Читать книгу Camp Echo - Paul Theroux - Страница 3

AT THE ENTRANCE to the camp, a man in khaki shorts, white T-shirt, and moccasins—a man dressed as a boy—was waiting at the gatehouse, which was like a sentry box. He raised his hand for us to stop, and smiled at my father’s open window. His hair was buzzed to a whiffle, he had pointed ears, and his face was sunburnt, his nose red and peeling. He held a clipboard in his hairy hands.

“Camper?” he asked, raising the clipboard.

“Right here,” my father said. “Andy Parent.”

“Welcome to Camp Echo.”

“He’s all yours,” my father said, and, to me, the last words I was to hear from him for three weeks, “Be good.”

• • •

We had driven from home, my father and me, as usual without saying much. There was no radio in our old car, a 1938 Nash Lafayette with a thunderous muffler. My father’s silences discouraged me from being a talker, and made me watchful. Today he was taking me away to Boy Scout camp. The thought that I’d be alone there reminded me that I was small for my age, a skinny boy, with my hatchet on my lap and a foretaste of loneliness in my throat.

Past the close-together white clapboard houses on our street, we rolled down the hill to where the bungalows thinned out at the margin of the oak woods. There were no houses at all near Doleful Pond, nor any at the “rezza”—Spot Pond Reservoir. A straight road beyond that into the low hills for an hour, and finally to the iron bridge across the Merrimack River and along its banks to the darker woods, where Camp Echo sat in a forest of pines at the edge of Echo Lake. Driving north from our crowded suburb, seeing fewer people, my mind eased; the landscape simplified and deepened with each mile on narrowing roads until we were on a dirt lane among log cabins in a forest so green, in such shadows, it was almost black.

I pushed the heavy door open and slipped out of the car and dragged my knapsack and sleeping bag from the back seat. My father reached from his window and patted my cheek in a tender gesture. He backed up the car, then jiggled the stick shift with a crunch into forward gear and drove away in his embarrassing car, which he called “the old bus,” black and noisy and unreliable, with cracked whitewall tires, chrome curling from the front bumper, leaking oil, trailing exhaust fumes.

In a new setting, among strangers, my father used anxious jokes as exit lines. “He’s all yours” was typical. But now he’d driven off, and when the car was past the last trees, the dust sifting onto the hot road, I was standing in stillness, with the big man in shorts and moccasins scratching a pointy ear with a hairy finger. At the edge of a big field, the sun behind him, he loomed over me, his face in shadow.

“You can use this,” he said, seeing me with the heavy pack and the sleeping bag.

A wheelbarrow was propped against a fence. He lowered it and threw my sleeping bag into it. I tipped in my knapsack. I tucked my hatchet handle inside my belt.

“I’ve got Andre here,” the man said, consulting his clipboard, tapping it with his pen.

“Andy,” I said.

“I’m Butch Rankin—camp counselor. You’re in Cabin Eight. Can’t miss it. It’s past the chow hall on the right.”

I took up the handles of the wheelbarrow and steered it through the gate and along the groove of one rut toward a large log structure topped by a fieldstone chimney—the chow hall—then an open field. At the margin of the field stood a row of about twenty cabins, their front doors facing the grass, a pole in the middle, holding a limp flag.

Dirt road, gravelly ruts, log cabins—with my piled-up wheelbarrow it seemed to me that I was wheeling my belongings into the past, a place entirely unfamiliar to me, simple and handmade, smelling of dust and recently sawed wood.

Bumping along the wheel rut, it occurred to me, as the rising breeze seemed to whittle me small, that I was on my own, headed to a log cabin in the forest where I would be living for three weeks, sleeping among strangers. This was new, and faintly worrying. I had spent a night or two away from my family at friends’ houses, but never for so long—days and nights among boys I didn’t know, none of them from my Boy Scout troop.

Camp Echo accepted boys from troops all over the Boston area, the “Minuteman Council.” My cabin was proof of that, because the five other boys were strangers to me. They had already arrived and chosen a bunk. Two were outside and said “Hi” while staring at me.

Inside, a boy folding a duffel bag said, “That top bunk is free.”

