by Matthew Wherttam
Martin hopped on to the back of the camp’s garbage truck, expecting to be riding it all the way to the town dump. But the truck made a sharp turn and flung him against the trunk of an oak tree. He slid down the tree, flapped around a little when he reached the ground, and then began clutching at the egg-shaped gash that was now in his forehead. When we got to the camp’s infirmary, the nurse removed the T-shirt I had been pressing against the gash, which was now dirty red and no longer bleeding. She shined a penlight into each of his eyes, cleaned the gash, dressed it with a topical antibiotic, bandaged it, phoned the camp’s director, and then told me I would be riding with Martin on the camp’s daily van trip to town, where the doctor would stitch him up.
He’d been quiet and even indifferent until he heard he was going to town. That woke him up. And after he climbed into the van, he began waving through its windows at other little boys who had gathered to watch him leave. He waved as if he had just won a war, or an election, or hit a ninth-inning home run; and, because this was decades ago, in a seatbeltless era, he was able to bounce around while he was waving—and he was bouncing around so much that he came close to tumbling into the space between the van’s front and back seats.
Then we started down the dirt-and-gravel road that led to Route 7, and, when we got to it, he began waving again—this time at the cars and trucks already on the highway.
We arrived at the doctor’s office. We walked across his porch and through his front door and found no other people inside except for the nurse. She led us to a room where there was an examining table, instruments, a mirror, and two or three diplomas hanging on walls in glass frames that were sparkling in the summer morning sun.
Then the doctor appeared. He shined his penlight into each of Martin’s eyes, took his pulse and his temperature, removed the camp nurse’s bandage, recleaned the gash, and put eight or nine stitches into his head. All the while, the doctor’s nurse wrestled with Martin. Martin wrestled back, but he didn’t shout, speak, or even grunt. When the doctor was done stitching, he fussed around a bit more with that sewn-up gash, rebandaged it, and told me that Martin wasn’t to go swimming for the next few days and was to leave the bandage in place. Then he gave Martin a half-tan, half-red capsule—an antibiotic, I would imagine—and disappeared. His nurse led us back to the front porch, where she handed me some paperwork and then disappeared.
Martin didn’t say a single word the whole time. The doctor hadn’t asked him how he got his gash, and the nurse hadn’t said much either. I didn’t say anything at all. So most of what happened while Martin was being treated could have been captured in a silent movie.
Similar stitchings had to be occurring all across the country, and, like this one, they were probably taking place without much noise or drama. So Shakespeare was wrong when he said all the world’s a stage. It is much less exciting than a stage. It is more like a circus. A huge and boring circus. But a circus with many more than three rings. And in each of those rings a head wound is being stitched up. Perhaps, in a mystical or metaphysical way, those stitchings are practice for one grand, perfect, and final stitching. Or, more probably, there will never be a perfect stitching, and because practice makes perfect, the stitchings will continue to continue and never end. Lots of things never end. Waves keep crashing onto beaches, clouds keep drifting across the sky, and we—that is, all of us—keep clearing our throats and coughing and blinking. And so it seems the world, and those of us in it, will be practicing forever.
Martin’s flight from that garbage truck was not his only accident at camp. In the days to come he would have many accidents. So many that he might have been practicing how to get injured. But he wasn’t focusing on any particular way of getting injured. Instead, he was trying out different ways. He ran face-first into a moving baseball bat, whacked his mouth on a water fountain, cut his chin by jumping into a ditch filled with jagged rocks, and hit himself in the face with his own flashlight. I don’t know how he managed to hit himself in the face with his own flashlight. And aside from the jagged rocks, there was nothing else to be found in that ditch.
Many days after his ride on the back of the garbage truck, after his face had become more torn up, I asked the camp’s director to send him home. For his own sake. The director said that things were under control and that he had been reporting each of Martin’s accidents to his parents.
But I am getting ahead of myself now. Let’s go back to the garbage-truck incident. Martin and I were now sitting in folding chairs on the doctor’s front porch, waiting for the camp’s van to return from other parts of town. It was a bright and dustless summer morning. Martin was jittery, twitchy. He always was. And even when he stopped twitching, it was only a moment before he began twitching again. He was short, narrow, and dreamy. Dreamy even when he was jumping into ditches and heaving himself across home plate at the wrong moment. Dreamy and yet intense. But how could someone be both dreamy and intense? He did it. He would be staring at something fiercely, and yet his eyes would be out of focus. He must have been multitasking with fury—thinking about everything and nothing.
He was now staring across the street at a store window. It held a sign that said there was ice cream within. But it also carried a barber’s pole. Could someone in there really be eating ice cream and getting a haircut at the same time?
