Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  “How come you never tell on me?” I used to ask him. He told me to stop asking him that.

  “You tease your brother?” my mother asked me once. It was after my brother and I had had a huge fight. I'd thrown his record player against his headboard. We'd all gotten calmed down at like midnight. My brother was still making noise in his room. My father had closed all the windows.

  I don't know, I said. Sometimes I teased him a little, I thought.

  More than that I didn't let him play my record collection. It was the thing he liked to do most but he always scratched everything. We took the bus into Bridgeport with my mother when she went to the bank so we could go to Korvette's afterwards for 45s. We listened to WICC and WMCA. We always asked if we could get two of everything so he could have his own copy and she always said we were lucky to get one. And he'd always like what I got better than what he got. So he'd sit in my room when I was trying to do something and go, “Can we play ‘Elusive Butterfly’?” And I'd go, “No.” And he'd sit there and hum the music while I tried to keep doing what I was doing. And I'd go, “I'm still not gonna play it.” And he'd shrug and keep humming, like that would have to do. Sometimes if he went out in the yard I'd play the song. Before I left for camp he got “98.6” by Keith and I got “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. He got a new record player but he wasn't supposed to touch any of my records until I got back. I hid them in the storage space before I left.

  “Can I play your records when you're gone?” he asked the morning I was leaving. It was still almost dark but he'd gotten up to see me go.

  “I don't care,” I told him.

  “That was nice of you,” my father said in the car on the drive up.

  If they called and asked where I'd hid them when I was up there, I'd probably tell them.

  I got to the sign-up board earlier the next morning but still too late for the beach. Me and two other kids and the fat kid ended up at Archery. The archery range was a field with three bales of hay and a fiberglass bow. The fat kid said somebody lost the arrows the year before.

  “You were here last year?” I asked him.

  “I been here three years in a row,” he said.

  The other two kids had the bow. They were taking turns throwing it at one of the bales.

  “Don't your parents know you hate it here?” I asked him.

  “Don't yours?” he said.

  BJ told us on the hike that afternoon that the fat kid had told on Chris.

  “Did he get him in trouble?” Joyce asked. We were spread out along the Widowmaker Trail waiting for lunch. A counselor was on a rock cutting Spam out of the can into fattish cylinders with his Swiss army knife and another one was handing out bread slices. The drink they'd passed around at the beginning had already ruined my canteen. Everybody who had kept their water was being asked by everybody else for a drink.

  The fat kid was in the middle of the trail behind us and Chris was kicking and scuffing at his butt like he was trying to get gum off the sidewalk. “Who are you throwing rocks at?” Chris said. He'd noticed me pinging pebbles down the trail.

  “Both of you,” I said.

  “Well cut it out,” he said.

  Before dinner when we got back the fat kid signed out one of the little sailboats and was just getting going when Chris waded out and tipped the boat over with him in it, and then waded back to shore.

  “Cut it out,” the fat kid screamed once he surfaced. “You cut it out too,” he said when he saw me throwing more little rocks from the shore. They plunked in the water around him.

  “Phone call,” some kid said to me when we were back in the tents. There was only one phone the campers could use, and it was in the Camp Director's office.

  “What's that noise?” I asked my father after he said hello.

  “That's your brother,” he said.

  “What's wrong with him?” I asked.

  “He wants to go see the Association in New Haven,” my father said.

  “The band the Association? They're playing in New Haven?” I asked.

  “What do you think: he wants to visit their house? Yes, they're playing in New Haven,” he said.

  “How'd he find out about it?” I asked.

  “How do I know?” my father said. “He listens to the radio.”

  “I'm goin',” I heard my brother tell him. You re not goin, my father said back. My mother shouted in her two cents from wherever she was.

  “Does he want you to go with him?” I said.

  “He's nine years old. He's not going to a rock concert,” he told me.

  My brother shouted something I couldn't make out. “Hey,” my father shouted back. “How'd you like to not leave your room for a few weeks?”

  My brother said something else I couldn't hear.

  “I told him he could play some of your records instead,” he said.

  “You talking to me?” I asked him. “My records?”

  “No, I'm talking to your mother,” he said. “He wants to play our Perry Como. That's why I called you.”

  “I don't want him playing my records,” I said.

  “Now don't you start too,” he said.

  “I'm not starting anything,” I said.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said. “I'm gonna take all these fucking records and pitch them out the window.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I don't care what he does. I hope he breaks them all.”

  “I hope so too,” my father said.

  “Lend me your flashlight,” Chris said to me when I was on my way back to my tent. He'd come from behind me.

  “How will I get home?” I asked him.

  “Lend me your flashlight,” he said. I handed it over and he veered into the woods and disappeared. I didn't even see it go on.

  “Chris has my flashlight,” I told my tentmates when I got back. I said it like Godzilla was loose in the city.

