the Sunday telephone, which did nothing else, on a Monday, which it had never done; and he took it out onto the porch, into the dark, with the insects breathing, and sat on the top step.

“Sir,” said Dame Margaret. “Good evening. I hope I am not disturbing you.”

“No, Dame Margaret.”

“The Private Secretary tells me,” said Dame Margaret, “that you have taken employment.”

“Yes.”

“At a swimming pool.”

“Yes. At a resort on the lake. Towels and the snack hut and the bathrooms and the skimmer.” He paused. “And the chemicals.”

There was a pause on the line from New Westminster. He knew that pause. It was the pause in which Dame Margaret, at her desk, in her office, with her folder in front of her, closed, made a note, without opening the folder, in the way that she did, which nobody in the Household had ever been able to explain.

“The Household would ask, sir,” she said, “that you do not handle the chemicals.”

“I don’t. Not unless Kaylee’s standing next to me.”

“Who is Kaylee?”

“My boss.”

There was a much longer pause.

“I see,” said Dame Margaret.

“She’s nineteen. She’s at Northeastern, in Tahlequah, in chemistry. She’s going to be a pharmacist. She taught me that the pH of the water has to be seven point four because that’s the pH of your eyes, and then it doesn’t sting.” He looked out at the dark yard. “She made me do the bathroom floor twice.”

There was no sound at all on the line for some time.

“Twice,” said Dame Margaret, at last.

“I’d missed a bit. Behind the pipe.”

“And she made you do the whole floor again.”

“Yes. Because if you’ve missed one bit you’ve missed others, you just can’t see them yet.” He thought about it. “It’s her mother’s rule. Her mother cleans the hospital at Vinita. Nights.”

Dame Margaret did not say anything for so long that he thought the line had gone. Then he heard her breathe out, very slowly, a long breath, at her desk in New Westminster at ten o’clock at night, with her folder closed in front of her.

“Sir,” she said. “I joined the Navy in 1994.” Another pause. “On my first morning at the naval college, the chief petty officer made me do the floor of the long corridor twice, because I had missed a bit behind a radiator. The whole corridor. From the top.” Another. “For the same reason.”

He did not say anything. He did not know what to say.

“I shall make a note,” said Dame Margaret, “that you are not to handle the chemicals unless Kaylee is standing next to you.”

“Thank you.”

“And I shall make another,” said Dame Margaret, “that nobody in this Household is to ring the resort.”

“Thank you, Dame Margaret.”

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

She rang off. He sat on the top step in the dark with the telephone in his hand.

Behind him, through the screen door, on the refrigerator, four ticks and a half. In front of him, the yard, and the oak, and the whip-poor-will saying its name, and the lights of the town across the water, doubled, each with its twin.

He thought: Tomorrow at ten. The bathrooms first.

He thought that he was looking forward to it, and that this was the strangest thing yet.