City Boy (18 page)

“All right, Bunk Sixteen, I can take a joke,” he said for all the car to hear. “But there are a lot of new boys here who don't know what's right and what's wrong. If you fellows want to spend the first two weeks without senior privileges I'm perfectly agreeable. Just remember, once you're on this train you aren't behind your mama's skirts any more. You're in Camp Manitou. If you can't show real camp spirit, then keep your faces shut.”

As Uncle Sandy walked back to the front of the car in a heavy silence, Herbie scanned the group of older boys. Smiles and whispers there were none—just shamed, resentful faces. The long trousers appeared to hang less jauntily on their gangling legs.

“Now, gang,” said the head counselor in a pleasanter tone through the megaphone, “a few simple train rules. No leaving your seat, no changing of seats without your counselor's permission. No opening windows. Absolutely no visiting in the girls' car up ahead. If I catch anyone in the girls' car, it will be just too bad. It's a three-hour ride, so make yourselves comfortable, get acquainted, and get all set for the swellest summer you've ever had. That's all.”

He sat down. Like a counterweight on a rope, Uncle Irish jumped up.

“Come on, fellows. Let's give an ‘Oink-oink, bow-wow’ for the good old head counselor, Uncle Sandy.”

And so a third time the chant was repeated, in such a dreary, tattered way that it all but died between the Chevrolets and the cannibals.

The train was bowling through suburbs, now, and green was beginning to show here and there through gray and brick red. Herbie's spirits, dampened by the recent shows of force, began to revive. He watched the fleeing landscape with pleasure as the city grimness dwindled and the world in its pristine colors came more and more to view. After a while a cow flashed by—a living cow, an animal the boy had never seen except in picture books and milk-company advertisements. His heart leaped up. Perhaps camp would be fun, after all.

Two counselors came along the aisle with baskets, and Herbie was handed a cardboard container of milk and a wrapped sandwich. He undid the paper; it was lettuce and canned salmon on rye bread, one of his favorite foods. He sank back into the seat, and munched and sipped and gazed out of the window at trees, brooks, and meadows. There was no longer any doubt about it: he was en route to the Promised Land.

“Hey, Herbie, where you been?”

His cousin, Cliff, was standing by the seat, a red and yellow felt cap, with the monogram “CM” on it, pulled down rakishly over one eye.

“Hi, Cliff, where
you
been? Whereja get the cap?”

“One of the guys in my bunk give it to me. They're a swell gang.”

“What bunk is that?”

“Twelve. Come on over. I been tellin' them about you.”

Herbie got up and started to edge out; then he remembered.

“Uncle Nig, permission to leave my seat?”

The counselor, his nose in a heavy blue book entitled
Comparative Literature, Third Year,
grunted consent. Herbie joined his cousin in the aisle.

“What're you doin' with these kids?” said Cliff in a low tone. “They don't even look like Intermediates.”

“What's Intermediates?”

“I'm an Intermediate. So's my whole bunk. It goes Midgets, Juniors, Intermediates, Seniors, and Super-seniors.”

“Jumpin' cats, I remember now. Cliff, you know what? These kids are Juniors. Juniors! One of them is in 5A. They've stuck me in with
Juniors!
”

Herbie pronounced the word “Juniors” as a minister says “pagans,” as a Southerner says “Yankees,” as a millionaire says “bolsheviks.”

“Aw, it's a mistake,” said Cliff. “Come on an' talk to my counselor. Bet he gets you in with us.”

Tilting the cap back, for the slant seriously cut down his vision, Cliff led his cousin to the group of boys surrounding the red-headed swimming counselor near the front of the car. “I'm in Uncle Irish's bunk,” he said proudly. Herbie observed lads his own age (and therefore somewhat larger than himself) laughing and joking with the cheer leader. He hoped mightily that he would be taken into this happy circle.

“Hey, Uncle Irish,” said Cliff, “here's my cousin Herb I been tellin' you about.”

“Oh, hello, boy wonder,” said Uncle Irish genially. (The name of Uncle Irish, by the way, was Abraham Potovsky.) “So you're the kid who's eleven years old and in 8B.”

“Eleven and a half,” said Herbie, bashfully.

