The Night of the Moonbow

by Thomas Tryon

  “No. Why?”

  “You’re messin’ around on Big Chief’s bed, that’s why.” The counselor’s cot stood in the center of the back wall, between the sets of double-decker bunks (four to a side), and was made up in the military style, with a footlocker at the foot (monogrammed “R.A.H.” - “rah-rah Reece!” -for “Reece Adam Hartsig”).

  Phil shagged Peewee off the cot and went about neatening the blankets and pillow.

  Meanwhile, Peewee had turned his attention to the frog dangling by its hind legs from the second boy’s fist.

  “Boy, that’s a whopper. Where’d you get it?”

  “I caught it,” said Wally Pfeiffer, his tongue bright pink from the Necco wafer he was sucking. “I stunned him with a rock.”

  Phil gave Wally an exasperated look. “So what? Who waded in and grabbed him? Don’t think you’re so hot. And listen, kiddo,” he added, “didn’t I tell you that candy’ll make you break out? You know how Big Chief feels about pimples.”

  Wally gave his pal a grim, tooth-clenched look and spat out his half-melted wafer. Phil Dodge, a square-headed boy with a hard-packed body, a spiky pineapple haircut, and eyes that never told you anything, was cabin monitor and Reece’s second-in-command, enforcing the counselor’s dictums as he could (which meant mostly in matters concerning the unassertive Wally) and even aping his mannerisms. “All right, camper, let’s hop to it,” Phil would say, and “Listen, kiddo, I don’t want to have to tell you again” - and when Reece said “Listen, kiddo,” Phil really did “hop to it.”

  Now he couldn’t mask a certain satisfaction in having bent Wally to his will, which made Wally burn silently. Wally could never hope to measure up to Phil; he was a skinny, dour-looking lad with limp, flaxen hair and the pale, puffy-lidded eyes that resulted from an overactive thyroid - a condition that probably accounted for his perpetually drowsy expression and morose disposition.

  “We both caught him,” Phil asserted, willing now to be generous. He took the frog from Wally and gave the creature a shake. It emitted a croak of protest.

  “Boy, he sure is fat,” Peewee said admiringly. “Can I have him?”

  “What for?”

  “I bet Oats’d let me keep him in the lodge,” Peewee said. Oats Gurley was the camp nature director. “In a box. I could have him for a pet. Or we could blow him up.” “What’re you talking about, runt?” Phil demanded. “You know, like a balloon,” Peewee said, refusing to be cowed by Phil’s contemptuous glare. “I seen Reece do it once. He took a soda straw and shoved it up this frog’s ass and blew it up. It floated in the water but it couldn’t swim.”

  “Oh, come on, Peewee, that’s disgusting!” Dump exclaimed.

  “I didn’t do it! Reece did!” Peewee protested.

  A frog-balloon was a good gag, after all. Didn’t campers chloroform frogs for dissection in nature study? Not that Reece Hartsig would bother with anything so pedestrian as that. In fact, he would never do anything ordinary, even when it came to frogs. And when you got right down to it, there wasn’t anything much Reece couldn’t do and do with style. Who else did the boys know whose sleek, tanned features had turned up in the Sunday rotogravure, grinning among a group of important-looking individuals? Who else had surfed at Waikiki Beach, and sailed to Europe with his parents to see the Berlin Olympics? Who else had climbed Mount Monadnock and paddled-and-portaged the Quinnebaug clear down to New London; who else wore a tux and went to country-club dances, and carried a silver flask on his hip? Who else had been courting the matchless Nancy Rider, subdeb daughter of the lieutenant-governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; had even, it was rumored, danced with Dixie Dunbar at the Rainbow Room in Radio City? Who else had left a trail of broken hearts (which was why the Jeremians sometimes liked to call him “Heartless”) up and down the whole of the Eastern Seaboard? Who else, after this, his last Moonbow summer, was going off to be a flier in the Army Air Corps, and get a pair of silver wings? At Friend-Indeed, Reece was the “Big-Chief,” former ace camper - a bunkee in Jeremiah, as his father had been before him - and current top-rated counselor, and it was a rare Moonbow boy who didn’t look forward to the day when, like his hero, he too would have been made one of Pa’s “Glad Men from Happy Boys” (Pa had dreamed up the camp motto and had decreed that it be painted on the sign at the highway turnoff), who could take up smoking a pipe in public - the same kind of briar Reece’s father had given him, in a smart gold-stamped leather case with a green satin interior, the kind you saw in an Esquire ad.

