Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  * * *

  And so it went the rest of the day, the kids playing, swimming, eating and bonding. Enjoying the kicks and punches and blocks in their martial arts classes, and occasionally outside of them as well. The counselors had to break up a few good-natured sparring sessions; warnings and Band-Aids were dispersed equally. The kids competed, joked and had a good time.

  Frankie lounged on a bench outside the rec hall, waiting for his chance at the fountain, when he looked up in the hills and noticed a reflected flash, as if for an instant a mirror had caught the sun. It was only a glimmer at the corner of his eye. When he turned to search for it, it was gone.

  He drank his water and then went to watch some of the kids play soccer out on the field, but for another hour the sense that someone was watching remained with him, like a bee crawling in endless circles between his shoulder blades.

  60

  Janie sat with her knees drawn up against her chest, hypnotized as Ocean capered and leaped and mimed before the campfire. It was story time, and the pile of flaming wood cooperated fabulously, burping smoke and casting fat, spiraling sparks up into the moonlit sky.

  Ocean was winding up a spookily modernized version of Poe’s “The Black Cat” rendered in a passable southern dialect. Hooting at first, the kids had finally quieted down, riveted by the tale of alcoholism, murder, madness and supernatural revenge. He concluded in a crouch by the fire: “—and that’s why tomorrow dawn, they gonna strap me in that chair, pull that long lever, and run ten thousand volts up and down mah spine. An’ I know I deserve to die, killin’ the only woman I ever love like that. But could someone, anyone tell me—them cats, man, wuz them two cats the same cat? Was they two cats with one soul? I got to know, just got to, ’fore I go to glory. Can’t anyone tell me? Please…?”

  He sagged, was silent for a long beat. Janie scanned the kids. Their eyes were riveted, not a sound, eyes wide. This was great! Then Ocean straightened and bowed as the kids applauded and screamed for another one.

  “Tomorrow,” he promised. After the kids finished cheering and giggling, Janie called them to order.

  “I want to share something with you,” she said. “It’s what the Apache call a ‘Horse Stealing’ song. Different Native American tribes often considered it sport to grab each other’s horses, and the young men of the tribe would compete to be the best thief. After a successful raid, they might celebrate by chanting something like this…”

  She and Paris beat the drums and sang back in forth to each other, a repetitive, intoxicating chant sung at a gallop. “Hey-yah hey-yah hey! Hey! Hey-yah hey-yah hey! Hey!”

  Haltingly at first, then with gradually increasing enthusiasm, the kids joined in. At first they were a bit rough. It was, after all, the first time that all of them had tried to create something together, in this case, a wall of sound.

  They got the hang of it swiftly, beginning to compete with each other, and play off each other’s voices. At every other camp she had attended, Janie had been forced to provide all the initial energy, carrying the kids on so that their natural shyness wouldn’t dampen the spiral of song. Not now. This time, the teams competed with each other eagerly.

  Blue chanted louder than White. Red, sweeter and wilder than Green. They stood, shouting at each other, and mimed riding horses. Although several of them couldn’t sing a lick, their voices began to blend together as if a professional choir director had worked with them for weeks, the sour pitches somehow canceling each other out, the sweet voices guiding, the strong ones driving on.

  Janie was first puzzled and then baffled, and finally boggled, just listening to the campers repeating that refrain: “Hey-yah hey-yah hey! Hey! Hey-yah hey-yah hey! Hey!”

  They were dancing now, stamping their feet in imitation of countless television and movie Indians, faces screwed up in concentration. Janie barely had to squint to imagine them in headdresses and leather clothing, chanting and singing their joy and challenge to the sky, to the earth, to the elements.

  These weren’t just a bunch of kids, in four separate tribes demarked by color. They were a single tribe. If Janie didn’t, couldn’t understand how that had suddenly happened, it was still an indisputable fact.

  She and her staff were the outsiders. She had the odd sense that if every adult vanished for the rest of the week, these kids would be just fine.

  And instead of feeling relieved, ecstatic, admiring, she couldn’t rid herself of a minuscule but growing sense of unease.

  It was like a bizarre reworking of that old musical refrain:

  Everything felt so damned right, something had to be wrong.

  61

  SATURDAY, JUNE 30

  The high desert’s afternoon heat baked the craft room, transforming each shallow breath into a labored chore. The Green tribe braved the biting black flies on the long, open patio, and only moved back inside when shadows swallowed the sun, and skeeters began their kamikaze dive-bombing runs.

  Vivian was careful not to hover, but watched obliquely as Patrick struggled to render clay into an aerodynamic form. He couldn’t seem to decide if it was a bird or a plane. It certainly wasn’t Superman. Perhaps it was a big bug of some kind.…

  He stopped, knuckled his fist against his temples, and looked down to the south, where a few dust devils were waltzing up the incline. In the free period after lunch she and Patrick had explored the terrain just below camp. It was a kilometer of dry grass, dead logs and brown, scrawny sad-looking scrub brush and stunted trees. It didn’t get green until you came closer to the cabins, as if the caretakers had hoarded every drop of rainwater, using it where it would do the most good.