“According to your cousin Cliff, you're about the smartest guy alive.”

“Heck, I'm too fat to run a lot, so I read a lot,” said Herbie.

This answer was a success both with the counselor and the boys, who had been staring at him rather critically. Uncle Irish laughed. A stocky boy with black hair that stood straight up said, “Well, he admits he's fat, anyway,” and smiled, and shifted so that Herbie could sit opposite the counselor.

“What bunk are you in, Herb?” said another boy.

Herbie felt ashamed, but he said, “They got me in Bunk Eight.”

The cheer leader was amazed. “Bunk Eight for a boy in 8B? Why, that's impossible. They're Juniors.”

“I guess it's a mistake. I hope so, anyway,” said Herbie.

“It certainly is,” said Uncle Irish. “Come along right now. We'll talk to Uncle Sandy.”

“See, I told you, Herb,” whispered Cliff.

“Get 'im in with us, Uncle Irish,” said the boy with the standing hair.

The counselor led Herbie by the hand to a front seat of the car which Uncle Sandy occupied in lone state, surrounded by charts, diagrams, and papers. He was preparing schedules of athletic activities, plotting them on sheets clipped to a writing board which he held in his lap. The one he was making at the moment bore the cryptic heading, “Basketball—Toothpaste.” It would bear fruit in due time, in desperate games between the Pepsodents and the Listerines, the Forhans and the Colgates. Boys who were Pebecos would vow everlasting hatred for boys who were Ipanas. Boys unfortunate enough to find themselves on the feeble Odonto team would tearfully ask their parents in mid-season to take them home. Uncle Sandy knew the simple truth that boys, and not only boys, will fight ten times more bitterly in a contest between labels, however inappropriate propriate and silly, than in a vague and casual tussle. So at Camp Manitou when baseball was played it was Fords against Cadillacs; volleyball, Greta Garbos against Joan Crawfords; track meets, Buffaloes against Polecats; and so forth, and so forth, the thin trick repeated and repeated, and never failing to goad the children into showing “camp spirit.” It ended at last in a so-called color war between the Reds and the Yellows. The whole camp, including counselors, was divided, and boys lost weight, made lifelong enemies, fought with fists, nearly drowned, and sometimes broke legs and arms defending the glorious name of Yellow or Red.

“Sandy,” said Uncle Irish, “may I talk to you for a minute?”

“Hmph,” said the head counselor, not taking his eye off the line he was drawing alongside the word Squibbs.

“There seems to have been a mistake in placing one of the kids in Bunk Eight.”

“Bunk Eight? That isn't your bunk, Irish,” said Uncle Sandy, rousing himself and peering at the speaker through thick lenses.

“I know. I just happened to find out about it. This boy here, Herbie Bookbinder, is in the eighth grade, and you've got him among the Juniors.”

Uncle Sandy transferred his squinting gaze to Herbie. His eyes had been nearly ruined in medical studies, of which he was now in the last year.

“Oh, yes, Herbie Bookbinder.” He meditated a moment, while Herbie fidgeted.

“I'll be glad to take him into my bunk,” said the swimming counselor. “That's about where you should have put him, anyhow.”

Unluckily for Herbie, Uncle Irish said the wrong thing. Sandy was a good-hearted sort of drudge; he had little humor in him and less warmth, but he was anxious to do his work well. Above all things, however, he disliked being forced to admit a mistake. The cheer leader's innocent phrase “you should have put him” was absorbed into the thick fluid of Uncle Sandy's mind as a criticism, and therefore set up irritation.

“I'm not so sure of that,” he answered slowly. “The basis of camp subdivision is physique, not academic standing. The boy's the size of a Junior, isn't he?”

“I suppose so,” said Uncle Irish, astonished that Sandy was even arguing the point, “but surely the kid's an exception. Why, he'll be miserable among boys he can't talk to. He simply won't stay the season.”

Herbie listened to the debate with a pounding pulse, and thought that angels in heaven must have bright red hair and wide shoulders.

Said Uncle Sandy grudgingly, “Why are you so anxious to have him in your bunk? Think his parents will be good tippers or something?”

“Gosh, Sandy, I don't care where he goes. I just thought you'd be glad if I mentioned it.”

