Emendare, page 6
Johnny ignored the others and looked into my eyes. We exchanged a look of empathetic knowing. I believed Johnny understood the kind of feral hatred I felt for Poyner. The white circular scars on his arms were healed cigarette burns received from his mother’s boyfriend, who went by the infamous name of Porky. A pot-dealing domestic abuser, Porky went to prison for charges stemming from a giant fight between the entire family, Johnny included. Unfortunately for Porky, he was splitting up a pound of homegrown when the shit hit the fan. Johnny’s mother still visited her man every month behind bars. Yeah, Johnny understood the kind of loathing I had for old man Poyner. Porky would be coming home soon.
“Don’t provoke that old drunk,” Johnny warned. “He’ll die soon enough.”
“Today is not soon enough,” I said.
Jeremy asked, “So, what are you doing down here at the campground?”
Doodie answered, “We’re looking for Jane’s cousin, Olin.”
Randy and Sandy repeated in unison, “Olin?” Then Randy asked, “What do you need him for?”
Doodie would never make it as a criminal. He couldn’t keep a secret. “We need Olin to kiss a virgin.”
Johnny shook his head. “You what?”
Malachi tried to cover Doodie’s blunder. “We need Olin for a…a…Dammit, Doodie. Man, you just can’t help yourself.”
Hains must have decided a lie wouldn’t work at this point. He explained, “We need a guy kin to Jane that will kiss a virgin and then dive for a treasure at the ferry dock. The kiss will protect the diver from the monster.”
Johnny laughed. “There ain’t no monster down at the ferry dock. Just trees and stuff gets pushed into the channel. People get hung up and drown.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“If you don’t believe me, I’ll go jump off the ferry dock right now.”
Sandy said, “You can’t jump now, the ferry still has a couple of more runs.”
We played all over that ferry dock, but only when the dockworkers were gone for the day. The ferry ran during daylight hours and overnighted on the mainland, so the last run was at least an hour before sunset. Our limited dive window approached, and we still had no virgin.
“Wait, did you say treasure?” Jeremy had been paying attention.
Johnny laughed. “Kids games. Check ya later.” He jumped on his bike and pedaled away.
The other three trailer park boys were not ready to dismiss the treasure adventure so easily. They stayed with us as we moved our bikes to the big tree at the end of the dock and stacked theirs with ours.
“Have you seen Olin today?” I asked Sandy as we walked toward the trailer park on the other side of the campground.
“Yeah, he had to cut the grass at the park today. He should be done by now.”
Olin’s parents owned the trailer park and lived in the big double-wide out by the road. The land, a part of the Doe family’s original grant, had been the source of the dispute between my side of the family and Olin’s. We found him driving the riding lawnmower back to the shed.
“I can’t go with you. I still have to finish the ditch up by the road with the push mower. Mom said she’d tan my hide if it weren’t done by the time she and Dad got back from town.”
We had explained our mission, and Olin seemed willing, but his mother was formidable, and he wasn’t about to cross her. Not many would. Olive Doe Walker stood six feet tall and weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. She seemed mad at the world because of it. Her husband, Delbert Walker, weighed one-fifty, maybe.
Jeremy and the Pine twins huddled together and then called Olin over to them. They spoke for a few minutes and then turned back to us. Jeremy acted as their spokesperson.
“Olin will do it if you guys mow the ditch. We have three mowers. It’ll get done faster, and we can get to the docks right after the last ferry leaves, while it’s still light. Oh, and we want a fifty-fifty split.”
“Sixty-forty,” Hains offered in return.
“Deal,” Jeremy said.
Hains shook Jeremy’s hand and declared, without consulting anyone else, that we would accept the terms. “Deal. Now, where are the mowers?”
I had no intentions of cutting grass with that many boys around to do it. Brain, not brawn, my dad would say. I didn’t give anyone a chance to argue with me.
I started walking away and said to the group, “I’m going back to the campground to look for Maria.”
Doodie, who wasn’t a real fan of manual labor, volunteered, “I’ll come with you. In case those campground boys give you any trouble.”
“We saw them earlier. They went to Swann’s. I want to find Maria before they get back. Meet me by the bikes when you’re done.”
