City Boy

by Herman Wouk

  “Uncle Sid,” said the head counselor, “here's one more boy for Bunk Thirteen. He's a little too smart for the bunk we assigned him to originally, so you get him.”

  At this auspicious introduction, Herbie became the target of five glares from five boys seated around the counselor.

  “Don't tell me we're stuck with General Garbage!” cried Lennie. “My summer is ruined.”

  “That's enough out of you,” said the counselor in a flat voice, but he regarded Herbie with no enthusiasm himself.

  “Uncle Sid is our dramatic and music counselor,” said Uncle Sandy, “so a smart boy who isn't very athletic should fit right in. Make room here, Ted.” He addressed a hawk-faced boy with pale blond hair and a wide mouth that seemed to split the face into two parts. The boy threw a mutinous look at the head counselor and hitched himself across the seat which he had been occupying alone. Herbie sat. The head counselor walked off—and there the fat boy was. Like a sailor embarked in a hell ship, like a policeman assigned to a tunnel, like a priest sent to a squalid settlement in the fever belt of India, Herbie Bookbinder was committed beyond hope of release to a summer in Bunk Thirteen.

  “What's your name?” inquired Uncle Sid.

  Herbie told him, but he had hardly done so when Lennie chirruped, “General Garbage. His name's General Garbage.”

  “Hi, General,” sneered a sallow boy in a red and yellow sweater with the CM emblem in front. Cruel nicknames catch on among boys like sparks in dry straw. Complimentary ones are almost unknown.

  “What bunk were you in before they moved you here?” said the counselor.

  “Bunk Eight. It was a Junior bunk,” Herbie answered defensively, with a weak show of indignation.

  “Guess maybe you belonged there. You're too small for this bunk, that's for sure,” said the hawk-faced boy, looking out of the window.

  “Now, let's be fair to him, fellows,” said the counselor. “He has a right to have a good time.”

  “Not if it spoils ours,” said Lennie. “Look, Uncle Sid, I know this kid from way back, from school an' everything. He can't run, he can't play ball, he can't fight, he can't do nothin'. He's just a fat sissy, and a teacher's pet, what's more, and none of us don't want him in Bunk Thirteen.”

  It seemed to Herbie that every word Lennie spoke was true, and that he himself was an abhorrent little thing, unworthy to stay alive.

  “Uncle Sid,” he said, “I sure don't wanna stay in the bunk if the fellows don't want me. Heck, I'd rather go back to Bunk Eight. Come on, let's go to Uncle Sandy.”

  Ted, the hawk-face, looked around at him. “Never mind, General Garbage,”,he said. “They stuck you in with us. I been goin' to this camp five years and I never saw no short punk like you in Bunk Thirteen. But now you're here, stay here.”

  “Now, that's the spirit,” said Uncle Sid. “We'll get to know each other and all have a dandy time.”

  This effort brought on a thick cloud of silence. The dramatic counselor, by profession a teacher of music in a girls' high school, lacked the touch for his summer job.

  Herbie ventured at last to say to his neighbor, “Are you guys Seniors?”

  “I sure shoulda been a Senior after five years in Gauss's Gruesome Gulch,” said Ted. “But catch ‘em doin’ anything right in this chain gang. We're the highest bunk of Intermediates.”

  Uncle Sid felt it behooved him to uphold the camp's fair name, little as he knew about it. “Why do you keep coming back to camp if you think it's a chain gang?”

  “'Cause my folks gotta park me somewhere while they play golf all summer, and ol' man Gauss has my mom hypnotized, that's why!” Ted burst out bitterly. “If he hanged me it would be O.K. with her.” He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, drew a horrible skeleton on the side of the car, and labeled it, “Uncle Sid after two months at Manitou.” Herbie laughed. Uncle Sid noticed the art work and made the hawk-face rub it out.

  A long, dismal quiet ensued in Bunk Thirteen, while around them the rest of the camp chattered vivaciously.

