Camp Pleasant

by Richard Matheson

  I stood unmoved and adamant. He struggled at first with many a “But Matt” and a “I gotta!” thrown in to bolster his struggle to quit the cabin. I persevered, however, and, finally, failing with the overt method, Tony slumped on his side on the bunk and stared at the wall, occasionally dropping a phrase which, although muttered under breath, still managed to reach me.

  “All right, never mind the cussing,” I said. “Your clothes are filthy. You are a disgrace to the good name of Cabin Thirteen. You will wash.”

  And, with that, I laid the behemoth bulk of his laundry bag by his side.

  “Come on now,” I said, “either you wash or I go get Sid.”

  Tears in his great, confused eyes; a curl to his lips.

  “I know,” I said, “you’re in beautiful agony. Now are you going to wash your clothes?”

  “I got a series!” Vehemently; voice of the betrayed.

  I left to get Sid. When we returned to the cabin, it was empty. The laundry bag was gone too.

  “Well, either he dumped it in the lake or he’s washing,” I judged.

  We found him in Paradise, surrounding by mountains of dirty clothes, cursing heartily while he scrubbed at the sink. As Sid and I entered, the cursing stopped and the scrubbing increased a little. When we reached the sink Tony looked up at Sid with sorrowful pleading in this eyes.

  “Gee, Sid, I got a series game.”

  “Tony, until you learn to take care of your clothes, you can’t expect to play ball.”

  Silence, then scrubbing and a muffled, “Don’t know why I came to this lousy goddam camp anyway.”

  I left, hearing, as the screen door closed behind me, those familiar lines from Sid, “Now, look, Tony. Matt is only doing this for your own good.” And the sullen reply, “I know.”

  Later, I returned and found miles of clothes hanging on the lines beside Paradise. None of them were clean, of course, but they were all wet anyway. I felt that was the most I could ask on such short notice.

  When I reached the cabin, Tony was just coming out with his bat.

  “I’m sorry, Matt,” he said. “I’ll try better. I’m gonna wash a little clothes every day and then it won’t pile up.”

  “That’s fine,” I managed. “That’s the stuff, Tony.”

  “Ain’t that the best, Matt? A little clothes every day?”

  “Sure. That’s the best, Tony.”

  He left for his imaginary series game, leaving me in pleasant shock. After less than two weeks, a slight change for the better. He was sorry. He was going to “try better.” It made me feel very good.

  After dinner, came the balancing act.

  Toward the end of the rest period, Mulhausen of Cabin 14 pushed the old wheelbarrow up the hill from the lodge, stopped in front of each cabin and tossed a stack of letters on the face of the poor counselor who was trying to catch a little sleep after knocking himself out for fifty minutes trying to keep the kids quiet.

  I handed out the letters that particular day, noticing that there was one from Tony’s mother. It was the first letter he’d received since camp started and it pleased me to watch him settle down on his bunk and, excitedly, tear open the envelope.

  The cabin was quiet for a few moments as it could only be when the boys were absorbed either in mail or comic books. Then began the inevitable comments.

  “Oh boy!” (From Charlie Barnett) “My mom is sending me two suits. I’m gonna go to the dance next week.”

  “I’m gettin’ my new shirts and my brown sport coat!” (From Marty Gingold)

  “My dad is sending me five bucks!” (Chester Wickerly)

  Tony very quiet, reading, then looking up excitedly.

  “Oh boy! My mom is sending me my blue suit and some shirts and some pants and everything!”

  His remark went unnoticed as did all the rest. The boys didn’t really expect any reception from their little personal remarks. They just wanted to let these things be known.

  Shortly after, the dock horn squalled and afternoon activity officially began. Bathing suits replaced shorts, tennis rackets and ball bats ousted comic books, forced repose succumbed to violent movement. In a minute, the last of the boys had dashed out of the cabin with Tony, as usual, trudging off to the diamond, weighed down by the Louisville Slugger that was almost as long as he was.