Maria Larking lived in Lynchburg, Virginia during the school year, but stayed with her family at the campground all summer. We had known her since we were old enough to walk this far from home, about six years. Maria was pretty, with sandy blonde hair and brown eyes, but not prissy like Cindy. All the boys loved Maria. I liked her too. In fact, Cindy was the only person I knew that didn’t think Maria was cool.
Of course, the campground boys would guard their princess against neighboring young males who might challenge for her attention, but maybe they wouldn’t notice me, and we could get the kiss done without anyone else discovering our quest for the treasure. I thought I could talk Maria into kissing Olin just one time. He wasn’t gross. Olin was kind of cute when his acne was under control. It wasn’t too bad today. I had an idea about how to make kissing him a more manageable proposition to sell to Maria.
As I ran off in the direction of the campground, I called back to Malachi, “Clean him up, Mali. Make sure he smells good.”
He yelled back, “Watch out for Poyner.”
I wasn’t scared of that old man, but I stopped to pick up a sturdy stick before I reached the campground.
#
I found Maria on her parents’ back deck, sprawled in a lounge chair reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She was twelve and going into seventh grade like Cindy. Decking surrounded the family travel trailer on three sides. The wooden structure stayed the same, but the camper had changed several times. She smiled when she saw me approaching.
“Jane Doe. I haven’t seen you all summer. Did you find a boyfriend to keep you busy?”
I still could not understand why girls’ worlds revolved around finding and keeping a boyfriend. It just boggled me. Boys surrounded me all the time.
“That’s not it. I just haven’t been around, that’s all.”
“Where have you been?”
“Down home, mostly.”
“Well, what are you doing here now?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
Maria grinned and closed the book, “What?”
“What if I told you that after you do it, you get to kiss Hains?”
Maria wrinkled her nose. “Is that supposed to be a reward?”
“I thought you liked him.”
“That was last summer.”
My plan to appeal to Maria’s crush on our resident stud was crumbling.
“Who do you like now?”
Maria put the book on the little table beside her chair and stood. She indicated I should follow her. We walked to the edge of the deck and leaned on the railing facing the water.
“I like this guy I’m not supposed to. My parents don’t like his parents, so I’m not allowed to be with him. It’s very Romeo and Juliet.”
“Who are they?”
“You don’t know who Romeo and Juliet are?”
“No, are they from Lynchburg?”
Maria laughed at me, which felt kind of weird in my stomach.
“No, silly. They’re from Shakespeare,” she explained.
“I don’t know where that is,” I said, and then got on with my quest. “Where is this new boy and are you still a virgin?”
“Jane!” Maria laughed again. “Of course, I’m still a virgin. I haven’t even kissed him yet. What a strange thing to ask.”
“It’s for a thing. Anyway, where does this guy live?”
I was hoping he didn’t live here, because what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and I thought I could still talk Maria into kissing Olin to save him from sure death at the hands of the ferry dock monster. I didn’t care what Johnny said. Some evil force lurked in that dark water. I had feared it my entire life. I could swim like a fish, but I wouldn’t dive off the ferry dock, no way!
“He lives here,” Maria said and dashed my hopes, but then she kept talking, “People don’t really know him like I do. He’s shy and sweet. When his face clears up, he’ll be adorable, I think.”
“Olin? You like Olin Walker?” My heart jumped with joy.
“Yes, but you can’t tell anyone. My mother hates Olive Walker.”
“You and Olin Walker. Wow,” I said, unable to fathom our luck.
“He’s nice. He brings me flowers and leaves notes for me in our secret place.”
“That’s cool, Maria.”
I think she thought I was approving of her romantic interest in Olin. It was cool because it made my job easier. She smiled at me, and I remembered why everyone loved Maria. For just a moment, I wished I were the Doe she was about to kiss.
She asked, “What did you want me to do, anyway?”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re not going to believe this.”
6
Who thought this was a good idea…
After promising Mrs. Larking that we would bring her daughter back before dark, Maria climbed into the boat with Doodie and Hains. We had about an hour to complete our quest and return the virgin unscathed. Mali and I led the bicycle contingent down the highway toward the ferry dock. We rushed to make preparations before the virgin arrived on her royal barge.
Jeremy and the Pine twins went to the ferry dock with Olin, while Mali and I broke off to retrieve the big pulley and some rope we had gathered for lowering our “male Doe” into the abyss.
“Jane, if Johnny said there’s no monster, why are we going through all this to break a curse that don’t exist?”