  Herbie thought about the day's events and concluded that no more mischances could befall him. He seemed to have had more concentrated bad luck in the past hour than in the previous eleven years of his term in the world. But he was mistaken in thinking it was over; he was about to bring on himself the worst trouble yet.

  “Uncle Sid, can I go get a drink of water?”

  The counselor said, “Yes, and don't bother me with such questions. You're with the big boys now.”

  Herbie sneaked off, still more crestfallen—nothing he did seemed right today—while Lennie jeered after him, “Unkie Siddie, pwetty pwease may I get a dwinkie water?”

  The cooler with its rack of paper cups was at the forward end of the car. Herbie drew himself a tepid cupful and stepped out on the platform, being uncomfortably close to Uncle Sandy at the cooler. As he raised the cup to his lips he saw Lucille looking at him through the glass of the door in the next car. She smiled, and beckoned.

  Now, Herbie had almost forgotten Lucille. He did not at all remember that his wild impulse after their first meeting had set in motion the chain of cause and effect that had deposited Lennie, Cliff, and himself on this train speeding to the Berkshire Mountains. A long-headed politician would have congratulated himself, at this point, on the success of his scheme, but the importance of the moment was lost on Herbie. Lucille was only an immediate temptation, sweet, but dangerous. Uncle Sandy's warning rang in his ears.

  He beckoned in return, but Lucille shook her head and waved at him, somewhat imperiously, to come to her. There are times when a man has no choice. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, and slipped quietly through to the other car, to Lucille's side. They shrank into a corner of the platform.

  “I ain't supposed to be here,” Herbie whispered.

  “Well, I ain't supposed to be talking to you, either,” retorted Lucille. “Go on back if you wanna.”

  They leaned against the wall and silently savored the delight of being together in violation of the law.

  “What bunk are you in?” said the boy after a while.

  “Eleven. Intermediates. How about you?”

  “Thirteen. That's the highest Intermediate bunk there is.”

  “What bunk is Lennie in?”

  This question vexed Herbie very much. To spend time talking about Lennie, practically at the risk of his head, seemed ridiculous.

  “What difference does that make?” he growled.

  “Oh, you!” The girl gave him a sly look. “I'm just curious.”

  “Well, he's in my bunk, if you wanna know, an' I wish he was down in you-know-where instead.”

  “Herbie, why do you hate Lennie so much? He's a nice boy.”

  Herbie was trying to think of a devastating answer when the train door opened—and Uncle Sandy entered the girls' car!

  He did not notice the two culprits, but stood on the platform with his back to them, so close that the boy could have touched him. “Aunt Tillie,” he called, “may I speak to you for a moment?”

  Frozen with fright, the boy and girl heard the voice of Aunt Tillie, drawing nearer as she spoke. “Certainly, Uncle Sandy. What is it?”

  “About the busses at the station, Tillie. Mr. Gauss only hired four,” said Uncle Sandy, and proceeded with an involved conversation about unloading the campers from the train. He did not move, and placed where he was he blocked Herbie's escape. The children stood silent and rigid as lizards.

  Many moments passed. It began to seem more and more likely that the weak-eyed Sandy might actually finish his business and go away without catching them in sin. Herbie, at first terror stricken, found the danger slightly enjoyable as time went by. He turned to Lucille at last, and winked. This was a fearsome blunder, for the little girl's self-control, already at the breaking point, blew completely apart. She burst out in a loud, raucous giggle. Uncle Sandy jumped several inches in the air at this startling sound directly behind him; then he whirled, and confr
onted Herbie.

  But the feelings of the small fat boy at this juncture are not to be described. Suffice it to say that he was marched back into the boys' car, publicly held up as an example of an undersize Romeo who wouldn't obey rules, and compelled to sit beside Uncle Sandy, with a large sign, reading “Camp Goop Number One,” hung around his neck. And it was in this unenviable condition that Herbie, now universally known as General Garbage, rode into the Promised Land.

