“Oh, that. He crawled under. Down there where the fence goes over those flat boulders at the edge of the beach. There’s a place where the rock dips down a little, and he squeezed through. He wouldn’t come back when I called so I had to swim out around the end of the fence.” She sighed. “I’ve been stuck with him all afternoon. My mom is in the tennis tournament. I probably should have just let him get lost or whatever, except then I wouldn’t have gotten my twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars? Just for baby-sitting?”
“Sure. For a whole afternoon with Jacky? What it’s really worth is more like a thousand.”
Glancing up, James noticed Jacky stomping purposefully in their direction, golf ball clutched in sandy fist. “Well, now that you mention it…” he said. The girl was crouching slightly preparing to dodge, and he followed her example.
“Look out,” she said. “Here it comes.” The ball whistled between them, and running after it, she scooped it up and headed towards the fence. “I’ve got to go,” she called. “Come over here and help me get him through the fence.”
James followed, wondering how she planned to get Jacky through the hole, which looked as if it would be a tight squeeze, if he didn’t want to go. Would she try to stuff him through it, or—he grinned, contemplating a more satisfying possibility—perhaps, throw him over the top? But when he reached the fence the problem had already been partly solved. The girl had thrown the golf ball through the fence, and Jacky was already frantically burrowing after it. Now all that remained for James to do was to make sure he didn’t come back while his sister was swimming around the end of the barricade.
It wasn’t too difficult. When Jacky tried to crawl back under, James sat down and, instead of vulnerable hands, used a toothproof hiking boot to shove him back to the other side. And when the kid gave up on the hole and threatened to golf ball him through the fence, he simply spoke to him firmly. “You throw that thing over here, you little turkey, and you’ll never see it again.” He wasn’t sure how much of that Jacky understood, but it seemed to be enough. He was still clutching his Spaulding torpedo when his sister rose from the lake like a hot pink mermaid. Grabbing his wrist she towed him, stiff-legged and bellowing, toward the center of The Camp.
James was still peering through the fence, watching them go with very mixed feelings, when she stopped suddenly and looked back. “Hey!” she called. “I’m Diane Jarrett. Who are you?”
“James! James Fielding!” he shouted, and for once his voice didn’t crack at the crucial moment. In fact, it burst forth with surprising resonance. Like the trumpeting of a bull moose in mating season—he would tell Max. Max would crack up.
CHAPTER 2
I SAID, ‘HOW IS Leonardo?’ As a matter of fact, it’s the third time I’ve said, ‘How is Leonardo?’ Where are you this morning, James?”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry.” James brought himself back to bacon and eggs and his mother’s anxious frown from across the breakfast table. “Leonardo is fine. I just have the Jenkins book to finish reading, and I’ll be ready to start the actual writing.”
“Well,” Charlotte said, “I should think you’d have to start soon if you’re going to be able to get it in the mail to Mr. Johnson by August.”
Charlotte meant well, but she was just too accustomed to coping with a husband who made your average run-of-the-mill absentminded professor look like an efficiency expert. James’ father did several things extremely well. He was an excellent lecturer, writer, and historical researcher and a real genius at infecting other people with his own passionate interest in history. But he was a total failure at certain aspects of daily life. At the university Professor Fielding was famous for his tendency to misplace such things as his glasses, his lunch, his wallet, his lecture notes, and, on an average of once a week, his 1969 Volvo. Even after Charlotte had it painted bright red. Half the people on campus had a funny story about helping him rummage through all six of the campus parking lots looking for it. There were a lot of other stories, too. One of the most famous dated back to the pre-Volvo days when Professor Fielding used to walk to school in good weather. One morning Charlotte had handed him the garbage pail to deposit on the curb as he left, and some time later he had arrived in the classroom with his briefcase in one hand and the garbage in the other. In fact, James sometimes privately compared his father to a very powerful airplane that had somehow been manufactured without a starter, navigational device, or a steering mechanism. Over the years there would have been a lot of crashes if it hadn’t been for Charlotte.
James, himself, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. Very early on—perhaps as a reaction to hearing his father chuckled about—he had decided to be famous someday, not only for his creative genius—exact area yet to be decided upon—but also for his brisk efficiency in everyday matters.
“Don’t worry,” he told his mother. “The essay will be done in plenty of time.” The essay on Leonardo da Vinci was the extra credit project that James had contracted to do as a part of his petition to finish high school in three years instead of four. The research was really no problem, since he had been a da Vinci fan for years—ever since William’s sabbatical, which the Fieldings had spent in Italy, near the village where Leonardo was born. There was, however, some reading he’d meant to do. He’d come to the wilderness equipped with a couple of new biographies, which he’d intended to read before he began to write. And, although there was no reason at all for Charlotte to worry, he had to admit that he hadn’t accomplished nearly as much as he’d intended to by now. What had made the difference was the fact that the wilderness hadn’t turned out to be as much of a bore as he’d expected.
