A moment later an angry expletive was heard from the porch.
“What the damn hell-!” Reece boomed out as he tripped over a pot. When he appeared in the doorway, he clutched a pine sapling in each hand, the roots exposed, pots gone.
“What’s this crap lying around out there for?” he demanded, looking around for the guilty party.
"It’s nothin’, Big Chief,” said the Bomber, hopping down to intercept him and forestall trouble. “Just a little gag is
Reece wasn’t to be put off. “I don’t get it. What gag?” He turned to Phil for explanation.
“Ask Wacko,” came the sullen reply.
“All right, Wackeem, is this some of your doing?”
Leo shrugged and feebly echoed the Bomber’s comment. “Just a joke.”
“I don’t like jokes. Not this kind anyway,” Reece fumed. “What do you think this place is, a shit-house? This is no Dewdrop Inn, it’s Jeremiah!"
“He’s got Tiger’s compass, too,” Phil was compelled to say.
“Is that true?” Reece demanded of Leo.
“I used it, sure.”
“Give Tiger back his property.”
“That’s okay, he can keep it,” Tiger said.
Reece scowled. “My dad awarded you that compass. It’s a good one. You take it back.”
To avoid further argument, Tiger pocketed the compass. “And you can have two mornings extra K.P. in exchange,” Reece said to Leo. “Post yourself for duty in the morning. And if anybody asks you why, tell them it’s because you’re a wiseguy.”
"Aw, c’mon,” the Bomber protested. “Have a heart.” “Yeah,” Leo said, “have a heart… Heartless.”
There was an awkward silence in the cabin; what Leo had intended as a joke hadn’t come off that way. Reece slowly turned his eyes on him. “What did you say?” he asked softly.
Leo blanched. “I just said… have a… h-heart.”
“You called me Heartless. Nobody calls me Heartless, got that?”
“Yes…”
“Yes, sir!"
“Yes, sir!"
“Now, you take the broom and clean up that mess out there.” Reece gestured toward the door.
“Yes, sir.” Leo took the broom and went out. He was disposing of the debris in the trash can when he saw Tiger waiting for him at the fountain.
“I guess I screwed up,” he said sheepishly.
“We told you he doesn’t like that name. The Bomber gets away with it sometimes – you forget you ever heard it. But ya done good, camper. Real smart.” He gave Leo a clap on the shoulder.
Leo warmed to the compliment; praise from Caesar. Still, he wished it had come not from Tiger, but from Reece himself.
Later, as he climbed into his bunk to settle down to sleep, he looked over at Reece in his cot a scant three-feet away. His eyes were slitted open, staring at him it seemed; Charlie Chan eyes that made Leo nervous.
“Shape up, Wacko,” they were saying. “Remember Stanley Wagner.”
Resolved to heed the silent warning, Leo shut his own eyes and tried to get some sleep. But sleep would not come that night, and he lay long awake, thinking about the luckless Stanley, who might have had bad dreams too, and about his sudden, mysterious departure. Leo decided he didn’t want to know too much about Stanley.
Ma Starbuck, seated with her ear as close to Pa’s static-riddled Atwater-Kent radio speaker as her bulk would allow, nodded emphatically. As usual, “Ma Perkins” was right. If Lauralee, a “modern” housewife, really wanted to hold on to her mate, Buzz Morgan – a “real good” garage mechanic who tuned up engines over at Zeke’s Service Station – she was just going to have to quit flirting with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who happened by.
“Ma Perkins” was a latter-day oracle in the Starbuck household, and no matter how busy she was, Ma stopped what she was doing to catch the quarter-hour broadcast, which just now vied with the whirr and clatter of the antiquated Gestetner machine grinding out The Pine Cone. Ma was used to doing several things at once (there was a brace of apple pies cooling on the shelf outside her kitchen window), but “Ma Perkins” was too good to miss, and not until Lauralee had agreed to watch her step (though she sure would like to “get outta this burg and see some city lights”) did Ma return to her typewriter, set up by the window so she could keep an eye on the compound formed by three facades – barn, store, and office – that was the hub of the upper camp.
