One day I was visiting my friend Carla when I noticed that her house didn't have any flies. I asked her mother why.
She pointed toward a shiny gold contraption dangling from the ceiling, which she proudly identified as a Shell No-Pest Strip. She said it could be bought at the filling station and that her family had one in every room. The No-Pest Strips, she explained, released a poison that killed all the flies.
"What do your lizards eat?" I asked.
"We don't have any lizards, either," she said.
I went home and told Mom we needed to get a No-Pest Strip like Carla's family, but she refused. "If it kills the flies," she said, "it can't be very good for us."
*
Dad bought a souped-up old Ford Fairlane that winter, and one weekend when the weather got cold, he announced that we were going swimming at the Hot Pot. The Hot Pot was a natural sulfur spring in the desert north of town, surrounded by craggy rocks and quicksand. The water was warm to the touch and smelled like rotten eggs. It was so full of minerals that rough, chalky encrustations had built up along the edges, like a coral reef. Dad was always saying we should buy the Hot Pot and develop it as a spa.
The deeper you went into the water, the hotter it got. It was very deep in the middle. Some people around Battle Mountain said the Hot Pot had no bottom at all, that it went clean through to the center of the earth. A couple of drunks and wild teenagers had drowned there, and people at the Owl Club said when their bodies floated back to the surface, they'd been literally boiled.
Both Brian and Lori knew how to swim, but I had never learned. Large bodies of water scared me. They seemed unnaturaloddities in the desert towns where we'd lived. We had once stayed at a motel with a swimming pool, and I worked up enough nerve to make my way around the entire length of the pool, clinging to the side. But the Hot Pot didn't have any neat edges like that swimming pool. There was nothing to cling to.
I waded in up to my shoulders. The water around my chest was warm, and the rocks I was standing on felt so hot I wanted to keep moving. I looked back at Dad, who watched me, unsmiling. I tried to push out into deeper water, but something held me back. Dad dived in and splashed his way toward me. "You're going to learn to swim today," he said.
He put an arm around me, and we started across the water. Dad was dragging me. I felt terrified and clutched his neck so tightly that his skin turned white. "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Dad asked when we got to the other side.
We started back, and this time, when we got to the middle, Dad pried my fingers from around his neck and pushed me away. My arms flailed around, and I sank into the hot, smelly water. I instinctively breathed in. Water surged into my nose and mouth and down my throat. My lungs burned. My eyes were open, the sulfur stinging them, but the water was dark and my hair was wrapped around my face and I couldn't see anything. A pair of hands grabbed me around the waist. Dad pulled me into the shallow water. I was spitting and coughing and breathing in uneven choking gasps.
"That's okay," Dad said. "Catch your breath."
When I recovered, Dad picked me up and heaved me back into the middle of the Hot Pot. "Sink or swim!" he called out. For the second time, I sank. The water once more filled my nose and lungs. I kicked and flailed and thrashed my way to the surface, gasping for air, and reached out to Dad. But he pulled back, and I didn't feel his hands around me until I'd sunk one more time.
He did it again and again, until the realization that he was rescuing me only to throw me back into the water took hold, and so, rather than reaching for Dad's hands, I tried to get away from them. I kicked at him and pushed away through the water with my arms, and finally, I was able to propel myself beyond his grasp.
"You're doing it, baby!" Dad shouted. "You're swimming!"
I staggered out of the water and sat on the calcified rocks, my chest heaving. Dad came out of the water, too, and tried to hug me, but I wouldn't have anything to do with him, or with Mom, who'd been floating on her back as if nothing were happening, or with Brian and Lori, who gathered around and were congratulating me. Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is. "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim." What other reason, he asked, would possibly make him do this?
Once I got my breath back, I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it.
"BAD NEWS," LORI SAID one day when I got home from exploring. "Dad lost his job."
Dad had kept this job for nearly six monthslonger than any other. I figured we were through with Battle Mountain and that within a few days, we'd be on the move again.
"I wonder where we'll live next," I said.
Lori shook her head. "We're staying here," she said. Dad insisted he hadn't exactly lost his job. He had arranged to have himself fired because he wanted to spend more time looking for gold. He had all sorts of plans to make money, she added, inventions he was working on, odd jobs he had lined up. But for the time being, things might get a little tight around the house. "We all have to help out," Lori said.
I thought of what I could do to contribute, besides collecting bottles and scrap metal. "I'll cut the prices on my rocks," I said.
Lori paused and looked down. "I don't think that will be enough," she said.
"I guess we can eat less," I said.
"We have before," Lori said.
*
We did eat less. Once we lost our credit at the commissary, we quickly ran out of food. Sometimes one of Dad's odd jobs would come through, or he'd win some money gambling, and we'd eat for a few days. Then the money would be gone and the refrigerator would be empty again.
Before, whenever we were out of food, Dad was always there, full of ideas and ingenuity. He'd find a can of tomatoes on the back of a shelf that everyone else had missed, or he'd go off for an hour and come back with an armful of vegetablesnever telling us where he got themand whip up a stew. But now he began disappearing a lot.
"Where Dad?" Maureen asked all the time. She was a year and a half old, and these were almost her first words.