by Mark Tufo
“Hey, one thing, Dennis.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” He turned to face me.
“My friends call me Talbot.”
He looked for a second at me before the light of recognition lit up.
“My friends call me Wags, short for Waggoner.”
“Good to meet you, Wags.” I extended my hand.
He took it. “And you too, Talbot.”
“I wouldn’t leave that girl for too long, I think she’d kiss whoever walked by next.”
“Funny.” He laughed and headed for the fridge.
The party rolled until around the 2:00 am hour, I can’t be sure because it was very difficult to focus on things that small. But that was roughly about the time the beer dried up and curfews became an issue. Dennis and Paul stayed the night. Much to their chagrin, their dates did not.
The next morning came the realization of what fifty drunken teenagers can do to a house. The place was trashed. And I had somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours to get it looking like home again. With a crippling hangover, I didn’t see the point in even trying. I heard noise in the kitchen, loud bottles rustling around. Was somebody still looking for beer to drink? They were some hardcore revelers, I thought to myself. I pulled myself up from the grasp of gravity, damn she was unrelenting. I strode my green-gilled self to the kitchen to see what was going on and was pleasantly surprised to find Dennis in the midst of throwing out the first of many trash bags.
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”
“That’s what friends are for.”
And then it was my turn to reflect on his words; yeah, I guess that’s what they were for. Friends were there for you when you couldn’t do it alone. What an awesome concept. Hardly new, but new to me.
“Where’s Paul?” I asked groggily.
“That Ginner guy?” Dennis responded in kind.
“Yeah.” I figured he had split hours ago.
“I think he’s in the bathroom cleaning up some mess.”
“Ohhhh, better him than me.”
“Smelling old beer is hard enough, smelling vomit would put me over the edge.”
“Just talking about it is killing me.”
“Hey, Talbot, do you have the key to your parents’ liquor cabinet?” Paul asked as he came out of the bathroom holding a trash bag as far as humanly possible away from his face. He even had huge rubber gloves on. I was tempted to ask him where he had found those but that seemed like entirely too much effort.
“Yeah, I know where my dad hides it, but why do you want in there?”
“I learned a little trick of the trade from my dad.”
I opened up the cabinet and Paul started mixing away.
“I have no idea what you’re doing, but I don’t want any part of it. I don’t like vodka and I hate tomato juice.”
“Trust me on this one.”
Dennis wasn’t even looking over at the bar. You could tell by the look on his face he was hoping that one of those wasn’t for him.
“Alright, guys, come on over.”
‘Me too?’ Dennis’ eyes seemed to say.
Paul held up his concoction proudly. “This is called a Bloody Mary, or in other words, ‘hair of the dog’.”
“Are you sure about this?” My stomach was quaking at the notion of putting more alcohol into it.
“Trust me, try it. We’ve got maybe an hour or so until your mom gets home and at the pace we’re going at, we’ll never make it.”
He was right and I was feeling entirely too crappy to have my mother rag on me for the rest of the weekend. So I opened up the hatch; the drink was refreshingly good. Dennis seemed to enjoy his too. We spent the next few minutes finishing our wonder elixirs. And damn if Paul wasn’t right, I felt like a new man. Everybody seemed to have an extra bounce in their step. We finished cleaning the house at least a full thirty minutes before my mom’s due back time. But I had no desire to stick around just in case she found something.
“Paulie, what do you have going on today?”
“Well, there is homework.” Dennis and I both looked at him before we pushed him off his chair. “What’s the temperature outside?”
“It’s warmer than it has been,” Dennis said.
“Hold on, I’ll check.” I went to the kitchen window to see the strategically located thermometer outside. “Damn, it’s thirty-two.”
“It’s a heat wave!” Paul yelled a decibel or two higher than I really wanted to hear. “Let’s go to the S&S.”
CHAPTER 8 – Journal Entry 8
“The S&S?” Dennis asked.