  TWELVE

  Mr. Gauss's Camp Manitou

  The legend that there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow must have been started by city people to entertain their children, who never see more than a broken section of the glorious arch between the roofs and so can easily believe that where the bow touches earth there are places of glamour and marvels. But anybody who has lived in open spaces has seen that the end of the rainbow rests on plain old ground no different from the rest of the world and that there's no pot of gold at the foot, either, just a mud puddle after the rain.

  Herbie's vision of Camp Manitou had been woven of rainbows. He had dreamed of smooth, grassy playing fields freshly marked in white, luxurious cottages, a wide, gleaming lake with a sandy beach, and sundry other charms compiled from books of English school life and movies laid in summer resorts. The reality was a mud puddle after the rain.

  Camp Manitou was a huddle of weather-beaten wooden bungalows half walled with rusty screens, situated on the shore of an anonymous body of water too small to be called a lake but too large to be dismissed as a pond, of a pretty blue color, and rather swampy than otherwise. The “bunks” stood in two rows, with a gravel path known as Company Street between them, and it was down this thoroughfare that Herbie marched with the rest of the camp, taking his first look at the rainbow territory. Company Street began at the dining hall, a large, crude wooden building midway on a hill, sloped down to the bunks, and branched off to a swimming dock at the water's edge. Coming down the hill, Herbie had a good view of the playing fields. There were two baseball diamonds knee high in daisies and less attractive weeds; a clump of tennis courts with nets sagging, net posts askew, and ragged dandelion patches flourishing in the red clay; a basketball court with one basket erect and the other flat on its back; handball walls with the sun shining through loose boards; and a rickety swimming dock hauled up on a rock-strewn shore, with one end lying in the shallow water beside a half-sunk rowboat.

  When Uncle Sid and his seven charges entered the bungalow labeled “13,” what met Herbie's eyes reminded him even less of a crock of gold. Bare iron cots were scattered about, seven new mattresses were dumped in the middle of the floor, and rust-streaked canvas flaps, evidently designed for protection against rain, were dangling along the walls and slapping against the screens when the wind blew. The roof was decorated with various names of boys carved, chalked, or painted in barbarous letters; outstanding among them was an inscription two feet long in thick red paint, reading “WILLIE ‘STUPID’ SCHNEIDERMAN.” Herbie's trunk, which had been sent on to camp a week earlier, was lying in a pile of luggage, upside down.

  As may be imagined, the boys did not observe this decay and neglect without loud grumbling. Lennie declared that Mr. Gauss was a “crook” and that he wanted to take the next train home. Uncle Sid was so surprised and disheartened that he could not silence the rebellious comments on all sides of him. When he came into the bunk and saw the chaos, his self-command gave way, and he slumped forlornly on the bare springs of a cot, saying, “Oh, dear. I never bargained for this.” The boys, baffled by having the representative of authority come over to their side, stood or sat around in silent dejection.

  But a leader always arises in time of trouble.

  “Look, guys, this ain't half as bad as it was in '25,” spoke up Ted, the hawk-faced boy. “Some of the bunks didn't even have screens on 'em then. I guarantee you in a week you won't know the joint. Come on, let's divvy up the cots and mattresses and get this mess cleaned up. We gotta live in here.”

  Heartened by having something to do besides complain, his bunkmates went to work. They put the cots and mattresses in place, changed from city clothes into the brief camping costume, made up beds with the new linen and blankets each boy had brought, swept the floor, brushed the festooned cobwebs from the corners, rolled up the rain flaps, and by degrees began to be gayer and gayer.

  The same process went on throughout the camp. Evening came on swiftly. When the double line of about eighty boys trooped up to the dining hall, there was more singing, cheering, and gay banter than one would have thought possible after seeing the glum and angry faces that had come down the hill that afternoon. Mr. Gauss, whatever his faults, had a working knowledge of the minds of boys. The dinner was a spectacular feast of chopped liver, chicken soup, steak, fried potatoes, fruit salad, and ice cream. A letter-writing period was announced immediately after dinner, and free camp stationery was distributed. Shining, happy epistles went forth in dozens from the gorged boys. Had the correspondence period been announced when the young population first arrived at camp, the tenor of the letters might have been much different, but, as has been said, Mr. Gauss knew his boys. Herbie, like the others, had resolved to write a scorcher, but the text of his communication ran:

  Dear Ma and Pa,

  It sure is swell here. We had steak and ice cream for supper just now. The place is real beautiful, with grass and trees and a lake. I'm in a swell bunk and the counselor is great. Everything is swell. This is a great camp. Well, have to quit writing now and finish unpacking. Will write more soon.

