A Fistful of Fig Newtons (13 page)

That night, back in our snug cabin, covered with iodine and Band-Aids, Schwartz sidled up to Skunkie and asked him where he had found it.

“In the Longlodge, of course, in the case where it’s kept on display all year round. It was simple deduction that they’d try to mislead us into believing the tomahawk was buried somewhere in the woods, rather than right here in camp in plain sight of everyone. The clues led me straight to it. If any of you had ever bothered to read Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ …”

We didn’t know whether to put him on our shoulders or throw him into the lake.

The next Saturday, our last morning in camp, was bright with golden sunshine, turning the lake into a billion flashing diamonds. After our last breakfast, the Chipmunks and Beavers, in two platoons, assembled on the tennis court. Colonel Bullard addressed us:

“You Chipmunks have come through magnificently. And now for the moment we have all awaited. There have been good times and difficult times, but we have come through it with clean
bodies, clean minds, and stout hearts. I now pronounce you, with the power vested in me by the Great Spirit of Chungacong, full and honored members of the Sacred Clan of BEAVERS.”

The ex-Chipmunks cheered and, in the hallowed tradition of Nobba-WaWa-Nockee, flung our hated Chipmunk caps into the air. A storm of green beanies rose over the tennis court.

A moment later I zipped up my crisp new blue Beaver jacket with its golden emblem bright over my heart. We sauntered back toward Mole Lodge, over the gravel path, past the administration building. We had three hours to kill until the buses picked us up and took us back to civilization. There they came now, wheezing up the rutted road. I saw a row of pale, staring faces all wearing bright new green Chipmunk beanies. Casually, we swaggered past the rec hall. Someone nudged me.

“Lookit that buncha babies.” It was my fellow Beaver, Jake Brannigan.

“How ’bout that short little twerp?” I barked cruelly. “Let’s throw him in the crapper.”

“Nah,” Jake answered, spitting between his teeth. “That’s too good for the little bastard. How ’bout a cow flop in his soup?”

“Not bad, Jake,” I answered, as we set out for the nearest meadow. “These kids are gettin’ worse every year.”

“Let’s throw him in the crapper!”

“…  a cow flop in his soup.”

How’s that for Utopia, gang? Did you notice that the little buggers immediately began torturing the incoming rookies just as they had been harassed in their day?

True, true, the minute one generation discovers the first wrinkle, it relentlessly attacks the upcoming generation as being callow, lacking in morals of any sort, hopelessly dumb. Going back to the days when men squatted in caves, eating clams, it has been so. I can just see a barrel-chested Neanderthal glaring across his flickering fire at a skulking teen-age Neanderthal and grunting:

“Get off your lazy ass. You never do anything around the cave. You kids don’t know what it was like when I was your age. Why, we …”

The line in my lane of the tunnel began to move again, slowly, tentatively. I laughed out loud, picturing the scene in the cave. I could almost smell the charred bones of elk, the same dampness of this god damned tunnel
.

I stuck my head out of the window and yelled at the next generation, ahead in their Charger
.

“Move it, you dumb boobs. Get your thumbs out!” I was carrying on an ancient tradition
.

We ground to a halt. My mind searched for another idea to worry, to play with. Boredom was setting in. I examined the interior of my car minutely. The headliner, the sun visor, my little world of gauges and locked doors, sealed in a bathysphere under the mysterious waters. How many hours of my life had I spent alone in this metal cocoon, my only companion a fevered imagination?

“Marcel Proust, the great French Impressionist writer, had a cork-lined room built so that he could write in absolute concentration. This cork-lined room cut out all sounds from the outside world so that he could concentrate and relive his past, which he put into his finely detailed works.”

The pasty-faced TV professor cleared his throat nervously and blinked at the camera with a noticeably spasmodic ticlike wink. He cleared his throat again, and continued–his voice crackly like dry onionskin paper that’s been left in the sun too long.

“On the other hand, Balzac found it necessary to have heavy curtains hung over the windows and doors of his study. He wrote late at night, by the light of a candle. He said he had to do this to concentrate, to get away from the world.”

The Prof glanced frantically off to someone or something to his right, just out of camera range. Apparently, he was getting a cue. I leaned forward sleepily. It isn’t often I see “Morning Classics,” an educational college course–type program that comes on the screen either so late or so early–depending on your point of view–that hardly anybody ever sees it, except maybe the professor’s
wife and a few video freaks who see everything, including the test patterns.

“Er …” he stammered in confusion.

“Er … that is, I’ll be back tomorrow with …”

He was abruptly cut off the screen and replaced with a sixty-second plug for Girl Scout cookies. Poor Prof, I thought, he just ain’t used to picking up his cues. So the whole point, if he had any, of his lecture went down the drain with the Girl Scout cookies and the morning news, which replaced him.

I fixed some instant coffee and as dawn was breaking somewhere out over the dark Atlantic I got to thinking of old Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room and Balzac scratching away with a quill pen with all those curtains hanging around him, at two in the morning. I sipped a bit of the lukewarm coffee and thought maybe I ought to build a cork-lined room, or hang black curtains over the window like those old-time writers did. I poured more coffee, and then it hit me–

Of course! I do have the equivalent of a cork-lined, black-curtain-draped concentration chamber, cut off from the rest of the world. My car!