“You’ll see, it’s kind of our home away from home,” I piped in. ‘Cause I sure don’t want to be at this home when my old lady shows up.” We bundled up in layers, the only appropriate way to dress in New England, and headed out. It would be the first of many in our exploration of new realms. The roof of the Stop and Shop was another ten degrees warmer than the surrounding air, which made the day seem even warmer after the cold snap we had just endured. We had even taken a few layers off by this time and had been on the roof for an hour or so, when Dennis asked what ‘that’ was.
“What’s what?” I asked, now seriously starting to catch a buzz. It doesn’t take much if you already started off with alcohol in your bloodstream.
“That.” He pointed off into the distance. It was a field maybe a mile away, straight back from the rear of the store. The majority of Paul’s time and mine was usually spent in the middle talking or toward the front of the store where we could see down the shirts off some of the hotter women. Even some not so hot, we were teenagers, what did we care? But you had to hide behind the Kihei sign, (The local Chinese restaurant) to make sure no one spotted you. Once, Paul had drooled, I’m sure it was by accident, but she was pretty. We almost got busted that time, but when her boyfriend looked up he must have thought it was condensation from the a/c, he didn’t look too bright anyway.
“I’m not sure what that place is, I’ve kinda never noticed it before,” Paul answered, sounding a little embarrassed for not even knowing a place in his own hometown.
“You guys ever been up there?” Dennis asked.
“No, to be honest, it’s never even caught my eye before,” I added.
“I think we should go check it out,” Dennis said with a gleam in his eye. Paul and I weren’t too thrilled.
“But what about our folks?” I whined (just a little). The thought of hiking in eight inches of snow didn’t entice me too much. And there would be no heat exhaust vents to lean against if it got too cold. What could I say? I was a city boy; not much hiking goes on in downtown Boston.
“Come on, Talbot,” Dennis goaded. “I can pretty much guarantee my parents aren’t going to be up there, do you seriously think your mom is going to be up there slogging around looking for you?”
“He does have a point, bud,” Paul chimed in with a smile.
“Yeah, you’re right, I guess.” But I still didn’t feel good about it. We climbed down off the roof and the temperature immediately plummeted, back on went the layers. “How are we going to get over there?” I asked, hoping this one little fact might thwart the whole attempt. “There’s a river between us and the embankment.”
From the back of the Stop and Shop was a small alleyway the cargo trucks used to transport food and beverages and past the alley there were wetlands and woods for a quarter of a mile or so. Then we would have to go down a steep embankment to the river, which wasn’t the Mississippi, but at sixty to seventy feet across was still formidable. And to fall in at these temperatures could be near fatal without proper attention. I was liking this idea less and less. But the more faults I found, the more reasons Paul and Dennis found to make this journey.
“There’s got to be a bridge or some way across,” Paul said.
“Yeah, how else would our parents make it over to bust us?” Dennis emphasized parents just to give me a hard time.
“Are you messing with me?” I ran at him.
“Of co
urse I am.” He danced away from my halfhearted jabs at his arm.
“Fine,” I answered, but I felt better anyway. “I think they’d come in from the other side anyway.”
“Really, you don’t think there is an entrance this way?” Dennis asked, incredulously.
“I don’t know, we’ve never been up there,” I answered. To be fair it would have been almost impossible to see the hill at any other time than winter because of the foliage on the dense trees.
“Come on!” Paul threw in. “We’re never going to find a way in if we sit here and debate about it. I don’t think we should go straight back, we’ll end up in the swamp and I’m definitely not in the mood to be wet.”
“Then I guess we should decide which way we should go along the river to find a crossing,” I said, finally giving my two cents’ worth. Better to be part of the team than to sit on the bench, watching.
“Which way goes where?” Dennis asked.
“Well, if we head that way,” Paul said, pointing south, “we’ll end up in the center of town, and that could be scarier than running into the principal on a skip day.”
