Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

Grasshopper Kings

The boy scrapes the stick across the grass a few times and flings it behind the hedge before Flynn can even get his car into the driveway. Flynn is home late from work, and driving up he saw it in the darkness, the small flame eating the end of the stick. The boy is alone on the front lawn in a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He stands very still, pale arms crossed behind his back. The smoke hovers around his head like an apparition. “Ryan,” Flynn says, rising from the car with a huff, “I thought we’d put this fire business behind us.”

His son’s eyes are like his wife’s eyes, which are like an owl’s eyes, hardly blinking and gigantic. Nothing else about his wife is very owl-like. She is skinny as a ferret and not at all nocturnal. She’s in bed by eight, or seven-thirty if Jeopardy!’s a repeat.

“Whatever you used, give it here,” Flynn says, and Ryan forfeits a small yellow matchbook. Flynn shoves the matches deep into his pocket and grabs the stick out of the hedge. The dark ash smears his hand, and with his index finger he smudges his son’s nose. When he opens the front door, the boy darts under his arm and runs ahead down the carpeted hall to his room.

By the time Flynn gets there Ryan is already under the covers with the stuffed blue bear, Mookie. His wife used to call her older sister Mookie, but that was years ago, before cancer killed Mookie at the nearly young age of fifty-one. His wife doesn’t like to talk about her sister’s death. “Why Mookie?” his wife is always asking. Meaning, why, of all names in the world for a bear, why that one? Ryan and Mookie (the bear) share many common interests: kites, Erector Sets, matches, magnifying glasses, flaming sticks, aerosol sprays. Ryan and Mookie (the aunt) never met unless you count the birth, and Flynn doesn’t, as his son was not then a real, thinking human animal.

Watching his son sleep — or rather, pretend to sleep — he swishes a toothpick back and forth across his lower lip. The toothpick is a sorry substitute for a cigarette. He rations out his pack across the week as a means of quitting, and he smoked the last of the day’s allowance at work.

Flynn is the activity director at an upscale drug and alcohol treatment center in the mountains, and as such, he arranges outings and adventures for patients — nature walks, movie screenings, theater performances, and so on. Today he drove a van full of recovering addicts to a chain bookstore, which would have been a pleasant excursion if not for the fact that one of the patients hadn’t shown up at the appointed time. The missing man — Small Paul with the needle marks between his toes, “Small” because you really could just about fold him into a shoebox — had checked himself in to the center voluntarily, but Flynn had still feared the worst. Along with a nurse he’d spent the rest of the afternoon going from store to store before finding Paul in a Sharper Image at the mall, testing out back massagers. “Already time to go back?” he asked when he saw them.

Flynn sits down on the end of the bed, and the boy’s eyes flicker open, then close again. His brown hair is wild and messy, the small snub nose just above the covers. He’s short for his age, just over four feet, but then again so was Flynn at nine.

“I don’t need to tell you I’m disappointed,” Flynn says. “Because you already know that.”

The closet door is decorated with Ryan’s old school paintings, and on the other side of that door, Flynn knows, there’s a black ring burned into the beige carpet, hidden by a doormat. Ryan is not a pyromaniac, or not yet, anyway. The doctor calls him a “fire-starter.” He’s more curious than compulsive.

“I’m sorry,” the boy says.

He wonders if it is because of his smoking. If the boy has seen him light too many matches. Does Flynn work too much? Does he not pay the boy enough attention? Should they be playing more catch? Does the boy need hobbies? Flynn’s father used to take him fishing and made him gut the fish in the sink behind the house, and at the time he’d hated it but looking back on it makes Flynn smile. Should he take Ryan fishing? Would he like to learn how to weight the line and wipe the gummy knife across his shirt? Is the boy bored? Is it a feeling of boredom? Is it a feeling of not belonging? When he looks inside his heart, does he see clouds or sunshine? Isn’t that how the doctor put it?

