Noses Are Red

by Richard Scrimger

  Boomer is on her feet. “Campers and guests!” She doesn’t need her microphone. Her voice bounces all over the big room. “Let us say our grace!”

  We all rise together, Lumberjack and Trailblazer, light and dark, good and evil. We bow our heads as Boomer recites a prayer:

  For the food we eat

  For the friends we greet

  For the day so sweet.

  Thank you.

  That’s all. You know, I don’t think it’s funny. In fact, it sounds pretty good. I say amen, with everyone else.

  The kid next to me is staring. “Your nose must hurt, Alan,” he says, with his mouth full. He’s a tough kid, like a length of rawhide. Looks like he can tie himself in knots. Mike? Is that his name? Mark, maybe? Something like that. Zinta introduced me around the two tables, but I can’t remember any of the names.

  “I beg your pardon?” I say.

  “It’s all red. Your cheeks and forehead too, but your nose is really red. You got a bad sunburn.” The kid talks around a plug of food in his cheek. Without swallowing, he takes a bite of Salisbury steak and keeps chewing. His jaw muscles bulge. He adds a forkful of mashed potatoes to the bite and keeps chewing. Then a bite of canned carrots and peas. Then another bite of steak. He’s a conveyor belt, never stopping. He grabs the plate of bread, takes a piece, and offers the plate to me. “Bread, Alan?”

  “No, um …,” I say. Um. Good name for him.

  “I’ll take a piece of bread. Thanks, Peter,” says the redhead on the other side of me. Drat! I thought he was Peter. Maybe he’s Mike. Or Mark.

  Peter, the skinny tough kid, takes a slice and slathers some margarine on it. Peter. Peter. The counselor at the Beaver table is the one with the bangs and the sharp jutting chin – I met her this morning at the campsite. Her name is Belinda. I think. The two boys across from me are Derek and Eric. One of them is dark skinned, and one light skinned, but I forget which is which. They’re both wearing striped shirts.

  Oh, the heck with it. Maybe they’ll all go on being Um to me.

  Is my nose red? I reach up and feel my nose furtively. A bit warm, I suppose.

  – HEY! shouts Norbert.

  The table stops to stare at me. Peter has his fork halfway to his mouth.

  “It’s the sunburn talking,” I say.

  “Hello, Omega campers!” booms Boomer.

  No microphone. We’re outside, all of us, sitting on tree trunk benches around a roaring campfire. Twilight. Sun behind the hills. Crickets in the grass. It’s almost bedtime. This is the official kickoff for the games.

  I’m with the rest of the Lumberjacks. We’re all fizzing with excitement, bubbling and buzzing and whispering. On the other side of the campfire, the Trailblazers grumble and mutter to each other.

  “A couple of announcements,” booms Boomer. “Could I have Zinta Zeeler here please.”

  Cheers from our side of the fire. Hoots and whistles from the other side.

  Blushing all the way down to her neckline, Zinta drags her feet up beside the camp director. Boomer grabs her by the elbow, turns her around to face the crowd.

  “You all know Zinta. She’s been a camper here for years. She’s the captain of the Lumberjack team. Yesterday, Zinta passed some really tough canoeing tests, including running the Bearclaw Rapids on the other side of Alpha Lake. (Cheers from all around the fire.) Then she stayed overnight without supervision, clearing her campsite, pitching her tent and lighting her fire, catching her dinner, and staying dry despite a tremendous storm! (Cheers!) Zinta, it is my very great pleasure to present you with this Master Tripper Scroll.” (Extra loud cheers!)

  I expect the scroll to be something mystical and ancient – the sort of thing Harry Potter would get if he went canoeing. It looks like a plain piece of paper, with string tied around the middle.

  “And that’s not all,” Boomer goes on. “Yesterday, Zinta did something more important than winning the Master Tripper Scroll. Would Victor and Alan come up here, please?”

  Victor is sitting beside Trixie. When he stands up, I happen to notice the expression on her face. Never have I seen such intense hatred coming from one person, and I include Big Mary, the nastiest of the bullies back at my school in Cobourg. Maybe it’s because Mary – fat as a banker’s wallet, mean as a dentist’s drill, strong as a steer roper – hates everyone, and Trixie hates one person. Very focused hatred.

