It had never been too hot to swim before:
Never.
They perused Monk’s comic book collection, which after banishment to the basement was on the verge of mold. Monk had built, from boards too useless even for the tree-house, a lab table in one corner, and they fiddled with the chemistry set, trying to make things that were yellow and then turned red, others that made smoke. They toyed with the rabbit-ear antenna on the ancient television, a huge wooden box with a tiny black and white screen the size of a TV dinner tin—for a while they brought in the monster movie channel, and watched, in a snowy and line-infested picture, the Man from Planet X rampage through the Scottish moors. Monk brought down a bowl of grapes, and they ate some of them, and spit the rest at each other out of their mouths, pressing their cheeks for cannonade.
But their eyes kept drifting to the cellar windows, and the heat and light outside.
“Maybe we should go swimming anyway,” Monk said, finally, on the second day.
They made it halfway to the secret pond, and turned around, dripping and panting.
Overhead, the sun looked hotter, if not larger.
They played darts in the cellar, and set up plastic army men and knocked them down with marbles and rubber bands.
Lem and Shep talked about body odor and shaving their upper lips while Monk scowled.
And always, for three days, they kept looking to the cellar windows, up high, filled with light, and closed against the summer heat.
~ * ~
That night they took Monk’s telescope to the secret pond, and Shep’s pup tent, and Lem’s dad’s battery radio.
The radio played music, and talked about the heat. The air was dry as the insides of an oven. There was a cloudless sky, and a smile of moon tilted at an amused angle, and, after a while, there were stars in the dark but they looked faraway and dim through the hot air. The telescope went unused. They swam for a while, but the water, over the last three days, had taken on the temperature and feel of warm tea. Inside the tent it was as hot as outside, and they shifted uncomfortably as they tried to sleep. When they tried to read comics by flashlight, the flashlights dimmed and then went out.
In the dark, Lem tried to talk again about Margaret O’Hearn and Amy Bernstein, and about Shep joining the track team when they all started Junior High in the fall, but Monk told them to shut up.
Later Shep said, out of the blue, “What do you think about Hell’s Cave?”
“What about it?” Monk sneered. “You think it leads down to hell?”
“That’s what they say.”
Lem was silent, and then he said, “You think that’s why the heat won’t end…?”
“I wonder,” Shep replied.
“You really think—?” Lem began.
“Go to sleep!” Monk demanded.
~ * ~
In the morning it was even hotter.
The sun came up over the trees the color of melted butter. Monk set up the griddle over two Sterno cans, but no one was hungry so he didn’t even start breakfast. They spit out the water in their canteens, which tasted like warm aluminum.
It was getting even hotter.
“Ninety-nine today,” the radio chirped, “and who knows how hot tomorrow. It only went down to eighty-nine last night, folks. Hope you’ve got those fans on high, or your head in the fridge!”
He went on to say the weather bureau had no idea why it was so hot.
“What does that mean?” Shep said. “Isn’t it their job to know?”
As if in answer the chirpy radio voice said, “Apparently, folks, this heat has little to do with the weather! According to meteorological indications, it should be in the middle eighties, with moderate humidity! Fancy that!”
“Fancy
The radio voice, again as if in answer, chirped just before a commercial came on: “Hey, folks! Maybe it’ll
Shep looked at his friends, and there was a suddenly grim look on his face.
“Maybe he’s right,” he said.
~ * ~
It didn’t rain over the next ten days. Thunder heads would gather in the West, dark mushrooming promises of cool and wet, and then break apart as they came overhead, dissipating like pipe smoke into the blue high air. The grasses turned from moist green to brown; postage stamp lawns changed color overnight and died. In town, the few places with air conditioning—Ferber’s Department Store, the Five and Dime with its brand new machine perched over the front door, dripping warm condenser water from its badly installed drain onto entering customers—were packed with customers who didn’t buy anything, only wandered the isles like zombies seeking cool relief. The temperature rose into the low hundreds, dropping into the nineties at night. On the roads, automobiles like ancient reptiles sat deserted at angles against curbs, their hoods up, radiators hissing angrily. Buses, looking like brontosauruses, passenger-less, stood unmoving, their front and middle doors accordianed open, yawning lazily at empty white bus stop benches.
Birds stopped singing in trees; the morning dawned as hot as midday. Dogs panted in their doghouses. There were no mosquitoes, and houseflies hung motionless to window screens. Spiders crawled into shadows and stayed there.
Cold water came out of taps almost steaming.
It was getting even hotter.
~ * ~
Three twelve-year-old boys made one more pilgrimage to the secret pond. They were sick of Monk’s cellar, had done every experiment in the chemistry manual, had recklessly mixed chemicals on their own until one produced in a beaker a roiling cloud of orange choking gas that drove them upstairs. It had become too hot in the cellar anyway, with the windows closed or open. In Monk’s kitchen the refrigerator whirred like an unhappy robot, its doors permanently open to provide a tiny measure of coolness to the kitchen. Milk had spoiled, its odor battling with the sour stench of rotting vegetables. Dishes, unwashed, were piled in the sink. The radio was on, a background insect buzz. Monk’s parents had gone to the five and dime for the air conditioning.
“And even hotter, with record temperatures reported now not only around the United States but in Europe and Asia as well, in a widening area…” the radio said, though the announcer sounded less chirpy, almost tired. “Locally, state authorities are warning anyone prone to heat stroke…”
Monk and Shep and Lem took whatever dry food was left, found Shep’s pup tent, inexpertly rolled and abandoned in a corner, and set out for the pond.
“…forty deaths reported in…” the radio voice reported unhappily as the screen door banged behind them.
~ * ~
It was like walking through a bakery oven. The heat was not only in the ground and in the air, but all around them. They felt it through their sneakers, on their knees, their eyelids. Their hair felt hot. The air was dry as a firecracker.
Shep looked up into the sun, and his eyes hurt.
“I don’t care how hot the water is,” Monk said, “it can’t be worse than this.”
It was. When they got to the pond and stripped, there was vapor rising from the surface of the water, and fish floated dead, like flat plastic toys.
“I don’t care,” Monk said, and stepped in, and yelped.
He looked back at his friends in awe, and showed his retracted foot, which was red.
“It’s actually
Lem sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.
Monk was putting his clothes back on, his hands shaking.
