Camp Echo. Paul Theroux
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out, running ahead.
We walked along the margin of the field in the moon shadow of the pines, boys from the farther cabins joining us, and we blinked entering the mess hall, which was brightly lit and smelled of sawdust, beans, and applesauce. Pomroy was the last to seat himself. A card with the number 8 was stuck in a wire stand at our table, where six bowls had been set out with plastic cups, a glass pitcher at one end. The six bowls contained brown, soupy applesauce. The glass pitcher brimmed with purple liquid.
Paretsky pointed to the number 8 at the table. He said, “That’s a composite number.”
“What language is that supposed to be?” Pinto said.
Wagging his pale finger at the 7 on the next table, Paretsky said, “That’s a prime number.”
“Primo,” Pagazzo said. “That’s wicked good.”
“This year is not a prime number. But 1951 was.”
“And your mother wears army boots,” Pagazzo said, flicking the pitcher with his bitten fingers. “Bug juice. Anyone want some?”
He poured it out but did not take any himself, and instead put his hands behind his tangled hair and leaned back, tightening his yellowish face by squinting at us. He had a pale scar like a claw mark next to his right eye. When he smiled, he made a chipmunk face and seemed to glory in showing us his broken front tooth.
“Know why I ain’t drinking no bug juice?” He did not wait for a reply. He said, “They put saltpeter in it. Know why? So you won’t get a boner.”
Pagazzo lowered his voice on the word boner, seeing Butch Rankin approaching our table.
“No, suh!” Pinto said.
“Yes, suh.”
“I’m going to ask my father,” Phelan said to Paretsky, seated next to him. “He knows chemistry.”
Rankin said, “It’s cafeteria style, so pick up a tray, get in line, and help yourself.”
We did as he said, filing with our tin trays past the metal tubs of fried Spam and mashed potatoes and baked beans, loading up, and then back at our table began eating, digging at the food with forks in our fists.
“The Navy gets the gravy, but the Army gets the beans,” Pagazzo said. “My uncle Mario says that.”
Phelan was telling Paretsky a story about his father in medical school, saying, “And before they tested their urine, my father slipped in some gold leaf. His lab partner’s a woman, and she does the test and says, ‘I have gold in my urine!’ And my father says, ‘What do you want me to do—sink a shaft?’”
Paretsky smiled nervously. He pushed a slab of Spam away from his potatoes and said, “Anyone want this?”
No one replied. They went on chewing, and their faces seemed freakish to me. I was returned again to thinking of the strangeness of the camp, how it seemed unfriendly because of those faces, so different from the faces of my family, or anyone I knew, strangers’ faces—and strangers seemed dangerous to me. Pagazzo’s yellow face; Paretsky’s pale, freckled face; Phelan’s receding chin and perfect teeth; Pinto’s delicate features, his bat-like ears and pursed lips; Pomroy’s gleaming black face and wide forehead, his cheeks bulging with food.
“Try the baloney instead,” Phelan said.
“Baloney,” Pagazzo said. “My old man calls it horse cock.”
The way they ate, the way they looked, made me anxious.
They were animal faces. I knew them to be boys, but the features were so unfamiliar I saw them as masks—not ugly, but so unusual as to be threatening, as though concealing a secret intention meant to upset me.
I did not want to think about it, but, sitting there at the table with them, they seemed to me like dog faces, the snouts and wet eyes and tangled hair of mutts, made more dog-like by the way they were eating—carelessly, hungrily snapping their jaws, chomping on their food, the teeth of twelve-year-olds having an animal largeness and bite. I knew boys like this at school, but these were boys I was living with in a cabin.
Seeing strangers eat, flecks of food on their lips, the famished faces, that hunger, revealed their personalities more than talking did, and suggested the crudeness of their secrets. And so I hardly ate anything—I nibbled at the awful, salty meat, poked at the dry potato and the pale carrots, and what Pagazzo had said about the bug juice kept me from drinking more. The mushy applesauce had the sour, fermented smell of wet fur.
At the end of the meal, still hungry, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and ate it feeling queasy, knowing I had three more weeks of this.
Seeing me swirling peanut butter out of a jar, Paretsky said, “Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and no wonder. All the rest have peanut butter. Except Grandma, who has a pail of blueberries.” The others stared at him, but I smiled: His little verse had made him seem human.
“You said ‘bloobrees,’” Pagazzo said.
“Okay, let’s do these dishes, guys,” Butch Rankin said, walking among the tables. “I want this place shipshape.”
We were given a big basin of soapy water and a small mop-shaped scrubber, and each of us was assigned a task, one boy scraping leftover food from the plates into a garbage can, other boys wiping the table or washing the cups and plates in the basin or drying them. I was drying with Pinto, who worked slowly and with great care, dabbing at the plate with the cloth wrapped around his finger, occasionally saying, “This one’s still icky,” and dropping it into the basin.
When this was done and the plates were stacked, the basin of gray water emptied and put away with the scrubber and the wet cloths, we sat at the table again. A red-faced fat man in khaki shorts shushed us.
“Welcome to Camp Echo,” he said. “I’m Camp Director Hempstone. Before I have my staff introduce themselves, I want to say one thing: Behave yourselves, do as you’re told, and you’ll have a great time. No bellyaching. No slacking. Get out of line and you will fail. Hygiene is very important, and so I say to you two words: Be clean.”
“That’s about ten things,” Pagazzo muttered.
“When you salute the flag, stand ramrod straight. I want snappy salutes and respect for the flag. My friend Arthur Schuck is chief scout executive, and I want to quote him now,” Hempstone said, glancing at a small piece of paper in his hand. “What is the main thrust of the Boy Scouts? Arthur Schuck tells us, ‘To give to America a new generation of men of character, with ingrained qualities that make for good citizenship.’” He gestured with the piece of paper, saying, “Be glad you live in a free country where everyone is treated equally. Communists live in fear. If you waver”—here he paused and poked a fat finger at us—“the Communists are gonna cook your goose.”
Hempstone then called upon the counselors, who introduced themselves, taking turns, strolling among the tables: the swimming instructor, the rowing coach, the volleyball coach, and Butch the rifle range director. An old, bald, bearded man in a neckerchief, named Beavers, announced himself as the craft shop manager and twirled a length of plastic twine, saying, “Anyone know what this is?”
Pagazzo called out, “Gimp!”
“Raise your hand next time,” Beavers said sternly.
But as soon as the man turned his back, Pagazzo faced us and briefly crossed his eyes.
“I can teach you to make lanyards and key chains and boondoggles,” said Beavers. He tugged at the slide on his neckerchief. “This here’s a boondoggle.”
As Pagazzo worked his lips in lunatic nibbling, mouthing the word boondoggle, Butch Rankin stepped behind him and twisted his ear, saying, “You again. That’s enough of that.”
A counselor had taken the floor in front of the tables. He said, “Let’s have a song.”
We listened with