by Jim Shepard
We were in a pine forest. Everything had that baked pine needle smell. My father had just driven away. A squirrel sat up across from me, woozy with the sun. He worked over a nut and then spit it at me. Way off behind him, two kids were sitting on another kid's chest in a clearing. Down the hill to my right, someone was ringing a bell.
I headed down the path toward the noise. I think I was affecting a saunter. I sauntered down to the lean-to where a few kids and some counselors were hanging out. A sign on top said counselors lean-to. The counselors were two blond guys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, the kind of guys who seem like nice boys to moms. A fat kid who'd already taken off his shirt was bugging them about something. The fat kid had my glasses. Which was too bad for the fat kid. They were even fixed with electrical tape on the same side that mine were. There was a whine in his voice that I could hear from up where I was, and he kept at it. You fucking idiot, I thought the whole time I was walking down to them. I was talking about me. I was always wanting myself to die whenever I found myself in a stupid situation. When I got to the front of the lean-to, I nodded at whoever caught my eye. Nobody nodded back.
“I told you I don't know,” one of the blond guys said, watching me fold my arms and stand there. He seemed to be talking to the fat kid. He had both hands on the two-by-four that was the top edge of the lean-to and he was swinging his body a little, keeping his feet in place. He looked dangerously bored. The fat kid said something else. The blond guy ignored him. The fat kid said something after that. The blond guy swung with everything he had and brought his feet up together and caught the fat kid under the chin and up along his face.
The fat kid left the ground a foot and a half and landed on his back. The sound was like when I whacked the sheet on our line with my wiffle bat. We all just stared like now we knew what we were in for, for the next however many weeks. I felt this rush, like I was the blond guy and the fat kid all at once. One of the other kids bent over and found where the glasses had landed.
“How are you?” the guy who'd kicked the fat kid asked me.
“I'm okay,” I told him. I didn't know what else to say.
“C'mon. Talk to me. Tell me. What's wrong?” my mother said when she got me alone the day before I left. I told her I didn't want to go to camp and she said, besides the camp. I told her I guessed I felt bad about my brother and she said, besides your brother.
She was asking because she saw what I was like during the day and after school and she wanted to help. She was worried that it would get even worse now that school was over. She said that everyone was worried that everything was taking too much of a toll.
My grades had gone downhill. My friends had stopped coming around. Even the Venus flytrap in my room had died.
She'd also found my list of the World's Deadliest Poisons. I was always ranking them and changing the rankings. I had a notebook with that title written inside on the first page that I kept in my desk. I looked in the encyclopedia and in the library and also under our sink. If it had a skull and crossbones on it, I checked it out.
The blond guys turned out to be Chris and Caleb. Chris was the meaner one and he looked like a guy on TV. Once we all got assembled he started a speech and Caleb finished it. It was a welcome to the camp speech. The fat kid held a dirty hand towel up to his nose while he listened. The bleeding had stopped but his lip and nose were swollen and the kids who'd gotten there late were all clearly wondering about it. He sniffled and kept shooting them looks even though he kept his head down. Chris had found him the towel and told him to suck it up when he handed it over. When he went looking for it, Caleb had helped the fat kid to his feet and had straightened out his glasses and stood next to him with his hands on his thighs, telling him it was all right while the kid got ahold of himself.
There were more counselors than just them, they told us, but the campers were divided into Beaver, Moose, and Fox troops, and they were in charge of Beaver. We were in Beaver.
“You see that?” my new tentmate asked when we were headed up to our tents. It was a stupid question because we'd both been standing there when it happened. The fat kid had landed more or less between us.
I shook my head, a little dazed, as in: Man: the things I've seen.
“They can't get away with that shit,” my new tentmate said. He sounded like he was worried that they could. He was wearing what looked like his little brother's plain white T-shirt and it was soaked through. I thought I was scrawny but he was so bad you could pass a Dixie cup through his armpit when his hands were at his sides.
Our other new tentmate told us he was horny, first thing. The three of us had our butts on the beds and feet on the floor and were leaning back on our hands. It was still really hot but they'd told us to go to our tents so that's what we'd done. We had some quiet time until the dinner horn, which was apparently going to be a real guy blowing a horn. Somebody had eaten some Hostess somethings and had left the wrappers all over the other bed. Maybe the fourth kid wasn't coming.
The scrawny kid said he was Joyce from upstate. He said “upstate” like that filled in all the gaps, as far as information about him went.
“Joyce?” the other kid said. “Hey, there. I'm Wanda.”
“You are not,” Joyce said. “What's your name?”
“Lulu Belle,” the other kid said.
Joyce turned to me. “What's your name?” he asked.
I told him.
“Nice to meet you,” Joyce said.
“What happened to the fat kid?” the other kid said.
“Oh, man,” Joyce said. “You won't believe it.” He told the story. He said, “We were both standing right there.”
“That is so fucked up,” the other kid said, like he'd just come downstairs on Christmas morning.
“So what is your name?” Joyce asked once we were back from dinner. Dinner had sucked. A little piece of metal or something had been in my Salisbury steak, and a kid in line behind me when we were bussing our trays had made fun of my shorts.
