At Raymond's (motto: “Where U Bot the Hat”) on Washington Street, pup tents cost more because they were new and oily, smelling of fresh waterproofing. Not having the stink and scuff of battle on them, they seemed less reliable to me.
The pup tent I saw as my own space, a little Eden where I could do as I pleased, a way of leaving home and being safe. The tent was just my size and seemed a familiar extension of my upraised blanket in bed, where I lay and read Trap Lines North with an army surplus flashlight. When I had had enough of a fur trapper in snowy Canada, snaring foxes and muskrats, and skinning and curing the pelts, I read the horror comics: Tales of Terror and Weird Fantasy. I needed a place to hide my books, to hide myself, a place to dream.
I mentally rehearsed the buying of the pup tent, and when I had the full ten dollars I took the trolley to Sullivan Square and the El to North Station and walked to Atlantic Avenue. I was fretful, anxious at the thought of being alone and having to hand over money to a clerk. The process of taking possession of a purchase made me fearful of being mocked or cheated.
The pup tents, rolled up, poles inside, were stacked like little logs. I chose one that was tightly rolled and carried it in both arms to the cash register.
“What can I do you for?” the clerk said to me. This was the sort of banter I feared.
I showed him the bundle.
“That’ll be ten simoleons.”
I handed over the money. I didn’t answer or make eye contact, just held on to the pup tent and thought: When I get home and set it up and crawl inside, I will be safe.
Walking home from the electric car stop on the Fellsway, just past Hickey Park, I approached Evelyn Frisch playing hopscotch alone in front of her house, tossing a pebble onto a square, clapping her hands. When she saw me she held the ankle of one leg from behind and balanced on the other leg. Then she hopped toward me on the chalked squares as her short skirt jumped above her pink panties, five hops and she was in front of me, in white socks and buckled shoes, tugging down her short skirt.
She squinted and said, “What’s that for?”
“Sleeping out.”
“Want some fudge?”
I shook my head and walked on.
“You got a hole in your fence,” she said.
She was twisting and screwing up her face at me when I looked back.
At home I took the tent into the back yard, unrolled it, and pitched it as far as I could from the house, banging in the stakes and tightening the guy ropes. I crawled inside and lay down with my hands under my head and thought, Paradise!
That night while I sat at the dinner table my father seemed surprised and annoyed. He was not eating; he was shaving. He shaved twice a day, morning and evening. He kept his razor and strop by a mirror in the kitchen, where he shaved — no one asked why — every evening before his bath. He held one soapy cheek tight with a finger and jerked the blade of his straight razor at the window. He said, “The hell’s that all about?”
“Pup tent.”
He scraped at his face. “Thinks money grows on trees.”
“I saved up for it.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted.”
“I got it cheap on Atlantic Ave.”
“Get what you pay for. Bet you dollars to donuts it falls apart.”
My mother said, “Andy, your dinner’s getting cold.”
I clawed at my mashed potatoes with the turned-over tines of my fork while my father wiped the suds from his ears and sat down.
“Can I sleep out?”
“Pup tent is a peck of trouble,” my father said. He snatched at my fingers. “You could grow vegetables under those nails.”
The next day I put down a ground cloth, a rubber sheet from Louie’s cot, and stocked my tent with a flashlight and a canteen of water and Trap Lines North, Campcraft, and the horror comics.
The horror comics I hid from my parents; they said they were violent and disgusting. I liked the comics because they were violent and disgusting. The women shown in them wore tight blouses and short skirts and had big red lips and were terrorized. Now and then they were dismembered, chopped into pieces and put into bloodstained bags, but only if they were cruel. Horror stories always had a moral. Good people were never killed in them, but guilty ones were always beheaded or devoured by ghouls or choked — blue tongues out, bloodshot eyes popping, neck squeezed small.
One hot afternoon in the summer of my pup tent I was reading Tales of Terror, two separate stories intertwined. In one a shapely blonde in a skimpy bathing suit was always lying in the sun, trying to darken her tan; in the other a pale-skinned brunette spent the day applying cosmetics, trying to devise ways to stay youthful. Their husbands were tormented by their vanity, one wife wasting time in the sun, the other wasting money on skin creams. By coincidence, in the middle of the story, both men met on the beach, just bumped into each other. “Sorry!” “Excuse me!” They did not realize how their lives were similar: henpecked by vain, demanding wives. One man was an electrician, the other man a chemist. This meeting was brief, a chance encounter before the stories diverged again, a detail of storytelling that impressed me.
Not long after, unable to stand the nagging, the men snapped. The electrician tied his wife to a table and burned her black, toasting her to death under the glare of a hundred sunlamps. She lay naked and scorched, her skin peeling.
You got your wish! Now you’re nice and brown!
In another part of the same city, the crazed chemist had prepared a huge vat of clear molten plastic. He shoved his wife into it, drowning her and sealing her in the goop as it solidified. She was fixed in the posture of thrashing, her legs apart, her mouth choked open.
You said you never wanted to grow old. Now you’ll be young forever!
The justice of it, the morality of it, the desperate husbands pushed over the edge; but I stared at the women’s bodies, their tortured corpses, still beautiful in tight bathing suits.
“Andy?”
Evelyn’s voice on top of the pictures made me flustered. I shut the comic book.
“Brought you some fudge.”
She stuck her arm through the tent flap, with a small brown paper bag, three squares of flat crumbly fudge.
“How did you get over here?”
“Through the hole in your fence.”
After she went away I heard her talking to herself, something she wanted me to hear, but it was only a meaningless murmur to me. Later I saw the missing pickets.
The next day just before dark she came again, saying, ‘Anybody home?”
“I don't want any fudge.”
“Didn't bring you any.” She put her face through the parted flap of the pup tent. “Can I come in?”
She was on her hands and knees in the grass, her face forward, her hair damp, and dampness on her face.
“I guess so.”
She duck-walked into the tent, knelt for a moment, then sat down on the ground sheet, her pleated skirt riding up her thighs. She smelled of soap and bubble gum. She wore her hair in braids, a ribbon at each end, and twirled one braid with a stubby finger. With her other hand she gave me a wrapped piece of Dubble Bubble.
Chewing the gum and unfolding and smoothing the small wax-paper rectangle of jokes that was wrapped with the gum, I pretended to read it. But all the while I was glancing at her skirt and her legs, her pretty lips, her smooth cheeks, her small shoes and white socks.
She was daintily dressed and so clean, with a slight film of sweat on her face from the summer heat. Her blouse and the socks were pure white, and there were a few crumbs of dirt on her knees.