A boy with wild hair, lying on his stomach in the next bunk, was looking at a magazine of photos he was half covering with his hand. He didn’t say anything to me, though he seemed to be muttering to the page of white bodies.

Using the ladder on the side of the bunk, I hoisted my sleeping bag and followed with my knapsack and hatchet. I had a sense of being new and not belonging, because I was the last to arrive, like an afterthought, and others seemed self-possessed, confident with the authority of being already settled, their things put away. I tugged the laces of my sleeping bag and punched it to fluff it. I unstrapped my knapsack and dumped out my clothes. I was the tenderfoot, uninitiated, hot from the effort with the wheelbarrow and conspicuous in my unpacking. Some other boys entered the cabin.

At that moment, I wanted to go home. I regretted that I’d come, and I felt foolish remembering how I’d eagerly looked forward to three weeks at Camp Echo, sharpening my hatchet with a whetstone, buying my sleeping bag and canteen at the army surplus store.

As I was sorting my clothes and hating the sharp mothball stink of my sleeping bag and the cabin’s raw tang of unpainted pine boards, I heard a shout—another “Hi”—and saw Butch Rankin filling the doorway, still holding his clipboard. Now I noticed a hunting knife hanging from the belt of his khaki shorts and sun streaks in his whiffle.

“Roll call,” he said in a hearty voice. “Say ‘Here’ when I call your name. Jerry Pinto.”

“Here.”

“Emmett Phelan.”

“Here.”

“Michael Paretsky.”

“Here.”

“Frankie Pagazzo.”

“Here.”

“Bayard Pomroy.”

“He’s outside.”

Butch Rankin turned and shouted, “Pomroy!”

“Coming,” was the prompt but distant reply.

“Andy Parent.”

“Here.”

And as I spoke, I heard “Excuse me” as Butch Rankin stepped aside and a boy squeezed past him—a tall boy in a Boy Scout uniform, a bright red neckerchief with a carved eagle as a woggle holding it in place, a jackknife in a belt holder, a wide-brimmed ranger’s hat. He was black.

“I’m Bayard,” he said, and sat in the bunk under mine, at the back of the cabin.

“I guess you know why you’re in this cabin,” Butch Rankin said. “It’s alphabetical—you’re the Ps—that’s one thing you have in common. But you’re Boy Scouts; you have that in common, too.” He slapped his clipboard. “Stand up, guys. Ten-shun!”

I climbed down the ladder and others hopped off their bunks, and we lined up on the cabin floor, stamping on the boards.

“Close interval, dress right—dress,” Rankin called out as we stuck out our elbows and aligned ourselves in a row. Then he pointed to a slouching boy with tangled hair. “What’s your name?”

“Pagazzo,” the boy said, in a mocking quack, his mouth open wide. One of his front teeth was cracked sideways in half, giving him a yellow fang.

“Stand up straight, Pagazzo, and fix those clodhoppers of yours. You’re giving me ten minutes to two with your feet.”

The boy took a breath so deep and loud that his nose narrowed and grew pale and then he gargled, grinning with yellow teeth as he exhaled and clicked his heels, and I knew at that moment we had a rebel in the cabin.

“You’re here at Camp Echo to learn what we call life lessons. In a few weeks, you’ll be tested at the Camporee, the shoot-out with Camp Metacomet, across the lake—the Metacomet Challenge. Okay?”

Pagazzo said, “The Metacomet Challenge. Sounds wicked.”

Butch Rankin frowned, then said, “Okay. The Boy Scout Oath. Let’s hear it.”

We raised our right hand, three fingers straight, thumb pressing the pinkie, and recited.

On my honor, I will do my best

To do my duty, to God and my country,

And to obey the Scout law;

To help other people at all times;

To keep myself physically strong,

Mentally awake, and morally straight.

“At ease,” Butch Rankin said, and saluted us. “And you, Pagazzo. Drop and give me ten.”

“For what?” Pagazzo said, frowning. Compressing his face made it yellower and his nose bigger.

Instead of replying, Butch Rankin leaned toward Pagazzo, hocked phlegm in imitation, and said, “Make it fifteen for defying an order.”

