Miguel had a much better disguise than I did. He wore an eye patch from a pirate costume he had stashed in his closet—one he wore in elementary school and kept around in case he ever needed it. He was resourceful like that. When I finally sat down with my friends in the cafeteria, Randy and Brian didn’t seem to care much about Miguel’s disguise; they were too busy stuffing their faces. I marveled at Miguel’s ingenuity and gumption.
“I’ve just been telling everyone it’s National Pirate Day,” he quipped as he nibbled on his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“And that worked?” I marveled.
“Yep!” he said, then raised a hand with his index finger crooked, imitating a pirate’s metal claw. “Yar!”
We all laughed. That was pretty funny and ingenious, and made me wish I had thought of it. My black eye was still exposed and garnered unwanted attention. Usually, my presence at school was ghostly; no one except for my friends hardly looked at or interacted with me. Not even my limp made me special, except for the occasional poor kid stares from the popular kids, but I had gotten used to that which was more irritating than anything else. Having your face beaten to a pulp certainly changes that dynamic, like pouring a bottle of ink on a ghost. I became exposed.
“What’s the plan this weekend?” Randy said, then taking a Little Debbie cupcake from his brown sack lunch. He always ate dessert first. Always. And this was his second cupcake. He shoved the entire thing into his mouth and slowly chewed, almost as if he was letting it absorb into his tongue rather than chew and swallow it. He mumbled with his mouth full, bits of cupcake and spittle showering the table. “We should-thh all hang out-thh.”
“You guys could come to my house and spend the night,” Brian said. “My mom seems to like you guys more lately. Said you were a good influence or something.”
“Little does she know!” Randy quipped. “Sucker.”
We all laughed.
“Wait!” I said, taking a deep breath, then exhaling slowly, preparing myself for what I wanted to tell them. “I have a better idea.”
All three of my friends stopped chewing, then set their curious gazes on me.
“Since it seems the Thousand Oaks Gang aren’t going to let things lie, I have a proposal. I know a place where we could go where they won’t find us, and we could take the backpack out there and hide it. They’d never, ever guess where it was then.”
“But don’t you think they’d still bother us?” Miguel said. “They’re relentless, bordering on insane. I mean, look at our faces.”
He lifted the eye patch, then tilted it upwards, revealing the nebula of burst capillaries around his eye. The three of us winced.
“Yeah. Well, they can only bother us for so long. Eventually, they’ll lose interest and look somewhere else.”
“You mean, hide it like treasure?” Brian said. Just the sound of that intriguing idea perked him up. “Sounds very interesting.”
“Where is this place?” Randy said.
“I call it The Cabin of Seclusion,” I said with a satisfied grin. “On Canyon Lake.”
“You mean, like the Fortress of Solitude?” Miguel interjected, leaning forward with both hands flat on the table. “Or even better—like a lair?”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a bite from a Pop Tart I brought from home for lunch. Frosted cherry this time instead of strawberry: my favorite flavor. “Yeah, but like I said, more like a Cabin of Seclusion. Remember that abandoned lake house Tony showed us last weekend?”
My three friends looked at each other. They all seemed to land on the same memory at the same time and nodded an epiphanic agreement.
“I called Tony last night and asked him to pick us up today at Miguel’s house at five thirty.”
“Why my house?!” Miguel said.
“It’s better than mine. My mom would know something was up if a guy in a Bronco showed up. Anyway, I told him I’d pay him a hundred bucks to pick us up and take us out there. He said it was cool.”
“A hundred bucks?!” Randy said, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Where did you get one hundred—” He stammered, then realized exactly where I got one hundred bucks from. A smirk slid across his face.
“But why go out there?” Brian said.
“Because we can. Because Tony said he’d drive us out there. Because I have the money to pay him. And because...”
I looked at each of my friends as they looked back at me. They were a little clueless. They didn’t see the potential in the Cabin of Seclusion that I did. But they soon would.
“Because no one goes there. It’s abandoned. But we could make it into something. It can be our hideout where no one bullies us, where we can be free to be ourselves. No bullies, no parents—”
“No food! What a nightmare!” Miguel said.