Uncle Sandy was glad to correct the blunder, which he would have had to do in any case, but it was necessary for him to make the correction his own instead of Uncle Irish's. He picked up the chart of bunks and checked it over crossly.

“Anyway, it's impossible to put him in your bunk. You seem to forget that with the space cut out for the water tank you have room for five, not six.”

“But I only have four now, Sandy. You know, Arnold Osterman didn't show up at the station on account of mumps.”

Sandy hauled his large mass erect. “Never mind, Irish, I'll take care of this. Your bunk stays as it is. Just go back to your boys. I'll place Herbie Bookbinder myself.”

Herbie felt his hand once more enclosed by Uncle Sandy's moist, tough paw. He was cut off from Uncle Irish's bunk now, as surely as if it were in another camp. What small things determine happiness and disaster sometimes! Had the cheer leader spoken differently—a change of two or three words would have been enough—Herbie would have attained his desire, instead of being separated from it beyond recall. The head counselor hauled the boy back along the aisle and stopped beside the seat of a dumpy, middle-aged man, whose pale face was blue where it had been shaved. Herbie observed uneasily that Lennie Krieger was sitting in the seat opposite.

“Uncle Sid,” said the head counselor, “here's one more boy for Bunk Thirteen. He's a little too smart for the bunk we assigned him to originally, so you get him.”

At this auspicious introduction, Herbie became the target of five glares from five boys seated around the counselor.

“Don't tell me we're stuck with General Garbage!” cried Lennie. “My summer is ruined.”

“That's enough out of you,” said the counselor in a flat voice, but he regarded Herbie with no enthusiasm himself.

“Uncle Sid is our dramatic and music counselor,” said Uncle Sandy, “so a smart boy who isn't very athletic should fit right in. Make room here, Ted.” He addressed a hawk-faced boy with pale blond hair and a wide mouth that seemed to split the face into two parts. The boy threw a mutinous look at the head counselor and hitched himself across the seat which he had been occupying alone. Herbie sat. The head counselor walked off—and there the fat boy was. Like a sailor embarked in a hell ship, like a policeman assigned to a tunnel, like a priest sent to a squalid settlement in the fever belt of India, Herbie Bookbinder was committed beyond hope of release to a summer in Bunk Thirteen.

“What's your name?” inquired Uncle Sid.

Herbie told him, but he had hardly done so when Lennie chirruped, “General Garbage. His name's General Garbage.”

“Hi, General,” sneered a sallow boy in a red and yellow sweater with the CM emblem in front. Cruel nicknames catch on among boys like sparks in dry straw. Complimentary ones are almost unknown.

“What bunk were you in before they moved you here?” said the counselor.

“Bunk Eight. It was a Junior bunk,” Herbie answered defensively, with a weak show of indignation.

“Guess maybe you belonged there. You're too small for this bunk, that's for sure,” said the hawk-faced boy, looking out of the window.

“Now, let's be fair to him, fellows,” said the counselor. “He has a right to have a good time.”

“Not if it spoils ours,” said Lennie. “Look, Uncle Sid, I know this kid from way back, from school an' everything. He can't run, he can't play ball, he can't fight, he can't do nothin'. He's just a fat sissy, and a teacher's pet, what's more, and none of us don't want him in Bunk Thirteen.”

It seemed to Herbie that every word Lennie spoke was true, and that he himself was an abhorrent little thing, unworthy to stay alive.

“Uncle Sid,” he said, “I sure don't wanna stay in the bunk if the fellows don't want me. Heck, I'd rather go back to Bunk Eight. Come on, let's go to Uncle Sandy.”

Ted, the hawk-face, looked around at him. “Never mind, General Garbage,”,he said. “They stuck you in with us. I been goin' to this camp five years and I never saw no short punk like you in Bunk Thirteen. But now you're here, stay here.”

“Now, that's the spirit,” said Uncle Sid. “We'll get to know each other and all have a dandy time.”

This effort brought on a thick cloud of silence. The dramatic counselor, by profession a teacher of music in a girls' high school, lacked the touch for his summer job.

Herbie ventured at last to say to his neighbor, “Are you guys Seniors?”