Chino comes up to dry off. "Lend me a dollar," the kid asks him again, and Chino does. The kid frowns. "Come on, man, lend me five."
Chino refuses and heads back for the diving board.
George Romero tries to chat with Ana Chicas at the Wheaton-Glenmont Pool.
(Photograph by Greg Miller)
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George Romero climbs out of the pool and ascends to the terrace. "Hey, man," says the kid who just touched Chino for a loan. "Lend me a dollar." George goes over and hands him a bill.
"M.S. was in here yesterday," George says. "The police came."
The boy is unimpressed. "I know who does all the killings in M.S.," he says. "I know who does all the drug-selling."
A few moments pass, and George goes back to the pool. The assistant manager returns. "I gave you five minutes," he says, with barely controlled anger. "It's been 10."
The guys say nothing.
"You gonna go?" Koutsos asks. "Or do you want me to call the police?"
The boys don't answer but mumble a few unintelligible phrases in a distinctly hostile register.
"Do you?" Koutsos asks. "You want me to call the police?"
"Yeah," one of the kids says. "Go ahead."
"Really?" Koutsos says.
"Yeah," the kid says.
One of the boys, who looks to be about 12, abandons the bluff. "Man, I'm leavin'," he says. And the boys troop toward the bathhouse, in a grumpy, shuffling gait.
George comes back up to the chilling spot to towel off. He looks down the back toward the road and sees a beige Maryland-National Capital Park Police cruiser nose out from behind an old brick clubhouse.
"Huh," he says. "What are the cops doing here?"
Moments later, George has vanished. Josh comes by. "Where's George?" he asks, his voice tinged with concern. His mother, who cleans houses part-time, and his father trust Josh and Chino to keep an eye on George and their other younger siblings at the pool, which isn't always easy. Josh glances down the hill and sees the police car. He looks around and finally spots George crossing the street. He's going over to a friend's house to pick up a video game. "It's all right," Josh says, watching his brother jog out of sight. "I just get nervous if I don't hear him say bye. I gotta look out for him, you know."
MONDAY AFTERNOON AFTER THE INDEPENDENCE DAY WEEKEND, the pool is crammed with a holiday crowd: A young father with a shaved head is trying to teach his two kids to swim, but they keep clinging to him -- one to his chest, one to his back -- a wriggling vest of children; a middle-aged couple dozes on the concrete peninsula in the center of the leisure pool, unperturbed by a nearby child howling, "Marco! Marco!" and lunging blindly after his friends. Nearby, a grandmother with her arm in a sling sits in the bleachers, watching her daughter and granddaughter swim. "I can't get in, and I'm mad," she says. It's partly cloudy, but every now and again, the harsh July sun breaks through a tatter in the cloud cover, glaring down on the pool with flashbulb intensity. A Latino family lunches at one of the shaded tables by the snack bar. The family talks in rapid Spanish, and the mother is searching for the word to describe something one of the kids is eating. The teenage daughter interrupts in unaccented English, "That's a corndog."
Past the leisure pool, beyond the shallow end of the main pool, opposite the Romeros' spot, sits another Wheaton-Glenmont regular, retired Lt. Col. Alfred Eisner. He is a short, sun-cured man of 72 whose poolgoing raiment invariably includes aviator-style glasses, an embroidered cap proclaiming his participation in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, knee-length shorts with "ARMY" stenciled on one leg, a gold chain, Hawaiian cowrie beads and a pair of dog tags that catch the reflected shimmer off the pool. On this crowded afternoon, Eisner sits with Frank Torchiano, 46, also an Army veteran, who sometimes comes to the pool on his days off -- one of the handful of acquaintances Eisner has made here.
Eisner is devoted to the pool. When he and his wife moved to Wheaton when they were in their late thirties, one of the selling points was that their new home was convenient to the pool. Eisner arrives each day with a large cargo of leisure equipment: towels, a small cooler, two radios, a newspaper and a police scanner, to which he listens to pass the time. He has so much stuff that he uses three chairs to accommodate it. He is somewhat put out because last week, "I had a little fanny pack I left sitting here, and some kid or somebody walked off with it," he says. The bag contained $4, a pair of prescription glasses, membership cards to the Military Officers Association of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Vietnam Veterans of America and a partial dental plate worth $800. "With the plate and the prescription glasses it's almost $1,000, but to the little stinkin' rat that took it, it's only worth $4, because he won't get any use out of the glasses, and he sure as hell won't get any use out of the teeth."
Wheaton, Eisner notes, is a very different place from quiet, village-like community he moved to 33 years ago. "When we first moved in here, you could leave the house and not lock the door," he says. "You don't lock your house or you don't lock the car, and they'll pilfer anything that isn't nailed down. But you get used to it. It doesn't affect me."
Torchiano is less pleased with the situation. He leans forward to look at a pair of muscle-bound, shaved-headed fellows sitting nearby who supposedly menaced a woman moments ago because she moved their chairs. "I thought I'd like the diversity of the place," Torchiano says. "But I don't. It's too diverse. It's rowdy. I'm watching these grown men fight with a lady because she moved their chair."
The park police arrive moments later. Eisner, who has been a full-time volunteer for the county police department during the seven years since his retirement, goes over to talk with the officers. "It's about that assault or fight or whatever over there," he says, easing back into his seat.
