Lostine
Lostine is a completed 54,000 word novel, and here, is offered the first three chapters.
Dear Reader,
LOSTINE’s sixth-grade narrator tells us:
“It wasn’t the kid’s finger I and Koz found in Coffin Marsh on a turned-up bucket.
“It wasn’t even how during a school lunch time baseball game a man came out of the swamp and grabbed a first-grader or how I killed that whole tall, human being with one rock throw.
“It wasn’t Koz and I and Lostine could never tell anybody I was the killer.
“What it was, Koz told me his Uncle taught him real jungle recon tactics. It was Koz said if we found out what was hidden in the jungle of Coffin Marsh, he’d prove he was old enough to take care of his Dad.
“Me? Mr. Bricker smiled, made me and mom trust Dad’s still alive. But over a year later, Bricker cannon-balled my chest that night in the swamp. I saw then he was part of why Dead Kid Theo never got found. I saw he probley lied about my Dad. But why? In the jungle of Coffin Marsh, Koz and I were a real Recon Team. People died.
“And you laugh a sixth-grader like me can’t know enough about love to say I’ll never get Lostine out of my heart – ever - even though when Koz and I painted-up and re-conned into the swamp that last time, Lostine yanked my heart right out of my chest and flung it away into the tree tops.”
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Joe C. Smolen
One
Dead Kid Theo
There’s a box at the start of this confession form for my name. You want to know it? Look there. My dad’s bigger than the water tower up on Kittridge Ridge over on the other side of the swamp. I got my dad’s name, sure, but I have to grow a lot yet before I can carry it around, and blab it like it’s mine.
This is the short version of my true confession about what happened in the Spring of 1969 at Coffin Marsh. I wouldn’t do it at all, but a Lady Judge said I better deposit, and since I’m just a sixth-grader, I can’t say it right either unless I write it out clear as I can here. I know it’s a lame sorta account, but it’s the best I could do, even with Mrs. Pinch trying to correct me.
This deposit is fact and can’t be improved with torture or interrogation and is meant to say by the facts who oughta fry for murder and who oughtn’t. I mean, I can’t have Lance Corporal Kozlowski or Lostine Lynn LePard scourged for life as what-do-you-call accessories to murders – which only I did.
I swear that everything I wrote down here is true and accurate including the sizes of the knives and guns which are now held in evidence by the court and can be checked with a measuring tape anyhow.
I’m telling this like it’s all happening right now, today, because that’s how it haunts my head – still keeps me awake sometimes at night, like when you cut yourself and the knife is still in your hand, but the cut isn’t bleeding yet, and you can’t hardly believe what you just did.
I heard once where a camel will fit through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man – which is what goes through my mind every time I see Mrs. Pinch on school security duty out back by the right field fence of the school ball field. I’m not sure if Mrs. Pinch is just a Teacher or Faculty, too.
Being rich or camel-sized aren’t Mrs. Pinch’s problems, but almost. She mashes a steel folding chair when she sits on it while she’s on right field fence security duty. When she wants to stand up, she has to swing both her arms together to get some momentum going almost like a stopped freight train when the engines start pulling and you hear the slam of couplings rippling tight on down the line. Takes a lot of power.
The main school security problem that Mrs. Pinch is supposed to deal with is the first-graders at noon recess – near the access road – edge of the swamp. At noon, the first-graders scatter like bugs dumped out of a can and invade our ball field. They prackley crawl up your pant leg, pestering and asking questions – won’t stay in their area
by the monkey bars.
Once, a red-head kid with bags under his eyes came on the field and wanted my autograph. He even knew the word autograph. That’s how he asked for it. Had his little autograph book. Wouldn’t let up. He showed me a page in his autograph book titled “Center Fielders”. Said he and his dad were going down to Frisco to get Willie Mays’ autograph. Said he was getting mine first. I hadda get rid of him somehow, so I signed it. But while I did, a really long ball bounced right by me, hopped over my centerfield fence, thumped on the access road and dove on down the bank into the swamp. I wasn’t supposed to. I was supposed to just leave it down there. We were supposed to just ask for
a new ball. But I had rocks, so I risked it and ran down and got it anyway.
Our school’s what they call a parish with its own church next to the school and there’s a period every day where old Sister Mary Leonissa tells us about what she calls the ‘Anno Domino’ and explains what the statues in the church stand for, but she doesn’t sell it hard and doesn’t make me sign anything and just lets me go back to my own brand of devil-dodging after she’s done. But see, the thing is, Sister Leonissa and the other nuns are just like Mrs. Pinch; they just look at you so kindly alla the time that I end up thinking kindly myself.
Few months ago, account of that Clover Park kid’s disappearance, there was a special school assembly in the gym and we all lined up on the bleachers. Our big, tall Principal, Sister Bendiga talked to us. I told you how I play deep center field at lunch time, right on the edge of the swamp. Well, just like she was really just talking to me in particular, but making a show of addressing the whole student body, I was sure Principal Bendiga looked me right in the eye while she talked. Did it three times – no lie.
