Hall of Small Mammals (7 page)

“Here's the deal,” he says to Flynn. “Ryan can stay. Only he won't be able to do some of the activities since he doesn't have his beads. Like the canoe trip to the island on the lake. That's for kids who've got their Swimming Skill Bead and their CPR Bead of Mercy. You understand, right, why we can't let him go on that trip?”

Flynn says he understands, of course. He gives his son's shoulder a squeeze.

•   •   •

The tent is old and once belonged to Flynn's father. The canvas is military green; the paraffin wax that kept its corners sealed from the rain has long since lost its shine. Father and son tie the canvas strips to the metal poles they've erected in the wide-open field with all the other tents. In all directions are tents: red, yellow, orange, and green nylon rain-flies spilling out around the domes like fruit candies melting in the afternoon sun. Beside every tent is a parked car. The field buzzes with bugs and the sound of a dozen car-powered air pumps blowing up mattresses, palatial beds two and three feet thick. Flynn has brought a number of thin foam pads and stacks them under their sleeping bags.

“Do you want the left or right?”

The boy picks the left.

“Where's your pillow?”

He forgot his pillow, but here's Mookie the blue bear, smuggled inside a pillowcase.

“I thought we agreed not to bring the bear.”

His son prepares a throne of T-shirts for the bear at the end of his sleeping bag. Its cold dark eyes are fixed on the two of them.

“Just for the first night,” Flynn says.

A bell echoes across the lake, and fathers and sons, a hundred of them, begin the boisterous migration to the dining hall. Like a herd of buffalo, Flynn imagines, and they're part of it. The boys, ages six to fourteen, run circles around the fathers, some as old as sixty.

One small boy with a round and ruddy face stops to examine an overturned kayak. “Snake,” he announces, and they all gather around him to admire the discovery, their first significant encounter with wildlife for the week. A dark, fat snake is coiled in the sand by the water.

Water moccasin, one of the fathers determines, and then they're all moving away at once, the fathers dragging the boys backward by their arms and shirttails. Someone should tell the camp director! Snakes in the lake again! Hadn't they hired someone to take care of this after last summer? Remember that kid last year who somehow trapped a water moccasin in a shopping bag and hung it from the rafters in the shower house?

“Clearly that kid didn't have any Beads of Mercy,” someone up ahead jokes.

“He wasn't allowed back this summer,” yells someone farther back.

They converge on the flagpole outside the dining hall. The man with the clipboard has traded his paperwork for a megaphone. The boys are organized into single-file lines radiating out from the flagpole like spokes from a hub. Flynn helps Ryan find
his place, the line for his group, Bill Tierney at the head. Two Grasshoppers take the flag down and fold it military-style into careful triangles. Time for the Grasshopper salute. Time for the Grasshopper Pledge.
There's a way around every wall,
hundreds of shrill voices yell out in near-unison. Time for dinner.

“Go ahead,” Flynn tells Ryan. “Find us a couple of seats.”

Flynn lingers on the porch, where a handful of men furtively smoke their cigarettes. They huddle near the steps, a conspiracy of tobacco. Flynn asks for a light. The man who gives him one introduces himself as John Price. “You a newbie?” he asks.

Flynn says he is. John Price sports a chinstrap beard that doesn't much help disguise his marshmallow chin. He owns a dealership. Toyotas and Hyundais, he adds. Ever need a new car, give him a call. Come on by. That's how this works. Grasshoppers isn't just for the kids. The dads stick together, you know? Help each other out.

Flynn nods his head enthusiastically. He couldn't agree more. That's how this should work.

One father says, “Marty, your kid ever tell you about his Truth Bead?”

“Never,” says Marty.

“My kid never told me neither,” another man says. “I guess that shouldn't bother me, but it does.”

“Only two Beads of Truth,” John Price explains to Flynn, “and the dads never get to know what they mean. The Head Guides decide when the kid is ready. I think it's just like a single sentence that gets whispered in their ear. But the kids aren't supposed to repeat it. Ever. I've heard that the first one is about the nature of time. My kid's got that one, but he's just as tight-lipped as the rest of them. When I press him about it, he smiles at me like
I'm an idiot who wouldn't understand. Just wait, it'll drive you crazy when your kid gets his.”

