“A murderer?” I said, chuckling. “Like Jason from Friday the 13th?!”
“Or worse—Michael Meyers,” Randy added. “Nobody would know we were even out here. Dead. My mom would have a hissy fit.”
“Mine, too,” Miguel said, and we could hear his teeth chattering. “My mom would put a curse on you, dude. Una maldición.”
“What does that mean?” Brian said, stopping in his tracks and turning to Miguel. He cocked his head, waiting for an answer.
“I just told you. A curse,” Miguel replied, putting his hands on his hips. “Are you not listening to me?”
“I don’t understand Spanish. That’s a foreign language, compadre.”
“Compadre is Spanish too, numb nuts,” Miguel said.
We all laughed. Miguel could be pretty funny when he wanted to be, but he abruptly quit laughing and jumped back what seemed like three feet.
He yelled. “What is that?!” Then he pointed to the ground.
I looked to where he was pointing, a small mound of dried leaves and twigs with something off-white underneath. Brian—being the outdoorsy type and less inclined to be afraid of things in nature—swept the dried leaves away from the mound with his right foot, revealing the skull of an animal with a line of ants exiting an eye socket. Randy and I squealed, then hopped back to where Miguel was standing. Brian placed his hands on his knees, then bent over at the waist to get a closer look. An inquisitive harrumph escaped his mouth, then he swept more leaves away from the skull.
“It’s a deer,” he called out. He squatted down to get an even better look. “It’s been dead for a while.”
“Gross,” Randy said, wrapping himself in his arms. It always surprised me when Randy seemed scared of something, being that he was so big for his age. Never judge a book by its cover, they say. “I’m staying over here.”
At this point, Brian had a long, straight twig and he was poking the skull’s eye socket, and jabbing at the line of ants.
“We should head back to the Cabin of Seclusion soon,” I suggested. “Maybe eat a snack. Maybe snoop around the house. We might find something good there. You never know.”
“Yeah!” Brian cried out, jumping up, and tossing the twig. “Treasure!” He sprinted full speed past us and back in the direction we came. As he ran, he yelled. “I want some candy!”
I looked at Miguel and Randy. “Who else wants some candy?”
“We do!” my two friends said, and we ran back the way we came. We hoofed it out of the woods and back to the pier, then ran up the grassy incline to the Cabin of Seclusion: our temporary home away from home.
13.
The afternoon meal we ate once we got back to the Cabin of Seclusion can be described in only one way: a junk food massacre. We plopped on that dusty hard, wooden floor with only one plan of action, and that was to eat everything in our cache of snacks. The ravenous hunger pangs we all experienced at that age were extraordinary to the point of ridiculous. All our parents complained about our bottomless pits for stomachs at one time or another; I’d heard it myself at various sleepovers at each other’s houses. My own mother complained every single Saturday morning about my unusual propensity to scarf down twenty or more pancakes in one sitting, even though she continued to satisfy my requests for more griddle cakes with aplomb. Why didn’t she just say no? Randy, of course, could usually out-eat the rest of us simply because he was much larger in stature. His ability to shove copious amounts of junk food into his gash of a mouth was legendary. Even my parents hid our snacks whenever they heard he was coming over. But don’t underestimate Brian and Miguel, either. I’ve seen these two tag-team on several boxes of Little Debbie cakes like a ruthless wrestling duo, laying waste to dozens of cakes in a single sitting. This time at the lake house was no different. Unmoored by our parents’ watchful eyes, we stormed the grocery bags and ate everything: fried fruit pies, cookies, snack cakes, chips, and jerkies, then guzzled two to three sodas a piece. It was a horrifyingly glorious display of gluttony that I’m certain would’ve given all our parents big, fat heart attacks. I think we assumed that Tony would just bring us more snacks later that evening. And besides, we were really hungry. Eating everything wasn’t just a challenge; it was inevitable.
I remember feeling so full that my t-shirt and the loose elastic waistband of my shorts felt unbearably restrictive, so I peeled off my shirt, slid my shorts down an inch or two to give my gut some room to expand, and laid back on the wood floor, Bloody Billy’s backpack underneath my head as a pillow.
