THE WATERSLIDE

It was the dog days of summer and half the city was away. Even the mailman was on vacation. The neighbourhood was so quiet you could hear the spiders at work. There was absolutely nothing to do.

Murphy and Sam were lying on their backs, shoulder to shoulder, underneath Jim Scoffield’s mulberry tree. There was an ant crawling across Sam’s forehead. Both boys had their mouths stretched wide open.

Sam said, “This is crazy. It’s been, like, an hour.”

Murphy said, “It’s been ten minutes. Do you give up?”

Sam said, “Do you?”

They had a bet. The first one to catch a mulberry in his mouth won.

A hot wind rustled the branches of the tree above them. The boys, sun dappled, watched the leaves turn from green to grey to green again. The clouds were doing summer things, but the berries weren’t. Nothing was coming down.

It was the middle of the week in the middle of the summer. The neighbourhood had been reduced to sun, soft wind, and one lovelorn cicada vibrating at the top of the mulberry tree.

Murphy said, “It sounds like in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Sam said, “Once again I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Murphy said, “The cicadas. Do you give up?”

Sam sat up abruptly. Sam said, “Okay. Whatever.”

Murphy said, “I win.”

Sam and Murphy were in the park. In the little kids’ section. They were by the wading pool, draped listlessly over two of the swings. They were barely moving and all alone, except for a bored teenage girl who was pushing a toddler on the swing nearest the gate. The toddler, who was holding an orange Popsicle, was wearing diapers and nothing else.

A water truck swished down the street. They all looked up hopefully as it passed, as if it were going to stop and offer some relief from the heat. But it didn’t even slow down. It was there and it was gone, and when it was gone the electric rattle of the neighbourhood cicadas was all that was left. You couldn’t tell where they were. It sounded as if they were everywhere.

Sam said, “Cicadas, right?”

Murphy said, “Good. They live underground for seventeen years. Then, on the very same day, they all crawl out of the ground together, and climb to the top of the trees.”

Sam said, “They live underground.”

Murphy said, “Seventeen years.”

Sam said, “What do they live on?”

Murphy said, “Root juice.”

Sam said, “And then they all crawl out together. At the same time. After seventeen years.”

Murphy said, “They only live for thirty days after that. They lay eggs, die, and it all starts again.”

Sam said, “If I was a cicada, I’d stay underground.”

Murphy said, “They eat them in China.”

Sam said, “See.”

Murphy said, “Stir-fry.”

Sam said, “If we could get some, we could wok them up for my sister.”

It was lunch. They were eating at Sam’s. Grilled cheese. Carrot sticks. Chocolate milk.

Morley was leaving for work, but she hadn’t got out the door yet. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips. She was considering something.

“No,” she said, “no videos. It’s summer. It’s a beautiful day. Play outside.”

Sam said, “We’re bored of outside.”

Morley said, “That’s funny. I thought you were bored of school. Adam Turlington is going to summer school. I bet summer school isn’t boring.”

Arthur, the dog, was lying in the cool dust under the back steps. Sam was holding a cup, dripping water on him through the slats.

Murphy said, “We should get the hose.”

And that, more or less, is the moment it all began.

They called Peter Moore. They said, “Bring your bathing suit. And a sprinkler.”

By the middle of the afternoon, there were five boys running around the backyard. Five boys and two sprinklers.

One sprinkler was attached to the garden tap and one was running out the back door, hooked up to the basement sink.

And the middle of the afternoon is when Rashida Chudary came by with little Fatima in tow. Rashida was on her way to the grocery store. She had stopped by with something for Morley. When no one answered the front door, she came around the back.

Fatima got sprayed. She squealed, but it was a squeal of delight. In fact, the tears only came when her mother said they had to go. One thing led to another, and Fatima ended up staying.

“We’ll take care of Fatima,” said Sam.

And they did—magnificently. They unscrewed one of the sprinklers and replaced it with a nozzle. They set the nozzle to jet spray. They set Fatima on a chair on the back of the deck. They gave her the jet hose. Fatima blasted them with the hose as they ran around the yard.

Fatima stood on her chair, up on her toes, whirling the hose around with the intensity of one of those white-gloved traffic policemen, with their crisply ironed shirts and braids looping over their shoulders. Fatima was in a watery heaven.

It was, beyond a doubt, the most wonderful fun Fatima had had in her entire life—ever. Better than anything. Better than Eid.

When Rashida came to get her daughter after an hour, Fatima wouldn’t leave.

Sam said, “She can stay. We’ll bring her home.”

When Sam and Murphy did bring Fatima home, Rashida gave them ten dollars.

“Sweet,” said Murphy.

It was Murphy’s idea to pick Fatima up the next afternoon. But before Sam and Murphy headed off to her place, they spent the morning getting ready. They got Peter Moore to bring his wading pool over. They dragged Sam’s old sandbox from a forgotten corner of the yard, and set it in the sun so the sand would dry out. They made lemonade.

Then the three of them walked over to the Chudarys’ place and knocked on their door, standing on the stoop like three little Jehovah’s Witnesses.

When Rashida answered, it was Murphy who did the talking.

“We were wondering,” said Murphy, “if Fatima would like to come to our water park.”

