by Nick White
“No,” Dale said. “I mean I got a grandma who lives in Orlando, close to Disney World.”
Sparse cocked his head. “You been?”
Dale told him how he’d been a couple of times. His description sounded more like science fiction than any movie I’d ever seen. Elevators that dropped thirteen flights. Mechanical bears that sang country music. A humongous spaceship that took you back in time to the dawn of civilization.
“My parents wouldn’t take me there if you paid them,” Sparse said. “But sounds like you got to do everything.”
Dale smiled, the grin contorting his face as he remembered something. “Oh, yeah. We did everything all day long.”
Sparse ruined it, however, with a non sequitur. “Let me ask you, Dale,” he said. “Now that we are friends. Which one would you rather fuck—Rick or Larry?” Dale’s smile vanished. “Now I,” Sparse continued, “am partial to a man with a bandanna, but then Rick has those lips.” He puckered at Dale, and Dale pushed away from the table. He relocated to the other one and returned to his notebook, doodling and sketching, as if he’d never opened his mouth. Sparse kept going. “But maybe, Dale, you like a man with a sad story, maybe you’ve seen Rick’s wrists and that does it for you.” Christopher threw his notebook at Sparse, and Sparse easily swatted it away. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Christopher said. Earlier that morning, during our microlesson with Rick and Larry, the counselors had compared our brains to computers, and now I spoke up and used their exact terminology against Sparse. “Garbage in, garbage out—didn’t you hear what they said? Don’t you listen?” Ignoring me, Christopher slid out of the picnic table and retrieved his book, but he didn’t return to our table. Instead, he sat with Dale.
Sparse went back to his own notebook, bearing down so hard on the page that the tip of his pen broke open, splattering ink everywhere. “Fuck,” he said, sighing, slamming the book closed. The ink bled on the table, on the bench, on his T-shirt and khakis. Dark blue smudges, the color of nighttime. For a few minutes, Sparse remained quiet. Then he reopened his notebook and started to read. Reading his story to himself over and over, I hoped, getting it down just right, so he wouldn’t be doomed to repeat it.
—
Before dinner on the next day, Rick and Larry took us to the abandoned house. The rooms were arranged one after the other like train cars. The first room was crammed with furniture: two tables, chairs, a wooden cabinet that Larry told us was an old-timey icebox. From the ceiling dangled sticky paper to catch flies. The counselors wouldn’t let us tarry. They took us on to the second room, which was more of the same, along with a headboard turned sideways and leaning against the wall. It wasn’t until we were in the back room that I remembered this house had been the site of my mother’s childhood. The realization hit me when I noticed these little dolls, caked in dirt and missing limbs and clothing, stashed in the corner. “Those,” I said, and Christopher heard me. “I wouldn’t touch them,” he told me. “I have a feeling they might be a trap.” Ever since Rumil got sent to the Sweat Shack for touching Sparse, we had been on guard for other actions unbecoming to boys that might get us sent away. Like Sparse, Rumil had returned not long after we had settled down for bed in our bunks. This time nobody had asked him how it was. Half of us already knew, and the other half, Christopher and I, were hoping we didn’t have to find out.
In the back room of the house, we found various used gym equipment. Dumbbells and a weight bench and plastic mats like the kind I used to nap on in kindergarten. Rick and Larry provided us with a list of activities—arm curls, bench presses, crunches, squats—to be accomplished before bed. The exercise, they informed us, would awaken our muscles and allow our bodies to produce more testosterone. Christopher and I halfheartedly bench-pressed, spotting for each other even though we only used the bar. Rumil was a natural with the dumbbells, using the fifteen-pound weights in lifts designed to strengthen his biceps and triceps. Sparse went through an ab workout on one of the mats, and Dale, the only one of us at home in this makeshift gym, took on squats. After some time had passed, Rick and Larry made us move on to something else. Our bodies had begun to heal from the sores, but the twisting and turning had torn open some of them. A sour smell developed in the room, the commingling of our body funk that seemed to bother only Rick. He wore his shirt over his nose until our stink became too much for him and he rushed outside to puke. Larry told us to rotate to different activities in five minutes and then left us to see about the other counselor.
