S u m m e r   o f   S m i t t y

We stayed up all night until after the park ranger called the police. Until after the fire trucks drove over our camp site. Until after the news cameras were shoved in our faces, on the highway outside the campground. It was the last summer of our lives, but we were too young to know and too stupid to care. The summer of Smitty.

We were hopped up on dime store wieners and no sleep. We sat in a half-circle around the campfire, seven or eight of us, corralled within a ring of olive drab scout tents. We tried making each other puke by telling grosser and grosser stories. They started out pretty lame, but by the end of the night I could taste sour hotdogs in the back of my throat.

Stories about zombie invasions—yawn! One about aliens harvesting human organs—snore! Another about a kid locked in a mortuary, eating corpses to stay alive—zzzzz… We all had our turns at bat except for one last kid. And all our stories had struck out. Barely even made it to third base.

At first base you whisper cuss words to yourself. At second base, there's nervous laughter. Third base, you taste sour hotdogs in the back of your throat. Home run, you puke.

Bases were loaded with nowhere to go but home plate. There was one kid left in the lineup. It was Smitty. Smitty the shy kid. Never raised his hand in class. Never talked.

Pissy-Pants Smitty. The kid who peed himself in fifth grade home room class because he was too chicken to raise his hand. Fifth grade, pissing in his pants.

Smitty the geek. He liked putting things in his mouth. His fingers, wads of paper, kitty litter. He ate bits of things from the floor like a toddler. Shag carpet was his all-you-can-eat buffet. His mouth would pucker like a hungry goldfish as he slid things into it. He had no lips, just a little round hole that never fully closed. You could hear it whispering air sometimes. And his full-moon face made it look even smaller. A Mr. Bill face made out of Spaghettios.

Rumor has it that his sister narced on him for drawing profanity with their mother’s good china markers. So he snuck into her room after school and chewed the head off one of her pet baby hamsters. He shoved its body inside the toe of her sneaker. We didn’t see him at school for a while after that. Probably got stuck in bed with some rodent disease, crapping out worms and parasites.

Rumor has it that a pack of schoolyard bullies trapped him inside a bathroom stall until he gargled their piss. They passed around an empty Dole fruit can and took turns filling it while one of them made him watch. They filled it warm and yellow. It was summer and the pranksters were dehydrated, so the pee was hot orange juice concentrate. Viscous, pungent, and burning on the way out. Mother Nature’s napalm.

Rumor has it that his old man locked him in the tool shed for refusing to eat his lima beans. They said he was in there for so long he went mute and his hair turned white.

His old man went psycho overseas just after Smitty was born. His brain wired itself backward during his tour of the Far East. Sergeant Schmidt Berger II watched his platoon buddies get blown to soldier bits in the rice paddy fields. He survived alone in a hole in the mud until the Victor Charlie were cleared out and he was saved. Nobody likes to talk about what happened to the guys who were made to go in with napalm tanks strapped to their backs, guns ablaze with liquid fire. Guys like Sgt. Schmidt Berger II and the rest of his platoon. Nobody likes to talk about what blown-up soldier bits taste like cooked over a chemical fire, served over hard rice.

Smitty’s old man came back all messed up. He came back too proud to get help for the shell shock, so he drank the ghosts away instead. He used to say that a man needs to hit rock bottom before he knows anything about living. So Sgt. Schmidt Berger II locked his kid in the rat-infested tool shed for insubordination. His defiant little soldier boy.

Rumor has it that Smitty survived locked in that POW shed on spiders and old gasoline. Spiders, because the rats were too smart to catch. The reason he didn’t die from drinking gasoline was because it’d been rotting and collecting condensation in storage. The water part separated from the fuel part, so all he had to do was smooch the surface with his guppy mouth and skim the top layer. You could probably drink skimmed gas for a while before it turned you permanently retarded.