At first it had been the forest itself. Before that summer James hadn’t particularly related to trees, having been well acquainted with only the few rather uninspired specimens to be found in backyards and in the scientifically groomed and landscaped groves of the university campus. Not that he had anything against them. It was just that trees, as such, had failed to make any significant impact on his philosophy of life in general. But that state of affairs had begun to change almost the moment the Fieldings moved into a cabin entirely surrounded for miles and miles by almost nothing else. The trees were everywhere, ancient stately trees; ragged shaggy undomesticated giants, possessed of towering dignity and a strange, almost intimidating mystery. From the first day he had been strangely and entirely unexpectedly fascinated. Passing up the more obvious pleasures of the lake, the swimming and boating and fishing, he had taken to the woods, spending most of every day exploring deeper and deeper into the surrounding area, much to his parents’ mystification. Now and then Charlotte took time out from collaborating with William on his third textbook to worry about it.
“What do you do out there in the woods alone all day?” she would ask, or “Your father and I are planning to take the afternoon off and row out to the island. Wouldn’t you like to come along?” James wouldn’t, but he found it difficult to explain why, even to himself.
He had, for a while, considered the possibility that it was a form of regression, that he had suddenly slipped black to his Daniel Boone period. Sifting back through his long history of what Charlotte called hero-worship and William referred to as historical transference, James was able to determine that, if it were true, he must have just lost about seven years. He was sure of the time sequence because he remembered specifically that the Daniel Boone syndrome had followed the Robin Hood phase, both of which had preceded Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, all of which had happened before his tenth birthday—because he definitely recalled that by the time he was ten, he had given up world conquest and decided, instead, to be a universal man. But after further analysis he’d decided that the whole thing had nothing to do with Daniel Boone, or with regression, for that matter. Whatever it was, he was sure it had nothing to do with pretending to be anybody, not even James Archer Fielding.
In fact, when he was alone in the woods, he seemed at times to be scarc
ely aware of James Archer Fielding at all. What he was aware of was a kind of overwhelming majesty, dignity, and beauty that owed nothing to him or to any other member of the human species. Walking through cathedral groves, dipping his fingers in the pure clarity of natural fonts, climbing high rocky altars, he experienced what seemed to be a kind of spiritual aerobics—as if undeveloped capacities of some mysterious nature were being stretched and challenged. Part of it was a constant feeling of anticipation, of wonders about to be revealed and promises soon to be kept. And then he had stumbled upon the hidden canyon and its magnificent occupant, and it all seemed to come together. The deer became the center of it all, a symbol too secret and significant to be shared or discussed—at least not for the present. To Max he only wrote that nature sometimes does something so perfect that it’s almost enough to shake your faith—in agnosticism. And to William and Charlotte he said nothing at all.
At first it had been simple stubbornness. They had said he would love the wilderness, he had said he wouldn’t, and he resisted admitting that they’d been right. But before long it was much more than that. Before long it had become the kind of private treasure you don’t risk by exposing it to the appraisal of others. Particularly not if the others in question happen to have made a career of investigating other people’s value systems in the cold light of logic. There was nothing logical about the way James felt about the deer in the valley—and he didn’t want there to be.
“James! You’re getting to be as bad as your father.” Apparently he’d been daydreaming again and missed something his mother had been saying to him. But now the frustrated shrillness of her voice had gotten through not only to him, but to his father as well.
Looking up from the notebook he’d been scribbling in all through breakfast, William smiled at James. “What’s this? What have you been up to to merit such a harsh accusation?”
“Not listening.” James grinned. “I stand accused of the heinous sin of not listening.”
“Shocking,” William said sternly. “Capital offense. Off with his head.”
Charlotte smiled, and then sighed with exasperation, at both of them or at herself for smiling at them. “What I’ve been saying was—we’re out of bread and milk again, and I wondered if you’d mind going over to the Commissary for me before you take off for the hills.”
For just a moment he felt disappointed—he’d been thinking of taking a lunch and spending the whole day in the valley of the stag; but then suddenly the disappointment faded. Another image had appeared in his mind, taking the place of the noble beast. A hot pink and golden tan image. “Sure,” he said. “I’d be glad to.”
The west gate of The Camp was a small pedestrian-sized opening, on the opposite side of the enclosure from the main entrance. It was used mostly by Campers on their way into the mountains to hike or ski—and by Willowbyites on their way to and from the Commissary. There was no gatehouse or guard, but there was a very heavy duty gate. Admission was by remote control. You opened the call box, held down a button, and talked to the guard at the main gate.
“Main gate, Sergeant Smithers speaking. Who goes there?”
James suppressed a laugh. Smithers was the chubby bald guard with the pot belly and slightly embarrassed manner. Embarrassed, no doubt, by having to call himself sergeant when the only army he’d ever been in was probably old T.J.’s, and by having to say corny things like, “Who goes there?”
As far as James had been able to determine, Major T. J. Mitchell’s private army consisted of himself; Lieutenant Carnaby, his fat-legged secretary; old Sergeant Smithers; and the two other gate guards who only got to play they were privates. And then of course, the troops—the Camp residents, more than one hundred members of the affluent society ranging in age from doddering to toddling, who seemed, in T.J.’s fantasy, to play the role of a kind of reserve army, but who would be about as effective militarily as a pack of pomeranians, with the possible exception, on second thought, of the little golf ball hit-man.
