Edinburgh Read online

  We sing for a half hour past the rehearsal end. The altos have finally adapted, the sopranos are holding themselves back, the second sopranos support us both through the gap left for them now. Big Eric sets his wand down after the end is reached for the fifth time that afternoon. He wipes sweat off his forehead and smiles at us and says, You’re done. Come back for dinner, at six.

  Back in my cabin my sweat dries in the cool air coming off the lake. I think about writing to my family. I wouldn’t know what to say. Last night, Big Eric broke up a Dungeons & Dragons game I’d been leading for the Cabin 2 boys, so they wouldn’t feel so left out by the nightly naked story hour. But then Peter and Zach had wanted to play, and so Big Eric came up and shut it down and took them back to Cabin 1. I look over the interrupted game story, and then put it away. I take out a book of Greek mythology I stole from the town library. The myths are occasionally checked by a pencil, as if this were a catalog, and someone had gone along marking what they wished to buy. I read until the dinner bell, dreading what Big Eric will say. When I go to dinner with my book, Big Eric looks at it. Greeks, he says. Wise men, the Greeks. He smiles and I shut the book, slip it under my thigh on the bench. At dinner, Big Eric announces that cliques are forbidden in the choir, and that, until further notice, the D&D games would be suspended. I wonder about naked story hour.

  After dinner, I take my sketch pad down to the edge of the water, where I can look at the late-summer sun still afternoon-bright at six-thirty in the evening. I draw two eyes there on the page. I can never decide easily whether to draw the eyes as white eyes or Asian ones. My eyes are white eyes, though slanted slightly, but with the white-boy eyelids. The irises have green centers and brown edges. Split through the middle.

  I look at my two eyes there on the page. I begin to draw hair, then fill in the face shape, put in lines for the neck. I taught myself to draw by tracing comics, so I draw smooth-lined broad-shouldered men and women of enormous cleavage, supported by powerful, tiny waists and long, muscled legs. I always wait for the eyes to tell me who they are, so I can know who I am drawing. I decide I am drawing my favorite character from D&D, a sorceress I’ve named Tammamo, for my long-ago great-grandmother. I draw a heart-shaped face atop a long beautiful body, with flowing red hair past her waist that rises behind her like fire in a storm wind. I try to make her look like one of my grandfather’s missing sisters.

  Who are you drawing? Behind me stands Big Eric.

  A character of mine, from D&D. As I say this, I feel a change come over me, like a direction change in the wind. All my air is now coming from another direction.

  You’re very good. She looks scary.

  She’s not supposed to. I guess I’m not that good.

  I look up at him. He is a tall man, he does carpentry. His round-rimmed gold-framed glasses gives him an owlish demeanor, though not the wise owl but the startled one. When the owl blinks around trying to see.

  I’m not targeting you, he says.

  All right. If you say so.

  They tell me you are the Dungeon Master. What does that mean?

  It means I am in charge of the game rules. I have the maps, I tell them who the enemies are, and I monitor the plays, to make sure the dice are rolled and everyone gets a turn. And I make up the stories.

  I turn back to my drawing. I draw Tammamo wearing a white buckskin fringe bikini and her power gem rests on a headdress that rides atop her hair. Her boots are thigh-high.

  I say, Adam’s a dungeon master too. A good one. Zach hates it. Merle or Luke can be good if they don’t get bored. It’s not just me.

  Big Eric bends down. All right then, he says. Just remember, some of these boys are not as sophisticated as you. I don’t want them feeling left out, and I don’t want them complaining to their parents. If someone wants to play I want you to find them a way. All right?

  Yep.

  When I finish my drawing, the light is nearly gone, and Tammamo’s hands each hold a ball of fire-lightning. I see her leap into the wind’s wide arms, her hair a torch, see her laugh as she rides the night. Before she fell in love, I think, she would have been mad with grief, wanting love. How would she have fallen in love with her husband? Was she preparing to destroy him and fell for him instead?

