The Last Animal, page 11
The sun rises slowly, fighting through a bank of cloud. Jesse is uncertain for a while whether he is really awake. For an instant he even wonders if he has died during the night. There is a strange thickness in the air. He rises, feeling almost weightless. When was the last time he ate? He does not remember. He fumbles with the buttons of his jeans and kicks on his boots.
Today is the day. The plane is finished. He built the track ages ago, leading down a steep hill and opening onto a wide, flat field, now patterned with ice. The rails are firmly embedded in the frost. The plane will ride the wheeled tray, which will catch at the bottom and launch the thing airborne. Jesse has gamed it out hundreds of times. He has had to make a few adjustments—the Wright brothers had a crew, not to mention each other, whereas Jesse has only himself. He is not afraid of failure. He finds his coat on the floor and wraps some gauze around the injured palm of his hand.
Snow has begun to fall as he hurries to the barn; the air is hung with fat, downy flakes, snagging in his eyelashes and landing cold on his tongue. Jesse throws open both doors and begins to elbow his creation out into the daylight. The plane grinds forward, its wings bouncing. In the distance, a crow makes its raucous call. One wheel catches in a hollow, and by the time Jesse gets it loose, he is damp with sweat, his heart hammering. He pushes the plane across the hilltop, conscious of the sheer spectacle of it—his golden achievement, the cables twanging, the propeller rotating by tiny increments. At last he has it poised on the top of the hill.
There is a moment of silence. With a childlike glee, Jesse lifts both hands to placate an imaginary audience. He used to toboggan on this hillside as a boy, in one of his few memories of being cupped in his father’s lap and hearing Toby’s unfettered laughter. From this angle, the track appears steep and uneven, dipping sharply downward. Jesse guns the motor, which rattles into life with a puff of smoke. The propeller begins to spin. He gives the plane a shove, and it lurches away from him, faster than he had anticipated; he flings out a hand and barely catches hold, dragging himself on board. The trees slip by in a rolling blur. The passage is rough, the wind icy—Jesse wishes he had thought to bring goggles. Jolting and groaning, the plane plummets down the slope. The cables shudder in his hands. Unable to restrain himself, he lets out a whoop of pure delight. At the bottom of the hill the plane pauses for a moment, as though taking one last look at its mundane, earthly surroundings. Then the powerful wings catch against the air, and Jesse takes flight.
THE GIRLS OF APACHE BRYN MAWR
There were eight of us in the cabin, all Jews from the north side of Chicago. A few girls had been to Camp Reeds before and spoke knowingly and loftily about what the rest could expect, the campfire songs, canoe races, and marathon games of Capture the Flag. There was the usual scuffle over who would get the bunks closest to the window and the counselor’s room. One or two girls had never been to sleep-away camp at all and were full of anxious questions about the latrines. Within an hour of our arrival, the cabin looked as though we had lived there forever. The contents of our duffel bags had exploded across the floor, and the bunks were draped with lanyards, training bras, rainbow sweatshirts, stray socks, and stuffed animals. We were already nicknaming one another, swapping Archie Comics and tubes of flavored ChapStick. The rough wooden planks of the walls had been vandalized by decades of campers. The window screens were festooned with holes. From the lake came the sound of splashing and screams, and already we felt that we were moving into a different world, the sluggish, golden daze of honeyed summer.
Our cabin was called Apache Bryn Mawr, which the new girls found funny. It was the rule at camp that each cabin had the name of an Indian tribe and a prestigious college. At lunchtime we would hear the other kids singing about their dedication to Navajo Harvard or watch them tattooing Chippewa Princeton onto their forearms in ballpoint pen. As twelve-year-olds, we were the oldest campers there—except for Sasha Rosen, who had already had her bat mitzvah back at the end of April. (She liked to shake out the golden locket around her throat, showing off the Star of David she’d received as a gift, and occasionally she would hum her Torah portion in a low, throaty voice, almost absently, just to make sure we knew she still had it memorized.) Chaya Stein, whose mother was an anthropologist, treated us to a little spiel about the history of false Indianness and the random use of tribal names at summer camps, how this had begun only one generation after Custer’s last stand, with the Boy Scouts. None of us were particularly interested. We giggled a little, standing around the wooden sign into which Apache Bryn Mawr had been elaborately carved. But by the end of the first week, we were all fiercely loyal to our name. There was only one other cabin of twelve-year-old girls, the Sioux Vassar group, and none of us could stand them. They were sleek, black-haired little minxes, and at lunchtime we sang the Apache Bryn Mawr fight song loud and clear, just to make sure they got the message.