  Trixie hates Zinta. As much as Zinta hates her, she hates Zinta more.

  Boomer explains about Zinta finding us wandering in the wilderness, and feeding and giving us shelter, and maybe saving our lives. She calls Christopher Leech’s name. He’s at the back of the crowd. He stands up and waves. Zinta blushes and looks away. We blush and look stupid. The campers cheer and whistle. “Hey, we helped too,” Victor whispers in my ear. “What about my safety pin?”

  The nurse helps Christopher to sit down. He looks around the campfire as he’s smiling at the nurse, and I realize that I do not like him at all.

  I think about all the hatred in the room right now – Trixie and Zinta, and me. And I can feel my Salisbury steak moving around in my stomach.

  Boomer has a hand on my shoulder. Her fingers are the size of bananas. “For those of you who don’t know, Victor and Alan will be competing in the games tomorrow,” she announces. “Victor is an honorary Trailblazer, and Alan is an honorary Lumberjack. I understand that Victor has some camping experience. Isn’t that right?” And she turns and smiles at Victor. It occurs to me that my friend looks like he’s had camping experience. It’s all the pockets in his clothes. Everything he’s wearing – shorts, of course, but shirt too, and hat, and underpants for all I know – has pockets. Camping seems to require a lot of things, and the prepared camper has places to put them.

  Now Victor reaches deep into a side pocket and pulls out a yellow rag. He waves it over his head. There’s a murmur, and some whistling, from the assembled weasels and skunks and porcupines on their side of the campfire. I guess the yellow rag means something.

  Boomer smiles and turns to me. “And Alan, here, is …” and then she stops. I am very aware of my unbuttoned shirt, oversized bathing shorts, and sunburnt face. “Well, we’re happy to have him anyway,” she says.

  No cheers or whistles. I can hear the crickets very clearly. Ah, well.

  Boomer waves the two of us back to our seats.

  “Okay, campers. Let’s see if we can predict a winner of the games. Are you ready? Are you ready to cheer for your team?” We cheer.

  “That’s it? That’s as loud as you can cheer?”

  We cheer louder.

  “Not bad,” says Boomer. “But I’ll bet you can do better. Watch carefully now, Lumberjacks!”

  A new fire blazes into sudden life off to the side of the field. Two large pieces of wood have been put together to make a capital letter L, and then set alight. The people around me start to cheer the burning L. L for Lumberjacks, I guess. I join in.

  “Now it’s your turn, Trailblazers!” The other side of the campfire is silent until another outsized letter leaps into startling flame on the other side of the field. A letter T. The Trailblazers cheer. We keep cheering. The fiery letters burn.

  “Are you ready for tomorrow, campers?” calls Boomer. “I want you to show me how ready you are. Lumberjacks, Trailblazers, PUT ON YOUR UNIFORMS!”

  Huh? A confused squirming lasts only a few seconds, and then everyone is on their feet, wearing a new T-shirt. The Trailblazers’ shirts are yellow. The team name is written in black script across the front. The Lumberjacks around me are wearing – I have to check because it’s getting dark – green shirts, with white lettering.

  Victor’s got a Trailblazer shirt. That was the yellow rag he was waving a minute ago.

  I lean towards my neighbor. He’s still cheering the letter L. “Nice shirt, Mike,” I shout. “Do I get one too?”

  “My name isn’t Mike,” he shouts.

  “Mark?” I try, but he’s turned away. Ah, well.

&
nbsp; Boomer’s voice booms even louder. “Get to bed everyone. Get lots of sleep. Tomorrow … LET THE GAMES BEGIN!”

  We keep cheering as we leave the field and walk back to the cabins. The T goes out. The L teeters and falls. We keep cheering. I feel false, like I’m playing a part, but I cheer along with everyone else. When I get back to the infirmary, there’s someone sleeping in my bed.

  Not in my bed. On it, with a whole pile of comforters on top. There’s a bag of clear stuff hanging on a metal pole beside the bed, dripping into the patient. The room lights are low. Dr. Callous is bending over the patient, shining a flashlight into her eyes. She moans faintly. I know who it is, of course. Not from her voice, which is even raspier than the doctor’s, or her face, which is scrunched away from the light. Her glasses are gone, and the braid has come out of her hair, but I would recognize her feet anywhere. They stick up like a mountain range beneath the comforters. No one else in the world has feet like that.

