As his family’s rented limousine came upon a horse-and-buggy with a Mennonite man at the reins, Treckman stared out at the steed and its black-clad master and prophesied that this, his own seventeenth summer, the summer of 1989, would be a dark and fell one. Behind the buggy shone a golden field of something noble and edible, corn or wheat or something.
I, thought the boy, am from Santa Monica. I am not designed for the staring at of crops.
The limousine arced around the buggy and kept on along the paved country lane. Treckman looked at the map in his lap. It showed an aerial photograph of New York State’s Finger Lakes and Treckman had circled in red ink the finger for which the limo was bound. It was a lake shaped like the letter Y, and waiting for Treckman and his parents between the branches of this Y was the Rivington resort hotel.
“I’m apprehensive,” Treckman said.
“We know, sweetie,” his mother said.
Treckman tapped his foot against the limo’s mini-bar. He opened and drank some tonic water to fortify himself with quinine and guard against malaria. “I’m being taken to a lake that looks like a tuning fork, like a divining rod. Shall I spend the summer trembling between the tines of said fork? And that name Rivington… there’s poseur opportunism in that name. It starts all mellifluous like a river and then for firm respectability it ends all British-sounding. We’re meant to feel relaxed and invited yet assured of a certain pedigree.”
“Treckman,” his father said, “stop babbling or you’ll never be happy.”
I know, the boy thought miserably.
His first name was Francis, but George and Kay Treckman had addressed their only child by surname for years. In the nursery he’d loved to play with tractors and to pet his parents’ earlobes, but by seven he was decrying Communism, and by twelve, despite his stocky shoulders, he was deficient at sports. He had his father’s handsome brown eyes, but Treckman’s tufts of black hair darted out like his utterances, and when he pondered aloud whether bees or ants would rule the earth after humans destroyed themselves, his mother listened sadly. Her son was odd. He was Treckman. He was going to be bad at being rich.
The limo turned onto the Rivington entrance road. Kay cracked the window open. “What a gorgeous smell… sweet alyssum and grape blossoms, I think. And that sky, so throbbing blue, not a cloud around! Drink it all in, Treckman.”
They came to the resort’s welcome hutch, out of which walked a young woman of perhaps thirty, wearing a white halter top, white shorts and white Topsiders.
“The Treckman family,” Kay said through the open window.
The young woman consulted a log-in sheet. “Welcome to the Rivington.” She looked past Kay and met Treckman’s eyes. “Hey there.”
The young woman was slender, with short cherry hair. As he peeked out at her Treckman thought, oh, front-gate-girl, you have no idea. There you are with your rebellious summer haircut and your breasts making their fine case to the world through your blouse and your no doubt affectionate relationship with wine coolers. You have no idea that before summer’s end, I, a shining lord of the West, shall take you down in bluebells and turn the meeting of your thighs into an opera-house of fervent song.
What Treckman, who was a virgin, actually said to her was, “Um… hey.”
* * *
Their family lived in hotels all year long. In Santa Monica they owned and operated the Hippodrome Hotel, but each summer they traveled. In Paris, George and Kay loved the Lutetia Hotel, where they’d taken Treckman for his eighth summer. Each night there he’d made a chessboard of the black and white marbled lobby floor, hopping from tile to tile, pitting himself against himself. In India, when the boy was thirteen, they’d summered in Orchha and stayed in a palace. The bathroom in their top-floor suite had been situated in a turret and Treckman had spent a month on the toilet adjusting to curry as he gazed out the window. And now it was the Rivington, and Treckman was seventeen, with pale limbs and a threat of facial hair. On their second day he ensconced himself poolside in a lounge chair, smeared on sun block and studied the guests. Several men had fluorescent-colored trunks and alarming Midwestern bellies. The boy looked at the black instrument wrapped around his wrist: 10:30, Eastern Standard Time.
“Hey,” a man’s voice said, “sweet watch.”
Treckman glanced up. A poolside waiter loomed beside him.
“Sir,” Treckman said, “calling this a watch is like calling a Lamborghini a go-kart.” He held his wrist out for inspection. “This is a 1978 Benrus, Type 1, Class A, U.S. military chronograph. Typically issued to Navy Seals. As 20th century Americans, you and I must devote time to thinking about killing people, or to thinking about those folks who kill on our behalf. We can emulate those folks, we can hold them in check through congressional oversight, and we can buy their time pieces at auctions in Malibu.”
“Um… all I was going to ask is, would you like a drink?”
“Crown Royal in a highball glass. Add two fingers of ginger ale, and six cubes of ice if they’re small cubes, four if they’re large. Put it on my tab and keep them coming.”
How about everything you just said, except with only the ginger ale and ice?”
“Done,” Treckman said.
It was a sunny morning in late June, a fine day to be what Treckman called a Friend of Life. A Friend of Life, he knew, was a philosopher, a warrior poet. You had to learn the lyrics of everyone from R.E.M. to Tammy Wynette, and you had to accept that, given human frailty, a glad but battered existence was the best that could be sought.
The boy had had a hard spring. He hadn’t made his high school’s baseball team and when he’d gone to auditions for the musical, Brigadoon, he’d been sent packing after his pre-prepared a cappella version of Judas Priest’s You’ve Got Another Thing Coming. As a further trial his parents had made him escort a neighbor’s daughter to the prom, and his date had laughed at his dance moves – the solitary, spastic lurchings that he believed future, wiser generations would marvel at when they studied his prom videotape.
He took a swim now, exhaling and sinking himself to the bottom of the deep end. Remaining still and using his Benrus, he clocked his breath-holding past ninety seconds until a pair of young, exquisite female legs scissored past overhead on their way to the poolside wetbar.
Oh, legs, thought Treckman, shall I remain alone in the depths or shall I petition the universe for a helpmate? He surfaced, crawl-stroked to the wet bar. The girl looked his age, but when she asked for a Southern Comfort Madras, the bartender mixed it. Treckman lurked, flexing his shoulders – his one muscular asset – till she turned.
