Camp Echo. Paul Theroux

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ dusk.

      “What’s up?” I said.

      “That’s the Big Dipper.”

      “I know that.”

      Still looking up, his voice slightly strangled from craning his neck, he said, “The two stars on the edge are Merak and Dubhe. I’m getting an astronomy merit badge. See how they’re pointing?”

      I could not see how they were pointing. I could just make out the corners of the bowl of the dipper. I said, “Yeah.”

      “To Polaris,” he said.

      “I was just going to say that.”

      “The North Star,” he grunted, his face upturned.

      “Right.”

      “And if it was a little darker, we’d be able to see the Little Dipper.” He swiveled his head to take in the rest of the sky. “Maybe later.”

      “How do you know this stuff?”

      “My father’s a teacher. He’s got a telescope,” Pomroy said. “We look at the moon sometimes. He can name most of the craters. No one knows how they got there. And no one’s ever seen the other side of the moon. The dark side.”

      “I don’t get it.”

      “Because the same side of the moon is always facing the earth,” he said. “And that’s Venus. It’s always bright. Venus was the first one I learned.”

      He was walking unsteadily, leaning backwards as he talked, because he was still scanning the sky. He stopped talking but kept moving and soon was lost in the darkness.

      Soon after that, I heard a metallic clanging—not a bell, but what I would later find out was a boy whacking a short length of train track with a piece of steel pipe.

      The cabin door banged open, and in the rectangle of light shining from the yellow pine boards inside I saw Frankie Pagazzo, followed by the others, Paretsky and Phelan and Pinto.

      “Chow time,” Pagazzo called out, running ahead.

      We walked along the margin of the field in the moon shadow of the pines, boys from the farther cabins joining us, and we blinked entering the mess hall, which was brightly lit and smelled of sawdust, beans, and applesauce. Pomroy was the last to seat himself. A card with the number 8 was stuck in a wire stand at our table, where six bowls had been set out with plastic cups, a glass pitcher at one end. The six bowls contained brown, soupy applesauce. The glass pitcher brimmed with purple liquid.

      Paretsky pointed to the number 8 at the table. He said, “That’s a composite number.”

      “What language is that supposed to be?” Pinto said.

      Wagging his pale finger at the 7 on the next table, Paretsky said, “That’s a prime number.”

      “Primo,” Pagazzo said. “That’s wicked good.”

      “This year is not a prime number. But 1951 was.”

      “And your mother wears army boots,” Pagazzo said, flicking the pitcher with his bitten fingers. “Bug juice. Anyone want some?”

      He poured it out but did not take any himself, and instead put his hands behind his tangled hair and leaned back, tightening his yellowish face by squinting at us. He had a pale scar like a claw mark next to his right eye. When he smiled, he made a chipmunk face and seemed to glory in showing us his broken front tooth.

      “Know why I ain’t drinking no bug juice?” He did not wait for a reply. He said, “They put saltpeter in it. Know why? So you won’t get a boner.”

      Pagazzo lowered his voice on the word boner, seeing Butch Rankin approaching our table.

      “No, suh!” Pinto said.

      “Yes, suh.”

      “I’m going to ask my father,” Phelan said to Paretsky, seated next to him. “He knows chemistry.”

      Rankin said, “It’s cafeteria style, so pick up a tray, get in line, and help yourself.”

      We did as he said, filing with our tin trays past the metal tubs of fried Spam and mashed potatoes and baked beans, loading up, and then back at our table began eating, digging at the food with forks in our fists.

      “The Navy gets the gravy, but the Army gets the beans,” Pagazzo said. “My uncle Mario says that.”

      Phelan was telling Paretsky a story about his father in medical school, saying, “And before they tested their urine, my father slipped in some gold leaf. His lab partner’s a woman, and she does the test and says, ‘I have gold in my urine!’ And my father says, ‘What do you want me to do—sink a shaft?’”

      Paretsky smiled nervously. He pushed a slab of Spam away from his potatoes and said, “Anyone want this?”

      No one replied. They went on chewing, and their faces seemed freakish to me. I was returned again to thinking of the strangeness of the camp, how it seemed unfriendly because of those faces, so different from the faces of my family, or anyone I knew, strangers’ faces—and strangers seemed dangerous to me. Pagazzo’s yellow face; Paretsky’s pale, freckled face; Phelan’s receding chin and perfect teeth; Pinto’s delicate features, his bat-like ears and pursed lips; Pomroy’s gleaming black face and wide forehead, his cheeks bulging with food.

      “Try the baloney instead,” Phelan said.

      “Baloney,” Pagazzo said. “My old man calls it horse cock.”

      The way they ate, the way they looked, made me anxious.

      They were animal faces. I knew them to be boys, but the features were so unfamiliar I saw them as masks—not ugly, but so unusual as to be threatening, as though concealing a secret intention meant to upset me.

      I did not want to think about it, but, sitting there at the table with them, they seemed to me like dog faces, the snouts and wet eyes and tangled hair of mutts, made more dog-like by the way they were eating—carelessly, hungrily snapping their jaws, chomping on their food, the teeth of twelve-year-olds having an animal largeness and bite. I knew boys like this at school, but these were boys I was living with in a cabin.

      Seeing strangers eat, flecks of food on their lips, the famished faces, that hunger, revealed their personalities more than talking did, and suggested the crudeness of their secrets. And so I hardly ate anything—I nibbled at the awful, salty meat, poked at the dry potato and the pale carrots, and what Pagazzo had said about the bug juice kept me from drinking more. The mushy applesauce had the sour, fermented smell of wet fur.

      At the end of the meal, still hungry, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and ate it feeling queasy, knowing I had three more weeks of this.

      Seeing me swirling peanut butter out of a jar, Paretsky said, “Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and no wonder. All the rest have peanut butter. Except Grandma, who has a pail of blueberries.” The others stared at him, but I smiled: His little verse had made him seem human.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