Mayor of the Universe

by Lorna Landvik

  Rocky stood on the path, his hands balled up into chubby fists.

  “You ever touch me again and I’ll drop out, after I kill you.”

  “Good,” said Shark, glad his voice didn’t crack. “Then I guess we understand each other.”

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  Today, as I was polishing the silver, Clarence came into the kitchen with a present.

  “A rose,” he said, handing me the long-stemmed flower. “Some say, ‘A rose for a rose,’ but in your case I have to say, ‘A rose for someone ten times sweeter, twenty times more lovely, and thirty times more beautiful.’” Who wouldn’t swoon at that romance? And yet it is the everyday gesture that makes me feel so cherished: the unasked-for back rub after a long afternoon of ironing . . . turning the radio dial to my favorite station, even when the ballgame’s on another . . . slipping out during the movie previews to buy me the Jordan almonds I said I didn’t want but really did . . .

  Intergalactic Memo/Reply

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  Frankly, your ellipses frighten me.

  You must wrap up all this earthly folderol as quickly as possible. Finally, thanks to a little bribe (he promised her a ride on a gravity wave), a UHC member told Revlor what exactly the Lodges have been in competition for.

  This is big, so wrap it up!

  When they reached the weight room, both boys were panting with exertion, and when Rocky flung open the door, he shouted, “There it is!”

  Following behind him, Shark saw a piece of paper thumbtacked to the bulletin board that usually posted instructional photographs on how to lift weights.

  Rocky read aloud, “Do fifteen squats, ten bicep curls with five-pound weights, and five push-ups. Then tell each other what your favorite movie star in your favorite movie is, and remember to write it down in your notebooks!”

  “This is stupid!” said Rocky. “I’m not going to do it! Or better yet—I’m not going to do it, but I’ll say I did!”

  “Well, I’m not a cheater,” said Shark, and he got down on the floor and began to do his push-ups, counting off each one.

  “One!”

  “There’s a difference in being a cheater and a sap,” said Rocky.

  “Two!”

  “Nobody’s gonna do these!”

  “Three!”

  “Oh, all right,” said Rocky, and he joined Shark on the floor and began his own set of push-ups.

  Getting up to do his squats, Shark noticed that Rocky was doing his push-ups the modified on-your-knees way (Shark had done all real ones), and he couldn’t help feeling smug, although he was smart enough to feel smug internally.

  Squats were not the easiest exercise for either boy, but neither laughed when the other teetered off balance.

  “How many of these stupid things are we supposed to do?” said Rocky, struggling to rise and squatting down.

  “Fifteen.”

  “I’ll bet Du-DuBarry really got her jollies thinking of these stupid things.”

  Shark snorted a laugh at his partner’s joke.

  Finishing the squats, they staggered to the weight rack, and Rocky took the eight-pound barbells, doing his bicep curls faster than Shark, who had the five-pound ones.

  “You’re good,” said Shark.

  Nodding his thanks, Rocky did ten more than required.

  “So who’s your favorite movie star and what movie did you like him in?” asked Shark, sitting down on the weight bench and opening the notebook.

  “That’s easy. Jack Parrish in Agent of Impossibility.”

  “Mine, too,” said Shark.

  “Well, you can’t use my answer.”

  “Hey, you don’t own Jack Parrish,” said Shark.

  “I don’t own him, but I’m gonna meet him—when I win the contest.”

  17

  A few clouds had started forming in the summer sky, but it was still hot as the boys headed toward 6 on the map—the camp’s laundry facilities.

  “I sure hope that old hag isn’t there,” said Rocky. Each boy had to bag his dirty laundry and deliver it on assigned days to Gertl, a small, wiry woman from Albania whose nearly toothless grin and unfamiliarity with the English language frightened the younger campers and embarrassed the older ones.

  “Where your dirt stuff?” said Shark, imitating the woman’s signature phrase. “Give to me dirt stuff!”

