City Boy (40 page)

“How 'bout me, Uncle Sandy?” he said at last.

“Why, you really have nothing to do, Herb, except be boss—just like the Skipper. Cliff does all the work,” said the head counselor with a grin at his own wit. He took a pair of large green sun glasses and Mr. Gauss's feather headdress from the shelf. “Put these on. Then just walk around, looking important. All right, Cliff, it's ten o'clock. Take over.”

The head counselor and his successor went outside. Herbie threw aside his costume and lay on the cot face upward. The sun fell in a flecked orange square on the canvas above his eyes. The air was hot in the tent. He heard the familiar three blasts of the whistle that summoned the bunks into two lines along Company Street, the running of feet on gravel, the slamming of many doors, and a thousand squeals and yelps of mirth as the campers saw the counselors in their silly boys' clothes. The entire joke seemed flat and stale to the Skipper-for-a-Day. He put his hand to his eyes and involuntarily moaned. He was a wretch who had stolen money from his own father, and could never pay it back.

“All right, fellows!” he heard Cliff shout. “Now I want you to show some real camp spirit when you greet Uncle Gus—I mean the Skipper. Here he comes now—our own dear Skipper.”

Herbie rose heavily and dashed the tears from his face. He donned the glasses and the feather headdress as he walked to the entrance of the tent. He contorted his body so that he jutted to a remarkable extent before and behind. Then he stepped out into the sunshine, and waddled majestically down Company Street, holding up the corners of his mouth in a fixed smile with two forefingers, and pointing his feet outward like a duck's.

The campers screamed and danced, and so did the counselors. Several of them fell to the ground and rolled around, giggling. Uncle Sandy, standing among the boys of Bunk Thirteen, maintained a straight face for perhaps ten seconds, then burst out in helpless bellow after bellow which touched off a perfect riot of hilarity. Herbie waggled his behind impassively as he strolled between the lines, nodding his head here and there. When he reached the end of the street he vanished in the direction of the lake, leaving the camp still in disorderly convulsions of mirth.

He was not seen again that merry morning, for he spent it lying on a flat rock near the shore, hidden by underbrush. A lonesome, quiet situation, you might say, yet he had plenty of company. Misery sat at the fat boy's right hand, and Shame at the left; and they made the morning mighty lively for Herbie between them.

S
o the day of Herbie's greatest success turned into the bitterest of his young life, because the fruit of triumph had a rotten core. Probably he should have hardened his heart and enjoyed himself, but he could not. Remorse ate him. To a better judge of crime—let us say, a policeman—this remorse might have seemed some days late in setting about its gnawing, but to Herbie his offense had been no offense until Mr. Gauss deprived him of the means to repay with interest the “borrowed” money.

Now, here the boy showed himself of pretty good mettle, for he wasted little breath blaming the camp owner, but took the disaster on his own conscience. A thousand weaklings, of either sex and all ages, will commit a misdeed which they plan to make up for later. Then if someone happens to prevent them from covering, they will throw all the blame for the original offense on that someone, and hold themselves virtuous. If you have not seen this happen yet, watch the feeble ones around you today and tomorrow. Herbie digested the thought of his own wickedness all during Campers' Day, and had a colicky time of it, and never sought the relief of saying “It's really Gauss's fault.”

Herbie and Cliff were eating lunch in grandeur at the head counselor's table. They still wore their costumes. Herbie's many-colored feather headdress provided a gay touch to the bleak dining hall.

“What are we gonna do during rest hour?” said Herbie to his cousin.

“Don't we have to stay in our bunks, same as always?” said Cliff.

“What, and us the bosses of the camp? Cliff, you don't use your head sometimes.”

The boys both gloated over the prospect of not being compelled to spend the hour after lunch on their cots in silence with shoes and stockings off.

“Hey, know what, Herb?” Cliff suddenly smiled. “Let's go up the hill an' say good-by to Elmer Bean an' Clever Sam. We won't hardly get to see 'em tomorrow, everything'll be so rushed goin' to the train.”

“Good,” said Herbie. “Why don't we go right now? I ain't hungry.”

