Pool_2

announcing on the PA that, "Officer Penchant needs children for target practice. If you are under four feet tall, please report to the guard room." Music was always lurking in the background at Charles Darling on the PA system.. When a lifeguard got a record of the musical Hair played on the sound system, a mocking of long hair and curdled face nose holding, circled the deck. Booo sssssss turn that off and shouted fecal references made it clear that this was neither music nor relevant here. Anything outside the city was equally irrelevant. The long long Chicago eight trial, later seven, Biafra starvation, and the Cally military fiasco only found dialog among the guards. Nixon's election had been a nonevent. The pool was obvious to them. They saw its goings on, daily. Just why were two eighteen wheelers worth of chlorine powder, in drums, delivered? Hundreds of huge drums. Where did it all go that same night? Huh? Where? Charles Darling only used chlorine gas. Penchant made a jerk off gesture to that query and put it simply, "It's in the pool." That brought no argument. Mac had trouble with this, but let it go. What he could not let go was the cool overcast day when he, alone, guarded the closed Charles Darling facility. A mysterious 'closed day'. Looking past the empty lifeguard stands, across cement decks, at the reservoir in the distance, he had no concept of the pool, of anything that it embodied, or that it mirrored. He could not see that this still portrait, this peaceful juxtaposition, was just another of its endless triumphs. He wasn't alone evidently. But, he couldn't tell that from being there. He had to read about it in the papers. Even then, he didn't immediately comprehend what it all meant. It paled next to the reports of the 100 U.S. soldiers killed in one week in Vietnam. Did anyone, except him, even briefly give it a moment's thought, yet alone ask