  Rocky allowed himself a little laugh and said, “And then the way she always pokes you in the chest when she talks—man, every time she does that, I want to grab her finger and break it right off!”

  Shark had felt the same thing when the old women jabbed his collarbone with her finger, but he never would have said it out loud.

  They were both relieved to find the laundry cabin empty of Gertl the Poker.

  “Twenty sit-ups,” said Rocky, reading the instructions taped over one of the washers. “And then we’re supposed to use the clothesline post outside to do four chin-ups.”

  Shark groaned; he was terrible at chin-ups.

  “And then get this—we’re supposed to tell each other about our favorite birthday.”

  The laundry room smelled pleasantly of bleach and detergent, but both campers, afraid that the Albanian laundress might appear at any time to attack their collarbones, decided to do their sit-ups as well as chin-ups outside.

  Again, each boy showed their particular strengths—the sit-ups were easy for Shark while Rocky huffed and puffed and grunted through his. When it came time to the chin-ups, Rocky was a machine cutting through the air while it seemed an earthquake had its epicenter in Shark’s arms as he pulled himself up to the bar for the last two times.

  Hiking to the Arts and Crafts cabin, Shark said, “So do you want to tell me about your favorite birthday or should I tell you about mine?”

  “This whole thing wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to do this feelings crap,” said Rocky. He sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Three years ago, my grandpa died.”

  “Your favorite birthday is when your grandpa died?”

  “No!” said Shark, suddenly on the verge of tears. “My grandpa, he . . . uh, he was a great guy.”

  “So why were you happy when he died on your birthday?”

  “I wasn’t! He didn’t! Will you just let me tell the story?”

  “Sheesh. Go ahead.”

  Both boys increased their pace as if rushing away from their discomfort.

  “Well, he . . . ,” began Shark, wondering why he had ever opened his big mouth at all. “He . . . never teased me about the way I look, he liked to do stuff with me, he laughed at my jokes.” Shark focused on the clouds gathering in the sky, not daring to look at his partner. “He’d take me into his office and tell everybody, from the shoeshine guy in the lobby to the elevator guy to his secretaries, ‘This is my grandson, Vince.’”

  Rocky’s laugh was like a bark. “We’re not supposed to tell each other our real names, Vince!”

  “Sorry,” said Shark, and he was—sorry for revealing so much of himself, sorry for sharing the memory of his grandfather with this clod who couldn’t care less about him. He increased his pace.

  “Well, go on,” said Rocky after a long moment. “Cripes.”

  Shark would have just as soon turned around and run back to his cabin, finished with this stupid game and his stupid partner, but the remembrance of his grandfather’s affection gave him the courage to finish his story.

  “The stuff we did doesn’t sound like a lot of fun—we didn’t go fishing or to the movies or anything ’cause he was always so busy working, but like I said, he’d take me to his office sometimes or we’d go out for lunch. Anytime I was with him, he made me feel . . . like I was important.” Shark’s mouth went through a strange series of configurations—he pursed his lips, pressed them together, then blew out a stream of air—before he continued.

  “Then he told me for my ninth birthday he
was going to take me to Yankee Stadium.”

  “Who were they playing?”

  Sounds of an argument rose up from the basketball court where a game between the twelve-year-olds was under way, an accusation of cheating and a counteraccusation of playing like babies.

  “The Red Sox,” said Shark. “I was so excited . . . but then two weeks before the game, he had a heart attack.”

  Rocky inhaled a little gasp.

  “Right in the middle of the stockholders’ meeting, my mom told me. He was in the hospital for three days before he died and I . . . I felt like I’d been robbed or something.”

  The boys kept walking, the incline of the path was rising, and they were breathing harder.

  “On my birthday, I felt so . . . lonesome, and then my dad says, ‘Come on, we’ve got a ball game to go to.’ Turns out, in the hospital, my grandpa told my dad the tickets were on his desk and to take me if he didn’t make it. Turns out he did some other stuff, too.”

  “What?”

  Shark cleared his throat; he had a powerful thirst.

