How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  —

  Christopher came back later that night.

  We had been in the Sleeping Cabin, quietly dozing, or so I thought, when he charged in. To my surprise, the other boys began talking to him as if they had been waiting up for his return. Christopher said the bugs were the worst of it. “Creepy-crawling all around me.” Rumil asked him how the heat affected him, and Christopher said it was not bad in there at first, almost cool, but when we started the fire, he thought he was going to cook like a turkey. “I could smell myself roasting,” he said. “And that stunk, but nothing compared to the funk in here.” He was right. The Sleeping Cabin smelled worse than the inside of a gym bag. Christopher said he spent most of his time in the dark thinking. Rumil laughed, and said, “What about?” and Christopher told us he was picturing ways to kill Father Drake. “First, I thought about what would happen if I ran him over with a lawnmower,” and Rumil said that was too messy. “I know, I know, so then I thought about drowning the bastard in the lake—all of us ganging up on him and forcing his head under.” Sparse said that Christopher didn’t sound like himself. “And that,” Sparse added, “is a good thing.” Christopher said, “I finally thought about poison—something neat and efficient.”

  Christopher’s list of ways to do in Father Drake sparked a lively debate among the boys. While they were plotting murder, I seethed. I was about to speak up, tell them to hush, when Dale, who’d also been quiet during the conversation, jumped in to share his two cents. “What we need is a plan.”

  Sparse said, “You mean make it look like an accident?”

  “No, I mean Orlando.”

  Christopher and Rumil spoke at the same time. “Orlando?”

  Dale reminded them about his grandmother in Florida. She was a liberal, he added. That’s where his sister went when their parents threatened to send her away. “They don’t know I’m here. They’d help us. Take us in.”

  Sparse was unconvinced: “And how, pray,” he asked, “do you expect us to get to Florida?”

  Now Dale was laughing—that same bitter chuckle he’d had during testimonials. “I doubt we could steal the keys. But my dad taught me how to work on cars. Small engines mostly, and it ain’t nothing to hot-wire something.” He told them they could all live there until they turned eighteen and were legal. He told them about Disney World, and how much they would like it.

  I stayed very still in my bed, my silence slowly making me feel uncomfortable. Like an intruder. I feigned sleep, but they knew that I was wide awake. Though nobody said it, I could feel them all coming to the same silent conclusion: That if they escaped, I wouldn’t be going with them.

  Christopher sounded like himself again when he asked, “But what will we do in Florida?”

  “Whatever we want,” Dale said. “Every day. All day long.”

  —

  Days blended together in a haze of activities designed to toughen us up. Father Drake took us on long hikes through the Neck, forcing us to use our senses of direction (or lack thereof) to find our way back to camp. He joked about our finding the lost whorehouse during our excursions. “We find those women,” he said, “and I might let them teach y’all a thing or two.” We played more Smear the Queer. Now, once I got the ball the boys would let me have it, tackling me hard, but not hard enough for me to drop it and force one of them to become the target. “Get up,” Father Drake yelled. “You ain’t done yet!” And he was right; I wasn’t. I kept running back and forth from the Sweat Shack to the abandoned house until my legs were numb, until the tackles felt more like hugs.

  My time for the Sweat Shack came during one of those rounds of Smear the Queer. Sparse had the football, and everybody else was running him down. Dale had gotten faster, and in a burst of speed, he clipped Sparse with the side of his arm. Sparse flipped, the football knocked out of his hand. I scooped up the ball and pivoted on my right foot, about to make a run for the abandoned house, but Rumil was waiting for me. His shoulder hit me in the ribs, and I was down, flat on my back. I tried to get back up but was too dizzy, so I lay back down in the cool grass. The ball had hit the ground beside me, and nobody wanted to touch it. Clearly, Christopher, Rumil, and Sparse wanted me to get my hands on the ball and keep going. A sore on the back of my neck had been ripped back open during the fall, and I felt the warm blood leaking down my shirt onto the grass. Father Drake was yelling something about taking too long for a break, and I could hear him approaching. I should have gotten up, I told myself to get up, but my body was unwilling. Above me, Rumil stood wiping his grimy face with his equally grimy shirt, showing me a flash of his belly. A tuft of hair was gathered below his navel then trailed down below the waistband of his khakis.