Like I said, Sister Bendiga is tall. Just like she was Julius Caesar marching up and down the Forum in his toga and waving his arms and addressing the Senators, big Sister Bendiga, in the flowing black robes of her BVM nun habit flew around that whole gym, the big black Rosary at her belt clattering as she told us personally about dead kid Theo Osterbyrd from over at Clover Park. “Dead kid” is me talking. It’s just what I figured’s so – based on the facts I had – namely the size of the swamp. Namely the things I saw and heard last Summer when I rafted in there solo on nothing but a door with a bucket to sit on.
Clover Park Grade School is a public school a coupla miles away from ours – over past the swamp on the far side of Kittridge Ridge. Principal Bendiga told us that one day, this kid Theo Osterbyrd never showed up home after school. Story was, he always walked by the swamp every day on his way home.
But now, with the Spring green-up starting, dead kid Theo’s mostly already forgot by most people and at lunch recess during our games, the whole school ball field security thing works out anyhow, because us sixth and seventh-graders are playing baseball and we’re older now and we’re pretty used to knowing what goes on. Like the Valentine’s Day hippies I spotted. Koz not there that day, our noon ball game was boring. I think I was marveling away at something way in the distance over the tops of the buildings at the Mall when I saw the two hippies coming. I saw them sneaking our way along the edge of the swamp – like Mutt & Jeff – a short one and a tall one. When I ran and told Mrs. Pinch, she started to herd the first-graders and count heads. Somebody else tore up to the school and told. Then, all their black robes flying big in the wind like the wings of giant, hovering eagles, all eleven of the Sisters ran out and formed a perimeter line down on the access road while Principal Bendiga hawked right for the hippies. I got a gold star on my Deportment.
Just to be telling the truth, it isn’t really baseball anyhow – what we played at noon. We played with a soft ball – not a real baseball. Just like the Majors, Little League uses a hard ball. I heard of Little Leaguers getting killed by pitches.
Koz usually pitches for us sixth-graders at our school recess games and today he told me I oughta really play deep because he heard a coupla the seventh-grader’s dads have been taking them to batting cages lately and they might hit some long ones. I mean, when I’m real deep in center, I’m right down next to the giant poplars that are just inside the outfield fence. I’m so far out there that I barely hear what’s going on in the infield and about the only person that’s easy to recognize is Koz in the center of the diamond on the pitcher’s mound with his straw-colored hair and his red Bo-Sox hat.
A centerfield advantage I had last year is I could slide between a tall poplar and the swamp when I wanted to and drain my lizard. I mean, way down there by the centerfield fence, the Spring sun kina melts you and all you feel and hear is the syrupy breeze drifting up off the swamp, the bees buzzing in the clover on the field and maybe a worried Killdeer decoying from the swamp side of the access road.
This year, there’s a kite stuck half way up one of the poplars, but after last winter, there’s nothing to salvage.
The big difference this year, though, there’s this girl Lostine. At lunch recess, ever since Principal Bendiga talked, Lostine’s always there by the outfield fence. I never see Lostine come or go. She just appears. Only reason I know her name is I heard her get whispered about. I don’t know what they said. She’s not popular. She’s a puzzle. Doesn’t show her teeth when she smiles. She doesn’t sit and chit with the other girls, either. She’s seventh grade. Her brother’s one of the first-graders that bugs me and Lostine’s always there by the out field fence. She doesn’t play with her little brother. She’s just there – watching – and talking lotta times to this tall guy I heard is named Ral Bonner. He’s eighth grade, but he wears a letterman’s jacket just like he’s already in High School.
I never heard of anybody called Lostine before. Mrs. Pinch makes me think of box cars. Lostine makes me think of the wind, the way it rushes soft and invisible through the trees and turns all the leaves upside down silvery. You can’t see where the wind comes from or where it goes. You can’t tell much of what the wind thinks. Same with Lostine. All by herself, she’s just always there.
I and Koz are always first out on the field when the game gets started, and then the first graders start to scatter as Mrs. Pinch stumps onto her security station stiff-legged. Lostine is usually standing there just outside the outfield fence. I always see her somewhere between the big poplars, her face half-hidden by the wind through her long black hair – and I don’t get it, but I see her look right at me sometimes like she’s waiting for me to do something, and like little bolts of lightning, sparks always jump off her face and hit mine – Bonner there or not.
Never forget the first time I smelled Lostine. I know all the swamp smells. Wasn’t the swamp. No stink to it. That day, a Killdeer was making a lot of racket. You could see it fluttering on the ground over on the swamp side of the black-topped access road like with a broken wing the way they fake you away from where their nest is. That day, I saw Bonner in his letterman’s jacket crowd Lostine, but she walked away from him - with the wind – opposite direction of the fluttering bird - toward me. Then she stopped and stood pretty close to me, like she was looking around on the ground for the nest.
