A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  “Hey, kid!” Flick looked up from his monstrosity. “Wait’ll Cliffie boy sees yer makin’ a jockstrap for your pet elephant.”

  The fat Chipmunk, who was silently working away on some obscure object at the other end of our table, glanced up, his tiny eyes expressionless behind his thick glasses.

  “Who ya lookin’ at, fatso?” Jake glared at him. The fat Chipmunk sniffed quietly and returned to work. “Boy, Chipmunks are gettin’ worse every year.” Jake went back to his crowd of Beavers over in the corner.

  That afternoon we set off on a hike, led by Captain Crabtree, wearing shorts and a baseball cap. “Now, boys, a hike is not just a walk. A woodsman is alert. He knows the meaning of every broken twig. He can identify every leaf in the forest. I want you to examine things and learn. Off we go now, follow me.”

  At a rapid pace, the captain charged off into the woods. We followed, grunting and scrambling.

  “Look around you, boys. Nature is kind,” the captain sang out. We looked.

  Ten minutes later, an uproar broke out as a Chipmunk near the rear yipped frantically past us–pursued by 12 million angry hornets. Chipmunks flew in all directions, yelling and screaming.

  The captain stood in the middle of the trail. “STAND STILL, BOYS. THEY WON’T STING IF YOU STAND STILL! THEY’RE MORE AFRAID OF YOU THAN YOU ARE OF THEM!”

  I burrowed deep in a thick growth of shiny green leaves that I wasn’t to learn until my second nature lesson–too late–were called Toxicodendron, commonly known as poison ivy. I caught a glimpse of a cloud of hornets settling on the captain, who stood like a statue. Foraging patrols of free-lance hornets ranged up and down the path, searching for scurrying Chipmunks.

  The captain suddenly bellowed hoarsely and took off in the direction of the camp. An angry wedge-shaped formation of hornets streamed after him. We didn’t see the captain again until three days later when he snuck in the back door of the mess hall. We didn’t recognize him at first. Once again, the notorious Stand Still and They Won’t Hurt You theory had failed. But the captain, a true nature lover, didn’t give up on it until the following year, when he tried it on a bull grazing in a meadow.

  In those three days, meanwhile, the lines had been drawn clearly. Being a Chipmunk, we learned, consisted mostly of attending lectures, making wallets, and fighting off Beavers, who could spot you a mile off wearing that damned Chipmunk cap. The only time you didn’t have to wear your cap was when you were sleeping, which wasn’t often–between being scared every night by the Thing in the Woods and having to get up at 3 A.M. and wait in line to go to the toilet. We quickly fell into the rhythm of life at Nobba-WaWa-Nockee.

  A few days later, Biggie Clagg gave us a swimming lesson, but not before we had been warned by two Beavers in the mess hall to beware of the monster that lived in the lake.

  “Y’gotta watch it,” one said. “Y’remember Marty?” he said to his friend, who had a pinched face and a worried look. “It grabbed him right over there by that big rock. He barely got out alive. It’s got some kinda spines that sting ya, and it’s got suckers on its feet, and if it ever gets ya, it’ll drag ya right down to the bottom and eatcha.”

  I stood quivering in six inches of icy lake water–but not because it was cold. If there’s anything I don’t like, it’s suckers and things with spines.

  “Let’s go. Come on.” Biggie, his massive thighs working like pistons, charged into the water, huffing and blowing as he thrashed about. A few Chipmunks waded in gingerly after him.

  “What’s the matter with you guys? Let’s get pumpin’ here!” shouted Biggie, his voice echoing across the lake.

  The news about the suckers and the spines had swept like wildfire through the Chipmunks. We cringed together in a craven knot with the water up to our ankles. A foolhardy few had ventured out to where the water lapped at their kneecaps.

  “Now, I’m gonna show you the dog paddle. That’s the first thing you gotta learn.” Biggie apparently hadn’t heard about the monster. He swam briskly twice around the rock where it lurked and headed back for shore, his huge feet splashing out behind him.

  “EEEEEEEEEEE! IT’S GOT ME!!” The Chipmunk farthest out in the water–a kid named Elrod from Monon, Indiana–struggled wildly toward shore. Instantly, panic surged through the crowd. We fled screaming toward the beach.

  “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

  “IT’S AFTER ME!”

  “HELLLP!”

  As I struggled over the jagged rocks toward the shore–through four inches of water–I felt slippery things clutching at my ankles, suckers grabbing at my heels.

