How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  I nodded.

  “What year was she?”

  “Nineteen sixty-eight.”

  She jumped, her sandals making another loud thwack as she came back down. “I was nineteen seventy—who was your mama?” I told her, and she squealed. “Debra Rose!” She told me she didn’t know her personally, but she certainly knew of her. “Everybody did, honey—she was so popular. It was a plain tragedy what her daddy did.” She appeared shocked to hear of her passing. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather.” She asked again what had brought me back here, and this time I was more honest and told her I was curious about the Neck, that my mother had told me some wild stories, and then, of course, there was the movie. “Honey, that movie is only half of it. Ever since that crazy camp mess happened ten years ago, stories about the place being haunted have continued. Teenagers will go out there during Halloween looking for trouble.” In recent years, she told me, people have claimed to have seen strange people lurking out there. “But I don’t want to worry you.” She squeezed my arm and then, as if by reflex, wiped her hand on her oversize blouse. “Most of the sightings happened right after Katrina, when all sorts of people migrated up from the coast. Sheriff told me he thought a few of them hung around for a spell and then moved on. But that don’t stop kids from letting their imaginations get the better of them. And now with this movie about a boogeyman killing people, I’m sure we’re in for one stupid Halloween season.”

  I asked her if people still knew about Horace Dodd and the gas station fire, and she shook her head, and said, “Don’t nobody talk about the old stories. A few years back, the mayor put together some of them in a little book for tourists.” She said she would show it to me if I’d give her a minute to go hunt it up. Before I could answer, she ran off to the circulation desk to look up a book number and then dashed around the stacks until she found it. “This here,” she said, coming back. “The mayor, you know, used to be your mama’s friend and so she heard all these tall tales from her. I like to take a look at it every now and then, but it was never very popular—just a novelty item we keep for posterity’s sake.” She handed me a small saddle-stapled booklet, the covers laminated. “Local color,” she said, as I turned the book over. It had illustrations and was forty-five pages long. The woman who wrote it—Sally Jo Levy—moved to Texas, Brenda told me, not long after she self-published the book. Her husband got a better-paying job in Dallas. “But she was a good mayor,” Brenda said. “Really steeped in all the lore about the Neck. Good thing she left, because she was the type of person who would have jumped at the chance to have that movie shot in these parts.” She took the book from me and opened to the title page and then handed it back over. “Look who she dedicated the book to.” Under the title, The History of the Neck, was the inscription “To D.R.” I handed the book back and felt dizzy, like one of my spells was coming on.

  “I hope I didn’t upset you?”

  I told her I just needed some lunch and grabbed a few of the romances off the shelf. We walked back toward the circulation desk. She began to run the spines of the trade-in paperbacks across the magnet block on the counter so they wouldn’t set off the alarms when I exited. She must have put together more pieces of my story when she paused before running the last book. “Your mama’s sister was your aunt,” she said. “That singer—what did you say your name was?” I told her, but the story of the camp and my family and all that came after was too tangled for her to make much sense of it right away. Instead, she did that southerner’s sleight-of-hand trick in conversations when talk had drifted into uncertainty: She changed the subject. She told me how the movie producers were, on the whole, disappointed by what they found at the Neck. “Said it wasn’t cinematic enough—and they were, I hear, gravely disappointed to find that the old polluted pond had been drained.” A few years after the camp, she said, the Fishery and Wildlife Commission designated it a public health risk. “All the fish in it were long dead.” When she set Sally Jo Levy’s book on her side of the counter, I told her that the mayor’s book had reminded me of another one. “A memoir,” I said. “The Summer I First Believed.” Brenda was familiar with it. “Made a big stir when it first came out, but not nearly as big as the movie will, I suspect.” I asked her if I could see it, maybe look at it before I left. She hunted up the call number on the computer database and wrote it down on a used notecard. Before she handed the card over I asked if she would help me find it. “I’m not used to the Dewey decimal system,” I said. “All the libraries up north are Library of Congress.” As I expected, her hospitality blinded her to my true intentions. She told me to wait right where I was and scooted around the corner, out of sight, to fetch the book I had no intention of looking at. I didn’t have long to do what followed: I reached over the counter and swiped The History of the Neck, ran its cornered spine across the magnet block, and was out the door, rushing to Doll before Brenda returned.

  —

  In the acknowledgments section of The History of the Neck, Sally Jo Levy thanked my mother in more depth. “For my last year of high school,” she wrote, “I got a sister. And though it was a dark time for my sweet Debra Rose, we told these stories, mostly wild fantasies, and somehow we muddled through by making the world better than it was. These tales have stayed with me, and now I’m happy to share them with all who travel through our troubled weeds.” She didn’t have an author photo and listed very little else about her biography. “Sally Jo Levy,” the book said, “has served several terms as the mayor of West.” Published five years after my mother’s death, the book included illustrations done by Sally Jo. The women of the woods were given pioneer garb, long dresses and lanterns and hard expressions. The moonshiners wore flannel shirts and overalls, and were posed behind various contraptions that constituted a makeshift distillery. The time period blurred to sometime after the Civil War and before the First World War. As I read Sally Jo’s account, it echoed what my mother and aunt had told me about the Neck. For the story of the lost mother, Sally Jo’s drawing of the woman’s face was wide and smooth, and took up most of the page. Her hair streamed across the page. She resembled my mother, this was true, but the depiction was supposed to be, I was sure of it, my grandmother. It had to do with the eyes, the mystery in them that Mother Maude had spoken of. I knew so many stories about the Neck, and not a one of them was completely true. Each one represented, instead, a single person’s attempt at truth. My own story wasn’t any different.

