Noses Are Red (12 page)

The games start right after breakfast, and go on all day. Is it the longest day of my life? No, of course not. Earlier this summer, surrounded by strangers in the middle of a scary big city, I spent an entire day waiting for my father to call me – and that seemed to go on forever. Once when I was six, I spent most of an afternoon waiting for the dentist to get to me and that was pretty awful, and then he did get to me, and that was even worse. But this late August day at Camp Omega seems to last a pretty darn long time. So many games I cannot play well. So much confusion. So many people shouting and trying hard.

It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet in a liver ’n onions restaurant. It’s crowded and busy, and I don’t want to eat anything. Not even the ice cream.

Some bad moments early on. Not highlights – low lights, maybe. The tug-of-war, for instance. What a disaster! Guess who stumbles and falls forward, tripping the person in front of him, who in turn trips the person in front of her, who trips the one in front of her, and so on, so that the whole Lumberjack team goes down like a row of dominoes, cursing the person on the end who started it? Guess who that person is? Right.

Guess who has to gunwale bob? (“It’s easy!” Zinta whispers. “If you can walk, you can gunwale bob!”) Guess who finds out that gunwale bobbing means balancing precariously on one end of the canoe while a fiendish laughing opponent in a yellow shirt jumps up and down on the other end, trying to bounce and knock you off? Go on, guess. Right again. I don’t see Zinta when I fall out of my own canoe in the shallow water, much to the delight of the yellow-shirted team.

“Good try, Alan,” the Lumberjacks say, smiling bravely and wishing me dead.

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry, Derek,” or “Sorry, Mike.”

Is there a height of humiliation? Maybe the war canoe race, where ten of us are paddling hard, but only one of us misses the water, bangs his paddle against the paddler behind him, turns to apologize, and falls out of the boat.

Guess who?

Hearing the cheers when Victor takes his turn at Red Rover is pretty tough, too. Our group of Lumberjacks from the Dove and Beaver cabins stands in the middle of the field, arms linked, like an impregnable wall.

Victor charges like a bull, right at me. He runs through my hands. His team of Trailblazers cheers. I think they’re mostly from the Fox cabin. We call him again. He runs through me again, barreling up to my place in the chain and knocking my hands away from Eric or Derek, or whoever it is. We can’t stop him. Correction: I can’t stop him.

His team cheers. I can’t hate him, but I wish him somewhere else.

We stop the rest of the Foxes. It helps that Zinta is with us for this game. We could have used her for the tug-of-war. Trixie stops by to watch the progress of her Trailblazers. “COME ON!” she shouts. “You can get past these little Doves!”

Zinta has a glint in her eye. “Red Rover, Red Rover,” she cries, “we call
Trixie
over!”

Trixie stares at Zinta, then away. Then at Zinta again. She starts off for my end of the line, but veers away from me. She can’t help herself. Zinta is a magnet for her. It’s as if she’s running unconsciously. She ends up hitting Zinta at full speed – eyes wide, mouth open, teeth bared, blonde hair streaming. What a mistake. Zinta stands straight and tall, and does not budge. Trixie bounces right off her like a soccer ball off a goalpost. She lies on the ground for a second, stunned.

“Change over,” calls the referee, a no-nonsense counselor in black and white.

Trixie gets up, breathing heavily. “You wait, Zinta!” she says in a husky voice. “I am going to annihilate you!”
Then she stomps away. Our team does not taunt her. We’re too nice.

All of us except Norbert.

–
You’ve got mud in your hair
, he calls.

She whirls around. “Who said that?” she hisses.

“Come on, come on, change over!” The referee looks at her watch.

Trixie doesn’t move. “Who said I had mud in my hair?”

My team looks at me. “Um, actually,” I say.

–
All down the back
, says Norbert.
A dark brown streak, Like a horse’s mane. Very interesting.

“Are you calling me a
horse?
” snaps Trixie.

–
With a brown mane
, says Norbert.
A lovely color. On Jupiter, brown is the color of hope.

“Red Rover, Red Rover, we call …” They pause. Victor whispers. “Alan,” they cry. “We call Alan over.”

“Come and get it, loser!” calls Trixie.

“Now see what you’ve got me into, Norbert,” I mutter.

I figure if I run slowly, I won’t hurt myself as much. I angle myself towards Victor. I don’t want any surprises. I’m nearly there, jogging along comfortably, trying to pick a place on the field to land, when I feel a tingle in my nose.

–
Looky, looky!
cries Norbert.
Over there, by the cabin. Skinny-dippers!!

