Thomas Tryon: The Night of the Moonbow

“Pee-yoo, you farted!” Holding his nose and screwing up his face, Peewee pointed out the obvious.

“Bombs away!” Eddie shouted, and began chanting, “Beans, beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot.” Then they all took up the refrain, “The more you toot the better you feel, so eat your beans at every meal.”

“Aw, come on, you guys-”

Despite his brashness, the Bomber was easily embarrassed, but it was because of this singular talent that he had been nicknamed “Bomber” in the first place; or sometimes the Brown Bomber, a cognomen stemming from a certain resemblance to boxer Joe Louis, who only the year before had knocked out Jim Braddock to become heavyweight champion of the world. Joe, of course, was a darker shade, but the swarthiness of the Bomber’s complexion, as well as his chunky features, furrowed brow, and poll of kinky black hair, marked a distinct likeness.

Monkey and Eddie and Dump stopped their razzing, but Peewee, never knowing when to quit, continued to pinch his nose and repeat his pee-yoo’s. When at last he subsided, they all seemed to. run out of talk. Dump frowned at his watch; what was keeping the others? he wondered. All Boats In had rung, the lake lay deserted, the waterfront too. Just about everybody, campers and counselors, was already indoors, engaged in the before-dinner routine known as “powwow,” the final one for the first group of two-weekers.

Fourteen days of camp had already passed, and tomorrow, Sunday, July 3, they would be going home, to be. replaced with a new incoming group, among them, the longed-for replacement for the infamous Stanley Wagner, and the talk in Cabin 7 now turned to speculation on this interesting subject. Whatever he turned out to be like, all the regular Jeremians hoped he would be the kind of boy who would help get them back in the habit of winning. For, until this summer, “Hartsig’s boys,” as they were called, had been prime stuff at Friend-Indeed. Thanks to the leadership of Reece, who had a peculiar knack of urging his campers to feats of prowess that outdid those of the other cabins (although even Reece had been stymied by Stanley), they had garnered more “happy points” and fewer “blackies” two years running, and (until Stanley had been inflicted on them) had fully expected to do the same again this season. If the new boy lived up to expectations, if he could “show some good old moxie,” and “bring home the bacon” (to use two of Reece’s favorite expressions), and, well, just “fit in,” they might still put it off; they might still see the names of the Jeremians and their counselor formally inscribed on the plaque at the base of the Hartsig Trophy, the handsome silver cup donated by Reece’s dad, Big Rolfe Hartsig.

Voices were heard out on the line-path, and in a moment two more Jeremians entered the cabin. -

“What’s going on?” demanded Phil Dodge, the taller and huskier of the two. “Jesus, Peewee, are you completely nuts!” he exclaimed, spotting the boy lolling grandly on Reece’s cot.

“No. Why?”

“You’re messin’ around on Big Chief’s bed, that’s why.” The counselor’s cot stood in the center of the back wall, between the sets of double-decker bunks (four to a side), and was made up in the military style, with a footlocker at the foot (monogrammed “R.A.H.” – “rah-rah Reece!” -for “Reece Adam Hartsig”).

Phil shagged Peewee off the cot and went about neatening the blankets and pillow.

Meanwhile, Peewee had turned his attention to the frog dangling by its hind legs from the second boy’s fist.

“Boy, that’s a whopper. Where’d you get it?”

“I caught it,” said Wally Pfeiffer, his tongue bright pink from the Necco wafer he was sucking. “I stunned him with a rock.”

Phil gave Wally an exasperated look. “So what? Who waded in and grabbed him? Don’t think you’re so hot. And listen, kiddo,” he added, “didn’t I tell you that candy’ll make you break out? You know how Big Chief feels about pimples.”

Wally gave his pal a grim, tooth-clenched look and spat out his half-melted wafer. Phil Dodge, a square-headed boy with a hard-packed body, a spiky pineapple haircut, and eyes that never told you anything, was cabin monitor and Reece’s second-in-command, enforcing the counselor’s dictums as he could (which meant mostly in matters concerning the unassertive Wally) and even aping his mannerisms. “All right, camper, let’s hop to it,” Phil would say, and “Listen, kiddo, I don’t want to have to tell you again” – and when Reece said “Listen, kiddo,” Phil really did “hop to it.”

Now he couldn’t mask a certain satisfaction in having bent Wally to his will, which made Wally burn silently. Wally could never hope to measure up to Phil; he was a skinny, dour-looking lad with limp, flaxen hair and the pale, puffy-lidded eyes that resulted from an overactive thyroid – a condition that probably accounted for his perpetually drowsy expression and morose disposition.

“We both caught him,” Phil asserted, willing now to be generous. He took the frog from Wally and gave the creature a shake. It emitted a croak of protest.

“Boy, he sure is fat,” Peewee said admiringly. “Can I have him?”

“What for?”

“I bet Oats’d let me keep him in the lodge,” Peewee said. Oats Gurley was the camp nature director. “In a box. I could have him for a pet. Or we could blow him up.” “What’re you talking about, runt?” Phil demanded. “You know, like a balloon,” Peewee said, refusing to be cowed by Phil’s contemptuous glare. “I seen Reece do it once. He took a soda straw and shoved it up this frog’s ass and blew it up. It floated in the water but it couldn’t swim.”

“Oh, come on, Peewee, that’s disgusting!” Dump exclaimed.

“I didn’t do it! Reece did!” Peewee protested.

A frog-balloon was a good gag, after all. Didn’t campers chloroform frogs for dissection in nature study? Not that Reece Hartsig would bother with anything so pedestrian as that. In fact, he would never do anything ordinary, even when it came to frogs. And when you got right down to it, there wasn’t anything much Reece couldn’t do and do with style. Who else did the boys know whose sleek, tanned features had turned up in the Sunday rotogravure, grinning among a group of important-looking individuals? Who else had surfed at Waikiki Beach, and sailed to Europe with his parents to see the Berlin Olympics? Who else had climbed Mount Monadnock and paddled-and-portaged the Quinnebaug clear down to New London; who else wore a tux and went to country-club dances, and carried a silver flask on his hip? Who else had been courting the matchless Nancy Rider, subdeb daughter of the lieutenant-governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; had even, it was rumored, danced with Dixie Dunbar at the Rainbow Room in Radio City? Who else had left a trail of broken hearts (which was why the Jeremians sometimes liked to call him “Heartless”) up and down the whole of the Eastern Seaboard? Who else, after this, his last Moonbow summer, was going off to be a flier in the Army Air Corps, and get a pair of silver wings? At Friend-Indeed, Reece was the “Big-Chief,” former ace camper – a bunkee in Jeremiah, as his father had been before him – and current top-rated counselor, and it was a rare Moonbow boy who didn’t look forward to the day when, like his hero, he too would have been made one of Pa’s “Glad Men from Happy Boys” (Pa had dreamed up the camp motto and had decreed that it be painted on the sign at the highway turnoff), who could take up smoking a pipe in public – the same kind of briar Reece’s father had given him, in a smart gold-stamped leather case with a green satin interior, the kind you saw in an Esquire ad.