  I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting by the dry lake bed under a nice shade tree, thumbing through the book. After coming back from the library, I’d parked Doll at the very end of the gravel road in front of the cabins. Before sitting down to read, I walked around what was left of the property. The Sleeping Cabin had caved in on itself and wasn’t much more than piles of splintery wood. The Chapel Cabin still stood, but I didn’t trust the structure enough to venture inside. Nature had reclaimed the farmhouse. Clots of sumac and bristly vines threaded in and out of the walls. A thin tree had broken through the floorboards of the back porch and was inching toward the roof. The lake had changed since I last saw it, too. As in the movie, the water had been drained from it, leaving behind a concave bowl full of cattails and clover. When I finished the book, I stared into the brush-choked bowl of the lake bed, listening to the wind. I set the book down in the grass and walked to the lake bed. I stepped in, sinking down to my knees in weeds. I combed through it, careful where I put my feet. Snakes or other hidden critters wouldn’t take kindly to my disturbing them. I made it to the middle of the lake, the spot I’d waded to during the first night. A stick snapped from somewhere back on the shore. But when I looked, nothing. My mind conjured up the boogeyman, how could it not: all incarnations of him—my grandfather, the killer in Proud Flesh, the recent sightings by teenagers Brenda had mentioned.

  What was remarkable about the Neck was how unconcerned it seemed with its own history, with the tellings and retellings swirling
around it. The land continued to grow, ferociously so, feeding on the remnants of the camp, the house. Sooner or later, any sign of human involvement would be devoured. A blessing.

  I hiked to the other side and climbed out. Here stood two granite headstones. Mother Maude had been laid to rest beside her brother. If there had been a funeral for her, my father never told me, just as he had never told me he had inherited the camp from her. Not that my knowing of her funeral would have mattered—I wouldn’t have come. During my Internet searches about the movie, I had discovered some small write-ups about what happened to her after she fled on the day of the accident. She’d relocated in secret to California, living on the lam for the rest of her life. Something cancerous had killed her, and here she was, her body beside her brother’s, both slowly moldering into the Neck, which I guess, for them, was a happy ending.

  When I returned to Doll, the trunk was popped up. As I got closer, I saw the doors had been flung open, too, like Doll’s carpet was about to be vacuumed. I eased up beside one of the rear doors. A thin boy was inside, rummaging through grocery sacks, the supplies I’d purchased at Walmart. He wore the princess mask I’d stuffed in the glove compartment. He rapped to himself or was speaking in tongues—I couldn’t tell which. I let him finish riffling and climb on out, not saying a word to him. In one hand, he toted the spotlight, and in the other, my box of beef jerky. “Look at this shit, Bubba!” he said, as he straightened himself up, not yet recognizing I wasn’t the person he thought I was. He stopped moving when he realized. After a brief silence, he removed the mask. He looked nineteen, maybe twenty. His hair was orangey blond, the color dark hair turns when you douse it in hydrogen peroxide. “Oh,” he said, stepping sideways, as if he were considering a speedy getaway into the woods. “We saw the car, and we . . .” He looked down at his dirty high-top tennis shoes. Several bands of duct tape were wound around the toes of them.

  “Rooster.”

  He’d slunk in behind me. I jerked around, already shouting. Ten years had done little to wrinkle his face. His teeth, however, were a different matter. A row of yellow and black bone flashed from his lips as he tried to speak, to explain to me why I shouldn’t be screaming. When that didn’t work, Father Drake took one big step forward, enough to close the gap between us, and placed a hand over my wailing mouth.

  EIGHT

  ■

  TREATMENT

  They never told us the mix of possible pollutants and sewage runoff and microscopic parasites in Lake John that made our skin rebel against us. We had our own name for it: the itch. But our language for it didn’t cover all the aftereffects. The day after our first dip into the lake, Sparse and Christopher reported experiencing a burning sensation in their skin. Like a sunburn, Christopher said, only deeper. Discolorations streaked across Sparse’s back and belly and thighs, and he worried that he might get keloids. For me, sores had cropped up on my fair skin soon after I’d gotten out, scabbing over by morning. The itchiest parts were along my scrotum and the rim of my anus. An ecosystem of welts had developed down there, and it only made me upset to inspect the damage, so I didn’t.

  We’d slept on bunk beds in the Sleeping Cabin, still wearing our yellow T-shirts and khakis. The cabin had no windows, and we’d left the door open in hopes of circulating cooler night air inside, but it didn’t work. When Rick and Larry fetched us in the morning, we awoke covered in a skein of our own sweat, our clothes sticking to our wrecked flesh. Getting out of bed required a great delicacy of movement. So did walking, which was more of a waddle for most of us.

