This Boy's Life (17 page)

I planned to travel alone under an assumed name. Later on, when I had my feet on the ground, I would send for my mother. It was not hard to imagine our reunion in my cabin: her grateful tears and cries of admiration at the pelt-covered walls, the racks of guns, the tame wolves dozing before the fire.

Our Scout troop went to Seattle every November for The Gathering of the Tribes. In the morning we competed with other troops. In the afternoon all the Scouts converged on Glenvale, an amusement park reserved that day for our use. Dwight always went drinking with some other Scoutmasters, then picked me up outside Glenvale for the drive home. This year he would have a long wait. He would have a long wait, and a long drive home alone, and a long explanation to make to my mother when he pulled up to the house without me.

I told no one but Arthur, who kept my secrets even when I betrayed his. He liked the plan. He thought so highly of it that he asked to be included. At first I said no. Being on my own was the whole idea. And Arthur had no money. But a few days before The Gathering of the Tribes I told him I’d changed my mind, that he could come along after all. I gave Arthur this news with a show of reluctance, as if I were doing him a favor, but really I was just afraid to be alone.

 

ARTHUR’S FATHER, CAL, worked on the turbines in the powerhouse. He thought I was a great wit because I could always tell him a new joke. I got the jokes from “Today’s Chuckle,” a filler they ran on the front page of the paper. Whenever I visited Arthur, Cal said, “Well, Jackaroony, what’s the word?”

“Woman bought three hundred pounds of steel wool. Says she’s going to knit a stove.”

“Knit a stove! Knit a stove, you say! Oh that’s rich, that’s a beauty....” and Cal would hold his sides and reel back and forth while Arthur and Mrs. Gayle looked on with disgust.

He was a simple, sunny man well liked in the camp. Even the kids called him Cal. I never heard anyone call him Mr. Gayle. Once, at a beach house belonging to friends of theirs, I persuaded Cal to let me take Arthur out for a spin in a sailboat, claiming that back in Florida I had pretty much lived with a tiller in my hand. After being very nearly swept out to sea we ran aground a mile from the house. Arthur went up the beach and got Cal, but Cal didn’t know how to sail either, so he had to pull the boat home through the surf. He had a hard time of it—the wind was stiff and the waves high—but he didn’t stop laughing the whole way back.

Arthur and Mrs. Gayle were complicated. They were complicated by themselves and exotically complicated when together, playing off each other in long cryptic riffs like a pair of scat singers, then falling heavily, portentously silent. They had a way of turning silence into accusation. Cal could not begin to understand them. Under their scrutiny he smiled and blinked his eyes. This seemed to compound the unspoken charges against him.

Mrs. Gayle was a snob. She and Cal had been among the first to move into the camp, and she would have nothing to do with those who came afterwards. Mrs. Gayle carried herself as one betrayed into an inferior version of life. The articles of this betrayal remained unpublished, but it was understood that Cal was to blame; also, to some degree, Arthur. Mrs. Gayle was disappointed. Every couple of weeks she dulled her disappointment by shopping in Mount Vernon with Liz Dempsey, a friend of hers from another Founding Family. They got all dressed up and had boozy lunches and bought things. Mostly they bought useless little things Mrs. Gayle called notions, but sometimes they concluded more serious purchases. I was in the house one night when Mrs. Gayle came back with an expensive lamp that had at its base a rickshaw pulled by a grinning coolie whose legs churned furiously when you pressed down on his hat.

The two women took Arthur and me along on a couple of their sprees. I enjoyed listening to Mrs. Gayle talk about other people in the camp, impaling them with a word or phrase so uncanny I could never see them afterward without remembering it. She knew that I admired her tongue. She liked me for that, and for the fact that my brother Geoffrey was a student at Princeton. She said the words Ivy League often, and tenderly. I was a big snob myself, so we got along fine.

