How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  “Will,” I said. “Plain and simple.”

  The littler one repeated my name, elongating the vowel sound. “Wheel,” she said, giggling. “Like the tire?” The huskier undid the flap of the leather satchel beside her and pulled out another jar of moonshine and three mugs, each a different shape and size. She passed them around and then poured us each a swallow. “I’d like to make a toast,” she said. “To my sweet love here and to our new friend Will, plain and simple.” She paused as if something had just occurred to her. “To love,” she said, “to love, plain and simple. I am plain and my sweetheart’s simple.”

  We all roared with laughter now, our voices causing a ruckus of noise behind the trees. I stood. The ground tilted, and I stumbled down again. “Probably just a deer,” the huskier one said, and the littler one came over to help me up. “Oh, honey, you are just a mess.” She said they had an extra sleeping bag if I wanted it, and I tried to tell them that this felt like one of my spells. “I panic sometimes,” I said. “And the world goes weird.” Two realizations came to me after I spoke: I’d not suffered one of these attacks since Memphis, and this one felt different. Not weaker but fading more quickly.

  “Shh,” the littler one said. “Ain’t nothing wrong with you but a little too much hooch.” With her help, I managed to sit back down on my perch in front of the fire, and then she returned to hers. I told them some people could be looking for me. “Might be dangerous.” Neither seemed too concerned. They told me not to worry about it, either. Strangely enough, I wasn’t. They’d been coming to these woods for years now, they said, and didn’t nobody bother them unless they chose to be bothered. “Like by me?” I said, but they didn’t answer, maybe because the answer was obvious. My face was slick with sweat, but I felt so cold inside, deathly cold. All the moonshine in the world couldn’t remedy it. Only thing to do was remove it. Get it out. “You remember that camp you were talking about?” I said. “The one for the boys? Well, I was sent to it. My father sent me. About ten years ago. He loved me and thought he was doing the right thing. But it wasn’t and a boy—he died, just like you said.” The words came easy. I didn’t feel better after saying them, exactly, but I didn’t feel worse, either. My head cleared. At my feet was the princess mask. I picked it up—“His name was Dale,” I was saying—and threw it into the fire.

  That night I used their extra sleeping bag. I made myself a pallet on my side of the fire and went to sleep with the flames raging a few feet away from me, the two women talking and talking. The fire drowned out most of what they said. I heard only the shapes of their words, as if they spoke in a very old and forgotten language. With my belly full of moonshine and grilled meat and vegetables, I slept soundly, more deeply than I had in weeks, only waking once. It was very late, and the fire had been stomped out recently, with curls of smoke still crawling in the air. I leaned up, expecting to find the women tucked away in their own sleeping bags. Only they weren’t. They were at the edge of the trees. They moved slowly, arms around each other’s waists, turning round and round in a small circle. My eyesight blurred into double vision. The image of them echoed into several repeated images. There were many women in the dark now, multiplied over and over, dancing to music that must have existed only in their own heads.

  —

  The next morning the women were gone.

  Beside the foot of the sleeping bag, I found the gifts they had left: another jar of cloudy moonshine, a magnetic compass the size of a fifty-cent piece, and a note written on a crumpled paper bag tucked under the jar of moonshine that said, in careful block lettering, to follow “due west” if I wanted to find my way out. Patches of morning sky were visible through the trees, pale blue and powdery. I held the compass in front of me and shifted my body until the little arrow closed over the W, then I walked. Several times I had to go southwest or even northwest for several feet until I discovered a passage through the bundle of trees. A half hour later, I staggered out of the woods in front of the gravel road leading to camp. When I reached my car, I remembered Father Drake had taken the keys, so I passed Doll by and went directly to the Chapel Cabin, where I suspected the two slept.