Girls usually smell like one of about three things – mothballs, grape bubble gum or soap. That day, Lostine’s un-swamp smell was like a sweet spice mixed in with the ceremonial smoke I smelled once at a church wedding. Lostine’s smell just floated over to me and I froze, waiting for another whiff – which was when it happened – she said something to me – right to me, myself, and it fit.
Before this gets out of hand, though, I have to confess a fact – just so you know. I’m not really a baseball player. Like, I don’t really know what a change-up is. I know it’s a kinda hard ball pitch, but that’s all. And I don’t know the baseball rules. They just let me on the lunch team so they’ll have a center fielder and because, ever since the second time he pitched a shut-out against the seventh-graders, they listen to Koz. After that game, he wasn’t “that bully kid Kozlowski” any more. After that, the way they called him “The Koz” or plain “Koz”, there was awe in the way they said it.
Everybody knows I drift, but Koz knows I can throw. I just look real hard right where I want it to go and it does – exactly. One time, while he was flying by, I looked right at a seagull’s arm pit and I had one of my rocks and I let go and that’s where I got him – right in the arm pit and he went down hard and flopped in the water. Laid there flapping quite a while before he took off again. I knew knocking down that seagull was nothing but my old violent ways again – out of nowhere – back – and my channel clicked and I flashed back fifth grade to where we used to live, to the beach at the Sound, below the main-line railroad tracks, to a south-bound freight tearing by, to a doors-open box car with a rusty bum standing in the door holding his lizard and whizzing out into the wind. I saw my opposite-direction rocks zing like tracer bullets. It lives now in my heart how I put out the rust man’s eye.
But all my sixth-grade team knows about me is that when a hit comes my way, I might be staring hard up at what a sky-writer plane is doing or signing an autograph for a fan, but when I get the ball and I let go, I can blast it to somewhere between the pitcher’s mound and home plate – no stop-off at short stop or second base.
So the first time Lostine talked to me, I’m frozen there, not looking at Lostine – not looking at anything – just waiting for her smoky smell and all out of a nowhere dream everybody is yelling at me. From sounds like a mile away, I hear my name on Koz’s deep voice and at the same time, the konk of something bouncing around up in one of the poplars, but it’s on the other side of the tree from me. I run over there to see what it is. It’s the ball! It’s a way long hit that fell up there in the branches and I can hear it falling, almost getting stuck sometimes. I spot it for a second, ricocheting mid-bounce back on my side and then I lose it again until – thump – I see it hit the ground.
Like I’m in the Majors, perfect, I bend. I scoop the ball with my gloved right. I spin toward home plate that’s so far off I can’t even see it. I jump to my right foot and hard as I can, my left arm lets go just as I lunge onto my left foot.
Watching my throw, all at the same time I feel dumb, scared and excited. I just gawk. For a second, the ball stays so high I think it’s going to hit one of the cars in the parking lot way over past the backstop. It flies dead down center. Over second base, it’s still climbing. I see Koz watch it go over him and then it drops perfect right into Frank Fast’s glove at home plate. Next, like he’s got all day, Frank just shuffles the three steps to home and the seventh-grade runner between third and scoring home stops all disgusted-like. That’s when, from close behind me, I hear a girl’s voice say, “That was pretty stupid. What were you doing when he made that hit?”
When I turn around, Lostine is right there at the fence close enough to see her almost-no-color eyes which are fastened on mine like I never had happen before and then she kina smiles. I don’t have an answer for her. I don’t know what I was thinking about when the ball fell in the tree. But just like Lostine said, it was stupid. I never came up with one thing to say back to her except, “We’re up.” Then, I turned and escaped for the dugout, way up between the back-stop fence and the row of dumpsters.
At the dugout, Koz is telling our batting order and what he calls our strategy, but all I can hear is the hush-hush-hush of my own blood pumping in my ears. All I feel is the ache in my left arm and Lostine’s eyes on me.
Everybody takes the batting order from Koz because they trust him to beat the seventh-graders. I trust him to leave me down the line-up so I won’t have to try and hit and that’s what he does this time. Which is a good thing, because all I can think of is how Lostine’s eyes looked like lights when she talked to me and how now I feel kina excited like one time at home when I was changing a light bulb and I got my finger tip in the socket and it made my tooth fillings ache. But this time, with Lostine’s eyes high-beaming right into mine, there’s no tooth ache – nothing like that.
Koz always sounded smart in those days – with his croaky voice – just like when he says he’s, just for general purposes, “rethinking” his “concept”. He says that when he’s re-thinking his concept, it’s like what he calls the bleeding edge of reality. This is the truth. It’s pretty much what he said. I know, because I wrote it down. Once, I asked him what a concept is. I wrote that down, too.
