Buddy Check
The summer I was nineteen I worked the waterfront at Camp Tamsett, a sleepaway camp on a cold green lake about three hours north of anywhere. I had my lifeguard card and a whistle on a lanyard and a sunburn that never quite healed, and I thought I was the most responsible person in the world.
If you never went to camp, here is the only thing you need to know about the waterfront: the buddy check. Every kid who goes in the water has a buddy. Before they swim, the two of them flip their name tags on the board by the dock, red side out. Every twenty minutes, or any time a guard feels like it, someone blows three short blasts, and every kid in the water has to find their buddy, grab their hand, and raise it over their head. Then the guards count pairs. The number of pairs in the water has to match the number of pairs on the board. If it doesn’t, everybody gets out, and you keep counting until it does.
It is the most boring safety procedure ever devised, and it works. In sixty-one years, Tamsett had never lost a swimmer.
The first time it came out wrong was the second week of July, during free swim, which was the worst time for it, because free swim meant ninety kids in the shallow crib and the deep crib together, shrieking, splashing, every one of them a blur of wet hair and orange.
Three blasts. Hands up. I counted the shallow crib and got twenty-two pairs. Dev, on the other tower, counted the deep crib and got twenty-four. Forty-six pairs.
The board said forty-five.
That’s the good direction to be wrong, Dev said. Somebody forgot to flip their tag. Happens every day. We whistled everyone out anyway, because that’s the rule, and lined them up on the beach, and counted them standing on dry sand with their buddies. Forty-five pairs. Exactly right.
So someone had raised their hand who wasn’t anyone’s buddy, or two kids had split and both found new partners, or I’d counted a pair twice. I believed all of those, one after the other, while the kids complained and dripped and went back in.
It happened again two days later. Then the next afternoon. Then during the morning instructional swim, which was only the Minnows, eight-year-olds, twelve of them in the shallow crib in water up to their ribs. Three blasts. Six pairs of hands.
Seven.
I was standing on the dock, not even on the tower. I was close enough to see their faces. I counted them as I’d been trained to count, touching each pair in the air with the end of my finger. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then at the far corner of the crib, out where the rope sagged, a pair of hands raised up out of the water together. Not a pair of children. Just the hands, held together, fingers laced, the wrists going down into the green.
I didn’t blow the whistle. I want to be honest about that. I stood there with it in my mouth, and the hands stayed up the way you’re supposed to keep them up until a guard tells you to drop them, patient, obedient, and then one of the Minnows, a little girl named Ruthie, said, “Can we put them down?” and I said yes, and all fourteen hands went down, and I was watching the far corner, and the water there closed over without a ripple.
I told the waterfront director. Her name was Corinne and she had been at Tamsett for twenty-two summers, and she listened to me without interrupting, which I took as a good sign until she said, “Did you look at the board?”
I hadn’t. The board was the board. Twelve tags flipped red for six pairs.
She walked me down to it. It was a big plywood panel under a little roof, painted white, with rows and rows of cup hooks and the kids’ name tags hanging off them, red on one side, white on the other. She ran her finger along the bottom row, below the cabin names, where I’d always assumed there were just spare hooks.
There were tags there. Old ones, wooden, the lettering burned in instead of written in marker. I’d never looked at them closely. Corinne didn’t touch them. She just pointed. Most were white side out. Two of them, side by side at the very end, were red.
“You get it a few times a summer,” she said. “Mostly in July. When it’s hot, and the water’s high.” She said it the way you’d talk about deer flies. “You count them. That’s all. You count them like they’re anybody else, and you don’t make them get out.”
“Who are they?”
She looked at me for a long time. “They’re in the water,” she said. “So they get counted. That’s the rule.”
I want to tell you I quit. I didn’t. I needed the money, and Corinne made it sound like part of the job, and by August I could almost do it. Three blasts. Count the pairs. Count the extra pair, out past where any of the kids were swimming, out in the deep corner where the dock’s shadow fell. Add one to the board in my head. Let them drop their hands.
I never saw anything but the hands. They were small hands, I think. A child’s hands, and a slightly bigger child’s, the way buddies at Tamsett were often an older camper paired with a younger one. The fingers were always laced very tight.
Once, the extra pair didn’t drop when I said hands down. Everybody else’s did. Those two stayed up, wrists in the water, waiting, and I realized I’d counted them in my head but I hadn’t looked at them, I hadn’t touched them with the end of my finger, and so as far as they knew they hadn’t been counted at all. I pointed. I said, out loud, “Forty-seven.” And they went down.
The last week of camp, the Minnows had their swim test, the one where you have to tread water for two minutes to graduate to the deep crib. Ruthie passed. She was so proud. She got her red tag moved up a row and a new buddy, a Bluegill named Hannah, and she spent the whole afternoon free swim in the deep crib, ecstatic, cannonballing off the ladder.
Three blasts. I counted. I counted them all, and I counted the pair in the corner by the dock’s shadow, and I touched them with the end of my finger, and everyone dropped their hands.
When we lined them up on the beach at the end of free swim, Hannah was standing alone.
They found Ruthie quickly, I’ll say that. She was right where she’d gone down, at the far corner of the deep crib, not ten feet from the ladder, and Dev got her out and did everything right, and she lived. She doesn’t remember any of it. Her parents sent a card.
What I remember is that Hannah, standing alone on the sand, wasn’t crying. She was looking at her hand and opening and closing it. She said that during the last buddy check, Ruthie had let go of her. Ruthie had let go of her, and swum away under the water toward the dock, toward somebody who was waving.
“It was okay,” Hannah said, “because she had a buddy. I saw her hold hands with somebody.”
I asked her who.
She said, “You counted them.”
I went back to the board that night, after lights-out, with a flashlight. I don’t know what I expected. The bottom row of wooden tags, mostly white. The last two red, at the end.
And beside them, a third hook that I was sure had been empty all summer. A new tag hung on it, a plain plastic one like the ones the kids had. It said RUTHIE, in marker, in careful eight-year-old capitals.
It was red side out. It was turning, very slowly, back and forth on its hook, as if someone had just let go of it.
I counted it. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve never been back to Tamsett, and I don’t swim anymore, not even in pools. But some nights in July, when it’s hot and I can’t sleep, I hear three short blasts very far away, and I find that I’ve raised my hand.