“This isn’t over,” Flynn says, giving his son’s foot a gentle squeeze, before going next door, to his wife’s room. The boxy television on the edge of her dresser flickers blue across her bedroom. They sleep separately because of the snoring. His snoring, not hers. She is asleep, or was, nestled in her mechanized queen bed with the hospital controls. She isn’t sick but kept the bed after Mookie died because, supposedly, it helps her back. He flips on her bedroom light, and she moans. She gives him a look like, Please, not tonight.

“He’s doing it again,” he says. “I don’t think he ever stopped. I think he’s been hiding it from us.”

She rummages for the control, and the bed vibrates into a sitting position. “We should call the doctor first thing,” she says.

“What, so he can squeeze another three hundred dollars from us?”

“The doctor said to call him.”

“He can’t fix the problem.”

“And the problem is — what?”

“The problem is a feeling. A feeling of not belonging.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the boy needs friends. He needs to be included. You know, to really belong to something.”

Her bed vibrates backward into a reclining position.

“I’m going to sign us up,” he says. “For the Grasshoppers.”

“To be continued,” she says.

• • •

Grasshoppers aren’t allowed at the father-son Grasshopper Camp until they’ve been in the program for a full year and earned enough beads. Flynn learns this in one of their brochures. Unfortunately, he’s never even taken Ryan to a Grasshoppers meeting.

Flynn goes to see Bill Tierney, a malpractice attorney in town with an ad on the back of the phone book. Tierney’s son, Grayson, is older than Ryan, president of the student body at the elementary school — and a Grasshopper. Tierney is the Head Guide.

The attorney wears a tan suit and offers Flynn a seat on the other side of his desk. Bill Tierney wonders if maybe Flynn would like some pistachio nuts. Bill Tierney is crazy about them. Was Flynn aware that the nuts have been part of the human diet since the Paleolithic? That they’re one of only two nuts in the Bible?

“What’s the other one?”

“The other what?”

“The other nut in the Bible,” Flynn says.

“Hell, I don’t know. Noah? Sorry, bad joke. Let’s get down to business. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m a father,” Flynn says. “And I love my son very much.”

“Yes, of course. Family’s got to be number one.”

“Right. And I want my son to feel like he’s a part of something bigger than himself.”

Flynn uncrosses his legs and reaches for a pistachio. The shell doesn’t want to pry. He admits that he should have signed his son up earlier and that he knows about the requirements for the father-son camp, but he’d be very grateful if the organization could make an exception in the case of his son, Ryan, who’s nine years old and who, Flynn thinks, would make a natural Grasshopper. His son is a good boy and loves the outdoors, and the camp would do him so much good. It would be a great fit. Flynn spins the chalky nut between his fingers.

Tierney squints, his mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I was under the impression you were here looking for representation.”

“No,” Flynn says. “I was hoping you could help me. As the Head Guide.”

“Ah,” Tierney says.

“Right.”

Neither of them says anything for a few moments. Not many people know this, but Tierney has a brother named Herbie who’s an addict. Flynn has tried to help Herbie at the center, but Herbie doesn’t want to be helped. That’s how it is with some people. Flynn considers mentioning this now, as a way of creating a bond, but decides against it.

“It would mean so much to my son,” Flynn says.

“Sure, okay.”

“Okay?” Flynn didn’t expect it to be so easy.

“Done,” he says, and pretends to sign an invisible piece of paper suspended in the air between them. “The Grasshopper district office is in Charlotte. You can go there and fill out the paperwork, pay up for camp. I’ll take care of the rest.” He stands and smoothes the wrinkles from his suit pants.

“Thank you,” Flynn says.

“Glad I could help. Now I’m afraid I need to…” His voice trails off as he motions vaguely at his empty desk.

• • •

Father and son rise early to depart on a Saturday morning, shafts of sunlight through a rising fog, the birds tweeting in the sycamore tree on the front lawn, its bark hanging like strips of beef jerky. You couldn’t ask for a more suitable morning, Flynn thinks.

