The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island

by Scott Semegran

  I even tried to keep up with Tony and Victoria over the years. I occasionally saw them the following summer, but not out at Canyon Lake. (Are you kidding me? My parents didn’t knowingly allow me near the lake.) Sometimes, Tony would call me to see how I was doing, and give me the latest scoop on he and Victoria’s future plans. I liked hearing him talk about her as she was my secret crush, but the more and more he talked about his true feelings for her, my crush eventually disintegrated. It’s hard pining over someone when someone else you care about loves them. They would sometimes drive into town and I’d meet them at the arcade or ice cream shop or something like that. I enjoyed spending time with them. They had plans, man.

  Their most precious plan was to get married right after high school and run away to Europe, far from the family businesses where they worked as indentured servants. Their parents insisted they run the respective businesses as soon as they graduated from high school so they could retire, but that just wasn’t in Tony and Victoria’s plans. The day after they graduated, they slipped away to the Bexar County Justice of the Peace to secretly be married. They could do that since they were both 18-years old. And the day after that, they drove to the San Antonio International Airport to catch a one-way flight to Ireland: their first stop in Europe. They had been saving money for a year to afford to go, all the while submitting the proper forms and identifications for their passports. Their clandestine plan worked perfectly; their parents had no idea. I wouldn’t see them again for years, although I would occasionally receive postcards from them from various European countries, usually with Tony’s favorite salutation scrawled in ballpoint ink. “What’s up, ass bandit?” That always made me laugh.

  I’m often asked if I had friends later on like the ones I had in middle school, and I find this question difficult to answer without sounding glib or hokey. I love my friends from middle school, just like I love the ones from high school, or college, or from my raging 20s, or the other parents I befriended when my wife and I had our own kids. I do look back on my time in middle school with fondness, and a bit of wonder, mostly at the amount of freedom we were given at the time. No devices to track us meant more freedom. It’s a generational thing, I guess. But what I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is this: the best friends you’ll ever have are the ones you have right now at this moment in time. That’s the most solid piece of wisdom I can impart to you. Not that old friendships aren’t more fun or more valuable or more important. They are important. But the friends who are with you right now—supporting you, cheering for you, loving you right now—those are the most important friends you’ll ever have.

  It just so happens, Brian and Miguel are still two of mine. And Tony and Victoria are another two. When I find good friends, I like to keep them, at least to the best of my abilities. Sometimes, your friends just leave you. I miss Randy. I have no doubt that we would still be friends today if he had survived cancer. I truly believe that.

  31.

  After middle school, I went on to Lee High School along with my friends and—while they had hobbies they pursued—I immersed myself in art and literature. I dreamed that one day I would be an artist, or maybe a writer, pouring my love for comic books and stories into my studies. The holy grail would have been living a life as both together, but I would’ve been happy doing either one. An artist’s or writer’s life was the one for me but, as is all too common, it just didn’t happen. Don’t get me wrong. I tried my damnedest to make it happen; it just didn’t. Fizzled out may be a better way of putting it, because of other more pressing priorities. You see, I graduated from high school and went on to study art and literature at the University of North Texas—the same school as Brian, but I rarely ever saw him. Who I did see a lot of during my time there was my future wife—Melissa.

  I met Melissa my freshman year at a local art show in downtown Denton, Texas. We hit it off pretty fast after we learned that we were both art students at U. N. T. My major was Graphic Design with an English minor. Hers was Ceramics with an Art History minor. Neither of us were destined to make loads of money. But we fell in love and were inseparable. On the day we graduated with big dreams of storming the creative world, Melissa learned we were pregnant. As careful as we tried to be, neither of us were to blame for our mutual lust for each other, and its possible biological outcome. We rolled the dice and came up with a baby. We discussed having the pregnancy aborted, but in the end, neither of us wanted that. Our love for each other made a baby and the baby won out. I’m glad we kept that baby. We moved to the city closest to both of our families: San Antonio, Texas. And eventually, we got married in the La Villita Historic Arts District next to the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio. It was a magical day. Like I’ve said, sometimes life can take a turn and, with that turn, my dreams of an artsy work life were dashed.

  I did my best to find meaningful work that paid well, but it was a slog. Many of the gigs were contract jobs without the benefits that come with full-time employment. Melissa had a girlfriend—Samantha was her name—whose husband was a government employee for Bexar County (the county where both San Antonio and Converse reside) in their tax appraisal unit. Samantha often bragged about the benefits he had and offered to put in a good word for me with her husband, if a position ever opened up. The spot that finally became available was nothing even remotely close to my college education: property tax compliance. But Samantha’s husband—Bob was his name—promised me that all the position required was a college degree (Any ol’ degree will do, he said at the time) and I would get trained on the job. Easy peasy, he said. The benefits were so good that I couldn’t refuse. Melissa and I would soon be parents to a newborn. I had to do what was best for my new family. Plus, Bob and I became fast friends. That’s a twofer, as they say. My life as an artist or writer soon took a backseat to my fledgling career as a government employee.

