Shock

Taking the high road was never my forte. Even when Jonathan twisted my ear during recess in second grade I made sure to trip him the next day and kick him good and hard when he was down, in the section behind the jungle gym that was most out of the teacher's line of sight. It wasn't revenge, it was a way of making things even. Maybe giving me the edge. Revenge really.

The kid was a snot. Not Jonathan, although he was, too. But Len, short for Leonard. His father's name was Leonard and his grandfather's name was Leonard and well wasn't that something. The middle one, the dad, had made a killing selling his technology start-up right before Len was born. He took that money and bought the house you'd think a guy like that would buy and filled it with all sorts of terrible art and decorative pieces. My guess is that he named his son Leonard to give the idea of old money, that this was a name that had been passed down from long ago and would continue to be so. My other guess is that he really named the boy after himself, and not after his grandfather. These are the kind of people I'm talking about.

I was the "pool boy," that's what they called me. Although besides cleaning and maintaining the pool and the water inside it I also taught little Len swimming lessons. Which was to say that I mostly supervised his splashing of me. "Boys will be boys," his walking Pinot Grigio of a mother would tell me. Boys splashed, they horsed around. They deliberately disobeyed any and all authority figures because they knew they could get away with it because parents like this let them. I was getting paid, and well, too much, so what was I to do. I grumbled and closed my eyes to the splashes, the Fun Noodles, the hard rubber torpedo he'd send shooting my way. The little plastic basketball. It was the apathy that infuriated me the most, the notion they held that this was the way to raise a child and somehow things would work themselves out. He would right himself eventually and they were there to ensure he didn't break any bones while doing it. I was at the mercy of an eight-year-old terror, with limitless funds, limitless energy, limitless joy-filled cruelty. And then Len kicked me in the face, knocked off my goggles, seared my eyes with the chlorinated water. That's when I got the idea. As I said, the high road has never been a road I've been interested in taking.

The nice thing about being pool boy was having a set of keys for access, in case any extra work needed to be done and they weren't around. I'd built up enough trust, plus there was nothing in the house I'd want to steal even if I made a habit of stealing things. Money doesn't buy good taste. Anyway, if I wanted to show up in the middle of the night I could, which is what I did. I parked a few houses down, took my bucket of chlorine, and made my way.

Chlorine tablets were kept in the skimmers to help keep the water clean. But every now and then the pool would need a shock. That's when the liquid chlorine would come into play. I'd walk along the sides, pouring it in as I go, tossing some out into the middle, trying to mix it in as best I could. I'd give the pool a day for the chlorine levels to lower to a body-friendly amount, and then swimming could resume. The pool was around twenty thousand gallons so I would use around two gallons of chlorine. This time I used five. I carried it out to the edge of the diving board and poured every last drop in. I didn't toss, I didn't mix, I took the empty drum back to my car and went home, and was back six hours later for swimming lessons. And when I closed the gate and walked up to the pool in the morning, like clockwork ran little Len, tearing around the edge, straight onto the diving board, cannonballing off, plunging into the chlorine patch.

He came up screaming. "My eyes! Ow! Ow ow ow ow ow ow owww! Mom! Mom! Mommyyy!" He dog paddled his way to the ladder (because of course he never paid enough attention to learn any proper strokes) and tried to climb out, but he was so frantic he slipped off the step and fell back in. It was all I could do hold in the laughter. I grabbed the skimmer and when he surfaced, shrieking, I told him to grab it and calm down. He got out successfully and ran to his towel. I asked him what happened, what was wrong, as he wrapped the towel around himself. He rubbed the water off and screamed louder. That's when Belinda, his mother, came out.

"What's going on?!" The kind of question that conveys more annoyance than concern.

"I don't know," I lied, "he jumped in and when he came up he was screaming. Len. Len, are you OK?"

But he was not OK. He was scratching all over, coughing and panting and gasping for aid. He was clutching his chest going "ow ow ow." He was squinting and blinking furiously, rubbing his eyes trying to get the hurt to go away. "Oh my god," Belinda said. That's when his nose started bleeding. "Oh my god!" That was when she finally went over to him, taking a towel to the blood on his face. "What did you do to my son?!"

It worked as well as I could have hoped, although the brat was playing it up. Maybe not consciously, but his little body had only experienced so much up until this point. Had the same thing happened to him ten years later would he have been running around like a chicken with his head cut off? Probably not. And it's not as if he touched the chlorine out of the water, that's when the real trouble happens. Here the water had diluted it, had at least six hours to do its job. He wasn't going to get cancer, he wasn't going to develop lung problems, he wasn't going to get any permanent burns. In fact, if this was the worst thing that ever happened to him I'd say he'd still make out like a bandit. This may turn out to be but a blip on the radar of his experience, he may hardly remember it at all. But I didn't do this for him. I did it for me.