At testimonials that day, Rumil had confessed to having sex with another boy at his school, a senior who was the varsity quarterback. Rumil’s sport was soccer, and the team had recruited him in ninth grade because they needed a kicker. A janitor had caught them in the locker room, and the parents of the quarterback had paid Rumil’s parents to send him to a private school in another town. He gave the impression in testimonial that this was the end of it, but now in the weight room with the counselors gone he became more candid. “My parents, his parents—they thought separating us would work,” he said. He had moved to the weight bench and was using dumbbells to do butterflies. “But he couldn’t stay away.” According to Rumil, the quarterback would drive over to Rumil’s house while his parents were still at work. “We ordered dirty movies on the satellite, and I thought my parents wouldn’t mind about it because it was man-and-woman porn, but watching it got us all started again.” He grunted as he brought the weights together above his chest. He described the things he and the quarterback would do to each other, and the rest of us, one by one, stopped our exercises and listened. Dale had a queasy look on his face, as if he were about to run out of the room to barf as Rick had. Very politely, he asked Rumil if he would please stop talking.
Rumil dropped the weights to the floor, making a loud racket. “You want to come spot me then?” Dale agreed, and we did the rest of our exercises in silence.
Later that night, I overheard the rest of Rumil’s story. We were in our bunks, and I think Christopher and Dale were already asleep. Rumil was whispering to Sparse, who lay in the bunk above him, the part of his story when his parents confronted him about the movies he’d rented. “I knew they would show up on the bill, I knew it,” he said. “But I just didn’t care.” He then told Sparse that he was adopted. “They got me from the Philippines, so I know what they think.”
“What they think?”
Rumil made these choking noises, the sound people make when they’re letting themselves cry and not worrying about how it makes their face look. “They think, they think I’m defective. They wished they’d been given somebody else.”
I leaned up from my pillow. “They tell you that?” I whisper-shouted across to his bunk.
“Don’t have to—I ain’t stupid.”
They stopped talking, and I couldn’t help but feel excluded. I began to hate them, these boys—not as a group but individually and in different moments. First, I hated Sparse. I hated him because Rumil had chosen him to confide in. I wasn’t sure why. He looked sickly. A waif. But he was funny, and his personality gave him points, perhaps. Even his eating disorder made him, somehow, seem trendy. He lorded his thinness around as if it were something to be proud of, a condition that took discipline. During one of our testimonials, he claimed that food became a problem after he came back from his treatment in Memphis. “Everybody was telling me what I should do, how I should feel, and all I had control over was the food I put into my mouth.”
In the weight room one day, Christopher admitted that he wished he could learn to control himself like Sparse had. We were alone again, so Sparse took the liberty of pinching one of Christopher’s pudgy pecs. “Cindy Crawford says nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” he said. “Something to consider, baby.” When Rumil laughed at Sparse’s joke, my hatred for Sparse shifted to him. Sparse glanced at me suddenly. “Cheer up,” he said. “You starting to look as sad as old Dale did his first day.” Dale paused
from his set of push-ups to tell us all to go to hell.
“Too late,” Sparse said.
At our next testimonial, late into our first week at camp, I told them about my own personal history of sin—my troubled relationship with my father, how he had caught me in the church. I wanted to shock them, especially Rumil and Sparse, so I was very specific about my abominable behavior, mentioning the candle and the dirty thoughts that’d been running through my head at the time. Christopher seemed the most shocked. “How far was it?” he asked, and I told them. Outside, Rick and Larry were trimming around the cabins with gas-powered weed eaters. The smell of freshly cut grass seeped in, making my eyes water.
“He’s lying,” Christopher said. “He’s just trying to be cute.”
