Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

two struggling boys in bathing suits, Femi with a swollen nostril leaking blood. “I’ll kill that filthy little nigger bastard,” panted Femi in his Mayfair accent, wiping his nose with his coal-black arm. “I’ll smear his dirty little arse all over the beach. He called me a monkey!”

“He spit on me,” the Thunderbird was muttering, scuffling his feet in the sand. “Motherfucker spit on me.”

Marvin Jones was called over to make peace. “This ain’t no way to act,” he began, but his tone was insincere, the tone of a showman bent on pleasing everyone. He sent a quick, shifty grin over to the Thunderbirds standing near him, and one of them suddenly shoved a camper, who went sprawling into the lake. In the boys’ swim group a general melee broke out between campers and Thunderbirds, the tanned bodies of the campers mingling wildly with the small, dark, muscular Thunderbirds. The two counselors were themselves dragged in. Pairs of boys bolted, yelling threats, and ran off into the woods.

The girls at the lake, both Thunderbirds and campers, were quickly marched off to our tents, where we were told to sit quietly. Back at her trunk, Chen-cheu looked and found that someone had taken three of her prettiest t-shirts and a new bathing suit. When she complained loudly about it, she found herself surrounded by three Thunderbird girls, including our tentmate Belinda. They began to jostle Chen-cheu and to pluck at her long black hair; Chen-cheu promptly socked Belinda in the stomach. Our counselor Molly came running down the path from the rec hall at precisely the moment when Chen-cheu, propelled by a nasty push, came flying out of the tent to sprawl in the dust and shriek out a string of curses that even Ellen and I had never heard her use. Her beautiful face was contorted and almost purple with rage, but she wasn’t crying. None of us were. After that we were separated from the Thunderbird girls.

Meanwhile, the boys were being rounded up. I heard later that a number of them were found grappling in twos and threes in the woods; there were surprisingly few injuries beyond a few black eyes and bloody noses. “We had a plan,” one of the boy campers said afterward. “We were going to barricade ourselves in the infirmary and fight ’em off from there. Firebomb them.”

The Thunderbird boys, escorted by several strapping counselors called in from a tennis camp across the lake, were confined to the rec hall. By eleven o’clock on a fine, sharp, hot August morning, Camp Grayfeather had settled into a stillness in which the only sounds were those of a sublimely untroubled nature—birdsong, the harsh whirring of cicadas; the light slapping of waves on the lake shore.

None of us was surprised to discover that the Thunderbirds were to be sent home. I sat with nine other girls on the sagging bunks of our tent as Hannah Woolworth, her plump, kindly face pale and drawn with strain beneath its sunburn and freckles, talked to us. “We all feel that it would be better and safer for everyone,” she said. “We don’t want any of you kids getting hurt.”

When she said “you kids,” it was clear that she did not mean the Thunderbirds.

I looked at Ellen and Chen-cheu, and they looked back at me. Events were passing, as usual, into the unreachable sphere of adult justice, and though there was a certain relief in that, it also seemed sad. For a day and a half, the Thunderbirds, like a small natural disaster, had given an edge of crazy danger to life at Grayfeather; now the same powers that had brought them to us were taking them away.

“We didn’t even get a chance to learn all their names,” said Ellen slowly, after Hannah Woolworth had left.

A flicker of resentment ran through the group of girls crowded together in the tent, and Ellen and I began, with an obscure feeling of defiance, to teach the others the song that the Thunderbirds had sung for us under the oak tree the day before.

In about two hours, after we’d eaten a large pile of bologna sandwiches on horrid white bread, sandwiches that the camp cook had provided as a sort of emergency take-out lunch, we heard through the woods the unmistakable sound of a bus. “We’ve got to see this,” I said.

Five of us—Ellen, Chen-cheu and I, and two other girls—jumped up and, against the strict instructions left us by our absent counselor, took off toward the rec hall. We didn’t take the path but ran dodging like Indian spies through the underbrush, stifling occasional nervous giggles and trying to avoid the poison ivy. When we got to the edge of the clearing, we stood discreetly back in the bushes and observed the scene. The midday sun gave the clearing a close, sleepy feeling. The Thunderbirds, their spirits apparently undaunted, stood in a rambunctious platoon behind a grim-faced Ned Woolworth, and the familiar graffiti-covered school bus was just coming to a halt in the parking lot.

We could see that the same tall, curly-haired man who had delivered the Thunderbirds was coming to pick them up; this time he was wearing a green eyeshade, as if he’d been interrupted during a stretch of desk work. He came quickly down the bus steps and strode over to stand in front of the assembled Thunderbirds. “Well,” he said, clapping his hands together, “what the hell have you guys been doing now?”

The Thunderbirds, all of them, broke into loud laughter, as if he had just told them the best joke in the world.

“We ain’t been doing nothing, man,” answered Marvin Jones, rocking on his heels. “Just being ourselves!”

The curly-haired man pulled off his visor and sighed so that even we could hear him, fixing his weary, skeptical gaze for a second on Marvin Jones’s scarred face, and then on the golden hills and fields of the Delaware countryside rolling into the distance. He talked to Ned Woolworth in a