Good Graces

Chapter Two

All I keep thinking about on the six-hour bus ride up to Rhinelander is how hard it is to keep my sister under my thumb in the neighborhood. In a new and different place she could slip through my fingers so easy. This is not even counting that she could drown, get shot through the heart by an archery arrow or, worst of all, the counselors could do something when she least expects it. I asked Dave about them after he pulled some strings to get us into Camp Towering Pines. He told me not to worry, that there would be only girl counselors and, “Maybe getting away for a while will do you some good, kiddo.”

At the start of the trip, Troo was by my side counting license plates and singing along with the rest of the kids the 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall song, but I didn’t open my mouth. I was afraid I might toss my cookies again. I already did once and my sister’s mad at me for “stinkin’ up the joint,” so that’s why she moved to the seat behind me and is telling everybody that we got on at different stops.

When the bus pulls into the campground, I turn to tell Troo, “I… I changed my mind… I’m sorry… we gotta go back home right away. I can’t…” but she’s already gone. She rushed right past me outta the bus. Through the window, I can see her bouncing and smiling, looking the happiest I’ve seen her in over a year.

What choice do I have?

Once the counselors get me and Troo and the rest of the girls lined up in front of the main wigwam, they hold up their palms to each and every one of us, saying “How” over and over and over again when they stick feathers in our hair that still have part of the bird left on ’em. After that, they hand out our Indian maiden names that we are to be known by for the rest of the week. They call me Minihaha. (Mother made me get a haircut from our eight-years-older-than-me half sister, Nell, who, even though she is a graduate of Yvonne’s School of Beauty, made my bangs too short because she’s a basket case, so even I gotta admit, I look a little funny.

Troo is to be known as Lovely Princess Floating Gently Down the Stream of Unending Happiness Beneath a Rainbow.

Every day is torture. Every night couldn’t be worse.

In the morning, we’re supposed to swim in Lake Freezing Cold but I can barely do the dead man’s float. When the triangle bell rings at noon, we have to go to the mess hall and eat a lunch of beans and wienies and drink the juice of bugs. After that, we gotta do crafts. Forced to make leather coin purses. There’s skeeters the size of dragonflies, an outhouse that anybody could fall into and once the sun sets, those counselors always got a grisly story all warmed up. Their favorite is this one about an escaped lunatic with a hook who goes after couples who are watching the submarine races on Lovers’ Lane. After they douse the campfire, one of the counselors always reminds us to pretend we’re not kids from the city sleeping in bunk beds in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, but real Indian children curled up in teepees on a wide open plain. But even me, who has no problem imagining just about anything, can’t feature that. What I can picture so clearly is that lunatic with the hook deciding that a pretty little redheaded girl is right up his alley so he rows one-handed from the other side of the lake after midnight, crawls into our cabin, snatches my sister and runs off with her into the woods. The next morning, Lovely Princess would no longer be Floating Gently Down the Stream of Unending Happiness Beneath a Rainbow but found under one of those Christmas trees like a ripped-open present.

That’s why I’ve been spending my nights tossing and turning even worse than I usually do, which I didn’t think was humanly possible. Standing watch over my sister is never easy and she hasn’t been any help at all. She giggles along with the other girls when they tease me about the dark circles I’ve got under my eyes. No matter how deep I stick my fingers in my ears, I can hear them calling me “Smudgy” and telling each other how camp is the greatest and that they never want to go home, which makes me feel even more like the odd maiden out because that’s all I want to do. I miss… everything. Troo doesn’t. She’s been having a gay old time making sit-upons and new friends and practicing her ventriloquist act for The Heap Big Talent Show, which is tonight.

I know that I’m not good at a lot of things, not like Troo is, but I do my best after my sister drags me up on the camp stage and growls into my ear, “You’re embarassin’ me. Again. Do one of your dumb imitations.”

So I try to perform my best Edgar G. Robinson, “You dirty rat,” but my tongue gets so twisted up that it comes out sounding like, “You thirty brats,” which makes everybody boo, and one kid, who is my sister, throws a stick of beef jerky at me. Of course, after all is said and done, Troo wins the top talent prize, The Golden Tomahawk, hands down. Nobody even cares that her lips moved.

By the time Sunday comes, I am very weak, almost floppy. I got a nose ache from pressing it against the cabin window counting the minutes until Dave’s woody station wagon comes roaring up the camp drive to rescue me.

When I finally spot him, I try to yell, “He’s here! He’s here!” but I hardly have enough air left in me to sigh out to Troo, “We’re goin’ home.”

“You are. I don’t got a home anymore,” she hollers on her run out the cabin door.

She hides in a tree and refuses to budge, but Dave is brave and tells her that she has until the count of three to get down. That takes a lotta guts on his part because he knows Troo will give him the cold shoulder all the way home. Or maybe that’s why he nixed the staying-longer-at-camp idea in the first place. Just to shut her up. I love my sister, I would die for her, but a spade is a spade. Troo is a smart alec, most especially to Dave, who she reminds, “You’re not my real father,” in case he forgot after she said it a half hour ago.

On the drive home, once Troo falls asleep against my shoulder hugging The Golden Tomahawk, I tap Dave on the shoulder and tell him, “Thank you for sendin’ us! That was really something!”

The reason I am not telling him that camp was the fourth-worst experience of my life behind losing Daddy and Mother almost dying and Bobby trying to murder me is because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Dave is a lot like me in the personality department. That’s who I get it from. Not from my mother, who says, “Being sensitive and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”

But when he parks the woody station wagon in front of our house on 52nd Street, since he is a police detective, Dave mighta deduced that I didn’t tell him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but about my camping experience. Because after Troo stomps off in a huff, I can’t stop myself from leaping out of the car, sinking down on my knees and kissing our front lawn, that’s how grateful I am to get back to the city where I know who lives in what house, which shortcuts we shouldn’t take and, most important, all the best hiding places.