The attorney wears a tan suit and offers Flynn a seat on the other side of his desk. Bill Tierney wonders if maybe Flynn would like some pistachio nuts. Bill Tierney is crazy about them. Was Flynn aware that the nuts have been part of the human diet since the Paleolithic? That they’re one of only two nuts in the Bible?
“What’s the other one?”
“The other what?”
“The other nut in the Bible,” Flynn says.
“Hell, I don’t know. Noah? Sorry, bad joke. Let’s get down to business. Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m a father,” Flynn says. “And I love my son very much.”
“Yes, of course. Family’s got to be number one.”
“Right. And I want my son to feel like he’s a part of something bigger than himself.”
Flynn uncrosses his legs and reaches for a pistachio. The shell doesn’t want to pry. He admits that he should have signed his son up earlier and that he knows about the requirements for the father-son camp, but he’d be very grateful if the organization could make an exception in the case of his son, Ryan, who’s nine years old and who, Flynn thinks, would make a natural Grasshopper. His son is a good boy and loves the outdoors, and the camp would do him so much good. It would be a great fit. Flynn spins the chalky nut between his fingers.
Tierney squints, his mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I was under the impression you were here looking for representation.”
“No,” Flynn says. “I was hoping you could help me. As the Head Guide.”
“Ah,” Tierney says.
“Right.”
Neither of them says anything for a few moments. Not many people know this, but Tierney has a brother named Herbie who’s an addict. Flynn has tried to help Herbie at the center, but Herbie doesn’t want to be helped. That’s how it is with some people. Flynn considers mentioning this now, as a way of creating a bond, but decides against it.
“It would mean so much to my son,” Flynn says.
“Sure, okay.”
“Okay?” Flynn didn’t expect it to be so easy.
“Done,” he says, and pretends to sign an invisible piece of paper suspended in the air between them. “The Grasshopper district office is in Charlotte. You can go there and fill out the paperwork, pay up for camp. I’ll take care of the rest.” He stands and smoothes the wrinkles from his suit pants.
“Thank you,” Flynn says.
“Glad I could help. Now I’m afraid I need to . . .” His voice trails off as he motions vaguely at his empty desk.
• • •
Father and son rise early to depart on a Saturday morning, shafts of sunlight through a rising fog, the birds tweeting in the sycamore tree on the front lawn, its bark hanging like strips of beef jerky. You couldn’t ask for a more suitable morning, Flynn thinks.
His wife comes outside in her bathrobe. “Couldn’t we just go to the beach?” she asks Flynn, a little upset because after three years without even using a sick day, Flynn is taking an entire week off from work, and he’s not using it to take his whole family on vacation. Instead he’s only taking his son to some mysterious camp in the woods. “Are you sure this is what he needs? He won’t know any of those kids.”
“This will be good for him,” Flynn assures her. “Kids make friends fast.”
When Ryan comes outside with a bowl of cereal, milk dripping down his chin, she gives him a cell phone. “Pay as you go,” she explains to Flynn. “I’ll feel better.” To Ryan, she says, “So you can call me if you want.”
The car is packed with sleeping bags, a tent, an electric lantern with the price-tag sticker still on it, and all the other equipment necessary for two human animals to live comfortably in the woods for five nights. Once they’re on the road, the boy is the navigator and is responsible for tracking their progress, his index finger across the atlas, and for calling out each step from the printed directions.
“Grasshopper Pledge,” Flynn quizzes him. “Go.”
“There’s a way,” the boy says glumly, “around every wall.”
“The beads you can earn and their colors.”
“Beads of Truth are the red ones. Beads of Mercy are the white ones.”
“And the third?”
The boy shrugs.
“They’re black . . .”
“Oh,” Ryan says. “Beads of Skill.”
“And how many beads does it take to move up a level?”
“Six beads.”
“Exactly,” Flynn says. “And you’ll have them in no time at all. Last question. The salute.”
Ryan points to his heart with his index finger, and then Flynn does the same.