Bowls of mashed potatoes, platters of chicken fingers, and pitchers of lemonade are on all the tables when they go inside the dining hall, a flurry of hand-waving, lip-smacking, and spilled drinks.

“Wouldn't mind a little vodka in that lemonade,” John Price says with a forced laugh before wandering off to find his son.

Flynn navigates the maze of tables and children. He watches one kid drown a chicken finger—perfectly fried on one side but mushy and gray on the other—in a gush of ketchup from a sticky red squirt bottle. Another boy, with a blue bandanna wrapped around his tiny head, drums on his plate with metal silverware until a father leans across the table with a stern look. All the kids are wearing their yellow uniforms. From the right pockets, on leather strings, their white, red, and black beads dangle.

Ryan, in his unadorned uniform, is sitting at the end of a table at the far end of the hall, three seats away from the next person. He's barely touched his food. Flynn asks if he'd like to move over a couple of seats, but the boy says no, he's fine where he is. So they sit together, apart from the others, poking tunnels into their mashed potatoes, drinking more and more lemonade, until the man with the megaphone, the camp director, stands at the front of the room with some announcements: tomorrow's activities are posted on the back wall; the bonfire ceremony will be three nights from tonight; a special visitor is coming to help construct a genuine Native American sweat lodge; oh, and the water moccasins are back in the lake, so watch where you step.

That night it rains, but only a little.

•   •   •

The nature hike the next morning is a success. Flynn is waiting at the tent when Ryan returns; his legs are bramble-scraped but he's happy. Did he see any wildlife? No, no wildlife. Did he see any plants? Yes, they saw a few plants. Flynn has trouble understanding what exactly Ryan enjoyed about the expedition, but he doesn't want to spoil the effect with questions, so he lets it go. That afternoon, after lunch, Ryan isn't able to go on the canoe trip, as expected, so Flynn finds a tub of toys in the shed behind the director's cabin. He takes out the soccer ball and tries to get Ryan to kick that back and forth across the field. But Ryan isn't interested.

“Basketball, then?”

“Nope,” he says. The boy is satisfied to sit in the rocking chairs on the dining hall porch.

“What are you thinking about?” Flynn asks.

“I don't know,” the boy says.

He's inscrutable, his large eyes blinking and looking but not conveying any secret meaning. Flynn wonders if some fathers instinctively know what their sons are thinking, if there exists between them some kind of private language, little symbols and gestures that only the two of them can decode. Who are you? Flynn is tempted to ask.

One of the cooks comes outside on the porch and says Ryan can ring the dinner bell if he wants. Ryan takes the cord like it might shock him, then gives it a gentle tug. “Needs more than that,” the cook says gruffly; Ryan pulls harder. The sound is immense, a physical presence, a peal felt in the bones. The boy is smiling, and Flynn is hopeful.

John Price finds Flynn at dinner. Does he want to smoke a cigarette? They go out on the porch with the other fathers. They struggle to keep the matches lit in the breeze.

“So you never told me what you do for a living,” John Price says.

Flynn tells him about the treatment center. How you can't understand addiction until you've seen someone fight one.

“I got a sister-in-law who used to do cocaine,” John says. “Even at Thanksgiving.”

“Did she get help?”

“Maybe, I don't know. My brother never talks about it anymore, so I guess she did.”

Flynn opens a new pack and offers up cigarettes. Almost everybody accepts. They use the first butt to light the second because of the breeze.

“My kid's up for his Second Truth Bead this week,” a father says.

“Mine too,” John Price adds.

The others perk up at that.

“The Second Truth is about what happens when you die.”

“That's not what I've heard.”

“What'd you hear?”

“My son told me it's about how the universe got started.”

“Was it with a bang or a whimper?”

“The Big Banger. That's what my oldest daughter calls God. I think she does it to get under my skin. She's a Unitarian now.”