  I finished my mail—a letter from my mother and one from a friend— and went to the door, stretching. Maybe an ice cream now.

  Then an urge; unkind, if you will. I suddenly wanted to read Tony’s letter. I wanted to see what his mother was like, I wanted to see if there was any hint in her words of the warped debilities she had transferred to her son. Was she young, wild, irresponsible? Or old, stolid, ignorant? I knew that Tony’s father had divorced her; Sid had told me that. But that was all I knew.

  I sat down on Tony’s bunk and picked up the letter.

  I hope you’re enjoing yourself. I hope you’ll be good. I hope I can come and see you. I hope you lisen to your counsiler. (A smile from me.)

  I sat there. I read that letter again, not understanding. Where was “the blue suit and some shirts and some pants and everything?” I kept rereading the letter, not quite able to believe it, undergoing a strange, unrealistic feeling; one I had trouble adjusting to.

  There it was though. A ten-year-old boy who had to lie because there was nothing else to balance himself with. A little boy who could find equality only in imagining.

  I didn’t know what to do or think. I couldn’t tell Tony; I wouldn’t want him to know I’d read his letter. There was nothing to do, nothing to say. Just keep quiet, be a little ashamed for knowing and three cheers for people who breed children only to ruin them.

  4.

  It was dark in the cabin; early morning. Everyone should have been asleep but I heard a moaning. I sat up with a rustling of bedclothes and listened hard.

  Tony.

  Realizing that, I suspected for a moment that it was a trick since he was excessively prone to them at all hours. I sat there listening a moment to see if he’d cease crying midnight wolf.

  He didn’t. The moaning went on and I got up and went over to his bed with my flashlight. I shone it down a little to the side of his face and saw his eyes, wide and stricken.

  “What’s the matter, Tony?” I asked quietly.

  “My foot hurts.”

  I pulled aside the army blanket and shone my flashlight there. It was no wonder his foot hurt. It was swollen and inflamed, along the bottom of it a ragged gash, purple-edged with infection.

  “Good God, when did this happen?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “How?”

  “I … j-jumped offa the dock and landed on a rock.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell somebody?”

  “I was scared.”

  No answer to that; it was beyond argument. I could only care for him. As gently as I could, wincing along with him, I wrapped some gauze from my first-aid kit around the foot and told him we’d go to the dispensary in the morning.

  “You’ve got to tell people when you get hurt, Tony,” I said. “Don’t keep it a secret.”

  Only a sniffling and a tear from Tony Rocca. I felt a sudden rush of pity for the kid. My smile was as tender as a smile in the sleep-logy middle of the night can be.

  “It’s all right, Tony,” I said. “All right. Go to sleep now.”

  “Thanks, Matt.” Quietly and gratefully.

  I went back to my bed and lay awake awhile to see if he was going to be all right. He made no further sounds of pain and, after about fifteen minutes, I heard the delicate babbling of his snores. I turned on my side, amused at the parental feeling I had.

  The next morning I took Tony to the dispensary where I spent an hour or so with him, lending moral support while a scolding Miss Leiber lanced, drained, sulfa-powdered and bandaged. When we finally returned to the cabin, Tony had a slipper on his bad boot and he made a pathetic picture limping back to the cabin with his Louisville Slugger f
or a cane.

  A few nights later, I woke up and heard him sobbing. With a head- shaking sigh, I slipped out of bed and went over to him.

  “What now, little man?” I said. No answer. I pulled up his blanket again and pointed the flashlight beam at the foot. Which lay, unbandaged and dirty on the course blanket.

  “What did you do with your bandages?” I asked in an angry mutter.

  More silence. I shined the flashlight into his big, helpless eyes.

  “Well? What did you take them off for? Good God, haven’t you got any more sense than that?”

  “I wanted to look at it.”

  “Ohhhh … Gawd!“

  I found the bandage coiled on the floor like a gauzy serpent and, tearing off the part that had gotten dirty, I re-bandaged the foot. It was inflamed again and Tony had to grit his teeth as I bandaged.

