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Effervescence
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The early afternoon sun beats down on a small suburban yard, and on the old car resting in its driveway. Sap coats it's dark outer frame and windows, and the dirt from previous journeys sticks more persistently because of it; the unhappy victim of a nearby tree and the cooling autumn weather.
The day is warm, though, and the boys need occupying.
Nina gives them a large bucket, the bottle of soap, a old washrag, a scrubbing brush, a firm stare, and because they're seven and twelve, she thinks (she hopes) she can trust them to behave themselves while she finishes the ironing inside.
She says, "Wash the car," from the porch before going into the house.
Wash the car.
Not wash each other.
In their defense, however, the latter wasn't actually a rule spoken aloud so much as it was an assumed what-not-to-do or, perhaps, a you-know-better-than-that. And, to their credit, for the first several minutes, it all goes smoothly.
Rocky enthusiastically twists the faucet on the side of the house, and Freckle - the calm one, the sensible one (the only one who can be trusted with such responsibility) - mans the water hose with both small hands, watching the water foam and brew when it hits the soap until it froths around the edges of the tin bucket.
"That's enough," he calls over his shoulder.
"T'ats enough," Rocky reiterates jovially from around the corner with much more emphasis on the missing "H", cutting the water off.
He lops over to his cousin, and Freckle glances at him, brow drawn self-consciously. Rocky grins, reassures him as he drops a hand into the bucket, ends up all the way down to his elbow, to retrieve the suds-soaked scrub brush, "It's cute," but Freckle can't decide whether he's sincere or condescending.
Maybe a little of both.
He means well.
When it comes to washing the car, Freckle makes a concerned effort to keep the soapy mess to a minimum. Rocky slings it all mercilessly against his designated side of old Lizzie and scrubs vigorously, bubbles and thick flaxen water dripping down his arms and from his chin. He gets soap in his eyes, once, cringes, and in a moment of stupid forgetfulness presses the back of his soapy wrist against them.
"Ah!" Rocky shouts, and drops the scrub brush.
His other wrist wipes futilely at the soap and it only burns further. Freckle cranes his neck, stands on his toes, and looks through the car windows at his distraught and blinded cousin. He stops the soapy circular patterns he's pressing into the sap with.
"What's wrong?"
Rocky, squinting and blinking, wrists hovering near his eyes, runs back to the side of the house, rattling something about, "Nob'dy! Nob'dy's blinded me," and laughing to himself because Odysseus is such a clever bastard. He turns the water back on and stands over the bucket to rinse out his eyes, dousing his face and arms.
Dropping the running end of the hose back into the bucket once his eyes are clear, Rocky presses the water from his face and shakes his head a little, exhaling a decided breath.
"No more of that, Freckle," he says, rubbing his eyes.
It still stings, and Freckle smiles sympathetically when he looks over, having continued washing his side of the vehicle during Rocky's diversion. The bucket starts to overflow. Not wanting to repeat the dire situation, Rocky leaves the water on when he goes to pick up the brush and resumes his fanatical scrubbing and slinging.
He works meticulously at the front tire on his side of the car, sitting on the damp and soapy ground and unmindful of the cold soaking through the thick fabric of his jeans.
"McMurray, you can get the top," he calls around to Freckle, knowing his smaller, nimble cousin is more likely to get the car roof cleaned without the falling and the breaking of something that Rocky would likely endure in the attempt, "I'll get the, uh, tires."
Freckle hesitates, crouched, his fingers stuck in between the spokes of his own front tire.
"Alright," he says, moving to dunk the rag in the bucket at the back of the car again, and ringing it out a few times. He opens the driver side door and climbs up, one foot resting on the back of the front seat, the other on the car window. His arms are still relatively short; he leans in from his toes and stretches, but still can't quite touch the middle.
The sap is thickest on the top, so Freckle scrubs harder, his palm pressing the coarse rag against the muggy roof of the car. Early on he realizes that he's just too short-limbed. Even when he goes around to the other side, there is still going to be a margin in the middle that's sappy and unwashed.
Frowning, Freckle presses harder, reaches farther, his toes inching up the window behind him until his middle is resting against the slick roof of the car. Consumed with scrubbing and reaching, focusing a little too intently, Freckle pushes his foot against the top of the window and accidentally propels himself forward, across the roof.
It's a brief moment of panic.
His hands skid out from under him, a small noise escapes his lips, but he doesn't slide far.
Just enough for his hands to reach over the edge of the other side of the car, and fast enough that the rag is slung forward, out of his hand. It lands with a soapy whap below, and Freckle pants a little, sprawled across the roof and collecting his bearings. He hardly has the time to, when Rocky pulls himself up against the side of the car to frown at him, wearing the washrag for a hat.
Soap is in his eyes again, but he stares through the stinging brown foam.
He looks unusually serious.
Before Freckle has the chance to mumble a quiet, "I'm sorry," or backpedal to climb down, Rocky takes in the half-washed roof, the skid lines in the soap, his small, pitifully apologetic cousin.
"Think y'missed a spot, Freckle," he says, and then the hose.
Rocky shoots the water directly into Freckle's face, his thumb pressed against the open end so it stings when it hits Freckle full on and gets in his eyes and ears, up his nose. Freckle coughs and sputters, swings out of instinct and hits Rocky between the eyes. Rocky shouts and drops the hose, and loses his grip on the car.
When he falls, backwards, into the bucket that he'd moved closer for his own leisure purposes, he grabs Freckle by the overalls and hauls him down right along with him. Rocky breaks Freckle's fall; the bucket breaks Rocky's.
