“For the criminals of tomorrow,” my mother said.
And as I neared the port of entry to About Face, I was struck by how much the camp looked like a prison. A high fence surrounded the property with gleaming loops of razor wire on top. The buildings were blocky and fortress-like. Watching the facility loom up in the windshield made the skin on my arms and neck tingle with excitement.
At the gated entrance booth, a guard took my name and ushered me into the parking lot. I pulled in between two dark blue vans and began the long walk across the lawn. To the west lay the barracks and to the east stood a set of obstacle courses. Rope bridges and ladders, tires chained together over pits of mud.
As I neared the main office, I saw an elephant of a man standing in front of the entrance, smoking a cigarette. He smiled and saluted me. “Mr. Fergus?” he said. “We spoke on the phone. I’m Eugene Brill, the camp director.” He wore fatigues and a tented hat that reminded me of paper boats I used to float down the gutter.
I saluted back. I’d worn a sleeveless shirt to suggest an air of toughness. I’d always considered myself leanly muscular, but standing here next to Sergeant Brill I realized that I was just plain skinny.
“The drive up all right?” he said. “We’ve had a problem with deer in the road. That’s an interesting hairdo you have.”
As for my general appearance, I am a white, plain-looking person. Dark eyes. Average height. The only thing abnormal about me is my head. I have a small shock of white hair in the center of it.
“Sir, this is from scar tissue, sir,” I told him.
“Well, allow me to remove my foot from my mouth and apologize, Mr. Fergus. And you don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ You’re a drill instructor now. You’re Sergeant Fergus. As per the city, you’re supposed to work here at least three days a week. If you want, you can work up to five. You’ve got seven hundred and sixty hours to fill. ‘As per’? Is that the right expression? ‘As per’?”
“Can I work seven days straight through?” I said.
Sergeant Brill smiled. “Judge Neal said you were raring to go. He told me you called his office near twenty times between June and August, asking what your assignment was going to be.”
“I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill. “As you probably know already, around here we basically specialize in this. Boo!” He suddenly contorted his face into a thing of horror: lips peeled back from his clenched teeth in a terrible grin, his bottom jaw humped out like an ape’s, his eyes wide and bulging, smoke curling from his nose.
“See that? See how you jumped back a step, but then stood tall quick? Tells me a lot about you, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill, his face having returned to normal. “Quite a lot. Tells me that you’re a little nervous, a little scared, but that you’re also determined to stand up for yourself, to prove yourself. Tells me you’re eager. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I told him, and he was right. I was scared. And I was determined to do well at About Face. I saw it as a last chance of sorts. Because at twenty-nine, I was no Ronald. No one was calling the house asking for me. I had no degrees. My longest stay at any one job had been six and a half months. But what I hoped was that About Face would be my chance to get back in the race, to redeem myself. After all, the camp was designed to help children get their lives on track, and I’d been a child myself when things had spun off course for me.
“You crack through a person’s front when you scare him, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill. “You penetrate his personal facade. His true colors come out when he’s afraid, who he really is. You can work with that. That’s what we do with these kids. We scare them straight, as the old expression goes.”
“Get their true colors out in the open. Then work with that,” I said, nodding.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. That stuff isn’t going to be your department.”
Not my department? I felt the tightening of disappointment in my chest.
“I hear you play the trumpet,” said Sergeant Brill.
I told him I played clean, hard trumpet.
Sergeant Brill picked up a drawstring sack sitting on the flagpole’s marble base and handed it to me. “This belonged to a friend of mine.”
I opened the bag and found a trumpet inside, a Blessing with a five-inch bell. I fingered the valves. They were stiff, but pumped smoothly. The last trumpet I played had been played before me by a seal at an amusement park. What I mean is that I hadn’t touched an instrument as nice as this one in over six years.
“That’s half your job there,” said Sergeant Brill. “You’ll play reveille in the morning to wake up the cadets, then taps at night to put them to bed. Right now all we’ve got is a recording. Piece of shit. Sounds like a someone whistling through a toilet paper tube.”
I asked him what the second half of my job was going to be. I wanted to do more.
Sergeant Brill stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and then picked up the butt and slipped it into his pocket. “The second half of the job is my daughter, Mr. Fergus.”
“Sir?” Behind us, the sprinklers started up, ticking graceful arcs of water over the lawn.
“My daughter, Lexington. Lex. She was born with her kidneys gummed up. The last few years she’s started having health problems, real ones. I don’t want to get into it. Believe me, it’s heart-breaking stuff. You know what dialysis is? That’s the second half of your job. To drive her up to the hospital in Albany three times a week to get her blood cleaned.”
Take the girl to get her blood cleaned. I liked the way that sounded. It had a vaguely heroic quality to it, and I began to forget my disappointment over not getting to work with the cadets.
“Hey, be nice to her,” he said, looking down at his boots. “All this dialysis stuff depresses the hell out of her. It’s made her into an introvert. She’s shy—I mean, she doesn’t have any friends.”
“When do I start?” I said.
“Hell, today,” said Sergeant Brill. “Right now.”
At eleven o’clock that morning, after filling out forms in the office, I set out with Lexington in one of the camp’s vans. How my life had changed since dawn! I now had on a uniform: a tan shirt with little buttoned flaps on the shoulders, tan army pants, and shiny black boots. I felt like playing my new horn right there in the van, felt like shouting over my shoulder to Lexington that she shouldn’t worry because she was in good hands, but she gave no sign of even noticing me; she sat in the back row with her head leaned against the window.
Though Lexington was twenty-one, she looked about four years younger. She was small, hardly taller than five feet, and while she had hips and breasts, there was still a newness, an awkwardness really, to the curves and flarings of her body. She had dark kinky hair with miniature curls, and that first day in the bus she wore Chap Stick with flecks of sparkle in it. The steroids she took made her face overly plump, but in an appealing, pillowy way. Whether Lex had actually stopped aging because of her kidney problems or was simply a late bloomer, I couldn’t tell, but there was something both weary and innocent in her face that I found myself immediately drawn to.
Another drill sergeant, a black man named Williams, rode in the passenger seat. He wore tight, wire-rim glasses, and had neatly trimmed his mustache to look like a perfect third eyebrow beneath his nose. Williams was along to make sure I did my job.
“So, where are you from?” he said as we passed a stand where people sold pumpkins and bunches of fresh corn.
“I’m from all over,” I said. “I played the trumpet for a long time. I was
“Cool beans,” he said. We drove a while longer and Williams told me about his childhood, growing up “on the streets,” how hard it had been. The landscape was beautiful. Oak and birch and poplar trees. The sun flashing through the branches. Lex looked so pretty in back. Suddenly Williams paused and turned to me.
“What’s that noise?” he said. “Do you hear a whistling?”
“What noise?” I said, though I knew very well what noise.
“I think…It’s coming from you. From your face.”
“Oh, that. Some of the bones behind my nose are a little out of place. The wind can get in there sometimes.”
Williams scrutinized my face. “Do you box?”