Of course there aren’t any skinny-dippers. There isn’t even a lake. We’re playing on the field behind the dining hall, where we had the campfire last night. But there’s something about the idea of skinny-dippers. The entire Trailblazer line turns to stare. Their arms get twisted, and they fall over each other, and I run through easily.

–
Heu heu heu!
Norbert gives his high-pitched, squeaky laugh.
Brown hair, brown shoes, we win, you lose!

This is hard to resist. I laugh out loud before I can stop myself. Eric and Derek giggle, and repeat it to each other.

Trixie gets so mad she jumps up, runs after me, and pushes me down in the mud. The referee calls a bad sportsmanship penalty, and we win the game.

Things get a bit better after that. My teammates stop treating me like Leroy the Leper. They even laugh at a few of my jokes. At dinner, kids from the other Lumberjack tables come over to say hi.

“Did you really call Trixie a horse?” asks one of the Chipmunks.

“Well, no,” I say.

“Because she does kind of look like one. She’s a model, you know, but she has this long horsey face. A good-looking horse, mind you.”

Victor sidles over just before dessert. “Trixie is really mad at you,” he whispers. “She says it’s all because of you that we lost the Red Rover game.”

“Oh,” I say.

From my side of the dining hall I hear a chorus of giggling voices. “Brown hair, brown shoes, we win, you lose!”

Victor shakes his head. “She is really mad about that rhyme too,” he says, sidling away. “Just thought I’d warn you.”

“Here’s your pudding, Alan,” says one of the girls from the Owl cabin. She passes me a bowl.

“Thanks, urn,” I say.

Zinta checks her clipboard again and again. “I’ve added up the scores three times, and it’s even worse than last year,” she reports in a low voice. “I’m pretty sure Trixie’s ahead right now. We
have
to win the casino night.” She looks at me. “We have to!” she says.

I nod.

I’m sitting across the table from her. She stands up, grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. “What am I thinking?” she says. “Come on, Alan, what am I thinking right now? You say you’re good at this. You have to know, if you’re going to win against Trixie.”

I swallow. I don’t know what to say. She’s really upset.

–
I really like pudding
, says Norbert.
Especially chocolate pudding.

Zinta drops her hands. “I wasn’t thinking about pudding at all,” she whispers.

There’s a huge squeak of feedback from the microphone by the head table. Boomer thanks us for making this edition of the games a great success so far. She is looking forward to the casino night tonight.

“Right now the two teams are very close in total points,” she says. “The Trailblazers (whistles and hoots from the dark side of the dining hall) won the log sawing competition, and the gunwale bobbing, and the tug-of-war. The Lumberjacks (cheers from the light side) won the swimming and the fire starting and the Red Rover. Lumberjacks would have won the war canoe race, only they were disqualified because there weren’t enough paddlers in the canoe.”

Laughter from both sides of the dining hall. I stare at my pudding.

“So,” says Boomer, “the Trailblazers are slightly ahead. Bragging rights for this year will be decided in a few hours,
over the spin of the roulette wheel, the roll of the dice, the bounce of the skee ball, and the turn of the cards.” She wishes everyone good luck, and tells us all to leave so the staff can start to set up in the dining hall.

Christopher is sitting at the head table, beside the nurse. He hobbles over after dinner.

“So, how was your day?” he asks. “Did you have fun?”

“Well,” I say.

“I have some bad news for you,” he says. “I saw Dr. Callous this afternoon. It looks like we aren’t going to be able to finish our canoe trip.”

I hold open the door of the dining hall so he can hobble through.

“Stretched ligaments in my ankle,” he says. “I’ll have to stay off it for a few weeks.”

Should I say I’m sorry about his injury? I still don’t like him. “Oh, well,” I say.

Sun’s going down. There’s a hint of chill in the air. I wish I had a coat. Leaves on the bushes nearby are starting to turn color. Spindly bushes, with fan-shaped leaves and fuzzy dark fruit. There are lots of them around. They seem able to cling to rocks.

“I talked to Victor earlier,” says Christopher. “He said he didn’t mind leaving early.”

“Did you call Mom?” I ask.

He looks embarrassed. “As a matter of fact, I did,” he says. “We had a long talk.” He seems like he wants to say more, but can’t decide how to put it. Then the nurse comes over.

“You should be elevating that ankle, Christopher,” she says.

“Okay,” he says.

“How does it feel?”

“Hurts,” he says.

She clucks her tongue. “Oh, dear,” she says. “I’ll take you to see the doctor again.”