“That was bad to the bone,” I said. I patted my stomach, then belched. My friends laughed.
The others followed my lead and peeled off their shirts, then laid on the wood floor with whatever they could find under their heads for support. The afternoon was much warmer than the morning time and the cool Hill Country breeze subsided to leave behind an oppressive humidity that settled on the peninsula like a dense fog. Being in the shade and solitude of the lake house was nice, although not air conditioned. We didn’t care, though. We were free.
“Bodacious!” Randy added.
“Tubular!” Miguel yelled.
“I got nothing,” Brian said, then snickered. “I’m just happy.”
“Me too,” I agreed.
“I could live out here,” Brian said, gazing up to the rafters of the lake house, contemplating something. “It wouldn’t be hard for me. I know how to rough it. Or we could just make this place more livable.”
“Maybe we could buy this place,” Miguel said, which elicited excitement from everybody including me.
“That would be rad!” Randy said, sitting up, then pointing to me. “Dude, how much we got in the backpack?” He snapped his fingers at me, as if to say Chop chop, which was annoying. I was chilling out.
Upon further consideration, I didn’t know for sure how much cash we had, having randomly plucked small wads of bills here and there to pay for snacks and rides. I sat up and unzipped the backpack, then spilled its contents onto the wood floor: money, papers, snack wrappers, and the 25-caliber American Derringer pistol.
Brian and Miguel sat up, too. And when all my friends saw the gun clunk on the floor, they all said the same thing: Whoa!
“Dude,” Randy said, leaning forward to pick up the gun. “I didn’t know you were packin’ heat.” He examined it, then his face flushed. He looked at me surprised. “Is this the gun from—you know?”
“Yeah,” I said sheepishly.
“I thought your step-dad got rid of it?”
“My mom asked him to, but he just put it in the garage.”
“I wanna see it!” Brian said, extending his hand to Randy, who willingly gave it to him. Brian jumped to his feet and dashed toward a window, pointing the gun at an imaginary target in the distance. “We could definitely live out here with this for self-defense.”
“Give it back,” I said. Brian reluctantly complied. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about it. Just thought we might need it. I don’t know why.”
I slipped the gun back into Bloody Billy’s backpack. Brian and I sat back down.
“So, how much cash we got to buy this place? Let’s count it!” Miguel said. He gathered the bills together and tapped the growing stack as he retrieved the money from the floor, mostly twenties and fifties with an occasional hundred or ten-dollar bill. Once he gathered them all, he began to count—licking his thumb to help with separating them—organizing the bills on the floor by denomination. “Twenty, forty, sixty...” And so on.
We watched him. Even—I dare say—cheered him on.
“Seems like a lot!” Randy gloated.
When Miguel was done, he announced, “$1,780.”
Again, we collectively declared: Whoa! It certainly seemed like a huge amount of money, and to four middle-schoolers in 1986, it was. Just not enough to actually buy our beloved Cabin of Seclusion. Even if it was enough to buy it, the property’s ownership was in family-estate limbo.
“We should ask Tony about buying it when he c
omes back,” Brian said, laying his arms across his gut, then farting. “I sure am sleepy.”
Brian laid down on the wood floor and so did Randy, obvious victims of a debilitating sugar crash. I opened the backpack so Miguel could put the money back in it. I zipped it shut, laid it on the floor, and used it as my pillow again, laying down with the rest of my friends.
“It sure would be cool if we could buy it. Make it our... What do you call a perfect place to live?”
“A utopia,” Miguel answered.
“Yeah, our utopia. And, if we can’t buy the Cabin of Seclusion, then we can decide how to split the money later,” I said, daydreaming a scene projected up in the rafters, a mental movie of me buying piles of comic books with wads of cash.
“Or bury it!” Brian said. “I wanna bury it! Please!”
We chuckled, then soon drifted off into an afternoon nap brought on by the sugar crashes, and the lull of daydreams.
***
I awoke to the cacophony of someone banging on the back door, and yelling.
“Get your hands up!” the intruder yelled, then banged on the door some more, the racket rattling the rickety bones of the lake house.