Koz’s “concept” would usually come up when Sister Leonissa, our home room teacher, would catch him looking out the window with what Mr. Bricker called the thousand yard stare. “We’re here to work, Mr. Kozlowski!” is what Sister Leonissa said one day. When that kina thing would get said, Koz just looked sad and chased with another one of his words – like “valid”. In those days, back before we were friends, he was always in dutch and wouldn’t let up and so Sister would have to put him on the after school list – “Detention” she called it – what Koz calls “The Brig”, because his Uncle says that’s where a U.S. Marine goes when he gets in trouble.
Raelene Rhonda Robinson, who is a smarter girl than somewhere between five and seven of me besides being able to run really fast, naturally taught the class while Sister Leonissa and Koz were out in the hall “in conference” and even from inside the class room, we could hear his voice rumble.
I have never seen a time when Raelene Rhona Robinson didn’t know an answer. I used to think I could use the word beautiful on her – or maybe the word wing – or some feathered flying thing anyhow. Back then, I didn’t dare look her in the eye – ever. I was afraid she’d think I was a dumb cluck. Looking her in the eye now’d be nothing. Raelene Rhonda Robinson sure talks a lot, though – just like most girls. Girls all seem to tell each other flat everything. This must be the case, because they never stop talking unless forced. Seems to me, anyhow, that after they get done, there’s nothing left to say.
The way I saw it, from what I could tell by looking and listening around, when you get involved with a girl, you gotta get married, otherwise there’s gonna be a lot of crying. I actually used to think stuff like that. I’m not the same now.
Koz used to be a bully, before he met me – back in his “Brig Days”. Koz did a lotta time after school in Detention – with Mrs. Pinch monitoring which page of the dictionary he had to copy out perfect. Koz used to think seeing your picture at the Post Office you were somebody.
Sometimes, I think one of my dad’s Coho flies ended Koz’s bully stage. Some other times, I think it was Mrs. Pinch did that. A Coho Fly’s just a Salmon lure that a Salmon thinks is a winged bug riding a hook big as a down payment. Koz saw the one I had when I was showing it around at morning recess and he took it away from me and I saw him slide it in his back pocket. Later, right in class, he yelled and jumped up and then cried in front of the whole class. Every move he made, his face got redder and his eyes bugged bigger. I heard later the school nurse hadda cut his pants off to get the barb outta his rear.
Even though Koz hit me and took dad’s fly, I felt bad – and worried, too. I saw my own kina pain coming. I was supposed to stay outta dad’s stuff. Long time, did pretty good, too – ever since kindygarden. Back then, I gave away dad’s shotgun shells at school. Cool stuff, but parents didn’t think so. Got me on some sorta list. Now, some grown up was bound to want to know where Koz got that Coho Fly. But they never got it out of him. He never cracked.
Koz never told on me. Stuff happens between people and I mostly never get the way of any of it. I just wonder about people sometimes at night when I’m fading off to sleep and watching the big neon signs on the other hill. Koz isn’t the same either now. Somehow, maybe the Fly changed him. When Koz got back to school a week after his pants got cut off, he was just different.
Some kids got a pretty good charge out of seeing Koz cry. Especially the girls – especially Raelene Rhonda Robinson. But one time in the hall, between classes, Mrs. Pinch saw the crowd of kids and heard the giggling. She saw how Koz tried hard to turn his other cheek, to just take what he had coming, to fight to reform. Koz turned his back on Raelene and pretended lame he was trying to find something in his locker.
“Lance! Lance Kozlowski!” Mrs. Pinch called out to him smiling. “I’m so glad I saw you.” Walking over to him, parting the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea, Mrs. Pinch gave Koz a little hug around the shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about your voice – its wonderful depth. We need you in our Choir. Will you please! Just think about it?” There was a lot of Mrs. Pinch to move, but she prackley danced. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a whole week!”
And then Mrs. Pinch stood there selling the school Choir to Koz right in front of Raelene Rhonda Robinson and proved, without Koz having to say even a word, how he was a Star and how his voice and its “rich tonal qualities” was going to take the School Choir to the big Archdiocese Competition. Mrs. Pinch was saying all of this right outside the school office and suddenly, big Principal Bendiga popped her office door and came out with a sky-blue choir robe and held it up in front of Koz and smiled at him and rattled her Rosary and said, “Mr. Kozlowski, nobody else in Cabrini School’s entire student body is big enough to fill this gown.”
I could tell Mrs. Pinch did that all on purpose. I could tell she and Principal Bendiga planned it. They were kina rough on Raelene. Everybody knew the one thing Raelene couldn’t do was sing even My Country Tis of Thee.
You can see how Koz turning over a new leaf was Mrs. Pinch. Not so much the hook.