  Almost on cue, Mr. Withers came trudging up the road, pushing a wheelbarrow stacked with red roofing tiles. He noted Patrick’s expression, and looked back down to the south. The dust devils were whipping more intensely, dancing like little gray funnels. “That’s the afternooner,” Withers said. “Every day about this time, we get a stiff one blowing up the Folly toward Charisma Lake.”

  Patrick was working again, hunched over; then he straightened and seem to compare his efforts to that of his nearest neighbor, Bucky. Patrick had started adding an antenna to his model, which would certainly skew it in an insectile direction. Bucky was working with some pipe cleaners, making a skeletal outline of something resembling a soccer ball.

  “What is that?” Patrick was instantly fascinated. Vivian drifted closer to listen.

  Bucky shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw it in a dream once, and started drawing it. See?”

  His dusty brown nap sack was at the side of the table. He opened it and pulled out a gray vinyl sketchbook. Its pages were crammed with drawings, and Bucky was a good artist. Most intriguing were several images of those strange soccer-ball shapes.

  Patrick studied them, then looked back at the pipe cleaner. Finally he said, “God, man. It’s like I’ve seen that too.” He looked at his own lumpy model, and then back at Bucky’s drawings, and pushed his own model to the side. “I think I could build one of those.”

  One of the other kids was looking as well. Soon, all had gathered around to watch. Some of them began to take sticks and clay, forming their own balls.

  Vivian shook her head. This was a familiar confusion, the odd sense of synchronization that had always existed around the Claremont preschool. Not regimentation, but as if the kids voluntarily, even instinctively, had aligned their thoughts and actions. She’d always thought the Claremont teachers were just brilliant disciplinarians, but what was she to make of this?

  As they worked, she went to sit next to Mathias, who was working quietly. He seemed entirely pulled into the world of the wire sculpture.

  “Hi,” she said. He barely acknowledged her, but she had no sense that he was being rude, just completely and utterly absorbed in his project.

  “Did you learn to make that in school?” she asked.

  “Naw.” His voice was quiet, far away.

  “Why is it so interesting to you?”


  He studied it. For a moment, his carefully cultivated inner-city toughness seemed to slough away. “It … it looks like the way I think,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, when I got a problem, I try makin’ a shape in my head.”

  “Something to hold the problem?”

  “Naw. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry. Try me.”

  He screwed up his square dark face, struggling to find a way to say it. Then he brightened. “I just did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I was trying to figure out how to explain it to you, you know?” His fingers traced shapes in the air, and he grew more animated. “And then pow, there was a shape in my head, like a pipe-cleaner soccer ball.” He pronounced it soccah bawl. “And you see where the wires meet? Each of those points had a different picture, or feeling.”

  A different picture or feeling…?

  “All right…” Vivian agreed cautiously.

  “And you were right here,” he pointed to one of the interstices. “And I was here,” he pointed to another. “And the idea, the shape idea thing, was over here—” he pointed to a third, so that the three points were evenly distributed around the surface of the ball. “Now if you’re at my position, I go straight through the center of the ball to the idea, see?” He groped in his pocket, found a pencil and thrust it through the center, connecting the points. “But you don’t understand, so you have to go around the outside, and it takes you a long time, because you don’t see the connections. See?”

  “Ah … sure,” she lied. And then, without knowing why she asked, “How many different points … ideas … people, whatever, can you hold on that … ball, is it? At one time?”

  “Usually only seven or so. The trick is to make a shape that fits any problem. Squares, pyramids, you know, stuff like that.”

  “And this soccer-ball shape?”

  “It’s just sittin’ in my head, you know?”

  “Where did you get it from?” And where did the rest of them get theirs? And does Patrick have a set of mental tools like that too? Suddenly, and fleetingly, she understood. The concept was similar to using a clothing dummy. A flat drawing of a costume revealed one set of needs and problems. Cutting the pattern and draping it on the form created an entirely new set of three-dimensional associations. And creating the first piece, and applying it to a living, breathing body, gave an entirely different view. More than once, she had asked herself how she would look at a problem if it were a costume commission. What materials? What effort? What time, skills and tools? What cost? What was it expected to do? What context would it be worn in, and how far away would the audience sit?

  All of these things impacted the decisions and strategies that might take her from concept to finished product.

  One darkly painful example: once upon a time, her marriage fit perfectly. As time went on, it seemed to shrink upon her, confining her spirit. She applied patches, let it out at every hem and seam, and still it strangled her. There had at last been an end to the devices at her command, a limit to the skill of her clever hands, her creative eye, her artist’s heart. And if she hadn’t had that costumer’s perspective, that way of looking at a problem, a connection between heart and mind, between Patrick and Otis and a working woman named Vivian, between finance and love, responsibility and freedom, it might have taken more wasted years to see that the marriage had to end. That in the kingdom of her heart, the emperor wore no clothes.

  Mathias watched her face, a clear question in his eyes. Do you understand? Are you one of us? Or of them?

  And the truth was that she wasn’t certain. Mathias (and how many of the others?) thought about his problems as if they were complex three-dimensional objects. Where in the world had he learned that trick? And how many other oddnesses remained to be found in their twelve-to-fifteen-year-old minds?