“Yeah, I’d rather fall into the river than run into him,” I said.
“Alright, so south is out,” Dennis noted. “So north it is. Where’s that head?”
“Into the woods,” Paul said as we all turned to the north. The woods were dark and quiet and somehow foreboding, but with three of us together what could possibly happen? That was the best argument I could come up with to still my fears. The bluster seemed to wane a little in Dennis and Paul both, but nobody was going to back out now. So into the woods we went and we never even saw Little Red Riding Hood or the Big Bad Wolf.
We had walked roughly a mile with the river always on our right, but not once did we see a way to cross; not a bridge, not even a fallen tree like in the movies. We had been tempted to turn around when Paul noticed up ahead a train trestle that crossed over. We were thrilled, we were like nine year olds on Christmas day. Or possibly fifteen year olds on a mission, either way the euphoria was the same. We started running toward the trestle overhead, but much to my impending chagrin, being the fastest of the trio I, was out in front. My foot plunged into icy coldness; it felt like little leprechauns were stabbing me through my boot. I had crashed through the ice of an offshoot stream. I wasn’t in danger of drowning, but I had the uncomfortable feeling of having an icy wet foot. At the time, the thought of frostbite never entered my mind. Dennis and Paul, having seen my slip-up, easily jumped across the six foot wide stream and then had enough energy left over to turn and laugh at me as I pulled my foot out of the darkness.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled.
“Yes, you are,” Paul laughed and smacked Dennis on the shoulder.
“That’s jacked up,” Dennis said, but it didn’t stop him from laughing. I wiped off most of the mud and leaves that were stuck to my boot and made the jump.
“I’d kick your butt with my wet foot if I didn’t think you’d go crying home.”
And we all shared in the laughter. We scrambled up the embankment as best we could. It was slick with snow and ice and the fact that it was a thirty degree pitch didn’t help, either. We reached the top and viewed our next endeavor. The trestle crossed over the river at an angle, making the bridge easily a hundred and fifty to two hundred foot span of metal and wood with a fifty foot drop into icy water. But that wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was once in the middle of said trestle there was nowhere to go, and with a bend in the tracks roughly a quarter of a mile up that would obscure our vision of any oncoming trains, it didn’t leave much room for error.
“Oh, hell no!” Dennis moaned. “There’s no way I’m going over that thing! There has to be another way.”
“You saw yourself there is no other way. We’ve been walking down this river for a while now and there is nothing else. You’re not gonna wuss out now, are you?” Good old Paul, he could always be trusted to pull out the peer pressure card.
“No, I wasn’t going to wuss out, I was just hoping there was another way across,” Dennis said staunchly.
“Well, we either go this way or find another way, but I’m not standing here too much longer,” I said. “My foot is starting to freeze.” The trestle didn’t look like that much fun to me either, but Wags was on the short end of this argument.
“Wait, I think there is another way across,” Paul said as relief flooded Dennis’ face. “If we stay on the tracks going the other way, we should come to Plimpton Street and then there’s a car bridge that goes over this.”
“Yeah, let’s try that,” Dennis said just a little too eagerly.
“We’ll have to be careful,” I added. “That exposes us to passersby and this town is small enough that our parents could find out. Make sure the beers are hidden.”