“Hi,” she said.
She wore a maroon bikini that he thought matched his black trunks fatefully well. He looked in her eyes and unleashed a line he’d been honing. “If you’re from Santa Monica, you are either made of light or you’re destined for it.”
“That’s cool. Where’s Santa Monica?”
Treckman was aghast. “You’re joking, of course.”
“I’m from Yaphank. You know Yaphank?”
He shivered. Yaphank. Yaphank. He felt he’d been sworn at.
“It’s on Long Island. Damn, boy, you’re really pale. This your first day?”
Her accent stirred nausea within him. She was not talking, but honking. He would have to break her of this tic before she bore him sons.
“I’m Trish. Do you want a drink?”
“I want to congratulate you,” he said. “Your family is vacationing in one of the safest places in the contiguous forty-eight. In a thermonuclear cataclysm, the Soviets might hit Rochester, to our north, because of the Kodak industrial nerve center there. If that happens, we’ll fry, but the Reds will surely concentrate on Albany and New York City. Long Island, I’m afraid, will be a Geiger counter’s wet dream because of fallout from the five boroughs, but as for us here, the prevailing weather coming down off Lake Ontario should guarantee you and me and our kin a plutonium-free summer.”
Her face had blanched. “Are you saying we’re at war? Was it on TV?”
“I’m saying fear not the Politburo. We’re good to go. I’m Treckman.”
The bartender wandered over. “This guy bothering you?”
“Yeah, he is,” Trish said.
Five minutes later Treckman was back in his lounge chair, alone and pouting. From his backpack he pulled out and found his place in Duras’ The Lover, began reading. His father walked over from the massage tent, stretching his tawny arms. He sat on an adjacent lounge chair and began softly patting his son’s left foot.
“Cut it out,” Treckman said.
“Son…” George glanced up at the sky. “I was within earshot while you were chatting up that young lady. I want you to know that this way that you are…” He was still patting Treckman’s foot. “This way that you talk and fail socially… this tone of being that isolates you… well, I had it too at your age. All males in our family go through it, I guess. But it won’t last forever.”
Flipping a page, Treckman blinked away a tear. “Detachment from the world is the price of mysticism. I am either made of light or destined for it.”
“Okay, buddy.”
“Unhand my foot.”
George did so. “So, listen… I have news. I apologize, but I haven’t been entirely honest with you about why we’ve come to this resort this summer.”
The boy peeked at his father over his book.
“The Rivington has a six week program for married couples,” George said. “It’s called an intimacy workshop and your mother and I have signed up. It’s a chance to focus on… well, on love.”
“Are you considering divorce? Did you step outside the marriage or has Mom made a cuckold of you?”
“No. It’s just… this workshop bills itself as a booster shot for romance between husband and wife.”
Treckman reflected upon this. That very morning in the shower, inspired by the Duras book, he had made out with the loofah sponge. “So, what, my existence has doused your marital fires?”
“Buddy, c’mon.” George sighed. “We’re just doing a little something for ourselves this summer and we’re going to give you the chance to do something for yourself too.”
“Do something for myself? Forget it, Dad. I eschew auto-eroticism.”
“I’m saying that I’ve enrolled you for the summer in the camp across the lake. Camp Pelletier. It’s time for you to step out of your parents’ shadow.”
Treckman was on his feet, pacing, rubbing his Benrus as he always did when panicked. “But I… I like it in your shadow! It’s a cool and shady place in which I can safely develop character!”
“You need this time apart, son. The camp’s been going for weeks, but they’ve made room for you. The place was founded by Catholics, but I’ve been assured that–”
“Catholics!” Treckman threw up his hands. “You know I don’t hold with Rome.”
“Give the camp a chance, Treckman. I got you into their L.I.T. program. That stands for Leader-In-Training. You’ll have fun with your own age group, but you’ll also be assigned some smaller children to look out for.”
Treckman stopped pacing, narrowed his eyes. For some time he had been wanting his own phalanx of cadres to train and mold. Maybe his chance was here.
Part Two
The next morning, before the sun came up, his parents accompanied Treckman in the limousine as it drove around the lake and pulled onto the steep driveway up to the camp. Treckman gazed at the honeysuckle and smoke bushes lining the driveway. At the crest of the hill he could make out a flag pole, an enormous maple tree and a barn.
“Please stop,” Treckman told the driver. “From here I’ll climb the hill on foot, alone.”
“Treckman,” Kay said, “that’s silly. Let’s just wait till sun-up, then we’ll come with you to meet the camp director.”
Treckman shook his head. “I insist upon a pre-dawn infiltration so that I may study the environs before the already matriculated campers awaken. I shall insinuate myself among them with fearsome stealth. As for your coming along…” – he laid a gentle palm against his mother’s cheek – “…this is a zone of burgeoning young adulthood. You cannot enter here.”
George checked his watch. “Let’s give him his space, Kay. Plus, if we leave now, we can get back to the resort in time for the Tantric breakfast.”
So his parents hugged the boy and drove off and Treckman labored up the hill, dragging his small suitcase along. Eyes keen, he turned his head about as he went, hoping to discover a hazardous ropes course that he could master or a river whose Class-Five rapids he could ford all within his first hour. But miasmic clouds of fog shifted over the campgrounds like alien craft, obscuring the landscape and frightening the boy enough that he hurried uphill past the great maple and the flagpole, toward the barn. Smelling skunk, he darted into the barn through the parting of two wooden doors on rollers. Inside he sat on his suitcase and stared at the cold dirt floor. Lacking anything braver to do, he wept openly.
Soon sunlight began burning through the fog outside and reaching him through the barn’s window. He looked up and gasped to see a face suspended above his.
He leapt to his feet. “Are you an apparition?! Are you something dark and fell?”
