City Boy

by Herman Wouk

  “O.K., O.K.,” said Ted. “I been at this camp a long time. If we see a nickel o' that dough again, it'll be a miracle.”

  “He's gotta gimme back the seventy-five bucks for material!” said Herbie. “I owe it.”

  “Don't be silly,” exclaimed Felicia fretfully. “What are you boys talking about? He's got to give us back all of it. You talk as though there was a question about it. Is he a robber? It's our money, not his. How can he possibly keep a penny of it?”

  Ted looked sidelong at her out of one eye, like a rooster. “This is my sixth year at Manitou,” he said. “Inside that box is money, an' outside that box is Mr. Gauss. All there is between 'em is a lid. It ain't enough.… Well, it was fun anyhow.” He shrugged. “More fun than I ever had in this hellhole. Thanks for lettin' me in on it, Herb.”

  “Aw, yer crazy, Ted,” Herbie began, but the bugle sounded retreat, and on this foreboding note of Ted's they were compelled to part.

  A few minutes later the boys of Bunk Thirteen sat around on their cots in pajamas, awaiting Uncle Sandy's announcement of the Skipper-for-a-Day.

  “Who you gonna appoint for Uncle Sandy, Herb?” said Lennie deferentially.

  “Heck, Lennie, I ain't won yet.”

  “You won. Nobody else can possibly win.”

  The other boys voiced a chorus of assents to this. They were proud of Herbie now. Boys from other bunks were shouting congratulations through the screen.

  “Well, let's wait till he announces it, anyhow,” said Herbie.

  Uncle Sid said, “I'm proud of you, Herbie, I really am. What you did was remarkable. You have a great future.” He puffed anxiously at a forbidden cigarette held in the hollow of his hand. Poor Uncle Sid was actually tense and nervous on Herbie's behalf. It is a strange thing that happens to these harassed adults and near-adults called counselors. Submerged in a children's world for the sake of a few dollars and a summer in the country, they come to take the events of that world with unsmiling earnestness. After all, the matters which people regard seriously in adult life are seldom less trivial, or indeed very different in kind, from the concerns of the boys at Manitou—the quest for success, the rivalries of cliques, the pursuit of pleasure, the evasion of irksome rules; where are the grownups whose years are not spent in those ways?

  A preliminary blast of Uncle Sandy's unmistakable whistle came from outer darkness, and cut dead all conversation. His voice boomed out of a megaphone.

  “Now the announcement you've all been waiting for. The judges—Aunt Tillie, the Skipper, and myself—had a tough time deciding among the many excellent entries, two in particular that you all know about.

  “The Skipper of the Day is”—a long, agonizing pause; then hurriedly—“Yishy Gabelson for his freak show, with special honorable mention to Herbie Bookbinder for his excellent ride. That's all.”

  But that was not all. Cries from every bungalow along Company Street tore the night.

  “Boo!”

  “Gyps!”

  “Robbers!”

  “General Garbage won!”

  “Crooks!”

  The whistle blew furiously several times and quieted the din.

  “Now, cut that out!” roared the head counselor. “You're not at home yet, you're still in camp. It isn't what you want, it's what we decide that goes here!”

  This was a provocative announcement that Uncle Sandy might have spared himself. But he was angry, and feeling guilty, too, to tell the truth, so he acted with poor judgment.

  “Yah!”

  “Boo!”

  “Ssss!”

  “You bet it ain?'t what we want!”

  “It ain't never what we want!”

  “Let's hang Uncle Gussie to a sour-apple tree!”

  These and forty other insolent cries were flung through the screens. Confused and at a loss, Uncle Sandy stepped back into his tent. Meantime, Ted in Bunk Thirteen jumped from his bed and seized a tin pan and spoon from his hiking pack.

  “Don't worry, General,” he grated to the dumfounded, pallid Herbie. “This is one time Uncle Gussie don't get away with it.”

  “Ted! You come back here!” exclaimed Uncle Sid, but Ted was already outside and marching up Company Street alone, beating the tin pan rhythmically and shouting, “We want Herbie! We want Herbie!” This was all the spark that was needed. In a twinkling twenty boys were in the street banging resounding objects—a glass, a drum, a tin canteen, and even a washtub were among them—and chanting, “We want Herbie!” The counselors were powerless to stop the irruption, and none of them particularly wanted to stop it. By the time the howling crowd of boys in pajamas had reached Uncle Sandy's tent their number included almost the whole camp. They milled under the large white electric light that hung on a pole at the end of the street, and chanted and yelled in a way to frighten the cloud of bugs that danced overhead.