  Rumil noticed my looking and covered himself. “Just get up,” he said, but before I could, Father Drake was on me, shouting that he had caught me. “Yes, sir!” he was saying. “I saw you. I saw it myself, I did, I did.” He grabbed me by the arm and hoisted me to my feet, keeping his fingers hooked in the fat of my neck as he pulled me along toward the Sweat Shack. Behind us, Rick and Larry were telling the other boys to hustle, and the game was restarted in my absence. I tried to justify my staring. I had looked, that was true, but not sexually. At least I didn’t think so. But maybe that’s just what sinners say to justify their abominations to an angry God. Along the way, Father Drake mumbled under his breath, more to himself, it seemed, than to me. “Yes, I saw him looking,” he said. “Just like Johnny. Looking like Johnny. Looking just like Johnny.”

  We rounded the Sweat Shack and he pushed me to the ground and pinned my head against the wall. His hand pressed into my chest like he intended to crack my breastbone in two. He threw off his cap and told me to look him in the eyes. I did. “You hear me now,” he said, almost out of breath. “Don’t go thinking you’re special. Nope. Johnny was just like you. So well-meaning, but deep down he was a snake in the grass always waiting to strike—when Maudie wasn’t around, when it was just us. He’d come for me. And when she was around, he’d look at me just like you was looking at that Oriental boy, waiting, biding his time.” Father Drake wheezed as he spoke, his breath hitting me in hot, wet waves of air. He scooted closer and pressed a knee between my crotch, my poor wrecked crotch, causing me to cry out, but he covered my mouth with his hand to blunt the noise. Little sores were dotted along his forehead, bird tracks on sand. He moved his hand from my mouth to my throat, pulling my face into his. I had no time to brace for it, his wide mouth on mine, a moist sponge pressing onto my lips. I screamed, but that only made it worse. My mouth opened, and I took more of him inside me—his tongue, his teeth. When I gagged, he pulled away and fell down beside me as if he’d been injured. “Be still,” he managed to say, as he propped himself up against the Sweat Shack. “Don’t move.” And I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because I had passed out.

  —

  When I came to, we were still behind the Sweat Shack, the shouts and grunts of boys knocking the hell out of one another ringing through the air. Father Drake had his hat back on, shielding most of his face. There was a new dampness between my legs. I had peed myself, which I’d not done since I was a young boy. “You trying to stall, Rooster?” he asked, more curious than angry. I wondered if I’d dreamed it. My mind, my sick and troubled mind, conjuring the whole scenario. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I went out or something.” I was thankful that my khaki shorts were so soiled with mud and soot that the piss stain didn’t show up as much. I stood and followed him to the little door of the Sweat Shack. Unlike Christopher, I went in headfirst, and once I’d crawled inside, Father Drake shut me in.

  My eyes remained closed until I felt the prickle of something wriggle across my hand. They flashed open to a darkness deeper than black, like a great yawning void. Not a speck of light shone through the roof, and yet the temperature kept rising as the afternoon persisted. Soon, I dripped, my sweat pooling around my belly. In the heat, my wounds seemed to expand and ooze. I im
agined poison, my body expelling all those toxins I’d absorbed in Lake John. I turned on my back, and more critters scuttled by my ears. I held out my hand in front of my face: nothing. The hours lingered. I forced myself to be as still as possible. Never itching my sores. Never adjusting my pants. Never flicking away whatever insect twitched on my skin. My body retreated from me, and I felt away. Asleep, awake—I didn’t know anymore. Suzette came to mind. I’d not seen her in two years, not since she had gone away. I conjured a life for her in Memphis. The one I thought she was living this very instant. She has gone with friends to see a matinee, I Want to Live! or Born Yesterday, and when the movie’s over, she tells her friends good-bye, all of them beautiful and eccentric like she is, and she goes for a walk along the river. She’s cut her hair short, above the ears, and she wears a jaunty dark hat and a peacoat, a subtle allusion to Judy Garland’s later years. Once she’s by the water, she thinks. In particular, about the day she threw that strange boy out of the restaurant. She wonders where he is and imagines a thousand possibilities, all of them ungenerous, so she tries again, and this time she dreams him into a school like hers. She dreams him with people who are funny and kind. She dreams him into a happy life, and then she flings this dream into the Mississippi River, hoping it floats on down to him, wherever he is, and then she goes home.

