He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a classroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corridor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother's, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a greenish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.
It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they'd arranged for him, how could he refuse? "Use your powers of observation," his father had said to him at the train station. "I wish I'd had this chance when I was your age."
For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn't understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff professional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though apparently with less success than he'd thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. "It's rough working with kids like this," she said, "but it's so rewarding." Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He'd been on shift for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food ("Let them do as much for themselves as they can"), the slurps and suction noises. Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. "It doesn't do them any good for you to be depressed," she said. "They'll use it against you. A lot of them don't know the difference. They've never been any other way." She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! "You'll get used to it," she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She's trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.
"I know your brother James," she said, smiling again with her solid teeth. "I met him on a double-date. He's quite the boy."
Rob excused himself and got up. She was older than him anyway, she was probably twenty.
But she'd been right, he was getting used to it. The nightmares had gone away, though not before he'd aroused the interest of the boys in his cabin. They nicknamed him "The Groaner." They had nicknames for everyone in the camp.
"Hey, ya hear the Groaner last night?"
"Yeah. Uh. Uh. Getting his rocks off good."
"Ya have a good time, Groaner?"
Rob, blushing, would mumble, "I was having a nightmare," but they would hoot with laughter.
"Oh yeah. We heard ya. Wish I had nightmares like that." They were the oldest boys' cabin, fourteen to sixteen-year-olds, and he'd had trouble with them from the first. They weren't like the younger children, polite, eager to enjoy themselves in whatever way they could, grateful for help. Instead they were cynical about the camp, about the Director, about Bert (whom they nicknamed "Bert the Nert") and about themselves and their lives. They drank beer, when they could get hold of it; they smoked furtive cigarettes. They kept girlie magazines hidden under their mattresses, and they told some of the foulest jokes Rob had ever heard. They divided the world into two camps, the "crips" and the "norms," and for the most part they accepted only the crips. The norms were seen as their oppressors, the dimwits who would never understand, who would never get it right, and whom it was their duty to war against and exploit. It gave them a bitter pleasure to outrage norm sensibility whenever possible, and they'd found Rob an easy target.
"Hey, Pete," Dave Snider would start. He'd be sitting in his chair, wearing one of the T-shirts with the cut-off arms that displayed his overdeveloped biceps to advantage. He had a Charles Atlas set at home, Rob knew, and subscribed to bodybuilding magazines.
"Yeah, Dave?" Pete would answer. They both had classic duck-tails, which they wore covered with grease. They found Rob's private-school English-style haircut ludicrous. Pete was paralyzed from the neck down, but he'd somehow gained second place in the cabin's pecking order. Dave combed his duck's ass for him.
"What's black and crawls and catches flies?"
"Roy Campanella!"
Raucous laughter, in which the rest of the cabin joined while Rob blushed. "I don't think that's very nice," he'd said the first time.
"He doesn't think it's very nice," Dave mimicked. "What weighs two thousand pounds and twitches?"
"Moby Spaz!"
They called these jokes "spaz jokes." What bothered Rob most about them was that they reminded him of the kinds of jokes his brothers and their medical-student friends would tell, having a game of pool in their father's rec room, to relax after classes ("Bring your friends over anytime, boys. You too, Rob.") Except that theirs were supposed to be true stories. They played endless practical jokes on each other, most of them involving parts of cadavers they would cut off during dissection: eyeballs in the teacup, hands in the coat pocket.
"Hey, we were doing this old guy, and I thought, What the hell, and I cut off his tool, it's all brown and shrivelled up, like they get, and I slipped it into my briefcase. So I go down to the Babloor, and I have a few beers, and I go into the can and I open my fly, but I stick this old guy's dork out instead of my own. So I stand there like I'm pissing, and I wait till another guy comes in, and I shake it and it comes off in my hand. So I throw it down and I say, 'Damn thing never worked anyway' You should've seen the look on his face!"
They related rumours from Emergency at the hospital, most of which seemed to involve women with broken Coke bottles stuck in them or men who had been masturbating with the hot water tap. "Had to get a plumber to saw him out. Came in with the tap still on and two feet of pipe." "I heard of one with a crayon. Got stuck in the bladder. He came in because he was pissing blue and he couldn't figure out why."
