The motel swimming pool had been poured in the shape of a kidney, and the plumbing serving it hummed in a compact, cement-walled room which faced the rear parking lot. Inside was a two-hundred gallon filter tank with domed, welded ends. A high-pressure pipe sucked drain-water from the bottom of the pool into the filter room, where it went through a strainer assembly designed to snag large objects before they reached the pump. Inside the metal skin of the main filter tank was a series of baffles and chambers filled with a chalky-white powder which trapped the dirt which ended up in the pool.

The brass pressure gauge on the main tank was calibrated from zero to ninety pounds-per-square-inch, and a red crescent bordered the face of the gauge above the fifty PSI mark. The normal operating pressure of the system was twenty PSI. When the needle on the gauge reached forty PSI the tank had to be backwashed, a noisy operation which blew all the sludge out of the tank and into a three-feet-deep pit in the corner of the room.

The red fifty-horse pump was whining as Spencer unlocked the louvered door. He parked his bike in the corner, next to the white plastic bottles holding chlorine and soda ash and muriatic acid. He checked the tank pressure. Thirty-four PSI, a little bit high, he thought.

Closing the door to the filter room, Spencer pulled off his clothes, folding them in a stack on the seat of his bike. This year his body had begun the achingly slow climb into puberty, and he smiled as his fingers combed through the expanding thatch of light brown hair surrounding the base of his penis. He lifted his trunks from a hook on the wall and pulled them on.

From a shelf near the door he picked up a black plastic pail, an industrial-size cardboard jar of Ajax cleanser, and a big sponge. On his way to the central courtyard, he grabbed a couple of towels from the laundry room.

Spencer slipped quietly through the still surface of the water. Shaking a cone of cleanser onto the sponge, he began to scrub the jellied suntan lotion and dirt caking the green tiles lining the sides of the pool. The smell of the chlorinated water was pleasant, and it mixed with the odor of bacon; the greasy vapors were rolling out from the nearby exhaust fans of the restaurant kitchen. In thirty minutes he had completed a circuit of the pool, his sponge grinding away at the tile.

The sun had risen high enough so only the deep end of the pool remained in the shadow of the eastern wing of guest rooms. Two of the motel maids pushed their squeaking carts down the sidewalk toward the rooms of guests that had checked out early. One of the maids, Mabel, waved at him and he waved back.

Spencer dried himself and took his pail to one of the three skimmers that collected whatever happened to fall on the surface of the water. His motions had set up small convergences of waves, and when one of the waves rolled into a skimmer opening, the trapdoor inside rocked back and forth with a soft rubber thunk. He lifted the round steel plate covering the first skimmer cage, set it down quietly, and reached into the opening, drawing up a metal basket.