So it went throughout that year of ephemeral crushes and round-robin loves, which was also the year when more and more of his friends turned up at school with braces on their teeth, and the year when everyone began to worry about outbreaks of bad skin. Ferguson felt lucky. So far, his face had been attacked by just three or four modest volcanoes, which he had popped at the first opportunity, and his parents had decided his teeth were straight enough to spare him the ordeals of orthodontia. More than that, they had insisted he go back to Camp Paradise for another summer. He had assumed that thirteen was perhaps a bit too old for camp and had therefore asked his father over the Christmas holidays if he could spend July and August working at the tennis center, but his father had laughed, saying there would be plenty of time for work later. You need to be out in the air, Archie, his father told him, running around with boys your own age. Besides, you can’t get your working papers until you’re fourteen. Not in New Jersey you can’t, and you wouldn’t want to get me into trouble for breaking the law, would you?
* * *
FERGUSON WAS HAPPY at camp. He had always been happy there, and it was good to be reunited with his New York summer friends, the half dozen city boys who kept going back year after year as he did. He took pleasure in the eternal sarcasm and humor of their fast-talking, high-spirited selves, which often reminded him of the way American soldiers spoke to one another in movies about World War II, the jocular, wisecracking banter, the compulsion never to take anything seriously, to turn every situation into an excuse for yet another joke or mocking aside. No doubt there was something admirable about attacking life with such wit and irreverence, but it could also become wearisome at times, and whenever Ferguson had his fill of his cabinmates’ verbal antics, he would find himself missing Howard, his close friend of the past two years, the closest friend he had ever had, and with Howard far away at his aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Vermont, where he spent all his summers, Ferguson began writing letters to him during the one-hour rest period after lunch, numerous short and long letters in which he set down whatever he happened to be thinking about at the moment, for Howard was the one person in the world he could unburden himself to, the one person he was not afraid to trust or confide in, the singular, unimpeachable friend with whom he could share everything, from criticisms of other people to comments about books he had read to musings about the difficulty of suppressing farts in public to thoughts about God.
There were sixteen letters in all, and Howard kept them in a square wooden box, holding on to them even after he had grown up and begun his life as an adult because the thirteen-year-old Ferguson, his friend of the straight teeth and shining countenance, the founder of the long defunct but never forgotten Cobble Road Crusader, the boy who had broken his leg at six and gashed his foot at three and nearly drowned at five, who had weathered the depredations of the Gang of Nine and the Band of Four, who had kissed Gloria Dolan and Susie Krauss and Peggy Goldstein, who had been counting the days until he entered the kingdom of erotic bliss, who had assumed and expected and entirely taken for granted that there were many years of life still in front of him, did not live to the end of the summer. That was why Howard Small saved those sixteen letters—because they were the last traces of Ferguson’s presence on this earth.
“I don’t believe in God anymore,” he wrote in one of them. “At least not the God of Judaism, Christianity, or any other religion. The Bible says that God created man in his own image. But men wrote the Bible, didn’t they? Which means that man created God in his image. Which also means that God doesn’t watch over us, and he certainly doesn’t give a damn about what men think or do or feel. If he cared about us at all, he wouldn’t have made a world with so many terrible things in it. Men wouldn’t fight wars and kill each other and build concentration camps. They wouldn’t lie and cheat and steal. I’m not saying that God didn’t create the world (no man did that!), but once the job was done he disappeared into the atoms and molecules of the universe and left us to fight it out among ourselves.”
“I’m glad Kennedy won the nomination,” he wrote in another letter. “I liked him better than the other candidates, and I’m sure he’ll beat Nixon in the fall. I don’t know why I’m sure, but it’s hard to imagine Americans wanting a man called Tricky Dick to be their president.”