"I heard about one with a snake."
"Why do you tell those stories?" Rob asked them one night when he felt courageous.
"Why do you listen to them?" James grinned.
"You'll do it, too," Adrian told him. "Wait and see." Then, after the others had gone home, he said, more seriously, "You have to tell them. I know you think it's pretty gross, but you don't know what it's like. It's real life out there. You have to laugh or go crazy." Rob tried to reject this, but it haunted him. Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. He would not be able to laugh. He would go crazy. He would run out into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.
"What weighs two thousand pounds and has an exploding head?"
"Moby Hydrocephalic!"
"That's enough!" Rob said, trying to assert his authority.
"Look, Groaner," Dave said. "You're here to see we have a good time, right? Well, we're having a good time."
"Yeah," Pete said. "You don't like it, you can beat me up."
"Sure, go on," Dave said. "Do your Boy Scout good deed for the week. Kill a cripple." Bullying him with his own guilt.
It didn't help that the other counsellor, Gordon Holmes, encouraged them. He smuggled beer and cigarettes into the cabin for them, ogled their girlie magazines, and told them which of the girl counsellors were "easy outs."
"Hey, make out last night?" Dave would ask him in the morning.
"Not bad, not bad."
"She go down for ya?"
Gordon's secretive smile. Patting Old Spice on the back of his neck.
"Who was it, Pammer the Slammer?"
"Every time she pounds my back I get a bone on."
"Hey, was it Jo-Anne?"
"Naw, she's a crip. Gord wouldn't take out a crip, would ya, Gord?"
"You got to go along with them," Gordon told Rob. "Kid them a little. They're frustrated, they got normal emotions just like you and me." He punched Rob on the shoulder. "Take it easy, man, you think too much."
Gordon went to a public high school in East York. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom he called "the old lady." He'd got the job with the camp through the Big Brothers. He wasn't a juvenile delinquent, and Rob could think of many good points about him, but he couldn't bear to be around him for long. It did no good for Rob to tell himself that Gord would probably end up as a garage mechanic, that the kind of girls he talked about so freely were what his own mother would call "cheap," that he would get one of them pregnant and have to get married and end up in a dingy, overcrowded apartment, drinking beer in front of the TV while his wife nagged him about the laundry. He was envious anyway, listening despite himself to the sagas of back seats and forbidden mickeys at the drive-in, of heavy petting, forays into undergarments by Gord's daring fingers, triumphs over hostile elastic straps, conquests of breasts. He resented this sleazy freedom even though he knew he wouldn't enjoy it himself, wouldn't know what to say or where to put his hands.
He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother's friends' daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be escorted to their own private-school dances and didn't know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hand against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceivably be undone; but no, that would be too embarrassing. Though he'd sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn't liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he'd kissed her harder than he'd intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street. Anyone watching would have thought it was a passionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he'd repressed her name.
Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys' cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little glass case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He'd taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly anyone else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn't shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert's repertoire that stuck in his throat when the assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his energetic accordion.
Jordan River is chilly and cold,
Hallelujah,
Chills the body but not the soul,
Hallelujah.
"Your name is the name of a famous river," he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her, and whether they'd felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never match it, never sip cocktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her father was something in a bank.
Sometimes, thinking of the catastrophe ahead of him, his failure and his flight, he thought about taking her with him. That was her clinging to his neck as he scrambled up the boxcar (but she couldn't cling!), she was with him in the hotel room when he woke up, sitting in her chair (how had he got her there?), looking into his eyes with her icy blue ones, her face miraculously still. Then she would open her mouth and words would come out, she would stand up, he would somehow have cured her.... Sometimes, very quickly (and he would repress it immediately) he would see both of them hurtling from the top of a building. An accident, an accident, he would tell himself. I don't mean that.
Jordan River is chilly and wide,
Hallelujah,
Rob crooned. He was heading for a bench, there was one up ahead, where he could sit and they could have their game of checkers.
"Hey, look at this." It was Bert's glass case. "Shelf fungus," he read from the typed card. "There are several species of shelf fungus. The shelf fungus is a saprophyte which feeds on decaying vegetable matter and can often be found growing on dead trees. You can write your name on the bottom with a stick," he said. He used to do that at the cottage, without removing the fungus from the tree, and it gave him pleasure to think of his name growing in secret, getting a little bigger every year. It was hard to tell whether or not she was interested.
