Good Graces

In the morning, we’re supposed to swim in Lake Freezing Cold but I can barely do the dead man’s float. When the triangle bell rings at noon, we have to go to the mess hall and eat a lunch of beans and wienies and drink the juice of bugs. After that, we gotta do crafts. Forced to make leather coin purses. There’s skeeters the size of dragonflies, an outhouse that anybody could fall into and once the sun sets, those counselors always got a grisly story all warmed up. Their favorite is this one about an escaped lunatic with a hook who goes after couples who are watching the submarine races on Lovers’ Lane. After they douse the campfire, one of the counselors always reminds us to pretend we’re not kids from the city sleeping in bunk beds in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, but real Indian children curled up in teepees on a wide open plain. But even me, who has no problem imagining just about anything, can’t feature that. What I can picture so clearly is that lunatic with the hook deciding that a pretty little redheaded girl is right up his alley so he rows one-handed from the other side of the lake after midnight, crawls into our cabin, snatches my sister and runs off with her into the woods. The next morning, Lovely Princess would no longer be Floating Gently Down the Stream of Unending Happiness Beneath a Rainbow but found under one of those Christmas trees like a ripped-open present.

That’s why I’ve been spending my nights tossing and turning even worse than I usually do, which I didn’t think was humanly possible. Standing watch over my sister is never easy and she hasn’t been any help at all. She giggles along with the other girls when they tease me about the dark circles I’ve got under my eyes. No matter how deep I stick my fingers in my ears, I can hear them calling me “Smudgy” and telling each other how camp is the greatest and that they never want to go home, which makes me feel even more like the odd maiden out because that’s all I want to do. I miss… everything. Troo doesn’t. She’s been having a gay old time making sit-upons and new friends and practicing her ventriloquist act for The Heap Big Talent Show, which is tonight.

I know that I’m not good at a lot of things, not like Troo is, but I do my best after my sister drags me up on the camp stage and growls into my ear, “You’re embarassin’ me. Again. Do one of your dumb imitations.”

So I try to perform my best Edgar G. Robinson, “You dirty rat,” but my tongue gets so twisted up that it comes out sounding like, “You thirty brats,” which makes everybody boo, and one kid, who is my sister, throws a stick of beef jerky at me. Of course, after all is said and done, Troo wins the top talent prize, The Golden Tomahawk, hands down. Nobody even cares that her lips moved.

By the time Sunday comes, I am very weak, almost floppy. I got a nose ache from pressing it against the cabin window counting the minutes until Dave’s woody station wagon comes roaring up the camp drive to rescue me.

When I finally spot him, I try to yell, “He’s here! He’s here!” but I hardly have enough air left in me to sigh out to Troo, “We’re goin’ home.”

“You are. I don’t got a home anymore,” she hollers on her run out the cabin door.

She hides in a tree and refuses to budge, but Dave is brave and tells her that she has until the count of three to get down. That takes a lotta guts on his part because he knows Troo will give him the cold shoulder all the way home. Or maybe that’s why he nixed the staying-longer-at-camp idea in the first place. Just to shut her up. I love my sister, I would die for her, but a spade is a spade. Troo is a smart alec, most especially to Dave, who she reminds, “You’re not my real father,” in case he forgot after she said it a half hour ago.

On the drive home, once Troo falls asleep against my shoulder hugging The Golden Tomahawk, I tap Dave on the shoulder and tell him, “Thank you for sendin’ us! That was really something!”

The reason I am not telling him that camp was the fourth-worst experience of my life behind losing Daddy and Mother almost dying and Bobby trying to murder me is because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Dave is a lot like me in the personality department. That’s who I get it from. Not from my mother, who says, “Being sensitive and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”

But when he parks the woody station wagon in front of our house on 52nd Street, since he is a police detective, Dave mighta deduced that I didn’t tell him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but about my camping experience. Because after Troo stomps off in a huff, I can’t stop myself from leaping out of the car, sinking down on my knees and kissing our front lawn, that’s how grateful I am to get back to the city where I know who lives in what house, which shortcuts we shouldn’t take and, most important, all the best hiding places.

Chapter Three

The first day back home, my sister and me and one of our best friends, Mary Lane, are having what Troo calls a rendezvous at Washington Park, the most important place to everybody in the neighborhood next to Mother of Good Hope Church. The park’s got everything.

Like the lagoon.

I used to love standing under the weeping willow and throwing in a hook, but I had to give that up. Instead of whiling away an afternoon dreaming about what I’m gonna catch, all I can think about these days are the innocent little fish swimming below the surface, so overjoyed to see that friendly worm waving in the water that they don’t even stop to wonder at their good luck. The lagoon is where the police found the two dead girls with pink undies tied around their necks in pretty bows. First one summer and then the next, Junie Piaskowski and Sara Marie Heinemann were laid out next to the rotting red rowboats you can rent for a dollar and I was almost spread out there, too. I could hear the muddy lagoon water lapping onto the rocks when Bobby Brophy ripped his shirt off over his head.

The park also has a swimming pool. I just about go dead in the water watching Troo climb up those silvery high-dive steps and run to the end of the board screaming, “Geronimo,” which she will probably do even louder now after all the practice she got at camp.

The Jack Hoyt Woods are a big relief. When you can’t take the sun beating down on you for one more second, you can eat a peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwich in a leafy branch or get your ankles wet when you look for leeches under slimy rocks in the Honey Creek that runs through it.

There’s also a band shell, but it’s not much good until after it gets dark. That’s why it’s called Music Under the Stars. Once a week you can lie out on a blanket and hear an orchestra perform something like Rhapsody in Blue by Mr. George Gershwin (one of Mother and Dave’s favorites) and drink cup after cup of Graf’s Root Beer (Troo guzzles it) while you search for the Big and Little Dippers in the western sky (Daddy went nuts for them). When the show’s all over, everybody in the neighborhood gathers their stuff and walks back home, laughing and calling to each other, or sometimes there’s a scuffle because they mighta had too much Pabst Blue Ribbon Under the Stars.

And it’s not only during the months of June, July and August when this park is the star of the show. When it gets cold and snowy, you can take a leap onto your flying saucer on Statue Hill. Or bundle up and go skating. I feel much better being around the lagoon once it freezes over. I can’t do spins or jumps or anything else fancy like that, but I like the feel of the chilly air on my forehead and the blades cutting through the ice sound like I mean business.

But the absolute best part of the park, no matter what time of the year it is, has always been right where we are. The zoo. Sitting on the bench under our favorite climbing tree in front of Sampson the gorilla’s enclosure. Daddy and I used to sit at this exact same spot together. He’d point at Sampson and say, “Some people say the lion is the king of the jungle, but I’d have to disagree with them. Just look at him, Sal! He is magnificent!” I would nod my head, but what I was secretly thinking was No, Daddy, you are the king. Of the land and the sky. It’s you who is magnificent.

That was in the good old days. Before the night Bobby the counselor set me down on the grass near the lagoon. Before I heard Daddy’s voice call to me from on high-Now, Sal, now… fly like the wind-and I ripped down the zoo path and jumped over the black iron fence in front of Sampson’s enclosure. When Bobby caught up to me, he gave me the same winning smile I loved when we played chess together at the playground. Only that night he didn’t say, “Checkmate. Better luck next time.” He ran the tip of his tongue over his top lip so slowly and whispered, “Gotcha,” and I was sure that he did. But when he leaped over the fence, the air came off his body and his arms became wings. I waited until the timing was right and I ducked. Bobby flew over my head like Sky King’s Songbird and crashed down into Sampson’s pit. He died, so the only one he’s playing chess with now is Lucifer.