Two
The U.S. Navy is Looking for Him
The whole Seventh Fleet still can’t find my dad, so mom got a job. She says it pays real good. She works a ton, though. Because she’s new and low-seniority, she works every night, and on weekends, driving buses she meets already somewhere downtown. Mom takes over from the driver that drove it all day.
I went with Mom once – on an all-night bus. It got real dark. People were like shadows. I saw a man puke. I saw a lady walking on the same sidewalk with a slice of pizza. Somebody ran into her. Her pizza landed face down on the sidewalk right by the puke. She just picked her pizza back up and took a bite and kept going.
Mom smiles at me when I get home from school, then she puts on her uniform and goes right back downtown.
She always looks tired, but we try to paint the house ourselves. She says she’s got other plans for Dad when the Navy gets around to finding him.
You need to know, though, too, what I know about Dave Bricker. I mean, I’m telling this how I remember Mr. Bricker in the beginning. I wasn’t there with him and dad when they got shot down. I was nothing but a picture in my dad’s back pocket.
Mr. Bricker and dad were air crew together. Dad flew the jet. Mr. Bricker buckled in behind him. Mr. Bricker said, “You can call me Dave or you can call me knave.” Last time he saw Dad, they were in an after-burner acceleration, trying to get east, out over the gulf. One second, a SAM - a surface-to-air missile - was tracking them. Next, there was a sorta thunk underneath and they flamed-out. Their Phantom rolled left, then faster. The jet spun out of control. Last thing Mr. Bricker heard was Dad yelling “Eject! Eject!”
Mr. Bricker told me and mom, “I reached back for the ejection handles and then I was in the water and a swarm of sampans was paddling after us from shore. I tried to reach for my .45, but my pistol arm was broken. I could see your dad in the water, too, floating free about three hundred yards closer to shore than me. Just when the sampans started to close on your dad’s position, from outta the Sun, two Skyraiders dumped hell on the sampans and they all disappeared.”
See, Mr. Bricker was telling me and mom his story about how he and dad got shot down, and flying with his hands, he’s acting it all out and all of a sudden, he stops and sags back in his chair and looks right in my eyes for an instant. Then, he looks at his feet so long, I wonder if he’s asleep with his eyes open.
When Mr. Bricker showed up at our house, mom was the one who asked him what happened over there, but he never looked at her - just me – like he was scared to look at mom. She knew the name Bricker from a letter Mr. Bricker wrote her from a hospital ship over there. But there he was – more than a year later – at our front door – no warning. Said he was out of the Navy now, but thought he’d “check on Chet’s family”. Wanted to know if there was any news about my dad. Well, I knew the answer to that one. Every few weeks mom comes back from the mailbox and reads me the latest letter from Dad. I told Mr. Bricker,
“The Canadian kids across the gulley say my Dad’s dead. They told me their Dad says ‘Charlie probley killed him long time ago.’ But Mom gets letters!”
That day, listening to Mr. Bricker, I guess Mom finally had enough wine, because when I shot my mouth off like that, she spilled her wine – slopped it right across the carpet and didn’t seem to notice.
Mr. Bricker’s eyes stayed on mine, and then he seemed to remember something fun and he grinned huge all of a sudden and told us about him and dad getting shot down,
“That was our sixty-first mission. But mission fifty-six! Your dad’s a natural. He flew our target approach right under a bridge. Rest of the squadron avoided the place, but Chet studied the intel, and he figured the NVA couldn’t depress their anti-aircraft guns under that bridge. He dropped us right down on the river, like a six hundred knot ski boat. Shoulda seen spray on the canopy we were so low. About four klicks from the bridge, I realized what Chet was gonna do. I was so scared, I messed in my flight suit.
“All at once, I felt Chet release our ordnance, hit the throttle and yank back on the stick. The loada Gs we got climbing out of there blacked me out.”
Mr. Bricker stared at his shoes for a minute, “But prop-driven Skyraiders are so enthusiastic about saving you, they practically comb your hair with their wing tips. Your dad was alive! The canopy blew like it was supposed to. We both got out of the plane OK. He was alive!”
Mr. Bricker took his eyes off mine, stuck ‘em on the toes of his shoes and hid there and the corners of his mouth drew down. You could see it like a diagram.
“Chet never apologized to me,” he said to his shoes. ”The Marine base had a deep sink. Your dad hosed-out my flight suit and hand washed it in their deep sink like it was a baby. Hadda love him.” He stopped and swolled hard. “We went down, I was RIO and I didn’t acquire that SAM soon enough. Your dad’s a natural, but I screwed us up so bad nobody would’ve had time to evade. He trusted me.”
Mr. Bricker showed up that day at our front door, tall and with the Sun coming out of his eyes and grinning and shaking hands. But that same day, he went away smaller, without a goodbye. He never looked at Mom once. Then, he was just – gone. Got on a motorcycle and left. That was two years ago, back when my problems were kina small.