  Father Drake was sitting on the Chapel Cabin’s bottom step as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. He was stock-still, and I suspected he’d been on that step all night. His eyes looked glassy, and he didn’t seem to notice me there until I was a foot away from him. He blinked then, extending his arm and unfolding his fist in one almost graceful movement. He dangled my set of keys in front of him. “Cake said you’d be back before sunup—he didn’t think you had the gumption to spend the whole night out in them woods.” He was barefoot and wearing cutoffs that showed off a pair of old-man legs littered with bug bites and scabs. “You must of forgotten them stories the women in your family liked to tell.” I snatched for the keys, and like a taunting child, he pulled them out of my reach in plenty of time for me to miss them. He reiterated his one stipulation from the day before: “You’ll speak with your daddy for me?”

  “You should move on,” I said. “Try to get some help.” I added that this was no way to live. “I can get you some help,” I said finally. “Take you to a hospital or a shelter or something.” Then I immediately regretted the offer; the thought of sharing a car with him for any length of time was unbearable.

  “Help?” The word hiccupped from his mouth. His head dropped, and he began to laugh, all raspy. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? Always the superior one. Thinking you know better. That’s why them boys was so ready to beat the shit out of you. All I needed to do was to give them permission.”

  At camp, Father Drake had shared precious little about himself. Fragments I would have to put together later to form the story about his love for the uncle I never met. My resemblance to this uncle was enough to make me a target for his rage, and Dale became the poor boy unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. But Father Drake and I are not enemies, I know this now; he is not the villain of my story. I understand the rage that lives in him lives in me, too. We are made brothers by it. We grew up being told our love was filthy and wrong. And later we were drawn back to the camp, still fascinated by this place and its failed promise to restore us into the Almighty’s fold. He was, and is and perhaps always will be, the distorted reflection of my own worst desire, which turned out not to be my attraction to the same gender but my longing to obliterate myself completely and remake something new and wholesome in its place.

  But it would take time, many months after this interchange, for me to articulate these thoughts to myself. In this moment, with his ugly maw so close to mine, I only wanted to unleash ten years’ worth of anger onto this man. So I flew at him, tackling his body off the steps. We slammed into the ground and rolled. He curled his body into a ball, the way an armadillo might, holding my set of keys close to his chest, clearly thinking that’s what I wanted. Only when I threw my first punch did it occur to him that my goal was more basic. He twisted onto his stomach, his back taking the brunt of the beating. My knuckles rang with pain, digging deeper and deeper into his spine with each lick. “Cake!” he cried. “You, boy!” We were both weeping now. Spit drooled from my lips onto the back of his head. My punches devolved into slaps. Soon after, it was over and I lay on top of him, winded.

  “Keep going, you bastard,” he said. “Kill me.”

  I rolled off onto my back beside him. A bank of clouds the color of smoke slugged eastward.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I told him why, and he whirled around to look at me.

  “What did you say to me?”

  I sat up and said it again, then once more for good measure, screaming it. “I forgive you, you motherfucker!”

  His old self, war ready and fast, returned. He was on me and had taken my shirt collar in his fist before I could move away. “What gives you the right to forgive me?” he asked. But this burst of strength was short-li
ved. He was an old man now, someone who’d had a remarkably hard life, and it was easy for me to hold him in my arms and let that old rage of his flare one final time then die out. Afterward, I stood, half carrying him to his feet with me. I told him how I might not have the right, but I was forgiving him all the same because I was tired of hating him. He pushed me back, and we lumbered away from each other.

  He threw the keys at my stomach. “Just leave us alone.”

  Cake stood in the doorway, shirtless and rubbing his eyes with one hand, the toy pistol held down at his waist with the other. He climbed down the first step, paused, and observed the two of us as if we were figments of his imagination. He shook his head, still waking himself up. His skin was as pale as bone; the only coloring on him was the trail of pink pimples lining his collarbone and chest.

  “Hey, Cake,” I said, and his mouth screwed up with confusion. He pointed the gun at me halfheartedly. “I can take you somewhere—if you don’t want to stay.” He put the gun down, looked at Father Drake, and shook his head again, this time indicating no. “Cake’s happy just where he is,” Father Drake was saying. “Same as me. We’re done with the world telling us it ain’t got no place for us. Well, we ain’t got no place for it. Do we, Cake?” Cake didn’t answer and drifted back into the darkness of the Chapel Cabin.