Arthur’s disappointment was more combative. He refused to accept as final the proposition that Cal and Mrs. Gayle were his real parents. He told me, and I contrived to believe, that he was adopted, and that his real family was descended from Scottish liege men who had followed Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile in France. I read the same novels Arthur read, but managed not to notice the correspondences between their plots and his. And Arthur in turn did not question the stories I told him. I told him that my family was descended from Prussian aristocrats—“Junkers,” I said, pronouncing the word with pedantic accuracy—whose estates had been seized after the war. I got the idea for this narrative from a book called The
Prussians.
It was full of pictures of Crusaders, kings, castles, splendid hussars riding to the attack at Waterloo, cold-eyed Von Richthofen standing beside his triplane.

Arthur was a great storyteller. He talked himself into reveries where every word rang with truth. He repeated ancient conversations. He rendered the creak of oars in their oarlocks. He spoke in the honest brogue of the crofter, the despicable whine of the traitor. In Arthur’s voice the mist rose above the loch and the pipes skirled; bold deeds were done, high words of troth plighted, and I believed them all.

I was his perfect witness and he was mine. We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.

Looking always backward, we became mired in nostalgia. We both liked old movies, which Mrs. Gayle allowed us to watch all night when I slept over, and whose fatuous obsession with aristocracy fed our own. We preferred old cars to new ones. We used antique slang. Arthur played the piano pretty well, and when we were alone in his house we sang old songs together, our voices quavering with loss:

One night he kissed me, or I kissed him, or we kissed each other. It surprised us both. After that, whenever we felt particularly close we turned on each other. Arthur was an easy target. His voice cracked. He bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety. He played no sports and was still a Second Class Scout, a truly pitiful rank for someone his age. As long as I didn’t call him a sissy I could cut him to pieces.

I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves. With feline insouciance he could produce a word that would knock me breathless and send me stumbling blind from the house. Sometimes he set Pepper on me. Pepper would yap at my heels all the way down the street while Arthur stood at his door and urged him on, knowing that I liked the little mutt too much to defend myself.

We had these blowups often. We’d stay clear of each other for a few days, then Arthur would call up and invite me over as if nothing had happened, and I would go.

 

THE GATHERING OF the Tribes was held in a high school just outside Seattle. My event was the swimming meet. I carried an overnight bag with my swimming trunks and towel, and a change of clothes for Arthur and me so our uniforms wouldn’t give us away when we left: Glenvale later that day and began hitching our way north.

During the Gathering I kept my distance from Arthur. I didn’t want to be associated with him, and not only because of what we were planning. His uniform was baggy and unadorned, his manner supercilious. He stood at the edges of the events and made sarcastic remarks. He didn’t look like a serious Scout. I did. I held Star rank. I had a new uniform and plenty of things to wear on it. Patrol leader’s insignia. The Order of the Arrow. A sash with several merit badges. To look at my merit badges you would have thought I could be dropped anywhere, in any season, just as I was, and in no time improvise a shelter and kindle a fire and snare an animal for dinner. You would have thought I could navigate by the stars. Name trees. Find, in any terrain, exactly those plants that would nourish me and toss them up in a mouthwatering salad.

And I actually could have done some of those things. The details began to fade as soon as I got the badges, but I had learned a rough kind of competence and ease in the woods. It was a gift of priceless worth. But I did not guess its value then. Then I was mainly interested in covering myself with enough insignia to look sharp, which, to my way of thinking, I did.

The swimming meet was held in the morning. I got bumped after the first couple of heats. This surprised me, though it shouldn’t have—I always got bumped. But I started every meet believing that I was going to win, and ended it believing that I should have won, that I was the best swimmer there. After I got bumped I spent a long time in the shower, feeling low, then took a tour of the other events.

