by Brian Doyle
But the counselors in the railroad cars at night were only a fraction of the counselors as a whole, for most of us drove off in the afternoon in the camp’s buses, carting home our charges and returning them sticky and tired to their parents. The buses peeled away two by two, and when they were gone, the camp stood nearly silent in the long afternoon light. Bereft of the bustling populace of the day except, here and there in the forest fringes or sunning by the pool, a few counselors in entangled pairs. Once that summer I persuaded a friend to take my bus route, and I stayed at camp until dark. I clambered up the stairs inside the house as far as I could go, and then climbed out onto a roof and sat for hours, high above the oaks and maples, watching. I remember the long bars of slanting light, the sighing and snapping of the metal roof as it cooled from the roaring heat of the day, the soaring of a brown hawk over the farthest softball field, the burbling of three pigeons on a nearby roofline, the wriggles of marijuana smoke from the archery yard, the faint sounds of voices far below me, under the house, in the tunnels. When dusk came, I climbed down, leaving the roof to the pigeons. I could pick out the shapes of counselors against the hunched trees, some running, some walking arm-in-arm, the only lights in the thick grainy twilight the blazing ends of their cigarettes and joints, moving through the dark like meteorites. I found a friend and hitched a ride home.
The Meteorites and I were for the most part interested in the same things—games, balls, hawks, bones, food, trees, hats, buses, songs with snickered words about body functions, the girl who graced Miguel’s dreams, and archery. They were absolutely obsessed with archery, although they could hardly handle even the tiniest bows, and even those bows mostly snapped emptily and whizzed over their ducking heads when they tried to draw back the strings, the arrows falling heavily to the ground without even a semblance of flight. When Meteorites ran away from the herd, which they did about once per week per boy, they could without fail be found in the archery alley, a broad grassy sward lined with stone walls and sheltered by sycamores whose fingers waved high above us and sent down shifting flitches of sunlight.
My great fear as counselor was that runaway boys would head either to the pool or through the woods to the highway, but they never did, not once. To the bows they went like arrows, and I would find them there a little later, watching the patient archery girl show them, for the hundredth time, how to grip the bow, how to notch the arrow to the string (the arrow shaking badly), how to pull the curve of the bow back to their sighting eye (their soprano grunts like the hoarse chuffing of pigeons as they hauled on the little bows with all the power they could muster), and how to loose the arrow with a flick of the fingers (a rain of bows in the air, a shower of arrows falling limply to the earth). At that point I would emerge from the sycamores and reclaim my Meteorite.
I don’t remember that I ever scolded a runaway, for the archery girl was beautiful as well as gentle and the archery lane a tranquil island. Years later, when I read books about the Middle Ages in England and France, filled with castles and archery and knights and such, my mind reflexively set the action in that quiet green alley where bows flew and arrows lay facedown in the grass. For all the violence of the sharp arrows that did, on rare occasions, actually puncture the hay-stuffed targets, the archery lane was a wonderfully peaceful place, and my mind wanders back there even now, from the chaos and hubbub of my middle years.
The days of the Meteorites were circumscribed by geography. We were to be in certain places at certain times—the basketball court in the early morning (dew on the court, a toad or two), the arts-and-crafts room midmorning (Miguel’s eyes riveted to the face of his beloved), the gym before lunch (the rubbery slam of dodgeballs against walls, the clatter of glasses flying to the floor when a small boy was hit full in the face), on the softball field after lunch (languid, hot, song of cicadas), the pool (shimmering and cool and perfect) and archery lane in midafternoon, the basketball court again late in the day. I was nominally the basketball teacher, and so conducted ragged drills and motley scrimmages not only for the Meteorites, some of whom were barely bigger than the ball, but also for young Comets, Planets, and Asteroids (known to the rest of the camp as Hemorrhoids). I also coached the older boys, who came to the court in increasingly insolent waves, ending with my last class of the day, the Seniors, sneeringly fourteen and fifteen years old, some as tan and strong as their teacher, and one—only one, always one—determined to defeat his teacher in pitched combat.
