The fat kid ignored me for a while and then he finally said, “I would've left me here too.” He was looking down the trail like he could see Paris.
“Your parents go away every summer?” I asked him. That sounded worse than my life.
“I don't have to be this fat, you know,” he said. “I eat like all the time.”
“Well, stop eating,” I told him. “Get some celery sticks.”
“That's what I'm gonna do,” he said.
We took a wrong turn in the dark and had to double back. He asked me not to say anything about what he said about BJ. “You're not supposed to know,” he said. “He asked about ten kids. I think I'm the only one who said yes.”
“Don't some kids want to kick his ass when he says something like that?” I asked him.
“Well, yeah,” he said. Like: Hel-lo. “What do you care?” he said when I asked if he was really going to do it. “Guys like it. In case you were wondering. Guys like it when you do it.”
We finally found his tent and there was this feeling down inside me like now I'd never sleep. “If you were normal you'd know that,” he said.
It was dark and his elbow kept bumping me. One of the kids from inside his tent stuck his head out. “Who're you? His girlfriend? You walk him home?”
“Yeah, I'm his girlfriend,” I said. “I walked him home.” They all made big noises about that.
“How's your special friend?” BJ said when I got back to our tent.
“Shouldn't you be jerking off?” I told him. And then we both got into our sleeping bags and lay there touching ourselves and trying to think of what to say next. I was still awake when he finally sat up and listened to see if we were asleep and pulled on his shorts and left. I could hear his flip-flops slapping as he went down the trail.
When the first birds started making noise I could see the canvas over my head again. I could feel a breeze and smell something fresh. My eyes were so tired they burned. There were noises in the underbrush up the hill.
I saw Chris three times before lunch and asked him each time about the flashlight. He seemed distracted. “I don't have your flashlight,” he said the last time, like he was finally able to focus. I didn't see the fat kid or BJ. For a while nobody knew where they were and then somebody said they were in the Health Center. The nurse who sat in the little front room there said they were both resting and I should come back after lunch. She had a little wooden rack of pamphlets on her desk: Your Gums and You, Proper Foot Hygiene, Courtesy for Beginners.
At lunch someone said they both got beaten up, or beat each other up.
There was no one at the desk when I came back so I walked in. They pretended to still be asleep. The fat kid had his hands bandaged with big ice bags on them and had a bandage on his ear too. BJ had two black eyes and an ice bag wrapped in a towel on his head. His cheek was swollen.
Outside, Chris was sitting on the steps of the Health Center with his head in his hands. His knuckles were scabby with dried blood. Two of the other counselors were trying to cheer him up. He was saying he was 1-A and his lottery number was five. Unless he took off for Canada he was going over. His brother didn't have a deferment either. He was over there already.
“That's the least of your worries at this point,” the Camp Director said. “Come with me.” And he got Chris up and they went to the Camp Director's office.
“What're you lookin' at?” one of the counselors said when he saw me.
I stuck my head in the Health Center's back window. BJ closed his eyes when he saw me, but the fat kid looked back, like he finally had something he could tell his parents.
I spent the rest of the day in bed. Daddy longlegs and flies came and went. Joyce looked in and then left. The next morning I missed breakfast but somebody got me out of bed because there was another phone call. When I got to the phone both my mother and father said hello. They were both on the line. I guessed somebody was upstairs and somebody was downstairs. “We had another episode with your brother,” my father said. I was just listening. My mother said he was going to have to go away. She started crying. She said that Doctor Waynik told them he was a danger to himself.
“Because he couldn't play my records?” I said.
That seemed to surprise them. “He has your records. It's not your records,” my father said.
I stood there holding the phone. He was nine. The year before he'd been playing with his toy trucks.
“Can I talk to him?” I said.
“I got some more 45s,” he said when he got on the line. “Dad took me.”
“What'd you get?” I asked. He told me. I raked my fingernails across my neck. “Those're good,” I told him.
“You like them?” he said.
I told him I did. Especially the MacArthur Park one.
He seemed happy about that. “You can play them when you get back,” he said.
“You all right?” the Camp Director asked me. He'd come out of his inner office, where he had Chris. He looked at my neck. He didn't leave until I nodded.
I was holding the dial part of the phone in front of me. I'd lifted it off the desk but there wasn't much reach on the cord. “You there?” my brother said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You gonna be okay?”
He started crying. “They're gonna put me somewhere,” he said. “I'm scared.”
“Oh, Georgie,” I said.
And what I could have said then was: I'll come home and we'll talk and you'll feel like somebody understands and you won't have to hit yourself or throw everything you have around the room. Or you can come up and see me, come up and visit, come up and be a part of the worst camp anybody's ever seen. Or let's keep our records together. Let's keep them in your room. Let's make a list of all the ones we've got. Or I'm sorry I make it harder and I have trouble too and maybe if we take walks or get a hobby we can figure out how to get through this. Or put Daddy on, you can't go away, you have to stay, we have to stay together. But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then with my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.
Sans Farine
My father, Jean-Baptiste Sanson, had christened in the church of Saint-Laurent two children: a daughter, who married Pierre Héris-son, executioner of Melun, and a son, myself. After my mother's death he remarried, his second wife from a family of executioners in the province of Touraine. Together they produced twelve children, eight of whom survived, six of whom were boys. All six eventually registered in the public rolls as executioners, my half brothers beginning their careers by assisting their father and then myself in the city of Paris.
My name is Charles-Henri Sanson, known to many throughout this city as the Keystone of the Revolution, and known to the rabble as Sans Farine, in reference to my use of emptied bran sacks to hold the severed heads. I was named for Charles Sanson, former adventurer and soldier of the King and until 1668 executioner of Cherbourg and Caudebec-en-Caux. My father claimed he was descended from Sanson de Longval and that our family coat of arms derived from either the First or Second Crusade. Its escutcheon represents another play on our name: a cracked bell and the motto San son: without sound.