How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  “Exactly!” Larry cried. “Exactly right.”

  Both counselors were young and attractive. Their athletic bodies were obscured on purpose, I figured, in their oversize yellow T-shirts and baggy khaki shorts, their hems hanging, like ours did, well below their kneecaps. Though Larry spoke of the importance of space being put between our bodies and the bodies of other men, neither counselor seemed to be all that aware that we were huddled awfully close to one another on the rug.

  As the lesson continued, my attention wavered. Larry’s talk about the power of the flesh made me hyperaware of it around me, Rumil’s knee in particular. He brushed his against mine. The first time I thought was an accident; he was just getting situated, settled. But then it happened again. Because of our sitting position, our long shorts were pushed up past our knees, exposing us to skin-to-skin contact. My insides were in an uproar when we brushed knees a third time. At the very moment Larry bemoaned the weakness of the flesh, here I was succumbing to it. Rumil’s knee tapped against mine again, and this time a sore on his leg aligned perfectly with a sore on mine. Like this, we held position; we pressed them together, a quick kiss of wounds. A sharp searing pain radiated from my groin as my penis thickened. Woozy, I leaned over.

  “You all right?” Rick asked. Larry was holding him in a hug and he was observing me over Larry’s shoulder. They’d been demonstrating how to embrace another man if one absolutely must. He released Larry and kneeled down in front of me, placing a hand on the back of my head. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just . . .” I knew that if I confessed to this knee action I’d be sent to the Sweat Shack, and a part of me wanted the punishment, it was true, but fear of the unknown kept me silent. I was, in my heart, a coward. “Bathroom,” I said, swallowing everything else. Rumil had removed his knee and was sitting away from me, his face blank, innocent. Larry took off his key necklace and handed it over. When I stood, I quickly learned another benefit of our baggy shorts: The excess fabric hid my hard-on and allowed me to shuffle out of the Chapel Cabin without embarrassment. Once I was outside, walking about, my penis softened and the pain subsided. The portable restroom reminded me of the ones I’d seen at the Neshoba County Fair. I took this opportunity to pee, finally, heartened that the peeing didn’t hurt as much as the hard-on had. When I was finished, I went back outside and darted around the cabin. In the distance, Mother Maude was standing beside the Sweat Shack with her back to me, her great mass of hair covering most of her broad shoulders. When I peered back around, she was stooping toward the little door in front of the Sweat Shack. Dale was crawling out on his hands and knees. After he was back on his feet, Mother Maude gave him a little applause and hugged him. Then, with her arm around his shoulder, she led him to the washbasin on the picnic table. He was given the same toiletries as us—toothbrush, bar of soap—and then Mother Maude guided him into the Sleeping Cabin.

  I headed back to the microlesson. Rumil smirked at me when I reentered. I handed the key back to Larry, apologizing to him for taking so long. I decided to sit on the other side of the rug from Rumil for the remainder of the lesson, beside the dough-faced and harmless Christopher.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  The question baffled me with its simplicity.

  “Of course not,” I said. “And that’s good.”

  —

  Dale rejoined us at lunch.

