Samurai Summer (12 page)

I sat on the steps. The courtyard was silent. Everyone was mostly just sitting in the shade waiting for the sun to set. It was a strange summer. The sun had almost become an enemy. Your whole head started to hurt if you stood in the sun in the middle of the day, and there were fire warnings everywhere.

On the radio they had talked about forest fires up north. A few days ago two transport planes had flown over us with huge sacks of water. I had followed the planes with my eyes but I couldn’t see when they dropped the water. It must have been like a waterfall. But the fire hadn’t been put out.

“Is the fire going to come here?” Sausage had asked when he stood next to me as the planes were flying over us.

“It depends on which way the wind’s blowing, I guess,” I had said. “If it’s blowing from the south, you just don’t know.”

“What’ll happen then?” Sausage had asked.

“The whole camp will burn up,” I had answered.

“Don’t you say burn
down
?”

“First it burns up and then it burns down.”

“What does?”

“The whole damn thing. The camp. Everything.”

“How about the castle?”

“We’ll save that.”

“We don’t even have a moat with water in it,” Sausage had said.

“The fire’s not gonna come from the forest.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn’t actually know what I meant. It was just something I felt—or thought. That there was a fire that was coming. Like a dream while you’re awake.

The letter from Mama was shorter than usual. There were smudges on the paper; or maybe she had been eating supper while she was writing and spilled something she was drinking. Some of the letters were fuzzy. An
F
could look like a
B
.

But I could still understand what she’d written.

She was going to be away when I came home after the summer. She would explain when she got back.

I was supposed to go stay with a friend of my mother’s who was not
my
friend. She had a boy who was three years younger than me who wasn’t my friend either. They lived about half a mile from us on a really boring street where there were no shops.

Everything’s been taken care of
, wrote Mama.
You don’t need to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.

Not the way you think
, I said to myself, and I crumpled up the letter and stuffed it into my pocket.

“Is it bad news?”

Lennart had sat down next to me on the steps.

“My mom,” I answered.

“Bad news, then.”

“I can’t go home,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody’s going to be there in the fall, so I can’t go home.”

“Well, that isn’t good news.”

“Just like Janne,” I said and nodded toward Janne.

He was standing in the middle of the playground throwing a ball against the wooden fence—
boink-boink-boink-boink-boink
.

“But he’s going to a foster home.”

“It makes no difference.”

“What are you gonna do then?”

“I’m not gonna go where they want me to go!”

“You’re not?”

“I’m gonna show them.”

“What are you gonna show them?” asked Lennart.

“What I can do. Where I can go.”

“And where’s that?”

“It’s a secret. For now.”

Micke wanted to speak to me behind the woodshed, where there hadn’t been any wood for a long time. There was still an ax in the chopping stump. Some grown-up with the strength
of five men had buried it in the stump last summer. I had tried to pull it out but hadn’t succeeded.

“Are you all right?” asked Micke.

“Sure, thanks to you and your help.”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened to Weine? Huh? What did you do to him?”

Micke looked around to see if someone was listening to us, but most of the kids were standing outside the mess hall waiting for supper.

“We had to consult with you first,” said Micke. “We couldn’t just go after him.” He looked around again. “Or the others. He’s not alone, you know.”

“Maybe there are more of them than there are of us,” I said. “Or will be soon. Before long they might outnumber us.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re stronger.”

Now he looked like someone you could rely on. I became unsure again. I hadn’t liked that smile, but maybe he had just gotten nervous when Weine tripped me.

“If it comes down to a fight, we’re stronger,” said Micke.

“They’re not the ones we should be fighting,” I said.

“Who is, then?”

A counselor opened the main doors to the mess hall.

Everyone poured in. I could hear another counselor shouting inside. The windows were open and her shouts were carried off across the lake.

“Sit STILL! Be QUIET! Stop all that RACKET!”

I nodded toward the mess hall. It was an answer to Micke’s question.