I made a show of clenching and unclenching my fists. I wanted to do to his pudgy face exactly what I’d done to Dale’s. My hate swirled, but I remained seated, gripping the bottom of my chair, holding myself in place.
“Nothing cute,” I said. “Nothing cute about it.”
Sparse had a question for me. “What did you say your father calls you?” I told him my nickname, and he said, “No, you don’t look like a Rooster.” He paused, possibly considering his next words very carefully. “You shouldn’t let people call you something you’re not.”
“But I want to be,” I said. “I want to be Rooster—I will be Rooster.”
The other boys remained silent, uncomfortably so. It occurred to me that they weren’t reacting to what I said but to how I said it, to the desperation in my voice.
But Mother Maude was pleased with my fervor. “Amen,” she said. “Now that is a testimony.”
—
The same routine continued the next week: microlessons with Rick and Larry in the morning, testimonials with Mother Maude in the afternoon, and evenings spent writing in our sin diaries or doing exercises in the gym at the abandoned house. Our bodies were healing up and getting stronger. Christopher had changed the most, losing his baby face. His shorts were so loose Rick had to give him a cord to tie through the belt loops to hold them up. At testimonials, we plunged deeper into our histories. Mother Maude was adamant that all of us were products of our ancestors’ misdeeds. I led the way, recounting for them what Mother Maude had told me, and she seemed pleased at my memory. I changed it just enough so that the other campers wouldn’t be able to connect me with her, but the gist of it was the same: my whorish grandmother, my murderous grandfather. When the other boys claimed ignorance of their family history, Mother Maude supplied them with questionnaires their parents had filled out, charting their darkest deeds for us to read and contemplate. My father’s was fairly uninteresting. Especially when compared to what I knew of my mother’s side of the family. He spoke of his drinking in high school, various indiscretions with girls. Nothing much to account for. “Ah,” Mother Maude said, after I told her I thought my mother’s side was the more sinful. “Look again. What does he say about his parents?” I flipped through the pages and saw what she’d meant. It was a yes or no question about divorce. He’d circled yes. His parents had not stayed together, and divorce, Mother Maude said, was like a tumor in the family tree, one that could, in the right circumstances, turn malignant for later generations. “So my life,” I said, “is like a perfect storm of sin.” She told me that was exactly right.
But other campers’ families were harder to trace. Sparse’s family didn’t have any divorce, but his grandfather had suffered, the questionnaire said, from “emotional disturbances” that caused him to beat his wife and children. Christopher had an aunt who’d been in and out of rehab for an addiction to painkillers. Rumil, however, didn’t know much about his blood relatives beyond the country they lived in. “But there’s the clue,” Mother Maude told him. “Is the Philippines a Christian country? Don’t they worship Allah and Muhammad?” Rumil said he didn’t know, but apparently his parents did. In the questionnaire, they’d listed all the possible reasons a Filipino boy would end up a homosexual.
The only person who didn’t contribute to testimonials was Dale. While the rest of us talked about ourselves and our families, Dale stayed mum. Midway through the second week, Mother Maude had begun to devote much of her attention to drawing him out. We’d spend most of the afternoon in tense silence as Mother Maude waited, never losing her cool, for Dale to respond to one of her questions. What led you here? Why do you think you are afflicted? Each time Dale responded the same. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t say.” One day she made him bring his notebook to the Chapel Cabin and read from it. Dale told her that was impossible, and she said, in her musical voice, “Why, Dale, I know you can read.” But it wasn’t that, and he opened his book to show her. He’d not been writing but drawing. The sketch was of a young woman with a prominent nose and sad eyes. Her hair was short, asymmetrical. “Is that supposed to be your sister?” she asked him, and Dale shrugged.
Frustrated, Sparse spoke up next. “He told me he had people in Orlando.”
Dale shut his notepad and clutched it tightly in his hand. The only thing that kept him from throwing it at Sparse, I guessed, was his not wanting to spend a night in the Sweat Shack.
