Sports Camp

by Rich Wallace

  Worse for Riley, he’d made two costly errors in right field and struck out twice. Barry muttered that they’d be better off with no right fielder at all.

  None of them had slept very well after the Maynard scare. Riley kept waiting for the cabin door to burst open, with the counselors threatening to kick them out of camp. What had that really been? Too big for a deer, too invisible. Riley knew for sure that Big Joe was real. Maynard might be, too.

  But the night had passed without any more incidents, and everything had seemed normal at breakfast.

  Riley opened his gym bag and took out the letter he’d received from his parents the day before. Nothing special, just a “Hope you’re having a fantastic time. We miss you!” and all that. He’d read it ten times already. He kept thinking about the great time they’d had at the beach two months before; about playing basketball with his father in their driveway in Jersey City; about sitting on the front porch with his parents on summer evenings, eating pizza. He couldn’t wait to get home, especially after a game like this morning’s.

  He flopped onto the bunk and shut his eyes. Thinking about that last day of camp—the last night—somehow made it seem as if it would get there faster. When he was swimming laps—imagining himself passing other competitors as they worked their way across the lake—it was as if each stroke brought him closer to home.

  He wouldn’t be swimming today, though. The cross-country relay was this afternoon, and his cabin mates had identified him as a fast runner with endurance. He’d be running the key next-to-last leg of the race. The longest one.

  The one with the most at stake.

  The race was to start in front of the mess hall, covering a flat, grassy area for about two hundred yards before dipping down to the water. The teams of runners—eight from each cabin—would run varying distances, circling the lake and finishing back at the starting line.

  The afternoon was hot and humid, so the runners had abandoned their T-shirts and were dressed in shorts and sweatbands.

  Riley followed a counselor and one runner from each of the other five cabins to a spot on the far side of the lake. They’d be the seventh legs, covering about eight hundred meters—the last third of it up Olympia Hill—and handing off to the anchor legs. Vinnie would be waiting at the top of the hill for the final two-hundred-meter sprint.

  The entire race would cover about two and a half miles.

  Riley scoped out his competition. Troy Hiller from Cabin 6 looked strong and fast; he’d hit a couple of triples against Riley’s team in softball that would have been doubles by a slower runner. And this kid Medina from Cabin 1 was built like a wrestler—lean and wiry, probably very quick.

  But Riley knew that by the time the first six runners had finished their legs, the competitors would probably be spread out. So he might be way behind some of these guys before he even started running—or way ahead.

  Part of him didn’t want to be ahead when he got the stick from Eldon. Squandering the lead would be embarrassing.

  A whistle blew far across the lake, and Riley stretched his neck to see the runners sprinting across the field. Tony Maniglia was leading off for the Threshers. He was easy to spot—taller than the other five runners and darker. He’d moved into second place, but the pack was very tight.

  Barry and Hernando were sitting this one out. They were the only paunchy guys in the cabin; everybody else was either skinny like Riley and Eldon or muscular like Vinnie and Diego.

  Tony and the others had reached the boat house and were straining to finish. The Cabin 5 runner had a ten-meter lead, but Tony was right in the thick of it with the others. He stumbled as he handed the stick to Diego, but the pass was clean and Diego sprinted onto the path.

  They were behind the trees now, and Riley had a hard time keeping track of the racers. It was more than a minute before he got his next clear glimpse, and by then Kirby had the stick. He was in third.

  Riley turned back to the guys he’d be running against. Jorge Medina was bouncing up and down, eyes shut, sweat dripping down his chest. Nearby, Troy Hiller had his hands propped against a maple trunk, stretching out his legs. Riley could hear shouts of encouragement from across the lake, but over here things were dead quiet. And tense.

  “They’re at the bridge!” said one of the runners, a tall guy in a purple headband over a brush cut. Cabin 5. He’d worked his way down to the lakeshore to get a better look. “My team’s got the lead. Then three guys packed real tight behind him; couldn’t tell who they were.”

  The kid scrambled up the bank and lined up on the path. “Any minute now,” he said.

