The next afternoon, when I got home from school, my mother was fussing at my father.
"We are not going to wait until we get calls from the neighbors. We are going to deal with it now," she was saying to him. "It stinks."
By "we" she meant him and me, and it soon became clear that by "it" she meant the backyard pond. And you may think that you know what "stink" means, but unless you have had your hands in a dank blackwater coffin like my father and I encountered that balmy afternoon, you do not have any idea what stink really means.
The change in the weather had melted the ice and freed the goldfish from their icy prison. They floated upside down on the surface of the water, stiff, swollen, and pale. Even worse were the dim, white shapes of leopard frogs drifting like ghostly blimps halfway to the bottom.
It was like the part in horror movies on TV where you hide your face behind your open fingers, peeking only to find out if it's over.
This one wasn't going to be over until my father and I had scooped out every last cold-blooded, foul-smelling soul. We used a fishing net, trying not to touch the bodies. I dug a grave in my mother's garden. The mud clung to my shoes and got on my hands.
Again and again, we turned the net upside down, plopping the victims one on top of the other. Using a circulating pump that had been purchased to create a waterfall, we attached a long black tube and drained the pond. A terrible smell spread across our yard.
Inside the house, the telephone rang and rang again. Wisely, I thought, my mother did not answer.
That night I woke several times from restless dreams, worried about Orwell. Once, shortly after four, as I lay face up on the pillow, frightened of the strange, vague shapes illuminated by the lighted numbers on my clock, I heard the telltale rumble of the newspaper truck. I listened to it slowing down, speeding up, and slowing down again each time it came near a subscriber's driveway. I heard the thuds and thumps and thwacks as the papers sometimes hit their concrete mark and sometimes landed in a yard. I listened and kept on listening until I heard the truck clatter around the corner. I listened even longer until I heard it drive away.