  There would be no showers at Camp Levi. Only the slightest attention would be given to our hygiene because we were “roughing it” in the Neck, just as the brochures had described. Fresh water, crisp and clear and cold, had been trucked in from somewhere nearby and poured into a metal basin, which was now docked on one of the picnic tables, waiting for us. We took turns brushing our teeth and washing our damp faces. We used the toiletries they’d set out beside the basin: individual plastic toothbrushes in clear wrapping, travel-size toothpaste tubes, unscented soap bars. Rick and Larry kept our items separate. After I used my toothbrush and soap, I handed them over to Larry, who placed them in a lunch box with my initials Magic Markered on the front. For peeing, Larry told us, we were encouraged to stand behind certain girthy trees lining the perimeter of the main grounds. He pointed to the ones he meant. “Don’t cluster. Only one per tree,” he added, “and no funny business, no lingering.” If we needed a toilet for more “pressing concerns,” there was the blue-tinted portable restroom shoved out of the way beside the Sleeping Cabin. It was locked, and Rick carried the key, a gleaming speck of metal around his neck.

  After we finished our morning ablutions, we gathered on the hard benches of the picnic table, and Rick and Larry dashed inside the Chapel Cabin to get our breakfast. It was then, and only then, I realized that Dale wasn’t among us. He’d not been with us all morning—not when we’d awoken, not when we’d brushed our teeth, not when we’d peed and shat in various locales around the campsite. He had certainly been with us the night before. After the lake, he’d stopped his crying and didn’t make a sound. He crashed on the only bed in the Sleeping Cabin that didn’t have a top bunk. He wrapped himself in the thin blanket on the mattress like a burrito, even though the cabin was sweltering.

  Rumil must have sensed my question because he said, “I heard them come for him early, before sunrise.” His neck was coated in slashes, as if he’d been strangled.

  Christopher leaned forward. “Did he leave? For good?”

  “The Sweat Shack, honey.” Sparse pulled from his pocket a shard of the broken mirror from last night and examined his face, the rawness around his lips, the scabbiness in the creases of his nose and above his left eyebrow. “I look a mess,” he announced. Rumil said they must treat Lake John with a chemical. Sparse, licking his inflamed lips, said, “It’s how they’ll keep us horny queens from fucking each other. They want to make it so we don’t even want to touch ourselves when we go to take a piss.” Sparse was correct about the last part. I had held my bladder for that very reason.

  Christopher patted his puffy face. “Is this legal?”

  No one answered. I believed nobody cared one way or the other about the legality of our situation. Our parents cared less about the means so long as the ends were delivered. Last night we’d come together in our violence, agreeing—without verbally acknowledging it—to see this process out. As I saw it, our orientation by the lake was nothing less than a forging of a holy covenant with the Lord. Now my groin ached so badly I sat with my legs spread out, as if I were airing myself out. Good, I thought. Pain was progress.

  The counselors returned with Styrofoam plates of eggs, passing them out quickly and hurrying back inside. No time for small talk.

  Christopher said, “I thought they said he wasn’t getting sent there this time.”

  “Ah,” Sparse said. “He didn’t get sent for what he did at dinner, but for what he did in the circle.” He waved the glass at us. “That probably signed his ticket.”

  At the edge of the pasture, the woods were alive with bird cackles and shivering trees as warm southerly winds rustled through their branches. From our table, the Sweat Shack was visible. I imagined Dale in there, his tall body hunched inside. The idea, I was beginning to understand, was for the sinful camper to sit in almost complete darkness, cocooned in thick ovenlike heat, and contemplate his sins. In essence, sweat them out.

  “Mother Maude was with Rick and Larry when they came for him,” Rumil said. “She saw me awake and came over.”

  Sparse said, “And?”

  “She just put her hand on my forehead like this.” He placed the back of his hand over his brows. “And she said, ‘Peace, peace.’”

  Sparse pushed his plate away. He’d barely touched his eggs. “Damn,” he said. “They’re good.”

  After breakfast, we went into the Chapel
Cabin. Like the other buildings, there wasn’t any electricity, but this cabin had more windows than the one we slept in, so it was almost cheery looking in the morning sunshine. On the walls hung posters with inspirational quotes from the Bible, encouraging us to be Christian soldiers. On a table in the back, there were several iceboxes, with the word MEALS scrawled across the lids. The four of us sat cross-legged on a tan horsehair rug that smelled of sawdust while Rick and Larry loomed over us. Our first microlesson, they told us, would focus on a series of responsible and irresponsible behaviors when interacting with other men. “For instance,” Larry said. “It is responsible to stand about two feet from a fellow brother in Christ when conversing with him.” Any closer, however, was irresponsible. Such closeness for boys like us could lead to inappropriate thoughts. Inappropriate thoughts, sooner or later, led to actions. “Men,” Larry went on to say, “are physical creatures—our desires begin and end in the flesh. We must stifle the stimulus to protect the core. Remember David? Remember how he ran buck naked from the temptress’s house?”

  Standing back, Rick suddenly looked quizzical and interrupted. “You mean Joseph, brother.” This would be his only notable contribution to the microlesson.