And again, it wasn't my fault that she was wearing her favorite sweater, and that streaks of chili don't exactly go with mango, which is a color that you shouldn't wear on a camping trip anyway.
I think this is why I was the one who ended up carrying all the pots and pans down to the stream to wash them.
Meryl Lee helped. She didn't have to, but she did. So it wasn't bad at all, scrubbing at the pots together and her splashing me a little and me splashing her a little until we finally gave up and splashed each other all over so that it looked like we had jumped in—which washed all of the chili off me. Which is more than I can say for Mrs. Sidman's mango sweater.
But by the time we were done, there was a breeze skimming over the top of the stream, and it wasn't warm. We stacked the pots near the rest of the food, and then stood by the fire—Mrs. Sidman did not seem to mind me adding a few sticks to make it blaze up. Still, we were pretty wet, and the problem with getting warm by a fire is that one side of you is always cold, and the other side is always roasting. So you have to keep turning around and around.
We were supposed to go swimming in the afternoon, but the breeze that sent me and Meryl to the fire got stronger when a few of the clouds stacked themselves up between us and the sun, and so we played Capture the Flag instead, which our side won because Danny cheated and hid our flag about three stories up in a pine tree. And after that we climbed down past the waterfall and followed a deer track that led out from it and then climbed back above the waterfall and explored an abandoned stone house in a field beyond it. There were supposed to be rattlesnakes in the basement, but none showed.
It was a whole lot colder when we got back, and so Mrs. Sidman sent us to bring in more wood, and while we did, Mrs. Baker heated up pots of hot chocolate—which tastes better in the woods by an open fire than it does anywhere else—and Mrs. Sidman started unpacking the hamburger patties and glaring at me again, since she wasn't sure whether she could cook them with only one spoon to turn them over.
Anyone would know that she couldn't, and I think that even Mrs. Baker knew it wasn't right to blame me entirely when four of Mrs. Sidman's remaining seven healthy fingers got burns on the ends.
Let me tell you, she made a big deal of it.
After supper, Meryl Lee and I did the pots again.
It was hard to tell when night came on. We got the fire going pretty high—almost as high as where Danny hid the flag—and the crackling and snapping and small explosions of pine resin sent out sparks that looked like rising stars. The clouds had gotten so thick now that there was no sunset to see, and the breeze had picked up to a kind of steady rhythm, steady enough that not even a single mosquito was brave enough to fly out into it.
"Just wait," said Mrs. Baker.
But all through the singing that we did that night, no mosquito showed its face. Which just goes to show that even Mrs. Baker isn't right all the time.
Mrs. Sidman tried some ghost stories after the singing, but there's something about principals that makes it impossible for them to tell ghost stories. I mean, you can't spend your days in the Main Administrative Office and then hope to scare someone with a story about a headless ghost. You don't have a chance. She tried to make her voice all low and quavery, but she just got to sound like old Pastor McClellan at Saint Andrew's grumbling out a hymn. When she finally got to the end and shouted out the climax—which was supposed to make us all scream in fascinated terror—not much happened. So she sat back down and looked at us like she was going to make us all repeat seventh grade next year. There's a special kind of principal look for that, and even though she had only been a principal for two months, she had it down.
So when Mrs. Sidman got up to give her what-you-should-be-careful-about-in-the-woods speech, we didn't pay much attention, either. After all, that's what happens when you have teachers and principals along on a camping trip: You hear about all sorts of disasters, like mosquito bites, bee stings, what to do if you trip over a stone and get blood on your knee. You're told not to wander so far from camp at night that you can't see the firelight—as if that's going to be a real issue. And you're reminded where the latrines are, and how you shouldn't use too much toilet paper since there wasn't a whole lot, and what the shovel is for—stuff like that.
But when she came to the snake part, she got our attention.