His wife comes outside in her bathrobe. “Couldn’t we just go to the beach?” she asks Flynn, a little upset because after three years without even using a sick day, Flynn is taking an entire week off from work, and he’s not using it to take his whole family on vacation. Instead he’s only taking his son to some mysterious camp in the woods. “Are you sure this is what he needs? He won’t know any of those kids.”

“This will be good for him,” Flynn assures her. “Kids make friends fast.”

When Ryan comes outside with a bowl of cereal, milk dripping down his chin, she gives him a cell phone. “Pay as you go,” she explains to Flynn. “I’ll feel better.” To Ryan, she says, “So you can call me if you want.”

The car is packed with sleeping bags, a tent, an electric lantern with the price-tag sticker still on it, and all the other equipment necessary for two human animals to live comfortably in the woods for five nights. Once they’re on the road, the boy is the navigator and is responsible for tracking their progress, his index finger across the atlas, and for calling out each step from the printed directions.

“Grasshopper Pledge,” Flynn quizzes him. “Go.”

“There’s a way,” the boy says glumly, “around every wall.”

“The beads you can earn and their colors.”

“Beads of Truth are the red ones. Beads of Mercy are the white ones.”

“And the third?”

The boy shrugs.

“They’re black…”

“Oh,” Ryan says. “Beads of Skill.”

“And how many beads does it take to move up a level?”

“Six beads.”

“Exactly,” Flynn says. “And you’ll have them in no time at all. Last question. The salute.”

Ryan points to his heart with his index finger, and then Flynn does the same.

“Aren’t you excited?”

The boy says he’s not sure if he’s excited. His brown shaggy mop — he hates haircuts — makes his small, narrow face seem even smaller. “What if it, like, rains?”

“That’s what the tent is for. We’re sharing a tent. That will be fun, right?”

The boy gives him an uncertain look. They drive into the mountains and then down a long road with thick woods the color of katydids and khaki: muted greens and browns. Ryan directs Flynn onto a paved road that turns to gravel, the rocks popping under the tires. Then the gravel road becomes a dirt one, a volcanic cloud of dust behind them in the rearview mirror.

Up ahead, rough beams form an arch over the road. The camp’s entrance.

“You should probably put on your uniform now,” Flynn says.

The shirt is yellow cotton with a white rugby collar and the Grasshopper patch sewn over the heart. It hangs loose on Ryan’s small, pale body.

Flynn pulls up in front of the director’s cabin, and a man in a green T-shirt much too tight for his potbelly comes out with a clipboard. He wants their names. He wants their district number. He’s got the pen top in his mouth, a small red ink stain on his bottom lip. What was that last name again? The man’s sweat drips down onto the pages. How do you spell that last name? He’s shuffling through the pages. That was with a C? No, he doesn’t see that one on here. Wait, here it is, on the back. There’s a problem. Ryan hasn’t met all the requirements for camp. He still needs eighteen beads. That’s three levels up from where Ryan is now, which is nowhere, according to the information on the clipboard. Can Flynn show documentation that Ryan has earned even one bead? Flynn can’t, of course, but he explains that he’s cleared this with Ryan’s Head Guide, Bill Tierney, who can sort all this out for them. Special arrangements have been made for Ryan.

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.

• • •

The nature hike the next morning is a success. Flynn is waiting at the tent when Ryan returns; his legs are bramble-scraped but he’s happy. Did he see any wildlife? No, no wildlife. Did he see any plants? Yes, they saw a few plants. Flynn has trouble understanding what exactly Ryan enjoyed about the expedition, but he doesn’t want to spoil the effect with questions, so he lets it go. That afternoon, after lunch, Ryan isn’t able to go on the canoe trip, as expected, so Flynn finds a tub of toys in the shed behind the director’s cabin. He takes out the soccer ball and tries to get Ryan to kick that back and forth across the field. But Ryan isn’t interested.

“Basketball, then?”

“Nope,” he says. The boy is satisfied to sit in the rocking chairs on the dining hall porch.

“What are you thinking about?” Flynn asks.

“I don’t know,” the boy says.