“I’m a girl,” the face above him said.
Treckman watched a lithe creature – whose ankles had been crossed around a ceiling beam – execute a flip and land on her bare feet beside him. She had beer-blonde, shoulder-length hair, daisy gray blue eyes and an Axl Rose T-shirt knotted at the abdomen above her jeans. She looked slightly older than he.
“You’re crying,” the girl said.
“How long were you surveilling me?”
She brushed tears off his cheek. “There, that’s better. You must be the new guy. I’m Athena Merrick, one of your fellow L.I.T.s. I’m in here every morning, doing what some call gymnastics. I call it upending my world view.”
He gave her his name and said, “Where I come from, in Santa Monica, on the beach near the pier, there are climbing rings set up. Folks of your ilk are always out there, swinging around very fast, very high in the air. It’s quite intimidating.”
“My ilk, huh?”
“Yes. World-view up-enders.”
From outside the barn came a clanging.
“That’s the breakfast bell,” Athena said. “Watch me in the rafters a bit more, then I’ll walk you over to the mess hall.”
Treckman sat on a hay bale and watched Athena spin. She briefed him about the camp’s owner, a man that everyone called Father Counselor. Allegedly, she said, he was a defrocked Catholic priest.
Treckman cleared his throat. “I’m kind of Jewish, myself.”
“I’m Sagittarius,” Athena replied.
* * *
Too anxious to be hungry, Treckman avoided the buffet line and skulked instead behind a full-sized taxidermized moose that stood in one corner of the mess hall. He was peeking out from behind this moose when a tall man strode out of the kitchen and raised a hand for silence. The campers hushed and hurried to their seats. Treckman studied the man, who was mostly bald but with rich red sideburns. He wore jeans, a black shirt and a white clerical collar, and when he spoke his voice was deep and sonorous.
“King Solomon,” he said, “would have turned a beautiful day like this into a poem for his beloved… we each should turn today into something equally grand.” The balding man nodded at the rightness of his words. “Amen. Okay, remember, everyone, water gun war at 10 a.m.”
The kids began eating and the balding man headed back to the kitchen. Rubbing his Benrus, Treckman found Athena’s table. She was sitting with several girls her age. Treckman checked eyes with each of them, but none seemed to share his gift for telepathy.
“That was Father Counselor?” he asked Athena.
“It was. And these are the other girl L.I.T.s.” Athena indicated her tablemates. “The guy L.I.T.s often skip breakfast to hang down in the boathouse.”
“Worthless chumps,” a freckled girl muttered.
“Speak for yourself,” an angular girl said. “Those boys are looking yummy this summer. Especially Jack.”
Athena rolled her eyes. “She’s talking about Jack Slavny, Treckman. He’s nineteen and always wears an orange bodybuilder’s shirt. I dated him last summer and he’s still hot for me. He sort of stalks me and I think I saw him watching us through the barn window earlier when I wiped away every tear from your eyes.”
Feeling unmoored, Treckman raised his chin with what he trusted was military precision. “And… and when do I meet my charges? That is, my neophytes. My tyros.”
The angular girl frowned at him. “You talk weird.”
“He means his juniors.” Athena stood. “Come on, Treckman.”
Treckman walked beside Athena. He detected a strawberry scent in her hair, and her skinny-smooth limbs and bare feet spoke to him of an admirable disdain for middle-class buffers between herself and raw living, buffers like Birkenstocks and the S&P 500.
She stopped before a table where two young boys were eating cereal. The first boy had a bushy bowl haircut so blond it was nearly white. The second was skinny as a wraith and wore glasses whose round black frames ringed his eyes like bruises.
“Treckman,” Athena said, “meet Danny and Moss. Moss is the towhead. Most L.I.T.s have six junior campers, but you get just these special two.”
Athena patted Danny and Moss each on the head, then walked away. Treckman judged the boys to be about ten, and it was obvious that neither had ever killed a man.
“I’m Treckman,” Treckman said. “Why did Athena say that you’re special?”
Moss sighed. “We’re the Sunshine Bunch. All juniors get placed in activity groups. Like the Clarion Choir… that’s girls who go sing at local restaurants. Or the Pelletier Panthers… our boys’ softball team that competes against teams from town. Kids that suck at everything get put in the Sunshine Bunch. We have to make a huge banner of the sun that gets unveiled at the End-Of-Summer Follies.”
Treckman reflected upon this. “So you and Danny suck at everything?”
“Yes,” Moss said. “And now you’re our leader.”
Treckman drew himself up at the inferred insult. “Did it ever occur to you, Moss, that we might tackle this banner mission with brio? Did you ever think that we three might render the sun in a way that shocks loose joy and wisdom in the impoverished spirits of Pelletier campers? Can you admit that such a miracle is possible?”
Danny stared at his corn flakes. “I miss my Mom.”
Treckman bit his lip. His missed his too.
* * *
After breakfast he walked the perimeter of the camp, alone. He was scheduled to be meeting with Father Counselor for orientation, but he preferred experiential learning. As he strolled, the details of the property assailed him. There were playing fields covered in clover and a rock promontory that gave a view of the spangling blue lake, and at the back of the acreage, a vast woods from which emanated a pulsing, breathing silence. Treckman peered hard at these realities – the grasses, rocks and forest – trying to get at their meanings. Then he stepped around a copse of sumac and stopped short.
Standing not ten yards before him was a figure – he could not call it a boy – wearing an orange bodybuilder’s tank top, black jeans and steel-toed boots. The figure had rocky packs of muscle in his shoulders, chest and arms, a face crowded with acne, silky and effeminately long brown hair, and green eyes hard enough to make a jury switch their verdict. Treckman felt strangely that he was staring at some swollen, pock-faced version of himself, some monstrous personification of his own id. He swallowed. “I know who you are. You’re Jack Slavny… and I sense that you bear me ill will. But I give you my word as a Friend of Life that Athena and I did no more than shake hands.”
