How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  —

  Rick and Larry dragged me back to land by the ankles, their gloves gnawing into my skin. They dumped me into a thicket of weeds and brambles. A possum trundling past hissed as I came rolling toward it. I yelled, and the animal shuffled away, its black eyes red rimmed and depthless. Larry told me to stand. “There’s no time to fool around,” he said. “Your brothers need you.” Rick gave me a towel to pat myself dry then handed over the new T-shirt and shorts. The clothes clung to my still-damp body, the starchy fabric making me itch. My skin felt slimy. Rick and Larry followed me back to the edge of the torchlight. Inside the circle, Rumil and Sparse and Christopher looked like they were dancing, arms lashing about wildly. But when I got closer, I saw that they weren’t dancing. They were fighting. Not each other, but Dale.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Dale,” Rick whispered.

  Larry clarified: “Says he’s not going in the water.”

  The boys were taking turns running at Dale while Mother Maude stood back, pressing the glass side of the mirror to her chest. Dale was able to keep the other boys off by using his big arms to push them away. The boys were no match for him. He could swat back all night, and this seemed to be our first test: Find some way to bring this big bastard down. And he was a bastard. Scattered around Mother Maude were shards of glass, twinkling in the flames. No one had to tell me what had happened. This fool had punched the mirror. The knuckles on his left hand, the one he favored as he swiped at the boys, looked bloody and raw, like the top layer of skin had been scraped off. The sight of his injury stoked a growing fury in me. Dale, I thought. Fuck Dale. I wanted to give him more wounds. I was suddenly running into the circle, and without any plan or foresight, I leaped into the melee, catching him by surprise. He swung. His fist caught my ear, sending me down fast. But with his attention diverted, the others saw their chance and pounced, all together this time. Christopher managed to wrestle him into an awkward headlock. He used the full weight of his body to stymie Dale long enough for Sparse and Rumil to tear off his shirt and then snatch down his jean shorts.

  “Bring him to the water,” Larry was shouting. “Hurry!”

  But the boys, even working together, couldn’t hold Dale for long. The four of them rolled onto the ground. They twisted and turned in the mess of shirts and pants and sneakers. Somehow Dale managed to free himself in the chaos. Dazed, he sat up to find me standing over him, my ear leaking blood. “Amen,” I said, and kicked him in the face. Hard. His head shot back, and he was down. He landed on top of the others who were still writhing in the clothes, unaware, I think, that Dale had escaped until his dead weight came slumping back down over them.

  “Is he breathing?” Rumil lifted one of Dale’s arms and let go, wide-eyed, as it fell listless to the dirt.

  “We’re not that lucky,” Sparse said, shaking out from under Dale’s shoulder.

  Dale came to as we were carrying him to the lake. Rick and Larry had pitched in, and now he was easy to manage. “Please,” he kept saying. “Please.” Mother Maude met us at the edge of the lake, still holding the broken mirror. We laid Dale at her feet. “My lamb,” she said to him. “We will drag you to salvation—kicking and screaming if need be.” She stooped to kiss the red mark my foot had left on his forehead. “Because I love you—so much I do.” She nodded to Rick and Larry, who, in turn, directed us to take up his legs and arms again. We worked together, different parts of the same machine. Dale didn’t fight us—he didn’t seem to have any fight left tonight. We swung him back and forth, our arcs modest but gaining momentum with each pass. “Okay,” Larry said. “On three.”

  “One,” Christopher screamed. “Two.”

  At three, we released Dale into the air. He didn’t fly very far, as big as he was, and he landed with a weak splash in the shallows. As soon as we let go, we sank. A moment later Dale resurfaced and filled the night with a throaty roar. No one paid much attention to him as he sloshed back to us. We were exhausted. We panted and itched at our necks and the insides of our arms and down our legs. Mosquito bites under the skin. Rumil touched a raw place on my elbow. “Look at you,” he said. “What is that?” Sores had begun to open up on my skin. Tiny wanton mouths gasping for air.

  SEVEN

  ■

  REORIENTATION

  My drive along the Natchez Trace was unremarkable and easy. Grand walls of trees rose up to lofty heights on both sides of the road, shielding me from the outside. For all my years in Mississippi, I’d taken the Trace for granted. Only tourists went this way, or people with time to kill. I wasn’t either, but here I was anyway. I drove without my GPS, without the radio on, and—of course—without my cell.

  I exited the Trace for the town of Kosciusko. I would have to go the rest of the way to Camp Levi on highways and dirt roads as the Trace curved westward and missed the Neck entirely. Named for the Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kościuszko, Kosciusko served as the seat for Attala County. It was also where the trial had taken place. Evening’s gauzy pink sky hung low overhead, casting a sepia glow on all the houses I passed, many of them built in the style of Queen Anne Victorian. There was a quiet, sleepy sort of beauty to the neighborhoods. I had overlooked it the last time I’d been here when I’d been called to testify. It was during my second semester at the magnet school in Jackson. I was smack-dab in the middle of rehearsals for the drama club’s production of Twelfth Night. It was an all-male, and decidedly queer, cast. I had been given the role of Orsino. When I wasn’t studying calculus and learning the basics of computer programing, I was memorizing my lines: “If music be the food of love,” I said in the shower to myself, in the cafeteria to the meat loaf, backstage to a boy whose love I craved, “play on. Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.” When my father called to tell me I had to go back for the trial, I was resentful and said no. Almost a full year had passed since camp. I had new attitudes and opinions, and saw no good reason for having to rehash that summer in front of a bunch of strangers. The boy I had been, the person seeking rehabilitation, embarrassed me, and I was worried my friends, anyone, really, would find out my past. Now, looking back, I see the irony of my situation. I had merely traded in one secret for another.