  It was my father's good one. When we'd been packing he'd been deciding between the crappy plastic one he let us play with and his. My brother had taken his once and had lost it. Even my mother had had to start looking for it. It had been this huge thing. I didn't care which one I had, but his had a better beam. I'd told him I wouldn't lose it and he'd said okay. And now Chris had it and when I tried to get it back he'd beat me to death with it.

  As usual I couldn't sleep. I got up when it was still dark and signed up for the beach. I went by the counselors' lean-to but nobody was moving. A raccoon was rooting around in somebody's knapsack in the dirt.

  Maybe it was good that I lost it, I thought on the way back to the tent. Maybe when they found out, my parents would be like, But he knew how much we wanted him to keep an eye on it.

  But I also wanted to be the kid who stayed up when everybody else went under.

  The fat kid showed up at the beach too. He said the Camp Director was trying to make it up to him about the Chris stuff.

  I cut my hand on the sharp edge of a broken garbage can.

  I was worried about the flashlight. The fat kid sat next to me. We were the only ones not in the water. It was so humid you couldn't tell we hadn't been in.

  Some kids were having races from the steel dock to the pontoon raft. A few sailboats were crisscrossing, the occasional sail collapsing. One rowboat sat a ways out, trailing a Mile Swimmer. The water over the sand by the reeds where we were was the color of cream soda.

  Kids were throwing other kids off the pontoon raft into the lake. There was a lot of shouting, and my hand was still bleeding. I was going to need a better Band-Aid.

  “You think BJ stands for Blow Job?” the fat kid said.

  I looked at him. I hadn't thought of that.

  “Has he asked you yet?” he said.

  “Asked me what?” I said.

  “He asked me” he said. “I told him I would.” He looked at my face like he'd gotten the reaction he wanted.

  “Why would you say that?” I said, though it was none of my business.

  He shrugged, his sh
oulders up on both sides of his ears.

  Someone whacked me on the head with a life preserver. “Camp Director wants you,” Chris said when I turned around.

  “You finished with my flashlight?” I asked.

  He looked at me, trying to figure out who I was. “I don't have your flashlight,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them he hadn't changed his expression. I told him I was the kid who lent him the flashlight.

  “I got my own flashlight,” he said. “Why would I borrow yours?”

  Last night, I told him. On the trail.

  “Give him his flashlight,” the fat kid told him.

  “What'd you say to me?” Chris asked.

  Then he repeated that I had a call and gave my shoulder a shove while he was still looking at the fat kid. As in Get going.

  When I looked back, he was standing there over him, the fat kid just looking out over the water like he was alone.

  “Where the Christ are the records?” my father asked on the phone. When I told him he hung up.

  When I got back the fat kid was standing in the water up to his waist, watching the kids on the pontoon raft, and Chris was gone. I got in as far as my knees and the air horn sounded for the end of sign-up events.

  “You think BJ stands for Blow Job?” I asked Joyce at lunch.

  “Duh,” he said. He had a quarter-sized strawberry on his forehead, like he'd been dragged facedown across a rug.

  “So you think it does,” I said.

  “It is all he ever talks about,” he said.

  We had our trays and were looking for places to sit. “I haven't heard him say it once,” I said.

  It turned out that Chris wasn't the only one who was beating on the fat kid. The fat kid's tentmates were too. The night before two of them held him down and one peed all over his face. And his bed. He told me at the Nature Center before dinner. The Nature Center was a two-room cabin that had a stuffed fox on a log and some turtle shells in a glass case. The best things in it were the spiders in the ceiling corners that weren't part of the exhibit. The fat kid said he didn't know where he'd go. He didn't want to sleep with those kids anymore. He didn't want to sleep anywhere anymore.

  “I know that feeling,” I said. But he looked at me like I was just trying to cheer him up.

  When I saw him later that night I thanked him for backing me up with Chris.

  “You don't have your flashlight, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “So what good did I do?” he said.

  We were on our way back from the campfire. “Where're you two going?” BJ asked when he saw us walking together. But he sounded worried.

  The fat kid ignored me for a while and then he finally said, “I would've left me here too.” He was looking down the trail like he could see Paris.

  “Your parents go away every summer?” I asked him. That sounded worse than my life.

  “I don't have to be this fat, you know,” he said. “I eat like all the time.”

  “Well, stop eating,” I told him. “Get some celery sticks.”

  “That's what I'm gonna do,” he said.

  We took a wrong turn in the dark and had to double back. He asked me not to say anything about what he said about BJ. “You're not supposed to know,” he said. “He asked about ten kids. I think I'm the only one who said yes.”

  “Don't some kids want to kick his ass when he says something like that?” I asked him.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. Like: Hel-lo. “What do you care?” he said when I asked if he was really going to do it. “Guys like it. In case you were wondering. Guys like it when you do it.”

  We finally found his tent and there was this feeling down inside me like now I'd never sleep. “If you were normal you'd know that,” he said.

  It was dark and his elbow kept bumping me. One of the kids from inside his tent stuck his head out. “Who're you? His girlfriend? You walk him home?”

