The Queue

He pushed the bicycle.

He could have ridden it. It was his. He had bought it with his own money and it was standing at the bottom of the porch steps with the sun on its blue crossbar at half past nine on Wednesday morning, and the Cove Point Resort was two miles round the cove by the road, and he could have been there in a quarter of an hour. But the others had to walk, because there was only one bicycle; and so he walked too, pushing it, along the verge of the paved road in the heat with the gravel crunching under the tyres and the bell going ting by itself at every stone; and his legs, which had carried a dead man’s house and ridden fourteen miles, said things to him at every step that he had never heard legs say.

“You could ride it,” said Marcus.

“I know.”

“We wouldn’t mind.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Frederick thought about it, pushing the bicycle.

“Because then I’d be there,” he said, “and you’d be here.”

Marcus did not say anything to that. But after a while, on the long hill down towards the water, he put his hand on the back of the bicycle’s saddle and walked with it there, pushing too, a little, so that it was two of them pushing one bicycle down a hill that it would have gone down perfectly well by itself.

---

The Cove Point Resort was on the far side of the cove from the town, on a point of land that went out into the lake with trees on it, and it was everything Ketchum was not.

It had a sign. A large one, at the turning off the road, carved out of wood and painted, with a sailing boat on it and a sunset and a fish leaping, and COVE POINT RESORT - CABINS - MARINA - POOL - EST. 1958 in gold letters; and a road through the trees that had been graded, and a car park, and cabins along the shore under the trees, painted green, each with a porch and a barbecue and a number; and a marina, with a fuel dock and forty boats in slips and a shop that sold bait and ice and sun cream and T-shirts with the sailing boat on them; and in the middle of all of it, on a terrace above the water, with a white fence round it and umbrellas, blue and white, and a snack hut with a hatch, and a high white chair at one end like an umpire’s, the pool.

It was the shape of a kidney. It was the bluest thing he had ever seen. It was bluer than the sky, which was white, and bluer than the lake, which was brown, close to, under the blue it got from the sky; and it lay in the sun on its terrace above a lake that had been made, the way Mr Vollmer had said, by a dam across a river with a town under it; and it was full of people.

“There’s a lake,” said Felix, standing at the white fence, looking at it. “There’s a whole lake. Right there. Why do they need a pool?”

“Because the lake’s got fish in it,” said Marcus.

“So?”

“So people don’t like swimming with fish,” said Marcus, with total certainty. “That’s why they invented pools.”

At the gate in the white fence there was a hut, painted white, with a window in it, a sliding one, closed, with a sign beside it on a board, in black letters on white, very large:

COVE POINT POOL. OPEN 10 - 6. RESORT GUESTS FREE. DAY PASSES £5. NO RUNNING. NO GLASS. NO DIVING IN SHALLOW END. NO BOMBS. ADULT SWIM 10 MINS EVERY HOUR. LIFEGUARD’S DECISION IS FINAL.

And in front of the hut, along the white fence, in the sun, at twenty to ten, there was a queue.

---

He looked at it.

It was the most ordinary thing he had ever seen. He had seen a great many queues in his life. He had seen them from the window of a car, and from a balcony, and from the steps of a cathedral, all the way down the street as far as you could see, people who had been waiting since the night before with folding chairs and flasks of coffee and flags. He had never in his life stood in one. He had never once in his life arrived somewhere and found other people there before him, waiting for the same thing, and gone to the end, and waited behind them until it was his turn.

Forty people. Perhaps more. Families, mostly, from the cabins and from the town and from somewhere else, in swimsuits and flip-flops and T-shirts, with bags and towels and cool boxes and children; children everywhere, small ones on their fathers’ shoulders and bigger ones with foam noodles, pink and green and yellow, hitting each other with them. A woman with a baby in a sun hat. Three girls of about his age in sunglasses, looking at their telephones. An old man in a vest with a newspaper. A boy of eight with a pair of goggles already on, waiting, with his whole face pressed against the white fence, looking at the water.

Frederick leaned the blue bicycle against the fence, and went to the end of the queue, behind the old man in the vest, and stood there.

“Number three,” said Theo, beside him, very quietly, as though they were in church.

---

The old man in the vest turned round.