“There are six other boys in my cabin,” he wrote in yet another letter, “and three of them are old enough to ‘do it’ now. They jerk off in their beds at night and tell the rest of us how good it feels. Two days ago, they did what they call a circle jerk and let us watch, so I finally saw what the stuff looks like and how far it spurts. It’s not milky white but a sort of creamy white, a bit like mayonnaise or hair tonic. Then one of the three jerk-off kings, a big guy named Andy, got another boner and did something that amazed me and everyone else. He bent over and sucked his own dick! I didn’t know it was humanly possible to do that. I mean, how could anyone be flexible enough to twist his body into that position? I tried to do it myself in the bathroom yesterday morning, but I couldn’t get my mouth anywhere near my dick. Just as well, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to walk around thinking of myself as a cocksucker, would I? But still, what a strange thing it was to see.”
“I’ve read three books since I’ve been here,” he wrote in the last letter, which was dated August ninth, “and I thought they were all terrific. Two of them were sent to me by my Aunt Mildred, a little one by Franz Kafka called The Metamorphosis and a bigger one by J. D. Salinger called The Catcher in the Rye. The other one was given to me by my cousin Francie’s husband, Gary—Candide, by Voltaire. The Kafka book is by far the weirdest and most difficult to read, but I loved it. A man wakes up one morning and discovers that he’s been turned into an enormous insect! It sounds like science fiction or a horror story, but it isn’t. It’s about the man’s soul. The Catcher in the Rye is about a high school boy wandering around New York. Nothing much happens in it, but the way Holden talks (he’s the hero) is very realistic and true, and you can’t help liking him and wishing you could be his friend. Candide is an old book from the 18th century, but it’s wild and funny, and I laughed out loud on almost every page. Gary called it a political satire. I call it great stuff! You must read it—and the other ones too. Now that I’ve finished them all, what strikes me is how different these three books are. They’re all written in their own way, and they’re all very good, which means that there isn’t just one way to write a good book. Last year, Mr. Dempsey kept telling us there was a right way and a wrong way—remember? Maybe with math and science there are, but not with books. You do them in your own way, and if your way is a good way, you can write a good book. The interesting thing is that I can’t decide which one I liked best. You’d think I would know, but I don’t. I loved them all. Which means, I guess, that any good way is the right way. It makes me happy to think about all the books I still haven’t read—hundreds of them, thousands of them. So much to look forward to!”
The last day of Ferguson’s life, August 10, 1960, began with a brief rain shower just after dawn, but by the time reveille sounded at seven-thirty, the clouds had blown off to the east and the sky was blue. Ferguson and his six cabinmates headed to the mess hall with their counselor, Bill Kaufman, who had finished his sophomore year at Brooklyn College in June, and during the thirty or forty minutes it took them to eat their oatmeal and scrambled eggs, the clouds returned, and as the boys walked back to the cabin for cleanup and inspection, rain was beginning to fall again, a rain so fine and inconsequential that it hardly seemed to matter that no one was wearing a poncho or carrying an umbrella. Their T-shirts were covered with dark specks of moisture, but that was the extent of it—the mildest of mild dousings, water in such small quantities that it didn’t even make them wet. As they started in on the morning ritual of making their beds and sweeping the floor, however, the sky continued to darken, and before long the rain began to fall in earnest, hitting the roof of the cabin with larger, ever more accelerated drops. For a minute or two, t
here was a lovely sort of off-key syncopation to the sound, Ferguson felt, but then the intensity of the rain increased, and the effect was lost. The rain wasn’t making music anymore. It had turned into a mass of dense, undifferentiated sound, a percussive blur. Bill told them that a new weather system was heading in from the south, and with a cold front simultaneously coming down from the north, they could expect a long, hard soak. Get comfortable, boys, he said. It’s going to be a big storm, and we’ll be sitting in this cabin for most of the day.