There’s always that one kid in class with the stupid name everyone makes fun of. Like Dorkus or Lipschitz or Tittsworth. Smitty’s real name was Schmidt Berger III. He was a junior, named after his psycho old man who ate his soldier buddies. Schmidt Berger III was what the teachers read from their roll call sheets for the first week of school, until they could remember your preferred names for the remainder of the year. Until the emotional damage had already been done. Until after you became the name that rhymes with shit burger turd, forever.

Schmidt Berger th’third Schmidt Berger th’third Schmidt Berger th’third. Say it three times fast and it sounds like shit burger turd. Sounds like something you’d order at the Roy Rogers. The one on the corner of Elm and Main, “Gimme a junior shit burger with cheese and a side of turd fries.” Warm, brown, and steaming between two pasty talcum-powdered buns. You taste it in the back of your throat every time you say your order to the big talking pile of pimples working the register.

Now it was Smitty’s turn to bat. He was nervous. Real nervous. The rest of us waited all night for this. He would’ve been sweating bullets if it wasn’t for a glandular imbalance. Damnedest thing. Coach would make him run laps for refusing to participate in team sports and the kid would be boiling in the sun and he wouldn’t break a bead of sweat. He perspired through his tear ducts like those lizards that shoot blood from the edges of their eyeballs when cornered.

Smitty the freak. He sat there on his stump, refusing to stand up to tell his story. Just sat there sucking his thumb. The anticipation of what might come out of his mouth had us chomping at the bit. So the kid sitting next to him shoved him to his feet. Smitty just stood there scanning us with his tiny pink baby hamster eyes. Like a field mouse in a flashlight. He clutched himself like he was naked, stubby arms groping the smooth, plump flesh. Tube socks sagged around his stick ankles. One shoe had one of those thick platform soles, but somehow he was still lopsided. His beige shorts were snug and his tighty-wities spilled out over the waistband. They were so old the fruit guys on the tag had either died or jumped ship. His belly peeked out from under a faded yellow baseball tee with The Bionic Woman ironed onto the front. Someone had cut it into a midriff with dull scissors. The ragged bottom edge creased his gut above the navel. The stretched out ironed-on face of Jaime Sommers laid across his chest, loose and saggy. It had been his older sister's shirt. He had to wear her hand-me-downs as she began to fill out.

Donna Berger had a rousing growth spurt over the course of that summer. She had involuntarily graduated from junior’s to the women’s clothing department seemingly overnight. Graduated with honors. Valedictorian. Summa cum laude. We couldn’t help but take notice of her battle against her wardrobe of shrinking shorts and tops. She was almost old enough to go to school with students who smoked during lunch break. Almost old enough to wear black rock and roll tee shirts with the sleeves and neckline cut off.

The Bergers had a weedy patch of a back yard surrounded by a privacy wall. A brick one with fancy wrought iron spikes along the top. The yard butted up to a vacant lot bristling with wild blackberry shrubs. The thorny, spiky kind. Every weekday afternoon from 3:45 to 4:06, Donna would cram into her junior girls two-piece swimsuit from last summer and bask in the sun’s radiation. For her, every weekday afternoon was a race to do this trivial but liberating act of defiance before her disapproving old man came home from work.

One tenacious kid sacrificed himself for the team. He'd be dead by the end of summer, but his contribution to our cause would make him legendary. Bubble gum trading card legendary. For four days straight, after school, the kid tunneled through the spikes and thorns with his pocket knife and scrape-scrape-scraped at the mortar between the bricks on the backside of the Bergers’ security compound. Like Frank Morris escaping from Alcatraz, carving out a VIP front row seat to the greatest show on Earth.

On day one, he scrape-scrape-scraped, on his knees. Day two. Day three. On day four, scraping, on his knees, until one eye-level brick came loose.

And on the fourth day the Donna Berger show aired its pilot episode.

Every weekday we’d sprint five blocks. Straight from our bus stop to the afterschool peepshow. 3:44 sharp. Probably right as Donna began wrestling her persistent little swimsuit into submission. Her old man came home from the mall at 4:08, everyday. On the button. We set our watches to it.

