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. Куriе 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.