Once a boy drowned at a summer camp. This was June of 1968. It was early evening, a dinner of fried chicken and green beans already breaking down inside the boys’ bellies, and as their counselors shouted numbers to the sky (“98 . . . 99 . . . 100!”), the campers hid, determined not to be found in the all-camp game of hide-and-seek.
More determined than most, ten-year-old Bobby Watson slipped away from his bunkmates and wandered toward the floating docks on the shores of Blackman Lake. He blocked the sun with his hand, allowing his eyes to refocus on the best hiding spot of all. There, glistening at the edge of a dock, was a Kenmore refrigerator. It was powder blue, round-topped, complete with silver handle. Bobby—smitten perhaps by the peculiarity of a refrigerator in such a strange locale—headed toward it.
Bobby knew as well as everyone else that the waterfront was off-limits to campers except during open swim. The head lifeguard—a broad-shouldered, sunburned man—had made this abundantly clear on the first night of camp (“You do, you die”). But it was a game of hide-and-seek, after all, and Bobby, a boy who wanted simply to hide, convinced himself to duck beneath the peeling fence. He jogged toward the fridge, peeking behind him to make sure he hadn’t been spotted. He hadn’t. No sign of him except for footprints in the sand.
He reached for the shiny handle, pulled, listened for the sound of the door yawning open:
Click.
And then, after entering inside, the sound of the door closing:
Click.
The inner shelves had been removed, though it was still a tight squeeze for a boy Bobby’s size. Nevertheless, he found that if he tucked himself into the fetal position, it almost felt like a womb. Somewhere in the world beyond the confines of that fridge, the dock wobbled beneath the new weight. Bobby smiled to himself. The boy who wanted simply to hide was quite certain they’d never find him.
Half an hour later, as the game wound down, Bobby’s prediction proved true.
Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee, the counselors’ voices droned, followed by the sharper Bob-be!
Amidst the shouting, a maintenance man spotted the fridge on the dock and, in an uncharacteristic act, decided not to put off till tomorrow what could easily be done today. Rope in hand, he wandered toward the water, ducking beneath the paint-peeling fence as his work boots clomped toward the dock. He tied one end of a rope around the fridge and the other to the dock post.
The fridge was meant to serve as an anchor to ensure the docks didn’t float away, and after the maintenance man double-checked his knots (“This’ll hold”), he leaned his stocky frame into the powder-blue box and knocked it into the water.
Nobody knows what Bobby thought as that fridge bobbed twice in the lake. We can imagine, of course. How the water wiggled through the seams like eels. And how it began filling that fridge within seconds, drenching Bobby’s shoes, Bobby’s socks, Bobby’s shorts. Meanwhile, on the other side of that refrigerator door, the maintenance man wiped his hands on his sleeves and headed toward the barn. There was a lawnmower in need of tuning.
Back on land, the counselors continued their search.
Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee! they cried. Come out, come out, wherever you are!
A chorus of prepubescent campers soon joined them.
Hey, Bobby! Game over! Ollie ollie oxen free!
Inside the fridge, the water continued to rise. Past Bobby’s orange-and-gray-striped T-shirt, past his slender neck, and finally, as the wide-eyed boy ballooned his cheeks for the last time, past his mouth and nose as well. His hands reached for a handle that was not there, his fingers clawing against the smooth surface. Then, as his cheeks deflated, he just stopped clawing. Just stopped everything. The refrigerator had become a coffin, and in the coming days, as a platoon of sheriff’s deputies commandeered fishing boats and skimmed the water, nobody thought to tug on the rope pulled tight to the post of the dock. Nobody thought. Instead, those deputies took solace in the sound of their outboard motors, while Bobby—once a boy—became an anchor.
That night, as the campers slept or tried to, the counselors snuck from their cabins, slipped beneath the paint-peeling fence, and joined the head lifeguard at the waterfront. They were all so terribly young—most of them not yet twenty—and death, for them, was still an abstraction. As they tugged their damp swimsuits over their hips the goose bumps served as proof that they were alive.
“All right, let’s link up,” the head lifeguard called, so the counselors did—locking elbows to form a chain of boys whose high-kneed march plunged their toes deep into the sand. Their toes revealed no bodies that night, but thirty feet away and ten feet below, Bobby Watson’s body responded to their ripples.
The days passed like seasons—the seasons like lifetimes—but first, the world stubbornly continued. That week’s batch of campers returned home, while the next batch arrived soon after, dragging their trunks along the cabins’ plywood 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 of keening—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 it had 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.
“Hell, 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 watch his damn mouth (“Or else”).
That night, after a campfire spent fending off mosquitoes, the Apache tribe marched back through the woods to our cabin. Our counselor promised us a scary story if we could get in our sleeping bags without playing too much grab-ass (“Randall, Paul, I’m talking to you!”).
We wanted the story so we did as we were told, peeling off sweat-soaked socks and shirts and curling—like Bobby—into spaces that were nearly too small for us. With the lights off, he told us about Buckethead, about Bobby Watson, about the refrigerator that clicked shut and did not open.
Since I knew the story, I mostly just watched the expressions on the other boys’ faces. Across from me, Dennis’s eyes emitted terror, but not nearly as much as Randall’s.