  Back in my bunk, later, I read some of a comic book a cousin sent me from Korea. He is learning English and has translated it for me, his careful, squared-off handwriting, all in capitals, tells me the story. FOX-DEMON MUST EAT THOUSAND LIVERS, YOUNG MEN VIRGINS, TO BECOME HUMAN. This fox has been drawn ugly, but she wears a beautiful mask, made from the face of a victim, to hide her ugliness. She is Korea’s most famous fox-demon.

  I write him a letter. Dear Paul, Thank you so much. The comic book is very good. At the bottom of my drawing I write FOX-DEMON, and mail it to him.

  8

  THE NEXT NIGHT storm clouds come up quickly after lights-out. We slip from our beds, drop tarps from the eaves and tie them to the sills, to seal the cabin windows, which have no glass. The rain falls hard and lightning lights the tarps occasionally, followed quickly by thunder. I lie on my bunk, reading myths by flashlight, comforted, thinking that I am perhaps like Lady Tammamo, that I have managed to conjure a storm. I compare her to the Greek gods and goddesses. Tonight I read about Atalanta, who wanted to outrun every man. I read about Europa, carried off to sea by Zeus. I read about Ganymede. How Zeus turned into an eagle in order to carry him off. Because he was so beautiful.

  Tammamo, I decide, is mightier. For the man she loves lived to die a natural death, and the Greeks always kill the mortals they love, through design or accident. None of these gods would renounce their godhood.

  Do we have lightning rods on the roofs, asks Eric B.

  I didn’t know he was still awake. Now wouldn’t be the time to find out, I say.

  I like walking in a thunderstorm. Do you?

  I do.

  We walk into the front room of the cabin. Rainwater sweeps in a stream down the hill to the lake, revealing steps made from the roots of the trees. I swing the door open.

  If we stay out in the open, and wear rubber shoes, we’re fine, he says.

  I think of the lightning swarming over me, unable to grasp the interior circuitry of nerve because of rubber soles on my feet. I want to wear a bolt. I say, All right then, and he and I step out.

  The night is the lighter for the storm, the clouds reflect light back to us. Somewhere in Cape Elizabeth, my mother’s porch light sends out a ray of light and part of it bounces off this cloud and arrows into my eye. I know my mother will keep her light on all night.

  Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Eric B. asks.

  Sure, a little.

  Do you think this lake has a monster?

  I think it might, I say.

  Really?

  I look at him in the dark. We are now in the woods. The rain reaches us here in little waterfalls collected off the roof of leaves and falling in through small openings. Eric B. will never be one of Big Eric’s chosen. He really doesn’t know, either. Some of these boys would never know. I say, Let’s go to the lake.

  9

  HE HAD HIDDEN inside one of the boats. No one knew he was there. When the storm began, he pushed out and the normally corpulent tides of the lake, now turgid with rain and wind, took him quickly out into the center, where Eric B. and I did not see him. What I remember is almost thinking there weren’t enough boats, that one was missing. I remember something about them called my eye to them, but I couldn’t have said what it was, and I said nothing at the time to Eric B. And so it wouldn’t be until the morning that Ralph, Big Eric’s eleven-year-old foster-child, was discovered to have drowned. The storm capsized the rowboat in the lake.

  Breakfast is an untidy half hour of silence and gulped oatmeal, and then gradually the speculations begin, in whispers. The screen door slaps open then, and Big Eric enters.

  Boys, he says. Ralph has been found. He drowned sometime last night, evidently from taking a boat out alone
in the storm. I would just say that for today, Fee and Eric are in charge of rehearsal. I will excuse myself from your midst. Thank you.

  And then he leaves.

  The silence creases after the door closes, and then splits. Zach, sitting next to me, says, All right, Mr. Director.

  I look across to Little Eric, who smiles at me. He gets up from his table of chattering sopranos and heads toward me. As he stands in front of me and Zach, I consider how we are the original three. Everything began with us. Even this.

  Something feels wrong here, I say.

  What do you mean, they ask at the same time.

  Jinx, I say.

  And so the rehearsal. A brief conference beforehand decided that Little Eric would sit at the piano and I would direct, as he had the piano skills and I was adept at the pronunciations and rhythms. As their gazes arrow in, I understand. If my baton had been a candle it would have lit on its own.