  He lumbered over to our table and shoved in between Sparse and Rumil. There was barely any room, but neither of them complained. Dale didn’t say a word about what’d transpired the night before. He ate his meal quietly, keeping his eyes trained on his food. For lunch, they’d served us ham-and-cheese sandwiches and more salt-and-vinegar potato chips. As with the other meals, Sparse ate very little, and when Christopher asked if he was done, Sparse shoveled his leftovers onto Christopher’s plate. Dale’s skin looked as ravaged as ours, but with one noticeable difference: The red mark on his forehead had turned purple and green, vaguely in the shape of California. He stopped chewing when he caught me staring at what my foot had done. “What?” he said, and I started and looked down at my own plate.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent with Mother Maude in the Chapel Cabin doing an activity that would come to be known as testimonials. For this activity, folding chairs were arranged in a circle. Mother Maude was already seated when we came in, smiling at us. Once we were seated, she explained how we would spend the next few hours. “The key to healing,” she told us, “is knowing our stories front ways and back—being able to articulate them to God in prayer. It shows him we are serious.” This gathering would be a kind of workshop for our stories, she explained, a time to confess and pick apart the events that had led us to this camp. “But first,” she said, holding up a manila folder, “I want to show you how your story could end, how it most certainly will end, should you carry on down the path you are on.” She opened the folder and held up a picture. “This is DeWayne—I met him hours before I took this picture of his body.” The picture showed an emaciated face, the eyes staring listlessly at a spot just above our heads. She passed the picture to Christopher, who was sitting beside her. “I want y’all to look at these men.” She passed out more, naming each one as she handed them out. “This here is Micah, and this is Darnel. This is Howard, and Carl, and John, and Edmund, and Garth.” All of these pictures were taken, she told us, at the moment right after their souls had left them. They were men she’d ministered to in New York City in the early 1990s, men who’d had the plague. “Same as my Johnny,” she said. “Look here.” She held up the picture I’d recognized from that night with her in Hawshaw. This time I saw the resemblance in his lifeless face. Johnny did look like me. We shared the same cheekbones and nose. I panicked, briefly, that someone else would notice. No one did. Most of the other boys didn’t stare at the pictures of the men for long—a fast look then they passed them on. “I want you to know the truth, and this is the truth about sin, the only truth that matters.”

  Christopher started crying, and when Mother Maude asked if anyone would like to go first in explaining how they arrived at Camp Levi, he raised his hand. “Started in youth group,” he said, and Sparse whispered, “Don’t it always?” Christopher continued. “Last year,” he said, “our church got a new youth leader. He was still in college.” According to Christopher, the new youth leader played the guitar. He also possessed a pair of blue-green eyes and the cleanest pair of New Balances he’d ever laid eyes on. “The Ns on them were so bright,” he said. “They glimmered.” Mother Maude interjected here, telling him in her gentle singsong voice to get back to the point of his testimony, so he did. He told us how he’d just turned fifteen and was the oldest boy at his church. The youth leader asked him to help out with Wednesday night devotionals. They would meet about an hour before the other teenagers arrived. At first they spent most of their time arguing over the music. The youth leader preferred praise music while Christopher insisted on traditional hymns. “I thought we hated each other,” Christopher told us, but then one Wednesday night after devotionals, the youth leader asked him over to his house to listen to some new CDs. “When I got there, he put on a DC Talk album—the one with the ‘Jesus Freak’ song on it.” Christopher didn’t like this music very much and told the youth leader he wasn’t sure how they’d ever use any of this for their Wednesday night devotionals. “Normally, we played songs that everybody could sing along with—that’s why I liked the hymns more than praise music. You could sing along to them, and the lyrics were more intricate. The other was too stripped down.” Mother Maude took this opportunity to say she, too, didn’t understand musical trends in Christian music anymore. “There’s something, I don’t know, too worldly about it.” Christopher agreed and said that the youth leader wanted to show him how the music sounded on his guitar. “Of course he did,” Mother Maude said, then gave us all a knowing look. Christopher remembered how fast it happened: the guitar, the youth leader’s low voice. “I
felt overwhelmed,” he said. He was crying again.

  Mother Maude touched his shoulder. “Of course you were.”

  “After it happened, he wouldn’t even look at me.”

  “Shame,” she said, “is powerful.”

  Sparse raised his hand, and Mother Maude nodded for him to speak. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You didn’t tell us how you got here—you just told us how you got your cherry popped.”

  Dale burst out laughing, triggering laughter from Rumil and Sparse. Mother Maude stood, frowning at them, and they got silent. “Now listen,” she said. “You haven’t heard the rest of it. Please, Christopher—tell it all.” He hesitated, and Mother Maude told him that he would have to be clear about it down to the last detail before he brought it before the Lord.

  “When it was over,” Christopher said, “I was guilty, too. So I told.”

  Still standing, Mother Maude said, “Who did you tell?”

  “My parents—they—they were horrified.”

  Sparse sat up in his seat, visibly shocked by something. “You told?” He looked at Rumil, who seemed to be signaling him to calm down. “He told? What a fucking moron!”

  Dale was laughing again, but none of us joined in. Mother Maude walked outside and returned with the counselors trailing behind her.

  “Robert,” she said. “You need some time, my lamb, to think about today, to think about Christopher’s testimony and how it might be similar to yours.”

