The Big Swim Read online

  THE BIG SWIM

  CARY FAGAN

  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS

  TORONTO BERKELEY

  Text copyright © 2010 by Cary Fagan

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2012 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2012 by

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  or c/o Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.groundwoodbooks.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Fagan, Cary

  The big swim / Cary Fagan.

  eISBN 978-1-55498-302-5

  I. Title.

  PS8561.A375B44 2010 jC813'.54 C2009-906084-1

  Cover photograph by Gordon Wiltsie/National Geographic Image Collection

  Design by Michael Solomon

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

  For Adeline Steinbaum and Henry Fagan,

  with a nephew’s love

  1

  WHAT WE HEARD

  WE KNEW HE WAS A BAD KID even before he showed up. I didn’t know where all the information came from, or whether it was true. I only knew that there was a lot of it and none of it was good.

  “He once tied a rolled-up newspaper to the tail of a dog. The dog belonged to the head of sailing at Camp Brunswick.”

  This was Flap Ears talking. Flap Ears had the upper bunk in the opposite corner from mine, the farthest from the door. It was a nice private spot, perfect unless you were the sort of kid who had to get up in the night to pee.

  I was that sort of kid.

  Flap Ears was a little crazy, so it was probably a good thing that he had a fairly calm place to sleep. The night was moonlit and I could see his arm and one leg draped over the side of his bunk like a spider monkey.

  “He lit the newspaper with a match and sent the dog running,” Flap Ears went on. “Second-degree burns. They had to put it to sleep.”

  “I heard it was at Camp Chippewa,” said Tex. Single bunk, east wall. “The dog belonged to the head of pottery and they only had to amputate its tail.”

  “At Camp Birchwood,” said Brickhouse, his mouth full of something even though eating in the cabin was against the rules, “he wrecked all the canoes with an ax just before a big canoe trip. It took five counselors to hold him down and he practically chopped one of their heads off.”

  “What do you mean, practically?” asked Legs. “You mean he chopped it halfway off?”

  “At Blue Water,” said Tiger, “he poured orange paint into the cabin laundry bags and ruined everybody’s clothes.”

  “At Camp Moccasin he beat the crap out of a kid for no reason,” said Presto.

  “That’s not what happened at Moccasin,” said Carrots. Carrots’ bunk was right across from mine. He reminded me of William Holden in the movie Stalag 17, about a German prison camp. I’d seen it on tv one afternoon when I was home with one of my stomach aches. Carrots pretty much ran the cabin, with Tiger as his lieutenant.

  “At Camp Moccasin,” Carrots said, “he stole the owner’s Cadillac and drove it into town. Wrapped it around a streetlamp. After they released him from the hospital he had to spend a night in jail.”

  “How did he know how to drive?” Legs again. Legs, who wore his glasses even after lights out, had become my best friend in the cabin. “I mean, he’s the same age as us, right? I don’t know how to drive.”

  “You barely know how to walk,” said Tiger.

  “Anyway,” said Carrots, “he would have gone to reform school if his old man hadn’t paid off the owner of the car and given a big donation to the police fund. He’s always paying out money like that.”

  “It’s a good thing he’s goddamn rich,” said Brickhouse.

  “Maybe it’sbecause he’s rich,” said Presto. “I hear his house has a pool table and a Ping-Pong table and a movie theater.”

  “Or because his mom died,” said Tex.

  Flap Ears said, “I think lighting a dog on fire is a lot worse than wrecking a car.”

  Legs said, “I’m going to pray that he isn’t put in our cabin.” He started chanting in Hebrew. It sounded like the portion he was studying for his Bar Mitzvah.

  “If you’re going to pray,” said Carrots, “you’d better pray to the Great Klopschitz.”

  Old Man Klopschitz was the owner of Camp White Birch. He drove everywhere in a Jeep, the only person allowed to have a vehicle on camp property. He was hugely fat and practically bald, wore sunglasses and white suits, wheezed when he walked and always sucked on a cigar. He’d never taken the slightest notice of me but I was afraid of him anyway.

  At that moment the cabin door opened and a beam of light ran across the bunks.

  “Quiet down in there.”

  It was Jerry, our counselor, who was on night duty. Brickhouse said all the counselors hated night duty because they couldn’t make out with their girlfriends.

  The door closed again. Darkness. Stirring noises as bodies turned over, faces pressed into pillows. I felt as if I needed to pee, but I didn’t want to get up.

  Legs whispered, “I heard he’s a good swimmer. Best in his school. Maybe he’ll do the Big Swim.”

  I hadn’t spoken a word, but now I said, “It can’t be true. Not all of it. Not about one person.”

  “Believe me, Pinky, it’s true,” Carrots whispered back.

  After that nobody else spoke, and soon the sounds of sleeping came from the bunks around me.

  2

  NOT TO BE THE WORST

  MY GOALS BEFORE COMING TO summer camp had been modest. First, to survive. Second, not to be hated. Third, not to be the worst at anything.

