Re-Writes of Passage: Chapter Five

King of the Lake

Photo by dominik hofbauer on Unsplash

He looked odd to my eleven-year-old eyes, not a bit like the other muscular, suntanned camp counselors. He was round and pale as a volleyball. Wore khaki Bermuda shorts and green knee socks. His too-small Boy Scout tunic clung to him in the high summer heat like a second skin. He had a black, pencil-thin mustache and eyes squeezed to slits by his plump cheeks.

His name was Frank.

He was our counselor at a pristine Boy Scout campground buried deep in the green rolling hills southeast of my hometown of Buffalo. I was a Tenderfoot Scout enduring my first week-long summer camping trip The year was 1961.

I was a good scout, as long as I stayed indoors. The last place you’d find me was outside, on a baseball diamond, a basketball court, the deep end of a swimming pool, or any part of a lake that didn’t offer a welcoming shore.

Baseball was a particular horror. It was bad enough that I couldn’t field a pop fly to save my life. Worse, my father was a sports reporter for the evening newspaper. I never felt more alone than when I took an inevitable third strike, knowing that I’d failed again.

While I was used to being the last kid picked for games, I was less happily reconciled to my fear of water. I knew if I couldn’t swim—and I couldn’t—I also couldn’t do the one outdoorsy activity I longed for that summer: row boating on the camp’s private lake.

Looking around me that first day, I saw Frank, and my spirits rose.

Frank threw like a girl. He waddled when he walked, and it only got worse when he tried to run. He very quickly earned the nickname Fat Frank, but I never called him that. I felt sorry for him. I recognized him. He was the fat version of the skinny doofus that was me.

When I wasn’t embarrassing myself at the camp’s rifle or archery range, I spent my free time in my the tent I shared with my best friend Pat, staring up at the sagging green canvas roof, daydreaming on my bunk. When it got too hot or I got too bored, I’d wander up to the camp’s pine-fragrant trading post, where I’d buy sufficient strands of plastic strips to weave into lanyards whose purposeless existence matched my feelings.

One hot sunny morning, halfway through my week’s exile, Frank startled me by sitting down at the picnic bench outside the trading post, where I was busy whipping up my umpteenth lanyard. I figured I was in trouble, because adults never sat down next to kids unless something bad had happened. Or was about to happen.

Frank asked to see what I was doing. I gave him the lanyard. He examined it and said I’d done a good job.

He gestured toward the lake. “Why aren’t you out swimming with the other boys?”

I surprised myself by blurting out the truth. “I can’t swim.”

Frank raised a knowing eyebrow. More words tumbled out of me.

“I really want to go boating, but I can’t if I can’t swim,” I said.

Frank pursed his lips and nodded. Said he couldn’t swim, either.

“But I don’t need permission to go boating.” He smiled, looking out toward the lake.

“And you can go, if I take you.”

I nodded, hardly daring to speak for fear I’d break the spell his words were weaving.

He said he’d stop by my tent during the camp’s mandatory “siesta” later that day and we’d have some fun. Then he left.

I could hardly believe it. Someone—an adult—had noticed me.

• • •

I didn’t even pretend to be sleeping during siesta. I sat on the edge of my bunk, certain Frank wouldn’t show. Just as I prepared myself to be disappointed, he appeared, looking ghostly against the tent’s sagging mosquito netting.

I leapt to my feet, but before I could spring outside and join him, he swept away the netting and peered inside.

He looked first at Pat, who was asleep on his bunk. Then he looked at me.

Putting a conspiratorial finger to his lips, he signaled me to be quiet. Then he stepped quickly, almost on tiptoes, into the tent and sat on my bunk.

In one quick motion, he swung his stubby legs up onto the bunk and laid down on his back. I stood next to him, mystified.

“Come up here,” he said in a harsh whisper.

I leaned in closer, not sure I’d heard him correctly. Not sure how I could possibly obey him. There was no room for me on the bunk.

He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me on my back atop the arc of his belly.

My mind scrambled to come up with an answer to the panic coursing through my body.

An idea flashed across my mind: Frank was performing a secret Boy Scout initiation rite, something grownups spring on Tenderfoot Scouts who weren’t supposed to know until it happened to them.

Then I felt Frank’s hand slide under the elastic band of my underpants.

I froze.

He began to fondle me. I knew nothing about sex. But I knew to my soul that something was very, very wrong.

I also knew I couldn’t make a sound. I thought that if I woke up Pat, I’d be somehow betraying Frank. Worse, what would I say to Pat?

Quiet, quiet, quiet. I had to stay quiet. No one could know what was happening. I had to lie perfectly still or things would get even worse.

As his hand continued to probe, I did the only thing left to me: I prayed. I pinched my eyes shut in desperate supplication to the God who’d never answered any of my previous prayers. But He was the only authority I could call on. And I could do so silently. So I prayed the most fervent prayer of my life: Please, God, please. Don’t let me get a boner.