  That would be Patrick running for Cabin 3. Patrick was fast, but Riley wasn’t sure how well he’d hold up over a full quarter mile. Just get the stick to Eldon, he thought. Don’t blow it, Patrick.

  Riley took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm himself. But his heart was pumping hard and his breathing was rapid. He shook his wrists and shifted his shoulders from side to side. He could see about a hundred yards down the path, so he’d have a good idea of the situation as Eldon approached.

  “That’s us!” said the brush-cut guy. A lone runner in a purple headband had rounded the turn and was sprinting toward Riley’s group. Two seconds later the Cabin 4 runner emerged, with Eldon and the Cabin 1 racer right on his heels.

  This last part of their leg was slightly uphill, and the strain on the runners’ faces was evident. Eldon was pumping his arms hard and grimacing, but he was losing ground to the others.

  The Cabin 5 runner grabbed the stick from his teammate and took off hard. Riley stretched his arm back, waiting for the exchange from Eldon. The last two runners were climbing the hill behind him.

  “Get ’em!” Eldon shouted as he slid the metal track baton into Riley’s palm. Riley gripped it tight—it was lighter than it looked, smooth and hollow, about a foot long. Head up, Riley sprinted along the path.

  Settle in, he told himself. Plenty of time. He’d be running a half mile, lots of room to make up the deficit. The leader was about twenty meters ahead, and the next two weren’t far behind that guy. They were all scrambling for position, probably moving too fast for such a long leg on this very hot afternoon.

  The path climbed for about a hundred meters, then dipped closer to the lake. The Cabin 5 runner had extended the lead to twenty-five meters, but Riley had closed slightly on the others.

  Coming downhill, Riley glanced back. The two runners trailing him were a good distance behind. But looking back had been a bad move; Riley’s right foot hit a rock and he began to fall, leaning way forward and stumbling.

  Somehow he managed to keep his footing and remain upright. They’d reached the lake, in full view now of all the other campers. He could hear Barry’s voice above the others: “Sprint, Night Crawler! Sprint!”

  But Riley knew it was too early to sprint. He was only halfway through his leg. He focused on the two runners ahead of him on the path—Jorge Medina and some kid from Cabin 4. They were running side by side, trying to stay close to the leader and gearing up for a fast finish.

  Riley felt good. He wanted to sprint now, but he knew he had to save something for that hill. His teammates were watching. Vinnie was up there waiting.

  As he rounded a turn and left the path, he could see the three runners ahead of him, churning their arms as they began to climb the hill toward the mess hall. The distance between them had shortened considerably; Riley was close enough to see the streams of sweat inching down their backs and to hear the labor of their breathing.

  “Yeah!” shouted Tony, standing on the side of the hill and pumping his fists. “You got ’em, Riley! Dig down!”

  Hernando was at the top of the hill, near the anchor runners. “Come on, Liston!” he called, leaning forward with two fists. “These guys are dying!”

  With his focus on Medina, Riley barely noticed that they were passing the purple-headband guy, who had slowed to nearly a walk. And the Cabin 4 runner was clutching at his side as Riley sprinted
past. Now Riley was neck and neck with Medina, just fifty meters from the exchange point.

  Suddenly the air before him was clear; Riley’d passed all of them and was dashing toward Vinnie. He could see the scowl on the Cabin 1 anchor’s face as his team lost the lead. And Cabin 4’s Kelvin Dawkins was a picture of determination, waiting to sprint that final two hundred meters. Vinnie’d be in for a battle.

  Riley got there first. Vinnie took the baton and raced toward the mess hall. There was no room for strategy now—this was an all-out sprint to the finish.

  Riley stopped cold and shut his eyes. Medina barreled into him from behind and Riley dropped to his knees. “Sorry,” Medina said, puffing hard.

  “No problem.”

  Medina yanked him to his feet and they watched as Kelvin Dawkins rapidly made up ground on Vinnie. The guy had to be the fastest runner in camp.

  But Riley had given Vinnie a ten-meter lead, just enough to make all the difference. Vinnie finished inches in front, lifting his arms overhead and shouting, “Yes!”

