They were always thirsty.
It would be ninety-two in the shade by midmorning and they would stop their front yard ball game and disperse to houses known to serve Kool-Aid, returning with faint clown smiles of various flavors. Or they would gobble plasticky water from the hose after running it for a while to get all the hot out. At the school gym they’d take a break from the shirts-and-skins basketball game to crowd around the rumbling old watercooler, urging the guy in front to goddamn hurry up! Hey, spaz, leave some for the fish! Hey, ya big jerk, you’re not a camel!
Sometimes they’d see the edges of a little grin protruding from either side of the pencil-thin stream of frigid water, and they’d go thirst crazy.
“Dammit, Stiggs!” And a writhing body would be pulled away from the fountain and briefly pummeled.
If anyone had money, they would race their bicycles through the wavy afternoon heat to the A&W, where the root beer mugs were frozen so solidly they gave off smoke in the afternoon heat and at some point a perfectly round medallion of ice would detach from the bottom and float majestically up through the bubbles to bob around in the foamy surface before being crunched by little teeth. Sometimes they’d pedal to Palm Drugs for a five-cent Pepsi, which the soda jerk would have to mix manually and which they would nurse for a half hour or more, not leaving the blessed air-conditioning until they had pried the last melting morsel of ice from the bottom of the glass with a straw.
Food mattered little to them and they tried not to waste too much time at their Formica kitchen tables, but their thirst was another matter. It would make them so desperate they would sometimes gulp water right from the lake or the river they were swimming in, despite admonitions from adults.
He and Stiggs and Randleman were on Rosedale Street; Joe and Johnny Augenblick, proprietors of a decent backyard basketball court, were one street over on Betty Drive, as were Buddy Lockridge and Billy Claytor. Demski was two blocks away on Homer Circle. The girls were playmates of last resort, but some of them were okay: Libby Claytor, Patty Robertson, Bonnie Johnson, and of course the adorable Maria DaRosa. They even knew some kids from six and seven blocks away, all the way up to Chelsea Street and Christy Avenue, though they seemed a bit foreign and exotic.
Cassidy was vaguely proud that his own roots went deeper than most of the others’, whose families came after the war, pouring back down to the sunny reptile farms and honky-tonk beaches dad had discovered in boot camp or flight school. Many were among the new breed of electronic warrior more at home with soldering irons, capacitors, and resistors than with guns and tanks. They worked on Air Force radar at Fort Murphy or Navy sonar at Lake Gem Mary or on one of dozens of cold war projects up and down the state, some as civilians, some still “in.” Others came down to start businesses or to take jobs in the newly awakened economy. No one had heard the term “baby boom,” but they were all nonetheless in the business of producing offspring, herds of skinny young’uns who grew up in baking pastel cinder-block houses in those wondrous days when air-conditioning was just a cruel rumor.
Cassidy would never forget endless summer nights perspiring on damp sheets, the faint hope of sleep just a fever dream. The droning arc of the rotating fan would bring a few seconds of blessed relief before sweeping past and lingering uselessly for a moment at the far end of its cycle.
Most of the children around Rosedale Street had never hurled a snowball, but they had flung many a rotten orange. That was one reason they loved winter, when the heat would finally back off, and abundant ammunition lay all around on the ground, courtesy of the remnants of the old citrus groves their houses were built among.
Most of the year they lived like simians, sometimes sitting right in the trees while munching on the flora. Or they would pull fruit from limbs as they ran by: loquats, a kind of sweet yellow plum with a single big seed; Brazilian cherries, which were miniature red-orange pumpkins that grew on hedges and were sweet but had a slightly nasty aftertaste; pink-fleshed guavas and red-yellow mangoes; fat little fig bananas; and of course citrus of all kinds, most of which dropped unnoticed from ignored trees. After a few days the oranges were mushy and fermented, perfect for rendering friends and enemies sticky, smelly, and spoiling for revenge. Mothers did a lot of laundry.
They got sandspurs in their feet, sunburns on their backs, and boils all over from the sandy soil. They were bitten by mosquitoes, chiggers, and occasionally each other. They were as at home in water as they were on land, and by the age of twelve many of them had landed their first sailfish or marlin. Most could throw a cast net, paddle a canoe, and handle a gaff.
In the happy midpoint of the twentieth century, Quenton Cassidy and the other kids on Rosedale Street grew up this way in Citrus City, a pebble toss away from the Atlantic Ocean, in the southern part of a coral peninsula the Spaniards named for flowers.