Across the way in the barn, morning crafts session was in full swing. One of the oldest in the district, the barn was well suited to its current purpose, its old stalls, tackrooms, and lofts having been readily transformed into workrooms – the Marconi Radio Shop (in the hayloft), the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop, the Rembrandt Paint Shop, the Silas Marner Weaving Shop, the Paul Revere Metalworking Shop – and on any morning except Sunday the place rang to the din of ball-peen hammers on sheet copper and saws eating wood, to the ceaseless hum of voices as young craftsmen went about the business of creating a work of art, this summer under the gentle guidance of Fritz Auerbach.
From time to time one of the boys would lay down his tools and come out to the pump for a cooling drink or to make a purchase at the Coop (stopping by the office first to get the money from his spending envelope). The Coop had once been exactly what its name implied, a chicken coop housing a flock of Rhode Island Reds, from which, in the camp’s earlier years, Ma had extracted her nickle of “egg money.” Nowadays, for two hours every morning and another in the evening, from behind its full-length oilcloth-covered counter, the counselors took turns vending materials for leather craft, beadwork, woodburning, and other handicraft projects, as well as candy bars and soda pop kept chilled in an old cold box upon which the legend MOXIE had all but worn away.
Now, through the window of the barn that marked the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop, Ma glimpsed the feathered Tyrolean cap belonging to Fritz Auerbach. He was hard at work on his pet project, a scale model of a village in Austria called Durenstein, which, when completed, was intended as a special gift for Camp Friend-Indeed.
“Hi, Fritz,” she called. “How’s it going with all the little folk?”
Fritz put his head out the window and laughed. “No little folk today, Mrs Starbuck, only little houses.”
“I thought you was gonna call me Ma, like everybody else at camp.”
“Okay, Ma, you’re the boss.” He tipped his hat brim over his eye and withdrew, catching his feather in a knothole. Ma beamed approvingly. She liked Fritz; everyone did.
Though he supervised all arts-and-crafts activities, the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop was Fritz’s personal duchy. Here he had set himself up with a sturdy workbench, a vise, chisels, knives, scroll saws, and other wood-working tools, and the adjacent walls were hung with tiny figures, human and animal, cleverly carved from chunks of wood and destined for the village: bushy-tailed squirrels, a tortoise, a deer, a man in lederhosen and a feathered cap. For Fritz was a master woodworker, and the Swoboda corner had become extremely popular with many of the campers, from the older boys in High Endeavor, eager to learn his carving secrets, to the cadets from Virtue like Peewee Oliphant, who crowded around him as he perched on his stool amid the aromatic sawdust and wood shavings.
Durenstein, the village on the outskirts of Vienna, was a place Fritz knew well – a little corner of his childhood that held many happy memories, unclouded by the misfortunes that had befallen him since. Sometimes, as he worked, he would tell the campers stories about how on Sundays in springtime he and his family would drive out of the city in their big touring car to take lunch under the arbor at a little cafe where the hasenpfeffer was tasty and they would drink May wine with strawberries in each glass and afterward sing the old German songs.
But no more. Fritz did not care to hear those songs any longer. It saddened Ma, for it didn’t seem likely he would ever see his family again – at Durenstein, or anywhere else. The Auerbachs had been one of the oldest and most respected banking families in Vienna; since the Austrian Nazis began their bid for power they had coveted the fortune of the family of Jews, and one night – this was some months before the Anschluss, when Hitler’s panzer units had rolled across the border into Austria -the Brownshirts had descended on the Auerbach house, breaking in at the front while the family escaped through the alley with only the clothes on their backs and a few bits of jewelry. Fritz, who had been away at school in Geneva, was sure his father would try to reach New York, and had himself made his way to America to wait, boarding with a family in Middletown and earning his tuition at Wesleyan by private tutoring in the German language. Among those he had taught had been Rex Kenniston’s younger brother, and it had been on Rex’s recommendation that Fritz, though a Jew, had been offered the post at Camp Friend-Indeed.