The water hose flops to the ground, calmly expelling water, and the boys land in a heap in the newly accumulated mud. Freckle gets up first, rubs his arm because he landed funny and wipes his nose, sneezing water. Rocky groans and slowly rolls upright, his hands tentatively rubbing his backside.
"Hurt the ol' derrière on the way down, there, Freckle," he laughs, strained at the same time as he gets up, his tail twitching painfully between his feet.
He kicks the dented, empty, assailant of a bucket aside and it hits off the ground with one meager bounce that sends remaining suds into a spiral before resting in the yard. Cold is he next assailant, and it hits him in the back, sharp and chilling it's way through his shirt and up his spine as he flinches and lurches around, hands flying up.
"Ah, no stop!" he shouts to the wielder, and dives around the car for safely.
Freckle follows him, pulling the hose taut. Rocky surprises him with the rag when Freckle rounds the corner, smacks him in the face with it, and they grapple for control of the water hose, the weapon of choice, trodding on the soap bottle in the process. The cap pops off, and soap mingles chaotically with mud and grass and angry feet.
The bucket sits alone across the yard.
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Nina is not impressed.
In hindsight, the unspoken not of "wash each other" was really meant to be interpreted as, "muddy up everything, including yourselves".
But they knew that.
It certainly didn't stop them.
When Nina returns to the yard, drawn by the commotion, but far too late be of any use, the fight (if you could call it that) is already over and neither of them look sorry. Until they spot Nina, on the porch. The only reason they look over in the first place is because her ire is palpable; it slaps the back of Rocky's head first, and he stiffens.
The grin falling from his face, he continues biting his lip as he turns, ears back, to look at Aunt Nina. Freckle cowers behind him, small fingers clutching the middle of the water hose. The end of it is somewhere nearby, trickling merrily into the yard and making more mud than can possibly cover two boys and an old car (exterior and half the interior, because the door was haplessly left open).
Soaked to the bone, mud and soap alike matted into their faces and arms and clothes and tails, missing shoes and socks, the two simply stare back at Nina, their formidable mother and aunt, with wide blue and amber eyes. She knows immediately who's to blame.
The instigator. Roark.
But Calvin is holding the hose and looks just a guilty as his cousin, if not more so. Roark, all eyebrows, simply stares, his fingertips pressed together, but Calvin's brow knots and he looks timorously away (not at Rocky; maybe at the discarded bucket), then back again. That alone is a distinct give-away.
He looks at Roark after following.
At anything else when he's kept pace.
She snaps out both their names in one well-practiced breath, "Calvin Allen McMurray!" first, and Rocky breaks a small grin and manages to squeeze in a quiet, "You wonder why I call you Freckle," before his own full name is thrown out for the neighborhood to hear. He stops smiling, and bends his knees, suddenly wishing to be the smaller of the two.
Freckle is dismayed because Rocky's thin frame is hardly built for hiding things, but he doesn't he best, peering over his cousin's shoulder as Nina comes across the ruined yard to get them. They know better than to run, but the compulsion is there nonetheless.
Freckle's knees shake.
Rocky grins.
"Aunt Nina," he begins obliquely, but there's not an excuse on his tongue and he isn't given the opportunity to cultivate one.
Nina grabs him by the ear, and Freckle by his and drags them from the car to the deserted street. When she releases her tight-fingered grin on their ears in exchange for the hose, they both cringe. It doesn't look good. That hose will hurt. Freckle almost cries, squeezes his eyes shut and covers them with his hands, and gasps around the lump forming in his throat, "I'm sorry, Momma, I'm sorry, I'm -"
He get's it first, because, uncharacteristically, his speaks first:
A mouthful of water.
He chokes for a second, and Rocky blinks at him, then at Nina. He can't help but admire than her aim is impeccable. She gives her son time to recover, asks if he swallowed enough, and when he confirms with a quiet, "Yes, ma'am," she tells him, "Good," and to keep his trap shut, and hoses the both of them off. Mud and soap and grass and loosened fur, and water, of course, roil to the pavement.
The reason for putting them on the street is clear enough; they've already ruined her yard. And she tells them as much while she hoses them off, snapping that they turn around at intervals, and resumes her tirade. Yard ruined, clothes stained and ruined, car filthy again and worse! Pneumonia was her next topic, because of the chilling breeze that had touched the afternoon air in her absence.
"Catch y'deaths out here," she says angrily, and somehow the water stings even more in the wake of that sentence when it bursts against Rocky's side. After she's finished, she holds the water hose loosely, and points to the forgotten bucket. Rocky runs to fetch it, and they're made to wash the car again.
"Inside and out," Nina tells them firmly, hands on her hips.
"Yes, ma'am," they chime, and rush to do so.
"And don't y'be ruinin' my yard anymore," she warns, already advancing to the front porch again.
"Yes, ma'am."
Spared a beating (and a beating at the hands of Nina McMurray is certainly one you'd like to be spared from), Rocky and Freckle are so relieved that they don't even mind the minor cold they contract the following week. Freckle gets sicks first, it starts with a runny nose and a sore throat, and he keeps it the longest; Rocky is as undeterred by it as he is by anything else.
He makes a point of getting up every day despite the hour, stating that he feels fine and asking to go outside, even if he unintentionally asks the large vase in the parlor instead of Aunt Nina, who ushers him back to his bed with a meaningful, "Didn't I tell ya t'stop gettin' out o' bed with that fever?" or, "Y'better not've woke Calvin with all your clamorin' around, Roark."
There was always soup at the ready when they felt better.
And despite all the "Well, I told y'didn't I?"s they had to endure, it was quite worth it.
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(A/n) :I Think I forgot to mention sandwiches (damn!). Brought on by some mid-rain, autumn car washing fun the other day! I, however, don't feel a cold coming on. x) Please review!