He looked at Frederick. Frederick watched it happen. See him, and know him, and be surprised, and think about it; and then, instead of deciding the thing that Darlene had decided, and the man with the tractor cap, and Royce Pettit, the old man in the vest decided something else.

He stepped aside.

“Go on, son,” he said, and made a little movement with his newspaper towards the front of the queue. “You go on ahead.”

“No, thank you, sir,” said Frederick. “I’m fine here.”

“Go on.”

“No, really. Thank you. I want to wait.”

The old man looked at him as if he had said something in another language.

“Well, suit yourself,” he said, and stepped back into his place; and Frederick stood behind him, in the sun, and was just beginning to breathe again when the woman in front of the old man, the one with the baby in the sun hat, turned round too.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness. Honey, you go in front of me.”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

“No, really. Go on. The baby doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind either. I want to wait. Thank you. Really.”

But she had already stepped out of the queue, with the baby, and the old man in the vest, seeing her do it, had stepped out too, so as not to be the only one; and there was a space in front of Frederick, two people long, and the family in front of the space, a father and a mother and two boys with noodles, had turned round to see what was happening, and seen him, and the father had put his hand on his chest, and stepped aside, and taken the boys with him by the backs of their necks.

“No,” said Frederick. “No, please, I…”

It went up the queue like a fire along a fence.

He had not known it could happen so fast. One after another, all the way along the white fence, people turned round, and saw him, and stepped aside; the three girls with the telephones, who looked at him over their sunglasses and stepped aside in a row, all at once, like a dance; the man with the cool box, who picked it up to step aside and dropped it; a woman who said oh, Lord and stepped aside so fast that she stepped on her own husband; the boy with the goggles, whose mother pulled him back from the fence so hard that his goggles came off. Until there was a long empty lane along the white fence between two lines of people, forty of them, and at the far end of it, at the hut, the sliding window, closed; and at the near end of it, by himself, holding a towel that Mrs Sixkiller had left in the airing cupboard with NOT THE GOOD ONES pinned to the shelf, him.

Everybody looked at him. They were waiting for him to go.

He did not move.

“Go on, honey,” said somebody, kindly.

“I don’t want to go first,” said Frederick.

Nobody understood. He could see that nobody understood. Forty people on a hot terrace above a lake looked at him with the deepest kindness and the most complete bewilderment, waiting, holding their children back by the shoulders, holding their noodles, and he stood at the end of the empty lane in the sun with Mrs Sixkiller’s second-best towel and felt himself going red from the neck up, and could not think of anything to say that would not make it worse; and behind him he heard Theo make a sound that was very nearly a word, and stop it.

Then a whistle went.

---

It was the loudest whistle he had ever heard. It came from the high white chair at the end of the pool, inside the fence, and it was one long, shrill, furious blast that went on for a very long time, and stopped every child on the terrace in its tracks, and every adult, and a dog at the marina, and very possibly the fish.

They all looked at the chair.

There was a girl on it. She was about nineteen, in a red swimsuit and a pair of red shorts over it and a white T-shirt over that, with GUARD on it, and a pair of sunglasses, and a visor, and a stripe of white zinc down her nose like paint, and a whistle on a lanyard round her neck, which she had taken out of her mouth. She was sitting on the top of the chair with her knees up and her elbows on them, looking down at the queue through the white fence. At all of it. At the empty lane down the middle of it, and the people on either side, and the boy at the end of it with the towel.

“Y’all,” she said.

She did not shout. She did not have to.

“He wants to stand in line,” said the girl on the chair. “He wants to. He came all this way to stand in line.” She looked along the fence at them. “So let the boy stand in line.”

Nobody moved.

The girl on the chair put the whistle back in her mouth.

It was like watching a film run backwards. The old man in the vest stepped back into his place. The woman with the baby. The family with the noodles. The three girls with the telephones, in a row, like a dance. The man with the cool box, who picked it up. The woman who had stepped on her husband, who said sorry, sorry, sorry to him all the way back. The boy with the goggles, who had not understood any of it, and put his goggles back on, and pressed his face against the fence again, and looked at the water. Until the queue was a queue again, along the white fence, in the sun, forty people long, and at the end of it, behind the old man in the vest, where he had been, Frederick.