He’s inscrutable, his large eyes blinking and looking but not conveying any secret meaning. Flynn wonders if some fathers instinctively know what their sons are thinking, if there exists between them some kind of private language, little symbols and gestures that only the two of them can decode. Who are you? Flynn is tempted to ask.

One of the cooks comes outside on the porch and says Ryan can ring the dinner bell if he wants. Ryan takes the cord like it might shock him, then gives it a gentle tug. “Needs more than that,” the cook says gruffly; Ryan pulls harder. The sound is immense, a physical presence, a peal felt in the bones. The boy is smiling, and Flynn is hopeful.

John Price finds Flynn at dinner. Does he want to smoke a cigarette? They go out on the porch with the other fathers. They struggle to keep the matches lit in the breeze.

“So you never told me what you do for a living,” John Price says.

Flynn tells him about the treatment center. How you can’t understand addiction until you’ve seen someone fight one.

“I got a sister-in-law who used to do cocaine,” John says. “Even at Thanksgiving.”

“Did she get help?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. My brother never talks about it anymore, so I guess she did.”

Flynn opens a new pack and offers up cigarettes. Almost everybody accepts. They use the first butt to light the second because of the breeze.

“My kid’s up for his Second Truth Bead this week,” a father says.

“Mine too,” John Price adds.

The others perk up at that.

“The Second Truth is about what happens when you die.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“What’d you hear?”

“My son told me it’s about how the universe got started.”

“Was it with a bang or a whimper?”

“The Big Banger. That’s what my oldest daughter calls God. I think she does it to get under my skin. She’s a Unitarian now.”

“Does that make Satan the Little Whimperer?”

“You guys don’t know shit. The Second Truth is about the end of the universe, not the beginning.”

“So enlighten us. How does it end?”

“The earth goes up in flames. God already tried drowning us once, so the next time he’ll smoke us out.”

“Bring it on,” says a father with smoke sneaking out his nostrils.

“If it wasn’t for these Truth Beads, my kid would have dropped out years ago. He’s obsessed. If I ever found out what they are, I’d just tell him so we could be done with it.”

“Anyone else think it’s bullshit we don’t get to know these Truths? We do half the work.”

“If you ask me, I think the whole process is bullshit. Why is it the Head Guides get to decide who’s ready for those beads? Grasshoppers didn’t use to be this way.”

“It can be a little clubby,” John Price admits.

“A little?”

“We’re just in it for the camping trips.”

“Us too. I wanted my son to stop playing his stupid computer games.”

“Has it worked?”

“Not really. He’s got some kind of portable thing. Miracle he never trips.”

“I wanted my son to feel like he’s a part of something,” Flynn says.

“Even if what he’s a part of is a little cultish? I’m sorry, guys, but it is, right?”

“It is, yeah.”

“A little bit.”

“My boy’s alone most afternoons,” Flynn continues, “and that gets him into all sorts of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Because there’s trouble and then there’s trouble.”

“I don’t know,” Flynn mutters. “Typical kid stuff, I guess.”

“My boy used to trap squirrels so he could drown them in the pool.”

“My kid used to shoot a crossbow into the neighbor’s yard, and one time he put an arrow in her leg. She’s almost eighty! God, that was awful.”

“Alex, he’s my stepson. Years ago we caught him with a hammer standing over his little sister’s crib.”

“My son likes fire,” Flynn says. “But I think he does it for the attention.”

“My kid Gene had a fire thing for a while. He almost burned down the garage.”

The camp director pokes his head out the door and asks them to come inside for announcements, and they look at each other like, Is this guy for real? Flynn smiles at his new friends.

That night in the tent, Flynn lets his son fall asleep first. He takes Mookie the bear out to the car and hides him under a piece of luggage. He’s stripping down for bed when he sees his son’s eyes on him.

“Just try it without the bear,” Flynn says.

The boy closes his eyes.