Christopher hobbles away, with one hand on his crutch and the other on the nurse’s arm. He winces and draws his breath in sharply.

“Oh, you poor thing!” she says.

My stomach lurches. My mom says that all the time.

Mike or Mark bounces up to me after supper. Big smile on his face. “Brown hair, brown shoes, we win, you lose!” he calls. “Got to say, I like that. Trixie nearly busted herself. What you doing now?”

I shrug. “Not much.”

“Good. Zinta wants to see you in the Beaver cabin.”

“Where is that?”

“Huh? Oh, that’s right, you’re staying in the infirmary. This way. I’ll show you.”

We head down the hill. He’s an energetic guy. He runs ahead of me. The sun is setting right in my eyes. I squint, stumble, and barely regain my balance. Why should it bother me that the nurse reminds me of my mother? What does it mean?

The boys’ cabin is dim and dank, and smells of wet clothes and dirty feet. There’s room inside for three bunk beds, and a long bench running across the front, under the screened windows. Four people sit along the bench: Zinta, Eric and Derek, and Lex, a chubby guy who’s the best swimmer in camp. Mike or Mark climbs into the middle upper bunk.

“Do you know skee ball, Alan?” asks Lex right away.

–
His bridle was silver
, sings Norbert.
His mane it was gold. And the worth of his saddle has never been told.

Lex chuckles. “That’s Stewball,” he says. “Not skee ball.”

“I don’t know what skee ball is,” I answer.

Zinta has her clipboard out. She makes a mark. “Count that as a no,” she says.

There are, Zinta explains, four main games at casino night. Skee ball – and I know I’m getting ahead of myself again, but I’ll say right now I never do find out how to play – roulette, dice, and poker. Each camper gets ten chips at the start of the night, and the team with more chips at the end wins. The Trailblazers won last year by saving all the chips they won at skee ball and dice and roulette, and giving them to their players at the poker table. Trixie was the big winner – she ended up with all the chips in play.

“Can you beat her, Alan?” asks Eric. He’s the dark-skinned one. He’s sweating more than the rest of us. “Zinta tells us you say you’re pretty good. Are you?”

“Eric was in the poker final with me last year,” says Zinta. “To get to the final, you have to clean out your first table.”

There’s a deck of cards on the bench. I pick it up, fan the cards out and back quickly, do a waterfall shuffle, and then cut the deck one-handed. I don’t drop a single card.

“Pretty good!” says Derek. Mike or Mark gives a whistle of appreciation from the bunk.

I deal two hands. Why am I doing this at all? Why bother? Why risk the extra humiliation? I’ve had plenty already today.

Partly it’s gratitude. I want to help Zinta, to pay her back for helping Victor and me. But it’s pride too. I want to show them I’m good. I’m sick of being the guy who can’t do anything.

The cards sit on the bench in two piles. Five cards each. “Okay, Eric,” I say. “Let’s play, you and me. Straight poker, no draw. Pretend you have a stack of chips. Would you bet this hand?”

He picks up his cards, studies them intently. “No.”

“I bet two pretend chips,” I say.

He cocks his head. “You didn’t look at your hand.”

“I don’t have to. I was looking in your eyes. I know you don’t like your hand. So my hand is bound to be better.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll see your pretend two chips, and raise two more.”

“But, Eric, why would you do that? You’re bluffing, trying to scare me. You want me to think you have good cards. But I know you don’t like them. What’s the point in
bluffing if the other guy knows? I see your two chips and raise twenty.”

His mouth opens. He checks his hand again. “I …”

“Do you want to put out twenty chips for a hand you don’t like? Twenty chips is a lot. Does it make sense to bet a lot on a hand we both know is lousy? Come on, Eric.”

“I…” He turns over his hand. “I fold.”

“Yes. That’s the right thing to do.”

He smiles. “It is, isn’t it.”

I sit back. Zinta stares at Eric, then turns to me. “But… but, Alan, you won without even looking at your hand. How did you do that?”

I wink at her.

“Hey!” says Lex. “This guy’s good!” He pats Eric on the back. “Too bad, Eric. Beat by a guy who didn’t even pick up his cards.” He holds up a hand for me to slap. “Hey, we might win after all. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants for Trixie, if a guy like Alan can beat her.”

What does he mean by “a guy like Alan”? What’s wrong with being a guy like Alan?

–
Oh, Skeeball was a racehorse
, sings Norbert.
And I wish he were mine. He never drank water. He always drank
–

The bell from the dining hall rings.

“Show time,” says Zinta.