  Sparse was looking at his feet when he said, “Shut up, Dale!” But Dale kept on laughing to himself. Larry got beside Sparse’s chair. “Don’t fight us now—we love you.” And Sparse didn’t. He gave a little shrug to Rumil and followed the two men out. Sparse was absent for dinner—pimento cheese sandwiches, more chips—and didn’t return until we were all in our bunk beds. There was only one place they could have sent him: the Sweat Shack. He came traipsing into the Sleeping Cabin, not bothering to be quiet, since he probably figured we were all awake. We were. He climbed up onto his bunk, the one above Rumil’s bed.

  “How was it?” Rumil asked in the darkness. Sparse turned onto his side, the squeaking metal bed frame the only answer he gave.

  —

  We would spend the first two weeks with Mother Maude and the second two with Father Drake. That was the plan. They wanted to emulate childhood development as they understood it. Campers would bond with the mother and then the father. It’s important, I think, to mention that neither of them held degrees in psychology. They were running this camp on instinct and prayer. In any event, we didn’t see much of Father Drake for the first fourteen days. He kept to his side of the lake, and Mother Maude held testimonials on most days in the afternoon, then we’d eat dinner with Rick and Larry, and after dinner, we’d journal in our sin diaries for several hours until bedtime.

  At the second testimonial, Sparse went, but not before listening to Mother Maude recount her brother’s many backslides. “Poor man,” she told us. “He couldn’t help himself. Every time I thought he’d gotten better, there he’d go again, fooling around with somebody he shouldn’t.” She used this anecdote to pivot to us. She asked us how many times we had tried to turn from wickedness. For the longest time, nobody spoke, and the only sound in the Chapel Cabin came from Rick and Larry, who were stationed at the back table preparing our dinner—spreading thick gobs of pimento cheese on white bread. The silence was not bothersome to Mother Maude. She sat in her folding chair, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She was a woman who knew how to wait for things. Finally, Sparse raised a hand, and Mother Maude nodded for him to speak. “Mama and Pop blamed Disney movies,” he said. Christopher and Rumil laughed at this until Mother Maude gave them a horrified stare that immediately hushed them. Sparse continued, his voice thin. “Not all Disney movies. The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp. They was fine. It was the princess movies they didn’t want me seeing. Claimed it gave me these mannerisms.” He folded his wrists in an exaggerated way to show us what he meant. My dancing in choir came back to me suddenly, the memory roaring back so strongly that I felt my ears prickle into a blush. I shook it away and listened to Sparse go on with his testimony: “Mama and Pop are both in the army, and they kept telling me I needed to toughen up. I wasn’t strong enough. Not by half if I wanted to make it as a black man. But I kept messing up, doing things I had no idea were wrong, but then I messed up really bad when I was eight. That’s when they started with the therapy.”

  Mother Maude asked him what happened when he was eight, and he said, “Sleeping Beauty.” His parents strictly forbade him from seeing these movies, but one day at school, the teacher showed the class this one. Sparse described to us how he had sat with the rest of the third grade in the dim classroom that smelled of chalk and forgot all about his parents’ objections and raptly watched the images flashing on the TV screen. Sleeping Beauty, he explained, was no ordinary cartoon: the pageantry, the opulent scenes flush with vibrant, heart-pumping color. “Later I’d learn Disney had insisted on the filmmakers using individually hand-inked cells for each shot and filmed the picture in Technirama widescreen.”