  Phil dumped the frog into the fire bucket and partially covered it with a box until Reece could decide its fate. No sooner had he and Wally hit their bunks than the missing Jeremian came in over the back sill.

  “Tiger!” Peewee crowed happily.

  “Hi, sprout, what are you doing here? It’s powwow time.”

  “I’m powwowing with your guys.”

  “Jay say it was all right?” Jay St John was the counselor of Habakkuk, Peewee’s cabin.

  “Yes-s.”

  “I bet he didn’t,” Phil put in.

  “Nerts to you,” Peewee said with a scowl. He tried chinning himself on Tiger’s bunk rail, then gave it up.

  “Where’s Reece?” Tiger asked, looking around.

  “He’s havin’ his picture taken with his dad,” Eddie reported.

  “How come?”

  Phil explained: On Big Rolfe’s order, Reece had donned his military school uniform and gone to have a newspaper picture taken at the Blue Ribbon Rathskeller over on the highway.

  “It’s for the Bund,” the Bomber added.

  Tiger knew about the weekly meetings of the German-American Bund, a popular local group to which Reece’s father paid allegiance. “Mail come?” he asked, looking around.

  Phil produced the afternoon’s allotment: only two letters for Cabin 7, one for Reece, another for Wally. When Tiger tossed Reece’s letter onto his pillow, Peewee snatched it up and proceeded to inspect it closely.

  “Y’know something, you guys? This thing really stinks!” he said, greedily sniffing the blue envelope, noting the return address penned in a light, feminine script with circles for the dots, over the i’s, and a puckered lipstick print on the flap. “It’s from Nancy Rider,” he added, glancing at the tinted snapshot of a shapely girl in the bathing suit tucked into the mirror frame over Reece’s cot.

  “Listen, small fry, you better not go screwing around with that letter,” Tiger advised as Peewee sprang into a bunk; “Reece won’t like it.”

  “Aw, Heartless don’t care,” Peewee protested, giving the letter another sniff and leaving a greasy thumb mark on the envelope as he returned it to Reece’s pillow.

  Tiger wasn’t so sure of that; nor was anyone else. While the fact that, in the absence of Nancy Rider, their counselor was this summer newly smitten with Peewee’s sister, Honey, gave the kid points, it didn’t necessarily follow that he could get away with messing around in Heartless’s private mail.

  “Gosh, look at that.” This from Eddie, who spoke in a confidential tone, his eye fixed on the line-path. The others looked too.

  “Who d’you suppose it is?” Wally wondered, staring at the odd sight that had suddenly presented itself: twenty feet away someone was standing on the path - a strange-looking guy, with ears that stuck out and a comical hat on his head. A skinny, gawky type, who’d appeared out of nowhere. They couldn’t see his face because he was positioned with his back to the cabin.

  “What’s he doin’ here, anyways?” said the Bomber.

  “Betcha it’s your new boy,” Peewee said, revealing hitherto unrealized psychic powers.

  “Cripes, you gotta be kidding,” the Bomber said in dismay.

  “He’s not supposed to be here till tomorrow,” Phil added.

  “Maybe he came early,” Tiger suggested. He jumped down from his bunk and signaled to Phil, and together they stepped out onto the porch. “Phil, you’re monitor. Go and bring him in.”

  “Are you kiddin’? Not me. Y
ou really think it’s the new guy?”

  Though he couldn’t be absolutely sure, something told Tiger that the boy on the path was indeed Leo Joaquim. If ever there was an orphan, this spud filled the bill.

  “Holy maloley, take a gander at the luggage, will ya?” the Bomber muttered from inside the cabin.

  The boy’s “luggage” was a worn cardboard suitcase, its clasps reinforced by a length of frayed rope. Beside it rested a blanket roll and a stack of small wooden boxes, both tied with twine, and a limp-looking pillow, and leaning against these was a black violin case, battered and scarred.

  “Knock it off, Bomber,” Tiger said. “The rest of you stay here. And don’t act like a bunch of tools.”

  Leaving Phil on the porch, Tiger went down the steps and made his way along the path. The newcomer stood amid his sorry paraphernalia, looking lost and tired.

  “Hi,” Tiger said in a friendly voice. “ Who’re you looking for?”

  “Cabin 7. Jeremiah.”