“Alright, let’s give it a shot,” Paul said and then he started whistling. I was about to yell at him. What the hell was all the racket about? We were trying to be stealthy. It only took me a moment to realize it wasn’t Paul, it was a passenger train coming from the center of town. It whipped around the bend and was heading straight toward us. We jumped off the tracks and melted into the woods a few yards away and waited for it to pass. The sight of the huge metal machine roaring by scared me deep. To see something that big moving that fast chilled me even more than my boot. Nobody said anything, but had Dennis not hemmed and hawed about crossing we would have been dead smack in the center of that thing when the train came. It would have been a near suicidal plunge fifty feet into icy cold water or a race to the finish on slippery wood and metal. Both thoughts made my stomach turn. The next few moments we traveled in silence as we all thanked whatever higher force had been responsible for that lifesaving delay. After another quarter mile or so we came to the intersection where the tracks went over Plimpton Street, so down the embankment we went. We waited by the edge of the woods to make sure the coast was clear, then sprinted across the bridge and back into the woods. Whether or not anybody saw us or even cared didn’t matter, we were on a mission. The woods were entirely too thick with brush to try to get in from here, so we hugged the tree line near the road where it wasn’t too dense. We jumped deeper in whenever someone passed by. We had almost given up all hopes of finding any inroads into Indian Hill as we later found out it was called, when we quite literally stepped onto a small path. It was absolutely invisible from the road. We went onto the road and checked. A huge oak tree had been strategically placed at the head of this small footpath. I had to think to myself that there were probably only a handful of people who knew about this and of that handful none had been up here lately. The snow was pristine. The path was no more than two feet across but straight through the brush it went. We reasoned it had to have been used, but from the condition of the snow we knew it hadn’t happened in the last few days. Wet, scratched, tired, and buzzed, we headed up the hill. The snow seemed to get deeper the farther in we went, it seemed mystical but more likely it was just that we were getting more tired and therefore couldn’t get our feet as high as we previously could. A few hundred yards later we came out from the woods and discovered one of the most awesome sights I had thus far encountered. Indian Hill spread out before us in a meadow to the left and right, with another rise directly in front of us, albeit it was another three or four hundred yards or so across the field. It was gorgeous with the snow and ice hanging from the trees. But what immediately caught our attention was a huge solitary oak tree in the center of the field. It was enormous, gnarled and twisted; ice clung to it like a lover on a spring day. We were transfixed.
“The hobbit tree!” Dennis yelled.
“What?” I said, shocked out of my reverie.
“It looks like a tree that would be in Lord of the Rings trilogy!” he yelled again.
“You’re right,” Paul said as he turned from the tree and looked at Dennis. And from then on that tree was and always would be known as the hobbit tree, even after its untimely demise a few years later. W
e spent a great deal of time growing up in those woods and hills, exploring every nook and cranny. And inevitably, when we all went our separate ways in life we would on occasion make a special journey back to those magical and mystical woods that would one day become the place where our fate as a planet would ultimately be decided. This initial visit did not last as long as we would have hoped. My foot was frozen, the sun was beginning its early descent and the temperature was plummeting nearly as fast as the setting sun. Apparently, the warm front had worn out its welcome, Old Man Winter was back and he was mad that someone had stepped in while he took a break. The wind picked up, the wind chill factor had to be somewhere in the neighborhood of minus ten, and we were roughly dressed in layers for the mid twenties. None of us looked forward to the long walk home but our steps were lightened with the knowledge of this new and wondrous land we were going to explore when the weather allowed. Like the lunar mission, we didn’t stay very long but the impression was indelible. And unlike the lunar mission, we would be back and soon.
“Where have you been?” my mother asked, staring straight at me, and unless I was being paranoid, she was looking closely at my eyes. Looking for some evidence of what I was sure she was suspecting. But it was amazing what could be hidden behind a bottle of Visine and a pack of Dentyne.
“I was just hanging out with Paul and Dennis, Mom. No big deal,” I added.
“Don’t you get flippant with me, young man. If your father were here, he’d have your hide for talking to me that way.”
“First off, Mom, I didn’t talk to you ‘that way’, and as far as worrying about what Dad would do if he were here—not necessarily something I’m too concerned about.” That shut her up faster than a roll of duct tape. To see my mom wordless was truly a rare occasion. Her mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. I’m sure she had a string of curses on her tongue, but as of yet had not unleashed them. That was fine with me, the longer I stood face to face with her, however, the more likely I might burp and she’d catch wind of my choice of afternoon beverages. I had turned and was going to seek refuge in the confines of my room when her brain engaged her mouth.