The figure stepped closer to Treckman, cracking the knuckles of one fist in the other.
“Will you speak?” Treckman asked. “Can there be no diplomacy here? May I please describe with my feet a semi-circle around your current path and safely walk on?”
The figure moved still closer, pausing only when Treckman held up a stiff palm. “Know this, Jack Slavny… like all the men of my line, I have a strength in my shoulders that gives me an uncanny ability to stay balanced on my feet. No matter what, you shall never knock me down. Also, I just might have malice in me. For example, I can imagine myself tangling with a feral lion and disemboweling it with no more than a butter knife. I see that despite my warnings you are once again advancing toward me. Oh, fuck.”
The figure straight-punched Treckman in the nose. Treckman cried out, smelling metal and feeling a sensation like bees swarming in his sinus cavity. Another punch came, a sly, hard shot to the gut. Treckman did not lose his footing, but he felt dizzy and profound. On the third punch, a jab to the kidney, the boy’s world went black.
When he came to, he was standing in the same place that he had been, but the sun was higher in the sky. His head was a woozy event at the top of his being. Also, Athena Merrick was beside him, using her T-shirt hem to dab some blood off his chin.
“What… what happened?” he mumbled.
“When you didn’t show at the water war, I came hunting you. I believe you passed out standing up. It probably would’ve been better if you’d fallen down… Jack would have stopped punching you sooner. It was Jack that did this, right?”
“Treckman males do not fall down.” He looked around but could see Jack nowhere. There was only the warm day and the stinging in his jaws.
“This is my fault.” She kept wiping his chin as a mollifying breeze came over them. “I feel responsible for you now.”
“Please stop tending to my wounds. If Jack sees you doing so, he may lobotomize me.” He checked his Benrus to be sure neither the band nor the fob had been blood-stained.
“You’re kind of in love with that watch, huh?” she said.
“It’s not a watch, it’s a chronograph, a Benrus Type 1. I use it to calculate when high or low tide hits in Santa Monica. As long as I know what the tide is back home, I know where things are at. I can find my way.”
“If you’re from California, how come you’re at Camp Pelletier at all?”
“My parents are focusing on love.”
Her lips pursed. “You’re a funny one, boy.”
With Athena escorting him, he made his gingerly way to Father Counselor’s office, which was a log cabin near the barn. Treckman entered alone and was surprised by the modernity. There were no totem poles or rainsticks or Native Americana, just an air conditioner, a metal desk and sitting behind it, the camp’s defrocked priest-in-charge.
“You must be Treckman,” Father Counselor said. “But what’s happened to your face? Did someone hit you?”
Treckman held his tongue. He knew the fate of snitches.
“Never mind the details,” Father sighed, “I can already guess who it was… it’s always the same boy, every summer. Did he say anything to you?”
“No,” Treckman admitted.
Father Counselor rapped his desk, brows furrowed. “That much at least is positive news. You see, I suggested to this boy – Jack Slavny – that he take a vow of silence for the summer as a penance. He’s fallen in with an unsavory local man of late and I’m trying to steer him clear of that trouble. I’d kick him out, but Jack’s an orphan who spends the rest of the year as a ward of the state and they don’t do any better with him than I do. Listen, I’ll have some stern words with him, but don’t be surprised if he comes at you again. Once he’s decided he doesn’t like someone, he can be remorseless. As Scripture says, the dog returns to its vomit.”
Treckman reflected upon this. “So, I’m the vomit?”
“No, Jack’s bad behavior is the vomit. And he himself is the dog.”
“May I go to the infirmary now?”
“I’ll take you there myself. Welcome to Camp.”
Part Three
As his first three weeks passed, Treckman avoided Jack Slavny – who could usually be circumvented because he was always in the exercise yard, lifting barbells and observing his code of silence. Yet Treckman had no success mixing with the other L.I.T.s, either. One guy his age, a life-guard named Greg, made an early overture by inviting Treckman to go canoeing. As they glided along, Greg goaded Treckman, trying to get him to discuss the Buffalo Bills or the legs of the female L.I.T.s. Treckman countered by yammering about the Sunshine Bunch’s exciting new direction, explaining that no banner of a gilded dawn would be complete without a shining, stenciled depiction of Russia’s next great hope, Boris Yeltsin. Greg cut the canoe trip short.
The banner undertaking, though, did give Treckman comfort and confidence. Each afternoon he worked with Moss and Danny in the art hut, telling them to leave their preconceptions at the door as they took up their brushes and nudged their creation toward completion.
“Look within yourselves,” he told them brightly. “Whoever you are at this moment, in this hut, testify to that via paint. Are you a Romulan? A Shropshire Lad? Well, bring it all to the banner.”
Nights were harder and more sobering for the three of them. With the normal cabins full, Treckman and his pair of charges bunked in an old tool shed that had been converted into a sleeping space. When Moss complained that his father hadn’t shelled out thousands for his son to spend nights in a lawn mower garage, Treckman tried to explain that each Sunshine Bunch man was a Friend of Life who could divorce himself from luxury. Yet he told the two boys bedtime stories about his family’s hotel, where pillowcases were scented with essence of grapefruit and no one laughed – like the old woman who ran the camp’s snack shack had – when you asked if the National Review was available.
If Moss got grouchy after dark, Danny was an even harder case, Treckman felt, because the bespectacled little fellow suffered from night terrors. He would wake and wail piercingly until Treckman hugged him and soothed him. Just the fact that Danny knew the phrase ‘night terrors’ unsettled Treckman because it reminded him of the dark truth that was hounding him this summer, the dread that echoed inside the chamber of each hour. This dread had its seat in Jack Slavny, Treckman knew, but he didn’t know what it would demand of him. One night, at well past midnight, when his juniors and the rest of the camp seemed deep asleep, Treckman climbed alone to the crest of the rock promontory and found Athena sitting there cross-legged, staring up at stars.
