Clyde

        Jen had just saved one of the kids from drowning in the frozen pond, so now she was in the Senior Counselors Cabin watching T.V. with me and trying to make herself dry and warm. She just never looked right for this kind of cold, the snow and wind always made her hands too pink and her knuckles too white, and her hair never melted the snow like it looked like it was meant to. She just looked like a girl whose blood froze easily and spent most of winter riding her veins in a bloody icy slush. So on days when it gets below twenty, the other counselors and I tried to cover most of her shifts for her.

I adjusted the antenna until the static gave way for The Waltons, and then returned to my seat and watched her break the ice out of her hair for the next half hour before my shift started. I put on my standard-issue Mt. Laurel Area Summer Camp Parka and headed down to the pond.   

              Tuesdays I had to go watch the little bastards play ice hockey and announce whenever one of them managed to score. But because of today’s near-drowning, and because I fucking hate hockey, I figured I shouldn’t risk letting the ice finally crack on my watch and decided to keep them off the pond.

        Five minutes late, a junior-counselor named Clyde came bouncing down the hill to share my shift with me, and cried right along with the kids about the unsafe pond. He knew I was right, though. Some people just love to start trouble. The kids kept begging and reasoning with me.

      “But we’ll be safe!”

      “The ice is only about 20 centimeters thick, more than enough to hold our combined mass!”

      “We’ll get off if it cracks, we promise!”

      I ignored them and had Clyde plan a snowball fight instead. The snow was pretty good for packing, so I built a few speed bump-shaped mounds for them to hide behind while Clyde helped the younger ones build snowballs and explained his favorite winter activities to them. I heard him steal stories about deformed snowmen from Calvin and Hobbes and attribute them to himself (“Like, thirty of them, horrible coal groans on their faces, surrounding my mom’s car when she tried to leave”). He explained snow angels, and something called “ice cherubs,” (“it’s essentially just accidentally dropping a baby, only there’s ice.”) I interrupted him before he could explain what he called a “hail Satan,” a pun he laughed at much harder than any of the kids. He whined, said he could give each precipitation its own kind of divinity. I took him aside and told him to start without me, I had to go piss and grab my orange vest.

        The woods surrounding the camp open for boar hunting in the winter, so campers and counselors alike are forced to wear bright orange vests after a couple kids were mistaken for a charging boar herd and shot a few years back. That was my first year working the camp, and it’s all been downhill since. A summer camp that stayed open all year seemed to me like a crazy idea at the time, but I was desperate. The college I faked my way into expelled me after I accidentally plagiarized a paper for my Criminology class. My dads demanded I pay rent or live somewhere else, so I took the job at Mountain Laurel Area Summer Camp because none of the places in town were hiring.

        Jen worked at the camp three years longer than I had, and she told me that when she was hired, it actually had been just a summer camp. The owner’s money troubles, though, forced him to keep it open year round, and change the activities to match the seasons. One job I had was to insulate the cabins and install the space heaters once winter came, then take out the heaters and insulation for the spring and summer. I stay on pretty much all year round now, only going home for major holidays.

    “What the hell are you doing back?” she asked me when I got to the Senior Counselors Cabin. She was curled up on the couch, watching Dynasty. A pile of ice and ripped-out hair was melting on the floor behind her.

      “How’re you doing up here?” I asked, “Want me to find another channel?”

        “You didn’t just leave the kids alone unsupervised, did you?”

        “Clyde’s there. Can I get you some hot chocolate or some beer?”

        “Clyde? The Junior Counselor? He’s barely older than the kids themselves, he can’t be responsible for them!” 

        “I think I found the comedy channel, is that better for you?”

        A gunshot sang through the camp from the forest, so after I brought her some hot chocolate, took a sip off the top, and, satisfied I had gotten most of her marshmallows, I grabbed my vest and started back down the trail to the pond area. There was an unbelievable frenzy of snowballs polluting the air in the clearing. Walking through it, I felt like a snowman caught in a particularly sadistic snow globe. One girl, I swear to God, was throwing about twenty per minute, and hard. She seemed to be the centerpiece of the chaos: other kids would scream in pain when she hit them, or whoop a victorious cheer when they managed to dodge her snowballs. The child had an arm like a pitching machine. I just sneaked around the back. One annoying laugh was obviously missing, though.