Three
Fingered
It was in the headlines. The newspaper said the police searched the swamp and never found Theo Osterbyrd’s dead body. But Koz and I never heard or saw of any such search and we had to look at the swamp from the ball field every day at lunch recess. Worried about it plenty. I mean, that’s all I got outta the school security assembly – that I hadda worry. People don’t know how good I am at it. Koz and I talked it all out, though. He said you can’t just worry. You got to do something. He made me feel OK – kina advanced. So I told Koz I knew that swamp. He told me his Dad and his Uncle taught him jungle survival and real U.S. Marines recon tactics. That newspaper report was what pushed us over the edge, made us jump off into the swamp. We could see we were skilled enough, so we planned a Recon Operation. We were going in.
Koz told his Mom he wanted to come over to my house which was OK with both Moms. Then, I told my Mom we were going over to the mall to buy model planes. At Tammie’s, I bought my sixth model Phantom – another F4-D – Navy markings. Dad and Mom and I used to play three-man ping-pong tournaments together in the basement. I was the champ, but now the ping pong table’s my carrier flight deck – all six of my Navy-marked F4-Ds lined up, nosed into the wind, ready to hook up to the launch catapult. The flight deck crew I made outta wire and glue is sweating over hanging last minute ordnance on the razor-sharp wings of the big jets. The last coupla pilots and RIOs – Radar Intercept Officers – are still running for their planes. Some of the canopies are already down-locked. Somewhere in-country, Marines, on their ‘Prick-25’ radio, are calling for close air. Same Phantom is always off first. I know Dad’s tail number by heart.
Koz told me my size raft would be too small, would crowd us. But I sold my swamp experience hard, sold my idea of what size a swamp raft should be – that I got the size in a dream and how dreams were important. I said we hadda build according to a size that came to me in a dream. The dream called it the “Window of Skull”. I said I’d been in the swamp before – way in – floating on nothing but just a bathroom door and a bucket for a seat, and how the jungle would grab at my raft – sometimes, even from where I couldn’t see. It was a risk, but we were expeditionary partners and so we built even bigger than the Window of Skull.
We went for two wooden freight pallets, wire-tied end-to-end by a lot of junk lumber jammed through the pallets. By the time we launched on the mall end of the swamp, our stomachs weren’t pretending, but we decided to wait on lunch on account of operational necessity. We were in a hurry. We needed to escape detection. This was clandesine OPs. Detection meant capture and we’d be forced to confess who our parents were, which would lead to top-level interrogation – speaking for myself anyhow.
Every bit of the raft we carried through the tall weeds and thistles along the mall perimeter road – meaning SW Coffin Marsh Road – what they would call it in a Police Report. We carried the parts of the raft to where the big ditch is. Then, pretend innocent, we’d sit in the road-side weeds and rest and grin at passing cars like sitting there and getting thumped by the Sun was a kick. We’d sit there until no cars were coming and then we’d heave our construction junk into the ditch and dive in after it. We put the raft together down there.
That ditch tees into Coffin Marsh Road back of the mall parking lot. East of the ditch, Coffin Marsh Road climbs in a curve about a mile and a half off around the heel of the swamp and up onto the high ground where our school is. In the bottom of the ditch, at its road end, opens a pipe about the diameter of a hula hoop. Spring time, the big pipe flows full of dark, cold water, and the ditch is deep and channels direct into the swamp. Right there at road level above the pipe is one of the big, plywood no trespassing signs saying how the swamp is condemned land now.
Took me a long time to figure out why I and Koz got so deep in the swamp so fast – why it got so outta hand. Last time, on that bathroom door, it was in the boring, back-to-school last fall at the end of a long, desert of a Summer. I was by myself every day with nothing to do but guard the house for Mom. This Spring, with baseball starting up, there’s more water in the swamp. A lot more.
Technically, I guess it’s a wetland. On the front page of the paper, it’s not a swamp – not unless you’re a mile in and the jungle is so thick you can’t see the Sun, can’t hear the traffic over on the front side of the mall anymore, can’t hear much of anything.
Pallet boards you call paddles slosh through water black as a gas station oil pit, and you get yourself deeper and deeper into the jam you’re in. No.You don’t call it a swamp until you’re in a proper bind.
From the launch ditch, sweating in the Sun, Koz and I paddled at a straight-up wall of high jungle green that sucked us in like a start button with a “Do Not Touch” sign over it. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we headed in anyhow. We shoulda looked back sooner. We didn’t notice it at first. All we knew was when we floated through the green curtain, the Sun was off us and we wanted more.
Once we were outta sight and away from the road, once we were in, we found an open channel straight as a street with leaning trees fingering over it. I guess the sudden quiet, the cool of the shade and the low, green-filtered light was a whole, quiet surprise world. I took the back pallet, Koz forward, with our lunch on top of our stacked models on deck mid-ships.