  “Well, my grandpa was sort of a big shot, I guess, although he never acted like it, and well, not only did I get to go to the game, I got to go in the clubhouse afterwards.” He took off the cap that was rarely off his head and handed it to Rocky. “Whitey Ford gave this to me. It was the hat he wore during the game.”

  “Wow,” said Rocky, stopping in his tracks. “I didn’t know this was the real thing.” He fingered the signature and set the cap on his own head, and a tiny explosion of panic detonated in Shark’s chest.

  “Don’t worry,” said Rocky, taking it off and flinging it at Shark. “It’s not like I was going to keep it or anything.”

  Ashamed at how transparent his feelings must have shown on his face, Shark settled the hat back on his own head while his cheeks singed with color.

  There was a bench in front of the Arts and Crafts cabin and Rocky sat down on it.

  “So I’m supposed to write this down, right?” he said, taking out the little pencil he’d put in his shorts pocket. He took the notebook his partner gave him.

  “Shark got to go to a Yankees game,” he said aloud as he wrote. “He got Whitey Ford to sign a hat for him.” With a hard poke of his pencil he added the period and then handed the notebook to Shark, who didn’t know whether to be hurt or grateful for Rocky’s brevity.

  “The best birthday party I ever had was my last one. We had a big party for my relatives, and I saw my cousin Susie’s tits.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She was changing in one of the spare bedrooms—only I didn’t know it. I was just trying to find my cousin Leonard. Anyway, I walk right in—and boom,” here he curved his fingers, as if holding imaginary melons, “there they were.”

  Shark couldn’t help himself; he laughed.

  “How am I supposed to write something like that?”

  Rocky thought for a moment. “Just say once I got a really good present from my cousin Susie.”

  Leaving their fourth stop, the camp library, they ran into two other boys.

  “Hey, where’ve you guys been?” asked Bronze.

  “Yeah, you get lost or something?” asked Condor.

  “We’ll see who’s lost,” said Rocky.

  “Yeah,” said Shark. “We’ll save a place for you at the finish line.”

  “Ha!” said Bronze.

  Other competitors they passed said the same things: “Where’ve you been?” “Do you know you’re going backwards?” “Are you lost?” to which the boys answered back with any number of insults.

  “We’re going to win, you know,” said Shark after they had passed the last of their competitors.

  “’Course we are!” said Rocky, and after a moment with an uncharacteristic lack of bluster asked, “But how do you know for sure?”

  “Bronze and Condor are ahead of all the other guys, and we ran into them coming into the library.”

  “So?”

  “So we were coming out. We were already done with 4 and they were just coming in. So we’re like one step ahead of them.”

  Rocky thought for a moment. “Yeah, but maybe the tasks are harder and longer at the stops we haven’t been to yet.”

  That was a possibility Shark hadn’t thought of.

  “In that case, let’s run.”

  And they did. By the time they were at their last destination—the boathouse—they had jumped rope, sprinted around the Dining Hall, and had done any number of lunges, side-twists, and toe-touches. Shark had learned Rocky’s favorite book was Robinson Crusoe and that his best family vacation was to Disneyland.

  “Although my sister made us ride those stupid little teacups about a million times,” he said.

  Rocky in turn learned Shark’s favorite book was Where the Red Fern Grows and that his favorite vacation had been to Yellowstone.

  “We saw four black bears in camp and one grizzly bear up in the mountains.”

  What Miss DuBarry would be most pleased to know, of course, was that each boy had also learned that his partner wasn’t so bad after all.

  And isn’t that the crux of successful weight—nay, life—management? she wrote in her journal. By getting in touch with feelings, others’ and one’s own?

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  This is what a warm hand caressing your face feels like. And this, the depths of looking not into someone’s eyes but their very souls—well, I’m still swimming in it!

  Live Field Report/Reply

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  Enough with the fooling around: report back to the Lodge immediately. And when you do, bring me an ice cream sandwich.