"There are poisonous snakes all around here," she said. "If they bite you, your leg will swell up until you have ankles like cantaloupes and shins like watermelons. If you get bitten, you have to swallow this very quickly"—she held up a small glass vial—"so that you can make it to the hospital. You have to swallow it within thirty seconds for it to work. And even if you get it swallowed in thirty seconds, there is no guarantee. So in addition to this vial, I'll have to cut between the fang marks"—she held up a knife that Long John Silver would have been proud of—"and hope that some of the venom will ooze out along with your pus and blood."
I felt my throat start to close up. Meryl Lee took my hand.
Doug Swieteck moaned.
"This is what she should have used for her ghost story," said Danny.
"So be careful to check your sleeping bags before you get into them," said Mrs. Sidman. "It might be a good idea to turn them inside out once, just in case. And be sure not to sleep directly under a low branch. Snakes can climb trees, and sometimes they crawl out onto branches and fall, and you don't want a snake to fall across your face while you're sleeping."
By the time she was done, no one was talking. No one was moving. And Doug Swieteck was close to passing out.
"I'm going to stay up all night," said Danny.
"We can keep the fire going," said Mai Thi.
"I'll help," I said.
Meryl Lee squeezed my hand. Hard.
And that's why long after midnight, after everyone else had turned their sleeping bags inside out, shaken them, then turned them back and crawled in and zipped them up over their heads, Danny and Mai Thi and Meryl Lee and Doug and I and Mrs. Baker—I guess the part about the snakes got to her, too—were sitting around the fire as the flames faded and the blue and gold embers glowed like jewels. We sat in close, with blankets over our backs.
None of us said anything. We sat beside each other by the fire, silent, watching the jewels change and glow first into white diamonds, then into sapphires, then into rubies. Sometimes Mrs. Baker got up and threw another piece of wood on the fire, and the sparks shattered up into the night darkness and we watched them ascend until they disappeared like the stuff of dreams. The breeze clicked the branches above us together, and the water farther away tumbled and dropped into the pool below.
It was about as far away from the Perfect House that you can get and still be in the same universe.
We probably would have stayed there all night—if it hadn't started to rain.
Actually, "started" isn't really the right word. It didn't come on like rain usually does, a little at a time until first you realize that you're feeling a drop or two, and then you realize it's more than a drop or two, and then you know you need to get someplace because it's going to really come down in a minute. Here, one second it was all ascending sparks, and the next it was all rain. It must have been something like the moment the doors closed on Noah's Ark.
We threw our wool blankets over our heads, but it was already too late. We held the blankets tight around us as a cold wind dropped down with the rain, and while every single seventh grader from Mrs. Baker's class was hollering and trying to keep already soggy sleeping bags from getting a whole lot soggier and asking if snakes came out in the rain, Danny and I loaded more wood onto the fire to keep it from going out.
And that's pretty much what we all did for the rest of the night—hollered and wrung out sleeping bags and kept throwing wood onto the fire. Except for Mrs. Baker, who went inside the tent with Mrs. Sidman.
When dawn finally came—which we were all ready for, let me tell you—every bit of ground around the campsite was wet. Every bit. Puddles
everywhere. It squelched while we walked, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Sometimes it might have been our sneakers squelching.
Mrs. Baker came out of the tent and looked at us with half-closed eyes. "Awfully soggy, isn't it," she said.
Why is it that when teachers go on campouts, they have tents?
Mrs. Sidman came out with a dark green poncho that covered her head and reached down to her ankles. She looked around the miserable campsite. We all had mud up to our knees, and most of us had draped our sleeping bags on pine branches above us; water dripped from their corners.
"You look like refugees," she said.
"Perhaps we should move toward breakfast," said Mrs. Baker.
Mrs. Sidman nodded. "You used a lot of wood last night," she told us.
"I'll find the eggs," said Mrs. Baker.
That morning, we had scrambled eggs spiced with pine bark, which came from the sticks we used to stir them. The orange Kool-Aid we drank was muddy, because the rain had stirred up the river before we filled our jugs. The bread was soggy, so we dripped honey onto the slices and rolled them and they didn't taste too bad.
