Rolling Fork in the Dog Days of Summer
A short story and a series of photographs about growing up
There are four teenagers sitting by the life guard chair. Matching t-shirts, a bright red that bursts in sudden motion reflected across the murky green water of the past-its-best-days public pool they are cleaning at closing time. Dog days, I think as I wait for my order at the Bumper’s Drive-In down the road. A loud road, a quiet road, it all depends now hat you’re listening for. The crows circling the dead animal at the yellow line? The motorcycle club on their Sunday evening ride? The exhaust smoke hazes the American flags waving from the back of their seats.
A car full of three teenage girls pulls in the stall by me, a cacophony of Olivia Rodrigo slipping through the cracked driver’s side window. We make brief eye contact before a shout bursts through the air to rival the waiter asking for the next order, and I’m pulled in reverse back onto the hot highway pavement, the falling sun attached to my wheels like a string to a lightbulb in the back corner of a shotgun house years ago.
“Anything goes! That’s fair!” A young boy shouts at his dad while they play basketball at the town court. I turn off the radio and stop the car to hear the shoes shuffle over the sweat stains left from years of previous drives to the rim.
“Gotta get ‘em before he starts beating me,” the dad tells me. I watch their dance while the sun falls below the trees. The lifeguards are gone now, their things packed into their cars and transported across the gravel parking lot. Two of them left alone, two of them left together. How did they manage that? I would see them later, parked behind the high school while a skunk wandered near the edge of the corn rows surrounding the baseball field.
Anything could happen here, in this small Delta town during the 100 degree sunset. I’m standing in the middle of the street. A sheriff flies by, out into the rural blue, lights on.
“Okay okay! Last shot then we gotta go!” Dad shouts.
The young boy steps back, runs to his left to escape his dads wingspan, finds an opening and slides his feet together before launching from the ground to levitate for a second he could never forget. I see the ball fly through the air across my rearview mirror, but I close my eyes. And by the time I’m back to my senses my headlights are feeling for the forest in the distance. Where the darkness of the trees stops us from seeing far ahead. To grow up.