by Cary Fagan
Every so often it came on me, the need to write something down.
Finding Zach alone and having this conversation felt like another stroke of luck, and I lay on my own bunk feeling pretty good about how things were going.
I opened the notebook to the first blank page. Sometimes I wrote my saddest stories when I was feeling good.
7
STINK
“SO, MIGHTY LEADER,” Flap Ears said to Jerry, his mouth full of peanut butter and toast, “what’s on for this morning?”
Meal times were not a pretty sight. Chewing, slurping, gulping. Half my cabin mates ate with their mouths open. No wonder the counselors needed a day off once in a while.
“A nature hike,” Jerry said. “We’re going to walk the perimeter of the marsh.”
Groans around the table.
“Not the Stink Trail,” said Carrots. I hadn’t walked the marsh yet, but everyone said it was like visiting a cesspool.
“Trust me,” Jerry said. “It’ll be really interesting. With luck we’ll see a dozen kinds of birds, turtles — even salamanders. Two years ago we saw a moose. Everyone should wear long sleeves and boots and put on plenty of insect repellent.”
“Great,” said Presto, making a straw disappear up his nose. “We’re going to be eaten alive.”
“But tomorrow’s the Big Swim,” said Tiger.
“So? You’re not in it.”
“We should be preparing somehow.”
“That’s right,” said Legs. “We could build an altar and make a sacrificial offering for the safe return of our beloved fellow campers and staff who are braving the elements.”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t go,” said Brickhouse. “I’m constipated. I mean, really bad. I’ve got to see the nurse.”
“You’re going,” said Jerry. Then he looked directly at Zach. “Everybody’s going.”
We were walking to the cabin to change, when Leonard came up beside me.
“Didn’t feel like going for a row, eh?” he whispered fiercely into my ear. “Nah, you just felt like hanging around with your juvenile delinquent friend. I saw you in the cabin with Zach.”
“I really hate it when you’re a pest, Leonard.”
“Sure, I was a real pest when you didn’t know anyone at camp and I was your only friend.”
“I would have made friends anyway.”
“You’re an ingrate.”
He moved away before I had a chance to reply. I was mad at him for saying what couldn’t be true because I wasn’t that kind of person. But it bugged me.
Rick, the head of nature, joined us and we set out.
It was as awful as everyone said it would be. Maybe Old Man Klopschitz believed that every kid had to endure physical suffering in order to get the full character-building experience of his camp.
We trudged single-file over ground so soggy that my boots got sucked into the slime. Mosquitoes buzzed viciously in my ears and landed on my perspiring neck and found their way under my sweatshirt. Every few seconds somebody slapped himself and yelped. The sun beat down and the marsh smelled like an outhouse.
Rick put me in charge of the binoculars. At first I was glad, but soon they dragged heavily around my neck, the strap biting into my skin. I was second-last in line, with Leonard just ahead and Zachary behind.
Rick enthusiastically pointed out the fourth redwing blackbird, muskrat droppings, the leathery head of a snapping turtle that might as well have been the waterlogged end of a branch.
No one cared. No one had the energy even for a stupid joke.
A mosquito landed on my cheek and I slapped myself, coming away with a bloody splotch on my hand. All I could think about was getting back to dry land and collapsing on my bed.
Ahead of me, a dozen mosquitoes clung to the back of Leonard’s damp shirt. I had a sudden panicky feeling that the back of my own shirt was just as covered, so I twisted around, trying to see.
And saw that there was no Zachary.
I stopped and stared. No sign of Zachary at all. Had he gotten sucked down into the slime?
Only slowly did I understand that he had gone his own way.
Of course he had.
I hurried to catch up with the others, almost losing a rubber boot.
When I reached Leonard I tapped him on the shoulder. The mosquitoes on his back didn’t move.
“Leave me alone.”
“Zachary’s gone.”
“Are you serious?”
“Shh!”
Leonard stopped and turned. “I can’t believe it. He’s gone awol.”
“Huh?”
“Like in the army. Absent without leave. They put you in front of a firing squad for that.”
“Keep walking,” I said, shoving him forward.
“We’ve got to tell Jerry and Rick.”
“No, we don’t. We’ll pretend we didn’t notice.”
“That makes us accomplices. There’s no way I’m getting into trouble for him.”
“Maybe he’ll come back.”
“And maybe I’m the king of Freedonia. Hey, Jerry! Rick!”
I couldn’t stop him. I was sure he was doing it to get at me as much as Zachary.
As soon as Jerry heard, he halted the line. Several mosquitoes landed on my neck, and on the necks of everyone else, and there was a flurry of slaps and yells. Jerry did a frantic search behind us to make sure that Zachary hadn’t fallen, shouting his name. He must have been worried about himself as much as Zachary. Who would want to be responsible for losing a kid in a swamp?
