Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  That night the Thunderbird girls who had been assigned to share our tent refused to undress until the light was turned out. There were three of them: a pair of tiny, frail-boned sisters named Cookie and June, who had large almond-shaped eyes, hair done identically in an elaborately braided puff over each ear, and small breasts in sharp brassieres that stuck out like pointed Dixie cups through the clinging nylon of their blouses; and Belinda, a stocky girl who looked twenty years old and had a slight squint, straightened hair bleached a bright orange-red in the front, and a loud, unbridled tongue—I had heard Belinda laughing and cursing above the others when they got off the bus. She was subdued now, as were Cookie and June, the three of them sitting bolt upright on the tightly stretched army blankets and sheets of the cots that had been set up for them, muttering replies to the kindly chitchat of our counselor, Molly. Molly was from Jamaica, a student with an anxious plump face and a delightful habit of shaking her head at her campers and exclaiming, “Girls, you are becoming hardened in your ways!”

  The three Thunderbird girls responded to Molly with a sudden opacity of gaze, glances among themselves, and abrupt fits of shy giggling. We campers were stricken with shyness ourselves: there was none of our usual roughhousing or bedtime ballets in our underwear, or wisecracking about Patty Haas’s ugly boyfriend—a standing joke. Instead we undressed quickly in our bunks, turning away from each other, painfully conscious of the contrast between the elaborately equipped trunks from which we drew our pajamas and the small vinyl bags that our guests had brought. Once Molly had turned off the single yellow bulb that illuminated the tent and had strolled off up the path to a late-night staff meeting at the rec hall, the tent was unnaturally silent.

  I arranged myself on my lumpy top bunk as I always did—with the sheet over my head to keep off mosquitoes—and breathed in the scent of slightly mildewed canvas from the rolled sides of the tent. From the bunk beneath me, Chen-cheu, a sound and instant sleeper, gave an adenoidal snore, and I could hear little clicks and rustlings that meant that the Thunderbird girls were undressing. There was a cool breeze blowing with a steady rushing sound in the trees, and I wondered what the girls from the city were thinking as they listened, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to the noises of the wild night. Never had I been so aware of the woods as a living place around me: over the stubborn saw of the crickets, I heard two hoots from a white-faced owl who lived in a tree near our tent, and a gradually intensifying gray light in the direction of the lake meant the moon was rising. In my mind the moon mingled with the yellow school bus that had brought the Thunderbirds, and then I found myself sliding quickly out of the vision, knowing that I’d been asleep. What had awakened me was a soft voice; it was the new girl, June, calling out to her sister in a whisper.

  “Cookie—Cookie—are you up? I hear a noise.”

  There was a soft creak as Cookie got up and crept over to her sister’s cot. I leaned my head out slightly from my bunk and in the dim moonlight caught a glimpse of the tiny girl, her hair greased and braided for the night, dressed in her underwear. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that perhaps the Thunderbird girls didn’t have pajamas. “Hush, girl,” hissed Cookie to her sister, sitting lightly down on the cot. “Hush up! You want these bitches to hear you?”

  “But there’s a noise,” whimpered June.

  “Hush up, girl. It’s just trees, that’s all. Just trees.”

  There was silence, and when after a few minutes I edged my head out of the bunk to have another look, I saw that Cookie had lain down on her sister’s cot and that the two girls were sleeping with their heads close together on the pillow.

  At breakfast Ned Woolworth announced to a chorus of groans from the campers that instead of swimming or canoeing or tennis, we would divide up into small groups for what he called “rap sessions.” My group included Ellen; Jackie Murdock, a camper notorious throughout Grayfeather for his prolonged belches at mealtimes; a plump, round-faced Thunderbird named Ricky; and a skinnier Thunderbird named Les, who wore a peculiar rust-colored bowler hat. There was also Marvin Jones, the Thunderbird leader, wearing an army fatigue jacket open to show his gleaming bronze chest; he sat slumped, wiggling his feet, on his face an expression of exaggerated forbearance.