I patted him on the shoulder to calm him down.
“That’s what the money is for: food, drinks, candy. Right?”
“Riiight,” they all said in unison. The potential in the cabin was becoming clearer and clearer.
“And when we’re ready to come back home, we’ll bury the ‘treasure.’ No one will know where it is, except us.”
“Can I bury it?!” Brian called out. “I wanna!”
“Sure, dude,” I agreed. “You can bury it.”
A self-satisfied look appeared on Brian’s face as he gnawed on a Fruit Roll-Up. He was already thinking of his burying technique, I could tell.
“Wait!” Miguel said. “What do we tell our parents? We can’t just tell them a high-schooler we hardly know is picking us up in a Bronco and taking us to an abandoned lake house on the lake for the weekend. They’ll freak out!”
I was prepared for this quandary. I had been thinking it through the entire morning in class and while I was sitting in the cafeteria with my friends. I had the perfect plan.
“So, this is what we do. Me, Randy, and Miguel. We tell our parents we’re spending both nights at Brian’s house this weekend. They’ll immediately believe that.”
“Yup,” Randy concurred. “It’s true. They would.”
“Then Brian, you tell your parents that you’re spending the night at Randy’s for the weekend. His mom is always on dates anyways, so even if they get a wild hair and try to call, she won’t be home.”
“Hey!” Randy said, as if mentioning his mom on dates was some precious secret not to be revealed to the rest of us with parents that were still married.
“That’s...” Brian started. He tilted his head back, rolled his eyes into the back of his head, then bellowed to the ceiling, his arms shooting upwards into a victorious V. “That’s genius!”
“Yup. It’s fool proof,” I said, pleased with myself. It really was a good plan, at least in my mind at the time. “So, all we gotta do is go home after school, pack some clothes and shit, then meet at Miguel’s by five thirty. We’ll just tell Miguel’s parents we’re meeting there so we can go to Brian’s house together. Cool?”
I placed my hand out above the table and waited for my friends to place theirs on mine. One by one, they emphatically stacked them. Once our hands were all together—our collective sign of unity levitating above the table—we all said, “Cool!”
“Now,” I began, pulling the second cherry frosted Pop Tart from my backpack. “Who wants to trade me something for this?”
***
The bike ride home after school was tense, but I didn’t see Bloody Billy or any of his cronies on the way. Nobody followed me in a car or waited in the park behind some shrubbery, which was a relief. But it did intensify their mysterious ways in my mind. Their ominous presence in the neighborhoods sent shivers down my spine. Their random appearances gave them a mythological quality like sightings of Sasquatch or Chupacabra. But fortunately, their absence after school on this day gave me a little bit of a reprieve.
When I got home, I completely forgot about my black eye. So, when I saw my mother in the kitchen, I wasn’t prepared for her bloodcurdling scream. It scared the crap out of me.
&nb
sp; “Oh my god!” she cried. Her mouth stretched into a disbelieving O as she approached me with both of her hands out. She quickly cradled my face. “What happened to my adorable baby?!”
I squirmed from her grasp. “It’s nothing mom. Really.”
“Did you get into a fight?” she continued.
“I wouldn’t call it a fight.”
“Who did this to you? Let me get some Neosporin.”
My mother bolted for the master bathroom and I took her absence as my cue to duck in my bedroom and lock the door. The first aid supplies under her vanity sink were in disarray, so I knew I had a few minutes to pack my backpack and get a couple of important items. I flung my closet door open and pushed my hanging clothes to the side. I knelt in front of the plumbing vent where I hid Bloody Billy’s backpack and unscrewed it from the wall with a screwdriver I left in my closet. And there it still was—undisturbed inside the gaping cavity in the wall—in the same place from the last time I pulled it out and stealthily took a small handful of bills. I tossed the backpack on my bed, then knelt back down in front of the opening for one more thing. I navigated my hand into the wall, then downward to the cement floor—touching the splintery wood bits, crunchy dead bugs, and stray insulation poofs—where I had one more hidden item: my mom’s 25-caliber American Derringer pistol.