That one was Andy, Randy Andy, sniggering scourge of the Senior Girls, artfully tousled black hair and puka-shell necklace, quick fists and a switchblade carried for show. Andy stole a bus, stole money, groped girls, smoked dope, came to camp drunk, started a brushfire near the softball field, cursed the camp director, urinated on walls, crucified toads to trees, beat a smaller boy bloody, and, hours after striking out near the end of a counselors-Seniors softball game, carefully smashed all sixteen of the camp’s bats to splinters—sizes 24 (Pee Wee Reese model) through 42 (Richie Allen model).
I have sometimes imagined the dark poetry of that act, the camp silent after hours, Andy emerging from his hiding place in the estate house, strolling down through the gathering dusk to the softball fields, dragging out the dusty canvas bat bag from the equipment shed, selecting the Pee Wee Reese model (you want to start small before working up to Dick Allen), taking a couple of practice cuts, selecting a young oak to absorb the blow in its belly, and then the sick crump of bat barrel against tree bone and the sudden green welt lashed oozing into the oak, and then a second swing and crack and shatter as the bat explodes. Andy drops the shaggy handle, shakes his hands to shuck the sting, and reaches for a 26: a Luis Aparicio. And through the thin woods the sound of vengeance echoes for almost an hour, until darkness.
Andy and I hated each other from the minute we met, as he slouched against a tree and muttered a joke under his breath while I explained a basketball drill to the restless Seniors. I was only a few years older than he was, and nervous, so I got in his face, and from that instant—a windy late afternoon in July, our faces an inch apart, his blackheads marching from one temple to another, my finger poking too hard into the little bowl of skin at the base of his throat—we were relentless enemies. It is a mark of my own chalky insecurity and mulish youth that I hounded Andy every chance I got, reporting his crimes to the director, ragging him from the sidelines of softball games, and once, by incredible luck, catching his fist in mid-swing (he was about to punch another boy for the second time) and so mortifying him before a girl, the ultimate humiliation for him and for me too, then. And now.
So every day at three o’clock, when the Seniors slouched up to my court and ran my drills and then circled watchfully as Andy and I stripped off our shirts to play one-on-one, there was the entrancing shock of possible blood in the air, and once there was blood in the air, mine. Andy waited patiently for the right long rebound and the right angle of me chasing it headlong, and as I lunged for the ball, he lashed his elbow into my mouth as hard as he could. But I won, and his hate rose another notch. I remember the garlic taste of my rage in my throat, and the tight circle of boys around us, staring, the only sounds the sharp shuffle of sneakers on dusty pavement and the relentless hammer of the ball.
Flirting with the female lifeguards was a nearly universal and daily habit among the hundreds of male creatures at the camp. It was a rare male counselor who did not detour his charges past the pool on their way to anywhere else. Not even the camp director, an ebullient and brilliant con man named Buck, was immune. He arranged his office in such a way that his gaze naturally strolled out the open French doors of the house veranda and down a short flight of stone steps to the pool. He spun on his huge chair, his eyes on the bikinis in the middle distance, recruiting students there is no camp on the entire North Shore that can offer the recreational and educational amenities we can, charming parents I understand that Marc has been named Camper of the Week three weeks running an unprecedented honor I may say and speaking of honor we
would be honored to see you and Mr. Harrow at the annual Inner Circle dinner for special friends and benefactors, chasing delinquent fees I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Kaplan, if we do not receive remuneration of your outstanding bill we will have to cancel Glen’s pool privileges which will come as a terrible blow to the boy, evading creditors my accountant tells me that the check was delivered yesterday via registered mail, arguing with his wife you told the Kaufmans their twins could come free!?, flirting with his wife what say we knock off early and knock one off, checking his toupee in the mirror goddamned rugs, writing camp advertisements more than one hundred acres of fields and fun staffed by one hundred board-certified educators, badgering food and gasoline and sports equipment and T-shirt vendors yes, sixteen bats, various weights, and placating angry parents I can assure you Mrs. Steinberg that David’s counselor was with him from the minute the accident occurred until his arrival at the oral surgeon’s office, and that this young fellow, a Cornell University engineering student I might add, had foresightedly brought both of David’s teeth with him in the ambulance. At every possible opportunity, Buck sauntered down to the pool, ostensibly to check on the insurance, the floats, the filter, the schedule, but really to savor the lithe bodies of his female employees. Because the camp sat high on a windy hill not far from the ocean, it was cold in the morning, even in July and August, and the lifeguards wore their sweatsuits until noon or so. After a few weeks I noticed that Buck conducted all his business in the morning so that he could be at the pool in the afternoon. When the sweatsuits were off.