The girl on the chair took the whistle out of her mouth.

“Thank you,” she said, to the queue.

Then she looked at him, at the end of it, over her sunglasses, for exactly one second; and he could not see her eyes, but he knew, as surely as he had ever known anything, that she was not impressed by him in the slightest. Not by any of it. Not by the queue, or by what he was, or by his wanting to stand in it.

She put her sunglasses back up her nose and turned to the pool.

“Who’s that?” said Felix, in a whisper.

“The lifeguard,” said Theo, in a whisper. “It says on the sign. Lifeguard’s decision is final.”

---

At ten o’clock exactly the sliding window in the hut went up with a bang, and a woman put her head out of it.

She was forty-five or so, small and brown and quick, in a pink polo shirt with the sailing boat on it and a visor of her own and a headset on her head with a microphone on a stalk in front of her mouth, and a pen behind each ear, and she looked at the queue, all of it, from one end to the other, in about a second, and said:

“Morning! Day passes five, guests show your key, cash or card, no…” She stopped, because she had reached the end of the queue with her eyes, and found him. “Oh,” she said. “Well. All right then. Morning!” She looked at the old man in the vest, at the front. “Walt! How’s the hip? Five. Thank you. Next!”

The queue moved.

He had not known that a queue moved like that. A step, and a wait, and a step. He stood in it, in the sun, behind the old man in the vest, who had gone through and been replaced by the woman with the baby; and then by the family with the noodles, who took for ever, because one of the boys had lost the money; and then by the three girls, who paid on their telephones; and the sun was on the back of his neck, and the hut got nearer, very slowly, a step at a time, and he found that he did not mind the slowness at all. He found that he liked it. He stood in the queue at the Cove Point pool in Ketchum with his towel, behind the man with the cool box, and was simply one of the people waiting, and nobody looked at him, now, at all, because the girl on the chair had told them not to; and it took twenty-seven minutes from the end of the queue to the window, and they were the most peaceful twenty-seven minutes of his summer.

Then he was at the window, and the woman with the headset was looking down at him.

“Five,” she said.

He opened his mouth.

“I’ve got it,” said Marcus, behind him, and held out the envelope that said FOR EMERGENCIES AND PIE, which was a great deal thinner than it had been on Saturday.

“I can’t,” said Frederick. “It’s number…”

“It’s number three,” said Marcus. “Swim at the pool, in the queue. It doesn’t say and pay.” He took out a note. “I checked. On the fridge. This morning.”

Frederick looked at Theo. Theo nodded.

“It should have,” said Felix, from the back. “We should have put and pay on all of them.”

“We didn’t think of it,” said Theo. “We didn’t know he’d never have any money.” He looked at Frederick. “Nobody’s ever not had money before.”

The woman with the headset took the note out of Marcus’s hand, and four more out of Theo’s and Felix’s, and gave them four orange wristbands made of paper, and looked at the four of them in front of her window, and then, for a moment, only at Frederick, with her quick bright eyes; and then her headset beeped, and she put her hand up to it, and turned away.

“Cove Point Resort, Bonnie speaking, how can I…”

---

The water was as warm as a bath.

It was ninety degrees, the sign by the steps said; and he had expected cold, because water was cold, at Solliden, where the sea was cold even in August and you went in all at once and came out with your skin burning; and he went down the steps into the shallow end of the Cove Point pool and it closed round his legs like a bath that somebody had run for him and forgotten, and he stood in it, waist deep, among the children, and laughed.

It was full. He had never been in a pool with anybody in it but himself and Theo, and the instructor, and once the Swedish ambassador’s daughters, who had been polite about it. This pool had sixty people in it, at least. It had children everywhere, small ones in armbands bobbing at the edges with their fathers and bigger ones in the middle going under and coming up and screaming, and noodles, and inflatable things, a crocodile and a ring like a doughnut with a bite out of it, and a ball that somebody kept throwing and somebody else kept missing, and a slide at the deep end, a short blue one, curved, with a queue of its own at the ladder. And the noise. The screaming and the splashing and the shouting of names and the slap of feet on the wet concrete and the radio at the snack hut playing a song about a pickup truck, and the whistle, every few minutes, from the high white chair.