I pulled the gun out and wiped the dust off it. As I examined it, my mother called from her bathroom.
“Billy, you doing OK?!” she cried out. That damn nickname.
“Yeah mom!” I replied.
“Should I take you to the emergency room?!”
“No, mom. Really!”
“I’m still looking for the Neosporin. Be right there!”
I held the small pistol in the palm of my hand and remembered the day I accidentally shot myself in the leg, when my mother and Randy accompanied me to the emergency room at the hospital. My mother was so distraught and wracked with guilt. She believed at the time that it was her fault that I shot myself, even though she had nothing to do with it. I mean, it was her pistol, but I took it without her knowledge. So, after I recovered from the wound, she asked my step-dad, Steve, to get rid of the pistol. He promised her he would, but he never did. He was a gun enthusiast, like many men in Texas, and even though his step-kid had shot himself, Steve probably didn’t feel that was a good enough reason to get rid of a perfectly good gun. I’m not really sure of what his rationale was for not keeping his promise, but I found the pistol a couple of years later in the garage on a metal shelf behind some cleaning supplies. Steve never, ever did any cleaning, so he probably just forgot about it. But when I found it—having gone out there in search of bleach because my mother insisted I look in the garage—all I could think about was keeping it for myself. It caused me so much pain that keeping it made me feel like I had power over it. I know that’s kind of stupid, but that’s what I thought at the time. So, I hid it in my closet.
My mother called out once more. “Found it! Be right there.”
I knew I only had a minute or so before she came knocking. I pushed the hanging clothes back and closed my closet door, quickly shoved the pistol and some clothes in Bloody Billy’s backpack, along with a towel and my Spider-Man pocket book, and put my ball cap and sunglasses back on by the time my mother started banging on my bedroom door. I flung my school backpack underneath the bed. I wouldn’t need it.
“Let me put some medicine on your face, sweetheart. Please!”
I opened the door to find her prepared to apply Neosporin, her hand up and a finger extended, covered in the clear, medicinal gel.
“Mom, I gotta go. I’m spending the night at Brian’s house this weekend.”
I tried to move past her, but she trapped me with her other arm.
“Let me just put this on,” she said, with an aggrieved look. The guilt she emitted crushed me.
“Fine,” I said. Acquiescing, I tilted my sunglasses up, so she could gently apply the gooey medicine, which appeased her.
“Thank you, dear.” She smiled, then patted me lovingly on both shoulders. “Be good then.”
“Yes, mom!” I said, kissing her cheek, then running out of the house.
I rode as fast as I could to Miguel’s house, then tossed my bike in the grass next to my other friends’ bikes. Inside, Brian was sitting at the breakfast table with Miguel, trying to convince Miguel’s parents—his father stout and hairy like an armadillo and his mother dainty and demure like a hummingbird—to let Miguel spend the night at his house, but I could see that they weren’t convinced. Miguel used to always tell us he felt his parents were racist and that they didn’t like Black people. Of course, we never wanted to believe that, but the mounting evidence was convincing. I looked at Randy. He was leaning against the wall behind them—his arms crossed and looking bored—and I tilted my head as if to say, You convince them. He nodded and interrupted Brian. Once Randy began his well-thought-out argument, Miguel’s parents seemed to give in, and also proved that what Miguel was trying to tell us about them being racist was maybe a little true.
As I watched my friends and Miguel’s parents work it out, I had a realization that maybe I should try to call Tony and tell him to meet us down the street instead of in front of Miguel’s house. I didn’t want his appearance to blow our scheme. So, I tapped Miguel on the shoulder and asked him to come to his room. I think he realized that Randy had things covered, so he came with me.
In his bedroom, I picked up his telephone and dialed the number on the business card that Tony had given me. The phone seemed to ring forever. When someone finally answered and I asked to speak to Tony, the voice on the other end said he wasn’t there, which I figured might be the case. A digital clock with red numbers in Miguel’s room flashed it was 5:28.