On either side of the street-channel, for a coupla hundred yards was dry ground and here and there, we had to slide our raft under dead trees fallen across the channel. The smell of the air forced up your nose like a worm, strong and stinky-rot like kina when you dig for fish worms, but not that clean. At the far end of the straight, the slow-moving water split three ways – the middle one dog-legging away toward a patch of sun not too far off. Wasn’t much of a course change. We took that one.
From a distance, the spot of sun ahead drew us to it, but it didn’t turn out nice. The air there was like in an attic closet with a heap of forgotten, wet laundry on the floor – still, steam-hot – worse than sweating in the road-side weeds. We watched a little green, sitting-duck frog kick fast across the glass skin of the dark water. Out of nowhere, like a Great White shark would do, a coupla-inches-long brown bug shot up from miles down in the dark water and grabbed the frog with arms big enough to be hairy. The bug bit the frog in the neck, then hauled it down outta sight into the dark. Froze, we just watched. We just looked at each other and picked up our paddles, glad to move out.
A while after that, we hove to and stayed still in a place that had vines in the trees – draped kina like in a Tarzan flick, but stems not as strong. It was double-plus shady there, kina glum, still as an abandoned basement. Everywhere there, the water was blanketed with little bright green floating plants that parted for the raft, but when I looked back behind us, they swirled seemed like kina on purpose and closed back again behind us and erased our track like we never were. Field rations was five candy bars apiece. Koz said we oughta eat only two for now. So we stopped and did, our backs to each other, him facing forward, me watching where we came from. From the start, we whispered. Just seemed wise.
Koz wasn’t big on planes as me. His model was of a man with see-through skin and all his insides in supposed-to-be-live colors. Kina creepy. Especially, I didn’t like the lizard and testicles – which were spelled out on the assembly instructions as part number fifty-nine. I coulda done without it, but Koz showed me where they were dangling on the molded plastic parts tree.
“Myself, I’m after insight,” Koz whispered.
At first, just watching my half of the jungle, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I could see where handling a person’s insides you would have insight.
“Like the petrified baseball,” he went on. “When my Uncle gave me that rock, I knew it was one of his stunts, but it gave me the idea for that experiment I did at school. Amazing how easy it is to make humans believe hooey.”
“But there wasn’t any stitching,” I whispered back.
“That the only thing you noticed?”
“Raelene was so amazed, her mouth was hanging open.”
“Yeah! I saw her, too. I started out working right on her. Next to you and me, she’s the sharpest one in the class. When I saw her mouth drop open, I knew I pulled it off.”
Then he whispered, “But actually, today, I just had to settle for a whole man model. I was hoping for a take-down, modular human brain. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand how our brain works. Know what they expect to be their biggest challenge?”
I had half a king-size snickers crammed in my mouth. It’s the best way to eat one, so all I could do for Koz was shake my head and go, “Nunh-unh.”
“Once, I heard my Pop say to my Mom, ‘Make up my mind!’ That’s science’s challenge – locating the human mind.” That’s when Koz asked, “Know why we’re whispering?”
“Seems like otherwise we might give away our position,” I said.
“That’s about it,” Koz agreed. “This is an LP – a Listening Post – just like my Uncle said.”
Koz’s Uncle told him about the jungle over there, how his squad would hump out into the boonies for a week or two at a time and do nothing but listen for the enemy. Some of the weird stuff Koz’s Uncle heard on LP made him wonder about something called ’perception’. After a coupla weeks on an LP mission, they got so they could hear their own hearts beat. Same with their eyes. They could tell when even the animals stopped seeing them they were getting invisible. That’s when they really saw and heard things – like music and voices – echoing from everywhere at once.
If Koz and I were going to last, we’d really have to dial back on the rations. We couldn’t hear anything at that LP – not even frogs croaking – nothing. Right next to me, I saw two more little green frogs kicking across the black background of the dark water. Made me nervous to watch. I didn’t wanna see death again, but just in time they shoved themselves under the cute little green surface weeds and the frogs disappeared and hid. Right then, another big brown water bug with what looked like oars showed up and then, I guess when it saw us, disappeared. But the frogs didn’t croak – never - like they were nervous themselves and watching for something they knew was coming. Then, like from some place in a half-awake dream, without really hearing it, I seemed to know about the faraway buzz of the engine of a lone light plane like a fly somewhere in a big empty room. That was when we figured out we shoulda looked back earlier. Everything around us looked the exact same and you couldn’t tell which direction the sun was. With an ache, all I could think of was home.
Then Koz, his eyes never off the jungle, just hadda start whispering that stuff again about how we’re always being watched. I thought he was playing with me when he said, “There’re things watching us that don’t even have eyes,” but when we turned and looked at each other and he looked back into the gloomy afternoon shadows and he said, “This is high, man. Too high,” I knew he wasn’t.