That twenty-one-minute window gave us roughly three minutes each, alone at the brick-shaped peep hole. On your knees, doing whatever you wanted for three whole minutes. Like you’re in a confession booth. Just slide the brick out, say your Hail Donnas, and prepare for the religious experience.

Hail, Donna, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blossomed art thou among women and ripened is the fruit of thy bosom.

Amen. Say it again.

We’d line up next to that hole in the wall in order of who ran there the fastest. Crouched between the bricks and thorn bushes, with scratches up and down our arms and legs. Until it was your turn at bat, you’d turn your back and wait. You’d line up like in a little league dugout. Everyone stared at their watches, especially the next kid up to bat. He made sure the one at the peep hole didn’t try to steal extra time.

When Donna got up from her lawn chair with her skin sparkling with sweat, that left about two minutes to plug the hole and run the brambled gauntlet to freedom before Sgt. Berger pulled up in the driveway.

Smitty got off at the same bus stop as the rest of us. With his platform duck foot and his knees knocking together, he couldn’t keep up with us. But he knew about our game. We said we’d pound him if he ever narced to his sister. He didn’t.

Or maybe he did. Maybe Donna knew she was on stage and soaked up the limelight just like the afternoon cancer rays. Lounging in that lawn chair like she was posing for the underwear section in the Sears Catalog.

The angry scratches all up and down our arms and legs, we could hide. But not the ones on our faces. The collective gasps of our mothers, when they noticed their immaculate little boys bearing the scars of prepubescent rites of passage, sucked a big fat hole in the ozone layer above our nondescript middle-American suburb. So they freaked. They used their power of influence on the PTA to hire a company to dump sodium arsenite on the lot, destroying the unholy blackberry bushes from Hell. More toxic than the chemical in varnish. You could smell the cancer in the faucet water for a long time after that.

They effectively pulled the plug on our afterschool special, and our weekdays suddenly became wide open. So we all joined the boy scouts. Smitty’s mother made him join too, to break him of his shyness.

Then a kid showed up at the bus stop one morning with a wad of magazines he’d swiped from behind his old man’s toilet. And just like that, our afterschool special was back on the air. It never matched the raw intimacy of Donna’s live show, but hey…

It was the last summer of our lives. But we were too young to know and too stupid to give a crap.

Smitty stood there bulging in his canary yellow midriff with his knobby knees locked together. Like the chicken lady from the ending of that 1930’s freak show movie.

Did I mention he smelled like a furniture factory? Like a furniture warehouse moonlighting as a fruit-packing plant. He smelled like apple varnish. His scout tent did too, like it was stored all winter in the back of his old man’s furniture repair van. Sgt. Berger ran a furniture repair kiosk in the middle of Oak Grove mall because that’s really all he could do after coming home from the jungle with his brain wired backward.

You’d cart your old lady’s scuffed up gossip bench through the center of the mall and he’d have it ready to go by the time you choked down your giant mall-pretzel. The kind with the salt bits the size of water softener pellets.

Smitty smelled like he bathed in it. Varnish, not water softener pellets. Our fearless scoutmaster hadn’t said anything to him about it all weekend. Didn't speak to none of us, really. Mr. Fearless just holed himself up in his half truck/half car GMC Caballero the whole trip. A couple times a day he’d chuck a plastic liter bottle out the window. They looked like someone poured Mello Yello into empty RC Cola bottles. He must’ve drawn the short straw during one of his wet weekends. He was passed out in the cab of his truck/car thing while a pack of preteens armed with pocket knives stoked a pyre of blazing pine cones during one of the worst droughts in the state’s history.

Shitty Smitty. He was standing front and center with his hands down the back of his tight little jogging shorts with blue ringer stripes, down inside his skivvies. Someone kicked him from behind. Not hard, just so he spun to the side so we could all take a peek at his rear. Another kid laughed, then more joined in, because there was a big wet bulge in the seat of Smitty’s shorts, deep down in his drawers. His hands fished around for it and fondled it. God, we laughed so loud. He just stood there with his back to us, head down, fingering that load in his shorts. He just stood there while we heckled. All of us losing it, with the whole forest chattering and cawing and howling at ol’ saggy-bottom Schmidt.

