Mayor of the Universe: A Novel

  “We always thought your planet was the poor relation,” said Tandy, her head held at an elegant angle. “So backward, but it’s . . . it’s almost . . . too much.”

  “Tandy,” whispered Fletcher. “Don’t go.”

  She hadn’t given any indication that she was going to, but Fletcher knew it to be true.

  “I have to, Fletcher. You’re doing fine here.”

  His boyish petulance rose up quick as a fist at a riot. “No, I’m not!” he said, letting go of her. “I’m about to get pulverized by this kid named Rocky! I have to exercise all the time and—”

  Tandy had begun to shimmer.

  “No! Don’t! I need you. Where are you going?”

  “Back to Florida.”

  The outlines of Tandy’s body had completely disappeared but he could still see her face in the sparkle and light.

  “Back to love,” she said and smiled, her old smile—gummy, huge, and bright.

  “Love?”

  What remained of Tandy’s face nodded, and then the pink and purple shimmer swallowed up her vast smile, and abruptly Fletcher, back in his robe and pajama bottoms, was plopped down in the canoe.

  “Love?” he said, louder than he had intended, and he sat still for a moment, half expecting to see cabin lights go on. When none did, he began paddling back to shore, and by the time he had tied the boat to a stake and run back to the cabin, Fletcher was gone, and it was Shark who quietly opened the door and tiptoed to his bunk so as not to wake his fellow Birch mates.

  Intergalactic Memo

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  The heavens are humming: from Alpha Centauri to Groombridge 34 there is much activity and we are a big part of it. Tandy, I am being sent signals that something big is underfoot. Do not lose focus—remember that it is Fletcher who should be first and foremost in your attentions.

  You’re right—the smell of suntan lotion is something that could inspire citizens of Venus to finally write that truce with Mars—but I reiterate: focus!

  Intergalactic Memo/Reply

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  I was given a gardenia to tuck behind my hair, and later the lead singer of a bar band announced, “This one’s for Tandy,” and played “When I Fall in Love” as Clarence and I danced to what we decided was “our song.” We drove along the beach afterward, and yes, I saw you winking at me. You and a billion stars.

  By week four, the resolve of about half the boys was compromised by tepid weigh-ins—if they were going to all the trouble of practically starving themselves and having to exercise, shouldn’t they lose more than a lousy two or three pounds a week?—and temptation. Eagle and Tern, whom Shark had once considered rivals, had turned their attention away from losing the most weight at camp to making the most money, a goal they worked diligently toward by selling the candy bars Tern’s brother sent in packages. It was as flourishing and furtive a business as drug dealing, and both boys enjoyed the money as well as the power; discovering everyone was your friend when they knew you had Milk Duds or Almond Joys for sale.

  Unfortunately for Shark, Copper was not temped by candy bars sold at a 100 percent markup and was proving himself a worthy rival, having lost weight consistently each week.

  “He never rests during Rest Hour,” whispered Shark to his friend Cheetah, as they sat in the Great Hall watching the weekly weigh-in. Miss DuBarry didn’t believe in privacy; she figured since the main goal of the campers was to lose weight, they should share in each other’s successes and failures.

  Standing on a stepladder, she stood at the blackboard and wrote 237 in the box that met with the horizontal row with the heading Copper and the vertical one reading Week 4.

  “Wow,” said Shark, “he’s down five more pounds.”

  He himself had already weighed in and had been happy with his loss of two-and-three-quarters pounds, until he saw how much his Fir rival had lost.

  Stepping off the weighing stage, Copper bunched his mouth into a repressed smile, careful not to look any other campers in the eye. He got picked on for too many things already and knew that gloating would only exacerbate persecution.

  Despite his discretion, someone made a loud farting noise as Copper walked by. It was Rocky, sitting with his friends Andes and Alps, whose laughter was the mirthless, gruff laughter of bullies.

  “What a bunch of jerks,” whispered Cheetah.