  “You found it. You must be Leo Joakum.”

  “Joaquim,” the boy said, pronouncing it Wack-eem. “And you must be Tiger Abernathy.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Mr Ives described you.” His voice had a rusty quality, a weary inflection.

  “How come you got here today?”

  “No bus Sunday.”

  Tiger measured himself against the new boy: Leo was a good six inches taller, taller than any of the Jeremians. And he was thin - too thin, Tiger judged - sort of scarecrow-ish, all arms and legs, joints and angles. His clothes were a haphazard job: shorts of some heavy, rough material that looked as if it must itch, and far too tight. Black buttons were sewn with white thread onto the waist, and to these were attached suspenders of scalloped elastic that hung loosely over his narrow shoulders. Instead of sneakers he had on a pair of brown leather shoes, badly scuffed and worn, with thick, rigid soles, and maroon socks that drooped around his ankles. And then there was the hat -an old felt “crown,” its narrow brim cut in a sawtooth and embellished with an array of brightly colored soda bottle caps and political buttons. All in all Leo Joaquim was ' as un-likely looking a specimen as could be imagined at

  Friend-Indeed. And what, Tiger wondered, would Reece say when he saw the new Jeremian? Yet - he was here. Tiger remembered Ma’s admonition.

  “How old are you?” He was making conversation.

  “I was fourteen last February. And you?”

  “Fourteen too. Last month.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Gotta pee?” Tiger asked, noticing that the boy was practically hopping from one foot to the other. “Help yourself. Take any bush.”

  “It was a long bus ride,” Leo explained sheepishly as he stepped behind a shrub and relieved himself.

  He was, Tiger thought as he waited on the path, decidedly weird. Still, there was something appealing in his shy, awkward manner, in the dusty, raspy voice. “Well,” he said as Leo rejoined him, “I guess we don’t want to stand around here all day, do we? Let me help you with something.” He took the cardboard suitcase. It felt heavy. “What you got in here, anyway?” he asked as they moved toward the cabin.

  “The family jewels,” Leo replied.

  Tiger laughed, and between them they got the stuff to the porch where Phil and, now, the others were waiting. There was a good deal of shuffling around while everyone said Hiya and shook hands and scratched elbows and the Bomber dropped the torch he was holding and picked it up again, and they all tried to act natural and naturally failed. Tiger performed the solemn introduction, getting the new boy’s name right, and one by one each of the Jeremians offered his hand and received in return an awkward handjerk.

  Phil looked the newcomer up and down. “My name’s Dodge,” he announced, a bit over hearty.

  “Mine’s Jackson,” the Bomber offered, and then the rest told their names, and Dump’s full title of Donald Dixon “Dump” Dillworth, Jr, was proclaimed amid much laughter and hoots of derision.

  “And my name’s Peewee Oliphant,” crowed Peewee, whipping off his ten-gallon hat and sticking his mug out.

  “And where is your trunk, Mr Pee Wee Elephant?” came the new boy’s quick reply.

  This made them all laugh and the new boy laughed with them, then blinked his eyes once or twice as though they hurt, and said in his dry, sandpapery voice, “Glad to know you all.” His face was just a face, nothing extraordinary there except perhaps for the large, dark eyes - they peered out with a kind of faraway expression that went past you, or even through you.

  The formalities seen to, the group filtered into the cabin, the Jeremians sending out silent signals to each other saying, What the heck? and Beats me. As yet, Tiger had given no indication of how far they ought to extend their hospitality, and this was odd, because Tiger usually provided them with guidelines regarding any new or unexpected situation. He now stood by the infamous yellow-stained bunk as if to say This is yours.

  “Who slept here?” Leo asked. He looked from the bunk to Tiger.

  “Belonged to a fellow named Wagner,” Tiger said.

  “You’re his replacement,” the Bomber added.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went home with his tail between his legs,” Phil said.

  “I see he left his yellow badge of cowardice.”

  Tiger shot the new boy a look. That was a good one, especially for a guy from Pitt Institute.

  Leo was regarding the cot in the middle of the room, a scant yard away. “Who sleeps there?” he asked.

  “Reece.”

  “Reece?”

  “He’s our counselor.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Havin’ his picture took,” the Bomber explained.

  “For the newspaper,” Wally chimed in.