  Sparse could have continued talking about the movie, but Mother Maude jumped in and asked him to get back to his relationship with his parents and how this movie interfered with his development. “Well,” Sparse said. “All I could think about after seeing the movie was the kissing scene.” He was referring to the moment in the movie when Prince Phillip, having vanquished Maleficent, storms the castle and climbs the tower steps to the sleeping Aurora, the moment when he touches his lips to hers, breaking the curse. “Must have been no more than a second, that kiss. A half second maybe.” For Sparse, that’s all it took to set his imagination on fire. The rest of the day—during lunchtime and math and social studies—the act of kissing occupied his thoughts: what it must feel like, taste like, to have another’s wet mouth pressed against your own. “Even then I knew the kind of mouth I wanted, but I didn’t dwell on that part.” The weekend came along, and he went to the park to play while his parents slept in. Because they were military, they had moved around several times in Sparse’s childhood. He didn’t know the boys in his neighborhood all that well; this was a suburb of Little Rock, and most of the other children were white and regarded Sparse with contempt and suspicion. So when he found one of them in the park, alone and bored, Sparse suggested a game they could play. “We didn’t know each other, so it was easy for me to just try something with him, something that had been tumbling around in my head since seeing the movie.” The way he told it, he was reclined on a seesaw, lying stock-still, and the other boy pretended to be the prince and tried different things to wake Sparse up. That morning, a jogger passed by at the exact wrong moment. She was a friend of the other boy’s mom and shrieked when she recognized him leaning over a black boy, kissing him on the lips. She broke them up, snatching the white boy by the arm and dragging him home with her. It didn’t take long for the news to travel back to Sparse’s parents, who were horrified, but not, Sparse told us, all that surprised. “I think I just confirmed what they had been suspecting for some time.” First, they went through their church in Little Rock to send him to a program in Memphis. “I did their workbooks and talked to people and still felt the same—nothing changed.” A few years later, when he was a little older, they sent him to a rehabilitation clinic in Florida for an eating disorder. “There I got the name Sparse from a white girl who threw up her meals.” Mother Maude asked him why she named him that, and he said, “Because no matter how much I eat I still look barely there, she told me. Sparsely drawn.” He choked up a little when he talked about the girl and his name. All his bravado and sassiness had been, in the telling of his story, peeled away. Sitting nearby, Rumil leaned over to touch Sparse’s hand, and then several things happened at once. Mother Maude stood. Rick and Larry paused in their sandwich making. And Sparse, very gently, nudged Rumil’s hand away. Only then did the rest of us understa
nd the error.

  Rumil understood most of all. “I didn’t mean—” But then he stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he told us finally. Mother Maude said, “I know you are,” and gestured for him to rise. Rick and Larry had already stepped outside and were waiting for him to follow them. After Rumil had left us, Mother Maude asked Sparse if there was anything else he wanted to add. Sparse thought about it, and said, “Last year we moved to Biloxi, and when I turned sixteen, Mama said I was big enough to make up my own mind about my future. I could choose to come to this camp, or I could choose to hit the road and never see them again.” He said this matter-of-factly, not stifling back tears as he had before, and Mother Maude wanted to know if he thought he made the right choice. Sparse laughed, not with happiness but with a kind of bitter resignation, the same sort of laugh we’d heard earlier from Dale. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t guess I had much of one.”

  —

  Rumil stayed in the Sweat Shack through dinner and on into evening while we journaled outside at the picnic tables. We scribbled down our testimonies, the wheres and hows of our lives. I was jealous that Rumil and Christopher already knew what to describe, had already confessed so much already with Mother Maude. My problem was knowing where to begin. I started copying out my mother’s stories of the Neck, but then I remembered Mother Maude’s version, so I wrote what she’d told me when we were alone. But that didn’t seem right, either. Frustrated, I sat back on the bench and rubbed my eye sockets. Christopher and Sparse were writing so furiously that I suspected they were only pretending, scratching incoherent marks into the lines of their pages. Dale appeared to be drawing, making dramatic swooping gestures on his page.

  The Sweat Shack loomed in the distance. A little bump of a building. Suzette and I had seen the old Invasion of the Body Snatchers in Greenwood once, and I had this idea that there was something supernatural about the shack. We’d crawl in, and alien vines would swarm us, cover our bodies, suck out our nutrients, and refashion another version of us. I imagined, as we were peacefully writing in our notebooks, aglow with torchlight, that Rumil was being repurposed. He’d come back without any emotion, like in that movie—but no, not without any emotion, that’s not quite right. He’d come back with all the right emotions. I was troubling through these possibilities when Dale spoke, causing me to jump. “I have a grandmother,” he said, and the oddness of this declaration overshadowed my reaction. Sparse put his pen down and looked at him. “Big fucking deal—we all got grandmas.” We weren’t supposed to talk during our journaling, but no one was around to supervise us. Mother Maude and Father Drake were across the lake holed up in the RV. Rick and Larry had taken the truck into town for more supplies.