We were already halfway round the marsh, and Jerry and Rick began to argue about whether it would be quicker to keep going or turn around. We stood there being eaten alive until Jerry won and we turned back. He refused to consider the possibility that Zach had deserted and insisted that he was lost. Was this another way of pretending that Zachary wasn’t breaking the rules?
We marched back as fast as we could and headed straight for the camp office, where we kids stood outside listening to Old Man Klopschitz take a strip off Jerry and Rick. It was hard to know what Old Man Klopschitz was more mad about — losing Zachary in the first place or not starting to look for him right away.
Two search parties were assembled. One consisted of Jerry, the nurse, and an off-duty swim instructor, and the other Rick, Stuart the camp director, and the head of sailing.
There was nothing for us to do but trudge to the wash house. It felt to me like our cabin had become something apart from the rest of the camp, cut off from the shouting and laughing I could hear around us.
Tex scratched at a mosquito bite and said, “I wonder what happened to him.”
“He returned to the muck from whence he came,” said Leonard.
“I hope he drowned,” said Tiger.
“Yeah,” said Flap Ears. “Fell down on his face and never got up.”
“Do you really think he drowned?” Brickhouse asked.
“It’s obvious what happened,” Carrots said and spat. It was something he had taken up only lately, and the spit landed on his own boot. “He ran away. He’s done it before. He probably went to the main road and hitched a ride into town. I bet he’s halfway to Toronto by now.”
“I almost feel sorry for him,” Presto said. “I mean about what his dad will do when he finds out. I heard that if Zachary doesn’t make it to the end of camp his dad’s going to send him to military school in Pennsylvania.”
Everyone went quiet. I didn’t know anything about military school and I had no idea where Pennsylvania was, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
Everyone headed for the wash house, but I trailed off and drifted toward the cabin instead.
Carrots was right. Zachary was probably on his way to Toronto, o
r maybe even Montreal or New York City or that place where Buddy Holly came from, Texas somewhere, so that he could lie on Buddy’s grave and listen to his tape recorder.
On the cabin porch I stripped off my boots and socks. There was a line of dried green sludge around my ankles.
I tried to understand why I was so disappointed that Zachary had gone. I’d only known him a few days and we weren’t exactly friends. He didn’t feel like somebody it would be good for me to get to know.
But he wasn’t like anybody else. He had a kind of secret knowledge, maybe, or just a way of being himself that I found both attractive and a little bit scary.
And now I wasn’t going to know any more about it.
I opened the screen door and went into the cabin. The place was cleaner than my room at home — beds neatly made, shoes lined up. Jerry was a neat freak and made us tidy up every day.
I sat on my bunk and dropped my chin into my hands.
“What’s up, Pinky?”
“Zach?”
His face appeared, upside down, from the bunk above. He was grinning like a magician who’d just pulled off a trick.
“What are you doing here?”
He disappeared a moment and then slid down the ladder.
“Gee, I don’t know, Pinky. Maybe I thought lying on a soft mattress might be preferable to slogging through a swamp.”
“But you just can’t leave. You can’t do whatever you want.”
“I don’t see why not. I’m not a slave, am I? Old Man Klopschitz doesn’t own me. People are always doing stuff because they think they have to. They’re training us now so we’ll be like prisoners our whole lives. Do this, do that. Live here, live there. I’m a free person, Pinky.”
“We all thought you ran away.”
“I considered it. But it kind of helps to have somewhere to go.”
“They’re out looking for you. Jerry and Rick and a bunch of others.”
He shrugged.
“What have you been doing, anyway?” I said.
“Listening to Buddy Holly.”
“So can I hear what he sounds like?”
“You wouldn’t get it. And now that you’ve found me you’d better go to the office and tell them.”
“I wouldn’t tell on you.”
“They’re going to find out anyway.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what your dad will say?”
Zachary didn’t answer. He stuck the earphone back in and lay down on his bunk so that I couldn’t see him.
Just as I was opening the screen door he called out to me, “After you go to the office, take a shower, Pinky. You stink like frog guts.”
8
GIANT CENTIPEDES
FROM MARS
A COUNSELOR-IN-TRAINING WAS sent to bring in the search parties. They returned swollen with mosquito bites, covered in slime and exhausted.
All considered, Zachary’s punishment was unbelievably mild. He was forbidden to attend the Big Swim the next day and then the evening movie. It might have seemed more severe if Jerry had known that Zach wanted to do the Big Swim, but Zach hadn’t told anyone except me.
“They had a three-hour meeting and that’s what they came up with?” said Carrots. “Brickhouse got worse for sneaking into the kitchen and stealing a box of cookies.”
“And they were those crappy wafer cookies, too,” said Brickhouse.
“You still ate twenty of them,” Flap Ears said.
“It isn’t fair,” said Leonard. “It isn’t equal justice before the law.”
“Yeah, but it’s justice before Klopschitz,” said Presto. “I bet Zachary’s father sent a check for another thousand dollars.”
“More like ten thousand,” said Tex.
