Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“How come you never tell on me?” I used to ask him. He told me to stop asking him that.

“You tease your brother?” my mother asked me once. It was after my brother and I had had a huge fight. I'd thrown his record player against his headboard. We'd all gotten calmed down at like midnight. My brother was still making noise in his room. My father had closed all the windows.

I don't know, I said. Sometimes I teased him a little, I thought.

More than that I didn't let him play my record collection. It was the thing he liked to do most but he always scratched everything. We took the bus into Bridgeport with my mother when she went to the bank so we could go to Korvette's afterwards for 45s. We listened to WICC and WMCA. We always asked if we could get two of everything so he could have his own copy and she always said we were lucky to get one. And he'd always like what I got better than what he got. So he'd sit in my room when I was trying to do something and go, “Can we play ‘Elusive Butterfly’?” And I'd go, “No.” And he'd sit there and hum the music while I tried to keep doing what I was doing. And I'd go, “I'm still not gonna play it.” And he'd shrug and keep humming, like that would have to do. Sometimes if he went out in the yard I'd play the song. Before I left for camp he got “98.6” by Keith and I got “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. He got a new record player but he wasn't supposed to touch any of my records until I got back. I hid them in the storage space before I left.

“Can I play your records when you're gone?” he asked the morning I was leaving. It was still almost dark but he'd gotten up to see me go.

“I don't care,” I told him.

“That was nice of you,” my father said in the car on the drive up.

If they called and asked where I'd hid them when I was up there, I'd probably tell them.

I got to the sign-up board earlier the next morning but still too late for the beach. Me and two other kids and the fat kid ended up at Archery. The archery range was a field with three bales of hay and a fiberglass bow. The fat kid said somebody lost the arrows the year before.

“You were here last year?” I asked him.

“I been here three years in a row,” he said.

The other two kids had the bow. They were taking turns throwing it at one of the bales.

“Don't your parents know you hate it here?” I asked him.

“Don't yours?” he said.

BJ told us on the hike that afternoon that the fat kid had told on Chris.

“Did he get him in trouble?” Joyce asked. We were spread out along the Widowmaker Trail waiting for lunch. A counselor was on a rock cutting Spam out of the can into fattish cylinders with his Swiss army knife and another one was handing out bread slices. The drink they'd passed around at the beginning had already ruined my canteen. Everybody who had kept their water was being asked by everybody else for a drink.

The fat kid was in the middle of the trail behind us and Chris was kicking and scuffing at his butt like he was trying to get gum off the sidewalk. “Who are you throwing rocks at?” Chris said. He'd noticed me pinging pebbles down the trail.

“Both of you,” I said.

“Well cut it out,” he said.

Before dinner when we got back the fat kid signed out one of the little sailboats and was just getting going when Chris waded out and tipped the boat over with him in it, and then waded back to shore.

“Cut it out,” the fat kid screamed once he surfaced. “You cut it out too,” he said when he saw me throwing more little rocks from the shore. They plunked in the water around him.

“Phone call,” some kid said to me when we were back in the tents. There was only one phone the campers could use, and it was in the Camp Director's office.

“What's that noise?” I asked my father after he said hello.

“That's your brother,” he said.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“He wants to go see the Association in New Haven,” my father said.

“The band the Association? They're playing in New Haven?” I asked.

“What do you think: he wants to visit their house? Yes , they're playing in New Haven,” he said.

“How'd he find out about it?” I asked.

“How do I know?” my father said. “He listens to the radio.”

“I'm goin',” I heard my brother tell him. You re not goin, my father said back. My mother shouted in her two cents from wherever she was.

“Does he want you to go with him?” I said.

“He's nine years old. He's not going to a rock concert,” he told me.

My brother shouted something I couldn't make out. “Hey,” my father shouted back. “How'd you like to not leave your room for a few weeks?”

My brother said something else I couldn't hear.

“I told him he could play some of your records instead,” he said.

“You talking to me?” I asked him. “My records?”

“No, I'm talking to your mother,” he said. “He wants to play our Perry Como. That's why I called you.”

“I don't want him playing my records,” I said.

“Now don't you start too,” he said.

“I'm not starting anything,” I said.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said. “I'm gonna take all these fucking records and pitch them out the window.”

“Fine,” I said. “I don't care what he does. I hope he breaks them all.”

“I hope so too,” my father said.

“Lend me your flashlight,” Chris said to me when I was on my way back to my tent. He'd come from behind me.

“How will I get home?” I asked him.

“Lend me your flashlight,” he said. I handed it over and he veered into the woods and disappeared. I didn't even see it go on.

“Chris has my flashlight,” I told my tentmates when I got back. I said it like Godzilla was loose in the city.

It was my father's good one. When we'd been packing he'd been deciding between the crappy plastic one he let us play with and his. My brother had taken his once and had lost it. Even my mother had had to start looking for it. It had been this huge thing. I didn't care which one I had, but his had a better beam. I'd told him I wouldn't lose it and he'd said okay. And now Chris had it and when I tried to get it back he'd beat me to death with it.

As usual I couldn't sleep. I got up when it was still dark and signed up for the beach. I went by the counselors' lean-to but nobody was moving. A raccoon was rooting around in somebody's knapsack in the dirt.

Maybe it was good that I lost it, I thought on the way back to the tent. Maybe when they found out, my parents would be like, But he knew how much we wanted him to keep an eye on it.

But I also wanted to be the kid who stayed up when everybody else went under.

The fat kid showed up at the beach too. He said the Camp Director was trying to make it up to him about the Chris stuff.

I cut my hand on the sharp edge of a broken garbage can.

I was worried about the flashlight. The fat kid sat next to me. We were the only ones not in the water. It was so humid you couldn't tell we hadn't been in.

Some kids were having races from the steel dock to the pontoon raft. A few sailboats were crisscrossing, the occasional sail collapsing. One rowboat sat a ways out, trailing a Mile Swimmer. The water over the sand by the reeds where we were was the color of cream soda.

Kids were throwing other kids off the pontoon raft into the lake. There was a lot of shouting, and my hand was still bleeding. I was going to need a better Band-Aid.

“You think BJ stands for Blow Job?” the fat kid said.

I looked at him. I hadn't thought of that.

“Has he asked you yet?” he said.