He swam. He swam the length of it, as far as you could swim the length of a kidney, among the children, and back. He went down the slide, after waiting at the ladder behind four eight-year-olds, and came off the end of it into the deep end with his eyes open and saw, under the water, in the blue, a whole world of legs, kicking. He floated on his back in the middle with his arms out and his ears under and the noise gone suddenly far away and hollow, and the sky above him, white, enormous, and the edge of the high white chair at the corner of his eye.

Kimura was in the pool.

He saw her at eleven, going past him at the deep end, swimming lengths along the one rope that divided the deep end off, steadily, in a black swimsuit and a cap, without looking at him; up and back, up and back, the only person in the whole pool going in a straight line. At the end of every length she turned under the water without stopping and came up facing the other way, and he understood after the third length that from the deep end she could see the whole pool, every corner of it, and the gate, and the hut, and him.

Castellanos was not in the pool. Castellanos was at a table under a blue and white umbrella by the snack hut, in his sports jacket, with a glass of iced tea that he had not touched, and his back to the wall.

---

He did a cannonball at twenty past eleven.

He did not mean to. That is, he meant to; but he had not planned it. He was on the edge at the deep end, behind the rope, where it said 9 FT, and Theo was in the water below him, and Theo said go on, and there was a boy of about ten beside him on the edge who had just done one, with a noise like a dropped piano, and come up shouting, and Frederick looked at the water, and at the boy, and thought: I have never done one. He had never in his life done one. Not once. You did not, in a pool where the instructor stood at the side with a stopwatch.

He tucked his knees up to his chest and jumped.

It was magnificent. The water went up round him like a wall, and came down, and he went under, deep, all the way down to where his feet touched the bottom of the deep end, and came up, through the white churning, into the noise, and shouted, because the boy had shouted, and you had to; and the whistle went.

It went right over his head. One sharp blast. He wiped the water out of his eyes and looked up.

The girl on the high white chair was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, looking down at him over her sunglasses, with the whistle in her teeth.

She took it out.

“You,” she said. “Yes. You. Can you read?”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Then read.” She pointed with the whistle at the sign on the fence, behind him, without looking at it. “What’s it say? Fourth line.”

He looked. He had to swim round to see it.

“No bombs,” he said.

“No bombs,” said the girl on the chair. “That was a bomb. I saw it. Everybody saw it. They saw it in Grove.” She put the whistle back between her teeth, round it, so that she could talk. “Next one, you’re out for ten minutes. Sitting on the side. With the babies. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m nineteen,” said the girl on the chair. “Don’t ma’am me.” She sat back. “And don’t do it again.”

He did not do it again.

He swam away from the deep end, down the pool, slowly, on his front, among the children; and when he reached the shallow end he stood up in the warm water among the armbands, waist deep, with his hair in his eyes and his face burning, and found Theo standing beside him with his hand over his mouth and his shoulders going.

“She told you off,” said Theo, through his hand.

“I know.”

“She told the King off. For a bomb.”

“I know she did,” said Frederick, and found that he could not stop smiling, and that his face was hot, and that it was not from the sun, and that he did not mind in the least. “She was right. It was a bomb.”

---

At eleven o’clock, and twelve, and one, the whistle went three times, short, and the girl on the chair shouted adult swim!, and every child in the pool groaned and climbed out, and sat on the edge with their feet in the water, in a row, all the way round, for ten minutes, while four grown-ups swam slowly up and down the empty pool in a great silence, very self-consciously, like people walking across a stage.

He got out with the children.

He was sixteen. The sign did not say what an adult was, but Theo asked, at the edge, very politely, and the girl on the chair said eighteen, without turning her head; and so the four of them sat on the edge of the Cove Point pool in a row with their feet in the water, between a girl of six in a pink swimsuit and a boy of eight with goggles, the boy from the fence, and waited, while Walt in his vest, whose hip was better, went up and down the empty pool in a slow and stately breaststroke with his chin held up out of the water and his eyes closed.

The boy with the goggles looked at Frederick, sideways, along the edge.

“Are you the King?” he said.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

The boy thought about it, kicking his feet in the water.

“Do you have to get out for adult swim at your house?”

