“Turn your lights off,” Timothy called.
In the dark, we only had to wait a minute to count again. When we flashed the lights back on the rats were already back scurrying over the trash and ash.
“Now,” Timothy yelled again.
Everyone threw their stones. I was so relieved this wasn’t some hazing punishment focused on me that I tossed the stones with the easy arc I’d learned to hurl potato mashers.
“Oh. Oh. The one I got looked just like the Jews in the poster. Did you see it?” Garth asked.
I hadn’t known many Jews, but those I did I had no problem with. My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Von Schuler, was Jewish. She’d float into the room every morning. “Yeladim. Yeladim. Time to sit, my Yeladim.” It was the Hebrew word for children and she said it like it were a song. The word a breathy hug. The word—my favorite word—that to me sounded like it should mean lights. Bright, radiant lights.
“Did you see it?” Garth asked again.
“I think I hit it too,” I said. It was one of those nothing, braggart things I said as a boy and forgot about for years, until it rose up in memory and my face grew hot with shame.
Our troop was up early the next morning and was brought to the camp’s main entrance. I remember being exhausted until we were led to a line of BMW motorcycles with sidecars. Drivers wearing trench coats and dark goggles snapped tight above the rims of their helmets stood in front of each motorcycle.
“You want to have a ride with us?” one of them called.
I got the last one in the line and sat in the low bucket of the sidecar. The rider pulled his dark goggles down and started the engine. We gained speed quickly. Several of the first boys raised their hands over their heads to catch the wind in their palms, but I had to pin my knees and elbows against the side to keep from bouncing out. Dust kicked up by the other riders swept over my face, but it was fun to move so fast. Fun to be a boy around so many other boys with games, movies, swimming, and great machines like this one to capture our attention. The driver shouted something but I couldn’t hear him over the smooth thrumming of the engine.
We drove around the entire camp to the western edge, which I hadn’t seen before. It was an annexed farm and my driver stopped on the road to let me look over at the horse barn. I’d overheard a small group of older boys talking at the lunch tables about mucking horseshit and piss-soaked hay from stalls. I saw they’d also built an obstacle course in the western paddock.
The same group were down there now in a single-file line in front of the barn. One by one they approached a grown man in riding boots who held his arms out in a circle the boys dove through. He caught the back of the boys’ heads with one hand and the bottom of their stomachs with the other, and spun them like they were sturgeon at a fish market. The boys tucked in midair, hit the ground, and rolled from their shoulders back to their feet before running to the back of the line again.
“They’re practicing falling off of a horse,” my driver said.
“Why?”
“They’ll be horse soldiers. A garrison of about twenty, I’d guess.”
He looked down at me and perhaps saw my surprise. “We train for everything. There are glider pilot units. Naval auxiliaries. You’ll find something good.”
He started the engine and we buzzed along the back side of the camp. It would be much later that I’d think, dear Christ, whoever put the camps together had thought through every minute of what would hook and bend a boy’s imagination into becoming a soldier, including feelings for girls, who were to be meticulously organized and regulated. Though at the time, my pubescent mind probably latched onto the idea of Timothy training to perform virginity tests.
For the final games, Günter pulled our troop into the cabin and had us sit on the edge of our cots.
“Now, if we are going to survive the final games, we have to work together. There have been problems between some of you, but I need our best six athletes for the main event, which means we have to team up.”
Günter had Timothy and Edwin stand side by side in the front of the cabin and put Pauwel between them. Then he had Ludo and Garth, who had jumped on me during our fight, stand behind those two. Then Günter called my name.
The main event of the games was a competition called Roman chariot. It took six boys to form one chariot. Three boys would link arms at the elbows, with the two outer boys having a leather loop hanging off their shoulders. Two more boys linked arms, bent their heads forward, and leaned into the linked three so the five of them faced one direction and fit together like a rugby scrum. The sixth boy, the charioteer—me, because I was the smallest—climbed up on the bent shoulders of the two boys in back, reached for the leather loops from the boys in front and leaned backward, letting the rope strung around the boys’ shoulders hold me from falling. My feet pushed forward, easing the two boys below me into the three boys ahead of them, so we were all tensed and held together as the five boys started to run. My hands pulled on the lines to guide Timothy and Edwin in the front and Ludo and Garth in the back as we practiced running all over the grounds.
My body was ropey and strong, but the first times we tried to move together I fell backward as if bucked from a horse. Then I overcompensated and sailed face-first over Timothy’s scoured neck. My brother and the rest of the team crashed on top of me. Then we switched Ludo so his weak arm faced out and didn’t affect his stance. Once I got the feel for shifting my weight, and warned the boys holding the straps in the front before leaning back, the whole group straightened out. Günter had us run the full circle around the camp. The team ran under my feet. Their ten legs pounded the dirt.
When we were back in our cabin, Edwin painted an animal on each of my teammates’ forearms, a wolf, a bear, a hawk. On mine he drew Thump-Drag, a hunchbacked silhouette.
“What is that?” Timothy asked.
“That’s Thump-Drag,” Edwin told him.
“Who’s that?”
Timothy’s question threw me off. I forgot not everyone knew about Thump-Drag.