The big sensation at this year’s Gathering was the close-order drill competition. It was dominated by a troop from Ballard led by a Scoutmaster who wore a black garrison cap with silver piping and a military-looking jacket with battle ribbons. It was not a uniform I had ever seen before, or would ever see again. His troop wore their pant legs tucked into the tops of gleaming black boots. They also sported black garrison caps. Their boots clapped resoundingly as the troop marched back and forth across the asphalt yard behind the school. The Scoutmaster shouted commands in a harsh voice, watching his troop with a fierce, imperious expression.

Our troop didn’t have a drill team and neither did most of the rest. There were only five or six other teams, and each of these was clearly outclassed by the Ballard troop. They were all business, these Ballard boys—crisp, erect, poker-faced, responsive to nothing but their Scoutmaster’s voice. They drew an enormous crowd. I saw Dwight across the yard, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.

“What a bunch of dildos,” Arthur said.

I ignored him.

They lost the competition, disqualified for wearing nonregulation caps and boots. The crowd booed the judges; the Ballard troop had won, hands down. Their Scoutmaster went into a rage. He cussed at the judges and threw his cap on the ground, and when the judges didn’t yield he marched his team off the yard and refused to form them up again for the awards ceremony.

I saw three boys from the Ballard troop in the cafeteria later on. They looked tough in their uniforms. I joined them at their table and told them how badly I thought they’d been screwed, and they agreed, and we got to talking. Over many such Gatherings and Councils I had developed a bluff conventioneer’s talent for working the floor and “establishing ties” with boys from other troops. I’d pump them for details about the places they lived as if they hailed from Greenland or Samoa. I’d give them my name and collect theirs on pieces of paper that thickened my wallet to a fistlike roundness.

I worked my magic on these boys from Ballard and pretty soon it was old home week. I told them some of my amazing stories, like the one about the escaped lunatic who’d left his hook hanging on the door handle of Bobby Crow’s car, and they told me some of theirs. They were good friends with the cousin of a guy who’d lost his dick in an automobile accident. He crashed his convertible into a tree and his girlfriend was thrown high up into the branches. When the police got her down they found the guy’s dong in her mouth. If I didn’t believe them I could ask anyone from Ballard.

When we ran out of true stories we told jokes. The Silver Saddle. The Glass Eye and the Wooden Leg. The Chinese Milkshake. One of them asked me if I smoked.

“Do I smoke?” I said. “Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“Let’s go,”

The four of us walked outside and sat down under some trees beside the football field. I noticed Arthur coming toward us. He stopped under the goalposts. I couldn’t believe he had followed me out here. The Ballard boys noticed him too. “Who’s that?” one of them asked.

“Just a guy,” I said.

“From your troop?”

I nodded.

“What’s his name?”

“Arthur.”

“As in King?”

We all laughed.

The Ballard boy held up a package of Hit Parades. “Hey Arthur,” he yelled. “Want a weed?”

Arthur shook his head. He stuck his hands in his pocket and looked away. After a while he sauntered back toward the school.

The Ballard boy passed the Hit Parades around. He took out another, smaller package and handed it to me; it was a six-pack of Trojans. I took out the one foil-wrapped rubber left inside, looked at it, then put it back in the box and returned it to him. “That was full last night,” he said.

We had a few cigarettes and went back to the school to catch our rides over to Glenvale, where we agreed to meet by the roller coaster. As soon as I got in the car, Dwight started talking about how sharp the Ballard drill team was and how our troop needed something like that, something that could really make it a force to contend with. He kept it up all the way to Glenvale. I got out of the car with him still talking and said I’d meet him later on. He looked at the overnight bag. “What do you need that for?” he asked.

“That’s okay,” I said vaguely, and walked away from the car. I expected to hear him call me back, but he didn’t.

The three Ballard boys were already in line for the roller coaster. All the rides were free that day. Everything was free except the food and the games of chance. While we waited in line we compared Ballard pussy with Concrete pussy and discussed the various roller coaster fatalities of which we had personal knowledge. Arthur stood some distance away, watching me. Finally he came up and asked me when I wanted to leave.