  As the warm-up scales begin and the summer sun whitens the sky outside, the morning haze fills with light. I feel, in the cool dark of the rehearsal room, the boat. The oarlocks would have been about the level of his chin. For him to get there on his own reflected a terrible determination. Ralph had been a slip of a child, large unhappy dark eyes, curly dark hair that reminded me of an elf. He was as pale as a mushroom.

  The key changes. The boys’ voices thunder through the scales, as if to call to Big Eric, wherever he was, in town with the small cold blue body. I sing alongside, use my voice as I use the baton, to guide.

  I let myself know. It’s no mystery why Ralph took a boat alone into the center of the lake during a storm. My eyes fill up, as if I had walked out into a rain and turned my face to the sky. It comes to me, something covered up in what Big Eric had said about the songs. Kyrie eleison means, Lord have mercy.

  10

  THE DAYS AFTERWARD filled with parents calling the camp. A few insisted on a weekend visit. What they found was a more or less placid group of boys, as unrippled as the lake. The camp was not called off because technically, Ralph was not one of us. He was Eric’s foster son. The police determined the cause of death accidental, death by drowning, the state sent Ralph’s caseworker to interview Eric and his wife, and all agreed that Ralph’s had been a short life of hardship and that it was possible he had killed himself. I overheard the interview, as it was conducted inside the Nurse cabin. I stood outside, my ear up against a crack in the wood frame. I wanted to know.

  . . . the whole time, asking repeatedly at nighttime if it was going to be soon. Returning to his mother.

  Does she know? Isn’t she in prison?

  She does know. She had to be sedated, actually, after she was told. Very sorry situation, for which she blames herself. But, I must ask, how was it he was able to push the rowboat out by himself?

  I don’t think he was trying to row anywhere. I think he went out and fell asleep inside the rowboat, and that the storm tides of the lake took it off the beach and that he awoke too late.

  He was always saying how warm it was here. Even with the fan. And the boats are cool. Like a cave.

  How is your baby?

  He’s fine, poor thing won’t remember. A blessing I suppose.

  I switch bunks with another boy so that my bed faces the field instead of the farther cabin and the lake. I am grateful the body was found, also grateful that we will not be asked to swim today. In the afternoon I write to my mother and father and grandparents a quick postcard: Dear Folks, The rehearsals are good and the other day I was chosen to lead one with Eric. Not too bad with mosquitoes here, and I am getting a tan. I am the best swimmer, of course. Everyone is very sad about Ralph. Please tell Grandfather and Grandmother that I love them and I have some pressed flowers for their book.

  I walk out to post the letter in the mailbox at the edge of the road and then walk back. The field has sprouted sunflowers, on the cabin side, and already they dwarf me. Their golden heads tower on slender green stalks rising as high as ten feet. Cleis was a girl who fell in love with Phoebus Apollo, the sun. To take pity on her the gods turned her into this flower, so that she might watch him all her life. I mistrust the myth, though certainly it seems a plausible story. All of it except for the part where the gods do this out of mercy. They do it for fun, it seems to me. In Greek mythology, loving Apollo seems to be among the most dangerous of the heart’s choices: the fields and gardens are full of his lovers, multiplied by time into millions. I think of Peter. How much more I could love him, if there was another of me. If there were millions. If I had been scattered. I go back to my bunk and flop down.

  What are you writing, Peter says, coming into the cabin. He throws himself onto my bunk. The sun is shining, he says. We should be outside.

  Outside, we head into the woods to find a birch tree to ride. My mother’s cousins taught me birch riding. You take a tree and bend it slowly until it touches the ground. You tie it so you can climb on and then you cut the rope. The rope we took from the cabin, and the knife, Peter brought: a child-sized deer knife. In the woods, it doesn’t take long to find a tree for us. You first, he says. We wind the rope around the tree and then under the edge of a stone for leverage and the tree lowers. I sit down across the papery trunk, dry against my thighs.

