That summer they added fluoride to the water. Our parents did not question that the commies who ran New York City wanted us to glow green in the dark. A decade earlier, our fathers had stopped the stain of evil spreading over the Pacific and Europe. They had no patience for the distinction between fluoride and radium.
In the playground, we drank water from what we called “the fountain”, a stanchion of cement with a cement bowl at its crown. Your thumb pressed a steel button on a brass spigot to allow water to bubble up. The water ran cold and tasted very good. You were supposed to sip; we gulped.
On hot days when yellow tree pollen floated like our dreams thick as wool in the air, the water pressure sank low. To drink, you had to bend close. Being thirsty made a guy vulnerable. We were boys, so a vulnerable guy’s head might be pushed down onto the brass spigot. One guy had two front teeth broken. It hurt like a motherfucker and he spit a lot of blood. He was always on the lookout for the chance to get even, so no one ever again bent over the fountain without first looking over their shoulder.
Mid-block, the playground made a convenient shortcut from street to street. The walking path was paved with hexagonal stones. Because faint lights from beyond the playground cast by moving auto headlights created ever-shifting shadow, at night the shortcut felt forbidding. Shifting shadows were the realm of monsters, real and imaginary.
The few trees were all elm, roots over time swelling to break the black macadam. The elms struggled for sun through the perpetual gloom from surrounding apartment buildings. The largest elm, so thick no one could get their arms around it, was home base for Hide ‘n’ Seek. If you were It, you hid your eyes against Home, inhaled the tree’s rich aroma, and counted to 100 before shouting, “Ready or not, here I come!”
Weeds that emerged through pavement cracks were stamped flat. Tan dirt surrounded the teeter-totters, the monkey bars, and the locked wooden tool shed at the playground’s edge farthest from the Home-base elm.
Older boys were in the streets, but the playground was designed for all ages. We were too young for stickball, a street sport made dangerous by passing automobiles, but the playground was ideal for pickup games of punchball, a variation of baseball with no pitcher. The shed’s padlocked front door served as home base. The grassless dirt before the shed was the playing field. You punched a pink ball and ran to first base.
Baby swings were a bore, but six bigger swings made of pressed metal and hung by chains thrilled us. Like trapeze artists, we were certain it was possible to pump a metal swing through a 360 degree arc. Our Icarus was the legendary kid who stood pumping his knees at the apex of every arc, each arc adding more energy until he worked the swing to vertical. But our Icarus lacked the necessary momentum to go full circle. Suspended upside-down, his grip loosened and he fell headfirst and broke his neck. The tale served as no deterrent because at the peak of an arc a swing balances among gravity, momentum, and centrifugal force.
Floating weightless is delicious.
The round wading pool at the playground’s center had a drain, of course, and two pipes from deep below the ground that rose to the pool’s perimeter. The pipes were capped by brass sieves controlled by plumbing locked underground beneath a steel plate beside the tool shed. Water sprayed to magnificent heights. When the sun was right, we ran beneath rainbows. We went barefoot through spray as if it were daring to do so. The odor of chlorine mixed with petrichor, the magical aroma emitted after a first rain by ground long dry.
It rained today, and so I recall the hot day when we played hide ‘n seek. While boys scattered and someone embraced an elm to count to a hundred, I persuaded a boy that I had the best place to hide. I led him to the side of the tool shed. Park maintenance had unlocked and moved aside the steel plate over the playground’s plumbing, a manmade cave of gauges, valves, and wheels in forbidding gloom in the world below. The wading pool had been turned off, but the workmen had neglected to replace the cover above the plumbing beneath our feet.
The steel plate fit snugly into a three inch metal frame embedded in the dirt, but it had been left ajar. The workmen must have planned to save themselves tomorrow’s small labor of working a pry-bar beneath the plate, lifting, and then sliding it aside.
We sat with our legs over the lip peering down into darkness when I said “No one can ever find you down there.” He grinned broadly. Then, as I shoved him enough to lose his balance, that imbecilic grin was replaced by wide eyes that recognized betrayal. He vanished into the shadows.
I looked down, but had no sight of him, a disappointment. I’d wanted to say goodbye. It was a simple matter to sit on the ground and with my heels slide the heavy plate to slip into its frame. It closed with satisfying finality.
That night I dreamt of spiders and the slow drip of water. It rained for two days, so no one had reason to investigate the valves in playgrounds steel. Our parents concluded that the boy was spirited away by a pervert; our fathers were intimate with evil. We listened to new cautionary lectures while I wondered if the boy who’d knocked out my teeth glowed radium-green in darkness.
For all I know, his bones glow there still.
Perry Glasser is the author of three prize-winning short fiction collections, a collection of memoirs, a surreal novel, Riverton Noir, and American Mayhem, the two volume novel consisting of Burn It Down and Blow Up the Ashes coming from Guernica Editions (ON) in 2023.