  That was my life for many years. Eight to five, Monday through Friday. Weekly work routine set on repeat. But one thing I could never forget—no matter how the years rolled along or what new obstacles were put in our way—was my time at the Cabin of Seclusion with my friends and our misadventure being stuck on Sometimes Island. I would often daydream about our nights in the lake house or our time—hungry and dirty as we were, at the brink of death—on the island, and found that as time went on, my time there became more precious. Isn’t that strange? For anyone who has lived through a tough time in their life, those trying moments we survived delineate who we are as we grow older into the full beings we are to become. My wife has often told me, as I recount the strange yet dangerous adventure that me, Brian, Miguel, and Randy experienced out on Canyon Lake, that the biggest smile on my face accompanies my story, as if I’m telling her about the most wonderful time in my life. Oh, the things our bodies unconsciously reveal to our family and friends. And I guess that was true; it was a wonderful time in my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about that damned lake house.

  One day while I was sitting at a table in the break room during lunch—listening to Bob dissect the squares he bought for the previous weekend’s football games and where he went wrong with his gambling strategy—I was eating a ham sandwich and I realized that an amicable agreement between Texas counties would allow me to lookup property tax records for other counties in addition to Bexar County. An example would be Comal County, the county where Canyon Lake resided, as well as the old Meyer lake house. A quick search on the internet provided me the address of the lake house, which I put into our tax records system. And voila! I had insight into years of tax records, who owned the property, if the taxes were paid or not, etc. I could voyeuristically watch an aspect of the Meyer family’s life through electronic tax records. The property had multiple owners, probably the children or grandchildren of Griffin and Mary Meyer, and the property taxes had been promptly paid for decades. I could flag the property as one to watch for any changes or discrepancies, so I did. Whenever I was bored at work, I would login to the tax records system and read about the old Meyer lake h
ouse. Some people at work farted around by playing games of Solitaire on their computers, instead of actually working; I read about that lake house during my free time.

  Some months later, my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away. Well, I won’t say that it was unexpected. She was rather old. But her death was a tragedy to our family nonetheless. She was a kooky woman with eccentric tendencies. She smoked cigarettes for 80 years and drank whiskey on the rocks every afternoon starting at 3:00 pm. She used to always tell me—while pinching my cheek or my butt—that I was her favorite. I didn’t understand why she would tell me that because my mother was an only child and I was the only grandchild, so I must have been her favorite between me and my mother, which was weird. But a few weeks after her funeral, I learned that I inherited $500,000 from my eccentric grandmother, a sum of money that shocked me. My wife was ecstatic. My mother was irritated as her inheritance was much smaller, but our relationship fortunately wasn’t tainted by my grandmother’s unusual gift. Upon receiving advice from friends and financial advisors, it seemed the best place to invest my inheritance was either the stock market or real estate. I had experience investing in neither. There was a part of me that wanted to heed the advice of the smart ones around me, and another part of me that hoped for a sign—a mystical tap on the shoulder from the great beyond—that would inform me what to do. And, believe it or not, a mystical tap came in the form of a notification from the tax records system: the old Meyer lake house was available to purchase through a sheriff’s sale.

  Now, I know you may be thinking (or may even be skeptical that this happened in this fashion, but life is funny this way), What the hell is a sheriff’s sale? You see, if multiple people own a property and they have a disagreement, like what to do with it or if to sell it, and they can’t come to an agreement about what to do, then one of the owners can request a sheriff’s sale. Let’s say nine ungrateful children own a lake house that they all inherited from their kind parents. After years of disrepair and grief, four of the children want to sell it and five do not. Well, owning property isn’t necessarily a democracy in the eyes of the government and the ones who want to sell don’t simply lose out as the minority. All they have to do is call a sheriff’s sale and the sheriff of the county will lock up the house and sell it at auction. So, if I was waiting for a mystical tap on the shoulder from the universe, then this was it. I did some quick research on how to win a property through an auction, informed my wife of the wise investment I was planning on making (she was onboard with it, fortunately), and arrived at the auction ten minutes early. I wasn’t in any way, shape, or form going to lose this auction. I had my trusty checkbook and ballpoint pen ready. Property auctions require cash and my kind and generous grandmother (bless her smoky and pickled soul) provided just that. My only worry was being outbid by a richer investor, but that didn’t happen. I was the only one to show up for the auction and bought the property for not much over the starting bid: $199,999. It was a done deal. The old Meyer lake house was mine. And good ol’ Sheriff “Sam” Hill was nowhere to be found, because he died years before (natural causes, no big deal). I would know; I asked. One of the deputies told me, “Sheriff Hill. Good man. God bless him.” So, there you go.

  They say you can never go back to your youth. And I say, they’re wrong. You can always go back to your youth—the places, the friends, the retraced adventures—but it really is never the same. Things change. That’s the natural order of things. Maybe that’s why they say you can never go back: the changing part. There’s something to be said for that, I guess. The marina and the campground were gone. Tony and Victoria’s parents sold them soon after they skipped town for their European elopement. The Canyon Lake Marina is now a Mexican restaurant / margarita bar (decent enchiladas, overpriced margaritas) and the land where the KOA campground sat nestled in trees is now a parking garage for the restaurant. Progress, they say. Bullshit, I say. The only thing in the whole area that had not changed one bit was the abandoned Meyer lake house, except it wasn’t abandoned anymore. It was mine. I even christened the lake house with a new name: Cabin of Seclusion. I had the moniker cast in iron and installed above the entrance gate at the end of the drive out to the farm road. Now, that’s what I call progress.