“Does that make Satan the Little Whimperer?”

“You guys don't know shit. The Second Truth is about the end of the universe, not the beginning.”

“So enlighten us. How does it end?”

“The earth goes up in flames. God already tried drowning us once, so the next time he'll smoke us out.”

“Bring it on,” says a father with smoke sneaking out his nostrils.

“If it wasn't for these Truth Beads, my kid would have dropped out years ago. He's obsessed. If I ever found out what they are, I'd just tell him so we could be done with it.”

“Anyone else think it's bullshit we don't get to know these Truths? We do half the work.”

“If you ask me, I think the whole process is bullshit. Why is it the Head Guides get to decide who's ready for those beads? Grasshoppers didn't use to be this way.”

“It can be a little clubby,” John Price admits.

“A little?”

“We're just in it for the camping trips.”

“Us too. I wanted my son to stop playing his stupid computer games.”

“Has it worked?”

“Not really. He's got some kind of portable thing. Miracle he never trips.”

“I wanted my son to feel like he's a part of something,” Flynn says.

“Even if what he's a part of is a little cultish? I'm sorry, guys, but it is, right?”

“It is, yeah.”

“A little bit.”

“My boy's alone most afternoons,” Flynn continues, “and that gets him into all sorts of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Because there's trouble and then there's
trouble
.”

“I don't know,” Flynn mutters. “Typical kid stuff, I guess.”

“My boy used to trap squirrels so he could drown them in the pool.”

“My kid used to shoot a crossbow into the neighbor's yard, and one time he put an arrow in her leg. She's almost eighty! God, that was awful.”

“Alex, he's my stepson. Years ago we caught him with a hammer standing over his little sister's crib.”

“My son likes fire,” Flynn says. “But I think he does it for the attention.”

“My kid Gene had a fire thing for a while. He almost burned down the garage.”

The camp director pokes his head out the door and asks them to come inside for announcements, and they look at each other like,
Is this guy for real?
Flynn smiles at his new friends.

That night in the tent, Flynn lets his son fall asleep first. He takes Mookie the bear out to the car and hides him under a piece of luggage. He's stripping down for bed when he sees his son's eyes on him.

“Just try it without the bear,” Flynn says.

The boy closes his eyes.

But Flynn has not won this battle, not yet. In the morning, the bear is back on its T-shirt throne. Flynn is undaunted. The dew sparkles with sunshine and, Flynn imagines, with promise. Ryan goes off to the art shack for leather making. The camp isn't really designed for earning beads—that's what the weekly meetings are for—but he might be able to earn a bead of skill this morning.

Flynn crosses the field, and by the time he reaches the edge of the woods, his boots are soaked. He has offered to help build the sweat lodge. John Price is there with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The camp director, a giant ring of keys jangling from his belt, introduces a special visitor, a man with a long brown-and-gray ponytail down his back. His name is Henri, pronounced the French way, though he has a distinctly southern accent. He says he's one-sixteenth Cherokee. He has a certificate in Native American studies. Sweat lodges are used as a means of purification, he says, of the body and the spirit. Sitting in a sweat lodge can help you reach a deeper level of consciousness. Sometimes the spirit travels.

Henri asks for volunteers to gather the firewood and rocks. He asks for more volunteers to cut down and strip small saplings. He distributes hatchets. He uses string and a stick to sketch out a circle with a ten-foot diameter. He instructs everyone to be as silent as possible. He's tapping on a drum. John Price rolls his eyes at Flynn. They jam the saplings into the ground and bend them toward the center. Henri sends John Price and Flynn to collect grasses for the floor of the lodge, and if they find any sage, even better.

They move through the trees, hunched like hunter-gatherers.

“Where did they find this guy anyway?” John Price asks. “Do you think they just Googled
hippie
and
bullshit
and this guy was number one on the list?”

Flynn's not sure. Will John Price try it out, though?

“Sure, why not?”

Their arms are full of green grass and dead leaves. “So,” John Price says, smiling, “I finally got it out of my son last night. The First Truth.”

“Oh.”