  “For God’s sake, cry if you want to,” I muttered grumpily.

  “Don’t want to.” His voice was thin and shaky but resolute.

  When I’d finished, I shined the light to the side of his face.

  “Now look,” I snapped. “Leave it alone! How do you expect it to get better if you play with it?”

  “Whassat? Whassat?” came a befuddled query from the semiconscious Chester Wickerly, wild man and wind breaker of Cabin 13.

  “Go to sleep,” I ordered, returning to my bed, tripping over Chester’s sneaker in so doing. I cursed and kicked the sneaker across the floor, seriously questioning my sanity in taking a counselor’s job for the summer.

  For the next few days, Tony was pretty well behaved. I don’t count him limping down to the lake to fish and falling in. That was in a day’s expectation. What I mean is—he left the new bandage intact and didn’t try to play baseball.

  Though, as a matter of fact, it was all I could do to keep him from running off on Cabin 13’s first hike day (each cabin had four during the two-month season). It was painfully obvious that Tony was in no condition for hiking but that didn’t seem to worry him. His obliviousness to the demands of the flesh bordered on lunacy.

  “Look,” I said, practically sitting on his chest, “your foot is bandaged. It’s infected. The way you’ve been treating it, you’re lucky you can get around at all. But you cannot walk for miles on it under a hot sun!

  “Aw, gee, Matt, I could hop on my good foot, couldn’t I?”

  “No!”

  His face curled up, blossom-like, and I had to resort to quiet, well- modulated reason. Arm around his match-stick shoulders, voice a soothing monotone, I said, “Stay in camp, Tony. You’ve got lizards and frogs to chase, ball games to watch, comic books to read, crafts to work on and a great big lake to fall in.”

  “Oh … sh—”

  “Aah-aah.”

  “Shoot.”

  I grinned at him. After a moment, he grinned back. “Diablo,” I said.

  “So’s your old man,” he countered.

  He lay on his bunk that afternoon, I remember, game foot propped up on the window sill, fingers picking out mattress stuffing from the bunk above. I was working out a musical program for the first campfire songfest and pow-wow which was coming up in a few days. My music directing, as yet, hadn’t really been put to the test except for some songs during movie-reel changing on Wednesday nights and for hymns on Sunday.

  While I worked, Tony sang his favorite song. He sang it often in his frail voice and, sometimes, I thought there was a kind of simile between the song and his life.

  “There was a little mouse lived on a hill

  —mmm-mmm, mmm-mmm

  There was a little mouse lived on a hill

  —mmm-mmm, mmm-mmm

  There was a little mouse lived on a hill As rough and tough as Buffalo Bill

  —mmm-mmm, mmm-mmm.”

  That was the opening verse which broke the ground for endless more in which this versatile rodent disported himself through varied, fantastic adventures, touching foot upon strange shores, accosting, in his mousy arrogance, a veritable galaxy of weird and fascinating characters ranging from Miss Mousy (who, it is noted, spurned his marital advances) and so on up all the way to The Rat That Sat on a Big Black Rock.

  There was another song too but I didn’t like that one. It started:

  One night I heard an awful noise

  I looked up on the wall

  The bedbugs and the cockroaches

  Was havin’ a game o’ ball.

  It was a song Tony had picked up at the mental institution; a song that was based upon actuality. That song gave me a hideous feeling. For there is something infinitely more terrible about a child being lost than an adult; and that song kept reminding me that, unless someone intervened, Tony might well be lost.

  I was only going to be with him for two months and what were two months in a lifetime? All the harm that had been done before he came to Camp Pleasant I couldn’t hope to undo in such a short time. All the things that had scarred and stained his mind could only be cleared away by a long-range miracle. Sometimes I visualized his probable future and it didn’t make me smile or want to smile.

  Little Tony. Needing someone so desperately, yet never finding that someone. Always with that unconscious look of hungry yearning on his face—yearning for a hope that kept moving ahead of him, flitting like a cruel shadow, always mocking, always unattainable.

  5.