The geometric light of high summer, the smell of chlorine, the shouts of children in the shallow end, the cannonball geysers of older boys hurtling into the middle by the bobbined rope, the streaming hair of Senior girls emerging blinking from the deep end, I remember it all now, my mind back in the itchy young cat-body I had then. I am bouncing down the stone steps toward the pool, peeling off my wet shirt, one eye on the shambling parade of Meteorites behind me watch the steps gentlemen the steps, the other eye staring at the shadow between the breasts of a girl in a bright yellow bikini fifty feet away. I take the last four steps in a casual easy bound and then lean easily into the pool, shorts and socks and sneakers and all, and as I go under I can hear the high-pitched voices of my boys in wild amazement: Counselor went in with his sneakers on…!
Of course I fell in love that summer, led there by the Meteorites. For weeks they watched me stare helplessly at one of the lifeguards, a shy lovely girl, and then one day they somehow conspired among themselves to bring her to me. They led her by the hand up the rickety stone steps of the castle, up the balustrade, down a wooden hall lined with sagging metal lockers, to our locker room, lined with sagging benches. I was slumped in the corner, adjusting the bandana I wore all that summer, waiting impatiently for the boys to change into their bathing trunks, their thin white slippery bodies like the startling white roots of plants just pulled from the ground. In walked Nancy, in her bathing suit. She was flanked by David and Daniel, who led her toward me by the hand, and then stepped back, Daniel giggling, David not.
I was very startled. There are few moments in life when you are idly dreaming about a book, a place, a meal, a girl, and you look up and there is your dream before you. Her hair was drying at the ends but still wet and tight to her head; one foot rested on the other as she leaned against a locker. Daniel was dancing about like an elf, quite proud of himself, but David was staring at me, waiting for something: a look I would not again see for years, until one of my own children, at the same age, regarded me as soberly with such powerful expectation.
Please sit down, here, sit here, move over Lucius, I say.
Lucius glares.
I’m so seeprised to sue you here, I say.
The boys giggle at my tangled tongue.
The boys told me you liked me very much, she says.
My God.
And I like you, she says. Very much.
My God.
I, I’ve liked you for a long time, I say.
And with that we rose, as if rising simultaneously was what we had in mind, as if we had agreed on something. We collected the boys (Tim was hiding behind the locker naked), and we paraded the Meteorites down the rickety stairs and toward the pool. Somewhere on the stairs we held hands, and so began that summer love, doomed and perfect, having much to do with the taste of sunburned skin, car radios, bitter words on lawns, letters on looseleaf paper, bright yellow notes on the driver’s seat of my bus at dusk, her college boyfriend, her coy best friend, her mother’s sharp eyes, the door of her room half-open, her shirt half-off, her face half-turned away.
The Meteorites are in their mid-twenties now, college graduates mostly, I would guess, and at work, married, in prison, who knows? I have thought about them every summer—summer brings me the Meteorites, ten strong always, Miguel still one of us—but I have never made the slightest effort to see them again. They would not remember me, and in their rangy men’s bodies, long-boned, tending to first fat, I would not recognize the four- and five- and six-year-olds they were. Yet I think of them more every year. I have small children of my own now, and I am surrounded again by hubbub and jelly; and it is summer as I write, with the smell of hot afternoon on my shirt.