My body involuntarily jerked up at the waist as I rubbed the crust from my eyes. I discovered my friends writhing on the floor around me, startled with the disturbance. The intruder banged harder on the door and yelled louder.
“You’re under arrest, you ass bandits!” he called out, then laughed.
“Oh, stop it!” a young woman’s voice said, followed by the sound of skin being smacked.
“Hey!” the intruder said, and that’s when I knew it was Tony.
The phosphorescent sunset was fading into twilight and I realized that we had napped for a long time, comatose from the junk food massacre earlier. The back door opened and the sound of feet stomped across the wood floor. The next thing I knew, I was looking up at Tony and his girlfriend Victoria. I forgot how pretty she was, and I was instantly embarrassed for sitting shirtless on the floor.
“Sorry, we fell asleep,” I said, finding my shirt, then pulling it over my disheveled head and onto my scrawny body.
“I can see that,” he replied, lifting a sixer of beer in one of his hands. “Brewsky?”
I shook my head. Victoria slugged Tony’s arm.
“They don’t like beer. They’re good boys. Remember?” she said, then knelt in the middle of our sleeping circle and turned on the camping lantern. It glowed softly, casting dim shadows on the walls. She looked around at the mess of candy wrappers and soda cans we’d strewn about on the floor along with our backpacks and towels. She winked at me.
“Yeah, I forgot,” he said, walking into the kitchen and setting the sixer on the counter. He opened the drawer where he stashed the weed and set it next to the beer. He pulled a small glass pipe from the front pocket of his worn jeans and began packing the bowl, pressing the weed into it with his thumb. “Maybe they’ll like ganja better.” He set the pipe ablaze with a Bic lighter and inhaled deeply, then a blast of white smoke erupted from what seemed like every orifice in his head. He hacked a staccato cough: phlegmy, hoarse, and euphoric.
Victoria laughed. “Doubt it.” She turned to me and smiled, but her cheerfulness quickly withered. For the first time, she got a good look at my face and the bruised halo still orbiting my eye. I had forgotten all about it, but Victoria hadn’t seen us since the camping trip.
“Oh my God!” she cried out. “What happened to your eye?”
“Got into a fight,” I replied, then thumbed to Miguel. “He got it bad, too.”
“Jesus!” Victoria covered her mouth with both hands. “I hope you got in a good punch or two.”
“Me, too,” I cracked. “I don’t remember.”
“Well then,” she began, patting me and Miguel on our hands. “What do you boys want to do?”
I was stricken with embarrassment, not being used to a pretty girl talking to me, especially after just waking up from a deep sleep. I looked over at Randy who was sitting up by now and pulling his t-shirt over his head. He winked slyly, and tilted his head as if to say, You go, stud! Seeing that I was also stricken with an immediate case of girl-induced laryngitis, he offered a suggestion for me.
“We could put on a show for you guys. I love to tell jokes. I wanna be a comedian one day.”
“A show?” Tony said, then coughed some more. His face turned bright red and he forced a smile through the coughing.
“Yeah!” Brian chimed in, also standing now and pulling his shirt back on. “He tells jokes. And I have survival stories.” He thumbed his chest as a proud smile appeared.
“Like a talent show?” Victoria said. Tony handed her the glass pipe, then sat down next to her. She took a small drag and softly exhaled wispy strands of smoke. “That sounds like fun.”
Miguel added, “And I can give a presentation about benevolent and malevolent rulers of history. I know all about ‘em!”
“A presentation?!” Tony said, then snickered longer than you would expect someone to snicker at such a comment. He was high as can be. “That’s funny.”
“What will I do?” I said. I didn’t think I had a particular talent or knowledge to present to everybody, so I was a bit miffed about how I would fit into our little talent show.
“Dude,” Randy began, then stood next to me and firmly placed his hand on my shoulder. “You’re a great artist and storyteller. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
I smiled at his revelation. I mean, I knew I liked to draw and tell stories, but I didn’t think of myself as a great artist. That moniker was beyond my comprehension at the time, but I certainly appreciated his adulation.
