Free Rainy Season by Adele Griffin Page B

because of his dad. During school breaks, Ted himself sometimes works as a line handler for the ships. Today, he parks the truck on the bank of the Miraflores lock and pays an old local man working on the dock fifty cents to watch over it.
    We take the boat to get to the tower. The skiff has a low-power outboard motor, and there are so many of us crammed in together that I worry through the whole ride that we will sink. It doesn’t help that as soon as we move far enough away from the dock, Charlie launches into a long story about alligators. He talks on about how they swim down from Florida to live in the locks and once they snap you up, they’ll drag you down and bury you in mud flats for days before eating you. “So you’re nice and soft and rotten to sink their teeth into,” he finishes, looking at me.
    “Whatever, Charlie. No alligators live here.”
    “Rotting, decomposing flesh.”
    “If you don’t shut up I’m going to push you overboard.” I shove away from him and stare down at the brown, murky image of myself that trembles on the surface of the water. Silent orange fish dart beneath my face; they flicker and are gone like candle flames. Then the water turns black; I look up into the sky and for the first time notice that clouds have gathered and are covering the sun. It seems like it happened in an instant.
    “You were right,” I say to Ted. “About the rain.”
    “We better jump quick is all I’m thinking,” he yawns. “Lightning. Of course, we could always sacrifice Charlie to the Lightning Gods and then maybe it won’t rain so hard. Tie him to the top of the tower, sling a shell necklace around his neck …”
    “Please feel free to shut up anytime, Ted.” Charlie beats on his chest with his fists. “I’m too tough to sacrifice.”
    “It’d be nobler than a lot of other ways you might meet your maker, Charlie. Lightning Gods—gotta love ’em.” Ted scans the water. “Land-ho! I see the Eiffel tower.”
    The Miraflores water tower is a tall skinny rusty iron scaffolding that stretches up about twenty-five feet out of the river. We call it the water tower because that’s all we know about how to describe it, although Ted once said it’s a watermark to let ship captains know how deep the Canal is in this part of the lock. I don’t know if that’s truth or Zonie-truth. Zonies like to make up stuff about the Canal and the Zone and the locals, hoping military people accept it as God’s truth. They know that no matter how dumb it is, we’ll most probably believe it, since we wouldn’t know any different.
    Ted ropes the skiff to one of the scaffold legs and cuts the engine. We all tip off the boat, falling into the water, shoes and all, and then we scale the iron rungs of the tower up to the halfway ledge, which is the only part wide enough to hold all of us comfortably at once.
    There’s enough room to stretch out and relax. The water is patterned with the reflection of shifting clouds. I can stare over the entire width of the lock to the messy snarl of jungle that always borders the horizon. I sit and wrap my arms tight around myself. Everyone else is talking, but I let their voices blend over me, turning into one faded color. For a minute I feel like I’m part of a picture that’s existed millions of years before me, and it’s weird to think it’ll just keep being here after I am gone.
    I hook my legs over the grilled ledge of the tower and lie back, my hands crossed underneath my head. Mary Jane lies down next to me while Rat lies on the other side, the opposite way. His head almost touches mine. I hear the others clank up the rungs on their way to the very top, to the jump point.
    “You coming, Mary Jane?” shouts Steph from above. She has climbed past the halfway ledge to a higher point on the tower. Her voice bubbles with fake sweetness. “We’re all doing the second highest jump for practice before we do the highest.”
    “I’m fixing on one jump,” Mary Jane shouts