|
At one point during the Eleventh Annual Boy Scout Family Picnic, Den 70, all the mothers, fathers, boys and girls gathered in the center of the wooden Woodbury picnic pavilion to look up. Pale arms poked out of sleeveless shirts and pale legs out of shorts. It was Mrs. Trevor who had caught sight of the bats clinging to the central rafters above their heads. The bats, hot, jostled each other, needing air, and wanting their wings untangled.
 After a few minutes, the picnickers drifted back to the trays of jello mixed with marshmallows, the buckets of cole slaw, hot dogs in broken buns, amazed by the creatures hanging upside down in daylight above their heads, but what more could be said about them?
"Better move this food off the tables that are underneath," Mrs. Trevor said.
As the ice cream began melting on paper plates, the men got a softball game going, the boys and little girls begging to join in, the women off to the side, scratching mosquito bite buds on freshly shaved legs and pushing the strollers and carriages of the babies left behind, back and forth, back and forth.
It was so hot cicadas buzzed around the edges of the park as if they were an electric fence.
Carl Jewett hit a ball off his bat, and the ball jerked away from the wood in a low, violent trajectory right into the Stimson boy's chest. The Stimson boy sat down, tongue thrust out oddly, a 'u.'
"I don't think he can breathe. Stand back."
But the Stimson boy was already trying to stand up, a little blue around the lips, saying, "I'm going to find my mother."
"Are you sure you're o.k.?" Carl Jewett called after, rubbing his own shoulder as if he had been the one hurt.
Mrs. Stimson took the boy home, while the red collision on the boy's chest turned blue, then purple, and then black.
The ball game broke up when the Stimson boy left and some of the children raced off for the swings while the men walked off to sneak cigarettes. The youngest of the Mayhee girls ran in front of Tony Donahue on a swing just as he leaped off it with a battle yell. He landed on top of the Mayhee girl, and she chipped her new front tooth on his boy scout belt.
Mrs. Mayhee came running.
"Open up," she said. The little girl sat in the sand, mouth closed, not sure what she had lost. "Open your mouth," Mrs. Mayhee insisted, her hand on her daughter's head.
The girl showed her mother her tooth. Mrs. Mayhee said "Oh, Tony, why couldn't you have watched where you were going," for her daughter's looks, already tenuous, were ruined. Mrs. Mayhee shook her head, defeated.
"What a shame," Mrs. Trevor said.
In the creek running along side the park with the picnic pavilion and the bats and the baseball diamond and the swings and the corner of the Mayhee girl's tooth lost in the dirt, some fish swam. The older boys decided to try to catch one with their hands even though the sign said 'No Fishing' and their mothers were calling "Come on back, we have to go home now."
The boys cupped their hands and dipped them into the water and tried to catch one of these fish, no bigger than a mackerel, as it swam between their palms. The boys had never managed to catch any before, the fish darted, and were slippery. Occasionally one touched a hand by mistake, but that was all.
But all of a sudden Mrs. Trevor's boy Donny stood up screeching, a wriggly brown speckled fish between his thumbs, he whirled around to show Tom and Adam before he dropped it, but he was already too late, the fish flopped down and split its sides open on a rock.
The boys had never considered what they would do if they caught one, had only imagined the triumph of success. They were silenced by the blood and guts on the rock that sat just above the surface of the water. Donny and Tom and Adam stooped down to look, saw green and gray and red innards all mixed up, looked up at each other, close enough for noses to touch, discovered a joke, ran off, mouths open, screaming laughter, a surprise of tears in their eyes.
|