“Aren’t you excited?”
The boy says he’s not sure if he’s excited. His brown shaggy mop—he hates haircuts—makes his small, narrow face seem even smaller. “What if it, like, rains?”
“That’s what the tent is for. We’re sharing a tent. That will be fun, right?”
The boy gives him an uncertain look. They drive into the mountains and then down a long road with thick woods the color of katydids and khaki: muted greens and browns. Ryan directs Flynn onto a paved road that turns to gravel, the rocks popping under the tires. Then the gravel road becomes a dirt one, a volcanic cloud of dust behind them in the rearview mirror.
Up ahead, rough beams form an arch over the road. The camp’s entrance.
“You should probably put on your uniform now,” Flynn says.
The shirt is yellow cotton with a white rugby collar and the Grasshopper patch sewn over the heart. It hangs loose on Ryan’s small, pale body.
Flynn pulls up in front of the director’s cabin, and a man in a green T-shirt much too tight for his potbelly comes out with a clipboard. He wants their names. He wants their district number. He’s got the pen top in his mouth, a small red ink stain on his bottom lip. What was that last name again? The man’s sweat drips down onto the pages. How do you spell that last name? He’s shuffling through the pages. That was with a C? No, he doesn’t see that one on here. Wait, here it is, on the back. There’s a problem. Ryan hasn’t met all the requirements for camp. He still needs eighteen beads. That’s three levels up from where Ryan is now, which is nowhere, according to the information on the clipboard. Can Flynn show documentation that Ryan has earned even one bead? Flynn can’t, of course, but he explains that he’s cleared this with Ryan’s Head Guide, Bill Tierney, who can sort all this out for them. Special arrangements have been made for Ryan.
The man puffs out his upper lip with his tongue, sniffing at his blond mustache hairs. All right, he says, wait over there. The walkie-talkie, crackling all along, comes off his belt, and he asks for someone named Bryant. Father and son sit together on a bench outside the cabin, slapping mosquitoes off their legs and arms and necks. Flynn didn’t bring any bug spray.
Tierney arrives on a golf cart. He’s wearing a linen shirt with pink stripes and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. He doesn’t smile or wave.
“What can I do you for?” Tierney asks the man with the clipboard.
“This gentleman says you told him he could bring his kid, even though he doesn’t have his beads.”
Tierney lean-sits on the front of the golf cart, his arms crossed. “Right,” he says. “I’m sorry. I meant to call the district office about that. This going to be a problem?”
“Maybe,” the man says. “The rules are pretty clear.”
The two men are talking low now, their lips quiet and slow like butterfly wings. Flynn can’t hear what they’re saying. Tierney laughs a little and pats the man on the back. The man nods and motions to the lake. Tierney nods then. Maybe Flynn should go over and join them. He can help make this okay. He stands too late. The conference that will determine his son’s fate has ended. Bill Tierney strides over to the bench.
“Here’s the deal,”
he says to Flynn. “Ryan can stay. Only he won’t be able to do some of the activities since he doesn’t have his beads. Like the canoe trip to the island on the lake. That’s for kids who’ve got their Swimming Skill Bead and their CPR Bead of Mercy. You understand, right, why we can’t let him go on that trip?”
Flynn says he understands, of course. He gives his son’s shoulder a squeeze.
• • •
The tent is old and once belonged to Flynn’s father. The canvas is military green; the paraffin wax that kept its corners sealed from the rain has long since lost its shine. Father and son tie the canvas strips to the metal poles they’ve erected in the wide-open field with all the other tents. In all directions are tents: red, yellow, orange, and green nylon rain-flies spilling out around the domes like fruit candies melting in the afternoon sun. Beside every tent is a parked car. The field buzzes with bugs and the sound of a dozen car-powered air pumps blowing up mattresses, palatial beds two and three feet thick. Flynn has brought a number of thin foam pads and stacks them under their sleeping bags.
“Do you want the left or right?”