  Like many courthouses, this one was located in the center of the square, elevated on a hill above a circuit of stores. I parked Doll in front of a drugstore and climbed a set of concrete steps sloping up the grassy hillside. Everything seemed quieter. I remembered Kosciusko as busy, a bustle in the air. Townsfolk traipsing up and down the sidewalks, calling out to one another, laughing. That day my father had parked behind one of the stores. He said, “I’m better off right here,” and left me to walk to the courthouse alone to meet my legal representative. Along the way, I wondered if any of the people I passed knew the reason I was there. Somehow, someway, I feared being recognized and that word would travel back to Jackson, to my new life. But after I had said my piece, what little I could, I returned to school without a single classmate batting an eye when I told them I’d been away to a funeral—a distant cousin, I lied.

  After the verdict was announced, a lawyer called to inform my father, and he eventually told me the outcome when I came home for summer vacation. At first I didn’t understand him. He said, “He got accidental manslaughter since nobody could pin down what exactly happened beyond a reasonable doubt.” Manslaughter? Doubt? I thought I had come in late to the conversation, that my father was referring to an incident in the news. “What?” I said. “Who?” And he took off his glasses, he rubbed his eyes. “Rooster,” he said. “You know who I mean.” Suddenly I did and I didn’t want to. But he wouldn’t let me off the hook; he required a response, some form of acknowledgment that I understood him. I decided to give my father Shakespeare’s words instead of my own. I called up my favorite lines from Twelfth Night, words that didn’t even belong to Orsino, but ones another boy, as Viola, had spoken to rapt audiences durin
g our three-night run: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie.” My father had the same confused look on his face he’d had all those years ago when he called me to his office for dancing flamboyantly in the choir. Only now I wasn’t the kind of son who cared anymore how much he horrified his father or his father’s God.

  The double doors to the courthouse on this side of the square were locked so I, ever the optimist, walked around to try the others. No luck. I pressed my face to the glass and peered in at the varnished hardwood floors and row of doors leading to various elected officials. The town was known as the beehive of the hills, a little hub of industry and small businesses in central Mississippi. Flanking the bottom of the steps to the main entrance were these burnished beehives. The metal had, however, tarnished over the years and looked more like twin dollops of dog scat. Without thinking, I searched my pockets for my cell phone to take a picture of these little sculptures to send to Bevy and, perhaps, Zeus before I remembered I’d gotten rid of it. Crammed in my pocket instead was the floppy princess mask. When I returned to Doll, I tossed the mask in the glove compartment and promptly forgot about it as I drove to the Walmart Supercenter.

  I used the remaining limit on my credit card to buy a high-performance LED spotlight, a flannel sleeping bag, a tent, a folding armchair, a battery-powered fan, a case of bottled water, Slim Jims, two bags of trail mix, half a dozen cans of Vienna sausages and black beans, and a pack of cherry-flavored chewable melatonin tablets. I brought the food and supplies to checkout line five and placed them one at a time onto the conveyor belt. The cashier—a young boy with dirty fingernails—looked up, and said, “Whoa! You look like you’re getting ready for a camping trip.” And I said, trying to be funny, “Or the apocalypse.” Something in my voice, a strain to it that even I heard, startled the boy. He smiled at me without making eye contact, the kind of response you give to people when you think they’re nuts and want to hurry them along without any trouble. I couldn’t blame him—my behavior in the past few days didn’t exactly illustrate someone with stellar mental health.

  I took Highway 19 toward West, which cut directly through the Neck. The gravel road that led into the campsite was easy to miss. But I spotted the no trespassing sign that looked familiar riddled with buckshot and nailed to a skinny pine just before a turnoff. I took my chances that this was the right way. Night had already fallen, so I pulled off onto a grassy shoulder about a mile and a half from where I expected to find the cabins and the Sweat Shack and the lake. I wanted the first time I saw Camp Levi again to be in daylight, preferably the morning, a more hopeful time of day. That night, I locked myself in Doll and shuffled over the console to the backseat. I riffled through the plastic bags until I found the packet of melatonin and ate two pills and tried to sleep. Doll’s backseat wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d assumed it would be. Sooner or later, I figured, I would spend my nights outside in the tent roughing it, but for now this would do nicely. I rolled up the sleeping bag for a pillow and shut my eyes. My time in cities had made me accustomed to distant night noises—police sirens, car horns, rowdy undergrads roaming the sidewalks. The silence of the country seemed louder now, dense and heavy. I had trouble sleeping under the weight of it, spending most of the night somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. I dreamed myself back into the courtroom. I was on the stand. Lawyers indistinguishable in their expensive suits peppering me with questions, each a variation of What happened? I could remember now, I told them. No more can’ts. I spoke about the first night, our long walk to the lake. I told them about the sores on our skin, the chants. My voice kept moving without me, telling them more than I had ever before remembered: the microlessons on manhood, the games we played, the long days of misery. My voice, at last, obliged the court.