“Can we go for ice cream?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Can we go?” he asked again.
“It’s a barber shop.”
“But they also have ice cream. The sign says so.”
“The sign is wrong.”
“No it isn’t. It says ice cream, and I’ll pay you for mine when we get back to camp. I got money from home.”
I didn’t answer.
“Why can’t we go? Don’t you have any money on you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why can’t we go?”
I said nothing back.
The weather was perfect, and the day was trying to drift by in a leisurely way. But Martin was hurrying things along. Just by sitting next to me, he was hurrying things along.
“Why did you jump on the back of that truck?” I finally asked him. “How long did you think you would be able to hang on to it? I always knew you were an idiot, but I never knew you were that dumb.”
He said nothing back.
Now and then someone would walk by the doctor’s office, but no one walked in. It was a healthy town that morning—except for Martin.
He began fidgeting again. And then fidgeting with greater intensity. He was very small. And flimsy. He was easily the least well-coordinated kid in camp. He’d punch some other little kid for no reason and I’d have to step in before that kid could punch him back.
He had a thin face and thick dark hair that was piled up high and always seemed to be in place even though I had never seen him combing it. It was in place now, and it looked pretty good. And this was after that garbage-truck ride and the collision with the oak tree, and the trip in the van, and after getting all those stitches. And if I really had had any money, I might have dragged him across the street and gotten the barber to give him a crew cut. A really short one. One that would show everyone just how large a bandage was now pasted in the middle of his forehead.
Maybe hopping onto garbage trucks was what he and his friends did back in the city. But I was amazed. And I was to be amazed by other things he would be doing in the coming days. Like when he jumped into that ditch and when he hit himself in the face with his own flashlight. And he needed stitches for those things and also for when he fell face-first against the cement wall of the basement of a house—a house that had been started long ago and never finished. He needed stitches almost every week. And since I was his counselor, I had to go with him to town whenever he needed them. And after he got them, my instructions were always the same: keep him from swimming for a few days and make sure his new bandage stayed on. Keeping him from swimming was easy. But his bunkmates always wanted to see his new stitches. And so did he. So he always managed to get his bandages off whenever he came back to camp with new stitches. Those stitches looked like they were lanyards that had been welded into his face.
Not every one of his trips to town was for stitches. He broke a finger reaching for a half-hidden mouse- or rat trap, scraped his chest riding a bike into the side of the recreation hall, and got poison ivy that crept into every crevice of his thin body.
His poison ivy was spectacular. His skin was bubbling. It was red and orange. The town’s doctor had to wash the many small parts of his very small body with a foamy, white soap, cover those parts with a colorless, ill-smelling cream, and top it all off with a large amount of oatmeal-like stuff that might actually have been oatmeal. Then he gave Martin a white, flat, circular, corticosteroid tablet that was bitter and far stronger than anything that could be gotten over the counter and handed me a bunch more of those tablets and told me to give them to him over the course of the next week. But a few days later, when his poison ivy had stopped itching, Martin refused to take any more tablets. I tried to coax him with candy. I told him he could eat candy while he was taking a tablet. I gave him a tablet. Then I gave him a Tootsie Roll. He spit out the tablet and left in the Tootsie Roll. I slapped him. That slap left no mark. No one had seen me do it. And we never talked about it afterwards.
But that flight from the back of that garbage truck at the start of the summer was a thing I could not get out of my mind. I was sure one day he would sustain a truly grievous injury, suffer unutterable agony, be beyond the help of any doctor, and then die. And while the camp’s director had assured me that he would be reporting all of Martin’s injuries to his parents, I couldn’t shake the thought that the director would insist that I be the one reporting his last accident and his death.
One afternoon, after general swim, when he was the last one showering in the camp’s partly outdoor shower stalls, one of his buddies began throwing fist-sized rocks into those stalls. Martin got hit in the head by the fifth or sixth one. And by the time he had run from that shower stall, his entire chest was red. Water had diluted the blood that had come from the hole now in his head, and all that red was more spectacular than the gash that had come from his flight from the garbage truck. But the hole now in his head was too small to need stitches, so this wasn’t practice for stitching. However, I couldn’t believe that accidents like this one were unfolding all over the country. That is to say, other kids in Martin’s situation would be running out of their shower stalls after the first or second rock had come flying in. So what had happened to him here had to be the first, perfect, and only time anyone ever got a hole in the head in that particular way. I had to ask the guy who had thrown the rocks why he had done it. And he said it was to get Martin outdoors without any clothes on and because he was taking too long in the shower. And when I asked Martin why he hadn’t run out right away, he said it was because none of the first four or five rocks had hit him.