  Inside the hot yellow tent sat Mr. Gauss and the two head counselors, with sullen expressions.

  “I say again, Sandy,” spoke out the camp owner, “are you going to do nothing about this breakdown of discipline?”

  “Skipper, I'm just one man. The counselors should have stopped it before it got started. Evidently they feel the same way I do, and I—”

  The bulky form of Yishy Gabelson catapulted into the tent, crowding it uncomfortably.

  “Uncle Sandy, Mr. Gauss, you can't do it to me. Them guys out there are ready to jump me. You know that kid won!” stammered the Super-senior, in a sweat.

  “Now, Yishy, don't be childish,” said Mr. Gauss. “Your freak show was admirable. And anyway, you know it's impossible to let an Intermediate be Skipper. It's too risky.”

  “You shoulda thought of that when you made up the contest!” shouted Yishy. “You shoulda said no Intermediates allowed to compete. It's too late to go makin' up rules now, Mr. Gauss. That kid won and you know it. You can do what you like, but I ain't gonna be your Skipper. I'm no crook!”

  He bolted from the tent and the three judges heard him yell above the din that greeted him, “I tole 'em! I tole 'em I wouldn't take it!” Thereupon the jeers changed to shouts of approval, and merged into a tremendous chant: “We want Herbie! We want Herbie!”

  “It seems to me, Mr. Gauss,” said Uncle Sandy, wiping his thick glasses with a handkerchief and laying emphasis on the camp owner's last name, “that we have a choice of calling off Campers' Day, or giving Skipper to Herbie Bookbinder.”

  “Nonsense. They'll forget all about it after a night's sleep. We'll give them ice cream for lunch,” said Mr. Gauss.

  “So far as I'm concerned,” said Aunt Tillie sourly, “the boy obviously did win. I simply went along with the Skipper's insistence that we needed an older boy to run the camp.”

  “You haven't got the older boy any more,” observed Uncle Sandy.

  “We want Herbie! We want Herbie!” came with undiminished gusto from outside, accompanied by bangs, rattles, clanks, and stamping.

  Mr. Gauss looked from one head counselor to another. He saw two decidedly hostile faces.

  “In view of the fact that I have no support from you, who should give it to me,” he said, “I seem compelled to abandon the only sensible policy. Do as you please, Uncle Sandy, on your own responsibility. I have no more to say.”

  “Do we call off the Campers' Day, sir, or give Skipper to the boy?”

  “I have no more to say.”

  Uncle Sandy stepped out of the tent. The mob of boys sensed news, and the chant died. The head counselor squinted around at the strange sight of his campers herded together in night clothes, in complete disorder. In the center of the crowd Herbie Bookbinder loomed high, naked except for white drawers, perched on the shoulders of Yishy and three other Seniors. When Sandy saw the fat boy thus glorified, he burst out laughing. “Come down, Herbie, you win. You're Skipper!” he shouted, and continued his good-natured guffawing.

  Great yells of triumph went up. Though the boys knew nothing of what had passed in the tent, they gathered from Uncle Sandy's m
anner that the change was as welcome to him as to them, and they pressed around him to shake his hand and pound him lovingly with their fists. The four Seniors who were holding Herbie up commenced dancing, and nearly dropped the hero of the evening several times. Cries of congratulation, good wishes, and admiration came up to the erstwhile General Garbage from every side, and they were all addressed to “Herbie.”

  Under no circumstances but these could he have received such an ovation, which exceeded anything that Lennie or Yishy had ever received for athletic prowess. He had become the symbol of resistance to Mr. Gauss, and in his victory every boy felt the throwing off of the yoke from his own shoulders. It was a brief temporary success, to be sure—tomorrow the heavy Gauss rules and edicts would be in force as always—but once, at least once, Uncle Gussie had been forced to give ground. “Hooray for Herbie! Hooray for Herbie!” cheered the boys, with all their hearts and lungs.