  —

  Morning came, and I postponed going into the campgrounds, my nerves getting to me. I turned Doll around and drove into West, a much smaller town than Kosciusko, with no square and a scattering of rundown buildings that faced the railroad and the Big Black River. One of those buildings, I was happy to learn, was the public library. Cutouts of drums and guitars and fiddles decorated the big glass windows that faced the street. STEP TO THE BEAT AND READ! hung above the front double doors in red letters.

  I hadn’t read for pleasure in years and was vaguely excited by the possibilities. I scanned the titles on the shelf of new releases for several minutes before I heard a cheery voice from the second floor. “I got more titles in the other day. They’re in the back, but I haven’t catalogued them yet. I can show them to you, and if you’re interested, I can put your name down on the list.” A woman came clomping down a spiral staircase connecting the floor. She seemed almost to relish the noise she made, as if purposely bucking the librarian stereotype.

  I told her I would need to apply for a library card before I could put my name down for any books. She removed a pair of baby-blue glasses and placed them on the top of her head. She sniffed. I wasn’t aware of my stink until now. I wore the same soiled shorts and polo I’d put on before I left Memphis. “Where you living?” she asked, giving the impression that she was trying to determine if I was a homeless person who’d come inside to enjoy the free air-conditioning. I decided in that moment to never come back here, and so I told her the truth. “The Neck,” I said. “Or thereabouts.”

  She laughed. “Thought the only things that lived out there were possums and ghosts.” She told me I would need proof of physical residence—a billing statement or some other official mail I’d received in the past two weeks—if I wanted to take out a card today. “You’re more than welcome to read books here until you can get documentation,” she added. I told her I’d wanted to take a book or two back with me. “There’s not much to do in the Neck but read.” The woman snapped her fingers, an idea occurring to her, and told me to follow her. “Come on,” she said, and led me to the other side of the L-shaped room, to a shelf of books called trade-ins. “These are old paperbacks and not in regular circulation. People usually bring books to swap out for these, but since you’re new, you can take a few with you to start you off.” The paperbacks were mostly westerns and romances, and the woman informed me that the ones with the heart-shaped stickers on the cover were the ones that didn’t have any dirty scenes. “Those are the only ones I can allow myself to read,” she explained, “because I’m not big enough of a person to skip over the sexy parts like some people claim to do.” She laughed again and told me her name was Brenda. “I got to go check in some books from the book drop, but do holler if you need anything.”

  After she left, I searched the titles. I’d read romances during the summer when I was home from school, the “sexy parts” my only access to pornography until I owned a computer of my own. Brenda soon returned with a question: “Hey, you aren’t one of them boys from Hollywood, are you?” This time I laughed. I told her my mother’s people used to live around the Neck. “So this is kind of a homecoming then?” she said, and I told her it was something like that. I figured this would satisfy her, but it didn’t, and I should have known it wouldn’t have. Brenda had more to say, mostly about the movie, as if she’d been waiting to get this off her chest. “Those people came by here about two years ago, scouting the area, wanting to film that trash on location.” She was happy to see them move along to Georgia instead. “We here in West didn’t want another Kosciusko on our hands.” When she realized I didn’t know what she was talking about, she continued. “Oh, honey, Dennis Hopper went to Kosciusko to make a movie once upon a time.” According to Brenda, people in that town thought they were about to hit pay dirt like Canton had when A Time to Kill was shot there. Hopper’s movie, however, turned out to be an embarrassment. “Went straight to video,” she said. “Lured Innocence—name speaks for itself. The newspaper in Holmes County called it soft-core cinema, and everybody in West laughed our butts off.” She clicked her tongue.

  I confessed to never hearing of that movie unt
il now. “And I’m a film studies major,” I said. “But not contemporary film.” She told me it was just as well I hadn’t known of it. “The less people who know it,” she said, “the better. I get so tired of how they make us look in movies—people from the outside coming down here and making us look like a bunch of undereducated hicks. Like we don’t have the Internet and don’t know how the world works nowadays.” She told me how one of the people from the film crew for Proud Flesh had come into the library to ask if she knew any grocery stores in the area that sold quinoa. “I had to pause to think a minute—not because I didn’t know what quinoa was, but because I was wondering if the fancy Kroger in Madison was too far away to send him. Well, he went on to give me a lesson in quinoa, and I had to stop him right there. I said, ‘I know, sir, what quinoa is. Hell, I don’t eat it myself, but I certainly know what it is, and if I wanted a mouthful of beach sand, then I’d take my happy ass to the Gulf Coast, where I could have my fill for free. That’s better than any quinoa I ever tasted.’” She paused to take a breath, and then her eyes got big. “Didn’t you say your mother was from around here? Did she go to the academy?”