Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

The man puffs out his upper lip with his tongue, sniffing at his blond mustache hairs. All right, he says, wait over there. The walkie-talkie, crackling all along, comes off his belt, and he asks for someone named Bryant. Father and son sit together on a bench outside the cabin, slapping mosquitoes off their legs and arms and necks. Flynn didn’t bring any bug spray.

Tierney arrives on a golf cart. He’s wearing a linen shirt with pink stripes and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. He doesn’t smile or wave.

“What can I do you for?” Tierney asks the man with the clipboard.

“This gentleman says you told him he could bring his kid, even though he doesn’t have his beads.”

Tierney lean-sits on the front of the golf cart, his arms crossed. “Right,” he says. “I’m sorry. I meant to call the district office about that. This going to be a problem?”

“Maybe,” the man says. “The rules are pretty clear.”

The two men are talking low now, their lips quiet and slow like butterfly wings. Flynn can’t hear what they’re saying. Tierney laughs a little and pats the man on the back. The man nods and motions to the lake. Tierney nods then. Maybe Flynn should go over and join them. He can help make this okay. He stands too late. The conference that will determine his son’s fate has ended. Bill Tierney strides over to the bench.

“Here’s the deal,” he says to Flynn. “Ryan can stay. Only he won’t be able to do some of the activities since he doesn’t have his beads. Like the canoe trip to the island on the lake. That’s for kids who’ve got their Swimming Skill Bead and their CPR Bead of Mercy. You understand, right, why we can’t let him go on that trip?”

Flynn says he understands, of course. He gives his son’s shoulder a squeeze.

• • •

The tent is old and once belonged to Flynn’s father. The canvas is military green; the paraffin wax that kept its corners sealed from the rain has long since lost its shine. Father and son tie the canvas strips to the metal poles they’ve erected in the wide-open field with all the other tents. In all directions are tents: red, yellow, orange, and green nylon rain-flies spilling out around the domes like fruit candies melting in the afternoon sun. Beside every tent is a parked car. The field buzzes with bugs and the sound of a dozen car-powered air pumps blowing up mattresses, palatial beds two and three feet thick. Flynn has brought a number of thin foam pads and stacks them under their sleeping bags.

“Do you want the left or right?”

The boy picks the left.

“Where’s your pillow?”

He forgot his pillow, but here’s Mookie the blue bear, smuggled inside a pillowcase.

“I thought we agreed not to bring the bear.”

His son prepares a throne of T-shirts for the bear at the end of his sleeping bag. Its cold dark eyes are fixed on the two of them.

“Just for the first night,” Flynn says.

A bell echoes across the lake, and fathers and sons, a hundred of them, begin the boisterous migration to the dining hall. Like a herd of buffalo, Flynn imagines, and they’re part of it. The boys, ages six to fourteen, run circles around the fathers, some as old as sixty.

One small boy with a round and ruddy face stops to examine an overturned kayak. “Snake,” he announces, and they all gather around him to admire the discovery, their first significant encounter with wildlife for the week. A dark, fat snake is coiled in the sand by the water.

Water moccasin, one of the fathers determines, and then they’re all moving away at once, the fathers dragging the boys backward by their arms and shirttails. Someone should tell the camp director! Snakes in the lake again! Hadn’t they hired someone to take care of this after last summer? Remember that kid last year who somehow trapped a water moccasin in a shopping bag and hung it from the rafters in the shower house?

“Clearly that kid didn’t have any Beads of Mercy,” someone up ahead jokes.

“He wasn’t allowed back this summer,” yells someone farther back.

They converge on the flagpole outside the dining hall. The man with the clipboard has traded his paperwork for a megaphone. The boys are organized into single-file lines radiating out from the flagpole like spokes from a hub. Flynn helps Ryan find his place, the line for his group, Bill Tierney at the head. Two Grasshoppers take the flag down and fold it military-style into careful triangles. Time for the Grasshopper salute. Time for the Grasshopper Pledge. There’s a way around every wall, hundreds of shrill voices yell out in near-unison. Time for dinner.

“Go ahead,” Flynn tells Ryan. “Find us a couple of seats.”

Flynn lingers on the porch, where a handful of men furtively smoke their cigarettes. They huddle near the steps, a conspiracy of tobacco. Flynn asks for a light. The man who gives him one introduces himself as John Price. “You a newbie?” he asks.

Flynn says he is. John Price sports a chinstrap beard that doesn’t much help disguise his marshmallow chin. He owns a dealership. Toyotas and Hyundais, he adds. Ever need a new car, give him a call. Come on by. That’s how this works. Grasshoppers isn’t just for the kids. The dads stick together, you know? Help each other out.

Flynn nods his head enthusiastically. He couldn’t agree more. That’s how this should work.

One father says, “Marty, your kid ever tell you about his Truth Bead?”

“Never,” says Marty.

“My kid never told me neither,” another man says. “I guess that shouldn’t bother me, but it does.”

“Only two Beads of Truth,” John Price explains to Flynn, “and the dads never get to know what they mean. The Head Guides decide when the kid is ready. I think it’s just like a single sentence that gets whispered in their ear. But the kids aren’t supposed to repeat it. Ever. I’ve heard that the first one is about the nature of time. My kid’s got that one, but he’s just as tight-lipped as the rest of them. When I press him about it, he smiles at me like I’m an idiot who wouldn’t understand. Just wait, it’ll drive you crazy when your kid gets his.”

Bowls of mashed potatoes, platters of chicken fingers, and pitchers of lemonade are on all the tables when they go inside the dining hall, a flurry of hand-waving, lip-smacking, and spilled drinks.

“Wouldn’t mind a little vodka in that lemonade,” John Price says with a forced laugh before wandering off to find his son.

Flynn navigates the maze of tables and children. He watches one kid drown a chicken finger — perfectly fried on one side but mushy and gray on the other — in a gush of ketchup from a sticky red squirt bottle. Another boy, with a blue bandanna wrapped around his tiny head, drums on his plate with metal silverware until a father leans across the table with a stern look. All the kids are wearing their yellow uniforms. From the right pockets, on leather strings, their white, red, and black beads dangle.

Ryan, in his unadorned uniform, is sitting at the end of a table at the far end of the hall, three seats away from the next person. He’s barely touched his food. Flynn asks if he’d like to move over a couple of seats, but the boy says no, he’s fine where he is. So they sit together, apart from the others, poking tunnels into their mashed potatoes, drinking more and more lemonade, until the man with the megaphone, the camp director, stands at the front of the room with some announcements: tomorrow’s activities are posted on the back wall; the bonfire ceremony will be three nights from tonight; a special visitor is coming to help construct a genuine Native American sweat lodge; oh, and the water moccasins are back in the lake, so watch where you step.

That night it rains, but only a little.