GOLD ON THE WATER
Winner: The Austin Light Short Story Contest

In 1959 my father was transferred from Bergstrom AFB to Japan. Dad went ahead of us, and Mom, Roy and I spent that summer at my grandparents’ house on Lake Austin Boulevard. Everything was different then. Shadows were deeper, life felt more intense, people were closer and the world was far away.

There were still neighborhood grocery stores with double screen doors on springs that made them slam behind you. Inside, they smelled like sugar and soap, and for some reason, a little like diesel. Everyday my grandmother walked to the store – she never learned how to drive – and bought food for supper. We always had tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, except on Fridays when we had hamburgers at Deep Eddy Café.

The first time I went with her, it made me sick to look through the glass when she picked out the meat, but I swelled up under the sound of her voice when she introduced me to the butcher. Sometimes my brother and I were sent to the store on our own for small things, like a can of paprika or a loaf of bread.

My grandmother didn’t make her own bread. She wasn’t country that way, like my dad’s mother who lived way out in Bastrop. My mom’s mother grew up in Austin and considered herself a city woman. She wore flowery hats and carried a beaded purse. She didn’t make cobbler or cakes from scratch either. She made desserts like English trifle and Boston cream pie from recipes she found in Ladies Home Journal. She had a subscription.

My grandma took us to Deep Eddy Pool every Friday and sat in the shade while our lips turned purple in the shallow end on account of the unheated very cold water that filled the pool. Even though our feet touched the bottom, Roy and I pretended to be swimming with our arms, and we called out for her to look at us, and she did. She smiled and clapped her hands and said how wonderfully we swam. We never felt guilty about fooling her because we were just trying to make her proud of us. It was the same feeling that made us get p in the middle of the night once and set the table for breakfast as a surprise for her.

Grandpa used to take us down to walk along the river after church on Sundays while Grandma and Mom made dinner. You could tell how much he loved the water by the way he looked at it, like it was way far off. He told us the names of the different kinds of ducks that swam near us to grab the bits of bread that he threw out for them.

Once that summer, he took us fishing on a Saturday afternoon instead of listening to the ballgame on the radio. He showed us how to bait a minnow on a hook through its gill so the minnow wouldn’t die if we didn’t catch anything. We didn’t. And when we got tired of waiting, we unhooked the minnows and set them free in the river.

Everyday my grandmother gave my brother and me each a nickel. We used it to buy Dr. Pepper at Shelton’s Texaco, go to the movies on Saturday morning, and once a week, we bought a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. I was eleven and Roy was nine, so I was the corrupting influence. And I mean corrupting, because my mother told us that no one who smoked would ever get to heaven. This was after my dad quit his two-pack-a-day habit.

In back of Grandma’s house was a little shed where Grandpa kept his tools, lawnmower, and a can of gasoline, and that’s where my brother and I smoked. We’d pretend we were movie stars on our way to the Academy Awards, calling each other “dahling” and flicking our ashes ever so lightly. Or pretend we were private detectives and flip our cigarette butts against the wall of the shed dangerously close to the gasoline. Generally, we only smoked one or two cigarettes a day for fear of getting caught, and we never inhaled because we didn’t know how.

Once, when we had just lit up, my grandpa came out to the shed for something. When I heard him coming, I dropped my cigarette and stomped it out, leaving my foot on top of it so Grandpa wouldn’t see the butt. Roy didn’t think the way I did, and he simply put his hand in his pocket, holding the lit cigarette. When Grandpa opened the door of the shed, Roy walked out in a hurry. Later on he showed me where he had burned a hole in his pocket.

We kept smoking, until one day when we were out of cigarettes, I got the idea that we ought to “roll our own.” I rolled up a piece of newspaper, stuck it between my lips, and lit the end of it. On the first inhale, I sucked fire into my mouth and started screaming. Grandma ran out of the house and Roy started crying and wailing that it wasn’t his fault. I would have smacked him to shut him up, but I was crying too hard myself.

After Grandma took me to Dr. Sloan, who said I was burned to the extent that a hot cup of coffee might have burned, she said she was “very disappointed in us” for using our allowance to buy cigarettes. And that was the end of our allowance that summer.

Mom was already so upset by the move out of the country away from her family, that finding out about our smoking just made her take a tranquilizer and lie down in her old bedroom. Roy and I agreed, when we talked in the night, that it was a good thing that Dad had already left. Then we said it was too bad was no liquor in the house.

My grandfather had a ten-year-old Buick that was as big as a zeppelin. He parked it in the detached garage behind the house and every weekday morning he backed it out to the street, looking over his shoulder through the rear window. He couldn’t see directly behind the car because the trunk was so high. They all were in those days which is why so many cars rolled over bicycles and things.

There were oleander bushes lining the driveway on the side between my grandparent’s house and the neighbor’s, and Roy and I hid in them when Grandpas went out to the garage in the morning. After we heard him start the car, reverse, get out and close the garage door, we’d sneak out of the bushes and lie in the driveway parallel to each other. The first one to get up as he backed the monstrous car toward us was a chicken.