After a time—a minute? five?—Frank withdrew his hand. I slid off his belly and ran outside.

There I stood, five feet from the tent’s entrance, not knowing what else to do or where to go. When Frank emerged, his scowling face was flushed. I said the first thing that came to mind:

“Take me boating.”

He just looked at me.

“You said you’d take me boating.”

I could hardly believe what I was saying. I’d never made such a demand—any demand—of an adult. Someone else was speaking, someone I didn’t recognize.

Without a word, Frank stalked off toward the lake. I followed him. The dock was deserted. I stepped into a rowboat, felt it slide and shimmy beneath my feet, forcing me to sit down in the bow. Frank squatted in the stern, seized the oars and shoved off.

Frank’s silence and his refusal to look at me told me he was angry. I didn’t care. I gazed at the sun-spangled lake, avoiding his silent glare, somehow aware that by ignoring him, I was making him even angrier.

I heard the oars slap the water. Felt the sun beat down on my buzz-cut, sunburned head. Frank rowed to the middle of the lake. I saw the water’s glassy surface shatter under his clumsy strokes and watched as the resulting wavelets radiated away.

The silence between us spread like those wavelets, which we followed back to the dock. I was dizzy with excitement. I’d held Frank to his promise. Made him do what I wanted him to do. I was king of the lake.

• • •

The week ended a few days later on Parents’ Day. Moms and dads parked their cars and piled out, eager to see what a week in the woods had done to their boys.

I saw my family’s Rambler station wagon pull into the dusty parking lot. My mother got out of the driver’s side. Then the front passenger door opened, and my father stepped out. I couldn’t believe it! I ran to join them. I blushed at my mother’s kisses and hugs. Before anything else embarrassing could happen, I had them follow me to the trading post.

Frank was standing there, wearing his too-tight uniform. His slitted eyes widened when he saw me approach, my parents in tow.

There was no mistaking my dad in this crowd. He wore a sport shirt, pressed dress slacks and shiny Oxfords despite the heat, despite the other fathers in their T-shirts and jeans. My father never wore a pair of jeans in his life. His wardrobe told the world he was different from the working-class men he’d grown up with. Men who stoked the furnaces at Bethlehem Steel, whose wives packed their lunches in black metal lunch pails every morning. Men who stopped for a shot and a beer at a favored tavern after their shift was over. Men whose sons I’d grown up with in the blue-collar neighborhood my father was dying to escape.

I don’t know what Frank was hoping for that day. I can’t imagine why he was there at all. Maybe he had the predator’s confidence that I wouldn’t—couldn’t—turn him in. Maybe he hoped I would. Maybe it was all part of his game. I like to think he experienced at least a moment of panic when he saw us approaching.

As my mother drifted into the trading post, I felt the sudden, giddy hope that the voice that had commanded Frank to do my bidding on the lake would return.

“Dad, this is Frank ….”

My voice failed. I stood between the two of them, grinning wildly. I didn’t know what else to say.

Dad nodded and smiled. Words were exchanged. Handshakes. Then Frank waddled off.  Dad and I walked up to my tent, where I presented him with a handful of lanyards.

We walked to the parking lot and on the way there, he put his hand on my head and let it fall for a moment to my shoulder. And with that simple, unexpected gesture, relief washed through me like a wave. I rode home that evening feeling as I had in the middle of the lake, the water lapping the rowboat’s sides, the sun splintering into shards that bounced back into my dazzled eyes.

I look back now on that little boy with all the yearning an old man feels while basking in the warmth of a summer memory. More than 50 years on, I can say I survived Frank’s attack, guileless kid that I was. On the odd occasions when the memory of what he did returns, I‘ve been able to sneer at the memory and tell myself I’d beaten the bastard at his own twisted, mysterious game.

But no one who’s felt a predator’s touch ever escapes without damage. The predator may not kill his victim outright, but he always takes prisoners.

Sometimes over the years, I’ve seen the lake again, seen its glassy surface broken not by the triumphant slap of oars on sparkling sunlight, but polluted by a fat, bloated body bobbing on its broken surface.

For a few years, I told myself that God had answered my prayer in my tent. But it didn’t take long to recognize that the God who allowed the attack in the first place didn’t save me that terrifying afternoon. I was just lucky.

But a miracle did occur. I cling to its memory whenever I feel the need to distance myself from the irrational doubts and questions that Frank left bobbing in my mind.

The miracle happened between my father and me.

My dad was a busy man, building a bright and shining future for his family. He worked multiple jobs, worked weekends and came home late. It was the price he was willing to pay for the success he craved. And it was a price I paid as well. The older I got, the more I needed him, and the more unavailable he became.

I never expected to see him that Parents’ Day. But there he was, striding straight and tall across the parking lot, past the other fathers in their jeans and T-shirts.

My father was there for me that day.  Though he wasn’t demonstrative as my mother, with the touch of his

hand on my shoulder, he reclaimed for his skinny, lonely son a boyhood nearly stolen away by a beast.