The boy picks the left.
“Where’s your pillow?”
He forgot his pillow, but here’s Mookie the blue bear, smuggled inside a pillowcase.
“I thought we agreed not to bring the bear.”
His son prepares a throne of T-shirts for the bear at the end of his sleeping bag. Its cold dark eyes are fixed on the two of them.
“Just for the first night,” Flynn says.
A bell echoes across the lake, and fathers and sons, a hundred of them, begin the boisterous migration to the dining hall. Like a herd of buffalo, Flynn imagines, and they’re part of it. The boys, ages six to fourteen, run circles around the fathers, some as old as sixty.
One small boy with a round and ruddy face stops to examine an overturned kayak. “Snake,” he announces, and they all gather around him to admire the discovery, their first significant encounter with wildlife for the week. A dark, fat snake is coiled in the sand by the water.
Water moccasin, one of the fathers determines, and then they’re all moving away at once, the fathers dragging the boys backward by their arms and shirttails. Someone should tell the camp director! Snakes in the lake again! Hadn’t they hired someone to take care of this after last summer? Remember that kid last year who somehow trapped a water moccasin in a shopping bag and hung it from the rafters in the shower house?
“Clearly that kid didn’t have any Beads of Mercy,” someone up ahead jokes.
“He wasn’t allowed back this summer,” yells someone farther back.
They converge on the flagpole outside the dining hall. The man with the clipboard has traded his paperwork for a megaphone. The boys are organized into single-file lines radiating out from the flagpole like spokes from a hub. Flynn helps Ryan find his place, the line for his group, Bill Tierney at the head. Two Grasshoppers take the flag down and fold it military-style into careful triangles. Time for the Grasshopper salute. Time for the Grasshopper Pledge. There’s a way around every wall, hundreds of shrill voices yell out in near-unison. Time for dinner.
“Go ahead,” Flynn tells Ryan. “Find us a couple of seats.”
Flynn lingers on the porch, where a handful of men furtively smoke their cigarettes. They huddle near the steps, a conspiracy of tobacco. Flynn asks for a light. The man who gives him one introduces himself as John Price. “You a newbie?” he asks.
Flynn says he is. John Price sports a chinstrap beard that doesn’t much help disguise his marshmallow chin. He owns a dealership. Toyotas and Hyundais, he adds. Ever need a new car, give him a call. Come on by. That’s how this works. Grasshoppers isn’t just for the kids. The dads stick together, you know? Help each other out.
Flynn nods his head enthusiastically. He couldn’t agree more. That’s how this should work.
One father says, “Marty, your kid ever tell you about his Truth Bead?”
“Never,” says Marty.
“My kid never told me neither,” another man says. “I guess that shouldn’t bother me, but it does.”
“Only two Beads of Truth,” John Price explains to Flynn, “and the dads never get to know what they mean. The Head Guides decide when the kid is ready. I think it’s just like a single sentence that gets whispered in their ear. But the kids aren’t supposed to repeat it. Ever. I’ve heard that the first one is about the nature of time. My kid’s got that one, but he’s just as tight-lipped as the rest of them. When I press him about it, he smiles at me like I’m an idiot who wouldn’t understand. Just wait, it’ll drive you crazy when your kid gets his.”
Bowls of mashed potatoes, platters of chicken fingers, and pitchers of lemonade are on all the tables when they go inside the dining hall, a flurry of hand-waving, lip-smacking, and spilled drinks.
“Wouldn’t mind a little vodka in that lemonade,” John Price says with a forced laugh before wandering off to find his son.
Flynn navigates the maze of tables and children. He watches one kid drown a chicken finger—perfectly fried on one side but mushy and gray on the other—in a gush of ketchup from a sticky red squirt bottle. Another boy, with a blue bandanna wrapped around his tiny head, drums on his plate with metal silverware until a father leans across the table with a stern look. All the kids are wearing their yellow uniforms. From the right pockets, on leather strings, their white, red, and black beads dangle.
