How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  He wept into my neck, and while he went silent, I told him how I didn’t want to be like Johnny. He became very still. “We have to stop them,” I said. “They have to stay, so they can become better.” His head leaned up, and he stared at something on my face and didn’t seem to hear me. “We’re almost finished with camp,” I said. “We’ve come too far.” His fingers rubbed the wet of his tears from my face. “What are you talking about?” he said, and I tried again, this time talking more slowly, telling him exactly what Dale had told me, their whole plan for escape to Orlando. But he wouldn’t listen. He tried kissing me but missed my face when I squiggled out of his arms and rolled over. Now Father Drake was moving fast and erratic. He stood and unbuttoned his pants. “No,” I said, and told him I was going to be sick. “This is what you want,” he said. “This is exactly what you came for,” and his penis flopped out, half-hard and shiny, the base of it ringed in sores from the lake. He took a step toward me, and I gagged, the bile rising to my lips. I had not eaten much today, so only a little vomit came out, but enough to shock Father Drake back to his senses. He kicked my shoulder. “Outside,” he said. “This is where I sleep.” I rolled out and dry heaved for several minutes.

  “You better hope the camp is working,” Father Drake said from inside the tent, “because you’d make one lousy faggot.”

  “I’m telling the truth,” I said. “About Dale and them.”

  “Get on back to your cabin.”

  I remembered the proof. “Firecrackers,” I said. “Dale put them under the stairs—if you don’t believe me, go and look.” I felt as if I were trying to save something that nobody cared about saving. I approached his tent. “We were both tested tonight,” I told him. “We were both tested and didn’t neither one of us fail. You didn’t do anything,” I knew I was stepping into a lie, but I was desperate. “You didn’t do a thing to be ashamed of.” He was putting his knife back in its case. “The way I see it, you got two choices, Rooster. You can go back to your cabin, or I can put you up in the Sweat Shack for a night. What’ll it be?” I nodded, and he said he suspected I meant the former. I nodded again, and he said he thought so.

  The interaction with Father Drake remained tangled up in my head as I made my way back to the Sleeping Cabin. I would need years to fully unwind it all, to understand how lucky I was to get away relatively unscathed. But I’m not trying to excuse my betrayal of the other boys or my stupidity in tattling on them despite all the evidence in the world, namely Father Drake’s ruthlessness, that doing so was a bad idea. I can’t defend it. I only want to explain, if I can, how my mind worked back then. I owed it to the camp, to my father, to God, but mostly I owed it to myself, to the man I was determined to become. I eased into the Sleeping Cabin, careful not to wake anyone. I rolled into my bottom bunk and wrapped my fetid covers around my legs. I had no sense of the danger I’d set in motion. I could only think of myself. Father Drake had offered himself to me, and I had been repulsed. In the wee hours of the morning, before I went to sleep, my last thoughts were hopeful ones: The treatment at camp had worked. It had, it had, it had.

  —

  We awoke to gunfire. Pow, pow, pow. Someone shooting a semiautomatic rifle under our feet. Pow, pow, pow. We rushed outside, barefoot and sleepy eyed. It was still early, the sun not finished with burning away the last traces of night sky. Pow, pow, pow. Rick and Larry’s tent beside the Chapel Cabin rattled and swished as the two counselors awoke to the noise and clamored outside to face the commotion. Pow, pow, pow. Father Drake sat on top of the picnic table, legs dangling off the edge. He was calmly slicing an apple with his black-bladed knife. Pow, pow, pow. The firecrackers finished, but the silence left over was worse than any racket. Rumil, Christopher, and Sparse gazed at Father Drake, at the counselors, at themselves, trying to figure out what these theatrics meant. A cloud of burned gunpowder billowed from under the stairs. Dale eyed the smoke, then Father Drake, and then his eyes, at last, landed on me. I couldn’t meet them; still, he stared at me when he told the other boys to hurry back inside and put on their shoes. But they were too late. Father Drake had moved from the picnic table to stand between the entrance of the Sleeping Cabin and us.

  “Orlando?” Father Drake chucked the apple core under the Sleeping Cabin. A piece of the fruit remained speared on the tip of his knife, which he carried in front of him like a torch. “Florida? Disney World?” He brought the knife to his mouth and sucked off the last bit of apple. He spoke with his mouth full, chewing. “Now I don’t blame you for picking Orlando as your destination. Everybody knows there’s no better place in this world for the homosexual than central Florida.” We stood in front of him like we were in a lineup and he was selecting the suspected perpetrator. He hollered a question to Larry over our heads. “What do you think of Disney World?” Larry said he didn’t know enough about the amusement park to have an opinion. Father Drake asked Rick, and Rick just shook his head. “They don’t teach y’all about amusement parks in seminary?” Father Drake laughed before either man could answer. “I told these boys,” he said, speaking to the counselors as if we weren’t around. “I told them the only way out of this camp was through me, and did they believe it?” He smiled at Dale. “Didn’t I tell you that, mermaid?”

  Dale kept his eyes on me. “Rooster,” he whispered. “Will.” Not angry but sad. The other campers played catch-up, putting it together all at once. “Dale?” Sparse rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t—”

  But Dale told them he had. “I messed up.”

