There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas . . . There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.
The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake? Most campers weren’t given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys. If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy.
Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.
Actually, Stanley had been impressed when he first found out that his great-great-grandfather was robbed by Kissin’ Kate Barlow. True, he would have preferred living on the beach in California, but it was still kind of cool to have someone in your family robbed by a famous outlaw.