Camp Pleasant Read Online Free PDF Page B

It’s something I think you should know.”
    “I think so too,” I said. “Why in hell didn’t Nolan
want
me to know.”
    “I don’t know,” Sid said. “He has his own ideas.”
    Not knowing just want Sid’s relationship to Ed was, I let it go at that. I thanked him for telling me and then moved down the trail to Nolan’s cabin.
    I played chess with Bob. A few other counselors were sitting around the living room, reading, listening to jazz records and playing cards. Ellen didn’t show herself once although I could hear her moving around behind the closed bedroom door.
    Around ten-thirty there was a crashing of breaking glass from behind that door and we all started.
    “What’s that?” I heard myself ask.
    “Guess she dropped a glass in the bathroom,” Bob said. “Check.”
    I returned to the game, wondering why Ellen bothered me so. Was it because she was one among so many men? Miss Leiber was too old, Pat Stauffer too stuffy Was it that look in her eyes? Or was it my mind, desperately seeking some way to forget Julia? I didn’t know. I only know I couldn’t concentrate on the game until I heard Ellen moving around in the bedroom again; heard the sound of her sitting down heavily on the bed.
    “Checkmate,” said Bob happily.
3.
    God knows whatever happened to Tony’s clothes. Sherlock Holmes could have gone stark, staring mad trying to keep track of them. After the first week I didn’t even try. Once in a while, maybe, I’d find a tee-shirt lying in the woods or, rummaging through the lost-and-found pile in the back of the dining hall, come up with an armful of shorts, towels, washcloths, handkerchiefs, and socks. About the only things Tony kept track of were his bathing trunks and his baseball bat; the latter because it was his pride and joy, the former because he wore them almost twenty-four hours a day and couldn’t very well lose them short of walking around naked.
    To make it worse, those clothes that managed, somehow, to stay within the vicinity of the cabin were all monstrously dirty. I’d keep telling him to wash them.
    “Just a little bit every day, Tony,” I’d say. “That way there’s no trouble at all.” Big eyes staring blankly. “But the way you let it all pile up—” Grave shake of Counselor Harper’s graying head, attempt by Counselor Harper to look effectively grim. All useless. Tony went to the ball field. Tony went to the lake. Tony read comic books and made a bead ring at the craft shop but Tony never washed clothes.
    The other kids in the cabin went more or less regularly up to Paradise with armfuls of grimy wardrobe, washed them in a sink with soap chips provided by the camp, hung them in the sunshine, then put them away in their trunks, if not clean at least sweeter smelling. Tony paid no attention. It got to the dismal point where his only apparel, outside of the bathing trunks, was a pair of dirty white ducks and a dirtier red sweater. After the second Sunday service he wore this outfit, Ed Nolan cornered me with the decree to “get him on the ball,” “get him in high gear” and thus and so.
    So, the next day—Monday of the third week, I wouldn’t let Tony out of the cabin. Almost forcibly, I removed the enormous bat from his shoulder, peeled off his cap and sat him down solidly on his bunk.
    “Today we wash, Tony,” I said, adding quickly as he stared to argue, “But me no buts, Anthony. We
wash.”
    “But I got a
series
game, Matt!”
    I knew that Tony was, to put it mildly, imagining things. Usually he went to the ball diamond, shillelagh bobbing over gaunt shoulder, then sat there on the bench and watched, the bat end resting on the ground between his feet, held like an old man’s cane. Once in a while, maybe, some desperate boy would ask Tony to have a catch with him. Even less frequently, some team would be so far behind in runs that they’d let him play outfield where he’d have one hell of a time dropping every flyball that came to him,