        “Where’s Clyde?” I asked the first kid I came to.

        “He said he saw a baby boar so he said he was sneaking off into the woods and he was going to grab the boar because it was a baby and he’s never seen a baby before. That way.”

        Shit.

        I called the Senior Counselors Cabin on my cell phone and Jen, God bless her, picked up and saved me a run back to camp. I didn’t know how to break this to her, though.

        “What is it?” she asked.

        “Shit. Shit. Shitshitshitshit,” I said.

        “What’s wrong? Is one of the kids hurt? Did the ice break again?”

        “Look,” I said, “Can you call one of the other counselors and get them to come watch the kids? Clyde ran off into the woods, I have to track him down.”

        “Shit,” she said. Then: “Sure, anything you say, just go find him. And hurry, his mom’s coming tomorrow.” Junior Counselors weren’t allowed to stay for more than two weeks at a time, and Clyde’s were almost up. He’d be back to annoy us for spring break, I’m sure, and all of summer. No, actually, he wasn’t that bad during the summer. Clyde’s dangerously fat, and knows it, so he keeps to himself the season where most boys go swimming shirtless.

        I wanted to tell her that it was all her fault, that if she hadn’t dove into a frozen lake, she’d have been out still and never gone back to the Senior Counselors Cabin to talk to me. I convinced myself she didn’t deserve to be snapped at, though, so I just told her not to call the police, that I have it under control. She actually wished me a soft, genuine good luck, and I made a mental note that I should lose kids more often.

        I ran off in the direction the kid pointed in, shouting Clyde’s name every hundred feet or so. I wished he had a nicer name, one that rolled off the tongue easier. I felt like an idiot saying “Clyde”. Clyde, you dumb bastard. I started to doubt if he even saw a baby boar anyway, or was doing this just to make me look bad.  To his credit, he’d left footprints when he walked, so I followed those up a hill to the west of the camp. These woods went on for miles, maybe even a hundred miles, in three directions away from the camp. The trail seemed to disappear when it came to a small stream, so I walked across and just kept going west.

        I was gone for an hour at that point, and still there was no sign of him. My CD player was dead and so was the iPod I borrowed from one of the more recent counselors. I didn’t know much of her music anyway.

        One of these years, I swore to myself, I’m going to spend an entire month back home and figure out what the hell’s going on in the real world.

        The first clue came soon after that. Clyde’s orange vest hung from an ostrich-sized pine tree, a thin one with annoyingly flexible branches. I pocketed it and kept stumbling forward.





      The wind died down finally, and had convinced the snow to go along with it, probably by using beer and soft-core porn as bribes. The silence was incredible. I was breathing. I actually felt and heard myself breathing, in through the nose, out the mouth again, and nothing else. It sounded more alive than I knew I was.

        When my breathing was interrupted by another’s, and by that other’s footsteps, and talking, and finally by another gunshot, I felt so wronged and startled I snuck behind the noises and peeked my head through the trees. An overweight man with a thin, wispy mustache was pointing a hunting rifle at my face.



        “Oh, jeez!” he said after a few seconds, and lifted the gun away from me. “Be careful, son, you scared the heck out of us!” Only after her said “us” did I notice he had a young girl with him, no older than seven, holding a rifle and wearing a hot pink hunting vest.

        “I thought you were a bear so I was going to make you dead,” she said, and giggled.

        The man laughed too, a warm laugh. He smiled at his daughter and took her gun from her.

        “Come on, come on, I almost killed you, I owe you a pop,” he said, putting his large hand on my shoulder and shoving a Dr. Pepper into my glove. “It’s dangerous out here; I thought you were a bear too, what with that parka and all. Another few seconds and you’d be hanging on my wall. A friend of mine accidentally killed some kids once while hunting thought they were opossums or something.”

        I could tell the joke was meant to break the tension, but it was creepy all the same.

        “I’m Tim Dobson,” he said, shaking my hand with the intensity of a man trying to start a chainsaw. “And this is my daughter, Emily.”

        I looked at their guns, their binoculars and the large knife he had in his pocket.

        “What brings you out here?” I asked.

