19
“Fifty cents for a hand on her crotch.”
Krantz was joking with Breavman about selling Anne to him piece by piece. Breavman didn’t like the joke but he laughed.
“An almost unused nipple for three bits?”
Oh, Krantz.
They had quarrelled over Breavman’s treatment of Martin. Breavman had categorically refused to enjoin the boy to participate in group activities. He had put his job on the line.
“You know we can’t start looking for replacements at this point in the season.”
“In that case you’ll have to let me handle him my own way.”
“I’m not telling you to force him into activities, but I swear you encourage him in the other direction.”
“I enjoy his madness. He enjoys his madness. He’s the only free person I’ve ever met. Nothing that anybody else does is as important as what he does.”
“You’re talking a lot of nonsense, Breavman.”
“Probably.”
Then Breavman had decided he couldn’t deliver a sermon to the camp on Saturday morning when his turn came around. He had nothing to say to anyone.
Krantz looked at him squarely.
“You made a mistake, coming up here, didn’t you?”
“And you made one asking me. We both wanted to prove different things. So now you know you’re your own man, Krantz.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I know.”
It was a moment, this true meeting, and Breavman didn’t try to stretch it into a guarantee. He had trained himself to delight in the fraction. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”
“Of course you know that you’re identifying with Martin and are only excluding yourself when you allow him to separate himself from the group.”
“Not that jargon, Krantz, please.”
“I remember everything, Breavman. But I can’t live in it.”
“Good.”
Therefore Breavman was obliged to laugh when Anne joined them and Krantz said, “Buttocks are going very cheap.”
20
In the evening he stayed motionless on the mess hall balcony. Krantz was about to put a record on the PA.
“Hey, Anne, you want Mozart, the Forty-ninth?” he shouted. She ran towards him.
Breavman saw clover in the grass, a discovery, and mist drifting across the tops of the low mountains, like the fade in a photo. Ripples on the water moving in the same direction as the mist, from black into silver into black.
He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t know whether he was at peace or paralysed.
Steve, the Hungarian tractor driver, passed below the balcony, picking a white flower from a bush. They were levelling out some land for another playing field, filling in a marsh.
The flute-bird had a needle in its whistle. A broken door down the hill beside the thick-bottomed pines.
“London Bridge is falling down
falling down
falling down”
sang a file of children.
Down the pine-needled path stood Martin, motionless as Breavman, his arm stretched out in a Fascist salute, his sleeve rolled up.
He was waiting for mosquitoes to land.
Martin had a new obsession. He elected himself to be the Scourge of Mosquitoes, counting them as he killed them. There was nothing frantic about his technique. He extended his arm and invited them. When one landed, wham! up came the other hand. “I hate you,” he told each one individually, and noted the statistic.
Martin saw his counsellor standing on the balcony.
“A hundred and eighty,” he called up as greeting.
Mozart came loud over the PA, sewing together everything that Breavman observed. It wove, it married the two figures bending over the records, whatever the music touched, child trapped in London Bridge, mountain-top dissolving in mist, empty swing rocking like a pendulum, the row of glistening red canoes, the players clustered underneath the basket, leaping for the ball like a stroboscopic photo of a splashing drop of water — whatever it touched was frozen in an immense tapestry. He was in it, a figure by a railing.
21
Since his mission against the mosquitoes had begun, Martin’s enjoyment percentages soared. All the days were up around 98 per cent. The other boys delighted in him and made him the ornament of the bunk, to be shown off to visitors and wondered at. Martin remained an innocent performer. He spent most afternoons down at the marsh where the tractors were preparing new fields to run on. His arm was swollen with bites. Breavman applied calamine.
On his next day off Breavman took a canoe down the lake. Red-wing blackbirds rose and plunged into the reeds. He ripped open a stalk of a waterlily. It was veined with purple foam.
The lake was glass-calm. He could make out sounds of camp from time to time, the PA announcing General Swim”; recorded music filtered through the forest and crept over the water.
He went down the creek as far as he could before sandbars stopped him. The only indication of current was the leaning underwater weeds. Clams black and thickly coated with mud — an unclean food. A snap of water and the green stretched-out body of a frog zoomed under the canoe. The low sun was blinding. As he paddled back to his camp-site it turned the paddle gold.
He built a fire, spread out his sleeping bag in the moss, and prepared to watch the sky.
The sun is always part of the sky, but the moon is a splendid and remote stranger. The moon. Your eye keeps coming back to it as it would do to a beautiful woman in a restaurant. He thought about Shell. The same moment he believed he had the confidence to live alone he believed he could live with Shell.
The mist was riding slowly on the reflection of birch trees; now it was piled like a snowdrift.
Four hours later he awakened with a start and grabbed his axe.
“It’s Martin Stark,” said Martin.
The fire was still giving some light, but not enough. He shone his flash in the boy’s face. One cheek had been badly scratched by branches but the boy grinned widely.
“What’s your favourite store?”
“What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?
“What’s your favourite store?”
Breavman wrapped the sleeping bag around the boy and ruffled