  “EEEEEEEEE! IT’S BITING ME!”

  “FER CHRISSAKE, WHAT THE HELL’S GOIN’ ON HERE?” Biggie boomed out as the squealing horde scampered up the beach. Biggie followed, his hair dripping. We huddled together on the sand.

  “There’s nothin’ out there but sunfish. Don’t tell me I got a buncha girls on my hands. Get back in that water!”

  Reluctantly, we waded back out into the lake. For an hour we practiced the dog paddle, but the terror never left us. Nobody got within fifty yards of the rock.

  That was the night of our first weenie roast. We sat around the sputtering campfire by the tennis court as a tidal wave of mosquitoes enveloped us in a humming black fog. Moving closer to the fire to escape them, we roasted the entire front of our bodies–leaving our rear flanks completely exposed. It created an interesting pattern of skin irritations. And, as things turned out, the mosquitoes ate better than we did.

  “My tongue! It’s burning up! It’s on fire!” Schwartz cried out in pain after he had bitten into a smoldering charcoal weenie. For a week afterward, his tongue looked like a barrage balloon.

  At least he got to taste his. I held a weenie in the flames for a couple of seconds until my green twig, which wasn’t supposed to burn, flared into a raging inferno. Waving the stick to put out the fire, I knocked fifty-seven other kids’ weenies into the flames. I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if we hadn’t been issued two weenies apiece. I didn’t want to take any chances on the second one, so I gulped it down raw, following it up with fifteen or twenty of the marshmallows that Beavers hadn’t heated into boiling white balls of pitch and then dropped down Chipmunks’ backs. It wasn’t until later that we discovered the raw weenies really were raw weenies, and the action that night at the latrine was spectacular.

  As we milled around the fire, batting at mosquito squadrons, scuffles broke out in the dark as Beavers waylaid Chipmunks who had foolishly strayed too far from the firelight. Then Colonel Bullard made a sudden and dramatic appearance, his face lit by the flames.

  “This is the stuff, eh, boys? Cooking your own food under the heavens! Living the clean outdoor life! I am reminded of my own youth, spent in the clean air of God’s own prairies. Now, all together, boys, let’s sing our beloved ‘Nobba-WaWa-Nockee Loyalty Song.’ ”

  With the fervor of a Methodist choirmaster, he led us in a droning, endless performance, punctuated by the obbligato of slapping and scratching at the fringes of the circle. Schwartz’s tongue was so thick by now that you couldn’t understand what he was singing. I looked up at the deep ebony arch of Michigan sky, luminous with millions of stars, and all the travails of the day were forgotten. What fools we mortals be.

  After the weenie roast, we trooped up to the rec hall. It was letter-writing night. Every three days, it was compulsory to write home. We hunched over the pool table and every other writing surface in the place, racking our brains for something to say to the home folks. I struggled over the blue-lined tablet my mother had bought for me. It had a cover with a red Indian head on it.

  Dear Mom & Dad & Randy,

  I am at camp.

  I pondered long and hard, trying to think of something else to say. But nothing came, so I printed my name at the bottom and put it in the envelope. Just as I was about to seal it, I remembered something else. I took the letter out and wrote under my signature:

  P.S. Schwartz burned his tonge. It i
s really fat. There is a funny thing in the lake that has suckers on it.

  I ran out of gas again. Cliffie, who was in charge of letter writing, swooped from kid to kid, making sure they were saying good things about the camp. He glanced at my letter.

  “My, my. This is very good.” His eyes narrowed a bit at my reference to the thing with suckers, but he let it pass.

  Kissel licked the stub of a pencil and started on the third page of his meticulous description of the shoulder holster he was making in leathercraft. Flick hid what he was writing.

  As I lay in bed that night, my stomach rumbling ominously with fermented weenies, Schwartz sprawled above me, whimpering over his bulging tongue. Flick, who had gotten a half-dozen strategic hornet stings, writhed in his sack. The kid who had the bunk above the fat Chipmunk had been picked up during the day by a gleaming Cadillac and swept out of our lives forever. For the time he was with us, he had said nothing, but he cried a lot at night. Mole Lodge was shaking down into a tight unit. Little did we realize, however, that there was a hero among us.

  “The canoe paddle is held thusly. It’s all in the wrist. Y’gotta have a steady, even stroke, like this.”