  “Hi, there … um, Doris,” I say.

  She moans some more.

  “Is she going to be all right?” asks Victor.

  The doctor stands away from the bed. “I still can’t get much of a response,” he says. “You kids had better stay out of the way until the ambulance comes.”

  Poor Doris. I feel terrible. It’s our fault she’s in this mess.

  “I wish there was something we could do,” I say.

  “She was out in her kayak all night,” says the doctor. “The rangers found her washed up at the far end of the lake.” He shakes his head. “Say, how do you boys know her?”

  “We saw her in her kayak,” I say.

  “We’ve been to her cabin,” says Victor.

  – The cabin with the brilliant painting on the wall, says Norbert. When I saw it, I was transplanted! Too bad Orion was a bit out of drawing.

  Doris moves a little in the bed. She shakes her head. “Drawing,” she mutters. “Out of drawing!”

  “What’s that?” The doctor moves quickly back to her side. “You seem to have woken her up. Hello, Miss Appel. Hello. It’s Dr. Callous. Hello. Can you hear me?”

  – He sounds like he’s talking on the telephone, says Norbert.

  “Is she going to be okay?” asks Victor.

  – Yes.

  “How do you know, Alan?”

  “I don’t.”

  – I do. She’ll be fine in a few days.

  The doctor bends low to ask Doris some questions. She replies weakly. He shakes his head, and keeps talking.

  “Why transplanted, Norbert?” I ask. “Don’t you mean you were transported?”

  Mom uses that kind of word all the time. Last week she told me she was transported back to her youth on the wings of a radio song. The song was called “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and midway through an extended drum solo, I was transported upstairs to watch TV.

  – Transplanted. As if I was back in my own garden. Jupiter never looked so blue. It made me homesick.

  When the ambulance comes, Doris is sitting up in her bed. The doctor tells the ambulance guys to be careful, and to keep her warm. “She got caught in the storm yesterday. Dropped her paddle in the middle of the lake, and couldn’t make it to shore.”

  The ambulance guys strap her onto a flat movable bed.

  “Hypothermia?” asks the one with the clipboard.

  The doctor raises his eyebrows. “She says she’s fine.”

  They shake their heads sadly. They know what that means.

  Ten minutes later I’m in bed. “Wonder what happened to her cabin?” I murmur. Victor is snoring. Norbert doesn’t answer. I go to sleep.

  The games start right after breakfast, and go on all day. Is it the longest day of my life? No, of course not. Earlier this summer, surrounded by strangers in the middle of a scary big city, I spent an entire day waiting for my father to call me – and that seemed to go on forever. Once when I was six, I spent most of an afternoon waiting for the dentist to get to me and that was pretty awful, and then he did get to me, and that was even worse. But this late August day at Camp Omega seems to last a pretty darn long time. So many games I cannot play well. So much confusion. So many people shouting and trying hard.

  It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet in a liver ’n onions restaurant. It’s crowded and busy, and I don’t want to eat anything. Not even the ice cream.

  Some bad moments early on. Not highlights – low lights, maybe. The tug-of-war, for instance. What a disaster! Guess who stumbles and falls forward, tripping the person in front of him, who in turn trips the person in front of her, who trips the one in front of her, and so on, so that the whole Lumberjack team goes down like a row of dominoes, cursing the person on the end who started it? Guess who that person is? Right.

  Guess who has to gunwale bob? (“It’s easy!” Zinta whispers. “If you can walk, you can gunwale bob!”) Guess who finds out that gunwale bobbing means balancing precariously on one end of the canoe while a fiendish laughing opponent in a yellow shirt jumps up and down on the other end, trying to bounce and knock you off? Go on, guess. Right again. I don’t see Zinta when I fall out of my own canoe in the shallow water, much to the delight of the yellow-shirted team.

  “Good try, Alan,” the Lumberjacks say, smiling bravely and wishing me dead.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Sorry, Derek,” or “Sorry, Mike.”

  Is there a height of humiliation? Maybe the war canoe race, where ten of us are paddling hard, but only one of us misses the water, bangs his paddle against the paddler behind him, turns to apologize, and falls out of the boat.