  Your loving son,

  Herbie.

  This may seem a rather intoxicated screed, and so it is. Boys can get just as drunk on steak and ice cream as their elders do on cocktails.

  Next morning howls of rage and protest rang through the camp again as it developed that the campers were going to be used to repair the fields. It was the new campers who did the howling. Veterans like Ted shrugged, and shouldered their spades and hoes. The objections grew so loud that Uncle Sandy called an assembly on the “parade ground,” a clearing between the bunks and the lake front.

  “I can hardly believe it,” he shouted, squinting around at the array of frowning boys whose garden tools glittered in the strong sunlight, “but I'm told that there are one or two lazy, shiftless slackers in our midst who don't know what camp spirit means.

  “Who's going to play on these fields, anyway? We are! Then who should fix them up so they can be played on? We should! If anybody will work harder today on those fields than I do, let him come to me, and I'll give him Super-senior privileges for the whole summer. And if there's anyone who doesn't want to work today, let him step right out now and say so.”

  Nobody stepped out, of course.

  “Well, I guess I've been told wrong, and I'm glad of it!” cried Uncle Sandy. “Every one of you guys has got the real Camp Manitou spirit after all. On to the fields, men!” He brandished a pitchfork with a great display of heartiness and marched off, the campers following with laggard steps, confused but not convinced by his argument.

  It was a diddle, of course. Uncle Sandy was being paid, and if Mr. Gauss imposed gardening on him as part of his job, that was his bad luck. The parents of the campers, however, had paid three hundred dollars per boy for a summer of games and pleasure, not for the privilege of digging weeds. Mr. Gauss was certainly cutting the corners of honest policy.

  But again, he knew his boys. A day's toil in the fields was as healthful for them as sports, and once they warmed to it they enjoyed it, especially when the counselors joined them in jokes about “Uncle Gussie's” greed. He saved a lot of money by this procedure and the fields were swiftly made usable, and another excellent dinner, followed by a new Western movie, plugged the possible leaks in his scheme via angry letters. He had pursued this method for several years, and a few campers had actually been withdrawn by indignant parents who learned of it, but, balancing the loss against the gain, Mr. Gauss had decided it was sound practice, and he stol
idly persisted in it.

  For a few days Herbie alternated between liking camp life and hating it—liking it when the sun was warm on him, or when he was diving into the sweet waters of the lake, or when he was eating, or when he sat with Cliff watching the sunset in the honeysuckle-scented scented evening breeze; hating it when the bugle coarsely called him out of bed, when he had to stand rigid for inspections, when he was marched out to play games he didn't enjoy, and when anyone called him General Garbage, which was often. He gradually came to the view that camp was like the rest of life, with good and bad in it, most of the bad being traceable to adults or to Lennie Krieger. So faded this particular rainbow, once for all.

  But there was another bow that glowed brightly as ever in the changeable sky—Lucille Glass. Herbie's first exploration of the grounds in his free time was in the direction of the girls' camp, and soon brought him up against a tall, thick hedge reinforced by a barbed-wire fence. He patiently examined its entire length, and found that it ran to the water's edge at one end and buried itself in brambles at the other end, near the top of the hill. There was one break in it about thirty yards from the water, wide enough for a pair of good-sized boys to walk through side by side, but this was closed with a heavily padlocked gate. Evidently Mr. Gauss was no encourager of romance.

  “Uncle Sid,” Herbie said diffidently that night in the bunk, “do we ever get to see the girls?”