The Color War (2 page)

The buzzing turned out to be chain saws. For a moment Raymond stood mesmerized by the machines, by the chips of ice thrown like sparks when the artist touched the saw to the edge of his masterpiece. It was a contest. Everywhere Raymond looked there were sculptures, in various stages of completion. Huge rectangular blocks of ice were stacked, melting into one another to form a wall of ice seven feet high. The big cuts were made with the chain saws; the final touches were done with a chisel or awl. Some were already finished, lit from behind with recessed bulbs in eerie aqua and milky yellow. Raymond and Monroe walked in wonder between a griffin and a mermaid; past a pair of entwined lovers and a monstrous turtle.

Raymond was so engrossed in a life-size medieval castle, complete with turrets and flying ice-flags, that he didn’t notice when Monroe disappeared. When he turned to push Monroe along and found him missing, he panicked. He called his friend’s name, but his voice sank into the sponge of the crowd. He tried to see around the sculpture, but he was too small. He scrambled onto an unused block of ice. “Monroe!” he yelled.

The chain-saw artist was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. “You lose your daddy?”

“My best friend,” Raymond said.

The artist lifted Raymond onto the second story of the ice castle so that he was perched in one of the turrets. He braced his bare hands on the wall, even though his skin stuck to the ice. Below, people pointed and took pictures with their cell phones, but Raymond didn’t notice. From this vantage he could see halfway across the Common. He could see the gazebo and the entrance to the T station. He could see the edge of the skating rink. And he could see Monroe.

His best friend was kneeling in front of an angel made of ice. Her wings brushed the stars; her eyes were blind and beautiful and terrible all at once, like marble statues Raymond had seen pictures of at school. Raymond climbed down from the castle and ran to Monroe. This ice sculpture was not lit with bulbs, but it still seemed to be glowing.
You found me,
Raymond heard, but he didn’t know if it was Monroe who spoke the words or that angel, reflecting the moon and casting him a hundred shades of white.

Raymond awoke and found the bus empty, except for the angel. “It’s about time,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I was about ready to give up on you.”

She was a dream, but she was here; and she didn’t look cold and forbidding anymore. Still groggy with sleep, Raymond touched one finger to her cheek—expecting ice; expecting her to vanish.

She didn’t. Her skin was smooth and soft and so pale it looked like the glass of milk his mother made him drink with his breakfast every morning. The angel leaned forward and touched her finger to Raymond’s cheek, too.

Raymond sucked in his breath. “Do you know Monroe?” he asked.

Her eyebrows drew together, making a small crease. “Not yet,” she said. “Is he another camper?”

That’s when Raymond remembered where he was supposed to be, and that this wasn’t his angel. He began to notice more about her, embarrassed that he had been dumb enough to think she was heavenly, when she was just a girl. She had freckles over the bridge of her nose; she smelled of lemons and clean laundry. He sat up straight, looking out the windows for landmarks he didn’t know. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m Melody. Everyone else went off to find their bunks, but I didn’t want to wake you up. You were sleeping like a baby.”

Raymond bristled. “I’m not a baby,” he said. “I’m nine.”

“I’m sixteen. I’m a lifeguard.” Then Melody smiled. It hit Raymond like an unexpected patch of blue sky on a weekend forecast to be 24/7 rain; and that was about when he fell in love.

Melody walked him back to the little cabin he would be sharing with three other boys and her cousin Matthew—Raymond’s counselor. She kept up a steady chatter as they walked, telling him that the best part of the camp was the lake, which felt like a sinkhole when you first walked in but bottomed out to sand if you stuck with it; and that the worst part was Bad Weather Days, when they had to sit in the auditorium and watch movies about being Good Samaritans and Jesus’ early life. “Here you go,” she said, and Raymond was caught in the web of her voice for a moment before he realized they were standing in front of the door to a cabin, where the other boys and the counselor had already picked out their bunks. Raymond’s mouth went dry. He waited for Melody to say something or introduce him or make him seem like less of an outsider, but when he turned around to look at her, she was already gone.