  Before I left, I mentioned to Father Drake about Larry’s plan for the campgrounds, speaking louder so Cake could hear me, too. “This place is going to change,” I said. “Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but it’s changing.”

  Father Drake told me I came back to the camp for a reason, and telling him about that wasn’t it. “But I think I know why.” He limped up to the top stair of the Chapel Cabin. “Why don’t you just stay here with us, Rooster, boy!—come inside the Chapel Cabin, and we’ll love on you and keep you safe.” He held out his arms. “We can all just be here at camp and let the world burn.”

  I told him over my shoulder as I walked away that I’d already spent far too much of my life at camp. “It’s everywhere else I got to work on figuring out.” But I wasn’t saying this aloud for his benefit.

  —

  The drive to Bucksnort took up the rest of the morning. I parked Doll, all dusty and corroded, down the road from my father’s double-wide. I walked the rest of the way because I needed another few minutes to collect myself before I stood on his doorstep. Never mind I’d had three hours on the road to mull over what to say to him. I expected resistance on his part. I expected him to take off his glasses and rub his eyes at my request. “I just don’t know,” he would say, I figured. I planned out my response accordingly. I would have to explain to him, at long last and with no evasions, the terrible legacy of Camp Levi. I would be clear about our roles in the debacle, his as well as mine. I would be firm in telling him how this plan for the other camp, if carried out correctly, represented a chance for us to achieve some measure of redemption. The dramatic language was intentional. Words like “legacy” and “redemption” would appeal, I hoped, to his love of rhetoric. I expected the conversation to be tense, for there to be a rough back-and-forth, but ultimately I expected him to relent. I didn’t expect, however, what I discovered at his home when I arrived.

  Zeus would later disagree with me on this point. He would believe, or claim to believe, that I had somehow orchestrated this reunion that followed for—in his words—“maximum dramatics.” He would point out that I must have known Bevy would be worried to the point of hysteria when I stopped taking their calls. He would say that I had called their bluff and that they had folded. After scouring the Internet and engaging in mild forms of electronic stalking, Bevy tracked down my father’s address. When Bevy called him, the search for me officially began. Believing they could do more, Bevy and Zeus bought plane tickets to Jackson, and after they’d touched down, they rented a car and drove into the heart of the Mississippi Delta, a place neither of them had ever been before. They made it to my father’s the day before while I was wandering, lost, in the Neck. Since then, they had already contacted the local police and were waiting to hear back from them. Bevy, in keeping with her general distrust of the law, wanted to go looking for me herself, but Zeus had convinced her to wait to hear back from the police, then they would make plans accordingly. At lunch, they had all gathered in the living room to discuss strategy. As I was walking up the front lawn toward the door, a deputy had called my father to tell him the latest on my whereabouts. He took the call in his daughter’s bedroom, and his wife decided to make lunch for everyone—ham-and-cheese sandwiches. She and their daughter stepped into the kitchen, leaving Bevy and Zeus on the couch to wonder in whispers if I was even still alive. “Surely he wouldn’t?” Bevy asked Zeus, and Zeus said, “No, not intentionally anyway.” Which, they later reported to me, didn’t make them feel any better.

  I was climbing up the concrete steps that led to the double-wide’s front door, finding it wide open. For this reason, I didn’t knock. Zeus would suggest later that I wanted to surprise them all at one time. The truth was, I was afraid to knock. Afraid they’d take too long to open up and I would chicken out like before. I pulled on the screen door, and it squeaked open, but nobody heard. I knew they were home; three cars were in the driveway, one of them belonging to Zeus and Bevy, though I didn’t know that yet. Instead, I assumed they had visitors, and I was crashing into the middle of something. I stepped into a little foyer with a mirror to greet me. With my tousled hair and dirty clothes, I looked as if I had just survived a hurricane, but it was too late to worry about that now, I told myself. I was walking into the living room, my mind racing with what I should say first. I was walking into the place where, days ago, I had seen my father singing alongside his new family. I decided now to lead with an apology—Sorry to bother, I don’t mean to intrude, but. I entered the living room in the middle of two people deep in conversation. I blinked and looked again. At first, I regarded them as hallucinations until they slowly became aware of my presence. They were still in the clothes they’d worn to bed the night before, warm-ups and oversize T-shirts, when they went to sleep on twin air mattresses in the dining room of my father’s house.