“What a crock of shit,” Randall grumbled, wadding up his pillow, though the tremor in his throat was unmistakable.
The week dragged on—days spent shooting bows and threading lanyards and trying to steer our canoes to the safety of the shoreline. We learned songs and then forgot them, built fires and put them out. We dedicated hours to sand volleyball, took turns at tetherball, measured the arc of our piss streams by the cattails.
Dennis couldn’t take part in everything, but most of us did what we could to make him feel a part of our tribe. We took turns sitting next to him at dinner, trying hard to anticipate his needs, our eyes focused on the eyes that couldn’t focus on us.
A few days in, Randall said something to Dennis—don’t ask me what, it was all so long ago. Nevertheless, I remember feeling that his comment had seemed unnecessarily cruel, spiteful even, and though we were just innocent boys back then—still scared by the minnows that nipped our toes—we knew we had to retaliate.
Later that day, while Dennis slapped his cane along the blacktop, four of us sprawled ourselves on the lodge porch plotting against Randall. We knew Buckethead was his weakness, so we figured we’d scare him. We wanted him to feel cruelty, too.
As we tried to figure out how, I offhandedly mentioned the bucket beneath my bunk.
“What kind of bucket?” asked Paul.
“The right kind,” I whispered.
That night, after campfire, we marched through the woods to the shower house as we’d done every night that week. We were an awkward bunch—some of us less suited for the wilderness than others (“Something bit my butt!”)—and our three-minute trek always seemed to stretch on much longer. Somebody (usually me) was always dropping his shower caddy in the leaves, or getting his towel stuck in the craggy arms of the branches. That night, I broke a spider web with my face and felt terrible for what I’d done to that poor creature.
Who knows where our counselor was, probably attending to a scraped knee or a poison ivy outbreak. Years later, when I was the counselor, I could confirm that these injuries were endless, that it was impossible for nine-year-old boys not to sprain ankles or stumble into wasp nests. Whatever our counselor’s alibi, it meant we were momentarily alone in that shower house, our mud-caked shoes tromping against the moldy tiles while we bit back guilty grins. The overhead lights gave us shadows, while a screened window invited in the summer heat. It was not hard to imagine decades of summers of boys just like us being baptized beneath those showerheads. Or if not there, then in the lake, or the mud, or half-drowned in the smoke around those campfires. I have seen black-and-white photographs from those ancient times, pictures of boys in war paint who—with the exception of Bobby (if there ever was a Bobby)—were lucky enough to grow to become old men.
Yet we thought little of history or our place in it as we kicked our clothes into a pile and positioned ourselves beneath those showerheads. We thought little of the story we would become. Our thoughts remained on Randall as he snapped a towel or two our way (“Take that, suckers!”). We did. We took it. He would get his soon enough.
A light flickered, a bug zapped, and I began reciting my line.
“Guys,” I said rather unconvincingly. “I think I saw Buckethead out the window.”
Refusing to look himself, Randall pretended to study the soap in his washcloth.
“Did you?” asked Dennis, reaching for my arm.
“Aw, he didn’t see jack shit,” Randall said.
“Then look,” someone pressed. “Why don’t you look?”
Newly emboldened, Randall marched bare-assed toward the screen and peeked out.
“See? Nothing out there but . . .”
We killed the lights as Paul pounded his plastic head against the shower house screen. His moans were louder than ours, more desperate, how I imagined a sheep might sound in the final thrusts of labor. I couldn’t see Paul’s face behind the bucket, but I thought of Bobby’s, what his might’ve looked like had his tragedy been true.
Randall screamed—it was all we wanted from him—so we flicked on the lights and told Paul to remove his bucket.
But what we saw with the lights on was far worse than what Randall had seen with them off:
Dennis—our friend, our charge—curled naked on the mossy tiles.
We’d underestimated the effect of confusion on a blind boy.
“Hey, Dennis, it was no one,” I said, hovering over him. “We were trying to teach a lesson.” The others gathered around him, touching his shoulder and his forehead to let him know they were there.
Dennis kept shaking, and as we repeatedly asked if he was all right—if he’d pull through—he just kept shaking, not quite a yes or a no.
Who can remember what happened on the walk back to the cabin that night? Randall shut his foul mouth for a change—I remember that much—and a pair of us may have threaded our arms through Dennis’s as we led him back through the woods.
That night, for the first time, we went to bed without talking.
“Finally tuckered you out,” our counselor said upon his return. “About time.”
While the others slept, I became newly afraid of the dark. I’d never needed a nightlight before, though I needed one then—the sliver of moon refracting off the lake seemed suddenly insufficient. Still, I took comfort where I could, reminding myself that the bucket was back beneath my bunk, that for the moment it wasn’t hiding anyone’s flesh-eaten face.
The box fan on the windowsill out-hummed the crickets, but I still knew they were out there, chirping as Buckethead’s sea-weeded shoes dragged along the overgrown trails. My imagination conjured him so clearly—a boy more scared than scary grasping in the dark, hoping for something to touch or to touch him.
Across from me, Dennis lay in his bunk, his hands folded across his chest. I couldn’t tell if he was awake or not, if he was afraid or not, so I balanced on my elbow to have a look.
“Hey, you still up?” I whispered. He didn’t answer.
But his eyes, like mine, were wide.