“BJ,” the other kid said. Now we had more time to piss away before the big Opening Night Campfire.
“What's that short for?” Joyce asked.
“BJ,” BJ said.
All through the first part of the campfire my gum was still bleeding from the thing in my food. I could taste it. I kept doing this thing with my face to make it feel better. “What're you, retarded?” BJ asked. I guessed he could see it even though it was getting pretty dark.
I was pressing my hands together really hard. I couldn't keep my feet still. It was interesting, though: being here wasn't any worse than being home, or being anywhere.
There was a big pyramid of wood in front of us. It was like six feet tall. A wire ran from the middle of it to a stepladder set up behind us. Every kid sitting on the grass was thinking bonfire and hoping it would maybe get out of control and the state would burn down.
We all had our flashlights with us for the trip back to the tents, though at this point they were supposed to be turned off. Chris pulled three kids from the audience and sat them in front and told them to turn their flashlights on him when he got up onstage. The stage was a plywood sheet on four metal milk crates. One of the kids was still shaking when Chris climbed up there. You could see the light beam jittering. He'd probably been thinking they were going to start things off by kicking three kids in the face.
Instead Chris said hi to us all and then said “I can't hear you” four times at what we said back. Finally even I screamed hi. He introduced the Camp Director, who had a beer in his hand. The Camp Director handed him the beer when he climbed up onto the stage. The plywood almost tipped and the Camp Director held his hands out on both sides of him and said, “Whoa, Old Paint.” He seemed to think that that should get a laugh.
He told us that Pautapaug was an old Nipmuc Indian name that meant “swampy land.” He told us that the camp got started by the Bridgeport Rotary Club in 1919. He said that we were 175 acres from the nearest town. He gave us the schedule: Reveill
e; Bunk Attack, for kids who slept through Reveille; the Call for Waiters; Breakfast; Sign-Up Events; the Call for Waiters; Lunch; Siesta; Sign-Up Events; Call for Waiters; Dinner; Water Polo or Capture the Flag; Campfire and Taps. He gave it to us again. Then he taught us the camp song.
“Pautapaug, carefree land, Pautapaug, helping hand,” the kid next to me sang.
The Camp Director got down and Chris got back up there. The Camp Director took his beer back. The other counselors were all doing something behind us.
“Fire god of Pautapaug, send down your fire!” Chris screamed.
A coffee can filled with some kind of fire slid down the wire to the pyramid. It bounced when it hit the wood and then sat against it for a minute before the whole thing went up. It must have been totally soaked with gas or something. That was a big hit with the campers.
The kids in the front row had to move back. The toe of one kid's sneaker started to melt.
There was more singing. Then the counselors all went somewhere. We sat there in the dark, looking at the fire.
Was I really going to make it to eighth grade? Did I even want to make it to eighth grade? Nothing about the year coming up seemed like anything I wanted to go through.
“So is that it?” BJ said, before the fire was even out.
The counselors came back. They shoved each other around and got each other in headlocks. Campers were dismissed by troops, Beaver first. One kid tripped when we got up to leave and burned his hand. On the way back to the tents everybody had sword fights with the flashlight beams until the counselors told us to cut it out.
Nobody said anything in the tent. I climbed under the covers, already too hot. Mosquitoes buzzed in one ear and then went over to the other one.
They called lights out. We switched off our flashlights. “So, do you beat off?” BJ asked, as soon as they went out.
For some reason I got all teary and rolled my face into the pillow. It already smelled like the bottom of a laundry bag.
“How old are you?” he asked. A light went by outside and I could see his silhouette.
“Who you talkin' to?” Joyce finally asked back.
“You,” BJ said. “Anyone.”
“I'm eleven,” Joyce said.
“Yeah, well I'm twelve,” BJ said.
“Huh,” Joyce said. In the dark, one of them rolled over and then kicked hard at his sheets.
“What about you?” BJ asked.
“I'm twelve too,” I said.
“You are not,” BJ scoffed.
“I don't have time for this,” I said.
“He is not,” he said to Joyce.
“He says he is,” Joyce said back.
“Fuckin' liar,” BJ said, and rattled something in a box. I could hear him eating.
I was crying, which was the very last thing I wanted to be doing, and trying not to make any noise at all. I was pushing on my eyeballs with my fingertips and I was worried I was going to drive them through my skull. They hurt enough that I stopped. My father had said, “You don't want to go to camp? You don't want to do any thing. Times're tough all over. Go up there and force yourself to have a good time. We'll stay down here and deal with your brother.” When I tried to bring it up again later on, he told me, “Believe me, you got the better deal.”
“I got a boner like an iron bar,” BJ said. He made a noise on his bed like he was hauling it around.
This is only the first night, I kept thinking. And that only made me cry harder, until I stopped.
“What was that?” Joyce asked, and he and BJ stopped moving to listen. But then there was nothing else to hear.
At breakfast everybody seemed to know everybody but me. “I got you,” BJ called to a kid at another table. “I got you later on. You're mine.”