  The six of us, with a counselor, met in a grove of pin oaks near the chapel. It was one of those clear, dry, autumnal days that occasionally leap ahead of their time into the middle of August. The sky was a sharp blue, crisp moving shadows checkered the ground, and in the eyes of all of the kids sitting there was a skittish, inattentive look, as if they might dash off suddenly into the breezy woods.

  A green acorn plopped down near Ricky, the plump Thunderbird sitting beside Ellen. “Wha’s that?” he asked her, pointing.

  “That’s an acorn,” said Ellen scornfully, tossing back her red hair. “Didn’t you ever see an acorn before?”

  “No, Sweet Thighs,” said Ricky, giving her a lascivious, cherubic smile that showed a broken front tooth. He picked up the acorn and put it carefully into his pocket.

  The counselor in charge clapped her hands. She was a diving coach with a pugnacious sunburnt face and a blunt, bossy way of talking. “This morning we’re going to discuss friendship,” she said. “We all have friends, so let’s talk about them—who they are, and what they mean to us—”

  “I don’t have friends,” interrupted Marvin Jones.

  “What?” said the counselor.

  “I said I don’t have friends,” said Marvin Jones, looking at her seriously, the platinum streak in his hair glittering in the sunlight through the treetops. “Yeah, that’s right, miss. I mean, shit—’scuse me, miss—I got my men. Spike is my man. Ricky is my man, and J.T., that dude with the sunglasses and the ‘Free Africa’ t-shirt, he’s my main man. I mean, them dudes will cut for me. But they don’t be no friends. And then we got the Thunderbird Queens—I mean our ladies.”

  “They’re not your friends, of course.” said the counselor acidly.

  “No, like I said, we don’t have no friends. We got enemies, though: the Twelfth and Diamond Street gang. You ever hear of them?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s good, ’cause the T-birds are on top. Wait a minute—I’ll show you something.”

  He gave a curt, imperious nod to Ricky and the other Thunderbird beside him, and an odd tension seemed to seize all three of them. The woods seemed very quiet for a minute. All at once, synchronized, they stood up, snapping their fingers. In high, plaintive voices they broke into words and rhythms that were not quite a song, not quite a chant.

  “What the word / Thunderbird …”

  It was a strange mixture: a bit of Motown, a bit of the interlocking verses all kids use to choose sides for games, a bit of the bouncy silliness of football and basketball cheers, all bound together quite naturally with swearwords—words that we Grayfeather campers all knew and used enthusiastically among ourselves, in spite of what parents and teachers and counselors had to say. The Thunderbird song could have been ridiculous, but instead it was thrilling, carrying with it, to those of us who sat listening, all the resonance of a dangerous young life in the city. It was clear that the song was not intended as an entertainment for us, but was presented as a kind of credential, like the letters scratched into the paint of the rec hall.

  Ellen and I punched each other excitedly in the ribs and tried to remember every word. When the song was finished, Marvin Jones and the other two Thunderbirds flopped down abruptly at the base of a tree, their faces full of restrained pride.

  “That was great, fellows,” said the counselor. She was trying to seem cordial, but it was clear that she was uncomfortable, almost angry, about what had just happened. “Let’s see if you can do a little more talking now, so that we can get to know you.”

  Marvin Jones picked up a twig from the ground and tapped the toes of his sneakers with it—one, two, three. “Lady, you just got to know us,” he said.

  Down at the lake that afternoon, Jimmy T
erkel, the boating counselor, gave a short briefing on canoeing to an assembled group of campers and Thunderbirds. Terkel was a dark, softspoken young man who loved the little irregular lake, with its cedar water and clustering lilies; all summer he had made canoeing into an austere rite, embarking on solitary voyages at dawn or sunset, an angular silhouette at the far corner of the water. The afternoon had grown overcast, and as Terkel talked about water safety and demonstrated the proper way to dip and feather a paddle—the lecture was chiefly for the newcomers, since the campers had been handling canoes all summer—swarms of audacious gnats made forays at our eyes and ears. Suddenly, in the middle of the talk, Marvin Jones strode over to one of the aluminum canoes on the shore and began to push it toward the water. “I want to go for a ride, mister,” he said politely to Jimmy Terkel. “I know how to do this. I see it all the time on TV.”