“Soon they’ll come out looking for us,” he said.

“I wonder what’s for supper,” I said.

“I wonder what’s for dessert,” said Micke.

I laughed.

M
atron seemed twice as big as usual. The counselors had dragged me off to her office since I had refused to eat my supper. It wasn’t something I had planned on doing, but when the plate was standing there in front of me, I couldn’t even get myself to lift the spoon.

Matron wasn’t alone.

“You’ve met Christian, haven’t you?”

She nodded at her son like it was the first time he’d been there, but he came every summer. Maybe he was going to take over after Matron.

“I don’t know what to do with you anymore, Tommy.”

Christian didn’t say anything. He seemed twice as big as Matron. He was a giant who filled most of the room. That made me think of the ax that was buried in the chopping stump in the woodshed. It must have been Christian who
planted it in the stump. It would have taken incredible strength. A frightening strength.

She turned to him.

“What should we do with him, Christian?”

“What’s he done?” Christian smiled. He was getting a kick out of learning about all the terrible things I had done. He looked like a film star. His golden-yellow hair was thick and wavy, combed into an Elvis-style pompadour, and his teeth were big and white when he smiled. He wore a white shirt tucked into a pair of jeans that looked like they’d come straight from America. He himself looked like he’d come straight from America. There was a silver chain hanging from his neck and he was tanned in a way that made his teeth look even whiter and his hair even more like gold.

“He picks fights,” said Matron. “He doesn’t eat. He tells lies. He incites the other children against us.”

“This little shrimp?” Christian took a few steps forward. I flinched.

“See that? He’s afraid of his own shadow.”

“He’s pretty cocky out there, I can tell you,” said Matron. “He thinks he can do as he pleases when no one’s watching.”

“Feeling cocky now?” asked Christian. He took another step and grabbed hold of my arm like I was a fly and he could pull my wing off with one little tug. “Think you can do as you please, huh?”

He let go of my arm and grabbed my sword as though
it
was my arm—which it was, of course; it was just an extension of my arm—and he yanked the sword from my belt.

“What’s this, huh?” He held up my sword. It looked like a matchstick in his hand. “What kind of crap is this?”

“That’s his sword,” said Matron and laughed. “He’s always got it with him. Says he’s a samurai.”

“Sam… samurai? What’s that? Some kind of Chinese crap, huh?” Christian looked down at me. “Are you Chinese, kid? What did you do, get lost? Dig in the wrong direction?”

He laughed just like Matron. They laughed together. Then he looked at her and held up the sword again.

“You let them go around with things like this? He could poke somebody’s eye out.”

“You might be right,” she said.

“Of course I’m right,” he replied, and he grabbed the sword with both hands and snapped it in two.

I saw how the wheels were turning in Sausage’s head. Something had happened that couldn’t happen. Sausage and I were the only ones in the dorm. We were confined indefinitely. Sausage had been punished for causing a fuss when they dragged me from the mess hall.

“You’re the only one who knows,” I said to Sausage.

He didn’t really seem to understand it yet. He was trying to work out how a sword could be broken in two.

“You realize you can’t tell anyone about this?”

He nodded.

“That’s good, Sausage.”

“What are we going to do now?” he asked after a while.

“Make a new one,” I said. “Make a new sword.”

“But… you had that one for a long time.”

“A samurai can lose his sword in different ways,” I said. “I haven’t lost my honor. Not when it happened like that.”

“I guess.”

“You could say that I’ve already got a sword, even though I don’t actually have one. You see what I mean, Sausage?”

“I… think so.”

“I’ve always got a long sword with me—in my mind,” I said as I looked at the short one, my
wakizashi
, that I’d taken out of its hiding place under the floorboard. “In my mind’s eye, I’ve always got it with me, and tomorrow I’m going to make it real so that I can hold it in my hands.”

“Are they going to let you?” asked Sausage.

“They can’t keep me locked up all summer.”