“Thanks, dude,” I said.
“All right, all right. We don’t need to circle jerk,” Tony said, then snickered again. Victoria slugged his arm. “Hey! Quit hitting me.”
“You’re such a jerk!” she scolded him.
“Sheesh,” he said, standing up. “Let me go get the snacks from the Bronco. You guys get ready. I got the munchies. Be right back.”
Tony stomped out of the lake house. Victoria looked up to us from the floor, obviously feeling the effects from the marijuana. She had a content look, one of tranquility. She pulled her knees to her chest, then wrapped her arms around her bent legs to steady herself.
“So, how does your show work? Who goes first?”
“I will,” Randy said. “I have a comedy routine.”
“Ooo,” Victoria said. “How exciting!” She clapped lightly.
Since the camping lantern was on the floor, its glow clung beneath it, casting eerie shadows above it. I could see Victoria looking strangely at us and up at the ceiling, as if maybe she was hallucinating. She cocked her head to the left, then tilted it to the right, as if trying to make out the spirits of the lake house’s previous owners, their souls occupying the space around our heads and in the rafters. She leaned forward and picked up the lantern by its top handle.
“Here,” she said, handing it to Randy. “Whoever’s turn it is, hold this. The speaker gets the lantern. That’s how we’ll know it’s their turn.”
“Good idea!” Randy chimed in, holding the lantern up to illuminate his face. “So, I’ll go first. Then I think Brian should go next. He’s got some great survival stories to tell. Right, dude?”
Brian nodded an agreement, punctuated by a thumbs up. Randy continued.
“Then I think William should go next. Maybe tell a Spider-Man story or something like that. Cool, dude?”
I also nodded. Then added, “You’re like our MC.”
“Yeah!” he said. “I’m the MC!”
“And a dufus,” Brian cracked, which prompted spontaneous snickering.
“Whatever,” Randy demurred. “Then Miguel should go last and talk about marvelous rulers and beneficial kings. Cool?”
“Malevolent and benevolent,” Miguel retorted, which bothered Randy. He didn’t like to be corrected in front of the rest of us.
&
nbsp; “You know what I’m talking about!”
Miguel nodded reluctantly. He didn’t seem too excited about the talent show or his place in the roster.
“I’ll do my best,” he said, then sighed. “I don’t like to speak in front of people.”
“People?!” Randy said. “We’re not people. We’re your friends.”
A smirk slid across Miguel’s face. “I know. I’ll do it.”
“Attaboy!”
Tony came back in, stomping over to where we were gathered, a couple of brown, paper grocery bags cradled in his arms. He gawked, noticing we were not in the same places we once were when he went outside.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said. “Why are you holding the lantern?”
“Whoever holds the lantern,” Randy said. “Gets to be the presenter. Victoria came up with that.”
Tony looked down at his girlfriend sitting on the floor, then smiled.
“That’s a great idea. Couldn’t have thought of a better one myself,” he said, sitting on the floor next to her. He fished a bag of chips out from one of the grocery bags and handed it to her. The surprise gift pleased her. “When does the show start?”
“Now!” Randy said. “Lady and gentleman. And boys. I am your MC for the evening. My name is Randy—”
“We know your name!” Brian heckled.
Randy blasted lasers of contempt from his eyes at Brian, who shrugged. Randy continued.
“Welcome to our first show at the Cabin of Seclusion!”
“The what?!” Tony said, looking at Victoria.
“That’s our name for the lake house,” Randy said, extending his arm like a TV game show host and presenting the inside of the lake house as if it was a grand prize. He continued. “I am your first entertainer for this evening. I have always wanted to be a stand-up comedian. So, here’s my first attempt in front of a real audience.”
The five of us scooted closer to Randy, sitting in various poses on the floor. He cleared his throat, then took a deep breath. What happened next was a comedic revelation.
“What’s the deal with bathroom passes at school being on a wood block? We take them in the stall whenever we take a crap, and hand it back to the teacher when we’re done. Then the teacher gives that poop-covered block to the next kid. That’s disgusting!”
The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Page 11