  The first summer I owned the place, my wife and I didn’t do much to it. We did stay there one night, roughing it as there was no water or electricity to it. I did have those utilities turned on, but they still didn’t work. I would later learn that the main power line had been eaten by squirrels and the main water line burst underground years before. The water company plugged the line, so it wouldn’t dump thousands of gallons of fresh water underground. It would cost a pretty penny to fix all that—in time. The one night we stayed—a blowup mattress in the middle of the living room with several blankets on top for me, my wife, and our young son—I searched for signs of our time in the lake house that summer after the seventh grade, but I couldn’t find a single trace of our visit. I stood in front of the bay windows with my wife and my son—my left arm around her, my right arm cradling my boy—the same windows my friends and I had huddled in front of, cowering from Bloody Billy and the fear of his wrath. I pointed out to my wife that the island we were staring at, the one out in the middle of the water with the rocky base and the spiky cedar trees, was the one where me and my friends were stranded.

  She gasped. “You could’ve died out there.”

  I sighed. “Yep. We were so stupid.”

  The second summer I owned the cabin, my wife and I started to make it our own. That summer was dedicated to demolition and foundation repair. The third summer was for remodeling. By the fourth summer, it was practically a livable cabin. By the fifth summer, it was officially our second home. The summer time became our time at the lake, where we’d take our boy and spend quality time as a family in the out of doors. I taught my boy things like fishing and how to use a pocket knife to whittle a stick. You know? Outdoorsy stuff. I loved showing him how to do these things, and I continued to spend time with my boy every summer as much as I could, even as he grew into a somewhat ornery teenager. Certain aspects of his personality curdled once he started high school. And as I shook my head and wondered how my wife and I could raise a kid that at times seemed like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (depression, anxiety, bi-polar), I often thought about what Sheriff “Sam” Hill said to me, slouched on the chair in my bedroom, looking through me with those dirty, brown eyes of his.

  “Billy Callahan is just a boy, just like you. And he got a mama that loves him, just like you,” he said to me. “He’s somebody’s son.”

  Ain’t that the damned truth?

  I did one last thing before I considered the Cabin of Seclusion complete. I had two bronze, commemorative plaques made. The first one was for my friend Randy. I had his name put on it along with the important dates to demark his life as well as the professions he probably would have excelled in: football star and comedian. He was really good at both. He was also my best friend. I mounted the bronze plaque on the tallest pecan tree that sat across the driveway to the cabin. It’s trunk was solid like concrete and seemed like a fitting place to mount the plaque. It was tall and solid, just like Randy.

  The second one was for Billy Callahan. And I know what you’re thinking. I must be crazy, right? Maybe you could say that. It’s your opinion, I guess. But here’s the thing. I thought a lot about my visit from Sheriff “Sam” Hill. What he said to me about Billy—the bully we all called Bloody Billy—it stuck in my mind. Then it got stuck in my craw, that place where you ruminate on things. And I couldn’t help but wonder why he told me that. It wasn’t until years later when my own son’s behavior and issues initiated a mantra that I often repeated over and over. A boy, just like you. He’s somebody’s son. That’s when I realized that Billy’s parents must have loved him unconditionally, just like I loved my own troubled son unconditionally. And with that unconditional love is the hope that whenever someone you love does something bad, they will hopefully on
e day have an opportunity for redemption.

  Hope.

  Redemption.

  A boy, just like you. He’s somebody’s son.

  So, on this second bronze plaque, it said this:

  Billy Callahan

  Somebody’s Son

  I had it mounted on the last wood plank at the end of the pier, probably the last place his feet touched something earthly before he disappeared into the water forever. I look at the plaque every time I stand on the end of that pier, peering out across the dark water at Sometimes Island, the desolate place where I experienced real, life-threatening danger for the first time in the seventh grade, along with my best friends, surrounded by the murky water that took somebody’s son.

  Afterword

  When I was a boy, I loved comic books, just like William. Wait! Let me rephrase that. I fucking loved comic books. That’s more like it. I didn’t fall in love with literature until I was in college. Stupid me. It took an excellent English professor, Margaret Downs-Gamble, to blow my mind with literature. As a boy, most literature did not capture my imagination. I don’t know why. Maybe it was my short, attention span. Comic books satisfied that quickly (Frank Miller, Alan Moore, John Byrne—to name a few—were on the newsstand when I was in junior high). Maybe it was the long list of bored school teachers I had in junior high and high school (underpaid, overworked, unenthused). But there was one novel that captured my imagination as a young reader: Lord of the Flies. It was—for me—the perfect book for boys. It had action, violence, insolence, and—most importantly—an amazing premise. What would happen if some boys were trapped on a deserted island without domineering parents around? In short, they would destroy each other, of course. It’s simply what humans would do. Right? Right?! Well, I don’t know. It made sense to me as a boy.