“I knew that you’d come,” she said.
He flumped down beside her. “I couldn’t sleep. The fell truth of summer was itching at me.”
Athena tossed back her hair. “I don’t mean that I knew you’d climb up here tonight… I mean that I knew that someone like you would come among us this summer. A sweet weirdo who speaks like he’s from another planet.”
He felt judged. He felt her words licking around under his ribs like coolness and fire at once, and so he went for broke. “Athena,” he said, “you are more attractive to the sole inhabitant of Planet Treckman than you ever could be to a mere, brawny earthling.”
She leaned back on her elbows and let his compliment live in the air between them. “So what’s the tide doing in Santa Monica right now?”
He checked his Benrus. “It’s rising.”
She sighed. “Pretty soon we all have to head for the Interior.”
“How’s that?”
She pointed to the black, shifting forest below and behind the promontory. “In a couple weeks, we L.I.T.s have to head in there, into the woods, in pairs of two for a day-long hike. It’s a camp tradition. I think we’re meant to discover shit about ourselves.”
Treckman looked at the forest and imagined living with Athena at the base of a violently cascading waterfall, with jungle on all sides, parts of it lush, other parts poisonous. He would hew things in the forest for her and she would upbraid him when such was his due.
Athena yawned. “Go away now, Treckman. I’ve got dibs on this place tonight.”
He got to his feet without objection and found his way down the promontory, heading across the dark, dew-heavy grass toward his billet shed. Coming around the barn he found Father Counselor sitting on a tree stump, plucking a guitar. The defrocked man had a few days’ growth of beard and looked as if haggard thoughts were eating at him. Treckman sat down next to the stump and Father nodded at him, kept playing.
“Are you going to sing?” Treckman asked.
“I have a lousy voice.”
Treckman reflected upon this. “Should I scat for you in the fashion of Ella Fitzgerald or Cab Calloway?”
Father shook his head. “You should just listen.”
“Meaning, I should undertake a radical vow of silence?”
“Let’s not be too ruthless with ourselves tonight, Treckman. Just listen.”
* * *
The next morning Treckman felt emboldened by the previous night’s promontory moment and decided to try windsurfing. The sport was the province of the cool L.I.T. boys who made the boathouse their lair, but Treckman marched onto the dock and knocked at the boathouse door. He peeked through the window, figuring the hipsters were in there, ignoring him. He saw no one, then heard giggling behind the boathouse. Pushing through the vines that cloaked the building’s rear, he found a bloodshot-eyed Greg the lifeguard, toking a bong. Behind Greg stood Jack Slavny, who was being handed a syringe by a grown man with a ponytail of gray hair to his ass.
“Oh,” Treckman said. He reviewed his mental files on cannabis and heroin users. “Hey. Hey there, cats.”
Jack grunted, set his syringe on a log, and stalked toward Treckman.
“Easy, Slavny,” Greg suggested. “He’s harmless.”
Treckman was backing away through the vines. “That’s right, don’t worry… Treckie ain’t no narc.”
Jack brought a hard palm to Treckman’s solar plexus, shoving him back onto the dock, pursuing him. Treckman thought that Jack, who was shirtless and tan, looked even thicker-chested than he had weeks before, but the smaller boy had also been anticipating this moment. After having spent a fortnight drawing and analyzing stick-figure recreations of the first assault he’d suffered – and after coaching Danny and Moss through a reenactment of the battle so that he could study the physics of it – Treckman had concluded that he could only stymie another pounding by literally embracing his enemy so that Jack’s blows couldn’t gather force. Now he executed his plan: ducking punches, he hugged Jack tight. The larger boy cried out, tried to break away.
“You won’t get free unless I release you,” Treckman explained. “I may not know how to throw a punch, but the uncanny strength in my shoulders will allow me to cling to you like a succubus till your rage dissipates. Please know that I am not enjoying our pas de deux. This is Darwinian self-preservation.”
When Jack tried to grapple free enough to punch, Treckman laced his arms around Jack’s, gripped tighter. Grimacing, they held each other’s shoulders, leaned hard at one another. Other campers gathered and hooted encouragements, but Treckman, his pulse in his teeth, felt alone with his adversary. Sweating, regarding the eyes across from his, he feared again that here was his doppelganger, a malevolent twin who would always accost him and never explain.
“Take him apart, Slavny,” a guy L.I.T. yelled, but Treckman, despite the nails tearing into his shoulders, was surprised to feel that the opposite was starting to happen, that he was somehow dissembling Jack, because panic came into the bully’s eyes now and both his arms and Treckman’s quaked, as if some strength innate to the built-up Jack were coursing out of him, into the paler boy. Sensing diminishment, Jack surged backward. His hands clawed down Treckman’s arms and his thumb caught Treckman’s watchband and then Jack fell alone into the lake.
A whoop went up from those watching. Some ran to congratulate Treckman. “Kudos to the geek,” one yelled.
But Treckman was gaping at what the surfacing Jack held in his fist.
“My Benrus!” Treckman yelled. “Give it back!”
Clouds had blocked the sun and Jack’s baleful green eyes mirrored the murk of the water. He reached into the shallow scum at his feet, brought up a rock, laced the watchband around it and hurled the Benrus out into the black, choppy deep.
“No,” Treckman begged, but his precious bead on things sank from sight and his no longer impressed fellows moved away from him on the dock.
He spent the rest of the day in a funk, and after lights-out that night he listened to the katydids outside his window screen, hating their redundancy. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, he walked through a field of winking fireflies to Athena’s cabin, where he peeked in the window and saw that her bunk was empty. On a hunch he sought out the promontory and climbed it. Athena was there, wearing a cream-colored peasant dress and earrings she’d made in the metal shop from bright, punctured dimes.
“I’ve been waiting,” she told him. “I heard about your chronograph. I’m so sorry.”