He found the bench, turned Jordan to face it and unfolded the board. "I was red last time," he said, "so you get it this time, okay?" There was one checker missing, on her side. "We'll use something else," he said. He looked around for a flat stone, but there wasn't one. Finally he pulled a button off his shirtsleeve. "That okay?" he said.
Jordan's hand moved yes. He began the laborious trial-and-error process of determining how she wanted to move. He would point at each checker in turn until she signalled. Then he would point to each possible square. They could get through a game a lot faster now that he was used to playing this way. Her face would fold and unfold, screw itself up, twitch, movements he found distressing in the other CP children still, but not in her. Concentrating made her worse.
They had hardly gone through the opening moves when the bell sounded from the main building. That meant the Play Period was over and it was time for the afternoon group activities. Jordan, he knew, had swimming with the rest of her cabin. She couldn't swim, but someone held her in the water, where her movements, they said, were more controlled than on land. He himself was supposed to help with Occupational Therapy. "Mud pies," the boys in his cabin called it. They liked making obscene statues out of clay in order to shock Wilda, the OT instructor, who wanted so much to be able to tell them they were being creative.
Rob put his shirt button into his pocket. He took out the notebook they used and marked down their respective positions. "We'll finish it tomorrow," he told Jordan. He wheeled her along the path in the same direction they'd been going, which would get them back sooner, since they were three-quarters of the way around the oval already.
To the north side of the cement path there was a clearing, a stretch of grass and across it the silver of water: the stream that was always there, usually a sluggish trickle but swollen now by last night's rain. Rob thought, She's probably never felt grass before, she's probably never had her hand in a real stream. He suddenly wanted to give her something that no one else ever had, that no one else would ever think of.
"I'm going to take you out," he told her. "I'm going to put you down on the grass, so you can feel it. Okay?"
There was a hesitation before she signalled yes. She was looking into his face; perhaps she didn't understand. "It's fun," he told her, "it feels nice," thinking of the many times he had sprawled on the lawn of the back garden, eight or ten years ago, chewing on the white soft ends of grass blades and reading the almost-forbidden Captain Marvel comic books.
He unbuckled the straps that held her in and lifted her thin body. She was so light, lighter even than she looked, a creature of balsa wood and paper. But tough, h
e told himself. She could take it, you could see it in her eyes. He put her down on the grass, on her side, where she could see the flowing stream.
"There," he said. He knelt beside her, took her left hand and put it into the cold stream. "That's real water, not like a swimming pool." He smiled, feeling magnanimous, a giver, a healer; but she had closed her eyes, and from somewhere a curious sound, a whine, a growl ... Her body was limp, her arm jerking; suddenly her leg shot out and her foot in its steel-crusted boot kicked him in the shin.
"Jordan," he said. "Are you all right?" More growling: was it joy or terror? He couldn't tell, and he was frightened. Maybe this was too much for her, too exciting. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her up to put her back into the chair. The grass had been damper than he'd thought, and the right side of her face was streaked with mud.
"What the hell are you doing with that child?" Pam's voice behind him. Rob turned, still holding Jordan, who was thrashing her arms like a propeller gone crazy. Pam was standing on the cement walk, hands on her hips, the posture of an accusing mother coming upon the children playing Doctor in the bushes. Her face was red, her hair mussed, as if she'd been running. There was a twig dangling above her ear.
"Nothing," Rob said, "I was just...." She thinks I'm some kind of a pervert, he saw, and felt himself blushing. "I thought she would like to see what the grass felt like," he said.
"You know that's dangerous," Pam said. "You know she isn't supposed to be taken out. She could hit her head, injure herself ..."
"I was watching her the whole time," Rob said. Who was she to be bossing him around like this?
"I think you spend far too much time with that child," Pam said, less angry now but definitely not convinced by his explanation. "You should spend more time with some of the others. It's not good for them, you know, forming ... attachments ... that can't possibly be kept up after camp." Jordan's eyes were open now; she was looking at Rob.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Rob said, almost shouted. "How do you know, you don't know ..." She was accusing him, in advance, of betraying Jordan, abandoning her.