  “The Sunday paper,” Monkey added with emphasis. Watching Leo trying to unknot the twine around his blanket roll, Tiger slid his knife from its sheath and handed it over. When the twine was cut, releasing the bedroll, Leo returned the knife.

  As he carefully moved his violin case aside and started to undo the dented clasps of his suitcase, the others by ones and twos crept into their bunks, watching, eyes filled with curiosity. The suitcase was unstrapped and the lid folded back on its wobbly hinges; it produced nothing remarkable, however, among its contents. Then Leo began to undo the twine holding together the stack of small wooden boxes.

  “Whatcha gonna do with those?” the Bomber inquired, trying not to sound overly curious.

  “I’m going to collect things in them.”

  “What kinda things?”

  “Ohh . . . flora and fauna.”

  “Flora who?”

  “Floradora.”

  Ha ha. The Bomber made a goony face to the others. Someone snickered. Leo, still having trouble with the knot, asked Tiger for the loan of his knife again. After he had cut the twine and unwound it from the boxes, he sat holding them, still stacked, between his knees. And though every camper in the cabin was bursting to know their real purpose, the new boy did nothing further to relieve them of their curiosity.

  “What do you play in baseball?” the Bomber asked, hanging his head over the end of his bunk.

  “In b-a-ase-ba-all?” Leo drawled the word, as though its meaning eluded him. Then, “I don’t play anything.”

  The Bomber sat up in surprise. “You don’t?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Tiger’s look went to Dump, in the opposite quarter of the cabin. “Well, there goes the ball game,” it said; Stanley Wagner’s bunk must be jinxed.

  Just then the bell rang for dinner, breaking the tension, and all along the line-path campers exploded from their cabins and streamed across the playing field, heading for the dining hall in the upper camp. Not inclined to hurry, the new boy sat on Stanley’s bunk rail and emptied a pebble out of one of his shoes.

  “I see you brought your own pillow,” Tiger remarked, waiting with the Bomber at the door. “That was sma
rt.” “Was it? Good. I never go anywhere without Albert.” “Who’s Albert?” Peewee wanted to know.

  “My pillow.”

  Oh.

  When he had put his shoe back on and laced it up, Leo went to join Tiger and the Bomber. As the second bell for dinner sounded, the three broke into a run.

  “Hey Wacko, you forgot your hat!” cried Peewee, short legs churning as he tried gamely to catch up, in his hand the bottle-cap cap.

  Peewee didn’t realize it then, but he had bestowed a new nickname on Stanley Wagner’s replacement: Wacko Wackeem, who played the violin and kept a pillow named Albert, who wore a funny-looking hat - and who didn’t like baseball!

  All together, the Jeremians could never just walk down the road from the dining hall to the lower camp, but, as they did this evening, they would form loose, lollygagging knots, dragging dust, kicking fannies, elbowing ribs, clipping shoulders, tripping feet, now seeing which of them could throw a stone the farthest or hold his breath the longest or strike the deepest tone, now knitting together, now spreading to both sides of the road, now joining up again to make cracks about Willa-Sue’s busted brain, coming closer to delve into the mysteries of all womanhood, with the Bomber telling - the Bomber was forever telling - about how he’d seen a naked female in the window of the tenement next to his tenement and what that looked like, and always, always, Peewee Oliphant’s plaintive cry behind, “Hey, you guys, wait up!”

  Tonight, though, there was a difference: tonight they came down with Leo, the new boy in Cabin 7. There was no doubt but that he’d made a splash at dinner; campers couldn’t take their eyes off him, and he was the subject of numerous jokes. “Hey, get a load of Mortimer Snerd.” “Where’d the yokel come from?” Jokes about his Adam’s apple and his ears and his bottle-cap hat. Things had quieted down some during the meal, but no one could ignore the fact that it seemed Cabin 7 might have drawn another Stanley Wagner. But, Tiger thought, twisting the bill of his baseball cap, this boy really was nothing like Stanley. For one thing, he was smart - his odd-shaped skull looked like it housed a full quota of brains. They must eat a lot of fish at the Institute. Still, he was odd, with his pathetic suitcase and mysterious codfish boxes, his beat-up violin case and weird hat, and his pillow named Albert. There were other strange things about him, too. His gawky kind of walk, the jug ears that stuck out, the habit he had of ducking his head before he spoke, the surprising way he had of phrasing things, the kind of things he said. Like when the Bomber asked him the question everybody else had been wanting to ask but refrained from.