But Flynn has not won this battle, not yet. In the morning, the bear is back on its T-shirt throne. Flynn is undaunted. The dew sparkles with sunshine and, Flynn imagines, with promise. Ryan goes off to the art shack for leather making. The camp isn’t really designed for earning beads — that’s what the weekly meetings are for — but he might be able to earn a bead of skill this morning.

Flynn crosses the field, and by the time he reaches the edge of the woods, his boots are soaked. He has offered to help build the sweat lodge. John Price is there with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The camp director, a giant ring of keys jangling from his belt, introduces a special visitor, a man with a long brown-and-gray ponytail down his back. His name is Henri, pronounced the French way, though he has a distinctly southern accent. He says he’s one-sixteenth Cherokee. He has a certificate in Native American studies. Sweat lodges are used as a means of purification, he says, of the body and the spirit. Sitting in a sweat lodge can help you reach a deeper level of consciousness. Sometimes the spirit travels.

Henri asks for volunteers to gather the firewood and rocks. He asks for more volunteers to cut down and strip small saplings. He distributes hatchets. He uses string and a stick to sketch out a circle with a ten-foot diameter. He instructs everyone to be as silent as possible. He’s tapping on a drum. John Price rolls his eyes at Flynn. They jam the saplings into the ground and bend them toward the center. Henri sends John Price and Flynn to collect grasses for the floor of the lodge, and if they find any sage, even better.

They move through the trees, hunched like hunter-gatherers.

“Where did they find this guy anyway?” John Price asks. “Do you think they just Googled hippie and bullshit and this guy was number one on the list?”

Flynn’s not sure. Will John Price try it out, though?

“Sure, why not?”

Their arms are full of green grass and dead leaves. “So,” John Price says, smiling, “I finally got it out of my son last night. The First Truth.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He was on the verge of falling asleep. I feel a little guilty about it. To be honest, I thought it was kind of anticlimactic. But I suppose that’s the way it is with these things. There’s a reason the Catholic Church only wanted priests reading the Bible, you know? You want me to tell you what it is?”

“Okay,” Flynn says.

“You sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, here it goes. Let the mind enter itself. Let the dark burn bright.”

They’re walking back to the sweat lodge. Flynn is quiet.

“It’s okay,” John Price says. “I have no idea what it means either. My kid definitely doesn’t. Probably doesn’t mean anything. You know the guy who founded the Grasshoppers did time in prison, right? He also wrote fantasy books. That’s how he made all his money.”

“What was he in jail for?”

“Tax evasion, maybe. I can’t remember. Something very white-collar. This was way back. In the fifties. Before he came up with this Grasshoppers idea. You probably know this already, but in the beginning the group had a strong flower-power element. Very antiestablishment. Very get-in-touch-with-your-inner-self. You can tell from the pledge. That bit about finding your way around walls? All the beads and the rules and the levels, that got added later, along with all the membership fees.”

They emerge from the woods, and the fathers have stretched a black tarp over the skeletal sapling frame. Henri is still tapping on his drum. They spread the grasses across the interior and then stand back to admire their construction. The camp director takes a photograph for the Grasshopper newsletter.

The sweat lodge sign-up sheet is posted now in the dining hall and at lunch Flynn schedules time for him and his son. Ryan returns from the leather-working class with a bead and a new friend. The boy’s name is Trevor. His face is freckled, his hair red and wild. They find seats together in the dining hall. Both boys are sporting the moccasins they made in class, the thin leather tight around their feet. They don’t talk to each other, only sit and slurp up spaghetti casserole. Flynn asks Trevor about his father, if he’ll be joining them for the meal. Trevor shrugs.

Does Trevor like being a Grasshopper?

“Sometimes,” he says.

What does Trevor’s father do for a living?

“He flies airplanes. He’s a pilot.”

“I’ll bet you get to fly all the time, then, huh?”

“Definitely.”

The camp director concludes the meal with his usual announcements: thank you to all the fathers who helped build the sweat lodge; the snake problem has been resolved, and the lake is open for swimming again; and would the fathers who smoke kindly stop dropping the butts off the edge of the porch?

Trevor’s father, a skinny man with blue jeans sagging, finds them after lunch.