  Humps of dark clouds had slowly gathered on the horizon like a herd of bison, and a stiff wind ruffled the surface of the lake.

  The boys’ last task was to paddle to the diving dock and circle it three times before heading back, but as they put on their life jackets, Shark said, “I don’t know if we should go out there, Rocky.”

  His partner’s answer was to push the canoe out into the lake, and Shark scrambled after him.

  The wind was like an invisible hand pushing them backwards, and Shark wished he’d been brave enough not to get into the boat.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” asked Rocky.

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  “Cripes, we’re hardly moving!” said Rocky, his voice nearly swallowed by the wind.

  Both boys’ arms moved like pistons and they were on their second trip around the dock when he saw the first lightning strike.

  “Hey! Hey, did you see that, Rocky? We’ve got to get off the lake now!”

  Rocky laughed. “What, are you scared of a little lightning?”

  “Yes! Now come on, let’s get back!”

  Big splats of rain began to fall.

  “We’ve gotta go around one more time,” said Rocky. “You’re the one who said you didn’t want to cheat.”

  A low rumble of thunder crescendoed in a loud crack.

  “Rocky, we’ve got to go back, now!”

  When they rounded the dock, Shark began paddling hard, steering toward shore, but Rocky paddled in opposition to him.

  “Rocky! Rocky!”

  The boy’s laugh was almost maniacal as he leaned toward Shark and pulled off his baseball cap.

  “Now maybe you’ll listen to the captain, huh?”

  For a moment Shark was stunned into muteness, staring through the rain at Rocky as he put his cap on.

  “Give me that!” he said, lunging toward Rocky. The canoe rocked.

  “One more time around is all,” said Rocky, leaning back and pushing his paddle through the water.

  Lightning zigzagged above the pine trees and the following thunderclap was almost immediate.

  “We’ve got to get off the lake now!”

  Rocky continued paddling in the direction he wanted to go, and as much as Shark
fought the motion, Rocky was stronger than he was, and it appeared the canoe would once again round the diving dock.

  But not with me in it, thought Shark.

  He jumped out of the canoe, nearly upturning it, and began swimming toward shore. The rain was now hard and fast, slicing through the sky. Behind him Rocky screamed at him, reviving his old names and calling him some new ones.

  “You stupid shit! Fat ass! Come back here, you chicken shit!”

  Shark staggered up the shore just as Rocky paddled up, and after jumping out of the canoe he gave chase, tackling Shark near the boathouse.

  Lightning lit up the sky and thunder made its accompanying crash.

  “Get off me!” shouted Shark.

  “How’d I get such a pansy for a partner?”

  Intergalactic Memo

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  Tandy—can’t you see Fletcher needs your help? Tandy? Tandy, shake the sand out of your receptors and answer me!

  The two boys rolled in the grass, pounding each other as the rain pelted them. Shark had just about pushed Rocky off him when he was yanked up onto his feet.

  “What the hell is going on?” cried Bear, his counselor, and holding on to Shark with one hand, he grabbed Rocky with the other, and the three of them began to run.

  The lightning and thunder chased them as they raced through the heavy drapes of rain. When they got to the nearest shelter, Bear pulled them up the stairs and pushed them through the doors of the Great Hall.

  Miss DuBarry and the rest of the eleven-year-old boys, seated around the fireplace, gaped at them.

  “Goodness, you boys are soaking wet!”

  After stating the obvious, the camp director pointed to the closet next to the door and said, “Bear, get those boys some blankets. Thank goodness we’ve got a fire built!”

  Shark accepted the blanket Bear draped around his shoulders and ran his fingers through his wet hair, gasping at what was not there.

  “Where’s my hat?” he said to Rocky.

  His partner shrugged elaborately. “It probably came off when I was beating you up.”

  He smirked at his friends, but Pyrennes and Allegheny did not offer any laughter.

  “Wait a second,” said Bear, grabbing Shark as he turned back toward the door. “You’re not going anywhere.”