  We sat in a small clearing in the woods, a thin wisp of fire smoke climbing toward the sky like a gray snake elevating to a fakir’s fluting. Merv, the boys and I sat absorbed in beans and frankfurters which had been burned to a turn by Chef Wickerly.

  “On the surface I agree with you,” Merv was telling me. “To come back here and be exposed year after year to Ed Nolan is idiocy. However, as I told you, I do like the camp, always have. I like my position in it. I’m not responsible for anything but hikes and I like hiking.

  “Of course,” he admitted, “if it gets much worse, even I won’t be able to stand it any more. It’s a pity, really. Pleasant is a fine camp; its personnel isn’t so bad; but that gluttonous fascist louses up the whole deal.”

  “What do you know about Nolan’s wife?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake.

  “A very strange young woman,” he said, chewing reflectively. “I’ve been here five years and I still don’t know her. Not that I’ve had much contact with her of course. The first year or so I spoke to her. We talked about music, books, plays, all sorts of things. Things which she’s starved for as the wife of we know who.”

  I nodded.

  “Naturally, as soon as said Ed grew aware of the talks, he squelched them.” Merv tossed the paper plate of beans onto the fire. “She was quite pleasant too,” he said.

  “I know.”

  We were silent a moment, then I asked him if he knew how old she was.

  “Let’s see, I think she told me. Oh….” He tapped his teeth with one long nail. “I think she’s about twenty-six.”

  “She doesn’t look it.”

  “Hadn’t noticed,” said Merv.

  “Is there anything wrong with her?”

  “Just a massive neurotic depression bordering on psychosis,” Merv said, casually. “Who can blame her, married to that pig?”

  “Why in hell did she marry him then?” I heard myself asking in more than normal irritation.

  “The details aren’t important,” Merv said. “The basic reason seems obvious enough, however. She couldn’t do any better.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She’s a lovely girl.”

  Merv looked at me with quick curiosity which was, just as quickly, repressed.

  “Well,” was all he said, “she’s still married to him.”

  “Yes, she is,” I said.

  “What about you?” Merv changed the subject. “What brings you here?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I suppose I came for lack of anything better to do. Bob’s been after me for years to try it.”

  “You knew him in college, didn’t you?�
�� Merv asked.

  “That’s right,” I said. “We’ve seen each other off and on since we graduated.”

  “What do you do the rest of the year?” Merv asked. “Work in a music store,” I said. “Uh-huh.” Merv nodded. “You have a girl?” I tossed my plate on the fire. “She’s dead,” I told him. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Auto accident,” I said. “Collision. She died the next morning.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Matt.”

  I grunted. “We were going to be married in a week when it happened,” I said.

  “Oh, no.” Merv looked pained.

  “Yep.” I nodded. “I was going to work in her father’s plant. Big executive type. We had all our furniture, a house picked out, a car—” I stopped and exhaled heavily. “That was the car she was killed in,” I said.

  We sat quietly, looking into the fire. “I’m sorry I made you talk about it, Matt,” he said then. “I guess I should talk about it more,” I answered. “That’s what they keep telling me.”

  6.

  Sid met me in front of the dining hall when we got back from the hike. “Tony,” was all he said.

  “No,” I said, fearing the worst. “What happened?” “He fell on top of a bottle and it broke. Cut his hand and wrist all to hell.”

  “Badly?”

  “He had to have six stitches.” “Oh … dear God! Where is he?”

  “The dispensary.”

  Tony was lying on a cot when I got there, turning comic book pages with his good hand. He didn’t see me at first and I stood looking at the bulky taped-down windings around his hand and wrist and the ones around his foot. I looked at the intent expression on his thin face as he followed The Batman through various exigencies of plot.

  “Hello, sad sack,” I finally said.

  He looked up quickly, smiled. “Hi, Matt. I cut myself.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said. “Couldn’t leave you alone one day, could I?”

  “Aw, gee, Matt,” he said earnestly, “it wasn’t my fault. Some guy shoved me.”