The eight of us were walking toward the beach. The Big Swim had begun more than an hour before and we had seen the swimmers — five counselors, three counselors-in-training and two fifteen-year-old kids from the oldest cabins — dive off the dock to start their swim to Downing Island and back. Surrounding them were three boats, each carrying flotation rings tied to ropes, and rescue poles. Stuart was in the lead boat, with the authority to pull in anyone who looked like he was struggling.
While the swimmers were “killing themselves for the glory of Camp White Birch,” as Presto put it, we played badminton in the field and then went on to rock climbing and pottery. Every so often a voice on the loudspeakers announced who was in the lead, who had been taken from the water, how far the swimmers were from Downing Island. When the first swimmer touched a rock off the island, a siren went off.
We joined the rest of the camp for the finish — all of us but Zach, who had to go back to the cabin.
All day I’d been working hard not to care, but now I couldn’t resist the tension as the three surviving swimmers approached. We watched as one of them slowed and hovered in the dark water. He was about fifty feet from the shore. We could see Stuart leaning over the keel to speak to him and then a moan went up as he was pulled from the lake. But the last two — a fifteen-year-old camper and one of the girl counselors — reached the shore as a mob waded in to congratulate them.
If Zach was sorry he didn’t get to try the Big Swim, he kept it to himself. I didn’t think he’d care about missing the evening movie, but I looked forward to it all day because I hoped that Amber would sit with me. I knew it was a slim chance. First, I had to find her. Second, I had to get up the nerve to ask her, and third, she’d have to say yes. But I never got to the second and third, because I didn’t see her before we went into the mess hall.
For the screen a white sheet was suspended from a wooden beam. The projector was set up in the aisle between the seats. There was a ton of popcorn.
It was neat to sit in the dark, the projector softly clacking, and the voices and music crackling through the speakers.
The movie was called Giant Centipedes from Mars, an old black-and-white sci-fi horror flick. It had a handsome spaceship captain, a crew member with a secret grudge, a robot named Friendly, a beautiful female navigator and an old scientist who would probably be the first to die.
About halfway through the movie I started wondering what Zach was up to. It couldn’t be much fun spending so much time alone in the cabin. He might be glad to see me. We could hang out together like actual friends.
I got up and began to squeeze down the aisle. When I reached the end, Leonard grabbed my arm.
“You’re going to miss the best part. The giant centipede’s eggs are about to hatch.”
“It’s boring.”
“You want me to come?”
“Nah, you stay and watch.”
He looked at me with an expression that was part angry and part sad. But I kept going, down the aisle and past Lori the nasty swim instructor doing sentry duty.
“Washroom?”
“Right.”
“Go ahead.”
I made my way along the dark path, careful not to trip over a tree root. Black forms flitted between the branches overhead. Bats. They had spooked me at first, but now I liked watching their jerky movements. One of my favorite things was to walk alone through the camp at night. I took my time, listening to the crickets and feeling the moist air on my skin.
As I approached the clearing in front of our cabin I could hear the faint sound of music. I knew it was Zach’s Buddy Holly tape and that he must be playing it through the cassette recorder’s little speaker.
I went up the stairs and had my hand on the knob of the screen door when I stopped.
Inside I could see Zachary. And Amber. They were sitting side by side on my bunk with the recorder in Amber’s lap. She was looking down at it and Zachary was looking at her.
I backed down the steps.
At the mess hall, I made my way up the aisle in the dark.
“You missed the best part,” Leonard whispered as I squeezed past. “The giant centipede has just taken the woman navigator hostage.”
9
RAIN
ALONE IN ARTS AND CRAFTS, I was trying to make a guitar out of a cardboard box, a plank of wood and some fishing line.
I wanted to be mad at Zach, even if that didn’t make sense, since he didn’t know what I felt about Amber. But instead I just felt pathetic for not looking for Amber sooner and maybe even telling her straight out how I felt. I knew that Zach was better looking than me, and a better athlete, and had this kind of faraway look that I’m sure was just so attractive, but it was just possible that Amber might have liked me best if she’d had a chance to get to know me.
But that wasn’t going to happen now.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In frustration I smacked the cardboard box with the plank. The plank bounced up and hit me in the forehead. I screamed out loud but nobody was there to hear me. Right away I could feel a bump rising.
A light rain began to patter on the roof. The patter became a din. There was so much water washing over the windows, it was impossible to see anything outside.
I went to the door and looked out. Campers were scattering down the paths. Puddles were already forming.
I didn’t want to be stuck forever in the hut so I lowered my head and made a dash for the cabin, my running shoes sliding in the mud. I was soaked in a minute, but I knew the way so well that I could keep my head down, and then I was on our porch and inside.
The cabin was empty. Everyone else must have decided to wait out the rain. Even my underwear was soaked.
I was just going to change when the screen door flew open.
Amber. She was soaked, too, her hair plastered to her face, her T-shirt to her skin. I looked down at her bare feet. She must have kicked her shoes off on the porch.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Is Zach around?”