Camp Echo. Paul Theroux
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Camp Echo
A Novella
By Paul Theroux
SCRIBD ORIGINALS
Copyright © 2019 by Paul Theroux
All rights reserved
Cover design and illustration by Fedor Vasilyev
ISBN: 9781094400006
First e-book edition: July 2019
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AT THE ENTRANCE to the camp, a man in khaki shorts, white T-shirt, and moccasins—a man dressed as a boy—was waiting at the gatehouse, which was like a sentry box. He raised his hand for us to stop, and smiled at my father’s open window. His hair was buzzed to a whiffle, he had pointed ears, and his face was sunburnt, his nose red and peeling. He held a clipboard in his hairy hands.
“Camper?” he asked, raising the clipboard.
“Right here,” my father said. “Andy Parent.”
“Welcome to Camp Echo.”
“He’s all yours,” my father said, and, to me, the last words I was to hear from him for three weeks, “Be good.”
• • •
We had driven from home, my father and me, as usual without saying much. There was no radio in our old car, a 1938 Nash Lafayette with a thunderous muffler. My father’s silences discouraged me from being a talker, and made me watchful. Today he was taking me away to Boy Scout camp. The thought that I’d be alone there reminded me that I was small for my age, a skinny boy, with my hatchet on my lap and a foretaste of loneliness in my throat.
Past the close-together white clapboard houses on our street, we rolled down the hill to where the bungalows thinned out at the margin of the oak woods. There were no houses at all near Doleful Pond, nor any at the “rezza”—Spot Pond Reservoir. A straight road beyond that into the low hills for an hour, and finally to the iron bridge across the Merrimack River and along its banks to the darker woods, where Camp Echo sat in a forest of pines at the edge of Echo Lake. Driving north from our crowded suburb, seeing fewer people, my mind eased; the landscape simplified and deepened with each mile on narrowing roads until we were on a dirt lane among log cabins in a forest so green, in such shadows, it was almost black.
I pushed the heavy door open and slipped out of the car and dragged my knapsack and sleeping bag from the back seat. My father reached from his window and patted my cheek in a tender gesture. He backed up the car, then jiggled the stick shift with a crunch into forward gear and drove away in his embarrassing car, which he called “the old bus,” black and noisy and unreliable, with cracked whitewall tires, chrome curling from the front bumper, leaking oil, trailing exhaust fumes.
In a new setting, among strangers, my father used anxious jokes as exit lines. “He’s all yours” was typical. But now he’d driven off, and when the car was past the last trees, the dust sifting onto the hot road, I was standing in stillness, with the big man in shorts and moccasins scratching a pointy ear with a hairy finger. At the edge of a big field, the sun behind him, he loomed over me, his face in shadow.
“You can use this,” he said, seeing me with the heavy pack and the sleeping bag.
A wheelbarrow was propped against a fence. He lowered it and threw my sleeping bag into it. I tipped in my knapsack. I tucked my hatchet handle inside my belt.
“I’ve got Andre here,” the man said, consulting his clipboard, tapping it with his pen.
“Andy,” I said.
“I’m Butch Rankin—camp counselor. You’re in Cabin Eight. Can’t miss it. It’s past the chow hall on the right.”
I took up the handles of the wheelbarrow and steered it through the gate and along the groove of one rut toward a large log structure topped by a fieldstone chimney—the chow hall—then an open field. At the margin of the field stood a row of about twenty cabins, their front doors facing the grass, a pole in the middle, holding a limp flag.
Dirt road, gravelly ruts, log cabins—with my piled-up wheelbarrow it seemed to me that I was wheeling my belongings into the past, a place entirely unfamiliar to me, simple and handmade, smelling of dust and recently sawed wood.
Bumping along the wheel rut, it occurred to me, as the rising breeze seemed to whittle me small, that I was on my own, headed to a log cabin in the forest where I would be living for three weeks, sleeping among strangers. This was new, and faintly worrying. I had spent a night or two away from my family at friends’ houses, but never for so long—days and nights among boys I didn’t know, none of them from my Boy Scout troop.
Camp Echo accepted boys from troops all over the Boston area, the “Minuteman Council.” My cabin was proof of that, because the five other boys were strangers to me. They had already arrived and chosen a bunk. Two were outside and said “Hi” while staring at me.
Inside, a boy folding a duffel bag said, “That top bunk is free.”
A boy with wild hair, lying on his stomach in the next bunk, was looking at a magazine of photos he was half covering with his hand. He didn’t say anything to me, though he seemed to be muttering to the page of white bodies.
Using the ladder on the side of the bunk, I hoisted my sleeping bag and followed with my knapsack and hatchet. I had a sense of being new and not belonging, because I was the last to arrive, like an afterthought, and others seemed self-possessed, confident with the authority of being already settled, their things put away. I tugged the laces of my sleeping bag and punched it to fluff it. I unstrapped my knapsack and dumped out my clothes. I was the tenderfoot, uninitiated, hot from the effort with the wheelbarrow and conspicuous in my unpacking. Some other boys entered the cabin.
At that moment, I wanted to go home. I regretted that I’d come, and I felt foolish remembering how I’d eagerly looked forward to three weeks at Camp Echo, sharpening my hatchet with a whetstone, buying my sleeping bag and canteen at the army surplus store.
As I was sorting my clothes and hating the sharp mothball stink of my sleeping bag and the cabin’s raw tang of unpainted pine boards, I heard a shout—another “Hi”—and saw Butch Rankin filling the doorway, still holding his clipboard. Now I noticed a hunting knife hanging from the belt of his khaki shorts and sun streaks in his whiffle.
“Roll call,” he said in a hearty voice. “Say ‘Here’ when I call your name. Jerry Pinto.”
“Here.”
“Emmett Phelan.”
“Here.”
“Michael Paretsky.”
“Here.”
“Frankie Pagazzo.”
“Here.”
“Bayard Pomroy.”
“He’s outside.”
Butch Rankin turned and shouted, “Pomroy!”
“Coming,” was the prompt but distant reply.
“Andy Parent.”
“Here.”
And as I spoke, I heard “Excuse me” as Butch Rankin stepped aside and a boy squeezed past him—a tall boy in a Boy Scout uniform, a bright red neckerchief with a carved eagle as a woggle holding it in place, a jackknife in a belt holder, a wide-brimmed ranger’s hat. He was black.
“I’m Bayard,” he said, and sat in the bunk under mine, at the back of the cabin.
“I guess you know why you’re in this cabin,” Butch Rankin said. “It’s alphabetical—you’re the Ps—that’s one thing you have in common. But you’re Boy