Mornings in a campground begin with the slap of the screen door on the pit toilets. Campers rise early, but they respect mornings. If there is any talking, it’s more a hum than a chatter. No one laughs. The only sound is aluminum poles clanking as someone pulls up stakes. Normally, there is no wind so the pines, tall and straight above the tent, hold in the quiet. Once in a while the rip of a sleeping bag zipper darts through the stillness. Car engines whine a little, cough in the cool mountain temperatures, then pop to a start. The smell of smoke singes the air.
It was three days’ worth of dirt on my face that got me up that morning--that and maybe Jamie's being out there alone again. You never feel clean in a tent, and even though I like the warm corners of my sleeping bag, some mornings I can't take the layer of grease around my nose. Only in a campground can a chilly rag full of soap make miracles, turn your senses inside out.
That morning I sat out at the table with a cup of coffee Jamie made for me and watched him sweep up sharp handfuls of pine needles to toss on the fire. Fire entrances him. He can stand there and stare as if the flames startle cartoons out of the logs. But I wanted him to be careful, and I knew that he heard the warning in my mind. I didn't have to tell him.
The man from the little trailer next door was up already, alone. In all the trips he made to the restrooms, he always wore white shorts with a perfect crease, sometimes without a shirt. But that morning he'd thrown a green windbreaker over his hare shoulders. He had the kind of stunningly silver-streaked hair that really doesn't need combing. When he walked back up the path past our place and towards his, he smiled, and I pulled my hood up around my ratty hair because I looked as if I'd just crawled out of a bag.
It was just before nine, I think. The ranger had already been around to pick up foes. Jamie was arranging the half-dozen logs he'd taken from the back of the truck, and I was worried about the way he was laying them on his fire, when a car pulled up, a big car-I think it was a Caddy. The woman driving was angry. You could tell by the way she stopped, throwing the car in park while the wheels were still turning, the car finally jerking to a stop.
The two women who jumped out had to be mother and daughter. You know about those things. You just know. The older woman gestured toward the other, pointing her head at the trailer.
Jamie stood beside me, because from the first moment, from the minute they flew up to the site, the whole thing seemed jarring, out of place in the leisure of a quiet park morning. It all happened so fast that both of us hadn't the time to do anything but watch.
By the time those two were at the trailer door, the older woman had a camera out of her bag and was holding it in her right hand. They had a key. The mother slipped it in the lock, found it open, then barged right in without knocking, the daughter just a step behind, the door leaning open behind them.
Some muffled yells, then a series of flashes-two or three. The older woman yelled, and the man's cussing broke out of the doorway and cut through the trees. Jamie watched it all.
Then the daughter appeared, her hand on her mother's forearm, dragging the older woman along down the stairs and back out to the car. They drove away, slowly, as if they wanted to make up for the disturbance.
No sound next door.
I held my coffee in both my hands and saw little rings form across the surface from my shaking. Jamie faced me, waiting for his mother to pass a sentence, I suppose, waiting for something profound. When I didn't speak, he picked up a couple of pine cones from the pile his sisters had laid on the table, and held them in his hands as if they were baseballs.
"He's screwing her, isn't he?" he said finally, tossing those pine cones into the fire-my boy, my child, his hair still stuck up in a rooster tail, his shirt pulled on inside out, the tag flapping off the back of his neck. It's not the kind of language I can just let go.
"That's no way to talk, Jamie," I told him.
"It's true," he told me. "She's not his wife either-the pretty one. I can tell that." There he stood, staring into the flames.
What was I supposed to say? I looked at him standing there, in a way that I thought, even then, seemed angry-really, as ifhe hated the man with the white shorts. I sat there at the picnic table and ran through a thousand lines, none of which seemed right. So I let the silence go on.
"Admit it, Mom," he said. "It's true."
What could I tell him?--what could his mother tell him, really? What could she say? I looked at something angry in him, in the way he positioned his cocked shoulders, braced as if expecting to deliver a blow-at his face, tight from the eyebrows, the glow of the fire in his cheeks; and yet, I had this horrible sense that he was fighting back tears he didn't understand.
"It's an awful thing," I told him, almost out of nowhere. "It's trust that's broken, isn't it? It's a promise they made, he and his wife, and now it's broken."
That's what I said, hoping, even praying, that this boy I've raised pretty much myself for the last three years wouldn't read it as an explanation for the broken world of his own parents. I didn't mean it that way. I really didn't. But I think that's what he felt. Someday it will be time to end the silence, I suppose, but I don't know what I'll say then either. Maybe he knows already.
His eyes never touched mine. "It's all his fault," he said, as he threw on the last of the pine cones. "He's the one," he muttered as he walked past me, slipped his stringless sneakers off at the door of the tent, tugged the zipper up quietly, and stepped in.
"Where you going, Jame?" I said, lamely.
"Lake," he said. One word.
I was still shaking. It all happened so fast. I felt as if I had to say something more to him, so I got up from the table with my coffee in my hand and walked to the tent and saw my daughters sleeping, smothered in the bundle of empty sleeping bags. I remember them all as babies, all three of them-remember their crying and fussing and the perfect peace of their baby sleep so many years ago already, those last minutes every night, so full of peace and beauty that I couldn't turn out the lights and go back down to my work.
The tent flap was half-opened, so I couldn't help looking at him, my son, through the screen, the girls fast asleep. He had his shorts off, and he was looking through a pile of clothes for his swimming suit. He stood there naked in front of me, unconscious of my presence, his back to the girls, and he pulled his trunks up slowly, wiggling his long legs into the damp tightness, the soft light of the open screen erasing the shadows completely from his hips so that I could see my little boy standing there as the man he knows he's becoming.
"You going swimming, Jamie?" I asked him. He half-turned quickly, as if ashamed. "It's cold in the morning," I told him. "The water is probably warmer than the air."
He shrugged his shoulders and slipped on a different shirt. "Nothing to do anyway till breakfast," he said.
"Take a sweatshirt," I told him, "one with a hood so your head doesn't get cold," sounding so much like a mother.
He nodded as he stepped back out, then grabbed his sneakers and a towel from the rope at the end of the hammock.
Our site was on a hill that sloped to the lake south of the campground.
There were no sites directly beneath us, nothing but a field of long, thin grass beneath the trees, and a path he'd already cut when the four of us had gone down to the beach. The day before, I had tried to interest him in the sharp pieces of white quartz that lay there as if strewn like memories for Hansel and Gretel, but all he'd cared about was a graying buffalo chip that looked as if it had rotted there for years.
He had showed it to me where it lay, pointed at it directly. "See, Mom," he'd said. "Buffalo get up here. Bulls. They call it rutting. I read it in a book. They wander."
"Rutting," I said, "you know what that is?"
He looked at me and rolled his eyes. "Of course, I do," he said. "What do you think?"
*
The morning, after the screaming next door, I sat back at the picnic table and watched my son walk down that path to the lake. I saw him deliberately step off the path and kick into the grass where that buffalo chip lay, then look back at me as he stood there, not a smile on his face, but a pose and a look that seemed to me to be affirmation.
He stood at that very spot, at the sign of the buffalo, as if to tell me that we both knew very well there was some deep secret the two of us, a mom and a son, would somehow never be able to share.
When he disappeared down the hill, I looked at my cup, the coffee now cold and steamless, and at my hands, the thinness of my fingers, the shaped nails, the thin skin, so much, right then, a woman's hand. Not since my husband left, Lord help me, did I feel so much alone.
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