  —

  Rick came for me sometime after midnight. He took me to the picnic tables and let me splash myself off with the water in the metal basin. He asked if I was hungry, and I shook my head. “Just tired,” I told him, and he said everybody was tired. “But this is the last week—I bet you’re excited to get back home.” His yellow shirt and khakis were almost as dirty as mine, and his beard had grown wild and unkempt. I remembered what Sparse had said about his wrists and looked. He made no effort to hide them from me when he noticed me staring at them. Each one had a silver scar embedded lengthwise in the flesh. We stood there, and he waited for me to figure out what I wanted to ask him. “What are you gonna write about us?” I said, and he turned and dunked his hands in the basin and splashed them around. “I thought I knew,” he said. “But now I don’t know. I see you boys trying so hard, and—” He stopped just short of saying something he would possibly regret. His doubt frightened me, and I listed off all the things I could tell him to give him heart. “I feel it working,” I said, even though I knew I was lying, and what’s more, he probably knew it, too. “I feel myself changing.” I laughed. “I doubt my daddy will even know who I am.” He flicked the wet from his hands, and he again wanted to know if I was hungry, and I told him that he had already asked me that. “Just want to be sure,” he said, and then he walked me to the steps of the Sleeping Cabin.

  I didn’t see Dale standing in the dark doorway of the Sleeping Cabin until Rick had gone back to the tent he shared with Larry. He walked out and sat on the bottom step, resting his oversize head against the railing. From a distance, a rumbling. The Illinois Central shuttling through West, its heavy rattle echoing off the Big Black River, a sound just faraway enough to be lonesome. “I’ve heard that train at the start of each week, and I guess that’s my last one.” He was barefoot and shoved one of his toes into the dirt at the bottom of the stairs. “I thought they would have kept you longer.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Were you scared?”

  I told him how I thought I might have fallen asleep, and I had a nice dream.

  Dale shook his head. “Don’t tell the others that. Sparse bet Rumil you’d come back saying how you going in there was for your own good.”

  “They seem to have me all figured out.”

  Dale pulled his toes out of the dirt and stood. “While you were gone, we did some talking.” He swallowed then continued. “We don’t have long before our parents get here.” I figured it up in my head: Today was Wednesday, and that meant three more days until I saw my father again. “We decided we ain’t sticking around for the festivities.” He took a step toward me, and in one quick motion, he had my shirt balled up in his fist. “Now they didn’t want me to tell you this, but I’m telling because I think somewhere in there is a boy who has his right mind, who knows this place is fucked up.” I told him that if he didn’t let me go I would scream and wake up Rick and Larry. “They’ll put you back in the Sweat Shack, Dale.” He released me then smiled. “They can do what they want to me. That’s the big joke, ain’t it? I’m not gay. My sister is, and my parents think I am prone to it because of her, because my mama caught me jerking it in my bedroom.”

  “Sorry, Dale, but I’m tired.” I stepped around him, but he moved in front of me, blocking my way inside the Sleeping Cabin.

  “You don’t have to stay here,” he said. “We’re going to slip out tomorrow night.” He proceeded to tell me the plan as if I might agree to tag along if I understood the feasibility of it. “At night,” he told me, “when everybody is sleeping, I go walking around the camp exploring.” He talked fast, becoming more animated than I’d ever seen him. During his walks at night, he told me, he ventured to the other side of the lake where Mother Maude and Father Drake slept in the RV. “Only she sleeps in there—he passes out in a tent nearby.” He noticed one night earlier this week that there were bags of fireworks left outside, the ones they were planning to use for the big finale on our last night at the camp. “Roman candles, sparklers, bottle rockets. Everything you can imagine.” The plan hadn’t come to him yet, but he stole some firecrackers. “I hid them here.” He went under the crawl space of the stairs and pulled out a wad of firecrackers. “I got matches, too.” I told him that I didn’t understand what fireworks had to do with our getting away. “A distraction, fool,” he said. He believed that in the cover of night they could sneak over to the other side of the lake and set off the firecrackers. “Mother Maude will come running outside to see what the fuss is about, and then we’ll all storm into the RV. I’ll connect some wires, and we’ll be on the road and in Alabama by sunrise. And at Disney by nightfall.”