Ryan, in his unadorned uniform, is sitting at the end of a table at the far end of the hall, three seats away from the next person. He’s barely touched his food. Flynn asks if he’d like to move over a couple of seats, but the boy says no, he’s fine where he is. So they sit together, apart from the others, poking tunnels into their mashed potatoes, drinking more and more lemonade, until the man with the megaphone, the camp director, stands at the front of the room with some announcements: tomorrow’s activities are posted on the back wall; the bonfire ceremony will be three nights from tonight; a special visitor is coming to help construct a genuine Native American sweat lodge; oh, and the water moccasins are back in the lake, so watch where you step.
That night it rains, but only a little.
• • •
The nature hike the next morning is a success. Flynn is waiting at the tent when Ryan returns; his legs are bramble-scraped but he’s happy. Did he see any wildlife? No, no wildlife. Did he see any plants? Yes, they saw a few plants. Flynn has trouble understanding what exactly Ryan enjoyed about the expedition, but he doesn’t want to spoil the effect with questions, so he lets it go. That afternoon, after lunch, Ryan isn’t able to go on the canoe trip, as expected, so Flynn finds a tub of toys in the shed behind the director’s cabin. He takes out the soccer ball and tries to get Ryan to kick that back and forth across the field. But Ryan isn’t interested.
“Basketball, then?”
“Nope,” he says. The boy is satisfied to sit in the rocking chairs on the dining hall porch.
“What are you thinking about?” Flynn asks.
“I don’t know,” the boy says.
He’s inscrutable, his large eyes blinking and looking but not conveying any secret meaning. Flynn wonders if some fathers instinctively know what their sons are thinking, if there exists between them some kind of private language, little symbols and gestures that only the two of them can decode. Who are you? Flynn is tempted to ask.
One of the cooks comes outside on the porch and says Ryan can ring the dinner bell if he wants. Ryan takes the cord like it might shock him, then gives it a gentle tug. “Needs more than that,” the cook says gruffly; Ryan pulls harder. The sound is immense, a physical presence, a peal felt in the bones. The boy is smiling, and Flynn is hopeful.
John Price finds Flynn at dinner. Does he want to smoke a cigarette? They go out on the porch with the other fathers. They struggle to keep the matches lit in the breeze.
&n
bsp; “So you never told me what you do for a living,” John Price says.
Flynn tells him about the treatment center. How you can’t understand addiction until you’ve seen someone fight one.
“I got a sister-in-law who used to do cocaine,” John says. “Even at Thanksgiving.”
“Did she get help?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. My brother never talks about it anymore, so I guess she did.”
Flynn opens a new pack and offers up cigarettes. Almost everybody accepts. They use the first butt to light the second because of the breeze.
“My kid’s up for his Second Truth Bead this week,” a father says.
“Mine too,” John Price adds.
The others perk up at that.
“The Second Truth is about what happens when you die.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“What’d you hear?”
“My son told me it’s about how the universe got started.”
“Was it with a bang or a whimper?”
“The Big Banger. That’s what my oldest daughter calls God. I think she does it to get under my skin. She’s a Unitarian now.”
“Does that make Satan the Little Whimperer?”
“You guys don’t know shit. The Second Truth is about the end of the universe, not the beginning.”
“So enlighten us. How does it end?”
“The earth goes up in flames. God already tried drowning us once, so the next time he’ll smoke us out.”
“Bring it on,” says a father with smoke sneaking out his nostrils.
“If it wasn’t for these Truth Beads, my kid would have dropped out years ago. He’s obsessed. If I ever found out what they are, I’d just tell him so we could be done with it.”
“Anyone else think it’s bullshit we don’t get to know these Truths? We do half the work.”
“If you ask me, I think the whole process is bullshit. Why is it the Head Guides get to decide who’s ready for those beads? Grasshoppers didn’t use to be this way.”
“It can be a little clubby,” John Price admits.
“A little?”
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