“No,” said Frederick.

“Huh,” said the boy, and thought about that too, and looked at the empty pool, and at Walt. “I would hate being the King,” he said.

---

The telephone call came at half past two.

He was at the snack hut, in the queue, again, with the others, to buy four hot dogs out of the last of Marcus’s envelope; and the hatch of the snack hut was beside the window of the pass hut, which was open, with Bonnie Tackett in it, in her headset, doing three things at once; and so he heard it. All of it. Or all of her half.

“Cove Point Resort, Bonnie speaking. Uh huh. Uh huh. Who? From where?” A pause. Bonnie Tackett took one of the pens from behind her ears and put it in her mouth and took it out again. “From the… I see. Yes. Yes, I know who you mean. Yes, he’s here.” A pause. “In the pool.” A pause. “Well, he was in the pool. He’s at the snack hut now. In line.” A pause, longer. “For a hot dog, I’d imagine, it’s a snack hut.” A pause. “No. No, I don’t think so.” A longer pause, in which Bonnie Tackett’s eyebrows went up and up, under her visor, until they went into it. “The junior swim certificates? On Friday? That’s… well, that’s very kind of the Prime Minister, I’m sure, but the junior swim certificates are Kaylee’s, Kaylee does the certificates, she’s done them every summer since she was…” A pause. “No, I don’t think he’d want to. No, I don’t think I’ll ask him. Because he paid, ma’am. He stood in line. He stood in line for twenty-seven minutes, I timed it, and he paid his five pounds, well, his friend paid it, but that’s…” A pause. “No. No, ma’am. I’ve got sixty people in that pool today, and one of them’s the King, and the other fifty-nine aren’t your business either, and neither is he, not on a Wednesday, not in my pool.” A pause. “Well, you have a nice day too. Bye now. Bye. Bye.”

She took off the headset and put it on the counter and looked at it.

Then she looked up, through the window of the pass hut, along the white fence, at the snack hut queue, and at him in it, with Marcus’s last note in his hand for the four hot dogs.

“Your Prime Minister’s office,” she said, “wants you to give out the junior swim certificates on Friday.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I heard. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s hers.” She thought about it. “The lady. Fen-something.”

“Fenner.”

“Fenner.” Bonnie Tackett put the headset back on. “Well, I told her.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Bonnie Tackett. “Thank Kaylee. If you’d given out her certificates she’d have drowned you in the deep end and I’d have had to fill out a form.”

---

The sign was on the gate.

He saw it at five, when the whistle went for the end of the day and the pool emptied and they came out through the gate with their towels and their orange paper wristbands, soggy, still on, because none of them could bear to take them off; and he had not seen it in the morning, because in the morning he had been looking at the queue. It was on the inside of the gate, small, handwritten, in marker on a piece of card, pinned to the white wood with four drawing pins.

HELP WANTED. POOL ATTENDANT. 16+. TOWELS, CHEMICALS, SNACK HUT, GENERAL. APPLY AT OFFICE. ASK FOR BONNIE.

He stopped in front of it.

The others went on, three steps, and stopped too, and turned, and came back, and stood behind him, and looked at it over his shoulder. Nobody said anything.

16+, he thought. He was sixteen. He had been sixteen since the second of May. He had sworn the oaths on it.

“Number four,” said Theo, behind him, very quietly.

“A real one,” said Felix. “With a form.”

He stood at the gate and read the card again. Towels. Chemicals. Snack hut. General. In marker, in Bonnie Tackett’s quick round hand, with the 16+ underlined.

On the high white chair, at the far end of the empty pool, the girl in the red swimsuit was taking down the umbrella that went over the chair, in the late sun, with her back to them, and folding it, and putting the whistle in her pocket; and she was going to be his boss, if he did this. She was nineteen and she had told him off for a bomb in front of sixty people and she would tell him off again, he knew it, for the towels, and the chemicals, and the snack hut, and everything, generally.

He went to the office.

---

Bonnie Tackett was in it, with her headset on and her feet on the desk, eating a hot dog.

She looked at him in the door. She did not take her feet off the desk.

“Ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “Thursday. Bring a pen.” She took a bite of the hot dog. “There’s a form.”