  Three other Thunderbirds grabbed paddles and rushed over to the canoe, pushing it through the shallows to deeper water and tilting it dangerously when they all climbed in, about fifteen yards from shore. “That’s too many in a boat, fellows!” called Jimmy Terkel, coming forward. The gunwales of the overloaded canoe were riding about six inches above the surface of the lake, and the boat shipped water occasionally as the passengers thrashed about trying to position themselves; miraculously, the canoe did not capsize. There was an argument between two of the Thunderbirds (“You on my arm, man!”) and then the canoe took off with an irregular splayed motion as Marvin Jones and a second Thunderbird paddled with great splashing thrusts.

  “Oh, no!” Jimmy Terkel muttered, glancing automatically at the heap of orange life preservers on the shore. But no disaster occurred. The canoe made its awkward, lunging way into a cluster of lily pads, and we heard the delighted yells of the novice canoeists as they yanked up the tough-stemmed blossoms, an act that the camp staff, ardent conservationists all, had raised in our minds to the level of a felony. Then the boys in the boat all took off their shirts, and Marvin Jones stood precariously upright to paddle like a gondolier, a big lily coiled dripping around his neck. There was something barbaric and absurd about the sight of him paddling that overloaded canoe, which, as it wobbled heavily over the dark water, seemed a parody of a boat, something out of a nursery rhyme. As I watched it, there came to me out of nowhere a surge of pure happiness. The other campers seemed to feel it as well; the faces of the kids around me were contorted with crazy laughter, and some of them were jumping up and down. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the boys, from pure joie de vivre, as it were, pick up a handful of sand and rub it into the hair of his bunkmate. Just for a minute, it seemed that the camp was a place where any mad thing could happen. While Jimmy Terkel stood on the shore with an angry smile on his face, campers and Thunderbirds alike were almost dying with glee. We laughed as if we’d never seen anything so funny.

  That was the last, really the only, good time we had with the Thunderbirds. Later that afternoon a scuffle broke out near the camp infirmary between two of the gang members and a stableboy. A burly counselor from Honolulu broke up the fight, which was just a matter of shoving and name-calling. The participants were made to stand face to face and explain themselves, and in the process they quite spontaneously shook hands and apologized. In ten minutes the camp grapevine had telegraphed news of the scuffle to all parts of Grayfeather. It seemed that everyone involved in the fight had laughed it off except for Ned Woolworth, who rushed to the scene and glared at the three boys as if he wanted to knock them all down.

  The staff had scheduled a hayride for that night. Normally, the campers looked forward to hayrides: the dusky country roads, shrill with insects; the creaky wagon and plodding, pungent horses; the deep, scratchy hay that offered the opportunity for a little romantic improvisation (though Grayfeather, a camp of overeducated fourteen-year-olds, was notoriously backward in that department). That particular evening, a subtle intelligence flashed through the ranks of the campers, a kind of mass intuition that suggested that things would be much better if we let the Thunderbirds go hayriding on their own. To the bewilderment of our counselors, who had no way of forcing us to accept a treat, all of the campers, gently but immovably, refused to go.

  After dinner, Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I, and the other girls from our tent, took part in a desultory sunset game of Capture the Flag as the Thunderbirds and their girls, escorted by Grayfeather staff members, boarded the wagon. An hour and a half later, the returning wagon creaked slowly up to the rec hall. Norah Pfleisch, a plump, excitable junior counselor, rushed inside and burst into tears on the shoulder of Ned Woolworth’s wife, Hannah, who was directing a spur-of-the-moment Ping-Pong tournament.

  “I’ve never, never had anything like this happen,” sobbed Norah, resisting Hannah’s efforts to lead her out of the rec hall and away from the fascinated gaze of forty campers. “They—fornicated! They lay in the hay like animals and just … did it! It started when we went under the old covered bridge. It was such a beautiful night. Usually we sing on hayrides, but this time I didn’t know where to look, or what to listen to!”

  We all rushed to the door of the rec hall. Outside, under a clear night sky streaked with meteor showers, the Thunderbirds and their girls, chattering loudly and innocently, were climbing out of the wagon, pulling hay out of each others’ clothes.