  Sparse used his naked foot and kicked dirt in my direction. “You bitch.”

  Father Drake shook his knife at us to get our attention. “Yoo-hoo, boys,” he said. “I think we need to talk about the matter of punishment.” As he spoke, Dale took two steps backward toward the woods and the lake. The others looked too scared to move, and I was too exhausted from going to bed so late last night to care much about how Father Drake punished us. I wanted to crumple on the grass and nap until the afternoon. I almost thought of volunteering for the Sweat Shack. There, at least, I could sleep. “I hold no hard feelings,” he was saying. “None at all, my children. But to make it right, we need an offering.” The word “offering” pricked up my ears. A trap, I felt, was slowly closing in on us. “You see, when Rooster came to me last night and told me of your plan, I was mighty mad about it.”

  He pulled me over and made me stand beside him. “It seems our Rooster is more of a rat.” He put his arm around me. With the other hand, he pointed the knife at them and talked faster. “Yes, I was going to make you bastards guzzle down gallons of Lake John so it could do to your insides what it has done to your outsides.” He squeezed my shoulder. “I was going to put you all in the Sweat Shack, one at a time on an hourly rotation. When I got through with you, your parents wouldn’t have much to take home this Sunday.” Rumil and Christopher and Sparse listened intently, their mouths a little open, almost as if Father Drake were putting them in a trance. “But then I got to thinking about the ingenuity to think up such a plan and the willingness to take action. I got to thinking that real men, if that’s what you’re to be, must have guts.” He paused. “Real men don’t go tattling.” At nearly the same time, the campers’ heads moved from Father Drake to me, and Father Drake explained to them that the activity today would be a mix of reward and punishment. Reward for them and punishment for me. “A revised game of Smear the Queer. The rules will be suspended for, say, twenty minutes. In that time, there will be no balls, no points. Only you and the target.” Father Drake mock-frowned at me. “The more you punish him, the less I will punish you.” He asked Larry the time, and he said it was a quarter after seven. “Good,” Father Drake said. “You can tell them when they can stop.”

  Father Drake shoved me into the middle of their line. “Go,” he yelled. “Now!” I fell against Christopher and slid down. Once I was on the ground, he spat on me, a big loogie that landed on my forehead and in my
eyes. Rumil and Sparse were circling me, getting ready to pounce. I remembered from our first night by the lake that neither of them were good at making the first move, which bought me a little time. While Father Drake and the counselors paid close attention to us, Dale was slowly distancing himself from the fray. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind which way to escape. I wanted to tell him to just run for it. Just go and don’t look back. I knew what would happen next to me: Sooner or later one of them would draw the first blood and then the other two would be emboldened enough to join in.

  I jumped to my feet and ran. I decided to run the opposite way from where Dale was going. The stickers in the grass needled my feet, but that just made me lift them faster off the ground. Rick and Larry had climbed to the top of the steps of the Chapel Cabin. They looked to be holding hands. As I passed through the cabins, headed toward the Sweat Shack and the abandoned house, Rick said, “You got fifteen minutes!” I dashed around the pile of burned furniture, and the other boys, gaining on me, were shouting, their words coming out garbled as if they were speaking underwater. “Just . . . let us . . . don’t fight . . .”

  I looked behind me to see, much to my surprise, that Christopher was in the lead, but Sparse and Rumil weren’t far behind. They were only jogging while Christopher, red faced and huffing, was clearly giving it his all. I bounded into the woods and my pace slowed down considerably. Jagged sticks and broken pinecones and hard acorns. A floor riddled with traps hidden in the brush. I made it to the other side of the lake and looked around for a place to hide. I figured I would have a better chance to outlast the clock if I was hiding and saving my energy. On this side of the lake, few options presented themselves to me. The tent was too obvious. And Mother Maude was in the RV.

  “Mother Maude!” I said to no one, realizing she was possibly my salvation. If I only explained to her what Father Drake was making us do, she would understand; she would stop this madness. I had about a minute before they’d come flying out of the trees. I beat on the side of the RV, slapping my hand on the door that led to the living quarters in the back. The blinds were drawn, and I panicked. She wasn’t in there. I kept beating on the door, losing hope. Christopher limped out of the trees, coughing. He carried a thick tree limb that he’d picked up along the way. Soon, Sparse and Rumil appeared. The door to the RV swung open, and Mother Maude emerged, her head wrapped in a scarf. I grabbed her arm and she wrapped herself around me, held me tight. I tried to explain, but my words came out muffled against her bosom. “I know, my lamb, but this is the only way.” I struggled, but she clung to me until Christopher was close enough, then she released, and he swung the branch. The stick landed against my kidneys, and I was thrown to my knees. Mother Maude moved out of the way to let me fall. Father Drake and the counselors had made it over and were hanging back by the tent, watching. Christopher swung again, and I turned in time for him to miss and strike the ground, breaking the limb in two. Sparse and Rumil were on either side of him, blocking me against the RV. I rolled over, flinging myself under the vehicle.

