So it went throughout that year of ephemeral crushes and round-robin loves, which was also the year when more and more of his friends turned up at school with braces on their teeth, and the year when everyone began to worry about outbreaks of bad skin. Ferguson felt lucky. So far, his face had been attacked by just three or four modest volcanoes, which he had popped at the first opportunity, and his parents had decided his teeth were straight enough to spare him the ordeals of orthodontia. More than that, they had insisted he go back to Camp Paradise for another summer. He had assumed that thirteen was perhaps a bit too old for camp and had therefore asked his father over the Christmas holidays if he could spend July and August working at the tennis center, but his father had laughed, saying there would be plenty of time for work later. You need to be out in the air, Archie, his father told him, running around with boys your own age. Besides, you can’t get your working papers until you’re fourteen. Not in New Jersey you can’t, and you wouldn’t want to get me into trouble for breaking the law, would you?
FERGUSON WAS HAPPY at camp. He had always been happy there, and it was good to be reunited with his New York summer friends, the half dozen city boys who kept going back year after year as he did. He took pleasure in the eternal sarcasm and humor of their fast-talking, high-spirited selves, which often reminded him of the way American soldiers spoke to one another in movies about World War II, the jocular, wisecracking banter, the compulsion never to take anything seriously, to turn every situation into an excuse for yet another joke or mocking aside. No doubt there was something admirable about attacking life with such wit and irreverence, but it could also become wearisome at times, and whenever Ferguson had his fill of his cabinmates’ verbal antics, he would find himself missing Howard, his close friend of the past two years, the closest friend he had ever had, and with Howard far away at his aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Vermont, where he spent all his summers, Ferguson began writing letters to him during the one-hour rest period after lunch, numerous short and long letters in which he set down whatever he happened to be thinking about at the moment, for Howard was the one person in the world he could unburden himself to, the one person he was not afraid to trust or confide in, the singular, unimpeachable friend with whom he could share everything, from criticisms of other people to comments about books he had read to musings about the difficulty of suppressing farts in public to thoughts about God.
There were sixteen letters in all, and Howard kept them in a square wooden box, holding on to them even after he had grown up and begun his life as an adult because the thirteen-year-old Ferguson, his friend of the straight teeth and shining countenance, the founder of the long defunct but never forgotten Cobble Road Crusader, the boy who had broken his leg at six and gashed his foot at three and nearly drowned at five, who had weathered the depredations of the Gang of Nine and the Band of Four, who had kissed Gloria Dolan and Susie Krauss and Peggy Goldstein, who had been counting the days until he entered the kingdom of erotic bliss, who had assumed and expected and entirely taken for granted that there were many years of life still in front of him, did not live to the end of the summer. That was why Howard Small saved those sixteen letters — because they were the last traces of Ferguson’s presence on this earth.
“I don’t believe in God anymore,” he wrote in one of them. “At least not the God of Judaism, Christianity, or any other religion. The Bible says that God created man in his own image. But men wrote the Bible, didn’t they? Which means that man created God in his image. Which also means that God doesn’t watch over us, and he certainly doesn’t give a damn about what men think or do or feel. If he cared about us at all, he wouldn’t have made a world with so many terrible things in it. Men wouldn’t fight wars and kill each other and build concentration camps. They wouldn’t lie and cheat and steal. I’m not saying that God didn’t create the world (no man did that!), but once the job was done he disappeared into the atoms and molecules of the universe and left us to fight it out among ourselves.”
“I’m glad Kennedy won the nomination,” he wrote in another letter. “I liked him better than the other candidates, and I’m sure he’ll beat Nixon in the fall. I don’t know why I’m sure, but it’s hard to imagine Americans wanting a man called Tricky Dick to be their president.”
“There are six other boys in my cabin,” he wrote in yet another letter, “and three of them are old enough to ‘do it’ now. They jerk off in their beds at night and tell the rest of us how good it feels. Two days ago, they did what they call a circle jerk and let us watch, so I finally saw what the stuff looks like and how far it spurts. It’s not milky white but a sort of creamy white, a bit like mayonnaise or hair tonic. Then one of the three jerk-off kings, a big guy named Andy, got another boner and did something that amazed me and everyone else. He bent over and sucked his own dick! I didn’t know it was humanly possible to do that. I mean, how could anyone be flexible enough to twist his body into that position? I tried to do it myself in the bathroom yesterday morning, but I couldn’t get my mouth anywhere near my dick. Just as well, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to walk around thinking of myself as a cocksucker, would I? But still, what a strange thing it was to see.”
“I’ve read three books since I’ve been here,” he wrote in the last letter, which was dated August ninth, “and I thought they were all terrific. Two of them were sent to me by my Aunt Mildred, a little one by Franz Kafka called The Metamorphosis and a bigger one by J. D. Salinger called The Catcher in the Rye. The other one was given to me by my cousin Francie’s husband, Gary—Candide, by Voltaire. The Kafka book is by far the weirdest and most difficult to read, but I loved it. A man wakes up one morning and discovers that he’s been turned into an enormous insect! It sounds like science fiction or a horror story, but it isn’t. It’s about the man’s soul. The Catcher in the Rye is about a high school boy wandering around New York. Nothing much happens in it, but the way Holden talks (he’s the hero) is very realistic and true, and you can’t help liking him and wishing you could be his friend. Candide is an old book from the 18th century, but it’s wild and funny, and I laughed out loud on almost every page. Gary called it a political satire. I call it great stuff! You must read it — and the other ones too. Now that I’ve finished them all, what strikes me is how different these three books are. They’re all written in their own way, and they’re all very good, which means that there isn’t just one way to write a good book. Last year, Mr. Dempsey kept telling us there was a right way and a wrong way — remember? Maybe with math and science there are, but not with books. You do them in your own way, and if your way is a good way, you can write a good book. The interesting thing is that I can’t decide which one I liked best. You’d think I would know, but I don’t. I loved them all. Which means, I guess, that any good way is the right way. It makes me happy to think about all the books I still haven’t read — hundreds of them, thousands of them. So much to look forward to!”