“Cookie—Cookie—are you up? I hear a noise.”
There was a soft creak as Cookie got up and crept over to her sister’s cot. I leaned my head out slightly from my bunk and in the dim moonlight caught a glimpse of the tiny girl, her hair greased and braided for the night, dressed in her underwear. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that perhaps the Thunderbird girls didn’t have pajamas. “Hush, girl,” hissed Cookie to her sister, sitting lightly down on the cot. “Hush up! You want these bitches to hear you?”
“But there’s a noise,” whimpered June.
“Hush up, girl. It’s just trees, that’s all. Just trees.”
There was silence, and when after a few minutes I edged my head out of the bunk to have another look, I saw that Cookie had lain down on her sister’s cot and that the two girls were sleeping with their heads close together on the pillow.
At breakfast Ned Woolworth announced to a chorus of groans from the campers that instead of swimming or canoeing or tennis, we would divide up into small groups for what he called “rap sessions.” My group included Ellen; Jackie Murdock, a camper notorious throughout Grayfeather for his prolonged belches at mealtimes; a plump, round-faced Thunderbird named Ricky; and a skinnier Thunderbird named Les, who wore a peculiar rust-colored bowler hat. There was also Marvin Jones, the Thunderbird leader, wearing an army fatigue jacket open to show his gleaming bronze chest; he sat slumped, wiggling his feet, on his face an expression of exaggerated forbearance.
The six of us, with a counselor, met in a grove of pin oaks near the chapel. It was one of those clear, dry, autumnal days that occasionally leap ahead of their time into the middle of August. The sky was a sharp blue, crisp moving shadows checkered the ground, and in the eyes of all of the kids sitting there was a skittish, inattentive look, as if they might dash off suddenly into the breezy woods.
A green acorn plopped down near Ricky, the plump Thunderbird sitting beside Ellen. “Wha’s that?” he asked her, pointing.
“That’s an acorn,” said Ellen scornfully, tossing back her red hair. “Didn’t you ever see an acorn before?”
“No, Sweet Thighs,” said Ricky, giving her a lascivious, cherubic smile that showed a broken front tooth. He picked up the acorn and put it carefully into his pocket.
The counselor in charge clapped her hands. She was a diving coach with a pugnacious sunburnt face and a blunt, bossy way of talking. “This morning we’re going to discuss friendship,” she said. “We all have friends, so let’s talk about them—who they are, and what they mean to us—”
“I don’t have friends,” interrupted Marvin Jones.
“What?” said the counselor.
“I said I don’t have friends,” said Marvin Jones, looking at her seriously, the platinum streak in his hair glittering in the sunlight through the treetops. “Yeah, that’s right, miss. I mean, shit—’scuse me, miss—I got my men. Spike is my man. Ricky is my man, and J.T., that dude with the sunglasses and the ‘Free Africa’ t-shirt, he’s my main man. I mean, them dudes will cut for me. But they don’t be no friends. And then we got the Thunderbird Queens—I mean our ladies.”
“They’re not your friends, of course,” said the counselor acidly.
“No, like I said, we don’t have no friends. We got enemies, though: the Twelfth and Diamond Street gang. You ever hear of them?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s good, ’cause the T-birds are on top. Wait a minute—I’ll show you something.”
He gave a curt, imperious nod to Ricky and the other Thunderbird beside him, and an odd tension seemed to seize all three of them. The woods seemed very quiet for a minute. All at once, synchronized, they stood up, snapping their fingers. In high, plaintive voices they broke into words and rhythms that were not quite a song, not quite a chant.
“What the word / Thunderbird…”
It was a strange mixture: a bit of Motown, a bit of the interlocking verses all kids use to choose sides for games, a bit of the bouncy silliness of football and basketball cheers, all bound together quite naturally with swearwords—words that we Grayfeather campers all knew and used enthusiastically among ourselves, in spite of what parents and teachers and counselors had to say. The Thunderbird song could have been ridiculous, but instead it was thrilling, carrying with it, to those of us who sat listening, all the resonance of a dangerous young life in the city. It was clear that the song was not intended as an entertainment for us, but was presented as a kind of credential, like the letters scratched into the paint of the rec hall.
Ellen and I punched each other excitedly in the ribs and tried to remember every word. When the song was finished, Marvin Jones and the other two Thunderbirds flopped down abruptly at the base of a tree, their faces full of restrained pride.
“That was great, fellows,” said the counselor. She was trying to seem cordial, but it was clear that she was uncomfortable, almost angry, about what had just happened. “Let’s see if you can do a little more talking now, so that we can get to know you.”
Marvin Jones picked up a twig from the ground and tapped the toes of his sneakers with it—one, two, three. “Lady, you just got to know us,” he said.
Down at the lake that afternoon, Jimmy Terkel, the boating counselor, gave a short briefing on canoeing to an assembled group of campers and Thunderbirds. Terkel was a dark, soft-spoken young man who loved the little irregular lake, with its cedar water and clustering lilies; all summer he had made canoeing into an austere rite, embarking on solitary voyages at dawn or sunset, an angular silhouette at the far corner of