  And Herbie, bouncing and swaying on his perilous perch under the glare of the lamp amid the darting insects, surrounded by a host of friendly, admiring, upturned faces, his ears ringing with cheers and praise, felt warm tears of joy and wonder trickling down his face. None of his many daydreams of triumph had ever been as sweet as this. “There is no man that has not his hour, and no thing that has not its place.” General Garbage, the fat, the unathletic, the despised, had come into his hour at last.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Disaster

  Herbie woke before reveille next day from a most horrible dream. The morning was misty gray outside the dripping screens. His bunk-mates lay sleeping all around him. Uncle Sid snored in a fitful, choking way. The crickets were silent. Streamers of mist floated through the screens and hung inside the bungalow, thick to the eye and clammy when they brushed the skin. Herbie shuddered as the events of the dream came back to him, hanging in his memory like the streamers of mist.

  He had murdered a man and buried him in the vacant lot behind the Place. Who the man was, he could not remember, but the murder had been done and covered up long ago and he had almost forgotten it. Then for some reason his father had decided to dig a hole behind the Place, and had selected the very spot where the body lay buried. His father, Mr. Krieger, and Mr. Powers had begun digging vigorously, and soon had a deep brown hole which grew deeper every moment. With increasing panic, Herbie, watching them excavate, had realized that the corpse must soon be found. And suddenly, with a ghastly shock of terror that was so powerful it woke him up, he remembered he had left a clue on the body that would instantly identify him as the murderer. As Herbie sat up in bed, still horrified, he strained to recall what the clue had been, and finally caught the fading image of it, though it made no sense. It was the cigar box in which he had kept the fares collected at the Ride.

  So vivid had the nightmare been that the drowsy boy actually began reviewing all the events of the night of his trip to the city to see if he had really killed someone, and it was with some relief that he came wider awake and dismissed the absurd fancy. The thought of the cigar box now grew stronger in his mind. He spent some time in imaginary arguments with Mr. Gauss; the camp owner tried to keep the money on various pretexts which Herbie scornfully exploded one by one. Then he dwelled on the glories of the previous night, and pictured some of the pleasures of his forthcoming day as lord of the camp. Little by little his mood of guilty foreboding caused by the dream faded, as the morning mist dissipated before the rising sun. When the bugle blew after what seemed a very long time, he was as cheery as the newly awakened ones, and jumped from bed faster than any of them.

  “Hey, Herbie, whaddayou getting' up for? You're Uncle Gussie,” said Lennie, yawning.

  “He is not,” Uncle Sid put in promptly, rubbing a blue bristling jowl with the back of his hand. “Campers' Day doesn't start until ten o'clock.”

  “Sure, otherwise the counselors would hafta stand inspection,” sneered Ted as he stepped into ragged, dirty slippers. “Mr. Gauss made up that rule after the first year—leave it to Uncle Gussie. Boy, that was fun when the counselors hadda sweep the floor an' all. Campers' Day ain't no good now.”

  “Shut up and get out to drill, all of you,” said Uncle Sid, and fell back on his cot with closed eyes as the boys trooped out the door.

  An hour later during breakfast the head counselor walked by the table of Bunk Thirteen and said casually, “Herbie, come to my tent after breakfast. Uncle Sid, have one of the other boys make Herbie's bed.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Uncle Sid.

  Herbie looked modestly into his plate while his bunkmates regarded him respectfully and enviously.

  “Hey, Herb, who ya gonna make head counselor?” said Lennie, ladling a generous portion of scrambled eggs into the fat boy's plate. “Don't forget your old pals. We been old pals for years, Herbie, you know we have.”

  “You?” said Ted, wrinkling his thin beak at Lennie in disgust. “After the way you haunted him all summer, how can you have the nerve to wanna be Uncle Sandy? 'Bout all he should appoint you is Clever Sam.”

  The other boys chortled.

  “That's well said,” remarked Uncle Sid. “As a matter of fact, Lennie, I appoint you to make Herbie's bed. And if it's Frenched or tricked up in any way, you'll spend the next two days on your cot.”

  “Why would I French it? I'm glad to make Herbie's bed,” said Lennie, with a rather frightening simulation of gladness on his face. “We're old pals, Herbie an' me. Ain't we, Herbie? Remember old Mrs. Gorkin's class, huh, Herbie? That was fun, wasn't it? Hey, I wonder what our fathers are doing now, down at the Place.”