The dark sky grew even darker, and inside the cabin it was becoming difficult to see. Bill switched on the overhead light, but even after the light came on it still felt dark in there, for the seventy-five-watt bulb was too high up in the rafters to illuminate much of anything down below. Ferguson was on his bed, flipping through a back issue of Mad magazine that had been circulating around the cabin, reading with the aid of his flashlight and wondering if any morning had ever been as dark as this one. The rain was battering the roof now, a full-bore assault, pounding on the shingles as if the liquid drops had turned to stone, millions of stones were falling from the sky and hammering down on them, and then, far off in the distance, Ferguson heard a dull basso rumbling, a thick, congested noise that made him think of someone clearing his throat, thunder that must have been many miles away from them, somewhere in the mountains, perhaps, and this struck Ferguson as odd, since in his experience the thunder and lightning of electric storms had always come in tandem with the rain, but in this instance it was already raining, raining as hard as it could possibly rain, and the thunder was still nowhere near them, which led Ferguson to speculate that perhaps there were two storms going on at once, not just a storm and a cold front, as Bill had said, but two separate storms, one directly overhead and the other approaching from the north, and if the first storm didn’t play itself out before the second storm arrived, the two storms would crash into each other and merge, and that would create one hell of a mighty storm, Ferguson said to himself, a monumental storm, the storm to end all storms.
The bed to the right of Ferguson’s was occupied by a boy named Hal Krasner. Since the beginning of the summer, the two of them had kept up a running gag in which they impersonated smart George and stupid Lennie, the drifters from Of Mice and Men, a book they had both read earlier in the year and found ripe with comic possibilities. Ferguson was George and Krasner was Lennie, and nearly every day they would spend a few minutes improvising crackpot dialogues for their chosen characters, a steady round of nonsense that would begin with Lennie asking George to tell him what it was going to be like when they got to heaven, for example, or George reminding Lennie not to pick his nose in public, idiotic exchanges that probably owed more to Laurel and Hardy than to Steinbeck, but it amused the boys to indulge in these shenanigans, and with rain now pouring down on the camp and everyone stuck inside, Krasner was in the mood to have another go at it.
Please, George, he said. Please make it stop. I can’t stand it no more.
Make what stop, Lennie? Ferguson asked.
The rain, George. The noise of the rain. It’s too loud, and it’s beginning to drive me crazy.
You’ve always been crazy, Lennie. You know that.
Not crazy, George. Just stupid.
Stupid, yes. But also crazy.
I can’t help it, George. I was born that way.
No one’s saying it’s your fault, Lennie.
Well?
Well what?
Are you going to stop the rain for me?
Only the boss can do that.
But you’re the boss, George. You’ve always been the boss.
I mean the big boss. The one and only.
I don’t know no one and only. I only know you, George.
It would take a miracle to pull off a thing like that.
That’s all right. You can do anything.
Can I?
The noise is making me sick, George. I think I’ll die if you don’t do it.
Krasner put his hands over his ears and moaned. He was Lennie telling George that he had come to the limit of his strength, and Ferguson-as-George nodded in sad commiseration, knowing that no man could stop the rain from falling, that miracles were beyond the scope of mankind’s power, but Ferguson-as-Ferguson was having trouble keeping up his end of the act, Krasner’s sick-cow moans were simply too funny, and after listening to them for another few seconds, Ferguson burst out laughing, which broke the spell of the charade for him although not for Krasner, who assumed that Ferguson was laughing as George, and therefore, still posing as Lennie, Krasner removed his hands from his ears and said:
It ain’t nice to laugh at a man like that, George. I might not be the smartest guy in the county, but I got a soul, just like you and everyone else, and if you don’t wipe that grin off your face, I’ll snap your neck in two, just like I done to them rabbits.
