This Is Only a Test by B.J. Hollars Page A

floors. In the time between, the maintenance man mowed a lawn, patched a roof, installed a new refrigerator in the mess. When the new campers arrived, the counselors knew better than to talk about Bobby. Though the boys kept inquiring what all those sheriff’s deputies were doing bobbing about in the water, the counselors remained mum, except for the one who lightened the mood by making some joke about bank-robbing bass.
    The head lifeguard, too, spent the following week staring out at the boats from his place at the edge of the dock. The summer was blazing then, and every half an hour or so he’d reach for a white bucket, fill it with lake water, and send the water sizzling across the scalding docks. He repeated this action—a kind ofkeening—though one afternoon, as he walked to the boathouse to retrieve the goose poop broom, he returned to the dock to find his bucket missing.
    This is the part of the story that gets gruesome, the part that, forty years later, when I am a counselor there myself, we are encouraged not to tell.
    How, according to lore, that bucket didn’t just disappear, but was taken—by Bobby—whose body had broken free from the fridge, though it was hardly his body any longer. His bones were intact, and most of his skin, though the fish had fed on his face.
    A week after his disappearance, young Bobby—trapped in some transitory state (not quite dead, certainly not living)—was said to have broken his seaweed-speckled hand across the waterline and retrieved the bucket, slipping it over his fish-eaten face to spare others the view.
    All of this
, we told our campers by flashlight,
might have been different had Bobby just followed the rules. But he didn’t. He just didn’t. And that was the end of him
.
    Before serving as a camp counselor, I was a camper, and for a week each summer I’d unfurl my sleeping bag on a hard mattress in the Apache cabin, unpack my sunscreen and calamine lotion, and begin using words like “kindling” and “rucksack” and “bug juice.” Each week, our counselor told us the tale of Buckethead, reminding us of the importance of never wandering into the waterfront unattended (“You do, you die”).
    Years later, when I became counselor of that cabin, I began leading my own tribe of rucksack-carrying, bug-juice-drinking, kindling-finding boys. And I repeated the Buckethead legend as ithad been told to me; adding a few flourishes, of course, including the pencil-scrawled initials “B. W.” on one of the bunks to prove that Bobby Watson, too, had been an Apache. A necessary detail, I thought, to connect us with our fabricated past.
    I probably took it too far—provided too many details on what it might feel like for water to rise in a confined space. Yet I told myself that my vivid recounting was meant merely to reinforce the cautionary tale; that if I told it well enough—true enough—I might scare these kids back to the safety of the shoreline.
    During my second summer as a camper, I, too, was scared for my own good. I’d been scared the previous summer as well, and as I slipped my duffel beneath the familiar bunk once more, my hand grazed a white bucket tilted sideways like a bowling pin. I reached for it, though I stopped when I heard a cane slap the plywood floor behind me.
    My eyes followed the cane up to the blind boy carrying it. He said hello (“Hi!), his name was Dennis (“I’m Dennis!”), and wondered whether he’d found his way into the Apache cabin.
    It was the first time any of us had ever seen a blind boy, and my bunkmates and I wanted to know how he kept from tripping over all those roots in the path leading up to the cabin.
    â€œHell, I trip over shit all the time,” announced Randall, the kid on the bunk above me. This, I later reasoned, might have been Randall’s only glimpse of empathy, though our counselor misread it, told the kid to