“We should go wait outside,” I said. “We don’t want your parents to see Tony’s Bronco.”
“OK,” Miguel replied.
He grabbed his back pack and we went back to the kitchen. We said goodbye to Miguel’s parents and left before they could change their minds. In the front yard, we waited in the shade under a large ash tree. Brian read the time aloud from his Casio digital wristwatch.
“Five thirty-five. You sure he’s coming?” he said to me.
“Pretty sure. I called the marina and they said he wasn’t there.”
“He could be anywhere,” Brian quipped.
But just as he said this, a Bronco that I could only assume was Tony’s barreled toward us. As it got closer, I came out from under the tree and pointed to the Bronco, then pointed to the other end of the street. I motioned for my friends to follow me down there to the stop sign, which was four houses down.
As we trotted down the street, Randy put both of his hands on my shoulders and leaned closer from behind me to say, “This is going to be awesome!”
“I know.”
The cream-colored Bronco passed us, then screeched to a stop at the corner. The engine farted out plumes of smoke and ribbons of steam from the tailpipe as it idled. It was a mean-looking ride with matte black wheels, burly bumpers, and chrome running boards for getting in the cab. When we got next to the Bronco, I could see Tony inside smoking a cigarette. He leaned over to turn the crank to roll down the passenger side window.
“What’s up, ass bandits?” he said, then sat back up in the driver seat. Cigarette smoke was exiting every orifice in his head. Once the smoke cleared and he got a good look at my face and Miguel’s face, the cigarette fell from his mouth into his lap. “Dude?! What happened to your—”
It’s amazing how fast a cigarette can burn through a pair of jeans, particularly in the groin area. Tony squealed then swatted at his jeans, trying to extinguish the cigarette. He quickly found it and tossed it out his window.
He breathed a sigh of relief. “What happened? You guys get in a scrap?”
“Yeah,” I said, sheepishly.
A smirk slid across Tony’s face. “You little dudes are... BAD ASSES!” he said, punctuated by a finger snap.
/> We chuckled, pleased with Tony’s adulation, although skeptical we were in anyway bad asses.
“Come on and get in,” Tony commanded, then opened the door with the inside handle.
I got in the front seat. Brian and Miguel got in the back seat and Randy got in the way back, sitting on the floor.
Once everyone was in and we closed the doors, Tony said to me, “I hope you cold-cocked whoever gave you that black eye.”
“I got in a good one.”
“Good. Got the gas money?”
I pulled the hundred bucks from my pocket and slapped it in his hand. He flashed his teeth through a sly grin.
“Let’s do this shit!” he said.
He stomped on the accelerator and the rear wheels of the Bronco burned a long, steaming skid mark as we tore through the intersection. I looked over at Tony—a new cigarette wedged between his clinched teeth and his hands gripping the steering wheel like he was twisting a wily snake to death—then I turned back to look at my friends. We all knew we were on our way to something adventurous and exciting. We just didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. But I will say this. Real danger was waiting for me and my friends on Canyon Lake.
PART II.
Escape to the Cabin of Seclusion
10.
I often look back at my time in middle school like it was a dream. It certainly seems like a dream sometimes. That’s what happens when you get older and your past zooms away into history, like looking at your younger self shrinking in the rear-view mirror of a speeding car. When thinking back, I marvel at the freedom my friends and I had, at the audacity we had. We definitely took it for granted. Nowadays in our evermore connected world, we seem to have less freedom and less courage. I mean, on the one hand, we—the human race—have more information at our disposal than we’ve ever had before. But on the other, our constant desire to tell the world what we’re doing at every given moment and our willingness to allow our devices to monitor our every move means we’ve given up our anonymity, and in doing so, some of our freedom and adventurousness. But in 1986, once we left our homes and the watchful eyes of our parents, there was no one watching us or tracking us or telling us what to do. We were free to do whatever we wanted, as long as we didn’t get caught by our parents or were home when we said we’d be home. Good times indeed.
The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Page 8