A tumult of whistles, jeers, and flirtatious calls distracted them. Lennie, his face red, was sidling into the dining room in his white nurse's cap and gown. Baseball sneakers and stockings completed his costume and added to its foolishness. He was looking here and there, trying to smile and flinging an occasional answer to the jibes.

Herbie said, “Where the heck has he been, comin' in so late?”

“Aw, the poor guy's been hidin'. He probably didn't even hear the bugle,” said Cliff.

Lennie sat at the table of Bunk Thirteen, and the din ebbed. In his case the exchange of identity was incomplete. The camp nurse was not required to become a boy. But dressing up a well-known athlete in feminine garb was too rich a comic idea to be sacrificed for a point of logic, and the mock nurse was always a feature of the day. Lennie was an angry, slow-witted butt, therefore an exceptionally good one. After being heavily badgered for an hour he had disappeared, not to be seen until lunch time.

Herbie and Cliff quitted their table of honor and walked through the huge bare wooden hall to the door—and behold, there was no commotion, nobody cracked jokes, and scarcely any campers turned away from the important business of stuffing Spanish omelet into their mouths. Herbie had wisely ceased his waddling after the first great hit; by now it would have been a wearisome jest. Cliff, as Uncle Sandy, had at no time caused much amusement. Lennie had made a sensation where the cousins went unnoticed, for the reason that impersonation is only entertaining when someone is degraded by it.

The boys were halfway up the hill when they met Elmer Bean rattling down with three enormous coarse cloth bags piled in a wheelbarrow. Cliff greeted him with, “Hi, Elmer! Last laundry, huh?”

“Last everythin', fellers. This time tomorrer yer free men. This time a week from now I am.” The handy man braced himself, brought the plunging wheelbarrow to a stop, and leaned against one of the bags. “You guys are the big shots o' the camp, huh?”

“Thanks to you,” said Herbie.

“Herb, there's somethin' I wish you'd do fer me on yer twenty-first birthday.”

“What, Elmer?”

“Write an' tell me where you guys got that fifty bucks.”

Herbie looked sick all at once. Cliff quickly said, “Clever Sam up in the stable, Elmer?”

“He was when I last saw him. Gonna kiss 'im good-by?”

Cliff smiled bashfully.

“Hey, Elmer,” said Herbie, “how 'bout us guys writin' to you? Will you write back?”

The handy man laughed. He looked around at the panorama of lake and bungalows, at the trees with creepers along their trunks already flaming in premature autumn colors, and at the two grotesquely dressed boys. The feathers of Herbie's headdress wagged in a breeze that had turned chilly. Elmer felt an impulse of pity for the small fat boy, whom he was sure he would never see after tomorrow, and whom he regarded as such an odd, self-tormenting mixture of good and bad.

“I tell yer, Herb,” he said, “I been shipmates with guys that I swore I'd write to regular when I got transferred, see? My first coupla years I did write, too, maybe one or two times, but it wasn't no good. You think a letter's gonna be somethin', see, but it ain't nothin'. You were shipmates once, and now yer on other ships an' it's all different. I dunno why.”

“I just thought maybe a letter just once in a long while,” persisted the boy. “You know, after all we done on the Ride together an' all—”

“Why, sure, Herb, write if you feel like it.” The handy man hesitated a moment, then blurted, “Don't be surprised if you git an answer that looks like you wrote it yourself in the fifth grade. I don't write such a hell of a lot, Herb.”

“I'll write, too, Elmer,” said Cliff.

Both boys looked intensely unhappy.

“Look, fellers,” said the handy man, “don't let old Gauss work on yer feelin's next year, see? You know—remember good old Elmer, remember good old this, good old that? I sure would like to see you again, an' I'll be here too, like as not, 'cause I ain't good fer much else, but don't come back, fellers. What's better than bein' free? Yer free when you git outta school, free fer a whole summer, see, and old Gauss gets you marchin' an' workin' again. And you sing them songs, an' you git choked up an' you think you love camp. I know all about them songs. In the Navy we called 'em shippin'-over music. They played 'em whenever the recruitin' officer come to sign us up fer another hitch. I got all the orders an' salutin' an' bugles I ever want in the Navy. And git this straight, I'm
proud
I was a sailor—but they paid me, see, and what's more important I was doin' somethin'. I was on a ship to defend the country. I wasn't fattenin' up no old turkey like Gauss. Don't come back, guys. I like you both swell. Cliff, yer O.K., yer a real guy.” He took the boy's hand and shook it. “Herb—I dunno what to tell you, Herb. You might be a very big guy someday, an' then again I dunno. Herb, is yer father alive?”