I wonder how many guys there are in this world who actually find that the only time in the whole hectic day when they are away from phone calls, mysterious visitations, constant meetings, endless talks, are those few daily private times that they spend absolutely alone in their cars. A lone driver has no family, no job, no age–he is just an individual bit of human protoplasm humming through space. The mind drifts like some rudderless sailboat over the murky sea of consciousness. One part of you expertly, using some inbuilt secret mind-computer, steers the machine, calculating accurately all the changing vectors of speed, light, other traffic, road conditions, that go to make up fast driving. In fact, after you’ve put in enough hours behind the wheel under all kinds of conditions, you never even think about it any more. You just do it. All the while, that other part of your mind drifts around dreamily, dredging up wild
thoughts, long-forgotten memories, and fragments of old disappointments. Proust had his cork-lined room; I have my vinyl-lined GT.

Take the other day. I’m battling it out with all the other sweating lonesome travelers on Jersey’s Route 22, which like all the Route 22s of America has a surreal landscape which makes anything by Salvador Dali look like Norman Rockwell: Dairy Queens, McDonald’s, instant seat cover palaces, a pizza joint that calls itself the Leaning Tower of Pizza that actually does lean, a gas station which for some reason has a forty-foot-high plastic North Woodsman swinging a motor-driven ax twenty-four hours a day, his face the color of an overripe watermelon, Gino’s, Colonel Sanders, the works, all laced together with an unbelievable spiderweb of high tension wires, phone wires, wire wires, and miles of neon tubing. My mind is just idling away at maybe one-tenth throttle, thinking of nothing, when I glance up and see in my rearview mirror that one of Jersey’s folk artists has zeroed in on me.

Jersey natives have made a fine creative art form of tailgating. I could see in the mirror that I was in the clutches of a real master. I speeded up. He clung to my rear deck like a shadow. I dodged around a bus, figuring I’d scrape him off like a barnacle. No way. I shifted lanes. He moved with me like Earl Campbell following a blocker. He edged closer and closer to my rear bumper. We were hurtling along Route 22 at the usual cruise speed of that 55 mph limit artery–75 plus. I slowed up, figuring that no true tailgater ever resists an opportunity to pass anything. There are guys who look upon all traffic as an endless obstacle to be passed. This is your average tailgater.

He wasn’t buying it. I slowed up; he slowed up. I quickly switched lanes and made a fast feint toward the asphalt parking lot of a Carvel ice cream joint, figuring he’d get mouse-trapped into thinking I was stopping by for a quick Banana Boat. He clung to my rear deck like a Band-Aid. He was good, in fact, one of the best I’d ever seen. He was so close now that his face filled my entire
rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see the hood or the grille of his car. I noticed that he had nicked himself while shaving. There was a piece of toilet paper plastered on his steel-blue chin. He was also eating a Big Mac casually as we screamed along, locked in mortal combat.

Suddenly I became aware that something was blotting out the gray Jersey sky inches from my own grille. I had fallen for the oldest tailgater trick in the book. He had maneuvered me behind a giant flatbed truck, and there was no escape. I darted tentatively to my left, hoping to pass. The tailgater hemmed me in. I tried the right. No way. A Greyhound bus was in that lane. Inches separating us, we whistled along. My mind, operating full-bore, like Proust’s or Balzac’s, flashed visions of shattering glass, screaming metal, and I wondered briefly whether there was anything to this heaven and hell business.

The flatbed was now four or five feet ahead of my front bumper. Its load towered above me for what looked like two or three stories. I began to enjoy the scene. I could see the truck driver’s face, pale and harassed, looking at me in his rearview mirror. He was muttering. A row of discount shoe stores flashed by us in a blur. I was so close to the flatbed that I began to examine its load minutely. My God, I thought, Proust never came up with a neater bit of irony in his life.

The load, stacked twenty-deep, consisted of a giant pile of flattened automobiles, each one maybe eight inches thick, crushed
like so many sardine cans under a cosmic steam roller. I had a brief image of me and my car joining them and looking exactly like all the rest. The tailgater behind me was now impassively sucking at what looked like a sixty-four-ounce family-size bottle of Pepsi.

It was then that my mind really took off. Here we were, sealed in our own little noisy, smelly projectiles, hurtling over the landscape toward … what? I could see the crushed cars ahead of me creaking and groaning as if in mortal fear of the fiery fate that lay ahead for them in some distant foreign blast furnace. My God, I thought, they still have their paint on.

I began to recognize the makes. There was a seven-inch-high ’57 Mercury, robin’s egg blue. Above it, a ’61 Plymouth Fury, thinner than a blueberry pancake at a cut-rate diner. It was sand beige. Then came a sad, peeling, forest green Nash Ambassador of indeterminate year. My mind flashed a brief headline on its beaded screen: Unknown Driver Killed By ’51 Studebaker. Like a news story flashed in light bulbs that march around the tops of Times Square buildings, the story went on:

The news item disappeared from my mind as the three of us howled through an overpass that echoed and boomed to the roar of the traffic. I peered ahead at the crushed cars. Tattered bumper stickers still clung to the hulks, a veritable cross section of ancient causes: LBJ–ALL THE WAY, I LIKE IKE, IMPEACH EARL WARREN, BAN THE BOMB, FREE THE PUEBLO.