He sat beside her and they looked down on the lake. The smooth gray rock beneath them still held heat from the day.
“Something mysterious is happening,” Treckman said. “Something between me and Jack Slavny. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it’s what this summer is all about. When Jack first crossed my path, he appeared so hugely and drastically before me that I thought he might be a poltergeist, or an allegory. Then he beat my face in and I realized he was a flesh and blood dude. Now I’m at sixes and sevens trying to discern the exact nature of our dynamic, and I’m inconsolable about the loss of my Benrus.”
She took his hand, squeezed it. “I love hearing you talk… but I hate to see you feeling so low. Will it help you to feel better if I deflower you?”
Treckman was both terrified and relieved that she’d sensed his virginity. His stomach churned and he felt percussion in his ears. He considered hurling himself off the promontory so that he might be dashed to pieces on the rocks below and immortalized in local lore as a pro-abstinence, cautionary saint.
“It just might,” he said softly.
After she took off all of her clothes, he did the same with his own.
“Now, Treckman,” she cautioned, “this is important. If we’re going to do this, it can’t be your boyish idealism that wants to fuck me. I’m just a girl and you’re just a guy. I’ve had trouble with swoony-headed boys turning me into a feminine paragon in their heads.”
Treckman reflected upon this. He looked down at his own naked self, too overwhelmed to peek at hers. “I- I think we’re okay,” he said. “I really think it’s just my penis that wants to fuck you.”
“Just make sure it’s not your boyish idealism,” she said and she lay back on the warm rock, ready for him.
Afterward they both felt untethered and galvanized and they took turns complimenting the moon. She whispered that it was okay if he wanted to fall for her a little.
“It’s more than okay,” Treckman said. “And it’s more than a little.”
Part Four
Two weeks later the Follies began. Each day there were special events: the Pelletier Panthers played a double header against two teams from the town and the mighty-necked Jack Slavny hit a grand slam home-run in one of them; the Clarion girls, having refused Treckman’s offer to arrange for them a five-part harmony rendition of “Debaser” by the Pixies, performed patriotic songs at a Friday night campfire; and one morning after breakfast, Treckman, Moss and Danny strung up between the flag pole and the maple tree their enormous sunshine banner. The campers gathered before it to murmur admirations and confusions, for the gold and red rays of light emanating from the banner’s psychedelic epicenter contained swirling likenesses of both fairy creatures and historical men and women: in general there were centaurs, satyrs and elves, and more specifically there were profiles of Billie Holiday, Frodo Baggins and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Treckman loved the air of ritual surrounding the Follies, but each day at dusk now, even when the weather was fine, he smelled something odd and cool and bracing on the wind, some scent like rotting apples or a freezer door held open for too long. Athena, who’d lived her whole life on the lake, told him that it was merely autumn, which in the Finger Lakes could come pricking over your senses as early as August. Treckman nodded as if to say of course, but under his breath he asked the Earth to let this autumn – this force that never called on him back home – pass him by now.
“It’s time for the Interior,” Father Counselor told the L.I.T.s one morning. “I’ll be sending you out in twos, as follows: Erika and Steven… Todd and Morgan…”
Treckman sat with the other L.I.T.s beneath the maple, listening. He finally had some color in his skin and he’d learned to tie bowlines and sheepshanks. He hoped such accomplishments would earn him the right to hear his name matched now with Athena’s.
“Jack Slavny and Treckman,” Father Counselor said.
The bigger boy crossed his arms on his chest and looked up at the maple’s branches, pretending not to have heard. Treckman threw dirt on an ant beside his sneaker, watched it dig its way free.
“These pairings are non-negotiable,” Father warned.
The two young men dragged themselves to their feet and headed off toward the forest. Once they’d cleared the limit of Father Counselor’s vision, Jack threw a punch toward Treckman’s shoulder but Treckman scampered clear, then whirled and stood his ground, pointing hard at Jack. “Enough! Enough, Jack Slavny. If you persist in your antagonisms, I’ll do as I did on the docks and cling to you like a leech that you can never shake free. It will embarrass me, but it will embarrass you more. Now stop this nonsensical warring with me.”
Jack glowered and cocked an arm back, his hand fisted up. But for whatever reason – Treckman’s words, the dearth of an audience, the dank smell of corn husks from nearby farms – he lowered the arm. He grunted agreement in Treckman’s direction and they set off again, eyeing each other warily.
Soon they were in the forest, beating side by side down a path bordered and overhung with green weeds the size of men. A third party walked between them, Treckman knew, and it was the fellness itself, the corporeal unease of their summer. In lieu and in honor of Jack’s vow of silence, Treckman knew that it was his place to speak out and deflate this unease. Yet as they pressed deeper into the Interior, swatting gnats and kicking at tree roots, he gazed at Jack’s steel-toed boots and scratched his scalp and strained for words to say.
Eventually well over an hour had passed and they stopped beside a creek, stooping to cup and slurp water from their palms. Thickets of nettle and tall coniferous giants surrounded them so that they were in shadow. They sat juxtaposed on rocks, looking at each other, and Treckman blushed as if on a date, at a loss.
“I… I like your boots,” he ventured. Jack inclined his chin, barely, in response.
“I could never get away with wearing those. Their strength seems more suited to, say, an east-end-of-London roughneck, perhaps a member of the ska band Madness.”
Jack made no reply. Treckman wondered whether it were the play of forest shadows or whether the set of Jack’s jowls had indeed widened and become more thickly lupine of late.
“I bet you’d enjoy London,” Treckman offered. “I bet English girls would love a tough Yank like you. Myself, I’ve yet to visit the Isle of Britain, although I would have investigated it by proxy if I’d been cast in Brigadoon this past spring. But not only was I not granted a role, my idea of how to make the show more arrestingly contemporary was shot down by Mrs. Gavatino, our theater director.”