Pagazzo flopped to the cabin floor and, with his bum in the air and working his skinny arms, did fifteen laborious push-ups, finishing by gasping and flattening himself on the boards.

“As you were,” Butch Rankin said. He left, pulling the cabin door shut.

“He had a conniption,” Pagazzo said. He rolled over and, still lying on the floor, yawned with fatigue. “What a pisser.”

“He’s the marksmanship instructor,” Phelan said.

“I’ll clip him then. Give him two in the hat,” Pagazzo said. “Then I’ll say, ‘As you were, dead-ass.’”

But Phelan had begun to talk to the others. “My father promised I could shoot his gun when I get back from camp. It’s a Winchester thirty-thirty.”

“What time is dinner supposed to be?” Paretsky asked.

“He keeps it on his boat,” Phelan said.

“In about an hour,” Pomroy said. “They ring a bell.”

“His boat’s in Osterville. It’s a ketch,” Phelan said.

“So I guess you can catch it,” Pagazzo said.

“Do you live down there?” Paretsky asked. “My folks took me swimming there once. The water was wicked cold. My father showed me some rescues.”

“No, my dad’s a doctor in Winchester.”

Pagazzo said, “My old man’s a waiter. At Perella’s in the North End. Where the goombahs eat. They got guns like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve already earned Civics,” Paretsky said. “I want to pass Marksmanship and Lifesaving. The main thing my father says is, ‘Don’t let the drowning person get ahold of you or he can drag you down with him.’”

“What’s that thing on your head?” Pagazzo asked.

A small woven disk was fastened by a bobby pin to Paretsky’s hair. I had never seen such an odd head covering, and was glad Pagazzo had asked.

“A yarmulke,” Paretsky said.

“Looks like a Frisbee.”

“The real name is kippah.”

“Okay, Skippah,” Pagazzo said, and at once Paretsky had a new name.

“A friend of my mother’s has one of those, only a bigger one,” Pinto said of Phelan’s hunting knife.

Phelan unsheathed his knife and flourished it, wagging it before Pinto’s face, and said, “This is a genuine Bowie knife. You have to be eighteen to buy one. My uncle gave it to me. He was a U.S. Marine.”

“A leatherneck, big deal,” Pagazzo said, and drew a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open, swiping the air with it. “How do you like this guinea toothpick?”

“Be careful with that thing,” Pinto said.

“You wish,” Pagazzo said, and swiped again. “I could deball you.”

“I mean it,” Pinto said with a screech in his voice.

“Sure. Every day and twice on Sunday.”

Phelan was saying to Paretsky, “A guy came into my father’s office. He had VD. He said he got it from a toilet. My father said, ‘That’s a hell of a place to take a girl.’”

“Hey, where’s the mulignan?” Pagazzo said.

Taking advantage of the confusion, I slipped out of the cabin. I had nothing to say, and it was too awkward to make conversation—most of the talk was in the form of boasts, or mockery. I was afraid of what they’d ask me. I had a hatchet: This was my boast, the hatchet buttoned into a leather hip holster to protect the blade I had carefully sharpened. I looped the hatchet holster to my belt, though its weight dragged my pants down and the handle bumped my leg when I walked.

Bayard Pomroy was standing away from the cabin, looking at the sooty evening sky, his face upturned, his skin silvery in the dusk.

“What’s up?” I said.

“That’s the Big Dipper.”

“I know that.”

Still looking up, his voice slightly strangled from craning his neck, he said, “The two stars on the edge are Merak and Dubhe. I’m getting an astronomy merit badge. See how they’re pointing?”

I could not see how they were pointing. I could just make out the corners of the bowl of the dipper. I said, “Yeah.”

“To Polaris,” he said.

“I was just going to say that.”

“The North Star,” he grunted, his face upturned.

“Right.”

“And if it was a little darker, we’d be able to see the Little Dipper.” He swiveled his head to take in the rest of the sky. “Maybe later.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“My father’s a teacher. He’s got a telescope,” Pomroy said. “We look at the moon sometimes. He can name most of the craters. No one knows how they got there. And no one’s ever seen the other side of the moon. The dark side.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Because the same side of the moon is always facing the earth,” he said. “And that’s Venus. It’s always bright. Venus was the first one I learned.”