“James Fielding,” he said into the speaker, trying to keep the giggle out of his voice. “Pass number one, eight, five, four, six.” The badge number was a case in point—as if The Camp had issued more than eighteen thousand passes. Eight would probably be more like it.
“Okay Fielding. Enter!” Smithers said, and a buzzer sounded, indicating that the gate was unlatched.
Recalling the two-year-old torpedo brought back images—most of which concerned his sister—and the fact that, as far as James was concerned, the main purpose of this expedition was more than the purchase of bread and milk. Man does not live by bread and milk alone. The main purpose was, of course—A. Diane Jarrett. And—B. The Don Juan Project.
The Don Juan Project had begun, or at least the idea had first arisen, in May not too long after James and Max had gotten acquainted. They’d been lying around the swimming pool at the university on one of the afternoons it was reserved for faculty families and their guests, and James had been telling Max, in an amusing and satirical way, about his history of identifying with famous characters from the past. While they were talking, Trudi Hepplewhite, whose father was in chemistry and who was one of the sexiest girls in James’ class, came in with three of her friends. It wasn’t very long before Max, who didn’t know any of the girls, was being suave and cool and just crass enough to be funny and the girls were all cracking up—while James, who had known them for years, was as usual, either saying nothing at all for so long everybody forgot he existed, or else coming up with a boring monologue or some joke that nobody got.
It had been that way with James ever since he’d started taking an interest in girls as such. And that had been a long time ago. Although he seemed to be retarded socially where females were concerned, there was every indication he was normal physically, or even precocious. He’d started thinking seriously about girls fairly early, and the more he thought about them, the more he tied up when they were around. Earlier, much earlier, before sex entered the picture, girls he’d known had been simply people and no particular problem. But the more interested he got, the more he worried about what they were thinking of him and the result was usually—fiasco. Like Heather Rubenstein, for instance. Heather was a neighbor with whom he built tree houses, published a neighborhood paper, started a dog walking business, discussed politics and co-authored several indignant letters to the editor of the Oakland Tribune. But then one day he’d noticed some interesting developments where Heather was concerned, and shortly afterwards he’d blown the whole relationship by trying to kiss her. It wasn’t that she refused him, either. She’d simply asked him why he wanted to, and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to say. And he hadn’t been able to think of anything to say to her ever since.
He’d discussed the problem with Max before that day at the pool, but he’d never really leveled with him. It just wasn’t easy to admit to someone with Max’s experience that you hadn’t even kissed a girl—at least not very successfully.
But Max must have guessed. That day at the pool, after the girls had gone, he did something typically Maxian. In the same circumstances anyone else would either have kidded James, or if they were abnormally kindhearted, pretended not to have noticed that he’d made an ass of himself. But Max didn’t do either one. What he did do was bring up the subject in a very unemotional way, analyze it, discuss it, and proceed to figure out what could be done about it.
According to Max there wasn’t really any reason why James was such a dud where girls were concerned. He was certainly smart, he could be very amusing in the right circumstances, and he wasn’t even bad looking.
“Oh sure,” James said, flexing his almost nonexistent biceps. “I’m a regular Mr. America.”
Max, who not only had a charismatic personality and an attractively homely face, but also a very adequate build, shrugged. “You’ll fill out,” he said. “I’ve filled out a lot since I was your age.” Max was eleven months older than James. “Besides, there are a lot of women who really go for that unhe
althy, soulful look. Look at Peter Frampton and Rod Stewart.”
“And Byron and Chopin,” James agreed eagerly.
Max regarded him thoughtfully for a minute before he said, “You do have a few problems—but it’s nothing that can’t be remedied. It’s mostly a matter of changing your style and building your confidence.” After he’d thought for a while longer he said, “Building your confidence is probably the crucial thing, and I know just the place to do it.”
It seemed that the year before, Max had worked for the summer recreation director at St. Mary’s, which was a private school for girls. Max had been in charge of keeping the swimming pool area clean and checking out towels and lounge chairs. This year he had moved up to the position of lifeguard and his old job would be open. It was an easy job, and there was plenty of time for socializing. And Max would be there in case James needed advice or moral support. It would be the perfect place for him to get the practice he needed to build his confidence. In fact, Max said he wouldn’t be surprised if, by the end of summer, James was into a whole new identification thing. Only this time it would be with a historically famous lady killer like—
“Don Juan?” James had suggested.
Max shook his head, grinning. “Sure,” he said. “Sure enough. Don Juan it is. This will be the summer of the Don Juan Project.”
Only it had turned out to be the summer of the New Moon Lake instead; and until Diane Jarrett had shown up there’d been no reason to think that any part of the Don Juan Project was transferrable to the high Sierras.
Inside the west gate a path led down through a grove of old trees and leveled out to merge with the jogging trail that bordered Anzio Avenue. After curving past two cabins, Anzio ran into Bunker Hill Road and directly down to the center of The Camp. On the jogging trail James shifted from the swift silent tread of the woodsman to a jog—when in Rome—and in a very few minutes was in sight of the complex of buildings grouped around a central quadrangle known as the “Parade Grounds.”
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