  Herbie, choking a little at the mention of the Place, pretended to have a mouthful of eggs, and answered Lennie with a meaningless grunt. The other boy continued his demonstrations of friendship throughout the meal, and left his eggs untasted in his eagerness to remind Herbie of their many sentimental ties. Herbie tried his best to say nothing in reply.

  “Boy, Herb, with you as Skipper an' me as Sandy, what stunts we couldn't work up, huh? We could really put this camp on its ear. We'll give 'em the old Homer Avenue treatment!”

  Herbie stood. “'Scuse me, Uncle Sid, could I leave the table early? I think maybe Uncle Sandy'll want to see me as soon as possible.”

  “Of course, go right ahead—Skipper!” said Uncle Sid, smiling.

  “Don't forget, Herbie,” called Lennie after him. “You an' me'll stick together, huh? Old Herbie an' Lennie! A coupla regular guys from Homer Avenue!”

  Lennie's new-found affection somehow depressed Herbie. As he made his way through the dining room he was the target of dozens of friendly hails; but he did not enjoy the homage quite as much as he might have. It all reminded him too forcibly of an incident he had observed a week ago. Daisy, the miserable, abhorred Daisy, had enjoyed a brief reign of dazzling popularity when the mail brought him a package containing four salamis. From the respect and cordiality lavished on him one might have thought Daisy had suddenly grown two feet taller. His head turned by the intoxication of being loved, poor Daisy had seized a knife and forthwith sliced up and given away all four salamis piece by piece to a swarm of outstretched hands. The last slice gone, he had just as suddenly shrunk to normal size, and Herbie recalled vividly the picture of the thin bespectacled boy, sitting alone on his expensive brass-bound trunk, the greasy knife still in his hand, peering around at the empty bungalow. What was so different, Herbie wondered, between Daisy with his salamis and General Garbage as Skipper? These were sad ideas for a boy of eleven at the height of good luck to be thinking and, like all cynicism, only partly true. Daisy's glory had been so brief because it was all salami and no achievement. But the fact is, in this summer Herbie had come far in knowledge of certain ways of the world. He was to come farther before another sun set.

  He knocked diffidently on the pole at the entrance to Uncle Sandy's tent. A hearty voice summoned him inside.

  “Hi, Herb. Sit down.” Uncle Sandy pointed with a smoking pipe to a three-legged stool beside his narrow desk. The desk was a piece o
f beaverboard supported by four planks. “First of all, congratulations. You're a remarkable little kid.”

  “If not for Elmer Bean an' my cousin Cliff, I wouldn't be nothin'. I had good luck,” said Herbie as he sat.

  “I know that. The fact that you know it, too, is good. But nobody ever makes a success without luck and help. You deserve your reward.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Sandy.”

  “Now, let's move fast.” The head counselor thrust a typewritten list and a pencil into his hand. “I've always run Campers' Day on the level, Herb, as much as—hm—as much as I was allowed to. That's why it's been a success. You go through that list and tick off the boy you want to be the counselor in each bunk.”

  “Yes, sir.” Herbie studied the sheet and made slow, careful marks.

  “By the way, who's going to be me?”

  Herbie answered at once, “Cliff.”

  Uncle Sandy grinned. “Well, this is the one day Uncle Sandy'll be able to ride Clever Sam. I think Cliff'll be fine.” He glanced over Herbie's shoulder, nodding. “Good. Good choices. Ted for Uncle Sid, eh? Fine. Poor Ted hasn't been a counselor in all his years.” He returned to writing at his desk. In a few minutes Herbie handed the sheet to him. The head counselor examined it and gave it back. “You haven't filled in names for the doctor and nurse.”

  “Nurse?” Herbie scratched his head and stared.

  “We always do that for laughs. Put down anybody who'll look funny in a nurse's uniform. Yishy would be fine, but you've got him as Uncle Peewee.”

  Herbie thought a moment; then he scrawled on the paper and passed it to the head counselor, who looked at it and laughed aloud. The writing read:

  Doctor—Daisy Gloster

  Nurse—Lennie Krieger

  Uncle Sandy glanced at the large cheap watch hanging on a nail over his bedside. “Nine twenty-five. Mr. Gauss wants to see you at nine-thirty, Herbie. Better run on up the hill. Come back here when you're through.”

  “What's he want to see me about?”