He was walking unsteadily, leaning backwards as he talked, because he was still scanning the sky. He stopped talking but kept moving and soon was lost in the darkness.

Soon after that, I heard a metallic clanging—not a bell, but what I would later find out was a boy whacking a short length of train track with a piece of steel pipe.

The cabin door banged open, and in the rectangle of light shining from the yellow pine boards inside I saw Frankie Pagazzo, followed by the others, Paretsky and Phelan and Pinto.

“Chow time,” Pagazzo called out, running ahead.

We walked along the margin of the field in the moon shadow of the pines, boys from the farther cabins joining us, and we blinked entering the mess hall, which was brightly lit and smelled of sawdust, beans, and applesauce. Pomroy was the last to seat himself. A card with the number 8 was stuck in a wire stand at our table, where six bowls had been set out with plastic cups, a glass pitcher at one end. The six bowls contained brown, soupy applesauce. The glass pitcher brimmed with purple liquid.

Paretsky pointed to the number 8 at the table. He said, “That’s a composite number.”

“What language is that supposed to be?” Pinto said.

Wagging his pale finger at the 7 on the next table, Paretsky said, “That’s a prime number.”

“Primo,” Pagazzo said. “That’s wicked good.”

“This year is not a prime number. But 1951 was.”

“And your mother wears army boots,” Pagazzo said, flicking the pitcher with his bitten fingers. “Bug juice. Anyone want some?”

He poured it out but did not take any himself, and instead put his hands behind his tangled hair and leaned back, tightening his yellowish face by squinting at us. He had a pale scar like a claw mark next to his right eye. When he smiled, he made a chipmunk face and seemed to glory in showing us his broken front tooth.

“Know why I ain’t drinking no bug juice?” He did not wait for a reply. He said, “They put saltpeter in it. Know why? So you won’t get a boner.”

Pagazzo lowered his voice on the word boner, seeing Butch Rankin approaching our table.

“No, suh!” Pinto said.

“Yes, suh.”

“I’m going to ask my father,” Phelan said to Paretsky, seated next to him. “He knows chemistry.”

Rankin said, “It’s cafeteria style, so pick up a tray, get in line, and help yourself.”

We did as he said, filing with our tin trays past the metal tubs of fried Spam and mashed potatoes and baked beans, loading up, and then back at our table began eating, digging at the food with forks in our fists.

“The Navy gets the gravy, but the Army gets the beans,” Pagazzo said. “My uncle Mario says that.”

Phelan was telling Paretsky a story about his father in medical school, saying, “And before they tested their urine, my father slipped in some gold leaf. His lab partner’s a woman, and she does the test and says, ‘I have gold in my urine!’ And my father says, ‘What do you want me to do—sink a shaft?’”

Paretsky smiled nervously. He pushed a slab of Spam away from his potatoes and said, “Anyone want this?”

No one replied. They went on chewing, and their faces seemed freakish to me. I was returned again to thinking of the strangeness of the camp, how it seemed unfriendly because of those faces, so different from the faces of my family, or anyone I knew, strangers’ faces—and strangers seemed dangerous to me. Pagazzo’s yellow face; Paretsky’s pale, freckled face; Phelan’s receding chin and perfect teeth; Pinto’s delicate features, his bat-like ears and pursed lips; Pomroy’s gleaming black face and wide forehead, his cheeks bulging with food.

“Try the baloney instead,” Phelan said.

“Baloney,” Pagazzo said. “My old man calls it horse cock.”

The way they ate, the way they looked, made me anxious.

They were animal faces. I knew them to be boys, but the features were so unfamiliar I saw them as masks—not ugly, but so unusual as to be threatening, as though concealing a secret intention meant to upset me.

I did not want to think about it, but, sitting there at the table with them, they seemed to me like dog faces, the snouts and wet eyes and tangled hair of mutts, made more dog-like by the way they were eating—carelessly, hungrily snapping their jaws, chomping on their food, the teeth of twelve-year-olds having an animal largeness and bite. I knew boys like this at school, but these were boys I was living with in a cabin.