Then he turned around.

The tip of his tongue wormed out of the little claymation mouth. Like a shy pink turtlehead turd. He sucked on the tip until it turned white. One kid said for us to shut up ‘cause he’s about to say somethin’. Another kid piped up and asked him if he’s gonna say nothin’ or what. There were resounding yeah’s and ain’tcha’s and c’mon spill it already’s.

Then something nobody expected happened. One of those once-in-a-lifetime hush-hush taboo things that happens to everybody but you’d never dare admit to it. Not in a thousand-million years would you let that cat out of the bag, even though you know that everyone’s done it. Even your grandmother's done it. Especially your grandmother.

Smitty shit himself.

“Lookit his leg!” said somebody, “there’s somethin’ drippin’ down his leg!”

Sure as sin. Sure as all get-out, a wet dribble of something glistened in the light of the campfire. It was brown. A long shiny dribble slowly oozed out from under a tight leg of Smitty’s dingy beige shorts. Ol’ Shitty Smitty just farted a trickle of diarrhea in front of God and country, and all the rest of us.

We snorted and groaned and laughed. But as humor turns to disgust, you can’t do anything but make that slow, nervous, uncomfortable laugh and glance around at everybody else to make sure they’re just as nervous and uncomfortable as you are. Because you realize that you’ve done the same disgusting thing at least once in your life. One kid, he might’ve had a nervous tic or something, started barking like a dog. Yipping and stabbing his finger toward Smitty.

It broke the tension. The flood gates opened again, and all of us were rolling and falling off our camp logs and stumps, in the dirt. And Smitty just stood there with his tiny glass eyes sparkling in the firelight. Oblivious and retarded-looking, with one hand coming out from the rear of his shorts. It lifted ever so slowly, like slow motion, up to his face. And then we all watched his pug nostrils flare. He lifted that brown drippy finger up under his nose and we could all see him sniff it. A deep, satisfying whiff. He closed his eyes in the moment. It must’ve really hit the spot.

We’ve all done it, sniffed our own diarrhea fart fingers when we thought nobody’s watching. Or how you sniff your hand after shaking somebody else's. You know you do it. Studies have confirmed it, sicko.

We exploded. The cacophony of cackles and hooting and knee clapping tore through Mother Nature’s sweet splendor. We kept on going until we laughed our guts raw. Until someone shouted, “Hey look!”

Something else was happening. An unstoppable thing no one expected in a thousand-million years.

Smitty’s other hand, the one groping around in his rear end, slid out. It came out holding something black and glistening in the firelight.

Not a turd.

A gun.

Smitty, silhouetted against the hellfire of blazing pine cones like a pale, wingless devil, had a gun. A big black shiny handgun, held at arms’ length, his elbows locked, both hands gripping the handle like he’s never held one before. Because none of us ever had. Sgt. Berger’s little soldier boy. Nobody laughed after that. Nobody laughed the rest of the weekend. Some of us never laughed again.

We all kinda sat there and crouched there and laid there in the dirt, wherever we ended up after falling from our log benches and stumps. We were in shock. It was like a dream, with all of us rubbing our eyes from campfire soot and too much laughing and lack of sleep.

Smitty pulled through after all. A home run. MVP. The rest of us were all tasting sour hotdogs in the backs of our throats. I remember one kid peeing himself but nobody noticed until the paramedics cut his shorts off him later that night.

Smitty could’ve stopped right there and then and we’d’ve all lined up to clap him on the back for scaring the puke out of us. We'd've say, “You got us, old chum. You really got us good! Truly, you came through as a shining example of our order, old chap!” We’d’ve swiped the backs of our hands across our sweaty, nervous foreheads saying, “Great work, again, for allowing us the pleasure of puking and peeing ourselves.” He could’ve gone home that night with a big fat first place blue ribbon and a published article in Boy’s Life magazine. But no, Smitty didn’t stop there and then. Smitty swung for the fences with bases loaded. Home freakin’ run.