  “No kidding,” said Shark. Since the volleyball incident, Rocky had failed to deliver on his threat to get him, but Shark was convinced it was only because of his own tireless effort to stay out of his tormentor’s way.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Shark. He took one more look at the blackboard, visualizing his total weight loss—the biggest number of all—written into the final square. “Shoot some baskets or something.”

  “Hah,” said Cheetah mirthlessly. “You forgot. We’ve got Feelings.”

  “Oh man,” said Shark, pulling down the brim of his baseball cap so it half-covered his face. “Don’t make me barf.”

  16

  Another Eureka Flash for Lucille DuBarry had occurred several years ago while she was getting her hair done.

  “So how’s the battle of the bulge going over there?” asked Ruby, squishing her Pall Mall in a sand-filled ashtray before she began Lucille’s shampoo.

  Ruby didn’t actually smoke while she worked on clients, only before and after. Lucille wasn’t about to complain; since the Classy Coif was the only beauty salon in town and Ruby was its proprietor, her choices were somewhat limited. Besides, no one could tame Lucille’s frizzy mane the way Ruby could.

  “The girls are fairly easy,” explained the camp director, who divided her time between the two camps. “Girls I understand. But you know boys . . . no, I guess that’s my problem—I don’t know them! Boys keep all doors closed!”

  “Well, break ’em down,” advised Ruby, dousing Lucille’s hair with a spray attachment.

  “How . . . how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Listen, Lucy, you know I’ve got a couple boys of my own, and after their dad—the bastard—ran off, they shut down. First, I liked it—yahoo—peace and quiet! But then I realized that just because they were quiet didn’t mean they were staying out of trouble. Hell, no!”

  “So what did you do?” asked Lucille, wincing as the hairstylist massaged her scalp a little too vigorously.

  “Well, after Danny got suspended for fighting in school—and Danny was my ‘good’ boy—I set all three of ’em down at the kitchen table and told ’em, ‘Look, you’ve got problems, you talk about ’em to me. And if you can’t talk about ’em, write ’em down.’ So that’s what they did—they wrote down what had got ’em steamed or sad, and they put those pieces of paper in a little coffee can, and every Friday night I’d dump it out and we’d talk about what they’d written.”

  “And how did it work out?”

  The steel trap of Ruby’s fingers loosened for a moment.

  “Well, Tom has got a good job with the creamery and just got married, and Mark drives truck for a big cross-country outfit, and Danny—well, my Danny graduates from UVM next spring!”

  “You must be very proud,” said Lucille, smiling, her eyes closed.

  “Way I see it,” Ruby said, beginning to rinse, “is them fat kids are just as sad and mad as my boys were, only they don’t show it by breaking windows or skipping school. Nope. Instead they shove food in their mouths. So get ’em to talk—at least talking, they can’t be eating!”

  I’ll make a game of it, thought Lucille, just like Ruby did, and when she left the salon, she tripled her usual tip, which was already more generous than any of the other Classy Coif clients gave.

  “My favorite song is . . . ,” Miss DuBarry said, throwing the ball at a boy.

  Tern caught it, his misery and embarrassment evident by his red, red ears.

  “No stopping to think,” said Miss DuBarry. “No judging what another boy says. Just say the
first thing that comes to your mind and then throw the ball. Speak and throw.”

  “’Row, Row, Row Your Boat!’” said Tern, flinging the ball at Iron.

  Rocky and his friend Pyrennes laughed, but the other boys standing in a circle did not, knowing that when it came their turn, they might just as easily come up with as dumb an answer.

  “‘The Theme from Agent of Impossibility!’” shouted Pyrennes, and every boy and Miss DuBarry broke the rule of judging and nodded their approval; that was a good song.

  Pyrennes threw the ball as hard as he could at Copper, who, surprising many, didn’t drop it.

  “‘Für Elise!’”

  One or two of the boys who had had piano lessons recognized the song, but the others didn’t; nevertheless, because it was spoken by Copper, it was assumed it was a lot more stupid than even “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but Copper hurled the ball so fast at Rocky that the impulse to laugh was cut short.

  Rocky caught the ball and glared at Copper.

  “Speak and throw!” reminded Miss DuBarry.

