by Susan Davis
Each day that summer just as it ended we swam in Bachman’s Pond. Small maples screened out fields and houses. Diving off the little dock landed you on cold springs, chilling the torso as you stroked over or drifted on your back. There were leeches too. Mr. Bachman touched their slime with his cigarette and they let go, leaving less a bite than mosquitoes.
At first, we would sneak down through his evergreens and slip in behind the dock. One day I saw him watching in khakis from his deck, looking like Clark Gable, exotic because he didn’t go to church. I was in love. At that distance he might have thought I was one of those neighborhood kids. He didn’t know my name. He called and offered the pond. My parents thanked him. When he and his wife adopted a little girl, we took her too.
At the post office in his nursery store’s corner, a collection rotated under counter glass when you pushed a button. In swinging racks, coins in cardboard mats flashed with foreign words and dates against blue paper. I looked at them, waiting for packages we weren’t home to get. It was the coins his killers came for, all the way from Florida where news of them had reached the little trade books. They tied him up, and his wife and her mother, and shot them in the head while their daughter spent the night with friends.