  “How much time?” I screamed, and Larry screamed back, “Three minutes.” I was not far enough in the center of the undercarriage, and Christopher was able to snag my ankle. Rumil caught the other one, and they pulled me out. They kicked and hit and clawed. Like me, they were worn-out; otherwise they would have killed me. Behind them, behind Mother Maude and Father Drake and the counselors, Dale trotted out of the woods. “Time,” I called again, and Rick said, “One minute.” I didn’t think Dale would make it in time, but he picked up his legs when he heard the clock, turning his slow gait into a hustle. “Here, Dale,” Sparse called, and he and Christopher hoisted me up. “You still got time to get a lick in.” They moved me closer and locked me in their arms. Dale wasn’t even looking in front of him. As he ran, he watched the ground. Father Drake waved him on. They were standing behind us, and Dale would reach us, and the adults would get front-row viewing to my clobbering. Rick yelled, “Time! Time’s up!” Father Drake said he didn’t give a damn what the clock said and hollered for Dale to make it count.

  The other boys started chanting his name. “Dale, Dale, Dale!” He buffaloed toward me, big Dale, and I anticipated the feel of his body crashing into mine, the total obliteration of mine. If I were him, I would want nothing more than to make me into a grease stain. When he got about a yard away from me, I shut my eyes and braced for impact.

  I felt the wind of Dale’s giant body swoop past as he sidestepped us at the last second. He screamed and said, “Fuck you!” He powered forward, increasing his speed, taking the adults by surprise. Mother Maude screamed, and Dale barreled into them, catching Father Drake in the stomach. They rolled onto the ground and fought—or, rather, Dale threw punches and Father Drake covered himself. Mother Maude screamed for the counselors to help him, and Larry started to move, but Rick stopped him. Dale continued to hit Father Drake, not landing many of the punches, until Father Drake kneed him in the groin. He gasped and slumped off. Father Drake was spitting blood and struggling to collect himself. During the chaos of their fight, his knife had been knocked out and lay on the ground near slouching Dale. They spotted it at the same time and went scrambling for it. They both had their hands on the handle of the knife, the blade swinging between them.

  “Y’all need to stop this,” Mother Maude said, and it wasn’t clear who she meant.

  Sparse and Christopher released me, and we all dove toward Father Drake and Dale, trying to pull them apart. We became a mass of arms and legs flailing about as we had been on our first night. The knife disappeared in the press of bodies. We spilled onto the ground and rolled apart like magnets being repelled. Father Drake was facedown in the grass, not moving. Mother Maude ran to him and flipped him over and slapped his face until he seemed to be coming back to his senses. The rest of us slowly stood back up, looking sheepishly at one another.

  “I hate this place,” Sparse said.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Dale was the last of the campers to make it back to his feet. When Rumil saw him, he said, “Oh, Dale. Oh, Dale.”

  The knife’s handle protruded from his belly. Dale glanced down at himself, and said, “I think—I think I am going to be sick.” Very calmly, he wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled the blade out in a slow suck.

  —

  I was the first to get to Dale. He was somehow still standing, blood seeping through his dirty yellow shirt. I put my hand over where I suspected the wound was and pressed down. He didn’t move; he looked confused by the whole thing. “I think,” he said again, “I think I am going to be sick.” Blood was coming out faster now, dripping through my hand and down his legs. I removed my hand long enough to take off my shirt, wad it into a ball, and use it to staunch the flow. Behind us, meanwhile, a plan had formed without words. Rick was asking Mother Maude for the keys to the RV. Sparse, who had already jumped inside the camper to look for them, popped his head out of the door to announce they were in the ignition. I told Dale that I thought we were about to go for a ride. “We are gonna get you help,” I said. “You are going to be fine.” He told me it wasn’t so bad. “I feel like I’ve been hit in the balls really hard,” he managed to say, and then Christopher and Rumil were behind him, putting his large arms around their shoulders. I stayed in front, holding the blood in, and like this, we walked him to the RV and helped him up the stairs inside. Mother Maude had gone back to Father Drake, who was still prone on the ground, dazed. She was the only one who was speaking now, explaining to him what we were doing. “They are taking him to the hospital, honey. He had an accident. Do you hear me? The boys are leaving. You got to get up and help me now.”

  We got Dale onto the mattress in the back, then I removed my blood-soaked shirt and replaced it with a bedsheet. Dale asked me if I knew what I was doing, and I said not at all. He laughed a little and allowed me to wrap his stomach in the cotton fabric. The other boys had gathered in the back aro
und us. “Why aren’t we moving?” I asked them, and Sparse went to see. At the front, Mother Maude was at the side door of the RV, trying to get inside. Rick was in the driver’s seat, telling her they had to move and that there wasn’t enough room for her, but she was insisting that not all of us had to go. “I know what you’re doing,” she told us. “I know what you will say!” Larry blocked her entry but was hesitating. “Maybe we should—” But whatever else he was going to say was drowned out by the turn of the engine. Sparse took this as his cue and shoved Rick aside. “Get back, bitch!” he yelled and forced her away from the clear, then he shut and locked it. In another minute, Rick had us turned around and pointed down the dirt road.