A branch above them cracked, then a silence came. Treckman resolved to continue speaking. “I merely told Mrs. Gavatino that the time-travel conceit of Brigadoon would allow us to create a futuristic dystopian version of the musical that might raise awareness about weapons of mass destruction. Are you familiar with the show, Jack Slavny? Well, in it, a charming Scottish village called Brigadoon conjures a way to appear out of the mist only once every two hundred years so that they can stay unsullied by the human evils outside their quaint town. Each day when they wake up, only one day has passed for them, but for the rest of us on the planet, two hundred years have gone by. Now, in my suggested version, everything’s going fine for these Brigadooners, and each morning their rising finds them ready to sing and frolic and pursue romantic high jinx… but what if one day they wake up and, whoops, it’s global nuclear winter? Because at some point during the two hundred years that transpired since these folks went to bed the night before, the Soviets launched their full arsenal of ICBMs at the U.S. homeland and we retaliated and now the whole planet has been fried by radiation and the rest of humanity has died out. So these cute little Scottish types wake up and immediately the pervasive nuclear fallout invades their town and they all go blind or sprout second heads, etcetera. Now you’ve got these freakish abominations galumphing around in the Highlands trying to sing along to bonny, chipper jig-and-reel numbers, but their skin is falling off in chunks and their dance partners are sliding out of their arms and croaking on the floor. I mean, if you saw that musical, you’d start reflecting… you’d think twice about wanting our commander-in-chief to drop anymore H-bombs anywhere. But Mrs. Gavantino said a flat-out no to producing my interpretation of the story, even though I was willing personally to design all the sets and to craft each player’s pus-filled, apocalyptic make-up.”
A sound – a mild but echoing rumble – broke in upon Treckman’s monologue. He looked to find its source in some nearby animal or some action of the creek until he realized that Jack Slavny was laughing. Looking at Treckman, the older boy was shaking his shaggy head back and forth with what seemed like appreciation. He slapped his thigh and kept on laughing, low and gruff, and Treckman, hearing no derision in the haws coming his way, ended up tittering as well, as if something infectious that he himself had unleashed were coming back and taking up house in him too. Their chortles mixed together and lasted, and Treckman had the fleeting thought that here at last was the deflation of their war.
Then, without warning, the noise coming from Jack’s mouth altered. He frowned and began spitting out small sounds that were far from the mirth of a moment before and closer to wheezing. His expression became bewildered.
“Jack?” Treckman said.
The older boy’s right hand went to his thick left bicep, massaged it. As blood drained from his face, his eyes glazed and he stood and planted his feet, his lips working silently now, as if he were calculating some private but infinite sum. Swaying on his feet and still gripping his left arm, he managed to step once toward Treckman before collapsing to his knees.
“Jack!” Treckman leaped to catch him.
“Treckman.” Jack pawed weakly at his left bicep. “This arm feels… like it’s tingling. Treckman?” His eyes rolled up in his head.
“Oh, Jesus. Oh sweet fucking hell-” Treckman lay Jack down, crouched, burrowed his head against Jack’s ribs, flipped the other boy into a fireman’s carry on his shoulders. And then he was running, crashing blindly back down the path toward camp, bent double from the muttering burden on his back.
“Father,” Treckman screamed. “Father.” He stumbled on in this way, clinging to the person curled around and above him. He sprinted, tears whipping free from the sides of his eyes, and he shouted at Jack to keep murmuring, to keep talking, long after Jack had ceased to do so. And as he hurtled forward, sobbing, staggering but never falling, Treckman felt the aching of his joints, the jutting of the path-stones that stubbed his feet, the indifference of the ferns, the lovely ferns that brushed him as he foundered past.
Part Five
The camp had never absorbed the death of a youth: the parents of most junior campers arrived almost immediately and spirited their children away. Those kids that remained waiting for their families stayed huddled close to their L.I.T.s as the phrase cardiac arrest spelled itself out darkly on their tongues.
As for Treckman, he watched in shock as an ambulance bore away Jack’s corpse, then he stood in place for hours staring after the ambulance. When he finally moved, he ran to the art hut and raided it for cans of black spray paint. He emptied them in blotting over as entirely as he could the sunshine banner that still hung between the maple and the flagpole. Moss and Danny would not help him, but when he was done, he hugged both boys as tightly as he could, guessing that this was goodbye. Then he went to the cabin that had been Jack’s, found Jack’s bunk stripped to a bare mattress and lay down on his back on this bunk, refusing to budge or utter a word to anybody.
The few remaining L.I.T. boys came for him first. They had blames and curses to bestow, and when these failed to make Treckman flinch, they filled a pillowcase with bars of soap and beat on Treckman’s arms and legs until he was weltered black and blue from neck to ankles. He gave them no tears or active resistance, but he gripped the sides of Jack’s bunk with all his might and they could not dislodge him from it. Father Counselor found them at their lashings, corralled the boys out, banished them from camp. When Father returned to Jack’s bunk, Treckman was still lying there, gripping the bunk edges and staring at the ceiling.
“Treckman,” Father said, “I’ve called your parents’ resort… your Mom and Dad have been notified, they’re hurrying back from a daytrip, they’ll be here by nightfall.”
When the boy made no reply, Father sighed. “Treckman, he’d been on steroids, okay? All summer, for his bodybuilding, Jack was spiking his ass with syringes he was getting from a hippy prick who deals contraband around here. No matter how many times I caught him, Jack kept sneaking off for more.” Father sat on a stool beside the head of the bunk but Treckman wouldn’t meet his eyes. “And the stuff he was on… you take enough of it, it promotes heart failure. So, Treckman, you’d better not-” – the priest’s tone was fierce now – “-you’d better not be harboring thoughts about having somehow brought this on him. Jack probably shot up just hours before you and he went walking. So this isn’t on you… and whatever loopy homage you’re trying to pay him by lying here, please cut it out. Goddammit, Treckman, say something.”