  I wasn’t promising camp material. I got frequent stomach aches that the family doctor said were on account of an “anxious disposition,” meaning they were all in my head. I hated sports and preferred to either hang around with my two older brothers or write strange stories in my notebooks.

  Summer had always meant spending long, free days with my brothers, building balsa-wood airplanes, swimming at the YMHA on Bathurst Street, developing photographs in the basement bathroom.

  But this summer they were old enough to get summer jobs. My oldest brother even had a girlfriend. Both the girlfriend and the jobs seemed like a betrayal, made worse by the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me stay home by myself.

  I argued that going to camp might be a psychologically crippling experience, especially if I turned out to be the only kid who didn’t know how to stern a canoe down a waterfall, or start a fire in a downpour, or wrestle a Mississauga rattlesnake into submission. I might end up with such damaged self-esteem that I would need a psychiatrist for the rest of my life. Or die of a snake bite.

  “Where d
id you learn to talk such nonsense?” my mom replied. “You’re a perfectly normal boy, Ethan. You just need to come out of your shell a little.”

  I said, “Anyway, I won’t be alone. Mom will be home.”

  Which was when my father spoke up. “I’m taking your mother to Europe. It’ll be our first holiday alone in years.”

  “I want to go to Europe, too!” I shouted, as if it had been my lifelong dream. “I want to see the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Taj Mahal.”

  “The Taj Mahal is in India.”

  And so on the first day of July, I watched as a duffel bag containing all my worldly goods was hurled into the storage compartment of a bus. I kissed my parents goodbye, barely holding back tears, staring into my mother’s own stricken eyes to make things worse for her. Then I shuffled away, head down, into the bus, joining the crowd of kids tussling over seats and screaming at friends they hadn’t seen since last summer.

  I took a free seat just as the doors whooshed closed. The bus driver blasted his horn, and as we pulled out, everyone started singing the Camp White Birch song.

  Everybody but me.

  3

  HORNSBLOOMER OF THE WILLOWDALE HORNSBLOOMERS

  WHILE THE CAMPERS AND counselors were singing their lungs out, the boy in the seat next to me turned and shouted into my ear.

  “I’m Leonard Hornsbloomer. Of the Willowdale Hornsbloomers. That’s a joke. What cabin are you in?”

  That’s how I became friends with Leonard, otherwise known as Legs because of the way he would bump into even stationary objects like trees and tetherball poles.

  It was because of Leonard that I fulfilled one of my camp goals: not to be the worst. Because Leonard was. The worst at canoeing, the worst at rock climbing, the worst at archery.

  The only activity in which we tied for last place was swimming. We had swim lessons five afternoons a week in the icy waters of Lake Tanasi, and Leonard and I had the same instructor, a girl named Lori whose freckles would merge into one big red blotch when she screamed at us.

  “No! No! Drop your legs and then kick out! Try it again!”

  No matter how much we tried, neither Leonard nor I could do the backstroke to Lori’s satisfaction. She wouldn’t allow us to move onto another stroke, so we had to practice it every lesson until I swore I would never use the backstroke again even if I were drowning.

  I did so many lengths that I could have backstroked across the Atlantic Ocean to visit my parents, who were no doubt having the time of their lives. And because Leonard and I couldn’t get it right, we couldn’t earn the swimming badge that let us canoe, sail or even go in a rowboat without wearing a lifejacket. All the other kids our age only had to throw lifejackets into the boats, but we had to put on the damp, moldy, throat-choking vests that were, as Leonard said in disgust, like orange signs flashing the word loser.

  It was weird, though. Leonard didn’t really seem to mind being the worst. He had been coming to Camp White Birch since he was seven, and even though everyone put up with him, they all thought he was a pest. For one thing, he talked too loud and often became hyper-excited. For another, he’d put his face too close when he spoke and accidentally spit.

  Also, he laughed when you didn’t want to be laughed at, like when you spilled the bug juice or went splat into the lake trying to get up on waterskis.

  On the other hand, Leonard could solve in his head any math question we asked him. He would sit down at the mess-hall piano and pour out Rachmaninoff or some other impossibly hard piece, abruptly stopping to make some stupid joke. He’d read all the science fiction books of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and could recount their plots in intricate detail.

  He showed me the ropes when we got to camp. How to make hospital corners on my bed. How to avoid being the last person at the dining table to put your finger on your nose so that you had to take all the dirty dishes back to the kitchen. He told me about the Big Swim, and how the few who made it were treated like heroes, and how exciting it was to watch.

  Leonard made fitting in easier, and he made me feel less lonely in those first days when I felt almost all the time as if I might throw up.

  And in the end, camp wasn’t the Garden of Eden, maybe, but it wasn’t Alcatraz prison, either. I liked hanging around the nature hut, with its terrariums of leopard frogs and snapping turtles. I liked arts and crafts, where I made marionettes and used the pottery wheel. And I liked the woods.