  “I think I understand,” she said uncertainly. And just maybe she did.

  * * *

  Six members of the Blue Team headed single file up to the lake, four boys and two girls. They trudged up the trail, across the little valley to the highest plateau, coarse white institutional towels draped over their shoulders.

  The man-made lake was roughly teardrop-shaped. Mrs. Withers claimed it was a mile in circumference, but it looked larger. Other kids were already in the lake swimming, having fun, pushing each other in, diving from one of three boards. Denise Nicolas, a sturdy, twenty-something straw-haired lifeguard, oversaw them, ruling the pool with inflexible discipline. One kid sat over to the side, alone. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and was nearly swallowed by an oversized green Army surplus coat that he wore almost everywhere.

  Frankie.

  Denise’s square jaw softened. “Hon, don’t you want to swim?”

  He wagged his head, gazing out at the water where the others were playing.

  “Then why did you come up here?”

  Frankie gazed out at the water. Something struggled in his eyes, something painful and private, a moment’s glimpse, quickly buried, swiftly gone.

  He got up and walked away. Denise looked after him, and then turned back to her charges. There were so many kids. Her heart was drawn to the boy, with his dense freckles and sun-peeled skin. He looked a little ungainly, but she was sure that if he’d just get in the water and mix with the others, he’d fit in fine.

  But there was no time to concern herself with that now. There were so many kids, and only five counselors. It was easy for a boy like Frankie to get lost in the shuffle.

  62

  SUNDAY, JULY 1

  Night had descended on Charisma Lake, and the crickets and night birds had awakened to sing their evening song. It had been a good day: the meals had been the traditional summer camp meld of canned vegetables, heavy starches and processed meats. The games were long and noisy and vigorous, the chance to bake in the Arizona high-desert sun intoxicating. As the day cooled, the boys and girls were separated by gender. The girls went to the white dome of the Sports center, the boys into the empty Arts room.

  Now as the stars emerged, Janie spoke to the girls with quiet strength, the fine tiny wrinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes etched more deeply as she concentrated. “You are about to enter the circle of women.” She paused, waiting for her words to sink in before she continued. “In most ancient cultures, there are ceremonies which draw a line between childhood and adulthood, but not in ours.”

  Some of the girls giggled, others shifted uncomfortably or looked confused. She expected that. The popular culture, movies and television and music, inundated the kids with images of adult rewards, adult sexuality, adult toys. But very little was said about the rigors of the passage between adolescence and full maturity. Heck, at thirty-nine she was still struggling with it herself.

  “We’re going to fix that,” she continued. “Toward the end of the week you will have a chance to take part in a very special ceremony, something you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. How many of you would like to hear more?” A moment’s pause, and then about half the hands were raised. “Good. Good. Now, then. Building up to it we wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about anything you might have on your minds. Anything at all. Nothing said here gets back to your parents, or to anything or anyone on the outside. So. What would you like to talk about?”

  There was a long pause. Then a girl named Heather said: “Boys?”

  That was predictable. They giggled, and there was a little fast talk, some embarrassed chatter, all of which was perfectly normal. What rather surprised Janie was the way lovely Courtney’s mouth twisted into a grimace, as if she had bitten down on something rotten. Her voice was an ugly rasp. “I’m not talking about what some boy wants. I know what boys want. Men want.” Her hard expression grew harder, colder.

  “How do you know that, Courtney?”

  “Because I can get whatever I want from them,” she said.

  “And how do you do that?”

  “You know,” she said, her voic
e ugly. “You all know.”

  “You give them sex?” Janie tried to keep her voice neutral. Courtney was large, well developed, with full breasts and a woman’s hips, but she was only fifteen.

  Courtney shrugged noncommittally, but her slightly parted lips and half-lidded eyes gave all the answer she needed.

  “What do you want out of life, Courtney?” Janie asked.

  The girl shrugged. Janie tried another tactic. “Does that get you the kind of attention you really want?”

  “I can get a man,” she said. She looked at Janie challengingly. “I could get your man, if I really wanted to. Ocean’s kind of cute. Don’t believe me? Dare me.” She wet her lips with her tongue.

  What a brat, Janie thought, but that thought was almost instantly followed by, No, not a brat. A little lost soul. Janie listened to the disbelieving giggles tolerantly. “I doubt that, Courtney, but don’t bother trying. I’m not interested in judging you, that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just say that ‘getting’ a man is different from holding one. Guys are easy to get in bed—”

  “Ah heard that,” Aylana said, and the girls giggled.

  “But the ones they keep are the ones who they’d want to raise their daughters. Just remember that, no matter what they say to get your pants off. So these guys, the ones you sleep with. Do any of them look at you with the kind of love and respect that you think they’d feel toward their own daughters?”

  “They love me,” she said, but now she seemed less certain.

  “Do you know the difference between love and lust? Would they still be there if you couldn’t give them sex? What about if your pretty face burned off in a fire?”

  Courtney physically recoiled from that. “No man would do that.”

  “My grandfather did,” Janie said. “My grandmother was burned in an auto accident. He stayed with her for another thirty years, until she died. And he never married again.”