That was the summer Camp Reeds ended up in the newspapers. For a few days, the place was splashed over local television shows and featured unflatteringly in op-ed pieces. The girls of Apache Bryn Mawr were front and center, since it was our counselor who had disappeared. Some of us—with our parents’ permission—appeared tearfully on camera. We were quoted in black and white. There was one picture in particular that seemed to crop up everywhere: all eight of us beaming gawkily at the camera, waving and giving each other bunny ears, and Danielle right in the middle of the huddle, flashing her easy smile.
Before she went missing, Danielle had been a bit of a legend at Camp Reeds. To begin with, she was a shiksa, which put her outside the norm. The camp was largely a Zionist organization, which more or less explained the odd cabin names: The administrators had found it prudent to feature education, even here, among the Hula-Hoop and pie-eating competitions, as this would theoretically make Jewish parents more comfortable sending their children off for six weeks of aimless amusement. For better or worse, education was our central creed. (Naomi Cohen, one of the girls in our cabin, told us that her zadie had been a rabbi and used to announce, in his rumbling voice and imperfect English, “If you have moneys only for building a temple or a school, you build the school. This is more important.”) Gentiles were theoretically welcome at Camp Reeds, but almost everyone there looked rather like we did, pale and dark, with intelligent brown eyes.
Danielle, however, was tall and golden. Her limbs were long and tanned, and she moved with a casual athleticism around the mess hall, dressed in khaki shorts, blithely unaware of the havoc she was playing with the hearts of the male counselors and campers alike. Many of us in Apache Bryn Mawr had been in awe of her for years; we would return each summer only to find Danielle’s glory undiminished, her hair still brassy and burnished, her tennis serve unparalleled. And now, at last, we were old enough to be her campers ourselves. It was Danielle who banged on our wall in the morning, shouting to get us out of bed. It was Danielle who led us in sack races and taught us swimming—making sure to stay near Rachael Schwartz, who was afraid of the water, now and then supporting her under the belly with one delicate hand. It was Danielle who strummed the guitar at the bonfire in the evenings, her flint-gray eyes sliding dreamily to the side. Elisheva Levy, the youngest in our cabin, could do a spot-on imitation of her, the hips slung one way, the shake of her hair behind one shoulder. Danielle was the best counselor there, and she was ours.
Our days began early. We were terrified of the bathrooms—cavernous holes in the dirt, reeking in wet weather, and always hung with a spider or two. We never went there at night, and our mornings generally began with a collective sprint down the gravel path. Breakfast took place right after dawn, when the air was still cool and laden with mist. The counselors would huddle together near the buffet tables, sipping their coffee and glowering at the younger kids, who could not eat without shrieking. Then we walked down to the archery field, where Sasha Rosen was the queen, standing erect, her posture perfect, as sanguine and self-assured as Artemis. We learned canoeing, which took us into the gray-green middle of the lake. The water was loaded with sand and silt. These lessons were generally a fiasco, mostly consisting of us trying to get close enough to the Sioux Vassar girls to poke them with our oars, and always ending abruptly when Rachael Schwartz spotted seaweed, or a minnow, or a half-submerged soda can, and went into a conniption.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, we would hike into the hills, following Danielle’s lithe form, that swaying flaxen ponytail. The air was steamy, choked with the rising moisture from the lake. Mushrooms sprouted obscenely from fallen logs. The trees were draped with curtains of kudzu, which made the Midwestern hillsides look like a tropical wilderness; in some cases the vines were heavy enough to drag smaller saplings to the side, jutting out of the ground at an odd, punch-drunk angle. Julia Goldblatt, the klutz of our group, was always turning her ankle on loose stones and bringing the parade to a nervous halt. Hannah Breckenridge, who had been on nature hikes all her life, would point out signs of animal life, some of which were clearly imaginary—the print of a deer hoof, the droppings of a rabbit, the scratch of mountain lion claws in a nearby tree. At the crest of the hill, we would stop and look down on the cabins like gods, taking in the shiny roofs, the smoke rising from the mess hall, the tiny figures crashing around in the foamy lake. Danielle would sigh and tell us that the camp was her favorite place in the world.