  “Yeah, I'm his girlfriend,” I said. “I walked him home.” They all made big noises about that.

  “How's your special friend?” BJ said when I got back to our tent.

  “Shouldn't you be jerking off?” I told him. And then we both got into our sleeping bags and lay there touching ourselves and trying to think of what to say next. I was still awake when he finally sat up and listened to see if we were asleep and pulled on his shorts and left. I could hear his flip-flops slapping as he went down the trail.

  When the first birds started making noise I could see the canvas over my head again. I could feel a breeze and smell something fresh. My eyes were so tired they burned. There were noises in the underbrush up the hill.

  I saw Chris three times before lunch and asked him each time about the flashlight. He seemed distracted. “I don't have your flashlight,” he said the last time, like he was finally able to focus. I didn't see the fat kid or BJ. For a while nobody knew where they were and then somebody said they were in the Health Center. The nurse who sat in the little front room there said they were both resting and I should come back after lunch. She had a little wooden rack of pamphlets on her desk: Your Gums and You, Proper Foot Hygiene, Courtesy for Beginners.

  At lunch someone said they both got beaten up, or beat each other up.

  There was no one at the desk when I came back so I walked in. They pretended to still be asleep. The fat kid had his hands bandaged with big ice bags on them and had a bandage on his ear too. BJ had two black eyes and an ice bag wrapped in a towel on his head. His cheek was swollen.

  Outside, Chris was sitting on the steps of the Health Center with his head in his hands. His knuckles were scabby with dried blood. Two of the other counselors were trying to cheer him up. He was saying he was 1-A and his lottery number was five. Unless he took off for Canada he was going over. His brother didn't have a deferment either. He was over there already.

  “That's the least of your worries at this point,” the Camp Director said. “Come with me.” And he got Chris up and they went to the Camp Director's office.

  “What're you lookin' at?” one of the counselors said when he saw me.

  I stuck my head in the Health Center's back window. BJ closed his eyes when he saw me, but the fat kid looked back, like he finally had something he could tell his parents.

  I spent the rest of the day in bed. Daddy longlegs and flies came and went. Joyce looked in and then left. The next morning I missed breakfast but somebody got me out of bed because there was another phone call. When I got to the phone both my mother and father said hello. They were both on the line. I guessed somebody was upstairs and somebody was downstairs. “We had another episode with your brother,” my father said. I was just listening. My mother said he was going to have to go away. She started crying. She said that Doctor Waynik told them he was a danger to himself.

  “Because he couldn't play my records?” I said.

  That seemed to surprise them. “He has your records. It's not your records,” my father said.

  I stood there holding the phone. He was nine. The year before he'd been playing with his toy trucks.

  “Can I talk to him?” I said.

  “I got some more 45s,” he said when he got on the line. “Dad took me.”

  “What'd you get?” I asked. He told me. I raked my fingernails across my neck. “Those're good,” I told him.

  “You like them?” he said.

  I told him I did. Especially the MacArthur Park one.

  He seemed happy about that. “You can play them when you get back,” he said.

  “You all right?” the Camp Director asked me. He'd come out of his inner office, where he had Chris. He looked at my neck. He didn't leave until I nodded.

  I was holding the dial part of the phone in front of me. I'd lifted it off the desk but there wasn't much reach on the cord. “You there?” my brother said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You gonna be okay?”

  He started crying. “They're gonna put me somewhere,” he said. “I
'm scared.”

  “Oh, Georgie,” I said.

  And what I could have said then was: I'll come home and we'll talk and you'll feel like somebody understands and you won't have to hit yourself or throw everything you have around the room. Or you can come up and see me, come up and visit, come up and be a part of the worst camp anybody's ever seen. Or let's keep our records together. Let's keep them in your room. Let's make a list of all the ones we've got. Or I'm sorry I make it harder and I have trouble too and maybe if we take walks or get a hobby we can figure out how to get through this. Or put Daddy on, you can't go away, you have to stay, we have to stay together. But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then with my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.

  Sans Farine

  My father, Jean-Baptiste Sanson, had christened in the church of Saint-Laurent two children: a daughter, who married Pierre Héris-son, executioner of Melun, and a son, myself. After my mother's death he remarried, his second wife from a family of executioners in the province of Touraine. Together they produced twelve children, eight of whom survived, six of whom were boys. All six eventually registered in the public rolls as executioners, my half brothers beginning their careers by assisting their father and then myself in the city of Paris.

  My name is Charles-Henri Sanson, known to many throughout this city as the Keystone of the Revolution, and known to the rabble as Sans Farine, in reference to my use of emptied bran sacks to hold the severed heads. I was named for Charles Sanson, former adventurer and soldier of the King and until 1668 executioner of Cherbourg and Caudebec-en-Caux. My father claimed he was descended from Sanson de Longval and that our family coat of arms derived from either the First or Second Crusade. Its escutcheon represents another play on our name: a cracked bell and the motto San son: without sound.