Mrs. Sidman warmed the rest of the chili over the fire again, in case anyone wanted it. Only Doug Swieteck did—which was a mistake, as it turned out.
I think if it had kept on raining, we would all have gotten in under Mrs. Sidman's poncho and walked back home. But after Meryl Lee and I had carried all the pots to the stream—we waded right on in with them, since we were wet through already—the clouds started to shred, and sunbeams slit through. Each beam stabbed at the cold winds, until one by one they whimpered and died. The whole sky grew yellow, and we threw off the wet blankets—nothing smells worse than a wet woolen blanket—and then squelched around the campsite gathering more wood for the day, until suddenly it was so warm that someone said, "Let's go swimming," and we all ran a little way down the paths to the latrines and put on shorts and came back to the water and stepped carefully in—it was still cold—until Danny finally let himself slide down with the high current and over the waterfall ledge and into the pool. When he surfaced, he was laughing and snorting with water up his nose.
"It's great!" he said. And so we all went over the waterfall and got water up our noses.
Even Meryl Lee.
Even Mai Thi—holding Meryl Lee's hand.
That's what we did most of the morning, while Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Sidman stood above us and watched.
I could tell that Mrs. Baker was wanting to try it. It was probably getting hot on the open rocks above the falls, with the sun coming straight down now. Everything in the woods around us was steaming and glistening. The ferns, the pines, the leaves, the moss—everything. Even the teachers.
It's got to be hard to be a teacher all the time and not jump into a pool of clear water and come up laughing and snorting with water up your nose.
We ate lunch—chicken salad sandwiches and cucumber spears, which didn't need utensils—and then we headed back to the water, where Danny was throwing dives that the rest of us tried to match but couldn't. He could flip one and a half times and land headfirst right where the falls hit the pool, disappearing in white spray. Once he got around two full turns, which no human being should be able to do, and came up laughing and snorting so hard he could barely breathe.
That's all we did most of the afternoon. Not a diagrammed sentence in sight. Swimming and diving in a waterfall through the heated hours. Until finally we came back up to the campsite and Mrs. Baker started to assign our chores.
Now, you have to understand that we'd been here for a day and a half, and in all that time Doug Swieteck hadn't followed the gentlemen sign and used what was over the two ridges. It was pretty clear he wanted to. Actually, it was very clear he wanted to. But he wasn't going to use a hole in the middle of the woods, he said, even if he had dug it himself.
Still, when you've eaten chili the night before, and chili for breakfast, you can't hold it off forever. Even Doug Swieteck knew that, and that's why he finally gave in. He didn't have any choice.
He was gone for a long time. No one said anything, but everyone watched down the path.
And no one was surprised when he came back smiling—which you can understand.
He probably had no idea what had found him, and what was now following him.
Even we couldn't tell.
"It looks like smoke," said Mai Thi.
"But it's following him," said Danny.
Mrs. Baker sighed. "It's not smoke," she said.
"It's mosquitoes," I said.
Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes.
We all ran. Doug Swieteck couldn't quite figure out why, until the first ones landed on him. He looked down and saw his arms covered. That was until they flew into his eyes. Then he ran, too, and probably hit a whole lot more trees than he would have if the world was a fairer place.
The mosquitoes followed us like little airplanes. You could hear them buzzing.
We ran down to the water and splashed at them.
They hovered above us and laughed.
We ran toward the woods and swatted at them with pine branches.
They laughed some more.
Then we ran toward the fire, since Mrs. Baker said they hated smoke.
They don't. Hiding in the smoke helps about as much as scrunching under a desk during an atomic bomb attack.
"Keep moving and stay in groups," said Mrs. Baker, which is the same strategy to use if you're floating in the ocean and surrounded by sharks. It means that anyone on the outside of the group gets picked off. So we took turns getting in close to the center—except I gave Meryl Lee my turn since she had helped me with the pots. She said that I saved her about a pint of blood—which was worth it the way she smiled at me when she said this.
