Once the newcomers had filed down the path into the woods to put their bags away in the tents, one of the counselors rang the evening activities bell. “We’ll have introductions at campfire,” she announced. “Be friendly!”
We campers simply looked at one another. With the Thunderbirds gone from the clearing, a powerful current of noise and energy had suddenly been shut off. Bats flitted across the darkening sky, and a breeze from the lake carried a smell of damp leaf mold. While the others were lining up, I went over to inspect a far corner of the dining hall, where I’d seen a group of the Thunderbirds clustering. There, carved deeply into the green paint, was a miniature version of the same long-stemmed, weirdly elegant graffiti that had covered the school bus, and that I had seen spray-painted on decrepit city buildings. It read: T-BIRDZ RULE.
Marvin Jones was the leader of the Thunderbirds. At the get-acquainted campfire, it was his command that galvanized his troops into standing up and stepping forward, one by one, to give their names. (“L.T.” “LaWanda.” “Doze.” “Brother Willy.”) He himself stood in the firelight with a crazy tremor running through his body, wearing a rubber-lipped showman’s smirk, like a black Mick Jagger. (“Stretch.” “Chewy.” “Belinda.” “Guy.”) In the bright circle of hot moving light that baked our faces and knees and left our backs chilled with the damp breath of the big pine grove behind us, we campers studied the Thunderbirds and they studied us. Both groups had the same peculiar expression: not hostility, but a wary reservation of judgment. As bits of ash danced like a swarm of glowing insects in the draft of the fire—a big log-cabin fire, built specially for the occasion by the Wood Crafts class—Ned Woolworth, his cheerful freckled wife, Hannah, and the rest of the staff guided us all through a number of cheers and folk songs.
Most of the counselors looked eager and uneasy. The near-instantaneous grapevine among the campers had already reported that the Thunderbirds had got into trouble immediately after their arrival, as they walked down the path to the boys’ tents. Marvin Jones and two others had shinnied up a tall, skinny tree—one of the birches unusual in that area, and beloved by the Nature counselors—swinging on it and pulling it down with their combined weight until it bent over and seemed likely to break. When one of the counselors asked them to stop, Marvin Jones, laughing crazily and hanging on to the birch, responded, “This is the woods, man! Ain’t no law against climbing no tree in the woods!”
That night the Thunderbird girls who had been assigned to share our tent refused to undress until the light was turned out. There were three of them: a pair of tiny, frail-boned sisters named Cookie and June, who had large almond-shaped eyes, hair done identically in an elaborately braided puff over each ear, and small breasts in sharp brassieres that stuck out like pointed Dixie cups through the clinging nylon of their blouses; and Belinda, a stocky girl who looked twenty years old and had a slight squint, straightened hair bleached a bright orange-red in the front, and a loud, unbridled tongue—I had heard Belinda laughing and cursing above the others when they got off the bus. She was subdued now, as were Cookie and June, the three of them sitting bolt upright on the tightly stretched army blankets and sheets of the cots that had been set up for them, muttering replies to the kindly chitchat of our counselor, Molly. Molly was from Jamaica, a student with an anxious plump face and a delightful habit of shaking her head at her campers and exclaiming, “Girls, you are becoming hardened in your ways!”
The three Thunderbird girls responded to Molly with a sudden opacity of gaze, glances among themselves, and abrupt fits of shy giggling. We campers were stricken with shyness ourselves: there was none of our usual roughhousing or bedtime ballets in our underwear, or wisecracking about Patty Haas’s ugly boyfriend—a standing joke. Instead we undressed quickly in our bunks, turning away from each other, painfully conscious of the contrast between the elaborately equipped trunks from which we drew our pajamas and the small vinyl bags that our guests had brought. Once Molly had turned off the single yellow bulb that illuminated the tent and had strolled off up the path to a late-night staff meeting at the rec hall, the tent was unnaturally silent.
I arranged myself on my lumpy top bunk as I always did—with the sheet over my head to keep off mosquitoes—and breathed in the scent of slightly mildewed canvas from the rolled sides of the tent. From the bunk beneath me, Chen-cheu, a sound and instant sleeper, gave an adenoidal snore, and I could hear little clicks and rustlings that meant that the Thunderbird girls were undressing. There was a cool breeze blowing with a steady rushing sound in the trees, and I wondered what the girls from the city were thinking as they listened, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to the noises of the wild night. Never had I been so aware of the woods as a living place around me: over the stubborn saw of the crickets, I heard two hoots from a white-faced owl who lived in a tree near our tent, and a gradually intensifying gray light in the direction of the lake meant the moon was rising. In my mind the moon mingled with the yellow school bus that had brought the Thunderbirds, and