During our breaks we lazed around the cabin, whistling the Apache Bryn Mawr fight song and munching on handfuls of trail mix. Danielle would teach us to weave friendship bracelets from thread. We might chat about whether it was logical or pretentious for Chaya Stein to insist that gentiles should pronounce her name correctly, sounding the rough Ch at the back of their throats. We would argue about whether scripture allowed us to drink juice during the fasting of the high holidays. We would ransack one another’s makeup and sunblock; our careful mothers had weighted us down with tubes of SPF 75, mostly organic brands that also made skin-care products, but we were all convinced the other girls had a better kind—nicer-smelling, less likely to give rise to acne. Eventually Danielle would ask us which boys we liked. None of us had secrets now, not after the long nights of whispering in the cabin, hour after hour, in a kind of trance, shielded by the darkness and the unreality of the setting. We all knew that Tal Klein was moony over a boy in Ojibwa Yale. We all knew that Elisheva Levy had a crush on one of the male counselors.
In the evenings the whole camp would gather around the bonfire, the younger boys slathered with face paint, the girls bedecked with braids and beads. The counselors would act out silly scenes for us, tossing logs carelessly on the fire, the sparks cascading upward in spirals. Sometimes we would all sing together, fearlessly, the way we could never do in school, no matter how much our teachers prodded us. Sometimes we would have what was called a powwow, a session in which we were asked to share anecdotes from the day—but to make the whole thing more Indian, the counselors taught us to speak in a fake pidgin: “We-um like Camp Reeds-um.” Hannah Breckenridge, who had a political streak, found this offensive and refused to participate. Chaya Stein humored her, and the two of them crept off to one side, debating in whispers the letter they were planning to write to the camp’s board of directors. The rest of us, however, had never met a real Indian and couldn’t have cared less. Sometimes, at the end of the evening, Danielle would dance, spinning and leaping to the rhythm of the guitar. She would throw back her head and give a laugh of sheer happiness.
And then one morning we woke late, bewildered by the bright sunlight and the loud roar of the kids at the lake. We had missed breakfast—there was no Danielle to herd us down the path to the mess hall. Tal Klein knocked timidly on the counselor’s door and got no reply. We went in, calling Danielle’s name in uncertain voices. The bed was tossed in its usual uproarious heap. Her guitar sat in the corner as though waiting for one of us to pick it up and give it a strum. “Maybe she’s at the bathroom,” someone ventured. There was nothing to do but wait. We were lost without her guidance. We spent the morning lounging awkwardly on our bunks, flipping through books, braiding Julia Goldblatt’s thick, inky hair, and glancing out the window every few seconds, like victims of a quarantine. Danielle never came. Around lunchtime, Rachael Schwartz, who was prone to melodrama, burst into tears. At this point Sasha Rosen took charge and led us authoritatively to the administrator’s office.
Mr. Benson, who ran Camp Reeds, seemed completely unruffled by the whole thing. Apparently it was not unheard-of for a counselor to prove unreliable—not Danielle, of course, who was a staple of the camp, but Mr. Benson assured us that there was bound to be some logical explanation. He got on the phone and barked a few orders through his thick red goatee. To our horror, our new counselor would be the lifeguard, whom we had never seen and could not picture outside of her ridiculously small bikini. We knew her as the woman who blew her whistle ferociously and gestured to prevent us swimming out too far. Indeed, she had been rather unkind when Tal Klein had got her first period and did not want to participate one day. Her name was Ilse, but among ourselves we always called her Itsy-Bitsy, because of her tiny swimsuits. Mr. Benson summoned her to his office, and she appeared, looking nettled, now clad in denim shorts and pigtails.