On the first day of their water park’s operation, they got Fatima and Erik Schmidt’s little brother Jürgen. They led Fatima and Jürgen through the sprinklers, let them spray the hoses, and watched them splash in the pool. After two hours, Peter walked the soggy and exhausted toddlers home.

Sam and Murphy stayed behind, putting everything back in place and mopping up the basement. They were almost finished when Peter marched into the backyard, with two ten-dollar bills. They had made twenty bucks.

Murphy went to his cottage over the weekend, which didn’t really matter because it rained on Saturday. But they were back at it on Monday. Murphy, who had had two days to think about things, arrived with three white T-shirts and two days of pent-up plans.

They set up the backyard: the sandbox, the wading pool, and the sprinklers. Then Murphy produced the white T-shirts.

“We should look professional,” said Murphy. They put on the white T-shirts and headed off. They were looking for customers.

That afternoon there were seven kids in the backyard. Four of them paying customers.

“Campers,” said Murphy. “Not customers.”

It’s not clear who thought up the waterslide. It might have been Fatima. Something about being the first kid there, the founding member of this club or camp or whatever this was—something, anyway, had given the normally shy four-year-old a massive injection of self-assurance. The highlight of each afternoon was the game they now called Jet Stream, the game in which Fatima stood on her chair, and whirled around and around with the hose, making them all run and squeal. Fatima, the smallest by a good half-foot, twisted and turned, running the backyard with the authority of a symphony conductor.

The waterslide could have been Fatima’s idea. But no one remembers any more. And it doesn’t really matter.

Old Eugene who lives next door was involved. It wouldn’t have happened without Eugene. It wasn’t his idea, of course, and no one ever tried to say it was. But he was involved. It wouldn’t have happened without him.

Eugene had been watching since the water park first began. How could he not? Eugene, in his blue suit pants and his matching vest, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled to the elbows, had watched, sitting where he always sits on hot summer afternoons, on the old kitchen chair under his grape arbour. He was smoking one of his Italian cigars, nursing a tumbler of his homemade Chianti, tilting his chair dangerously backwards, his feet feathering the fence whenever he started to teeter.

The day the waterslide was born, Eugene, in the middle of his ninety-second summer, tilted dangerously back in his kitchen chair under the grape arbour, the fruit flies buzzing around him, and the children too. He had been wondering if he should open another bottle of the five-year-old Chianti, or try some of last year’s batch, but then he had been taken over with the children and what they were trying to do. What in God’s name were they trying to do? They had two slides they had removed from two playsets, and they were duct-taping them together. Or trying to. They seemed to be trying to make them into one long slide.

“Sam,” called Eugene, in his throaty whisper, waving his spotted arm in the air. If it was a slide they needed, he had a better one. It was in his shed. He was pretty sure.

“Sam,” he called again, coughing and spitting on the ground, gesturing at the shed at the bottom of his garden.

Eugene has one of just about everything down in the shed: gardening tools, household appliances, leftover construction supplies. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface. There was also contraband, for instance: hidden bottles of eau-de-vie, secret cases of cigars.

He led the boys around his wife’s flower bed, past his famous fig tree, under the grape arbour, between the rows of peppers and tomatoes, and into the earthy cool of the shaded shed.

When his watery eyes adjusted to the light, Eugene started Sam, Peter, and Murphy moving stuff around: an old refrigerator, a bureau, two hand-push lawn mowers. It was dirty work and they were getting hot and annoyed because they didn’t understand what he was up to. Then they unearthed it. Eugene stepped back, and beamed, and the boys stood there in the sticky darkness without saying a word, struck dumb, staring into the back corner of Eugene’s shed as if they had just uncovered the gold mask of Tutankhamen. It was the greatest treasure they could imagine—a long plastic tube. It was a portable industrial garbage chute, the kind you use when renovating houses to slide debris from the second floor to the yard. Eugene had packed the chute into the shed thinking someone might have a use for it some day. And now they did.

Sam and Murphy had been trying to build a waterslide that ran from the back deck down to the garden. A little slide. A modest drop. But by the time they had finished, by the time they had heaved Eugene’s enormous plastic tube out of the shed, and dropped it over the fence, they had also heaved modesty out the window.

This was the waterslide to end all waterslides. This waterslide didn’t start on the deck. This waterslide began at the second-floor bathroom window, traversed the family-room roof, looped around the clothesline pole, rolled over the picnic table, and ended in the back garden near the pear tree.

Fatima stood on the deck with her little arms folded over her chest as the boys worked, nodding occasionally, pointing at this and then at that, like the foreman at a construction site.

It took most of the afternoon to assemble it. The hardest part was connecting the slides from the playsets to Eugene’s chute. They finally figured it out, and when they did, they all agreed it just might be the greatest waterslide built. Ever.

Any normal adult watching this unfold would have been seized by a spasm of anxiety and put a stop to it. But Eugene was the only adult watching. And at ninety-two, Eugene was a lot closer to boys, and the boyhood call to adventure, than he was to the anxiety levels of any normal adult.

What could possibly go wrong? After two wars and ninety-one and a half summers, the only thing Eugene worried about was his cellar of homemade wine, and the boys’ slide wasn’t going anywhere near that.

Fatima was the first one down. She bounced to her feet at the bottom like a trapeze artist. She confirmed it—it was the greatest waterslide ever built.