I wish I could say Koz looked scared or nervous or worried or something. He didn’t. He looked excited. He put his face close to mine. “This is the kind of place, man,” he whispered, “where, just like in the song, you might break on through to the other side.”
From under his left pant leg, he pulled out a big folding knife I never knew was there. He opened the blade, tested the edge with his thumb, then snapped it back into its scabbard against his leg. Then he went back to watching the jungle. When you’re friends with somebody, it’s hard sometimes. You got to gamble.
We never saw what was watching us. Nothing happened. We didn’t hear even a bird or a bug. Not even a frog – ever. Koz just sat on the forward pallet, his shifting eyes tight on the jungle of the swamp. I tried to think about stuff I liked to think about. For a minute, I thought about both Raelene Rhonda Robinson and Lostine – how Raelene Rhonda Robinson reminded me of standing in the fresh morning sun where pretty quick, somebody would tell me to ‘enjoy’ my day. Lostine made me think about shadows, though, where I’d just as soon be, where nobody’d notice me, where they wouldn’t ask questions or tell me what to do. I thought again about Lostine’s smoky smell – like kina the smell at that church wedding when I was little. The man running the show carried a brass ball and chain. Inside the ball was, I guess, a fire. There sure was a lot of smoke coming out of it. He swung his ball and chain all around the church. I loved that smell. I loved the part where they said they did. Thinking about Lostine made me think so hard again about the bride and groom, I was flat right there in the church again.
So I jumped when Koz knuckled me on the shoulder, stood up and whispered, “Let’s move out.”
After that, the swamp changed pretty fast. Everywhere, the water seemed to get over our heads – way deeper than we could reach with our paddles. We spotted a little, peanut-shaped island and we worked around it anti-clock-wise. From off-shore, we could see a sort of cleared campsite. We could see empty – maybe soup cans and a coupla old blankets. On the highest ground, between a coupla scrawny trees, a long pole was tied, like for the ridge pole of a tent. We amphibbed ashore. For a minute, it felt good to stand on something that didn’t move. You could see where long time ago, they had a fire. There was a machete – the blade busted in half. There was a rubber boot sole seemed about two feet long, the leather upper part burnt off. I kicked at a coupla old rotten paper grocery sacks. There was a receipt for coffee – you could barely read it – from about three months ago. It was from the Thriftway over on the far side of the mall. Off a little ways was a blue plastic bucket sitting bottom-up, kina tilted a little. I knew that bucket right away. It was my very bucket – the one I sat on during my solo bathroom door expedition last Summer.
“Hey, Koz!” I whispered, running toward it, “My bucket!”
Only problem I had with the whole bucket scene as I got closer was the short, fat worm laying by itself in the center of the bottom of the up-side-down bucket. I wanted it to be a bug, but I knew right away it wasn’t. Bug-size, it was brownish-black but it didn’t move. I gave the bucket a bump with one my brogans and the worm still didn’t crawl. Looking for folded legs, I crouched close and stared. I felt the skin on my arms prickle. The lost ghost of a winter wind shot up under my shirt and drafted up the middle of my back and across the bare skin of my shoulders and out up the back of my neck – a ghost – hadda been what it was. I shivered. I swallowed. I pointed.
“Look at that!” I told Koz. He reached up his left pant leg again and unsnapped his knife and crouched at the bucket. “Know what Voodoo Practitioners are?” he whispered, opening his knife.
“No,” was all I said.
“Neither do it, but I heard they do stuff like this. I’m telling you. We’re being watched. We need to confirm this contact, collect the facts we can and clear out.”
We didn’t touch it. We didn’t touch even the bucket. Koz just poked with the tip of his blade. He flipped the worm over like you would bacon, but it was a finger – an actual human finger with the rest of the person missing. I looked at mine. It was smaller than any I had, but there wasn’t any doubt about it. It was a finger – partly curled and shriveled and dark and drying up like jerky. On one end, ragged, torn to the quick, like the kid used to bite his nails, you could see the little finger nail – the two joints – and bone, whited bone surprising out of the shriveled meat of the other end. No question about it. It was some kid’s finger – a little kid’s finger – and we didn’t figure he just forgot it there on the bucket.
When I looked at Koz, he wasn’t looking at me or the finger. He looked hard at the jungle. Staying low, he scanned careful in a full circle while he folded the blade of his knife. He licked his lips, but he didn’t put the big knife away. Then, lightning fast, without watching it – the way you get from a lotta practice – he banged his knife hand against the heel of his empty hand and the blade flew out and locked open with a click, all by itself. He folded the blade back. He did it again – faster. He folded the blade once more and snapped the knife back against his leg. Careful, his eyes still scanning the jungle, he pulled his pant leg down over the knife and stood up slow.
Then he ran.