  Guess who?

  Hearing the cheers when Victor takes his turn at Red Rover is pretty tough, too. Our group of Lumberjacks from the Dove and Beaver cabins stands in the middle of the field, arms linked, like an impregnable wall.

  Victor charges like a bull, right at me. He runs through my hands. His team of Trailblazers cheers. I think they’re mostly from the Fox cabin. We call him again. He runs through me again, barreling up to my place in the chain and knocking my hands away from Eric or Derek, or whoever it is. We can’t stop him. Correction: I can’t stop him.

  His team cheers. I can’t hate him, but I wish him somewhere else.

  We stop the rest of the Foxes. It helps that Zinta is with us for this game. We could have used her for the tug-of-war. Trixie stops by to watch the progress of her Trailblazers. “COME ON!” she shouts. “You can get past these little Doves!”

  Zinta has a glint in her eye. “Red Rover, Red Rover,” she cries, “we call Trixie over!”

  Trixie stares at Zinta, then away. Then at Zinta again. She starts off for my end of the line, but veers away from me. She can’t help herself. Zinta is a magnet for her. It’s as if she’s running unconsciously. She ends up hitting Zinta at full speed – eyes wide, mouth open, teeth bared, blonde hair streaming. What a mistake. Zinta stands straight and tall, and does not budge. Trixie bounces right off her like a soccer ball off a goalpost. She lies on the ground for a second, stunned.

  “Change over,” calls the referee, a no-nonsense counselor in black and white.

  Trixie gets up, breathing heavily. “You wait, Zinta!” she says in a husky voice. “I am going to annihilate you!” Then she stomps away. Our team does not taunt her. We’re too nice.

  All of us except Norbert.

  – You’ve got mud in your hair, he calls.

  She whirls around. “Who said that?” she hisses.

  “Come on, come on, change over!” The referee looks at her watch.

  Trixie doesn’t move. “Who said I had mud in my hair?”

  My team looks at me. “Um, actually,” I say.

  – All down the back, says Norbert. A dark brown streak, Like a horse’s mane. Very interesting.

  “Are you calling me a horse?” snaps Trixie.

  – With a brown mane, says Norbert. A lovely color. On Jupiter, brown is the color of hope.

  “Red Rover, Red Rover, we call …” They pause. Victor whispers. “Alan,” they cry.
“We call Alan over.”

  “Come and get it, loser!” calls Trixie.

  “Now see what you’ve got me into, Norbert,” I mutter.

  I figure if I run slowly, I won’t hurt myself as much. I angle myself towards Victor. I don’t want any surprises. I’m nearly there, jogging along comfortably, trying to pick a place on the field to land, when I feel a tingle in my nose.

  – Looky, looky! cries Norbert. Over there, by the cabin. Skinny-dippers!!

  Of course there aren’t any skinny-dippers. There isn’t even a lake. We’re playing on the field behind the dining hall, where we had the campfire last night. But there’s something about the idea of skinny-dippers. The entire Trailblazer line turns to stare. Their arms get twisted, and they fall over each other, and I run through easily.

  – Heu heu heu! Norbert gives his high-pitched, squeaky laugh. Brown hair, brown shoes, we win, you lose!

  This is hard to resist. I laugh out loud before I can stop myself. Eric and Derek giggle, and repeat it to each other.

  Trixie gets so mad she jumps up, runs after me, and pushes me down in the mud. The referee calls a bad sportsmanship penalty, and we win the game.

  Things get a bit better after that. My teammates stop treating me like Leroy the Leper. They even laugh at a few of my jokes. At dinner, kids from the other Lumberjack tables come over to say hi.

  “Did you really call Trixie a horse?” asks one of the Chipmunks.

  “Well, no,” I say.

  “Because she does kind of look like one. She’s a model, you know, but she has this long horsey face. A good-looking horse, mind you.”

  Victor sidles over just before dessert. “Trixie is really mad at you,” he whispers. “She says it’s all because of you that we lost the Red Rover game.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  From my side of the dining hall I hear a chorus of giggling voices. “Brown hair, brown shoes, we win, you lose!”

  Victor shakes his head. “She is really mad about that rhyme too,” he says, sidling away. “Just thought I’d warn you.”