  A smile came over Rocky’s face, and as he fondled the ball he turned his head to direct his stare at Shark.

  “Speak and throw!”

  This game was one Lucille DuBarry had culled from her background in theater (she had nearly majored in it in college); its object was to get everyone loose and in the moment. Holding on to the ball and giving dirty looks to fellow players was not part of the game, and she did not like this blatant lack of cooperation.

  “Speak and throw!”

  “‘Big Bad John!’” shouted Rocky and threw the ball as hard as he could.

  Shark’s hands stung, but he had caught it.

  “‘Sixteen Tons!’” He could be as tough as Rocky, he thought, throwing the ball at Hawk.

  When all the boys had a chance to catch and throw the ball and reveal their favorite songs, they switched to men they admired.

  “President Kennedy!”

  “Chuck Conners from The Rifleman!”

  “Beethoven!” (This was Copper’s.)

  And when they were done with that, they switched to naming their least favorite foods.

  “Baked squash!”

  “Liver!”

  “And onions!”

  Finally Miss DuBarry showed mercy and blew the whistle around her neck.

  “Good job, men, now let’s all take a seat. Shark, put the ball in the bin, please.”

  As they sat down in a circle, energy drained out of the boys like water through a sieve. If Feelings were an elective, the Great Hall would be empty.

  “Men, I know this is not your favorite camp activity,” said Miss DuBarry, which made more than one boy wonder if she was a mind reader, too. “But if one fails to master one’s feelings, one isn’t a master at all.”

  Ignoring some of the ruder boys’ smirks, Miss DuBarry continued.

  “Now, we’re going to count to eight twice. Starting with you, Iron.”

  “One,” said Iron, with the enthusiasm of a robot with a failing battery.

  Steel said, “Two,” and they went around the circle until Hawk said the second and final “Eight.”

  “All right, then,” said Miss DuBarry briskly. “Will the Ones please line up over here?”

  Warily eying one another, Iron and Cheetah followed instructions.

  Miss DuBarry directed the rest of the groups to join the line.

  “And now,” she said, her voice trilling with excitement, “shake hands with your partners.”

  Shark looked at the other boy who was a Four and wished hard that the floor would open and swallow him up, but the rough wooden planks did not relent. He reached out his hand, and as Rocky took it in his, squeezing it as hard as he could, Shark wondered how many bones were fractured.

  “Yeah, and I’m happy about this, too,” he said through a clenched smile.

  “I see none of you is with your cabin-mate, which is what I intended,” said Miss DuBarry, pacing the line. “Because new friendships can teach you new things. And that’s what we’re about to discover today.”

  From a leather pouch hanging on a hook on the wall, Miss DuBarry took out eight rolled tubes of paper and gave them to each twosome.

  “Behold Camp WoogiWikki’s Treasure Hunt!”

  After unrolling the mimeographed paper, several boys held the paper to their nose and inhaled.

  “Let me smell that!” said Allegheny to his partner, Hawk.

  “Boys! Attention! Please!” Miss DuBarry pushed her cat’s-eye glasses up the bony ridge of her nose and clasped her hands. “Now. At each destination shown on the map, you’ll find a task. Complete the task and move on to the next one. You’ve got until three o’clock!”

  “What about lunch?” asked Tern. “We haven’t even eaten lunch yet.”

  “There are bagged lunches for you waiting on the picnic table outside. You may eat them there or you may eat them on the run. Remember, first team back wins!”

  “Wins what?” asked Lynx, who was partnered with Copper.

  “Well, that’s for me to know and you to find out!” said Miss DuBarry, who in truth had been so excited creating the game she had neglected to think of a prize. “But let me just say that although the first boys back to the Great Hall will be the technical winners, merely by playing this game, you’ll all be winners!”

  “Yeah, right,” muttered Rocky under his breath.

  “Oh, and you’ll need these,” she said, giving each pair a pocket-sized notebook and the short pencils golfers use to keep score. She looked harried, but certain she’d gone through all pertinent instructions she said, “Now on your mark, get set—”

  She blew the whistle she wore on a lanyard around her neck, and sixteen big boys thundered out of the Great Hall and toward the picnic table. Two nine-year-olds, heading for the lake with towels yoked around their necks, scurried off the path, hoping to avoid the stampede.