  At last! All my Boy’s Life fantasies were about to come true. They just didn’t have canoes on the south side of Chicago. A canoe was something you read about that Indians paddled around on Lake Gitchee-Goomie. We converged on seven or eight or so canoes that were pulled up on shore–long, imperially slim, forest green, each emblazoned with the proud yellow arrowhead of Nobba-WaWa-Nockee. Canoes are so beautiful that even the dullest clod of a Chipmunk got excited at the sight of them. Like most things of beauty, they are also highly dangerous.

  An unfamiliar counselor, who wore a black cowboy hat, green swimming trunks, and an orange life jacket over his camp T-shirt, neatly flicked the canoe paddle, demonstrating the stroke.

  “Y’gotta have a beat. One … two … three … DIG. One … two … three … DIG. Steady. Even. Got that, gang?”

  We had it, or thought we had.

  “The bow paddle gives you the power, while the stern paddle gives you power and steers.”

  Schwartz whispered to Beakie Humbert, another kid from Troop 41. “Which one’s the bow?”

  “The one in the back, jerk. Boy, you don’t know nothin’.” Beakie was famous in the troop for his knot tying and for his merit badge for wood carving, which he got for chopping out a totem pole from a railroad tie.

  “Now, you guys over on this end go first.” The counselor pulled his cowboy hat down over his eyes. “Two to a canoe–but put them life jackets on first.”

  Mine was already on; I leaped forward eagerly. The next thirty seconds were a blur. I remember stepping into the front of the canoe from the little pier, with Schwartz right behind me in the back, then shoving off into the water just the way he had told us. A split second later, I found myself deep underwater, having caught a brief glimpse of the gleaming bottom of our canoe flashing in the sunlight. Wildly afraid that the thing with suckers would get me, I flailed to the surface, my life jacket jabbing me in the armpits. Weeds streamed from my hair. A frog and a small bullhead skittered out of my path. Schwartz, blowing frantically, arms flapping like a windmill, stood hip-deep in the mud a few feet away. Waves of raucous horselaughs rolled out over the water.

  I struggled up onto the pier, scraping my knee as I did. Schwartz continued to flounder helplessly in the weeds. The counselor paddled his canoe expertly to the wreckage.

  “All you guys just saw how not to do it, right?” More catcalls. “Now, let’s try it again.”

  This time I clung desperately to the pier while I put first one foot, then the other, and finally my whole weight into the canoe. Schwartz, who had sworn off canoes for the rest of his life, had retired to the shore and was hiding behind a stump. Flick eased himself into the stern, his face looking like poured concrete. We were in and still upright.

  “Now, push off and paddle like I showed you.”

  I gave the pier a tiny shove, and immediately the canoe, seemingly propelled by hidden forces, glided across the water, heading rapidly for the opposite shore, two miles away. I dug my paddle into the waves to keep from cracking up on the other side. We spun rapidly counterclockwise.

  “Hey, Flick, paddle, willya?” I hollered, looking back over my shoulder and seeing that Flick was sitting low in the stern, his hands clamped like vises on both sides of the canoe. His paddle floated some thirty or forty feet behind us.

  “I don’t like this,” he squeaked. We were drifting out to sea. My life started flashing before my eyes. I dug in again. We spun faster. We probably would have spent the next week corkscrewing around the lake if the counselor hadn’t paddled out and towed us to shore.

  “All right, you guys. Give somebody else a chance.”

  We joined Schwartz behind his stump.

  “Boy, I never knew paddling a canoe was so hard,” said Flick as we watched two other Chipmunks flip over, their paddles flying high in the air.

  “Whaddaya mean, paddle?” I answered. “You didn’t do nothin’ but sit there.”

  Flick thought about this for a bit, then answered, sounding bugged: “Whaddaya expect. This was the first time I was out. You were out with Schwartz before.” That was true, so there was no point arguing.

  The gulf between the Chipmunks and the Beavers widened as the weeks went by. Rumors swept the mess hall that five Beavers, led by Jake, had pulled off a daring panty raid in the night on the girls’ camp across the lake, that Jake and his mob were planning to burn down Eagle Lodge and Jaguar Lodge, and would mop up Mole Lodge just for laughs. One Chipmunk had fled screaming into the night when he discovered that he was sleeping with a woodchuck. Jake and his cronies immediately claimed credit and threatened reprisals against any Chipmunk who reported the incident to Crabtree. It was even rumored that Crabtree himself was an undercover agent working for Jake’s mob. Morale among the green-beanie wearers sank rapidly. Even Cliffie, in self-defense, was trying to curry favor with Jake and his truculent toady Dan Baxter, the short, broad Beaver with the red neck who had bedeviled us on the bus ride to camp, ten years ago.