  I looked at him. “Dale,” I said, careful not to anger or agitate him any more than he already was. “Then what? Your grandma can’t take in five teenage boys. Our parents wouldn’t let us go. They—”

  “They’ve already let us go.” He had the tone of a quarterback giving his team a pep talk at halftime. “And it ain’t about what happens after, neither. It’s about what we do now.” He seemed to be holding back tears, and I found it hard to look him in the face. “The point is that they can’t do this to us, and you don’t have to come, but I think you should. I think you want to.”

  I told him it was a pretty good idea. “But I’ve made a deal to see this through. I want to see this through.”

  I tried to move around him again, but he put a hand on my shoulder, more gently than before. “But you’ll let us go? Let us do what we’re going to do?”

  I said, “Of course,” and he let me pass.

  —

  An hour later, when I was sure everyone was sound asleep, including Dale, I slipped out of the Sleeping Cabin. My decision to tell on them was an easy one. I had made several bad choices, I knew, that had led me to camp. If I stood by and let them go through with this cockamamie plan, I would have made another one. I would have effectively failed the summer. I understood this decision was perhaps my last chance to prove, once and for all, my commitment to the process. I darted through the clearing, zigzagging around the Sweat Shack and through the woods. My eyes were used to the dark, and I sprinted through the trees unafraid. I veered right at Lake John and followed the edge of it around to the other side. The RV was parked on a little patch of ryegrass. Closer to the water, Father Drake’s tent was pitched beside a grave.

  Now that I was there, I didn’t know how to proceed. I tiptoed around an extinguished campfire and examined the tent. It was one of the fancier ones, tall and long, with a zipper on the inside that cocooned Father Drake from the elements. Nowhere to knock, obviously, and this fact puzzled me
. I considered going to Mother Maude’s RV and waking her, but it was Father Drake’s week, and I didn’t want to break the rules. He would act fast. As if I might find a door on the other side, I walked around the tent. I sat down beside the gravestone of the uncle I never knew. It provided nice support for my back, and I stayed like this, dozing, until I heard movement from inside the tent. The plastic house shook, and then the front unzipped. Out walked Father Drake. He strolled up to the lake to piss, and when he came back, he was about to reenter the tent when he paused. “Who’s there?” he said, and I told him. He came around to the foot of the grave. “You,” he said, and before I could explain, he rushed me.

  He clutched a wad of my hair and pulled me toward the tent and pushed me inside. “I knew you would come,” he said. “I knew you would come to me one night. You are doing something right out of Johnny’s playbook, coming to me.” And then his hands were ripping at the holes in my shirt, trying to tear it off. “Stop!” I said, and slapped him away. I tried to tell him that I needed to speak with him about something important, but he wouldn’t listen. I scrambled away and crawled back out into the night, but he got me by the ankles before I could stand and dragged me back in. Inside the tent were several books and wads of trash. I threw everything I could grab at him, but he laughed when anything hit him. We wrestled like Jacob and the angel. Spending half the day in the Sweat Shack had worn me out, and I didn’t have much fight in me to begin with. Soon he was on top of me. His legs had my arms pinned by my waist. With one hand, he covered my mouth; with the other, he reached under the folds of his rumpled sleeping bag and found a buck knife still sheathed in a leather case. “When Johnny’d come to me, I’d be weak and give in. And he held it over my head, didn’t he?” He put his forehead right up to mine and whisper-screamed, “Didn’t he?” Keeping one hand gripped over my face, he worried the knife out of its case with the other, using his thumb to unbutton the leather strap from the handle, then he flung the full sheath off in one quick swipe. The blade had been blackened on purpose to prevent rust. “Oh, God,” Father Drake was saying. “He would hang it over my head—threaten to tell Maudie if I didn’t give him more, and then when he finally did tell her, he was all crazy and it didn’t matter.” He removed his hand from my mouth and waved the knife over my face. When he saw me the first day as I came walking up to the RV with Mother Maude, he thought he was seeing a ghost, he said. “But you’re real and twice as crafty as ole Johnny ever was.” He put the blunt side of the blade up to my face. “I could cut your face off, I could make you different, then you’d not mess with me.” He raised the knife and then brought it down, slicing through the plastic flooring of the tent an inch or so from my face.