“There you are,” he says to his son.

“I hear you’re a pilot,” Flynn says, and introduces himself.

The man gazes down at Flynn’s feet for what feels like a long time. “You’ve got me confused,” he says, and then walks ahead toward the tents with his son.

• • •

The sweat lodge fits ten father-son pairs at a time. Thick steam rises from the rocks at its center. The hot coals beneath glow orange in the darkness. As instructed, Flynn sits cross-legged next to his son, both of them shirtless, dressed in swim trunks. If anyone feels faint, Henri warns them from the door, they should come outside and drink some water. Flynn can feel the trickles of sweat traveling down his back and his arms. He’s swaying a little. His son stares wide-eyed at the rocks, then at the door, shifting restlessly.

Flynn wonders what his son might be thinking. About fire again? Does the steam remind him of smoke? He’s made a friend and earned a bead. Is it belonging he feels? If he painted a picture, what colors would he choose? If he wrote a song, would the key be major or minor? Flynn worries he’s failed the boy. Could Ryan be ashamed of him? Does he wish Flynn had more money? That he flew airplanes? Flynn feels like he is in an airplane now, the air rumbling all around him, a bumpy takeoff. He can feel himself rising — or, maybe, falling.

Flynn opens his eyes. He’s outside again, in the sunlight. Three faces hover above him. They put the water to his lips, and he drinks. Flynn passed out in the sweat lodge, but he’s okay. He just needed some air. He should have had more water.

Henri is there. “Go someplace interesting?”

As Flynn guzzles down an entire canteen of water, Ryan sits nearby on a stump, drawing shapes in the dirt with his finger.

“You should probably lay down for a while,” someone says.

Flynn nods and stands to go, his legs like two iron bars hinged at his hips, but somehow he gets them swinging. He’s moving down the trail, and thankfully so is Ryan, though he lags a few feet behind until they reach the tent. The air inside the tent is hot and sticky, so hot that Flynn throws the door up over the rain-fly to let in the breeze. He slides across his sleeping bag on his belly, not bothering to take off his shoes, his toes in the grass just outside the door. In the distance he can hear a stereo and laughter, and closer by, just outside the tent, his son’s voice, his words like stones skipped across the water, such little soft bursts. He’s talking to someone.

“No, he’s not dead,” Ryan says. “Just tired.”

“Someone said he was dead.” It’s Trevor.

“Nope.”

“You still got that cell phone? Let’s call something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’m starving. Nothing good to eat here.”

“There’s no one to call,” Ryan says. “This is all there is. Besides, just a few more days left.”

“I’m never coming back,” Trevor says, his voice mousy and distant. They’re walking away from the tent together.

Exhausted, Flynn closes his eyes and lets his body sink. He sleeps.

When he comes to, it’s morning. He unzips the tent door. Pale sunlight slips into the tent. Flynn is still in his swim trunks, though his shoes have been removed and placed under the rain-fly. The entire camp is quiet, and he flips to find Ryan’s owlish eyes on him, hardly blinking. In his arms is Mookie the bear.

“You missed dinner,” the boy reports.

“Who’d you eat with?”

“Trevor.”

“Sorry I missed it,” he says.

• • •

Flynn spends the day in a daze. He digs his emergency smokes out of the glove compartment. The lighter is dead, but in his pocket he discovers the yellow matchbook, the one he took from Ryan on the front lawn. In plain black letters on the cover it says Big Fixin’s, which is a diner they used to go to when Ryan was little. Flynn blows through half a pack on the dining hall porch while Ryan is off at archery and then smokes a few more while Ryan’s at the low-ropes course.

Aimlessly, Flynn walks the perimeter of camp, exploring its boundaries. He finds a tennis court, cracked and full of puddles. Somewhere high up in the trees he hears bees. A thin path through the woods takes him to the back of the director’s cabin. Flynn smells the cigar smoke before he sees the men on the back deck.

“Who’s out there?” the camp director yells.

