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struck with sudden bolts of faggot lightning, but it was just this feeling I had, that Van Wort was getting a bad break.
    He wasn’t so off. He wasn’t even weird. It wasn’t like he wrote bird poems or wore the wrong kind of underwear.
    â€œWhy are you doing this?” said Van Wort.
    â€œJust because.”
    â€œI don’t care what you do to me,” said Van Wort. “If it’s a trick, it’s a trick.”
    We were quiet and stacked for a while.
    â€œSo,” I said, “who killed your dad?”
    â€œNobody killed him,” said Van Wort. “He dropped dead. I saw it.”
    â€œNo shit,” I said. “You saw it?”
    â€œHe went blue and had a bubble on his mouth.”
    â€œWhat’d you do?”
    â€œI didn’t do anything.”
    â€œDidn’t you give him mouth to mouth?”
    â€œHe had a bubble there.”
    Â 
    Some of us were smoking behind the Port-O-Sans after lights out when Steve-Ivan wandered by. We had figured him for off to the bars on the highway by now.
    â€œHey, it’s lights out,” said Steve-Ivan.
    â€œWe know,” I said.
    â€œThat means lights out out.”
    â€œI said we know,” I said.
    â€œDon’t wise off to me,” said Steve-Ivan. “You think you’re special just because you’ve been going for those hog rides?”
    This was wit near Canada. The boys did a round of barnyard jokes about me and Van Wort.
    â€œSo, what’s it like, sucking on the bacon?” said Steve-Ivan.
    They called me Bacon from then on.
    I didn’t mind the cracks, but I missed the camaraderie.
    I calcified, got crusty. I lost my boxball crown.
    Â 
    Each night they came to his bed where he lay wheezing. It wasn’t even foot powder and Indian burns anymore. They wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed. They taped him down to the bed frame, went at it with tweezers and pocket knives. They got his sock bunched up for a ball gag. They pinched off pieces of him with nail clippers and tiny sewing shears from kits their mothers had packed because it was on the list.
    I’d get up and walk to the other end of the bunk until they were done.
    In the morning I’d help him clean up, wipe down the blood until it was just dark nicks.
    We talked about everything except what they did to him.
    We talked about the day’s activities, the boats, the beads, the weaving. We talked about our dreams the night before.
    He told me he had gun dreams where the gun wouldn’t shoot, falling dreams where he fell into a stilled river that had his father’s face in its bed. He had one where all the girls at the girls’ camp were rolled out on a float for his fancy. I told him he should keep a dream diary and he told me he did, showed me a spiral-bound notebook with his entries. It read:
    G UN
    G IRLS
    R IVER
    R IVER
    R IVER
    He told me he had given the eulogy at his father’s funeral, that it was easy, he’d just used an essay he’d written for school and substituted “my father” for “our founding fathers.”
    I started to admire Van Wort. But then I’d hate him for being so weak. He’d given up even the shrieking and they rarely bothered to gag him anymore.
    â€œWhy don’t you fight back?” I said.
    â€œWhat’s the point?”
    â€œThe point is you show them you’re not a pussy. Then they leave you alone.” I believe I’d first heard this argument advanced by a talking beagle on one of those claymation shows the Lutherans used to produce.
    â€œWill you help me?” he said.
    â€œNo,” I said. “That would be wrong.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIt’s complicated,” I said.
    Â 
    Then it was the last day of camp. We packed all our stuff in duffels. Tomorrow we would strip our beds and get into our family wagons, wave.
    At our last lunch Steve-Ivan said that Van Wort and I would be voted camp love-birds at the camp