But there is more than memory here, more than nostalgia, more than a man’s occasional yearning to be the quick boy he was. I learned about love, how to love, that summer—and not from the girl who came from the water, although I loved her and she me, for a time. No, I loved David because he loved Daniel; because David came to me that August morning and touched me on the shoulder and whispered, Counselor, Danny needs you; because after I cleaned Daniel, in that filthy bathroom, David was waiting, his glasses askew, and when Daniel and I emerged into the clean sunshine, the boys embraced each other, their thin fluttering hands like birds on the bones of their shoulders.
Counselor, Danny needs you, spoken by a small boy on a high hill, and the four words fell from his mouth and were scattered by the four winds, years ago: but they have been a storm in me.
First Kiss
One thing no one informs you of when you get ready to kiss a girl
For the first time is where to put your nose: do you lay it alongside
Hers, like a skipper eases his ship along a dock, or do you take turns,
Alternating left and right? You laugh, but this is a pressing question,
As you well remember yourself. And your hands—do they…quest?
Or do they alight on her shoulders like birds, like leaves? The glasses
On each of your noses—is it sweet when they clink, or is that dorkish?
Should you take them off just before you kiss, or is that too confident
That you will be kissing? And most of all the breathing. This is a real
Problem. Do you hold your breath? Do you aim for staggered breaths
Like in the pool? And who is in charge? If your partner wants to retire,
What are the accepted signal flags for such a decision? Can I appeal?
I hear you laughing, but you were in the same boat. We were shaking.
We so wanted to do this well and so wanted not to be seen to want to.
In a sense it was practice for so very many things that we would want
But would not know how to get, or know what to do with after we got
Them. You know full well what I mean. Nothing was as gently sweet,
Nothing so roaringly nerve-racking; how could both things be true at
Once? How could that be? Yet it was so, and would be hourly more so.
[Silence]
For several days when we were young, my sister stayed silent. She was perhaps twenty, a student of spirituality. I was thirteen, a student of surliness. She announced that she would be silent for a while and then commenced to be so. My parents were gracious about it. Seems like there’s a lot more room in the house now, said my dad. We should applaud and celebrate this form of prayer, said my mom. Cooool, my brothers sai
d. Is this permanent?
Eventually my sister spoke again—to yell at me, as I recall—but I never forgot those days. I was reminded of it recently when she emerged from a very long silence at the Buddhist monastery where she now lives, and I asked her what her first words were when she emerged from her silent retreat, and she grinned and said, “Pass the butter,” which I did, which made her laugh, because those actually were her first words after the retreat.
I really wanted that butter, she says.
Is it hard to be silent? I ask.
In the beginning it is, she says. Then it becomes a prayer.
I contemplate snippets of silence in mine existence and find them few; but I find that this delights rather than dismays me, for the chaos and hubbub in my life, most of my sea of sound, are my children, who are small quicksilver russet testy touchy tempestuous mammals always underfoot in the understory, yowling and howling and weeping and chirping and teasing and shouting and moaning and laughing and singing and screaming and sneering and sassing and humming and snoring and wheezing and growling and muttering and mumbling and musing and so making magic music all the livelong day. Which is pretty cool; though it will not be permanent.
But sometimes they are silent and I am a student of their silence: my teenage daughter absorbed in book or homework, curled in her chair like a cat in the thicket of her room; my sons asleep, their limbs flung to the four holy directions, their faces beatific, their bedclothes rippled hills and dells, their beds aswarm with socks and shirts and books and balls; or all three children dozing in the back seat of the car as we slide through the velvet night, their faces flashing cinematically in my mirror as streetlights snick by metronomically; or the way they sat together silently before the silent television one crystal morning, four years ago, and watched two flaming towers crumble down down down unto unthinkable unimaginable ash and dust. Silently the towers fell, and silently my children watched, the twin scars burning into their brains.