  Camp White Birch wasn’t exactly roughing it. We had electric lights, hot showers, a washroom with a sink and toilet on the cabin porch. But we were surrounded by spruce and maple trees, and the paths were a bed of pine needles that gave off a sharp smell, and tiny wildflowers dotted the baseball field and the grassy spaces around the wooden buildings. Farther from the cabins was a heavily wooded section we simply called the Forest, and next to it was a marsh. There was the lake and the strip of beach.

  The nights were silent as I’d never known before. One night, Jerry took us to the baseball field where we lay on our backs and looked up into the darkness. I saw my first shooting star.

  My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t fit in, but the truth was that I usually got along with people. Teachers liked me. I stayed out of trouble, got my homework done, opened doors for old people. I was a good boy but I was smart enough not to bring any attention to myself.

  The boys in my cabin turned out to be pretty good, too, or at least not troublemakers or fighters. Their real names were Marcus, Samuel, Howard, Sheldon, Daniel, Allan and of course Leonard. But Carrots (that is, Marcus) gave everyone nicknames to give our cabin a “sense of camaraderie.” Flap Ears wasn’t because of Sheldon’s ears but from a hat he liked to wear to keep the mosquitoes off. Presto’s nickname came from the one magic trick he could do, making a straw disappear up his nose.

  I didn’t like my own name, but I didn’t want to make waves. It came from my blanket. All the other kids had standard-issue Hudson’s Bay blankets on their beds, but because I was allergic to wool, my mother sent a non-allergic blanket, and the only one she could find was pink. (My mother insisted it was “rose,” but it wasn’t. It was pink.) And anyway, I’d been so relieved to get any nickname at all that at first I didn’t realize how lame it was.

  So I was stuck with Pinky.

  4

  A HAND IN WARM WATER

  “HEY, PINKY, WANT TO GO for a row?”

  Supper was over and we were pouring out of the mess hall into the still-light evening. The meal had been Sloppy Joes — ground meat and tomato sauce dumped over a hamburger bun. Eating it had made me nauseated.

  “I don’t know, Legs. I’m feeling kind of sick.”

  “Sure, from that slop they just fed us. It was like eating someone else’s puke.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Old Man Klopschitz is a cheapskate. He charges our parents a fortune and then feeds us like we’re in Oliver Twist. You know what that supper looked like?”

  “You already said.”

  “Yeah, but you know what else? Like leftovers on an operating table.”

  “You’re going to make me throw up.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive. Come for a row,” he said, putting on an English accent. “The lake air is just the thing you need, old boy.”

  “All right. But I’m rowing.”

  “Naturally.”

  We followed the path down to the dock, past the office and tuck shop. The water twinkled in the light just like it did on the camp brochure.

  The lake was long, stretching in each direction farther than I could see, but it was narrow enough to see the roofs of cottages on the opposite shore.

  A little more than halfway was Downing Island, named after a family that had lived on it about a hundred years ago. Sometimes kids called it Drowning Island because of a rumor that a camper had dro
wned trying to swim to it. Stuart, the camp director, said it wasn’t true and if Mr. Klopschitz heard anyone use that name he’d spend the rest of the day on a buffalo hunt.

  A buffalo hunt, Leonard had explained, was a fun-sounding name for walking through camp picking up trash.

  It was to banish the rumor of the drowning that the Big Swim had been started. It was held in the second week of August and only the older kids were allowed to try it. They had to swim to Downing Island and back, surrounded by several boats with lifeguards. It took about two and a half hours, and anyone who showed signs of fatigue was pulled in whether he wanted to quit or not.

  Only one or two swimmers made it every year. But the reward was immortality. Your name burned into a wooden plaque displayed in the mess hall.

  Tiger had an older brother on the plaque. Tiger was expected to try the Big Swim himself one day, and he always got nervous when anyone mentioned it.

  Leonard and I passed the end of the swim area, the canoe and sailing docks, and came to the lowly rowboat dock. All three boats were in. We squeezed lifejackets over our heads and tied them around the back like fat bibs. Then Leonard untied a boat and we got in.

  He immediately lost his balance, reaching out and shoving me so hard that I fell, my knees cracking against the floorboards.

  “Ow! That hurt.”

  “Sorry.”

  A scattering of applause and laughter came from the shore. I looked up to see Carrots and Brickhouse and some others on the next dock watching the two of us flailing around like Laurel and Hardy. On the beach a bunch of girls were laughing, too, although I couldn’t tell if they were looking at us.

  One of the girls was Amber Levine.

  I had noticed Amber on the very first day of camp. She had brown eyes and kind of big cheeks and unusually red lips, and her hair was down to her shoulders and her eyebrows were dark, and she was short. She just looked like a really nice person, like somebody who wasn’t a snob and didn’t make snide comments behind people’s backs, and who smiled easily and liked to laugh. She wore cut-off jean shorts and sneakers and T-shirts with funny sayings on them like not from concentrate and everyone is entitled to my opinion. She had a freckle on one knee.