Wednesday
Jul142010

Fragmentation: How to Stitch a Story

B.J. Hollars


 

STEP 1: BEGIN WITH THE PATTERN

The story goes that once, many years back, a camper from the Apache Cabin drowned in Blackman Lake. 

It is not that simple. 

The story has a time and a place, a context we've built around it.

1932.  South Milford, Indiana.  His name was Bobby Watson and the fish ate away his pale and freckled face.

The camp is still operational today, and I was a camper there, in the Apache Cabin, and years later, a counselor, chief of the Apaches.

My own linkages to this story are unimportant.  That is, except to say that the boy that did or did not drown there, did or did not walk those wooded paths, slouched in the campfire shadows or never did, was not far removed from my own experiences.

We swam in the same lake sixty years apart.

The difference:

Only one of us ever resurfaced.

STEP 2: EXTEND ALL STRANDS TO THEIR FULL POTENTIALS

The story goes that once, many years back, young Bobby Watson of the Apache Cabin wandered the docks alone.  And in those days the docks were hot, and the peeling lifeguards took turns heaving large white buckets of lake water to cool them. 

There was a refrigerator, too, connected to a long chain at the far end of the floating docks, which was to be dumped in the lake to keep the docks in place.  The refrigerator was light blue, a Kenmore, with a rounded top and a door handle that always squeaked open and close.

Bobby, who was pale and freckled and homesick, wandered the docks in search of a hiding place.  He believed his counselor cruel, and the previous night, when Bobby asked to borrow the lantern to make his way up the hill to the shower house, the counselor had refused.

"Just piss outside, would ya?  No sense wasting a match."

But there was sense in it, Bobby thought, and the truth was, he'd already pissed his bunk, waking to feel the strange coolness streaming down his hairless thighs.

What he had needed then was a lantern, something to guide him up the path so he could clean himself, clean the bunk, right the wrong before the others woke from his odor.

And so, lightless, he stumbled up the knobby path in the direction of the showers.  He'd been there plenty in the daytime, but night was different, and aside from a few evenings spent walking home from the movies with his father, Bobby remained wholly unfamiliar with the dark.  He had just turned nine years old.

 Bobby found the shower house, eventually, and found the light switch, too.  He listened to the moths tapping the orange bulb as he rubbed damp paper towels raw against his skin. 

Far below, in the cabin, he would repeat the process, wiping away his mess and praying his cabin mates would never smell it.

He managed to keep his secret, though he dreaded the thought of another night spent tucked into his own filth.  He wondered also, if that day’s sun had soaked into his sleeping bag, allowing the smell to return.

And so, after excusing himself from dinner in the mess hall—while the others pounded the tables and sang songs and belched and fought and slapped and farted and laughed—Bobby Watson slipped down the cement steps and headed toward the lake. 
He was tired of playing baseball and he was tired of the food.  Tired of everyone but him knowing all the words to the songs.

He slipped inside the refrigerator because he wanted to disappear for a while.

Then the door snapped shut. 

He didn't panic, but instead tried to forget that he was trapped in a fridge at the end of a dock on the edge of a lake at a place he did not want to be. 

The maintenance man, fresh from stealing a nip from his flask, emerged from his hiding place in the woods and headed toward the lake. 

Later, he informed police that he was humming "Oh!  Susana" as he marched across those hot docks, directing his shoulder into the fridge, sending it sinking to depths he himself had never endured.

 

STEP 3: MEASURE ALL STRANDS BEFORE CUTTING.

Questions begin to emerge, not simply related to Bobby's death, but related to the narrative as well.

How can we possibly know the things that we do?

Bobby's bedwetting for instance.

His homesickness.

It's possible he confided in someone, expressed these details to a bunkmate he felt he could trust.  But if so, who was that bunkmate, and how has his name never appeared during the retellings of the story?

We begin questioning the maintenance man's intent, if he really did steal a nip from his flask prior to dumping the fridge.  We wonder, what kind of alcohol did he drink, and how much, and had alcohol in any way impaired him?

We know Bobby was pale and freckled and homesick, but do we know if he was scared as the water began to rise?

Did he cry out? 

Push his body against the tightly sealed door as the water slipped in through the seams, as it rose from his toes to his knees to his piss-stained thighs, to his belly button and nipples and neck?

