Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

“The day is lost!” he said, as I hit. “Our Lord has forsaken us for vile Moors!”

“Vile Moors,” he kept saying, which I didn’t get at the time, but I see now was because we had Black Sean with us and it was Black Sean who took the flag.

Then the agony of having your nuts crushed by an airborne boy, it must have suddenly arrived on Mr. Marv. The man shut up.

Victory equaled a sack of candy bars, to be divided evenly among all living members of our unit.

Van Wort spent the night in the infirmary, though a boy who was there for a spider bite said there were no visible marks.

We played Freeze-Please every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Steve-Ivan would say “Freeze, Please” while we were eating and we’d all go stone-cold statue. Whoever moved first was Admiral of the Swiss Navy, which meant you had to scrape and stack the dishes, bus them over to Black Sean’s mother in the kitchen.

The Swiss have no navy, but who knew that then?

We called Van Wort the Commodore because he couldn’t hold still. I think it was unfair, really, because it wasn’t so much him as his fat that was moving, if that makes any sense at all. Study a fat kid hard and it might.

“Well, it looks like another lucky day for the Hog,” Steve-Ivan said one morning.

“I’ll help him,” I said.

Everyone gawked, as though I’d been struck with sudden bolts of faggot lightning, but it was just this feeling I had, that Van Wort was getting a bad break.

He wasn’t so off. He wasn’t even weird. It wasn’t like he wrote bird poems or wore the wrong kind of underwear.

“Why are you doing this?” said Van Wort.

“Just because.”

“I don’t care what you do to me,” said Van Wort. “If it’s a trick, it’s a trick.”

We were quiet and stacked for a while.

“So,” I said, “who killed your dad?”

“Nobody killed him,” said Van Wort. “He dropped dead. I saw it.”

“No shit,” I said. “You saw it?”

“He went blue and had a bubble on his mouth.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you give him mouth to mouth?”

“He had a bubble there.”

Some of us were smoking behind the Port-O-Sans after lights out when Steve-Ivan wandered by. We had figured him for off to the bars on the highway by now.

“Hey, it’s lights out,” said Steve-Ivan.

“We know,” I said.

“That means lights out out.”

“I said we know,” I said.

“Don’t wise off to me,” said Steve-Ivan. “You think you’re special just because you’ve been going for those hog rides?”

This was wit near Canada. The boys did a round of barnyard jokes about me and Van Wort.

“So, what’s it like, sucking on the bacon?” said Steve-Ivan.

They called me Bacon from then on.

I didn’t mind the cracks, but I missed the camaraderie.

I calcified, got crusty. I lost my boxball crown.

Each night they came to his bed where he lay wheezing. It wasn’t even foot powder and Indian burns anymore. They wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed. They taped him down to the bed frame, went at it with tweezers and pocket knives. They got his sock bunched up for a ball gag. They pinched off pieces of him with nail clippers and tiny sewing shears from kits their mothers had packed because it was on the list.

I’d get up and walk to the other end of the bunk until they were done.

In the morning I’d help him clean up, wipe down the blood until it was just dark nicks.

We talked about everything except what they did to him.

We talked about the day’s activities, the boats, the beads, the weaving. We talked about our dreams the night before.

He told me he had gun dreams where the gun wouldn’t shoot, falling dreams where he fell into a stilled river that had his father’s face in its bed. He had one where all the girls at the girls’ camp were rolled out on a float for his fancy. I told him he should keep a dream diary and he told me he did, showed me a spiral-bound notebook with his entries. It read:

GUN

GIRLS

RIVER

RIVER

RIVER

He told me he had given the eulogy at his father’s funeral, that it was easy, he’d just used an essay he’d written for school and substituted “my father” for “our founding fathers.”

I started to admire Van Wort. But then I’d hate him for being so weak. He’d given up even the shrieking and they rarely bothered to gag him anymore.

“Why don’t you fight back?” I said.

“What’s the point?”

“The point is you show them you’re not a pussy. Then they leave you alone.” I believe I’d first heard this argument advanced by a talking beagle on one of those claymation shows the Lutherans used to produce.

“Will you help me?” he said.

“No,” I said. “That would be wrong.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

Then it was the last day of camp. We packed all our stuff in duffels. Tomorrow we would strip our beds and get into our family wagons, wave.

At our last lunch Steve-Ivan said that Van Wort and I would be voted camp love-birds at the camp banquet that night.

“Vote us whatever the fuck you want,” I said.

“Oh, you little bitch,” said Steve-Ivan.

We had to stack without even a Freeze-Please and Van Wort wouldn’t look at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

“I’m done with this,” said Van Wort.

I took that to mean that he was going to do something, make himself the last of the brave. What he meant, though, was that he was truly done. Van Wort took a canoe out to the middle of the lake. We were doing free swim and we heard him call to us, watched him drink from a big plastic jug and just sort of bend over, roll off the bow into the lake. You’d figure drowning would be hard going to begin with, all that lung smash and lung stove and no air to dream of rivers anymore, but picture it with your guts burning off from a stolen jug of kitchen lye. Steve-Ivan dove in to save him but Van Wort was too fat. We watched them bob together in the middle of the lake. Then Steve-Ivan was bobbing up and down alone. He swam back weeping, or maybe it was the water.

They got Van Wort’s body out with a special boat. They had him in a strap swinging off the gunwale. His swim trunks trailed out from his feet and you could see all the night wounds on him.

“Self-mutilation,” said Mr. Marv. “Interesting.”

The news trucks drove up that afternoon.

Van Wort’s father appeared, too. He was a skinny man in a sun hat. He stood on the shoreline shouting at no one in particular. I walked up to him.

“I’m Bacon,” I said. “I was his friend.”

“Were you his Judas, too?” said Mr. Van Wort. He busted me a tough one on the jaw. Then he took me to his bony chest.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I know you were his friend. Bobby wrote me about you.”

I had long forgotten Van Wort was also a Bobby, if I ever knew.

I wonder if his father saw me on the newscast that night.

“Friend of the Victim,” they flashed across my heart.

I was voted Most Humane at the camp banquet. Black Sean was Leadership Qualities. His mother cried. Steve-Ivan got up with a God’s Eye he claimed Van Wort had woven for him and Mr. Marv led us in a Moment of Silent Reflection.

Van Wort, Mr. Marv told us, had touched all of our lives.

He may have just been talking, like he did about the bone spurs, but he was also right. I put on a ton of weight in school that year, got jumped and beat in my town a lot. It felt good, like I was getting free of something, but I never let on that I was enjoying myself. Then I found a severe diet, sought welcome from a band of semi-evil people. We were all nearly beautiful and eager to destroy each other for it. I had the kind of time where you don’t notice the time going by, but it did.