"What do your lizards eat?" I asked.
"We don't have any lizards, either," she said.
I went home and told Mom we needed to get a No-Pest Strip like Carla's
family, but she refused. "If it kills the flies," she said, "it can't be very
good for us."
Dad bought a souped-up old Ford Fairlane that winter, and one weekend
when the weather got cold, he announced that we were going swimming
at the Hot Pot. The Hot Pot was a natural sulfur spring in the desert north
of town, surrounded by craggy rocks and quicksand. The water was warm
to the touch and smelled like rotten eggs. It was so full of minerals that
rough, chalky encrustations had built up along the edges, like a coral
reef. Dad was always saying we should buy the Hot Pot and develop it as
a spa.
The deeper you went into the water, the hotter it got. It was very deep in
the middle. Some people around Battle Mountain said the Hot Pot had no
bottom at all, that it went clean through to the center of the earth. A
couple of drunks and wild teenagers had drowned there, and people at the
Owl Club said when their bodies floated back to the surface, they'd been
literally boiled.
Both Brian and Lori knew how to swim, but I had never learned. Large
bodies of water scared me. They seemed unnatural—oddities in the
desert towns where we'd lived. We had once stayed at a motel with a
swimming pool, and I worked up enough nerve to make my way around
the entire length of the pool, clinging to the side. But the Hot Pot didn't
have any neat edges like that swimming pool. There was nothing to cling
to.
I waded in up to my shoulders. The water around my chest was warm,
and the rocks I was standing on felt so hot I wanted to keep moving. I