Read The Hour of Bad Decisions for Free Online Page B

eyebrows, swaying slowly back and forth on the shifting thermal updrafts. John wondered what it was the hawk was seeing, whether the bird was focusing on one small patch in the field, or whether it was looking across the whole panorama beneath it, seeing as part of the view a pale man banked against the light blue side of the hot tub, seeing the three children as they left the pool with their mother, closing the gate behind them. She had come over to the hot tub before that, surprising John, asking him how hot the water was, trailing her fingertips in the bubbles for a moment. She called out goodbye when the gate wasclosing. Someone was mowing grass – he could hear the distant, regular purr of the mower, although he couldn’t see it, and occasional breaths of wind brought the clear, sweet smell of the cut grass. It was the time in summer when seconds drag and minutes trail, when the day limps weakly towards evening under the weight of the summer heat.
    It was even hotter in the tub: John could feel the fat beads of sweat rolling out of his hairline, rolling down his cheeks and narrowly missing the corners of his eyes. Now and then, he’d lay his arms on the deck, and once, he stood up to pull a towel over towards him. The sudden movement made him dizzy for a moment, stars and snow jumping in front of his eyes – he twisted the plastic cap from the big bottle of water, and drank deeply.
    Two families came out to play a game of catch in the grassy open field directly beside the pool fence, kids and parents and a ball and bat, and even with his eyes closed John could picture the loosely-played game, could hear the hard wooden thwack of the bat and the rush of feet, the crowded, eager yells of children scrambling for the ball.
    The robins started their late, liquid songs, and the ball players left, and still Heather didn’t come back. He had heard her call his name once or twice, short, sharp yells, cut off abruptly like someone calling a disobedient pet. John. John. Then a door slamming, hard.
    By nine, the sun was tilting down. Sky orange along the horizon, the upwards-reaching arms of the trees suddenly and sharply jet black, branches set sosharply against the sky that they were matte and completely without depth, just simple cut-outs pasted up against the whorled depth of the sky. The pool was lit up blue in the fading evening, the white underwater lights playing off the blue-painted bottom, the brightness of the water sharpening with each subtle darkening of the sky, until the lights made it glow electric and unnatural. Strings of coloured patio lights wobbled along the fence top, teetering in the slightest breeze. To John, the water surrounding him no longer felt hot, hardly even warm, and not because it was cooling. By then, the skin on his hands and feet felt waterlogged, and he could imagine his feet, naked and stark-white and horrendously wrinkled, soft as sponges and never again needed for walking.
    I am, he thought, acclimatizing, learning to live in the heat like the peculiar sea-bottom bacteria that thrive around volcanic fumeroles.
    Fumeroles, he thought. What a strange word, what an awkward word, to have stuck in memory, to be remembered instead of discarded like so many others. He could picture a fumerole from some once-watched nature special, videotape shot through the thick glass eyepiece of a deep-diving submersible, the hot water and silt boiling up like smoke. He let his back slide down until his chin reached the water, then pulled his whole body under. I am a submarine, he thought, diving to the fumeroles. But at the last moment he decided not to open his eyes, and came back up to the surface gasping when his breath ran out. The water that ran into his eyes stung like fire.
    At eleven, they turned off the lights between the cabins, and the stars suddenly sprang out in the sky. He could hear the fizz of the water, and smell the alkali-chlorine hot-springs breath of it. Heather had