        “We were just doing a little hunting,” the large man said, “It’s kind of a family tradition, ever since my wife started getting into environmentalism, and she left me because I wouldn’t stop hunting. So ever since then, every Sunday we come to the woods and just shoot whatever’s legal. Is that really so wrong?”

        Yes.

        “No.” I just wanted him to stop talking; I had Clyde to worry about. That bastard, running away with me on watch and everything. Does that make it my fault? Did I lose you, Clyde? What did I do?

        “You’re damn right it’s not!” Tim Dobson boomed. “God, she was such a… Earmuffs, Emily!” at that, the girl covered her ears with her hands, “such a bitch. She didn’t understand the first thing about life. She had this horrible ‘everything is perfect no matter what’ mentality. That's not the way to enjoy things, loving them all! It made her too afraid to ever try to be exciting or happy. So goshdamn content. I swear, son, loving everything is just as bad as hating everything. I can’t imagine either; it makes no sense to me. It’s not about, you know, here’s what most people don’t understand. It’s not about the killing. That’s just a side effect. People don’t go fishing just cause they just hate fish, right? They do it because it fills them up, fills this empty spot in them that nothing that makes sense can feel. You know what I mean?”

        “Yes.” 

        “Are you a hunting man?”

        “No.”

        “What fills you, then?”

        I think for a while and draw a blank. Finally, I say “Hockey.”

        “That’s fine, I guess. But man, it can’t compare to just coming out here on a winter day and killing a bear or a boar or opossum.”

        “It’s not actually bear season,” I told him, “bears are all hibernating.”

        “That’s not true!” the girl interrupted. “I shot at one, I shot one today!”

        “Yeah, you know, I thought they were hibernating too, but I can attest for what the girl said myself,” Tim told me. “She got a hell of a shot in, from at least 100 yards, but the thing managed to limp away anyway. Wasn’t worth it to follow the trail of blood. So we moved on to boar. I think the girl just got one, too, but I can’t figure out where it got off to.”

        I told them I had to go. They agreed, it was venturing on too dark to hunt. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was too low now for its reflection on the snow to provide adequate lighting. Soon I’d have to turn back, Clyde or no Clyde. Clyde? Really? What kind of parents name their kid Clyde? Anyway, I looped around where Tim and Emily were and found a trail of blood in the snow. It went behind a giant patch of bushes, so I got on my hands and knees in the snow and crawled in. My hair was mostly frozen, and I couldn’t feel my feet or knees that well. Inside the bushes, a small dark shape was bleeding onto the snow, melting it and reddening the moss underneath. It was a baby boar.

 

        It’s still alive, though. I can see its breath rise from its snout, and I hear it grunt weakly, more discontented than scared or angry. The bullet hole is just above the beast’s shoulder, spilling blood that mattes its fur. I put my hand on the bullet would and more blood comes spilling out. The animal shudders when I touch it, and weakly kicks. It smells awful, already like death. I wrap my arm over the top of it and lift it up, so I can wrap Clyde’s hunting jacket around the creature’s shoulder, trying to cover the wound. I feel it breath, and hope my breathing never gets that fast, but it already is. It looks at me, not specifically in my face so much as just in my general direction, then his entire face blinks. The boar sighs and it is dead.



        No matter how late I get back to the camp, Jen will be waiting for me in the Senior Counselors Camp. I’ll open the door, and she’ll see me in the doorway, lit only by the camp’s dim outdoor lamps, my hands covered in blood, soaked in my entirety from the snow. But she’ll take me to sit next to her on the couch anyway, and she’ll put on whatever 1970s sitcom she can find. She’ll ask about Clyde, and I will say no, I did not find Clyde. I won’t tell her about the boar I felt die, or the seven year old girl who did it, or Clyde’s orange hunting vest on the tree.

        “He’s fine. He’ll come back tonight, he’ll be home when you wake up tomorrow,” she will tell me.

        “He’s fine. He’s fine, he’ll be home when I wake up tomorrow.”

        “He’s fine,” we will say together. We’ll say it separately, until we fall asleep here on the couch, we’ll repeat “he’s fine, he’s on his way back now, maybe he’s already back and we don’t know it, perhaps he never even left.”

        And when his mother comes in the morning, I will say that Clyde is okay and fine and alive and on his way back, any minute now, just wait.