Seeing strangers eat, flecks of food on their lips, the famished faces, that hunger, revealed their personalities more than talking did, and suggested the crudeness of their secrets. And so I hardly ate anything—I nibbled at the awful, salty meat, poked at the dry potato and the pale carrots, and what Pagazzo had said about the bug juice kept me from drinking more. The mushy applesauce had the sour, fermented smell of wet fur.

At the end of the meal, still hungry, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and ate it feeling queasy, knowing I had three more weeks of this.

Seeing me swirling peanut butter out of a jar, Paretsky said, “Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and no wonder. All the rest have peanut butter. Except Grandma, who has a pail of blueberries.” The others stared at him, but I smiled: His little verse had made him seem human.

“You said ‘bloobrees,’” Pagazzo said.

“Okay, let’s do these dishes, guys,” Butch Rankin said, walking among the tables. “I want this place shipshape.”

We were given a big basin of soapy water and a small mop-shaped scrubber, and each of us was assigned a task, one boy scraping leftover food from the plates into a garbage can, other boys wiping the table or washing the cups and plates in the basin or drying them. I was drying with Pinto, who worked slowly and with great care, dabbing at the plate with the cloth wrapped around his finger, occasionally saying, “This one’s still icky,” and dropping it into the basin.

When this was done and the plates were stacked, the basin of gray water emptied and put away with the scrubber and the wet cloths, we sat at the table again. A red-faced fat man in khaki shorts shushed us.

“Welcome to Camp Echo,” he said. “I’m Camp Director Hempstone. Before I have my staff introduce themselves, I want to say one thing: Behave yourselves, do as you’re told, and you’ll have a great time. No bellyaching. No slacking. Get out of line and you will fail. Hygiene is very important, and so I say to you two words: Be clean.”

“That’s about ten things,” Pagazzo muttered.

“When you salute the flag, stand ramrod straight. I want snappy salutes and respect for the flag. My friend Arthur Schuck is chief scout executive, and I want to quote him now,” Hempstone said, glancing at a small piece of paper in his hand. “What is the main thrust of the Boy Scouts? Arthur Schuck tells us, ‘To give to America a new generation of men of character, with ingrained qualities that make for good citizenship.’” He gestured with the piece of paper, saying, “Be glad you live in a free country where everyone is treated equally. Communists live in fear. If you waver”—here he paused and poked a fat finger at us—“the Communists are gonna cook your goose.”

Hempstone then called upon the counselors, who introduced themselves, taking turns, strolling among the tables: the swimming instructor, the rowing coach, the volleyball coach, and Butch the rifle range director. An old, bald, bearded man in a neckerchief, named Beavers, announced himself as the craft shop manager and twirled a length of plastic twine, saying, “Anyone know what this is?”

Pagazzo called out, “Gimp!”

“Raise your hand next time,” Beavers said sternly.

But as soon as the man turned his back, Pagazzo faced us and briefly crossed his eyes.

“I can teach you to make lanyards and key chains and boondoggles,” said Beavers. He tugged at the slide on his neckerchief. “This here’s a boondoggle.”

As Pagazzo worked his lips in lunatic nibbling, mouthing the word boondoggle, Butch Rankin stepped behind him and twisted his ear, saying, “You again. That’s enough of that.”

A counselor had taken the floor in front of the tables. He said, “Let’s have a song.”

We listened with embarrassment while he sang, full-throated and gesturing. When he’d finished, he said, “Okay, we’ll take it one verse at a time.”

Up in the air, junior birdman,

Up in the air, upside down.

Up in the air, junior birdman,

Keep your noses off the ground …

Walking back to the cabin, the six of us in the shadows, Pagazzo said, “Hey, how about Arthur Schuck? What a pisser.”

Paretsky said, “Know this one?” And he began to sing.

John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,

His name is my name, too …

Pagazzo interrupted, saying, “Quit it, Skipper. I know a better one,” and snapped his fingers and sang,

Baby let me bang your box,

Baby let me bang your box …