  One quiet Tuesday, Mole Lodge was struggling fruitlessly to win a volleyball game from the Chipmunks of Jaguar Lodge, which had two six-foot-six-inch monsters who kept hammering the ball down our throats, since the rest of us averaged about four foot six. Suddenly, in the middle of the game, a rumpus broke out in the woods back of one of the Beaver cabins.

  Biggie had trapped Baxter red-handed with a freshly lit Lucky Strike clamped in his jaw.

  “O.K., Baxter, I got you at last! You’re the one that’s been throwin’ them butts around. Hand over that package.”

  We crowded around in a big circle as Baxter, his face a rich crimson, his stubbly neck bulging with anger, hauled out a freshly opened pack of Luckies from the pocket of his shorts and handed them over.

  “You like cigarettes, Baxter? O.K., buddy boy, you’re gonna get cigarettes. You keep puffin’ until I tell you to stop. You’re gonna smoke every one a’ these coffin nails one after the other. Now, get puffin’. One a’ you guys go get me a bucket from the latrine.”

  A Beaver behind me who had obviously been around hissed in a low tone, “My God, it’s the bucket treatment!”

  Baxter puffed away sneeringly on the Lucky, while Biggie stood over him. Jake and his scurvy crew mumbled in the crowd, giving bad looks to any Chipmunk who dared to smile. Someone came running back with the mop bucket.

  “O.K., Baxter.” Biggie grabbed the bucket and lowered it upside down over Baxter’s head. A murmur swept through the audience. “Now, you puff on that Lucky, y’hear me in there?”

  Biggie knocked on the top of the bucket with his knuckles, making a hollow donging sound. Smoke billowed out from under Baxter’s helmet. “Keep puffin’, Baxter. That smoke is gettin’ thin.” Biggie knocked again on the bucket. More smoke billowed out.

  “How long can he keep it up?” said the Beaver behind me
in an awed voice.

  We found out. Baxter cracked at a little over six minutes. A hollow gurgling sound came from under the bucket.

  “Had enough, Baxter?” Biggie lifted the bucket. Baxter, his face the color of a rotten cantaloupe, lurched into the weeds, retching violently.

  “Watch it there, Baxter. You’re gonna have to police that up.” Biggie rubbed it in. “Hey, Baxter!” he yelled. “What you need is a nice Lucky to calm your nerves.”

  There was another storm of retching, then silence.

  “All right, you men. Get back to what you were doin’. This ain’t no show.”

  We scattered. Another Nobba-WaWa-Nockee legend was born. Naturally, there were repercussions. A Chipmunk who had laughed openly at Baxter’s humilation was mysteriously set upon in the dark one night, depantsed, and found in the latrine, his head protruding from the second hole. He was rescued just in time. Cross-examined for hours in relays by various counselors, he wisely refused to say who had perpetrated the deed. Every Chipmunk in camp knew that Jake Brannigan and Dan Baxter had struck again.

  “Come on, you guys, quit screwin’ around. I gotta find my sweater! You heard what old Fartridge said. We got ten minutes to get out by that crummy flagpole before they start this crummy treasure hunt.” Flick was rooting around in his laundry bag as Schwartz and a couple of other guys rolled on the floor, battling over a bag of malted-milk balls they had found cleverly concealed under the fat Chipmunk’s mattress.

  “Fartridge,” of course, was Morey Partridge. Because of his complexion, he was also known as “Birdshit” among the Chipmunks. Historically, prisoners of war have always given deserving names to their jailers. Cliffie, for example, was better known as “Violet” or “That Fag” among the green-beanie crowd. It was reported that even Mrs. Bullard herself called the colonel “Old Leather Ass.” Biggie had become “the Tank” or “Lard Butt” and Crabtree had evolved to “Craptree” and finally to “Crappo.” He was even, among the Beavers, known affectionately as “Crabs” in commemoration of a legendary invasion that had occurred the year before at Nobba-WaWa-Nockee after Crappo had spent a big weekend in town. The resultant furor culminated with every camper’s being doused with DDT, green lime, and Dr. Pilcher’s Magic Ointment, but all to no avail. The scourge was finally defeated by marinating everyone, including Mrs. Bullard, in drums of kerosene. There was even talk among the state authorities of burning the camp down. Mercifully, the crabs took the hint and departed for the girls’ camp across the lake.