“You know him from back home?” I asked.
“I met him when you did,” BJ said. He sawed his fork into some waffles.
I looked at the kid. “When did I meet him?” I asked. Nobody answered.
The fat kid and I collided on the way out of the dining hall. He spilled something but I didn't see what. BJ high-fived me on the way down the front steps.
“It's not a crime to help somebody,” my mother told me once. She was talking about my little brother.
My little brother was going crazy. That was the big worry. I was wound pretty tight and had some issues, which was how my father put it, but my little brother worried everybody. I couldn't tell who was more scared about it, my mother or father. They started going over it one night after school got out for the summer, when they thought we were asleep, and after I listened for a while I sat up in bed and realized he was standing there in the hall in the dark.
“C'mon in here,” I told him. He came in and sat on the covers. He was only nine and it felt like he'd been crying since Easter. He had bed head and thick hair and it stuck up like a wing. Even in the dark he seemed sad.
“Waynik, Keough, what's his name, they're all the same,” my father said. He was rinsing something at the sink.
“They're trying everything they can think of,” my mother told him. “Waynik says to give it some time.”
“Waynik sees him one hour a week,” my father told her. “Friday afternoon to boot. He's got his clubs by the door. He's ready to hit the first tee.”
“You wanna try someone else, we'll try someone else,” my mother said.
“We tried someone else,” he said. “That's how we got here.”
My brother had been going along okay until he hit fourth grade. Then it was like everything was fine until it was too hard for him. He'd be shooting baskets and miss three in a row and just go off, tearing down branches and throwing the ball as hard as he could into the street. He broke a new tree my dad planted in half. He pulled his jaw down so hard with his hand he had to go to the emergency room. I caught him hitting himself one night because I heard the wet sound of the blood from his mouth. We were supposed to do our homework at the same time, and I'd hear him stop halfway through and tear it up and then move his arms so spastically that he'd knock over whatever else was on his desk.
That night after they went over things my mother and father were quiet, down in the kitchen. It was pretty bad to think about them down there just looking at each other.
“They think I'm mental,” my brother finally said.
“They're worried about you,” I told him.
“You think I'm mental?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“So why do I do mental things?” he wanted to know.
“I do mental things,” I reminded him.
“Not like me,” he said.
And I could have told him that I did. I could have told him how weird I was. I could've given him a hundred examples. Instead I just sat there with him.
“You're a good brother,” he told me before he went back to his room.
“I wish,” I told him.
“Are you guys still up?” my father called from downstairs.
Because I was up all night, I got to the sign-up board late and all the good things were taken. All that was left was Trail Policing and the Craft Hut.
“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the kid whose shoulder I was looking over. He didn't answer. He took the pencil hanging on the string and wrote his name under Craft Hut and left.
“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the fat kid. He was sitting in the dirt of the truck turnaround, trying to get something out of the bottom of his foot. The area behind the main dining hall was messed up from all the traffic.
“Picking up garbage,” he said.
I wrote my name under Craft Hut. “You know where the Craft Hut is?” I asked him.
“You any good at getting splinters out?” he asked back.
It turned out that the fat kid was there for the entire summer. BJ told us at lunch. It was the talk of the camp. We were there for two weeks, most of us, one kid for three. But this kid was there for the whole summer. His parents were in Europe or Paris or something and had dumped h
im there. He'd told his tentmates. He'd even had to get there a day early and sleep on the Camp Director's couch.
His parents were probably like, Oh, I'm sure he'll like it okay. Once he makes some friends …
It ended up that he was in the Craft Hut too. There was one other kid in there who wore an eye patch under his glasses. The kid who'd signed up in front of me wasn't even there. Maybe he was dead.
“You're in my light,” the kid with the eye patch said when I sat down.
“Aye-aye,” I told him, but I don't think he got it.
He was making an ashtray with clay. The fat kid spent the time scraping at the bottom of his foot with his fingernail. I made one of those lanyards for a keychain.
The other subject at lunch was how much fun everybody else had had. Swimming off the float, doing cannonballs, playing Killer Handbreaker Tetherball.
“I made a lanyard,” I told them. People talked about the signups for the Mile Swim. Joyce put his hands on the outside of his arms, like he was already cold. BJ said that he heard that the counselors did a Bunk Attack with the fat kid even though he'd been trying to get up in time. Joyce said he'd heard the same thing. It turned out that Bunk Attack was when they came into your tent and pitched you off the bed so that you fell between the edge of the platform and the canvas wall. “It's so gross in there, too,” someone said.
My brother's name was Georgie and one of the things he really hated was when I called him Puddin' n' Pie. We'd be riding in the backseat and out of nowhere I'd say it so only he could hear it and he'd go Stop it! and scare the shit out of my father and then get yelled at. I hated it as much as he did but I couldn't stop. Don't do it, I'd say to myself when it came to pushing him. And then I'd do it. It was like when I did stuff like that at least I had the satisfaction of seeing myself like I really was. He always got mad but he never told them what I was doing.