Herbie nodded. The question touched off a storm of emotion, and he dared not speak.

“Listen, feller, do what yer father tells you, see? In a coupla years yer gonna start thinkin' he's all wet about everything. Maybe you do now. Well, I'm tellin' you, Herb, do whatever yer father says. A guy like you needs his pa.”

The handy man patted Herbie's shoulder. Then he bent and picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow.

“We had fun, didn't we, guys? There ain't never been nothin' like Herbie's Ride in this camp, and there ain't never gonna be again. It took the three of us, see, an' Herbie bein' jealous over Lucille, an' all. Them things only happen once.” He started to wheel away his burden, and said over his shoulder, “Sure, write to me here at Panksville. Only like I say, don't mind none about the way I spell an' write. I ain't nothin' but a country boy.”

He went off down the hill, leaning backward to keep the wheel-barrow from running away, his yellow hair flying.

The boys walked to the stable in silence. As they came to the door Cliff said, “Clever Sam must be asleep. Can't hear him movin' at all.” The boys went inside and, to their astonishment, found the stall empty.

“Maybe he's outside eatin' grass,” Herbie suggested.

“Elmer said he was in here,” Cliff said anxiously, but he went outside and looked in the practice ring. The horse was not there, nor anywhere in sight.

“Hey, Herbie, whaddya suppose has happened to him?”

“I dunno. Maybe he wandered off down the road.”

“Clever Sam don't wander. He likes the barn better'n any place. Listen, there's somethin' wrong. Let's go down and tell Elmer.”

The boys descended the hill at a run. With each step they bounded twice as far as they would have on level ground, and felt fleet as stags. Pounding around the corner of a bungalow into Company Street they came to a quick halt, for there was Clever Sam in the middle of the gravel path, surrounded by laughing, chattering boys. He was walking slowly, his head hanging in a woebegone way, the reins dragging from his bridle, and on his side there was whitewashed in crude letters, “HERBIE THE SISSY.”

“Come on, Herb,” exclaimed Cliff. He plunged into the crowd, followed by his cousin, and elbowed his way to the horse. He put his arm around Clever Sam's neck, saying, “Whoa, boy. What're they doin' to you? O.K., boy.”

Hearing Cliff's voice, the animal raised his head, neighed, and nuzzled against him. Herbie, coming up to Clever Sam, saw that his skin had been whitewashed on his other side too, with the words, “SKIPPER GARBAGE.”

The laughter and jokes subsided. A few boys sneaked away from the fringe of the group into bungalows. Curious noses pressed against screens up and down the street.

“O.K.,” said Cliff to the crowd. “Who done it?”

“Not me.” “I don't know.” “I just got here.” “The horse just come walkin' along.” These and answers like them came in a chorus. But the boys looked at each other with knowing smiles. Uncle Sandy appeared in the doorway of Bunk Twelve, still dressed as Cliff. He observed the scene and said nothing. Cliff glanced hesitantly at the head counselor, then at the crowd.

“First I'm gonna take care o' this poor horse, then I'll come back an' find out who done it.”

He was leading the horse to the road up the hill, and was just passing Bunk Thirteen. Lennie stepped out of the doorway, picked up the edges of his white nurse's skirt, and made a clumsy curtsy.

“Why, Mr. Head Counselor, is there somethin' the matter?” he said in effeminate tones.

Herbie, walking beside his cousin, whispered, “Lookit his left arm, Cliff.”

Cliff saw a streak of whitewash running from the wrist to the elbow. Lennie noticed where his eyes were directed and rubbed his right hand along the streak, smiling insolently at the other boy.

“O.K., Lennie, you done it, huh?” said Cliff.