Now that Krasner-as-Lennie had delivered such an earnest and effective speech, Ferguson felt obliged to force himself back into character, to become George again for Krasner’s sake and the sake of the other boys who were listening to them, but just as he was about to open his lungs and shout out an order for the rain to stop—Enough with the waterworks, boss!—the sky blasted forth a piercing clap of thunder, a noise so loud and so explosive that it shook the floor of the cabin and rattled the window frames, which went on humming and vibrating until the next burst of thunder rattled them again. Half of the boys jumped, jerked forward, twitched involuntarily in response to the sounds, while others called out by pure reflex, the air shooting from their lungs in short, startled exclamations that seemed to be words but were in fact instinctive grunts in the form of words—wow, whoa, waw. The rain was still coming down hard, lashing against the windows and making it difficult to see anything through them—nothing more than a wavy, watery darkness lit up by sudden spears of lightning, all black for ten or twenty heartbeats and then a moment or two of blinding white light. The storm that Ferguson had imagined, the vast double storm that would fuse into one storm when the air from the north and the air from the south collided, was upon them now, and it was even bigger and better than he had hoped it would be. A grand tempest. An axe of fury tearing apart the heavens. An exhilaration.
Don’t worry, Lennie, he said to Krasner. There’s no need to be scared. I’m going to put an end to this noise right now.
Without pausing to tell anyone what he was about to do, Ferguson leapt off his bed and ran for the door, which he yanked open with a hard, two-handed tug, and even though he could hear Bill’s voice shouting behind him—What the hell, Archie! Are you crazy!—he didn’t stop. He understood that it was indeed a crazy thing to be doing, but the fact was that he wanted to be crazy just then, and he wanted to be out in the storm, to taste the storm, to be part of the storm, to be inside the storm for as long as it took for the storm to be inside him.
The rain was superb. Once Ferguson crossed the threshold and stepped out onto the ground, he realized that no rain had ever fallen harder, that the drops of this rain were thicker and traveling faster than any other drops he had known, that they were rushing down from the sky with the force of lead pellets and were heavy enough to bruise his skin and perhaps even dent his skull. A magnificent rain, an all-powerful rain, but in order to savor it to the fullest, he figured he should run to the cluster of oaks that stood about twenty yards in front of him, for the leaves and branches would protect his body from those falling bullets, and so Ferguson made a break for it, dashing across the soggy, slippery ground toward the trees, splashing through ankle-deep puddles as thunder boomed above him and around him and bolts of lightning shot down within yards of his feet. He was thoroughly soaked by the time he got there, but it felt good to be soaked, it was the best of all good feelings to be soaked like that, and Ferguson felt happy, happier than he had been at any time that summer or any other summer or any other time of his life, for surely this was the greatest thing he had ever done.
There was little or no wind. The storm w
asn’t a hurricane or a typhoon, it was a raging downpour with thunder to stir up his bones and lightning to dazzle his eyes, and Ferguson wasn’t the least bit afraid of that lightning, since he was wearing sneakers and had no metal objects with him, not even a wristwatch or a belt with a silver buckle, and therefore he felt safe and exultant under the shelter of the trees, looking out at the gray wall of water that stood between him and the cabin, watching the dim, almost entirely obscured figure of his counselor Bill, who was standing in the open doorway and seemed to be shouting to him, or shouting at him as he gestured for Ferguson to come back to the cabin, but Ferguson couldn’t hear a word he was saying, not with the noise of the rain and the thunder, and especially not when Ferguson himself began to howl, no longer George on his mission to save Lennie but simply Ferguson himself, a thirteen-year-old boy wailing in exaltation at the thought of being alive in such a world as the one he had been given that morning, and even when a shaft of lightning struck the top branch of one of the trees, Ferguson paid no attention to it, for he knew he was safe, and then he saw that Bill had left the cabin and was running toward him, why in the world would he do that, Ferguson asked himself, but before he could answer the question, the branch had broken off from the tree and was falling toward Ferguson’s head. He felt the impact, felt the wood crack down on him as if someone had clubbed him from behind, and then he felt nothing, nothing at all or ever again, and as his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground, the rain continued to pour down on him and the thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other, the gods were silent.