  Bevy glanced over at me first. “Holy shit,” she said dully. “Holy shit, holy shit.”

  I was just as baffled. “The fuck is going on?” I said.

  Zeus stood, more angry than surprised. “You tell us, bastard. Why you stop answering the phone, huh?” He poked at my shoulder, and we continued to argue like this while my father’s wife and daughter were returning from the kitchen with food.

  My father’s wife was carrying a tray of sandwiches into the living room when she found Zeus and me still arguing over who was more at fault. I had lost my temper. “You were the one,” I reminded him, “who went silent on me first!” The tray crashed onto the carpet, and our quarrel stalled. My father’s wife called out to him. “Frank! You better get on out here.”

  “That’s Lila,” Zeus said.

  “Who?”

  He pointed to my father’s wife. “Your stepmom.”

  Behind her, their daughter appeared. “What’s that smell?” she said, for she would tell me later, along with everyone else, that I stunk. When she realized the smell belonged to a person, to me, this strange-looking man with bits of grass and pine straw in his hair, she stopped asking that question and replaced it with another one: “Who is that?” Everybody ignored her. Bevy sank back down on the sofa, her jaw locked shut for once, her eyes wide and unblinking. Zeus took a step closer to me and slapped dirt off my shoulder. And Lila kept calling for her absent husband. Meanwhile, I stood at the center of them gazing down at the girl, my sister. “Her name,” Zeus said, enjoying himself, “is Cecily.”

  My father wasn’t paying attention to the commotion in his living room because he was, he’d tell me later, busy talking on the phone with the sheriff, trying to understand the latest on my whereabouts. They had found nothing yet, the sheriff told him, a
dding that he should “hold tight.” He burst out of his daughter’s room, his face flushed.

  When she saw our father emerge, Cecily chanted her questions at him. “Who is this, Daddy? Daddy, please! Who is that?” I inched backward toward the door. Here he was, my father. In his late fifties, in a green polo shirt. “Who is it?” he said, repeating his daughter’s question back to her. Then he rushed me. As in the sanctuary when he came barreling toward me years ago, I had few precious seconds to brace myself for however his feelings would break over my body. He pulled me to him and shoved his face into my neck, into my prickly under beard. “I’d have known this boy anywhere!” he said. “Anywhere.” Still holding me in his arms, he lifted me off my feet and turned us around so that he faced his daughter. He spoke to her over my shoulder. “Sugar pie,” he said at last. “This here’s your brother, and his name is Will.”

  TEN

  ■

  RELEASE

  Around the one-year anniversary of the release of Proud Flesh, Sparse gives an interview in an entertainment magazine. In it, the reporter asks him about his movie’s much-debated ending. “People are mixed,” the reporter says. “Some think it’s a political statement and others bark about it being an exploitation of what actually happened and a few claim it’s actually a failure of imagination. What do you say?” In the article, the reporter writes that Sparse’s face “curled into a smile” at the question. “Obviously,” she writes, “this is not the first time he’s been asked this, and each time he has given variations of the same answer. Now he smiles and shrugs.” Sparse replies, “Why can’t it be all three? I did the ending I wanted, and people are welcome to respond to it however they wish—that’s none of my business.” Not long after I returned from Mississippi, Sparse admitted to being sent to the camp that the movie was based on. When the reporter reminds him of his time at Camp Levi, Sparse references the book. “The Summer I First Believed is not a bad book; it’s just Rick’s version. I wanted to retell it, I wanted to twist it to my own devices, to my own understanding of truth, and this is what I came up with.” The interview concludes with the reporter asking if he had any thoughts about how the camp he’d gone to was redone into a retreat for gay teens. Here, he is his clearest and most resolute. “No.”