  Things fell apart completely the next day. That morning at swimming class another fight broke out, this one between Femi, the camper from Nigeria, and an agile, pale-skinned, sullen-faced Thunderbird. On the shore in front of the swimming area of the lake, as the white rope and bright floats of the lane dividers bobbed gaily in the morning sun, two counselors held back the two struggling boys in bathing suits, Femi with a swollen nostril leaking blood. “I’ll kill that filthy little nigger bastard,” panted Femi in his Mayfair accent, wiping his nose with his coal-black arm. “I’ll smear his dirty little arse all over the beach. He called me a monkey!”

  “He spit on me,” the Thunderbird was muttering, scuffling his feet in the sand. “Motherfucker spit on me.”

  Marvin Jones was called over to make peace. “This ain’t no way to act,” he began, but his tone was insincere, the tone of a showman bent on pleasing everyone. He sent a quick, shifty grin over to the Thunderbirds standing near him, and one of them suddenly shoved a camper, who went sprawling into the lake. In the boys’ swim group a general melee broke out between campers and Thunderbirds, the tanned bodies of the campers mingling wildly with the small, dark, muscular Thunderbirds. The two counselors were themselves dragged in. Pairs of boys bolted, yelling threats, and ran off into the woods.

  The girls at the lake, both Thunderbirds and campers, were quickly marched off to our tents, where we were told to sit quietly. Back at her trunk, Chen-cheu looked and found that someone had taken three of her prettiest t-shirts and a new bathing suit. When she complained loudly about it, she found herself surrounded by three Thunderbird girls, including our tentmate Belinda. They began to jostle Chen-cheu and to pluck at her long black hair; Chen-cheu promptly socked Belinda in the stomach. Our counselor Molly came running down the path from the rec hall at precisely the moment when Chen-cheu, propelled by a nasty push, came flying out of the tent to sprawl in the dust and shriek out a string of curses that even Ellen and I had never heard her use. Her beautiful face was contorted and almost purple with rage, but she wasn’t crying. None of us were. After that we were separated from the Thunderbird girls.

  Meanwhile, the boys were being rounded up. I heard later that a number of them were found grappling in twos and threes in the woods; there were surprisingly few injuries beyond a few black eyes and bloody noses. “We had a plan,” one of the boy campers said afterward. “We were going to barricade ourselves in the infirmary and fight ’em off from there. Firebomb them.”

  The Thunderbird boys, escorted by several strapping counselors called in from a tennis camp across the lake, were confined to the rec hall. By eleven o’clock on a fine, sharp, hot August morning, Camp Grayfeather had
settled into a stillness in which the only sounds were those of a sublimely untroubled nature—birdsong; the harsh whirring of cicadas; the light slapping of waves on the lake shore.

  None of us was surprised to discover that the Thunderbirds were to be sent home. I sat with nine other girls on the sagging bunks of our tent as Hannah Woolworth, her plump, kindly face pale and drawn with strain beneath its sunburn and freckles, talked to us. “We all feel that it would be better and safer for everyone,” she said. “We don’t want any of you kids getting hurt.”

  When she said “you kids,” it was clear that she did not mean the Thunderbirds.

  I looked at Ellen and Chen-cheu, and they looked back at me. Events were passing, as usual, into the unreachable sphere of adult justice, and though there was a certain relief in that, it also seemed sad. For a day and a half, the Thunderbirds, like a small natural disaster, had given an edge of crazy danger to life at Grayfeather; now the same powers that had brought them to us were taking them away.

  “We didn’t even get a chance to learn all their names,” said Ellen slowly, after Hannah Woolworth had left.

  A flicker of resentment ran through the group of girls crowded together in the tent, and Ellen and I began, with an obscure feeling of defiance, to teach the others the song that the Thunderbirds had sung for us under the oak tree the day before.

  In about two hours, after we’d eaten a large pile of bologna sandwiches on horrid white bread, sandwiches that the camp cook had provided as a sort of emergency take-out lunch, we heard through the woods the unmistakable sound of a bus. “We’ve got to see this,” I said.