Flynn emerges from behind the trees with a wave. “It’s me,” he says, “I was just exploring.”

Bill Tierney is there, along with a few other men. They’re holding glasses with a light brown liquid. Scotch. Flynn can almost taste it.

“Come on up here,” Bill Tierney says.

Flynn climbs the steps. He feels like a kid called to the principal’s office.

Tierney offers him a drink, and Flynn says no, thanks.

“Come on, just one drink.”

“I can’t,” Flynn says. “What I mean is, I don’t anymore.”

“I see, I see,” Tierney says, and brushes a pine needle from his puffy hair. “We were just talking about Vince’s son”—he pats one of the other men on the back—“who’s up for his Second Truth Bead tonight. At the bonfire.”

“My boy has no idea,” the man says, grinning.

“This is the last stage,” Tierney says. “Once you get both Truth Beads, you’re a Grasshopper King. A very high honor. How’s your boy doing, Flynn? He enjoying himself?”

Flynn says that Ryan has made some good friends. That he’s loving it here.

“They always do,” the camp director says. “My son’s too old to come back now, but I remember the night he got his Second Truth Bead. We were so proud.”

“Flynn, your son’s starting a little later than most,” Tierney says, “but if he works hard, he might be able to finish.”

“How old’s your kid?” the director asks.

“Nine,” Flynn says.

“Oh,” Tierney says. “For some reason I had it in my head he was seven or eight. Statistically speaking, he may not have enough time to be a King. Not that he should give up. It’s not all about becoming a Grasshopper King.”

“I’d love to see Ryan get there.”

“Of course,” Tierney says, grinning. “Anything is possible, I guess.”

They swirl the ice in their liquor drinks.

“Hey, now,” the director says to Flynn. “You the one who passed out in the sweat lodge yesterday?”

Flynn turns red. “That was me.”

They all take long sips, smiling into their ice cubes. An old Willie Nelson record plays from a speaker propped up in the screen window. Then Bill Tierney turns to the others and says, “All right, fellas, should we get started? You’ll have to forgive us, Flynn, but we have some planning to do for tonight. Logistics and whatnot. We’ll see you there, right?”

“You will.” He leaves them on the deck and sets off for the dining hall. Inside every group, he decides, there are more groups. Circles within circles, and inside of those, more circles still, all of them infinitely divisible. You could spend your whole life wondering which ones you’re in and which ones you’re not and which ones really want you and which ones are holes that have no bottom.

• • •

The bonfire is built in the outdoor amphitheater at the edge of the lake. The logs are stacked two across two, up and up, the kindling stuffed inside the column and doused with kerosene. The fathers cross their legs and swat mosquitoes. The boys fidget and squirm. John Price is there with his son. The camp director stands to the side with Henri, who’s wearing overalls now, his drum put away. The sun sinks behind the pine trees on the opposite bank.

The ceremony begins with a procession of boys, most of them probably twelve or thirteen years old, gawky and pimpled, moving down the center row, some goofy and others somber. The one in front carries a long torch, rolls of toilet paper jammed on the end of a stick. Another torchbearer approaches in a canoe on the lake, a starlike light and its rippled reflection moving through the darkness toward the assembled. Flynn is reminded of the First Truth. Let the dark burn bright. The boys are forming a semicircle around the unlit bonfire, waiting for the second torchbearer to reach the shore. They all have one Truth Bead on their uniform. Are they thinking about the First Truth too? Is this ceremony designed to invoke it?

The torches meet at the logs, and the entire structure, almost ten feet tall, bursts into flames, red and blue and yellow. Flynn is five rows back and can feel the blaze. Next to him, his son’s face shines too. But he’s not looking at the flames. He’s looking up at Flynn.

“Can you see okay? What do you think?”

The boy says it’s interesting.

The camp director opens a notebook. He tosses some grass into the fire, and the smoke curls around him. His voice is hoarse and thin.

