Laughing Waters, Roaring Thunder - Patrick Sean Lee (urban books to read .txt) 📗

You ain’t near old enough, I’m guessin’. How old are ya’?”
The boy, as it turned out, was a girl—a tomboy if I’d ever seen one—and she shot us a mind-your-own-business glance, then hustled into her cabin without bothering to answer.
“Well I’ll be go to hell. If that don’t beat all. Must not be any cops in this place for miles an’ miles! How old you figure she was?”
“I don’t know. Who cares?” I answered. “Let’s get going. The cows are waiting.”
“Nah. Nah, wait a sec. She was drivin’ around here, an’ I know she don’t have a license. I’m thinkin’…”
“Oh no you don’t! Don’t be thinking about anything, Jimmy. Let’s just get back to the pasture. We don’t need any trouble. Remember what we promised Mom.”
Jimmy was off again on one of his mental adventures, not hearing a word I said, planning something I wasn’t about to cave into. Not this time.
“You…go on without me, Skip. I’ll be there in a flash. I just wanna’ check out this buggy here. Maybe that girl’ll come back out…I wanna’ ask her a coupla’ things, too.”
“No. I’m not going back without you. Whatever it is your planning, you’re not gonna’ do it. I’m not gonna’ let you.” I walked up to where he stood, put my hand on his arm, and began to pull him down the hill. His eyes narrowed, with the look I’d seen only once before. In his bedroom, as he’d glared at the crudely drawn, perforated picture of Inky hanging on the wall. Before I could blink, he hit me so hard that I fell backward onto my rear. I believed in that moment we’d lost a world, that Jimmy had gone mad.
I looked to Mickey to help me out. “Mick! Tell him to back off. Let’s get out of here!”
Mickey stared down at me, shook his head, and then chose his master. “Goddam, Skip. You always crap out whenever you think you smell smoke. What’s the big deal? We haven’t done anything yet. Not a thing! What are you so afraid of?” He stepped closer to Jimmy. I gathered myself up off the ground, dusted off, and then walked back to Laughing Waters alone.

Mom, Pop, Aunt Corey and Sylvie had disappeared. Into the tangle of brush along the banks of Cabin Creek and its laughing waters. The fishing poles stacked neatly inside the door, the creels filled with bait and extra hooks—the hats with more hooks imbedded in their brims, the rubber boots, and cans of mosquito repellant—all of it was gone. I stepped in, glanced right, left, and then walked through the dining room into the kitchen where a tiny mirror hung alone and strangely out of place on the wall behind the door. In the worn, cloudy reflection I recognized my face with another reddened bruise beginning to swell up beneath my eye. Funny, I thought, the last time I’d gotten a shiner it was from the fist of Inky the Terrible. Private enemy number one. Really, I didn’t know who hit the hardest, him or Jimmy. It might have been a tie.
Despairing at what I was going to tell Mom and Pop about this new black eye, I left the kitchen and walked into the dining room where I took a seat beneath the windows. I knew what Jimmy was up to—he intended to steal that family’s car. I didn’t know if he knew how to drive, I don’t think he did, but Jimmy’s M.O. was very predictable. He and Mickey would come flying down the hill any minute. I was certain of that.
I waited ten minutes, and then thirty. No sound outside at all. Tired of standing vigil, and hungry, I returned to the kitchen and threw together a sandwich. As I searched for the bag of chips the shuffle of shoes atop the steps out front caught me. I was surprised when the door creaked open and in came Jimmy, followed by his little puppy, Mickey. Both Jimmy and I stared across the long space of the rooms at one another, I expressionless, he with his eyes downcast slightly.
“Where’s the car?” I asked him in the most deprecating voice I could muster. He answered immediately.
“Still up there. She wouldn’t give us a ride. Hey, Skip…umm, I dunno’ what came over me. God, I’m sure sorry. If ya’ want to, you can take a good poke at me. I sure as hell deserve it, and I won’t even try to block it. I’m really sorry.”
I was stunned. “You weren’t going to steal it?”
“Steal it? Heck no! How would I steal it? I dunno how to drive. Cripes! Why’d ya’ think I was gonna’ steal it?”
“Because I know you,” I said.
“Maybe not as good as ya’ think you do. I wanted to talk to that girl, that’s all—an’ I did! Well, I liked the car, too. I wanted a ride in it.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No. I swear it. Geez are you dumb!”
“Yeah. You took a shiner for that?” Mickey finally spoke.
Jimmy related to me how after seeing that the guy was actually a girl, he’d taken a fancy to her because of her short, black hair and funny clothes. After beating up on me, he and Mickey had stood around waiting for her to come out and tell them to leave. She did, of course, but Jimmy listens to no one when he wants something. He wanted to talk to “Ginsberg”—that’s what she called herself. The weird name for a girl had something to do with Beatniks and a book called “Howl”, he told me. I don’t know, he lost me there. She was thirteen, Jimmy’s age, now, and she had come to Colorado at the insistence of her parents, who refused to leave her with either friends or relatives back in Manhattan for fear she’d run off with these bongo-playing, poetry-reading nuts, to a city, I think he said, called Geenwich Village. When her parents left the cabin it was her “duty”, she also told him, to drive their car all over the place. A protest or something. How or where she’d learned to drive he didn’t say, or didn’t know. He said he was very impressed with her, though. I think he found his Carol.
We had three more days until the end of our stay at Cabin Creek, and for two and nine-tenths of them, I swear Jimmy courted and wooed her until I feared he’d jump ship and find a way to stow away in Ginsberg’s baggage, and then sneak back to Manhattan with her. Taking a teasing from Mickey—once again a comrade of mine—and me, he swore his relationship with her was “strictly platonic”, another couple of words whose meaning eluded me. “We read poetry,” he explained. I know I saw him kiss her. By my understanding of the words, reading poetry had very little to do with kissing. And speaking of explaining.
My fishermen family trudged into the cabin later that same afternoon when Jimmy blackened my eye. They asked me—asked all of us—how it had come to happen.
“We were horsing around,” I said, “and I tripped…”
“No he didn’t. I hit ‘im. He wouldn’t stay with me an’ Mickey. He thought we was gonna’ steal Ginsberg’s folks’ car, an’ he tried to pull me away. We wasn’t

gonna’ steal it, an’ I didn’t know why he was so upset. I just wanted to talk to Ginsberg—the girl in the cabin next door. I shouldna’ done it, an’ I’m really sorry I did. Honest, Mr. an’ Mrs. Morley. I shouldna’ done it an’ I’m sorry.”
That said a lot to me about my best friend, and brought a smile to the lips of Mom.

Imprint

Text: Patrick Sean Lee
Editing: Self
Publication Date: 08-04-2012

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
To Jimmy, God rest his soul. Although the category is listed as Juvenile fiction, the basic facts and events are true.