As you already know, Martin was fascinated by the possibilities for fun afforded by the camp’s garbage truck. In fact, he liked all the trucks coming into and out of camp. The camp’s dog also liked those trucks. That dog would run after them each day and bite at their tires. One morning he sank his teeth into one of them. It snapped his neck. I saw all that happen. Now, Martin had teeth, and Martin had a thin neck. And while you wouldn’t think he’d ever try to bite a truck’s tire, he had hit himself in the face with his own flashlight.
At the end of meals, Martin would come close to the long rubber-and-metal conveyor belt that carried dirty dishes to the back of the kitchen. He would put his face really close to those rattling dishes and the steamy, hot water splashing down on them. Why?
And when we went to town for bowling, he would bend over the grooves that the bowling balls came flying back on. Wasn’t the sound of bowling balls crashing together and the sound of falling pins—all from a common-sense distance—supposed to be enough fun to be having at a bowling alley? And he leaned way out the back of the truck during the camp hayride, ignoring the hay that was supposed to be a big part of the appeal of the ride. And when an actual circus came to town—that is, when he went to town for a reason other than to receive medical care—he crawled under and past the circus signs that said “Keep Out.” And on the Fourth of July, he couldn’t get close enough to the guy who was setting off the fireworks when instead he was supposed to be watching from a safe distance as they shot up into the sky and fell back into the lake.
With all this, was he practicing for anything? I don’t think so. Maybe he was gathering information—information he hoped to use one day to construct a giant contraption that could be ignited into the biggest explosion of all time. Wasn’t there some rich Englishman in the 1800s who built tracks and put locomotives on them so that he and his friends could watch them collide?
One afternoon late in August, when the summer was almost over, I was walking with my campers in a farmer’s field. A field filled with tall, flowing, golden grass. A field that contained a tractor. But no farmer. And because there was no farmer, Martin broke away from the rest of us and ran up to and then onto the seat of that tractor. And when I called for him to come down, he ignored me and began pushing and pulling at every button, bar, rod, and lever he could find. The tractor wouldn’t move. And I didn’t go running after him. I went walking after him. After all, the farmer surely had put the tractor’s brakes on and was also carrying its ignition key. Besides, the tractor’s seat was not all that high, and the ground around it was not all that hard, and so even if Martin were to fall face-first from that seat, he would not be getting all that hurt, and certainly not as hurt as when he had been flung from the back of that garbage truck. And maybe getting onto that tractor to get him down would be a bit of fun for me.
Then the tractor started up. It started up with a roar and without a key. And why not? That is, why should it have had a key? Keys, after all, are anti-theft devices, and farm tractors spend most of their time in golden fields far from cities and evil city men bent on vehicular theft.
The tractor was really roaring now, and I was sprinting toward it. There had to be a button that would set the whole damn thing in motion. And Martin was still hitting every button he could reach. And if he did start it moving, and if it made its way off that golden field and onto Route 7, it would then be on a road filled with moving vehicles. Vehicles going in opposite directions and going unspeakably fast.
That garbage truck had just been getting rid of Martin. This tractor, on the other hand, could soon be carrying Martin onto an interstate highway, a place where there was lots of onrushing rubber and metal.
I finally got onto the tractor, and now the two of us were pushing and pulling and punching at everything we could find. Our chances of turning the tractor off were now greater, but so were our chances of setting it loose.
Instead, one of us, or maybe both of us, punched the right button and the tractor began to calm down. It calmed itself down by degrees. And finally it stopped and was altogether soundless and asleep—that is, as far as we could tell.
Then we got off it and ran. And we stopped, turned, and looked back. I regained my breath. Martin began fidgeting again. He was standing in front of me, a little nearer to the tractor. And he was twitching. His eyes must have been dreamy and intense. He had to be thinking. All sorts of electricity had to be rushing through the neurons in his brain. Neurons that were bunched up in his small, small head just behind the gash that the garbage truck and oak tree had made. Everything was quiet. My other campers must have run over to where we were, and they must have been shouting, but this happened so many years ago I don’t remember them. I don’t remember them at all. I remember just me and Martin. And everything was quiet. I don’t remember hearing any birds. Even the tall grass around us wasn’t moving.
“That’s some tractor,” he said. “That’s the best one I ever saw. It was smoking. It was shaking. It was going crazy.”
Exactly how many neurons are there in a human brain? Google says 80, 90 or as many as 100 billion of them. More than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Because Martin was a little in front of me, I couldn’t see that torn-up face of his. Instead, I was looking at his thin shoulders and the back of his thin neck. And suddenly I realized I didn’t want to see his face. The tractor’s engine had to be still warm. And it wasn’t all that far away.