“Grasshoppers feast on the grass,” he reads, “and so do the flames. Grasshoppers are virtuous and vibrant, resourceful and resilient, patient and peaceful, creative and kind. These are the qualities we, this community, value most. When the first grasshopper molted and shook the morning dew from his new wings, the world marveled at this development. The world took notice. Tonight, some of you have sprouted wings, and we are here to marvel at your achievements, to take notice, to bask in your light. Tonight, we are awarding ten boys with their Second Truth Bead.”

One by one, the director names the boys in the semicircle around the bonfire, and, one by one, those boys step forward with unusually good posture. A red bead is placed in ten sweaty palms. The boys are all smiles as they’re led to the other side of the fire, away from the audience, and the director whispers something in each of their ears, one by one.

“They’re learning the Second Truth,” Flynn tells Ryan.

“What’s the Second Truth?”

“Only Grasshopper Kings are supposed to know,” Flynn says. He puts his arm around his son, who will never be a Grasshopper King. One day he’ll have to explain to his son how most games are rigged, and how sometimes it’s best not to play at all.

After the ceremony, Trevor comes over with a Ziploc bag full of marshmallows and a coat hanger for Ryan. Flynn overhears Trevor telling Ryan how his uncle once branded himself with a red-hot hanger.

“Then your uncle’s an idiot,” Flynn interrupts.

“My uncle is a military general,” Trevor says.

Flynn grabs their coat hangers and then rummages in the brush for two sticks. He gives those to the boys, and they run off to the fire. Flynn walks over to John Price, who stands next to his son. The son has a chin like his father’s, one that slopes down to his chest in a gentle, fleshy curve.

“He did it,” John Price reports. “He got that Second Truth.”

“Congratulations,” Flynn says. “You must be proud.”

“Oh, of course. And maybe now I can get that next Truth out of him. I’ll let you know what I find out. Say, you feeling better after the sweat lodge? I heard you passed out? That true?”

“Didn’t drink enough beforehand,” Flynn says.

“Yep, number-one hippie rule. Hydrate before going on your vision quest. Listen, you’ll have to excuse me, Flynn. Apparently, all the Grasshopper Kings and their dads are supposed to go to some kind of function now at the director’s cabin. Probably a cake-and-punch thing.”

Circles within circles, Flynn thinks. He finds his son by the fire.

“You ready to call it a night?”

“Okay,” he says, and tosses his marshmallow stick into the bonfire.

They leave the light of the ceremony. Their eyes slowly adjust to the darkness of the field. Ryan is swinging his arms and looking up to the stars. Flynn wants his boy to be happy.

“What are you thinking about?” Flynn asks.

“Nothing.”

“What else are you thinking about?”

“I don’t like this uniform,” he says.

“That’s okay.”

“I hate it. It makes my armpits itch.”

“You don’t have to wear it again,” Flynn says. “If you don’t want.”

They’re following the edge of the lake now. A cool breeze twists the leaves in the trees. Flynn is still thinking about circles within circles. Also, he’s thinking about snakes curled into circles by the water.

They reach the tent and climb inside. They stretch out on the sleeping bags and lie awake, side by side. The cell phone dings, its screen glowing blue inside his son’s sleeping bag.

“She wants to know if I’m ready to come home,” Ryan says. “I can talk to her tomorrow.”

Flynn burrows into his bag and takes off his socks, trying to get comfortable. They’re still not asleep when the thunderstorm starts an hour later. The thought of all those Grasshopper Kings caught in the downpour brings a smile to Flynn’s face. The tent shakes in the wind, the rain loud as bullets on the canvas. Everything is dark, but they can feel water dripping from the seams. The water bubbles up from below too. Tonight they will get very wet. Tonight they may get washed away. Even Mookie the bear on his T-shirt throne will not be spared. The water will cover all. Soon, nothing will ever burn again.

Flynn rolls over onto his side with the yellow matchbook. When he lights the match, his son’s face is there, just beyond the flame, the light reflected in his eyes. They watch the tiny fire move down the paper stick toward Flynn’s fingers. Before it hits the bottom and goes out, he leans toward his son. “Do you want to hear a truth?”