“What’s going to happen with the castle?”

“We’ll keep building it, of course,” I said.

Sausage looked like he wasn’t convinced.

“Nothing can keep me in here,” I continued.

“What if they send you home?”

“They can’t. There’s no one at home. You know that.”

Sausage didn’t say anything more. We looked at the short sword. I carefully thumbed the edge of the blade. It was sharp.

Christian and Matron had made a big mistake when they didn’t look for this sword and destroy it too. They didn’t know what a samurai used it for. They would be surprised when they understood.

Sometime during the night I had a dream that was full of fire. I was standing in the middle of the flames and I saw no one else. I heard someone calling out, but I didn’t know who it was. Then I stood outside the fire and saw the flames rise all the way up to the sky. Only there was no sky, just fire. I was on my way back into the fire when I woke up covered in sweat. It was like I had really been in there in my dream. I still had the smell of smoke in my nostrils.

Everything was quiet. Then I heard a scraping noise outside. It sounded like someone was moving around on the playground. Then it went silent again. And then that scraping noise again. The window was like a panel of light on the wall. As I walked over to it, the floor felt cold beneath my feet. Sausage was rocking back and forth in his sleep as though he were trying to escape his own dream. Everyone
in the dorm room was asleep. There were hours still to go until morning.

I lifted the blinds and looked down onto the grounds. I didn’t see anything except the grass that was more gray than green in the moonlight. Everything was grayer down there. All the colors seemed to have turned over in their sleep. I heard that scraping sound again and I realized what it was. I recognized the squeak of the merry-go-round. It was on the other side of the building, but the sound circled around and around the building too. It creaked again, a hollow scraping sound from the rusty metal.

Someone was sitting on the merry-go-round in the middle of the night slowly spinning around. It was a drawn-out sound that was barely audible. It wasn’t something that would wake you up.

I went back to my bed and sat down and thought. It didn’t take more than a few seconds. I pulled on my shirt and shorts but left my sandals underneath the bed. I strapped on my short sword. The blade felt cold against my leg.

When I sneaked down the stairs, the moon was shining into the mess hall, splitting it into two parts. One for the kids who behaved and one for the kids who didn’t.

As I stood on the stairs, I heard the creak and the scraping sound again from the turning of the merry-go-round. Whoever was sitting on it must be pushing off every
so often with their foot. I continued silently down the stairs and then snuck outside.

The grass was wet beneath my feet as I headed cautiously around the corner. Even though the days were so hot, the nights were still wet. Or maybe that was why it was wet. It may have been moisture from the lake rather than rain. The nights had already started to get a little longer and there was more and more moisture. The summer would soon be over—and not just for me.

I could see the lake from where I stood at the corner of the building. The fog floated above the surface of the water and headed in toward land. I could see the merry-go-round. It was spinning very slowly, but enough that you could hear it. Someone was sitting on it. Someone who was just a shadow moving around and around. When the merry-go-round swung toward me I saw the surging glow of a cigarette in the face of the person sitting there. It was Christian.

I took a step back, but he didn’t see me. I don’t think he did anyway. His face was turned toward the main building. There was something over there that was holding his interest the whole time. I looked too. All I could see were the windows to the girls’ dormitories.

All of a sudden he put his foot down and the merry-go-round came to a stop with a little creak. The glow of his
cigarette surged again, lighting up his face. It looked like a mask. He glanced toward the lake before he headed off in the other direction and disappeared behind the corner of the building. Then I heard a car engine start up. I ran to the other side and saw the red tail lights disappear through the front gate. Where was he going? It was still nighttime. He had a room here at the camp.

It hit me that Christian must have been here as a child. Matron had been the camp overseer for many years, and when Christian was little, he must have been here. How had it been for him? Had he been allowed to play with the camp children? Had he been alone out in the forest? I tried to picture him as a child among the others, but I couldn’t see him—not any more than I could see him now that the lights of his car had disappeared.