Lamar and James were from Roxbury and had known each other before they got to camp. They lived for basketball and quizzed each other about which player had the highest career player efficiency rating (Michael Jordan) and whether it was Chris Ford of the Celtics or Kevin Grevey of the Bullets who made the first three-point shot in NBA history. Winslow came from Jamaica Plain and was so big for his age that he’d nearly been placed with the older campers. They sat on their bunks while Matthew explained the routine at Camp Konoke. “By the time you leave here,” he said, “everyone in this cabin is going to know how to swim, how to sail a Sunfish, and how to get a bull’s-eye.” He smiled at James. “Have you ever shot a bow and arrow?”

James looked up. “You ever shot a gun?”

Once, Monroe’s older brother DeShawn had let him hold his P380. Raymond could remember scratching his nail against the grooved metal where the serial number had been filed off. At the time he’d felt like he was holding lightning in his hands, like if he let out the breath he was holding the trigger would go off. Now, when he thought about that gun, he just wanted to throw up.

Raymond shook his head. Beside him, Winslow pulled a penknife out of his sock and began to pare his fingernails. Matthew blinked once, then turned to the other boys. “We’ve got a camp meeting in ten minutes,” he said. “Who needs to use the latrine?”

Raymond was the last boy out the door. He was wondering if and when he would be seeing Melody again, and he was concentrating so hard on remembering what her skin had felt like that he almost didn’t notice Matthew slipping a hand into Winslow’s duffel and confiscating the knife, with no one the worse for wear.

He saw her once, walking across the empty archery field behind Reverend Helm during the opening address to campers. He couldn’t be sure it was her, not with the half-dozen life jackets looped around her neck and the kickboards stacked in her arms, but his body started doing crazy things—his pulse hammering and his palms sweating—and before he knew it he was standing on his feet when everyone else was sitting, and the reverend was asking if he had a question.

“No, sir,” he muttered, and he sat down, all the heat in the world flooding his cheeks.

The counselors played pranks on one another. Someone put toothpaste on the toilet seat. One of the girls turned on a blow dryer and baby powder exploded in her face. Matthew went to put on his socks one morning only to find the toes cut off, so that they pulled up over his knees like leg warmers. Raymond didn’t understand why, if you were lucky enough to have a friend, you would try to make him look like an idiot in front of everyone else.

He asked James as they were getting ready for bed that night. “Why do they think that stuff is funny?”

James answered a question with a question. “Why do they think we want to go to this stupid camp?”

Raymond considered this. “I guess it’s supposed to be like a vacation.”

“The problem with vacations,” James said, “is that you still got to go back home.”

One night, Lamar got homesick and cried when they were toasting marshmallows. Matthew told them he was going to a place called Trinity College in the fall and showed them a picture of his girlfriend, Susannah, who led the younger girl campers and who looked a little like Melody. At nine o’clock—lights out—Matthew coached them in their prayers. They lay in the darkness for several minutes, keeping time with Lamar’s sniffling, and then Matthew asked if they wanted to hear a ghost story. Raymond curled up under the covers, scared by the image of Matthew’s pale face in the reflected glow of a flashlight. He listened to Matthew spin a story about a man named Ichabod Crane and a Headless Horseman who wouldn’t stay dead. In the silence that followed, Raymond waited for someone else to take the first breath.

James’s voice broke the spell. “That the scariest story you ever heard?”

“Just about,” Matthew said.

Raymond could hear James roll over in his bunk. His words were muffled by his pillow. “You should try hanging on Blue Hill Avenue with me,” he said. “We got stories to last you a lifetime.”

The next morning, when the boys went to the latrines to shower, the water streamed purple, orange, red—a tacky, sweet mess that splattered Raymond from head to toe. “Damn,” Winslow said as some of the spray hit his mouth. “It’s raining Kool-Aid.”

Raymond looked over at Matthew, who had been the target of the prank. His skin was painted like a rainbow, the perfect canvas. Raymond looked down at his own chest and belly. The colors were harder to see against Raymond’s skin, but he could feel the stickiness and taste the sweetness in his mouth.

Matthew turned off the faucet and unscrewed the showerhead, which had been jammed up with the powdered mix used to make juices in the mess hall. “Not cool,” he yelled out the window to the girl counselors who were outside waiting to hear the reaction to their night’s work. But Raymond noticed he was grinning while he said it.