  Most of the boys grabbed their lunches and raced off in the direction of the beach.

  “Why aren’t we going?” asked Shark, as Rocky seated himself at the picnic table and began unfolding the top of a brown lunch bag. “Come on, everyone’s getting ahead of us, let’s—”

  “Will you shut up?” said Rocky, polishing an apple on the front of his T-shirt.

  “But everybody—”

  “I don’t give a shit about everybody. I’m going to eat my lunch.” He chomped into his apple, juice spraying.

  I’d like to smack you in your big fat mouth, thought Shark as he reluctantly sat down across from his partner.

  “Can I at least see the map?” he asked, “so I can see where we should be going?”

  His cheeks bulging with apple, Rocky reached into his back pocket and slapped the squished roll of paper on the table.

  “Eshytee—”

  “I can’t understand you,” said Shark crossly, “with your mouth full.”

  Smoothing the map out on the splintery wood tabletop and looking at the various locations, Shark traced the distance between them with his finger. Rocky gnawed away at his apple, and when it was almost down to the core, he threw it at one of the randomly placed geranium plants Miss DuBarry thought perked up the landscape.

  “He scores!” he said, as the core thwacked against the stems of the plant and landed in the pot. He unfolded the wax paper from his sandwich and regarded Shark.

  “What I had started to say was, every team needs a captain, and guess what, doofus—I’m ours.”

  “My name’s Shark.”

  Rocky sighed. “Okay, Shark, but get this straight: I make the rules, I decide how we’re gonna operate, okay?”

  Shark tugged at the brim of his baseball cap and shrugged his reluctant approval.

  “All those idiots,” said Rocky, nodding toward the beach and the fading shouts of their competitors—“are just getting in each other’s way. They’ll stop to eat sooner or later—and meanwhile, we’ve already eaten. They’ll all have left the boathouse by the time we get there?
??we avoid the crowd and get our stuff done easier. We’ll make up our time like that.” He snapped his fingers and gave Shark a self-satisfied smile. “It’s all about strategy.”

  Shark nodded, torn between being impressed by Rocky’s cool thinking and loathing the guy. He surveyed the map as he absently chewed his sandwich.

  “Well, if we’re thinking strategy,” he said, “why don’t we just go to all these places backward?”

  “What do you mean, backward?” Rocky asked sharply.

  Shark pointed to the seven destinations on the map.

  “Look, each place is numbered, but it doesn’t say anywhere that we’ve got to go to any of these places in any order.”

  Not particularly fond of input from his subordinate, Rocky’s forehead creased.

  “See, we could really avoid the crowd if we didn’t go to each place in order. We could do it backwards, go to 7 first, then 6.”

  Rocky surveyed the map. “But what if the clue at the first spot leads to the clue in the second spot?”

  Shark idly picked a shred of turkey out of his teeth and flicked it on the ground.

  “Miss DuBarry didn’t say clues. She said tasks.” He pointed to 1, the boathouse, and at 2, the camp library on the map. “I’d bet one place has nothing to do with the other.”

  Crumpling his empty milk carton in his hand, Rocky stood up.

  “All right, but if you’re wrong, I’ll kill you.”

  “That might get in the way of us winning.”

  “Funny,” said Rocky, standing up. “And remember, I’m still the captain, and what I say goes.”

  Shark got up to follow him but not before quickly collecting his own garbage as well as the lunch detritus Rocky left behind and depositing it all into the big waste receptacle that sat five feet away from the picnic table.

  “So where are we headed?” he asked, chasing Rocky up the path.

  “To number 7, stupid! We said we’re going backwards.”

  Shark pushed Rocky’s shoulder in what could have been an affectionate gesture but wasn’t.

  “Hey!” said Rocky.

  “You call me stupid again and I’m out,” said Shark. “I’ll drop out and we’ll be disqualified, got it?”