The part I’ll never forget is how we all thought we were gonna get shot and die. Screaming, riddled-full-of-holes dead. Smitty was gonna shoot us dead for all the insidious pranks we pulled on him that summer. For all the mean things we said about his slutty sister and his psycho old man.

For the time we took Polaroids of him taking a dump under the gymnasium bleachers and taped them up in the girls' locker room.

For the time we filled his lunch Thermos with storm drain water. Topped off with mashed bug bits and spittle and anything else our perverted minds could think up. He almost choked. The kid who drank gasoline almost keeled over from bug water. Who’da thunk it.

I remember that part so well, about us thinking we were gonna die a quick bullet-hole death, because what actually happened was way, way worse. Some of us wished we had been shot full of bullet holes that night. None of us were laughing. Some of us never laughed again.

Smitty’s fingers flexed around the trigger of the gun. It made a chk-swsh sound. The kid closest to Smitty yelped like a girl and rubbed his eyes. A second flex of Smitty’s fingers and the tip of the gun spit something brown and oily. The gun arced over us, spitting us with brown pungent sputum.

Suddenly we were at the Oak Grove mall, choking down giant mall-pretzels and waiting for Smitty’s old man to finish the job on our wife’s gossip bench.

Varnish. We were being shot with wood varnish. From a squirt gun.

The kid in front who yelped stood up, “Yer gonna get it, geek!” and groped at Smitty with an extended arm, rubbing his swollen eyes with his other hand, “I’m gonna pound you, you stupid freak tard!”

The rest of us watched, with our mouths falling open, as the kid went blind.

Smitty waddled backward on his out-toed duck feet until he had the protection of the campfire in front of him. The blind kid shuffled forward with one hand extended like a shield, using the heat of the fire as a measure of where not to step. Smitty held the squirt pistol at arm’s length, zeroed in on the kid. His pink little mouse eyes watered from the heat, and the Bionic Woman on the front of his tee would’ve been plastered to his saggy chest if his sweat glands worked.

As the slow motion game of retard tag played out, something was happening to the gun. Thin lines of black liquid tar dangled from it like strings of sick dog drool. It melted and slid off in rivulets, running down Smitty’s hands and down his arms, leaving bright red trails in the skin.

It was paint. Smitty had painted the gun black so it would look real, and now the stuff was melting his skin off in the heat of the campfire. The soft creases and crannies in the plastic gun were filling themselves in and smoothing into a a misshapen blob. It was swelling. The gun bloated in the heat like it drank too many Mello Yellos.

All that chromium arsenate mixed in with the varnish yearned to be set free. The goop contained in the flimsy plastic toy was reaching the critical temperature at which it goes thermal. Nuclear. Chemical changes taking place, eventually releasing arsenic and other forever-poisons into the wild.

Same goes for napalm. All you need is gasoline and a crapload of polystyrene. Cheapo lawn mower fuel and Styrofoam, is all. Fill a good-sized bucket halfway with gas and stir in chunks of Styrofoam until they dissolve. Keep dropping them in until you get a thick jelly the color of a urinary infection. Then load that into a pressure washer with a lit rag on the tip. Homemade napalm. Liquid death.

The soft plastic plug holding back all that pressure shot out the back with a pop! Hot chemical splooge ejaculated from the gun’s butthole into Smitty’s face. Like popping a swollen cheek pimple, hot with infection, that squirts brown juice into your eye when you squeeze it. Smitty made an injured bird noise, and a slow hand came up to shield his face. Too late.

Varnish dribbled down into his mouth and down his chin and stained Donna’s old stretched out midriff.

The blind kid sidestepped from the pop sound the gun made and stumbled over a smoldering pine cone. A spray of embers showered up and over Smitty. The floaty flecks of fire stuck to Smitty's cheeks and chest where the chemicals had stained it wet. Bright orange freckles with short fuses.