At Camp Konoke, Melody taught swimming to beginners. Raymond figured this out from the locker room, watching her through a cobwebbed window as she demonstrated how to make bubbles through your nose. So when Matthew asked them to raise their hands if they knew how to swim, Raymond didn’t move a muscle, even though he knew the front crawl and the breaststroke.

He stepped into the lake, letting it lap at his ankles. He felt a little sick to his stomach, and he knew it was because he had lied, but then again, hadn’t his mother told him to make friends at camp, and wasn’t that what he was doing? “Raymond!” Melody said, remembering him, and he smiled. “How many of you can hold your breath for a count of three?” she asked, and when they all said they could, she dared them to do it. Raymond held his breath for five counts, just to show off.

He was careful not to look like a good swimmer, because he didn’t want to get bumped into the higher-level group, which was taught by a boy with a birthmark on his shoulder that looked like a sunburst. So Raymond sank a little during his dead man’s float, and he swallowed water several times on purpose. Then Melody waded toward him, picking him out of the group of six to be her guinea pig. She stood behind him, modeling the windmill of the freestyle stroke, her hands each covering one of his and her breath falling on his ear. “See?” she said. “Over, then through. Over, then through.”

Raymond followed her gaze as she watched the next group of campers arrive for their swimming lesson. “That’s it for today, guys,” Melody said. “See you, Raymond.”

“See you,” he replied, realizing for the first time how cold the water in the lake really was.

Without knowing how it happened, Raymond became accustomed to the sound of starlings waking him up, instead of cars and sirens. He learned how to saddle a horse and how to tie square knots for rigging. The backs of his hands and his cheeks became sunburned. He relearned the front crawl, and with Melody’s help he swam longer and faster than he ever had before.

Raymond looked forward to the three days of the week when he had swimming with Melody. On those days, he was the first one out of his bunk; he walked a little more purposefully from activity to activity. He spent the time he wasn’t with her dreaming of the moments he would be.

The other kids in his cabin noticed. Matthew gave Raymond the nickname Phelps, after the legendary swimmer. Mrs. Knott, who treated him for his swimmer’s ear, said she was pretty sure he was growing a fin. Only James seemed to notice that this was about more than just swimming. One day, as they sat in a steamy tent, weaving bright yarn around popsicle sticks to make god’s-eyes during Arts & Crafts, James grabbed Raymond’s out of his hand and held it up to his chest, along with his own—a makeshift bikini top. “Looky here,” he sang. “I’m Melody the mermaid.”

Raymond yanked his ornament away from James. “Cut it out,” he said fiercely.

“You defending your
girlfriend,
Raymond?” James laughed. “Like some kind of white knight? Oh, wait, that’s right. You
black
.”

“Shut up,” Raymond gritted out. He looked to the edge of the tent, where the counselors were gossiping over a magazine. He could go to them for help, but that would make this an even bigger deal than it already was, and Raymond just wanted it to stop.

“You ain’t nothing special to her,” James said. “You just the charity flavor of the month. Next week, she might rescue a kitten from the SPCA instead of you.”

“She’s helping me with my swimming.”

“Yeah,” James said. “Is that your ticket out? You gonna swim yourself right off the streets?”

Raymond lifted his chin. “Maybe I will. There are tons of brothers who are famous athletes.”

“Name one swimmer,” James said.

Raymond couldn’t. “Just ’cause I don’t know one doesn’t mean it don’t exist.”

James looped some red yard around the crossed sticks. “You believe that,” he said, “and you an even dumber nigga than I thought.”

On Wednesday, when his cabin had swimming as their final afternoon activity, Raymond helped Melody stack the kickboards and water wings in the supply shed. Usually the other lifeguards left, in a hurry to shower or to make it to the cafeteria before the red Jell-O was gone. But if he started talking, Raymond could get Melody to stay a little longer.

“You’re quite a swimmer, Raymond,” she said one day. “You’re going to be the number-one pick for the Color War swimming relay next week. Either you were lying to us or I’m a better teacher than I thought.”

Raymond, who was unlacing buoys, hesitated. “Are there people who get famous because they’re swimmers?”