And that's how Mrs. Bigio found us when she hiked in at dusk—all huddled into small groups, swatting hopelessly at hordes of mosquitoes, nothing cooking on the fire. (Mrs. Sidman was in the tent, with the entrance zipped up.)
Mrs. Bigio unslung her backpack, whipped out a can of insect repellant, and went to work on us. Then she loaded wood onto the fire and sent half of us out for more. "The rest of you, bring me three large flat stones from the river. And scrub them clean! And bring back two pots of water, too. Who's been cleaning these?"
When we came back with the stones and pots of water, she unloaded garlic and carrots and potatoes and turnips and chuck beef and tomatoes.
Mai Thi stared at it all. "Thit bo kho?" she asked.
"It will be by the time we're done," said Mrs. Bigio. "The curry and gingerroot are in the front pocket there. I couldn't find any lemongrass, so we'll have to make do."
She and Mai Thi made do. In a little while, the water was boiling, and they had chopped up the potatoes and turnips into one pot, and the chuck beef into another. And then they combined them and added everything else that Mrs. Bigio had brought. And even if there wasn't any lemongrass, it all smelled as wonderful as any food cooked over an open fire can smell—which is pretty wonderful, let me tell you.
Just as we saw the first star, Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi ladled the stew out into bowls—that Mrs. Bigio had packed—and gave us spoons—that Mrs. Bigio had picked up all along the trail. "You can never be too careful about your supplies," she said to Mrs. Sidman, who, because she was eating hot thit bo kho, was happy enough not to blame anything on me. Even though I still was the one who carried the pots down to the stream to clean them out.
With Meryl Lee.
And neither of us minded at all.
We were still there when Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi came down to wash Mrs. Bigio's cutting knives—which she wouldn't let anyone but Mai Thi touch—and when Mrs. Bigio said to Mai Thi that she had meant to be up to the campsite earlier but that she had taken the morning to speak with the Catholic Relief Agency that had sponsored Mai Thi when she came from Vietnam. She wanted Mai Thi to know that the house where she was living with the relief sisters was very nice, but if she wanted, that is, if Mai
Thi would like to, Mrs. Bigio had a small house and she was living all alone now and she thought that maybe, if Mai Thi would ever, could ever imagine that—until Mai Thi put her arms around Mrs. Bigio, and Mrs. Bigio put her arms around Mai Thi, and the ripples of the water replaced all words.
Good Lord, for alliance!
***
That night, I lay awake. It seemed that the soggy ground had sunk down and left a whole lot of rocks to poke up into me. I watched the bazillion stars amaze the sky above. I watched until they fell asleep themselves. Half my mind on sea, half on shore. Thinking about Mai Thi and Mrs. Bigio. And Lieutenant Baker coming home to Mrs. Baker. And Danny Hupfer getting ready for his bar mitzvah. And Bobby Kennedy. And Martin Luther King, Jr. And how in five years I'd have to register for the Vietnam draft.
And how the dew was starting to soak my sleeping bag.
So I was still awake when the dawn started to think about showing herself. The air was coloring everything gray, and the fog was coming up from the ground in white shreds and billows, as if the whole campsite had lifted itself up into the clouds overnight. I slipped out of my dewy sleeping bag and walked through the white and the gray to the water. When I reached it, the stream rippled happily, as if it had been waiting just for me all this time. I knelt down and lowered my palm into it. Cold. Frigidly cold. But I rolled up my pants and waded in. Beneath me, the rocks of the streambed felt smooth and slick, even soft, as the water rushed past, carrying itself away.
Then I looked upstream.
The disk of the sun had just come up, and the billows of fog had bowed to it and backed away. The river was a sudden ribbon of silvery light, flickering and sparkling and flashing, carrying the new light on its back all the way down from the high mountains. It was so bright that you couldn't see below the surface until the water was right up to you, and then it was suddenly clear, and buoying me up in its rush. And it never stopped, this rush of bright water from the mountains, these flashes and chunks of light from the sun. There was so much of it to come.
The Wednesday Wars Page 22