The same water that, just hours before, had cooled him while engaged in Marco Polo.

There are questions here worth asking.

Measure all the details twice before cutting the ones that don't matter.

 

STEP 4: SUTURE ANY HOLES IN THE MATERIAL

They looked everywhere—in the woods, in the water.  Campers armed with lanterns calling out, walking with arms locked as they covered the whole of the camp.

 A similar scene refracted in the water; the peeling lifeguards locked together walking the shallows, praying that someone else's foot might fall upon the seaweed body.

That night, the chain of command was followed perfectly but they did not find Bobby Watson.

The campers did not sleep, but instead, whispered in the dark, the mighty warriors of the Apache Cabin staring at the empty bunk. 

The counselors stayed awake, too, and a few hours before dawn the camp director got in his head to widen the search by making use of the canoes.

"Take out the whole fleet," he said, rallying his counselors.  "Just paddle around searching for clues."

So they paddled around, and those counselors—most of them virgins, most of them not yet eighteen—searched among the weeds and the cattails, sifting through the thickest reeds with the blades of their paddles.  One of them had swiped a loaf of bread from the mess, and they chewed on the floury, white pieces, wiped the crumbs into the lake.

"You know we're never going to find him," one of them finally admitted.

He was the first to paddle back to shore as the purpled sun began rising.

 

STEP 5: PREPARE YOUR PIECE FOR VIEWING

They found Bobby the next summer, when the refrigerator bobbed to the surface after a storm. 

This was on a Saturday, after all the campers had gone home.

A few counselors out for a dip had spotted the light blue shape in the water.  The door had unfastened, and as they treaded toward it, swung wide.

They were the first to see the body.

Bobby Watson's face was no face, and it was impossible to tell whether he was freckled or otherwise. 

What remained of his skin was still pale.

The first counselor vomited in the water, then dunked beneath the surface in the hopes it might not be there when he returned. 

It was still there.

The levelheaded lifeguard tried to remain levelheaded.

"We'll swim this to shore," he informed the others.  "Then make sure we got our stories straight."

 

STEP 6: DICTATE THE ANGLE FROM WHICH YOUR PIECE WILL BE VIEWED

Perhaps there were police reports.  Perhaps not.

As if his death was not enough, they found a way to haunt him further.

Bobby Watson became lore.

Rendered his fish-eaten face in Technicolor, retelling the tale around campfires for years until the truth of the matter stopped mattering. 

Summers came and went, and the story turned flimsier than the hulls of the oldest canoes.

Some counselor transformed Bobby Watson into more than he'd ever been.  He said that on the darkest of nights, Bobby Watson could still be seen slinking around the camp.

They say after the fish ate his face, he took one of those white buckets from the dock and placed it over his head, so ashamed was he by his mutation.


This was what I looked for as a camper.

Not a pale and freckled boy who looked like me, but a spectral Buckethead.  He was one more reason to kick hard into the water during the swim test, one more reason to never walk around camp after dark.

Years later, as a counselor myself, I passed this story on, caused more than a few bed-wedding incidents by assuring them everything I'd said was true.

I don't know if everything I've said is true.

The story has been gutted, stitched, snipped, stretched and revised. 

Torn and pieced back together.

We took the fragments and searched for matching edges, but not all the edges matched.

One fish became dozens; his pale skin a skeleton.

Over the years we bestowed upon Bobby a context.  A moral.  Made him our cautionary tale.

Do not wander outside the cabin after lights out or you just might meet Bobby Watson.

Never sneak off near the waterfront or else you'll run into Bobby Watson.

Not a summer day goes by when some camper doesn’t whisper his name while treading near the buoy, adding to his myth, but what Bobby Watson was or was not all hinges on the telling.

For full summers I plucked spiders from the walls of the Apache Cabin and saw my campers safely home, no more injured than the occasional mild case of poison ivy, but perhaps their injuries cut deeper.

When those moon-faced boys found their pluck, cast their eyes at me in the flashlight light, whispered to ask if Bobby Watson was real, then listened for clues.

Depending on the degree of trembling in their throats, I stitched the version that allowed their eyes to grow heavy. 

The one where we all live happily ever after, the one where he never existed.