  Barry was running toward Vinnie—the only running Barry would do today—with Hernando and Tony right behind. Riley flopped to the grass and stretched out on his back, huffing and sweating and cramping.

  He sat up and pulled in his knees, wrapping his arms around them and letting his chin sink to his chest. The sun felt good; his breathing was getting back to normal. Kirby and Diego had made their way over now and were running up the hill toward Barry and the others, pumping their fists and shouting.

  Vinnie would get all the credit for holding off Dawkins, but Riley knew the score. He’d made all the difference in that race. He’d been the man.

  That had been truly Olympian.

  CAMP OLYMPIA BULLETIN

  Monday, August 9

  IT’S CHAMPIONSHIP TIME!

  Play-offs in Major Sports Begin Tomorrow

  Semifinals in basketball kick off a frantic four days of championship action Tuesday, culminating in the awarding of the Big Joe Trophy on Friday night.

  Top-seeded Cabin 4 meets Cabin 1 in the first semifinal. It’ll be Cabin 5 against Cabin 3 in the other.

  Points in the major sports are 50 for the champions and 25 for the runners-up, so the Big Joe standings can change quickly. The third-place team gets 15, fourth is worth 10, and fifth earns 5.

  Softball semifinals are Wednesday morning and water-polo semis are Thursday. The championship games in each sport are as follows:

  Basketball: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday

  Softball: 1 p.m. Thursday

  Water polo: 11:30 a.m. Friday

  Cabin 3 Runs Off with Relay

  Cabin 3’s Vinnie Kazmerski held off Cabin 4’s fast-closing Kelvin Dawkins to win the round-the-lake cross-country relay race Sunday afternoon. Cabin 3 moved from fourth place to first on the next-to-last leg.

  Cabin 1 finished a close third.

  Quote of the Day

  “It was like climbing Mount Everest with a backpack full of rocks and a knife plunging into your lungs.”—Cabin 1’s Jorge Medina after racing up Olympia Hill

  CHAPTER TEN

  Like the Loch Ness Monster

  By late Monday afternoon, Cabin 3 had won its last regular-season games in softball and water polo, securing high seeds in the play-offs for both sports.

  Barry and Colin were competing in the archery contest, but nobody else even wanted to watch.

  “Let’s hit the yacht club,” Tony said. So Riley followed several of his cabin mates down toward the water.

  “You bring a fishing pole?” Tony asked him.

  Riley shook his head. “Don’t have one.”

  “You can use one of mine. You want to?”

  Riley’s face brightened. “Yeah.” Nobody’d asked him to go fishing the whole time he’d been at camp.

  “Grab the tackle box,” Tony said. “I’ll get a boat.”

  Eldon and Riley sat side by side in the back of the rowboat and Tony took the oars, rowing across the lake. The morning had been very hot and humid, but things had turned overcast as the afternoon wore on. The wind was picking up.

  “This is better fishing weather,” Eldon said, looking up at the clouds. “The fish don’t bite when the sun’s strong.”

  The lake was dotted with canoes and rowboats. “I caught a good-sized bass the other day out by the totem pole,” Tony said. “Let’s head there.”

  The totem pole sat on a tiny island near the farthest edge of the lake. It was about ten feet tall, with a huge eagle’s head carved on top.

  “You guys know how to row?” Tony asked, turning his head.

  Eldon shrugged. Riley said, “No.”

  “It’s easy. Switch spots with me.”

  Carefully, Eldon and Riley moved up as Tony shifted back, each keeping a hand on the side of the boat. Riley put both hands on an oar and Eldon took the other.

  Riley’s oar skipped along the surface and the metal oarlock rattled. The boat began turning toward the left.

  “In sync, guys,” Tony said. “You have to row in unison.”

  After a minute or so they straightened things out and began to move forward.

  “This is the spot,” Tony said. He handed Riley a fishing rod. “You know how to cast?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been fishing a few times.” With his dad. He’d never caught anything, though, not even a bluegill or a catfish.

  Riley looked at the lure on the end of his line, a fat yellow orb with black spots.