Mother Maude seized on this tidbit of information. “Is that where Laura lives now?”
“Who’s Laura?” Christopher asked. “He says he has a grandma in Florida.”
Mother Maude asked Dale if he would let her see his notebook. He scrutinized us, all gathered around him, and then he glanced over to Rick and Larry, who were watching this interaction with great interest. Shaking his head, he handed the book over. Mother Maude thanked him and began to unfold the pages, inspecting them, before finding one she liked. “This here,” she said, holding the book up so we could see for ourselves. “This here is his sister, Laura.” The sketch was done with pen, but there was shading on the cheeks and jawline. Dale was skilled.
Mother Maude asked him if he wanted to tell us more about Laura, but when he didn’t say anything, she took it upon herself to give us his story. “Dale’s family probably lives the closest to camp—what is it? Twenty miles away?” Dale had gone very still, but if his nonresponsiveness bothered Mother Maude, she didn’t let on. “They have a big horse farm. Well, when Dale was a boy, he caught his sister—” Dale jumped up, as he had on the first night. Rick and Larry were quick. They got on either side of him and, using gentle force, pushed him back down to his seat. They remained beside him while Mother Maude finished the story. “He found them in the hammock. His sister with another girl. Being innocent, being not yet eight, he didn’t know what he was looking at, so he went to ask his mother about it. He tattled on his sister, but he didn’t mean to, I am sure, and maybe he feels some guilt over it.” Here she looked at Dale when she spoke. “But he shouldn’t. No, sir. What he did was alert his parents to the rot.” As Mother Maude continued, Dale got to crying again. Mother Maude told us how his sister had run away from home when her parents tried to get her help, how she spent the rest of her teenage years with a liberal grandmother and was now working at Disney. “Did he tell y’all what his sister does at Disney? She cleans the toilets at the most magical place on earth. Can you imagine?” We couldn’t. “His parents were always worried about him, fearful her sodomy had infected him. So when his mother came in on him—”
“I was jerking off!” he said. “That’s all! For fuck’s sake, I told Mama I was thinking about a woman, too! And I was!”
Mother Maude was shaking her head. She lifted her hand, giving a signal to Rick and Larry, who began to usher Dale out. As with the first night by the lake, he fought. He was on the floor, grasping at our chairs, trying to untangle himself from their grasp. We rushed out of the way. Mother Maude appeared to be the only calm one. “Like I told you, my lamb. We will drag you kicking and screaming to salvation if need be.” And that’s exactly what Rick and Larry had to do to get him out of the room.
—
On Mother Mau
de’s last night, she took us back to Lake John.
A storm cloud had blown up earlier in the day. One that promised rain and made the dark come sooner. She didn’t have a mirror with her. “Tonight,” she said, “I will be the mirror.” She climbed atop a small embankment overlooking the water. The torches were not lined up in a circle as before but as two lines running parallel from the water. A kind of landing strip. Looking at us, she spoke our names. “I see Christopher, I see Rumil. I see Robert, I see Will.” With a heavy voice, she added, “And I see Dale, sweet Dale.” He stood beside me, silent. In the days after his second night in the Sweat Shack, he had only gone further into himself. He didn’t talk at testimonials. He only went through the motions during our exercises. And, what’s more, he no longer drew in his notebook. After Mother Maude said our names, she motioned for us to move closer. “You boys have been honest with me,” she told us. “As honest as you have probably been with anyone else in your lives. And now I want to be honest with you.” She ran her hands through her hair and pulled her wig off. Her head was as bare as a stone. “You see, when I was in New York,” she told us, “and surrounded by all that death, it affected me more than I knew.” She had stunned us to full attention. “It started to fall out not long after Johnny died. A few strands here, a clump there. Doctors called it alopecia—sounds like a foreign country to me, sounds like someplace Rumil’s people would be from.” She laughed but only a little. “But I know it to be the unmistakable hand of God.” No amens from Rick and Larry tonight; they stood by the water, heads bowed.
