For the next four weeks, Mark hardly ever saw Doug. Doug was good at baseball and it turned out he had sports buddies from last year. Mark couldn’t throw, bat, or field. Doug distanced himself. Mark was also terrible at volleyball, basketball, soccer, tennis, and archery. He had the further disadvantage of crying when kids made fun of his tendency to cry whenever they made fun of him.
His cabin of ten was ruled by Kenny, a small boy with a pale face and dark curls who had dirty magazines in his footlocker, and who lay in bed wriggling under his blanket and cooing in a baby voice about the enormous boner he’d just gotten. Like bullies in books, he had two big cabinmates who served as his enforcers. Kenny was kind of a genius. He got all the kids in the cabin to do what he wanted by continually holding out the slight possibility of being accepted by him, and thus of his calling off his two goons, who did whatever he wanted with an unquestioning devotion that puzzled Mark. Between them, they could have torn Kenny in half, so why didn’t they? There came the day when Steve, the only other kid who had consistently been at the bottom of the pecking order along with Mark, and who Mark had occasionally looked to for a spark of compassion, offering Steve the same—there came the day, about two weeks in, when Steve also begged excitedly to see Kenny’s latest boner, and Mark was alone.
One day, Mark came into the cabin to find it empty except for one of the goons. He hesitated at the door, but the goon waved him in. This one was Jeff. He was looking through the other goon’s footlocker. That one was Russell. “You’re not such a bad kid,” Jeff said. “Kenny’s a little prick, isn’t he?” Relief and hope warmed Mark. Might this be the wished-for rebellion of the goons? He didn’t say anything. He stood in the glow of Jeff’s humanity. Jeff was still rummaging in Russell’s locker. He pulled out some candy bars from Russell’s care package. He unwrapped one and took a bite. “You want one?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on. No one will know.”
“No, that’s OK.”
“Russell’s taken some from your care package, you know. And from mine, too, that asshole. That’s why I’m getting back at him. Don’t be a wuss. Take it.”
Mark didn’t want to jeopardize this fragile new bond. “OK.” He reached out his hand.
There was a hoot of glee from the platform above where the tents were stored, and down hopped Russell. “You fuckin’ stealing from me, fag?” He came scooting over the intervening cots and footlockers with simian agility, arms already pinwheeling for the pummeling. As Mark went down, terrified and despairing, a part of his mind considered the possibility that the goons were smarter than he’d given them credit for.
• • •
He collected Matchbox cars. His parents gave him two or three every birthday and Christmas, and he also bought them with his allowance at Woolworth’s. One car cost fifty cents. They were made in England, by the Lesney company. His mother always said (he was beginning to realize that whatever Mom said, she always said) that Matchbox cars were better than Hot Wheels. “Look at that detailing on the front grill. Whereas, look at this flakey chrome crap. Leave it to the Great American Businessman to make a shitty toy car.”
Mark’s favorites were a copper-colored 1950 Vauxhall Cresta, a gold Opel Diplomat, a cherry Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a green Ferrari Berlinetta, and a royal blue Iso Grifo. There was something about the vibrant color of the Iso Grifo that particularly entranced him. It glowed like a deep pond inviting him to jump in.
One of his blankets was made of a lightweight artificial material that, when you lifted it at its midpoint and let go, would settle into perfect mounds and curvy channels. Bowl-shaped depressions became home sites, whereas channels were roads working their way over the hills. He drove the cars along the channels, admiring the way they handled the curves, which demonstrated their precision engineering.
On his eleventh birthday he got an electric train, along with a signal tower his father had preliminarily made from a kit. The tower was beautiful, with a red brick storage room on the first floor and a green clapboard office above. There were window-shade decals in the upper windows and a tiny broom and lantern glued immaculately next to the door. Over the following months Mark used his allowance to buy other model buildings and tried to construct them as heartbreakingly neatly as his father had done, never quite succeeding. His father had chosen HO gauge, which fit the Matchbox cars pretty well, and now Mark had a train and buildings and cars and crossings and crossing gates, and he set them up in different configurations. The train circled, the cars waited at the crossings, then crossed. The Vauxhall Cresta turned right, accelerating. The Iso Grifo parked by the old mill. It all gave him that unnameable emotion. He could almost believe it was real, and the closer he got to that fugitive belief, the more he felt that feeling.
He added buildings and cars. Now he had a Mercedes-Benz ambulance and a Ford Galaxie police car. He had a cattle truck with a cow and three calves. One of the calves sometimes wandered onto the track and got hit by the train. Sometimes that made the train derail, which looked realistic. He was eleven, twelve. Susan sometimes joined him on the rare occasions when she was in the house, or not heavily asleep and more or less unwakeable in her bedroom. She asked him who lived where, where did they work, who was having affairs with whom, what was the name of the town. Mark was so thrilled at her interest