The boy shook his head. In frustration Father Counselor left him there, but when he returned a bit later with water and a plate of food, the boy would only sip from the water: he ate and said nothing. Still later when Treckman stepped out to use the bathroom in the barn, Father Counselor scuttled into the cabin and removed the mattress from Jack’s bunk. Upon returning, Treckman merely lay himself back down on the recessed wooden slat of the bunk bottom and folded his arms.
And then it was night and his parents were there. They got as far as the doorway of Jack’s cabin when Treckman jumped up and barred their way, slamming his palms against the door jambs. There was a pleading desperation in his eyes as he took from his pocket and gave his folks a note he’d scribbled on a scrap of paper in the art hut back when he’d fetched the black spray paint. Even then he’d known his plans.
George and Kay looked at the note. It read YOU CANNOT ENTER HERE.
The father searched his boy’s eyes, saw something elemental. “Let’s not force him, Kay. Let’s give him his space.”
“What? I’m his mother and he just witnessed another boy’s death. Like hell am I going to-”
“Just for a while,” George urged.
So his parents took up vigil just outside the cabin door, where Kay could peek in and monitor Treckman as he lay on Jack’s bunk.
It went on for another day and a half. Treckman slept or lay awake on the bunk, pausing only to sip water or use the bathroom, refusing to eat or speak. By now the camp had virtually emptied of other children. In another ploy, during a lavatory break of Treckman’s, Father Counselor had all bunks and other furniture removed from the cabin. When Treckman came back, he studied the floor and found the coffin-shaped pressure stain that Jack’s bunk had made and lay down within the stain’s borders.
“At least tell me why you won’t eat,” Father asked the boy.
Treckman reflected upon this. He was light-headed from hunger, but he had a notion that the thinner and less substantial he became in this world now, the stronger Jack might grow to be in whatever realm he’d crossed into, if such a realm existed.
* * *
On the morning when Father Counselor planned to lock up camp and drive back to his Chautauqua home, the weather was sunny and cold. Kay remained at the door of Jack’s cabin, but George, after whispering with Father Counselor, disappeared for a while and came back with a certain young camper in tow.
Still lying prone in Jack’s cabin, Treckman watched as a bright, window-shaped square of dawn threw itself on the floor and slowly crossed the cabin, bearing down on him like a searchlight. He heard scuffling footsteps and then Athena Merrick, in her jeans and Axel Rose shirt, walked into the cabin.
“I’m leaving this morning, Treckman,” she said. “Everyone is. On Father’s urging, I’ve kept my distance and let you mourn as you wish. But your Dad asked me to come in to see you because… because whatever you’ve been up to in here has to stop now. Summer’s over.”
Treckman clenched his top teeth onto his bottom ones. He’d read in athletic magazines that muscles had memory and, gritting his molars together, he tried to summon in his jaw the pain that Jack’s first punches had brought him.
“Treckman.” Athena knelt at his side, took his hand, kept her voice a low pact between them. “It’s terrible about Jack and it’s sad that you and I will probably never see each other again after today, but that’s not why I came in here. I came in here to say that you have to stop this silence. The world needs you to think in the fucked-up way that you think and care about the fucked-up things that you care about and talk the fucked-up way that you talk. Otherwise… otherwise, people will just do more and more of that awful thing they do where they buy special, shiny, horrible outfits for going to the gym in, and they’ll try so horribly hard to make money so that they can keep themselves and their loved ones safe, when all along, down deep, they’re all so scared and the workouts and the money won’t make them less scared, and maybe the only thing that can make any of us less scared is when a guy like you cares about fucked-up stuff and tells us all about that fucked-up stuff in that fucked-up way that you talk.”
Her words were too much for Treckman. He stood, shoved his way past the girl, past his parents, and out. Though no one gave him literal chase, he ran around the perimeter of the camp, looking for a portal, a way out of his circumstances, his plagued mind. The promontory and the forest were places that he’d already burned through or that had already burned through him, and he passed them by. The sweeping lawns and the barn held out neither freedom nor haven, so he spurned them and, still running and breathing hard, he found himself seeking the lowest elevation he could, the lake shore.
The boathouse was as locked as it always had been for him, filled now with every craft the camp owned. He stood on the dock and spat toward the building, then turned to the blasting blue team of the sky and the water. Clouds spun from a chill late August cotton were out and tiny whitecaps surrounded a pair of powerboats tugging late season water skiers. Treckman spat at the skiers too, and at the boats and the clouds, and then at the day itself. He saw a loon on the shoreline, trying to grip a large weed-wrapped snail shell in its beak, and he spat toward it too. When the loon made no start, no acknowledgement of his existence, he stomped down the dock and ran at the bird, causing it to drop its work and fly.
Treckman marched to the bird’s take-off point to crush beneath his heel the provision the loon had hoped to feast on. Arriving, he drove his foot down on the weedy snail, which refused to shatter. The boy grunted, frustrated. He bent to pull the weeds off the shell and weaken its defenses. After plucking off just a couple of weed strands, he fell back on his ass in the sand with a gasp, for the thick snail shell in his hand was no snail shell at all, but rather his Benrus.
His heart rose into his mouth. The wet sand soaked his trouser bottoms as he wiped detritus off the chronograph. Its band bore deep scratches and was slick with lichen, but the Benrus was working. Treckman got to his feet, clutching the instrument, swiveling his head round, trying to glimpse the vanished loon. As he secured the Benrus to his wrist, he tried to put down the welling in his eyes.
He took a last look at the water, the local day. I’m sorry I spat at you, he thought.
Then he turned up the hill toward camp. The flag pole and the maple were far off, but his and Moss and Danny’s banner hung there in the distance. He could see the scars that he’d given the banner, yet he could also make out brightness beneath the black, and he climbed the hill, battered, but destined for light and determined to find his way.