We all sat there and laid there and kneeled there in our own personal theater of horror in the woods. Slow motion Hell. Smitty and the blind kid lumbered in front of us. Two dim-witted imps ad-libbing their way across a stage of fire and death. VIP front row seats. A chain reaction unfolded on the stage:

The ember freckles ignited the glossy brown stains on Smitty’s cheeks.

The flames traced a white hot line down his chin, down inside his open Spaghettio mouth.

The wet Bionic Woman on his chest caught fire.

His hand wiping at his burning face caught fire.

His hand reached out for the gun and the gun caught fire.

Smitty burped wispy green flames from his mouth. His head looked like a sideways science project volcano made out of paper mache and Elmer’s school paste. He musta swallowed some varnish. Petroleum-based. It does not mix with water, ever. It burns underwater like napalm. Smitty’s mother Bernice had delusions about her baby boy joining the junior glee club someday, to break him of his shyness. Smitty’s singing days just went up in flames.

Bernice Berger would’ve worn long house-dresses to the beach, instead of swimsuits, if she were allowed to go to the beach. If she were allowed to drive to the beach, or drive at all. If Sgt. Schmidt Berger hadn’t run such a tight ship.

On Sunday mornings her heavyhanded husband dropped her and the kids off at church. Then he’d park in the empty lot of the American Legion down the street, gulping down giant mall-pretzels and trunk-beers until he decided it was time to haul his Berger brood back to the homestead. He drank the cheap canary yellow beers that looked the same in a bottle as they do in a toilet bowl.

By that many beers, he’d get the family home, already pickling with reasons to hate what his life had become after being saved from the jungle a decorated coward. Hiding in a hole in the mud with a belly full of his buddies’ soldier bits.

By that many beers, Smitty was a genetic defect contrived by his manipulative whore of a mother. A mute man-baby. A plump, little bacon strip underwear shit stain on the long line of proud Shit Burgers that came before him.

By that many beers, Donna was an insubordinate trollop who would end up as one of those middle of the night visits by a forlorn uniformed officer, “We regret to inform you, sir, madam, that your daughter is dead. Your unruly little slut of a daughter OD’ed on pills and swiped a razor down her wrists behind the grease barrels at the Roy Rogers. The one on the corner of Elm and Main.”

So he’d get them home and poison them with curses and insults. Bernice would feed him more beers until he forgot to be mad at the kids anymore. By that many beers, he could only focus on the woman standing in front of him. The kids would slink to their rooms and cover their ears until the yelling and hitting stopped. But the sobbing sounds that always came after was always, always worse.

Next day, her remorseful husband would come home from the mall with a department store box. Long-sleeved tops to conceal the dark blotches on her arms. It was his own sicko, brain-wired-backward way of putting things right again.

The world is cruel. People are, too. So Bernice shielded her kids from the cruelty the best she knew how. Donna would probably end up okay if she made it past high school. But Smitty’s odds of success were not in his favor. Smitty wasn’t made for this world. The world wasn’t made for people like Smitty.

Soldier boy Smitty. He stood there gargling hot varnish. The plastic gun, set ablaze in his hands, spit again. But this time it didn’t just splash a kid in the eyes. This time it didn’t just stain someone’s faded canary yellow midriff. Smitty squeezed it, hard. He must’ve been in shock from fire burping because he just stood there squeezing with his bright pink charcoal fingers pulling back on the trigger. Two constipated plugs of melted plastic strained inside the tips of the gun’s puckered mouth and anus until they burst into hot, sticky shrapnel. A stream of molten diarrhea vomited from each end, glossy and brown and on fire with green flames.

Smitty swung the glowing napalm ribbon side to side and let the pressurized chemicals do the heavy lifting. The glowing green geyser streaming out the front end tagged all of us. Ankles, eyes, arms, all of us stained diarrhea brown. And on fire.