  “That’s my best bass plug,” Tony said. “It worked great last time I was out here.”

  Riley cast the lure as hard as he could, but it landed only about fifteen feet from the boat. Eldon and Tony cast to the other side.

  “You hear about Cabin Five?” Tony asked.

  “What about ’em?”

  “Somebody poured soda or lemonade all over the floor of the cabin yesterday afternoon. By the time they got back from the relay, there were about ten trillion ants.”

  Eldon and Riley laughed. “They know who did it?” Eldon asked.

  “They think it was somebody from Cabin One. But the Cabin Five guys are the ones who had to deal with it.”

  There was a low rumble of thunder way in the distance. The counselors would call in the boats if there was any chance of a storm. There were still a few breaks in the clouds, though; a couple of rays of sun were peeking through.

  “I heard a good one,” Eldon said. “When Cabin Two was playing water polo the other day, somebody snuck into their cabin and tied all the sneakers together by the laces.”

  Tony gave a short laugh. “Pretty good, but not as clever as the lemonade.”

  “Guess not.”

  Riley reeled in his line and checked the lure. They hadn’t had any bites yet. He cast it better this time. “Pretty deep out here?” he asked.

  Tony scrunched up his face as if he was thinking hard. “I saw a depth chart once at the Trading Post. I think it gets forty feet deep in a few spots.”

  “We’ll be out here without a boat in a few days,” Riley said.

  “You know it.”

  The qualifying heats for the swim marathon hadn’t taken them this far out, but the final race would. Riley looked back toward the dock. It was a long way to swim.

  “It’ll be intense,” Tony said. “Out here in all this water, night coming on … Tell you what, my strategy is gonna be to do my fastest swimming right around here. Get to the turnaround point and sprint my butt back home.”

  Riley laughed. “Don’t want to be another Maynard.”

  “You got that right.”

  They were the only boat out this far; it was at least a couple of hundred yards to the nearest canoe. Riley felt a drop of rain on his neck. The sky was all clouds now.

  “Hope Big Joe will be sleeping Friday evening,” Eldon said with a grin. “Going to be a lot of commotion out here, with twenty guys racing through.”

  “It’s not just him you have to worry about,” Tony said. “I heard somebody saying there’s a
Little Joe, too. And the only reason they call him Little is because he’s smaller than Big Joe. But not by much.”

  “How old is Big Joe supposed to be anyway?” Eldon asked. “Like a hundred?”

  Tony shrugged. “Nobody knows. Snapping turtles live a long, long time. And they never stop growing.”

  Riley heard more thunder and glanced at the sky. But then he felt a hard tug on his fishing pole. The line was stretched tight and the tip of the rod was bending toward the water.

  “You got one!” Tony yelled. “Looks big.”

  “Reel him in!” Eldon shouted.

  Riley started reeling, and the line zigzagged through the water. Eldon and Tony brought their lines in and Tony picked up the net.

  The fish was at the surface now, thrashing the water about ten feet from the boat and pulling hard. It dove under, but they’d had a good look at it.

  “That’s a nice bass,” Tony said. “Give him a little line to play with.”

  “Why?” Riley asked, reeling even harder.

  Suddenly the line went limp.

  “That’s why,” Tony said. “That was a big, strong fish. You needed to let him tire himself out a bit before bringing him in.”

  Riley brought in the empty line.

  “So much for my favorite plug,” Tony said with a sigh.

  “I’ll pay you for it.”

  “Nah.”

  Lightning flashed, and a shrill whistle sounded from the dock. A counselor was waving an orange flag and continuing to blow the whistle. Another counselor with a megaphone was calling, “All boats in!”

  “Let’s hustle!” Tony said. “Me and Eldon. Let’s go.”

  So Riley moved to the back again and Eldon and Tony began rowing. Small waves were smacking against the boat, and the thunder sounded much closer. The rain was steady now but light.

  Something to the right—maybe twenty yards from the boat—caught Riley’s eye. A grayish head, about the size of a football, was sticking up from the lake. “That’s him!” Riley shouted.

  “Wow!” said Eldon as he and Tony stopped rowing.