Itsy-Bitsy led us competently enough through our day’s activities. She slept in our cabin that night, and the next night too, but she did not participate with us as Danielle had done. During archery lessons, she sat around examining her fingernails. During our session at the crafts table, she abandoned us to our own valiant but doomed attempts to stamp precise letters into leather pouches. Even her appearance was an affront to us. She was not tawny like Danielle, with a smile as bright as sunlight caught in a sprinkler. Instead, Itsy-Bitsy was pale, and her fishy skin was scattered with freckles the size of ladybugs.
By the third day of Danielle’s absence, we began to worry in earnest. We had believed Mr. Benson’s assurances that she would pop back very soon. We were hurt by her desertion, of course, but were fully prepared to forgive her as long as she offered us the juicy details of whatever family crisis or love-affair-gone-wrong had taken her away so unexpectedly. Each time the screen door of our cabin bumped in the wind, we all looked up hopefully. When we were out on the tennis courts and caught a glimpse of someone’s blond hair in the distance, our hearts leapt. But there was no sign of her. We were not the only ones to be concerned; at mealtimes, the counselors left their tables and gathered together in the corner, talking in urgent voices. Mr. Benson, despite his pretense at insouciance, was spotted yammering away on the telephone at all hours, gesturing fervently to the air around him. The information that something was amiss percolated down to the younger campers, who began to generate fantastic theories of their own—Danielle had been kidnapped, Danielle was a Russian spy in disguise, Danielle had swum into the lake the night she disappeared.
We would learn later on that Danielle had been a foster child. Bounced from house to house in her youth, she had no central family unit to act on her behalf. Since she was a college sophomore now, and no longer a minor, the state would not intervene either. It was up to the camp to decide whether she should be declared missing. Day by day, Mr. Benson put it off, knowing the media storm that would ensue, waiting, as we were waiting, for Danielle to come strolling down the path again, swinging her bronzed arms and humming some popular medley softly to herself.
Camp Reeds had its own ghost story. At night, around the fire, one of the counselors could always be coaxed into telling it, though most of us knew it by heart anyway. Many years ago—so the story went—a cruel counselor had beaten his charges, torturing them and making them sleep on the concrete floor. But his deserts had come: One night he had fallen—or was pushed?—into the bonfire and, burning furiously, had dashed into the forest. The story held that on moonless nights he dragged his mangled body out from the underbrush and lurched around the grounds, looking for stray campers on whom he could exact his revenge. There was some dissension among the girls of Apache Bryn Mawr about whether this story was true. At ten o’clock, when we climbed into our bunks and lay whispering together, as the distant voices from other cabins were carried to us on the breeze, the story was certainly false. But around 3:00 AM, if one of us woke up on her own, listening to the unfamiliar whine of the ceaseless crickets, it suddenly became very real indeed. We got used to hearing each other whimpering in the darkness. We got used to waking suddenly to Elisheva Levy’s panicked fingers clutching our shoulders, shaking us awake as she hissed, “Oh, thank God! I thought you’d been murdered.”
One night none of us could get to sleep. It was bright outside, the trees bathed in unearthly blue, the moon glowing like a searchlight. On past evenings we had played word games or gathered around for Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. We had listened for the mossy footsteps of the camp ghost and painted our fingernails inexpertly in the gloom. Tonight we were jittery, uncertain.
At last Sasha Rosen reached under her bunk and dragged out her Ouija Board. We sat ourselves importantly in a circle, and a few girls put their fingertips delicately on the pointer, ready for channeling.
“What should we ask it?” Hannah Breckenridge whispered. It was not the sort of night to bother the spirits with nonsense, wondering whether our crushes liked us back or which of us would be next to get her first period.
“We need to know about Danielle,” Sasha said.
“Right! Danielle.”
“Are there spirits in the room?” Sasha asked, each word distinct. “Is there someone who can answer us?”