Smitty took the rear geyser full in the face and head. White hair turned brown and wet, then green an instant later. The top half of Smitty was a funeral pyre of brown-stained wreckage. A pale, half-charred bedpost with a flaming moon face finial screwed on top. Like from that burning bed movie with Farrah Fawcett that your parents wouldn’t let you watch until you were older.

Smitty was Sgt. Schmidt Berger II, hosing down the Victor Charlie with his napalm gun while his soldier buddies fermented in his guts. He would earn that Medal of Honor for his platoon or be damned. Eating them was the only way he could carry all of them out of that rice paddy Hell. Killing them, then eating them. They didn’t even put up a fight. They went down surprisingly easy cooked over a chemical fire. Served over hard rice. In that foreign world of fire and death, it was the only thing that made sense to Sgt. Berger. Everything becomes clearer after your brain wires itself backward. As clear as the jungle canopy the morning after an agent orange flyover.

They find you in a hole in the mud and ship you back home, a decorated coward. And you’d line up to do it all over again, for God and country, if they asked you.

The blind kid brushed past the burning pyre of Smitty and escaped through a gap between the tents. He would turn out the hero in the end.

The pressure in the lump of plastic held in Smitty’s hands kept building until it finally exploded. It went thermal. Nuclear. Sticky hot lava sprayed us, sprayed Smitty, sprayed the dry cotton canvas tents hemming us all in.

The tents that were hit went up fast. The other ones caught fire from the flying embers. Then Smitty’s tent, the one with the backpack and canteens and lunch boxes packed with varnish, fireballed up into the stars. A blinding green column of flames and flying bits of canvas fabric and sleeping bag and old stretched out midriffs rained down on top of us. All of it on fire.

One kid tried to dig himself under one of the heavy log benches. His shirt was burning off and his blistery back gleamed in the firelight, lacquered and lustrous. He was crying. Another kid rubbed fist-fulls of dirt into his own face because his eyes were sticky and brown and on fire. He was crying, too. Another kid panicked and ran into the safety of his burning tent. He cried, but then stopped a short while later.

There was another kid. And another one. And maybe one more. All of us sticky and smoldering with patches of molten varnish, and trapped inside a circular wall of tent fires.

The air raid siren echoed through the heat, and suddenly we were in a foreign jungle, overseas, with agent orange raining down on us through the smoke screen. The part I’ll never forget is how the chemical mist felt cool and soothing on our peeling skin.

Or maybe it was raining, and the thunder sounded just like cop cars.

Or maybe it wasn’t raining, after all.

Or maybe the chemical rain was actually water from fire hoses, and red lights from emergency trucks discoed through the camp site.

We were taken out on stretchers and shoved into the backs of the white emergency trucks. Even the kids that were charred black and had stopped crying were taken out on stretchers. They even stretchered out a shriveled piece of kid-shaped charcoal from one of the tents and loaded it into a truck.

Later that week, Weekly World News published the front page headline: “Blind Kid, Pickled Scoutmaster Save Campers From Albino Fire Devil.”

A sauced Mr. Fearless had driven the blind kid to the ranger station. The ranger had called the cops. Then they had called the fire department.

Smitty the legend. They found him standing in the mud next to the campfire’s soupy ashes. They found him dead, but still standing on his splayed duck feet, with his knees braced together. A grotesque garden statue made of half-burnt matchsticks, part gnome, part bird. His hands rested against his belly, fused together in a lump of black plastic. They tipped him over and took him away on a stretcher.

He ended up as one of those middle of the night visits by a forlorn uniformed officer, “We regret to inform you, sir, madam, that your son is dead. Your defective shit stain of a son popped his cork and torched his entire platoon to a crisp before eating their boy scout bits.”

They shipped him out to his parents in a Smitty-shaped pine box, a decorated coward. No Medal of Honor. No Boy Scout Atomic Energy merit badge. Just a brief mention in a two-column writeup in Boy’s Life magazine about camping safety and the dangers of combustible materials.

We've all had that one summer that seemed to last forever, the one that changed you forever. For us, it was the summer of Smitty. It was the last summer of our lives, but we were too young to know and too stupid to care.