  Cut, I say. And the tree swings me up harder than I expect. I go up and then as I come down, the tree bobbles and I fall. I hit the ground hard. I put my left hand out to stop the fall and when I pull it up the forearm is crooked, like a tree branch, and they hear my scream across the camp.

  On the phone later, my mother is circumspect. Honey, these things happen. You always were a troublemaker and this is what comes of it. But I hear the arm is well set.

  It is, I say. The camp phone is located in the mudroom of the rehearsal building. I stretch out flat on my back, my new cast a solid weight on my side.

  Terrible thing, about Ralph, she says.

  Yep.

  But you know, this is why we always insisted you kids be good swimmers.

  What?

  So you could swim to shore. So in case the boat you were on was going down, you could swim to shore.

  The lake has a monster.

  How do you know, I ask.

  I can feel it. It watches me.

  My arm cast glows in the moonlight here on the dock. Under the plaster, the doctor said the arm would lose its hair and skin, that for a little while after the cast’s removal, it might even be smaller. Peter sits beside me, wet from a night swim. The night air feels as thick as the cast. Even the crickets sound tired.

  Why didn’t it take Ralph, I ask.

  Nobody wanted Ralph, Peter says, after a long quiet.

  11

  AS MY VOICE may change soon, I have finally been given a solo, in an a cappella song.

  Well, that’s one way of keeping you out of trouble, Zach says.

  What do you mean by that? I ask Zach. We have gone out of sight of the camp, and we stand now, naked, in the lake, pressed against each other lightly, face to face. I hold my cast just above the water, resting it against his back.

  He laughs and looks up. Extra rehearsal time. Less time for D&D. Plus more time spent with him. He co-opts you. A very smart tactical move.

  We aren’t at war, I say.

  Sure. If you can’t see that, I can. I can see that easy. He wants Peter.

  The trees lean out over the lakeshore above us, a green scrim hung across heaven’s summer face. The birch trees are a pale fire running slow through the summer woods and there isn’t a thing wrong. Kissing Zach now spins me, makes me feel like I want to run myself all the way through him. I understand, why people like this.

  I have to go back, I say then. I have to go ride bikes with Peter.

  Where are we.

  We took a bad turn there. We need to think about going back, I guess.

  Above, thunder clouds. Peter and I are on bikes the camp lets us use, having ridden down dirt roads that line the forested countryside. Above the firs that toss the air around them I c
an see boiling clouds, dark like duck wings and glossy from carrying their rain. The air fills with dust, pollen, twigs, and torn leaves as the winds conduct playful raids. I can smell my sweat, which alarms me. I consider that my odor has caught up to me, now that we are stopped.

  How many turns, Peter asks. How many did we take. Seven, right?

  I run through my memory. I have a serial memory, I remember sequences, patterns, numbers. I am finding it applies equally to sentences and mathematics, spelling words or building numbers. Seven turns, I say. A left, two rights, two lefts, two more rights.

  Peter climbs up on his bike, rising out of the seat. Because of my arm cast, I lag behind, sweating until wet spots slick my shirt; a dull ache radiates from under the cast. We are now shadowed completely by clouds. Peter seems about to lift up like the pieces of the road and field lifting around him. And then he comes down again. He says, We shouldn’t ride until the storm is over. You aren’t supposed to get your cast wet.

  I think of all the sweat on it. Huh. But we aren’t supposed to stay under trees during storms. Lightning.

  Peter hoists himself up again. To the field then, he says, and he bobs up and down through the grass that almost covers him. I push my bike, following his new trail, my nose itching already from the grass broken by his passing.

  We sit down in the middle of a field under a roof we make from our bikes and windbreakers. I guess that we are at least a mile and a half from the camp. Heat lightning passes from cloud to cloud without visible impact. The trees roll their branches around and around as the wind passes through them like a running line to some giant, lost sail. Until now, it had been a clear if sticky day.

  Are you psyched, Peter says. You have a solo.

  Yeah, I say. Our two coats, tied together, burp up, a wind having snuck underneath. We hold the bikes. I want this wind to continue, for us to lift into the sky, holding on. To go far away, just me and Peter.