It was a great game that I usually won and lasted a few weeks until one morning my mother came out to fill the hummingbird feeder and saw u. She started screaming, which of course got our attention and startled my grandfather who slammed on the brakes. Before he got out of the car, we were already up and standing beside the rear fender.

“They were lying in the driveway,” my mother stammered. I felt sure that she had another tranquilizer coming on.

Lucky for us my grandpa had to get to work. He said he’d handle us later, but when he got home, we were off at a neighbor’s house building kites, so he just gave us a glare at supper. In our hearts, we knew he would never have hurt us.

There were two kids, both boys, both my age, who lived across the alley from my grandparents on Fifth Street. They were twins and sometimes they could be mean. They knew how to build kites from sticks and wrapping paper, and they taught my bother and me. There wasn’t a whole lot to it, but I’ve forgotten it all, to the disappointment of my own son.

We built a new kite almost every day, trying out different sizes and shapes, and we named them. Roy and I made kite tails out of our flannel shirts that we cut into strips. Something Mom wouldn’t find out about until she unpacked our winter clothes in Japan. Then we walked two blocks down to the river bank where we had space to run the kites out.

On the last day that we stayed with my grandparents, I built my best kite ever – JOAN OF ARC. I ran hard to get the kite to lift off, and when it did, I felt triumphant. I let the string out a little at a time, making sure that the kite didn’t dip and that the line was taut, feeling grown up and in control of something.

I can remember, and will for the rest of my life, what the water felt like on that day. How it came across the water and cooled me and how deep inside it made me want to laugh. The wind was stronger by the river in those days before massive bridges and high-rise buildings were built at the waters edge, and it blew against my face and body making me feel that I could fly too.

The twins had built an oversized kite that they had named SAM HOUSTON, and they were trying to fly it together, but it kept crashing until the spine broke. That’s when they came over to see how I was doing. My kite was flying out over the river. The string was low for about 20 or 30 feet before it curved upward and disappeared into the blueness of the sky.

One of the twins distracted me by getting me to look at my brother, who had a small kite flying so high that his whole ball of string was unwound. And, while I was looking at Roy’s kite, the other twin cut the string of JOAN OF ARC with his penknife. I didn’t see it, but I’m sure of it to this day and still hope for rotten things to happen to them. I used to wish they’d end up in prison, but now I hope for vicious malpractice suits. They both became dentists.

When I looked back, it was to see JOAN OF ARC dive into the river and float away. At first I was in shock, but then I felt tears coming. I dropped the ball of string and ran back to my grandmother’s house.

The twins called out after me in mock concern, “What happened, Patsy?”

My brother was so content with his own success that he didn’t even notice my tragedy, for which I hated him the rest of the day.

When I got to the house, Grandmas was washing the porch stairs. It was something that she did once a week, and I never understood why. It seemed silly, since we walked all over them even when they were still wet and she didn’t seem to mind. Now, I suspect that it was a therapeutic or meditative task.

She had a string mop in the kitchen, but she didn’t use it on the stairs. She got on her knees and scrubbed them with a brush, and that’s how I found her. When I got close to the house, I stopped running and started crying out loud. Grandma heard me and stopped what she was doing and turned to me. She held the dripping brush and her hands were red.

I broke down sobbing and told her that the boys had broken my kite string and that JOAN OF ARC was gone down the river.

Grandma had a hard face and soft eyes when she said, “Well sugar, they are just plain bad!”

She meant it too. I never had any doubt that anyone who might ever hurt me in my life, deliberately or otherwise would be “just plain bad” in my grandma’s mind.

I sat down on the porch swing and watched her finish scrubbing. Roy came home with the little kite that he’d name DOPEY after his favorite dwarf, but I wouldn’t speak to him until the next morning. I sat on the porch until Grandpa drove up, and I kept sitting there after he rubbed my head and went inside.

There was no obstruction of the view of the river back then. No apartments. No Mopac Bridge. And I could see the way the sun reflected so bright on the water and decided that maybe it wasn’t so bad that my kite was part of something so pretty.

After supper, I went out again to look at the water, to watch it turn gray toward dusk, with a line of gold from the sun slashing across it. I saw the ski boats go by and wondered if the people in them had seen JOAN OF ARC and thought it was a good kite.

In the morning, we said goodbye and all the grownups cried. Even Grandpa. Roy and I didn’t cry because we were too excited about going to Japan and too young to know what we were losing.

But I know now.

It’s all gone now. The grocery store, the kites, the way of life, and I can never bring it back. By the time I moved back to Austin, my grandparent’s house had been torn down to make way for Mopac Expressway and my grandmother and grandfather had died.

But sometimes when I walk beside the river and the wind is strong and warm, I can remember pieces of that summer. Sometimes when the sun shines through certain chemicals in the ozone and there’s that golden sheen to everything and shadows are deep, I can remember that I was here before when people were closer and the world was far away.