Malachi was thin and not as strong as Doodie and Hains. He wasn’t even as stout as me, but he said God made me tough and him pretty. He got the better deal. I carried the massive head block on ahead, while Malachi struggled with the thick coil of rope, dragging it up the hill to the ferry dock from the boathouse.
I dismissed his concerns about the monster’s existence. “Better safe than sorry, Mali. Do you think Doodie remembered the waterproof flashlight?”
“Yes. I saw it in the boat. Ugh,” Mali grunted against the weight of his burden. “We have too much rope.”
“Do you know how deep the ferry dock hole is?” I asked and watched him shake his head. “Neither do I. No one we know has ever touched bottom and come out alive.”
Our conversation stopped as we crested the little hill and heard the disturbance. The ground vibrated as the last ferry’s propellers gathered speed and rumbled away, while a rumble of another kind had begun on the dock. The campground boys had run into the trailer park boys.
I looked at Mali. “Is there ever a time when boys don’t pick sides and fight?”
Mali smiled. He rarely caused trouble and floated between social groups with ease.
“Only when there is someone they can fight together. So don’t give them a reason to make that someone us.”
“That has to be why they invented football, to keep y’all from killin’ each other all the time.”
As we approached, we heard Jeremy say, “Go home to your mommy, pussy.”
“At least my mom doesn’t get her dresses from Omar the tent maker, like Olin’s mom,” replied one of Simon’s friends.
“Oh, yeah,” Olin shot back, “well, your mom is a campground tent tramp.”
Bikes hit the ground, and tempers flared. Boys and their mothers—I doubted I would ever understand them at all. Ignoring Mali’s advice, I intervened.
“Hey, fellas. My mother left me on my grandma’s doorstep an hour after I was born and just took off. She forgot to see if anyone was home. It was November. I could have frozen to death before someone found me. My pecker froze off, and now I’m a girl. I win the worst mother prize.”
Malachi’s eyes widened. He could never believe it when I would tell people that story. I loved the shock value of it. My frozen pecker embellishment depended on the audience, but the rest was totally true. Mothers who would do what mine did unnerve people. Although everyone had a mother, very few had one who would wrap a newborn in a tee shirt with a bloody umbilical cord still attached and stuff it into a canvas gym bag she pulled from the trash behind the high school, complete with crusty socks and a dirty jock strap.
Joan Smith had me in the girls’ locker room, walked across the road to deposit me on my dad’s doorstep, and then waited at Swann’s store for the next Greyhound out of town. Knowing the Smith family as I did, I was fortunate that Joan chose to leave me with Virginia Swann Doe, my grandmother, who knew exactly what to do with a wild child like me—let her run. Joan had not been back to North Carolina again, as far as I knew. I heard she lived in Tidewater Virginia somewhere, but I didn’t care to know more than that. She could live her life. Mine was going along fine without her.
My worst mother ploy worked. The boys focused on me long enough to distract them from their testosterone infused squabbling.
I asked the Pine twins, “Hey, can you help Mali pull that rope up the hill?”
They hesitated to leave Jeremy and Olin alone to stand off Simon and his two friends. I kept moving until I was standing in the middle of the two factions.
“Hi, Simon. Whatcha doin’ at the ferry dock?”
Simon smiled now. We had always gotten along. “We came to Swann’s. Old man Poyner was watching us at the marina, and no one was around to keep him from being a pervert. Whatcha doin’ with that rope and stuff?”
“We’re going to tie Olin to the end of the rope and drop him off the ferry dock to see what he can find down there.”
It wasn’t a lie. I just failed to mention the treasure.
The older of Simon’s companions asked, “Cool, can we watch?”
A station wagon slowed to a stop on the road.
All our heads turned when the driver yelled out the open windows, “Robert Wright, I’m going to skin you alive.”
The smaller campground kid turned pale. He must have been Robert.
The woman with a red scarf tied around her beehive hairdo crooked a finger at her son and said, “Let’s go! I’m following you back to the campground. And you two, Wilson, Simon, your mothers said to bring you home with Robby.”
I saw the skiff approaching. While being followed home by a station wagon with its hazard lights on and driven by a housewife in a red scarf had to be humiliating, I was glad Robby’s mother showed up when she did. Our luck was holding so far. Just a few more minutes and the treasure would be ours.
Simon shrugged. “I guess we have to go. See you ‘round.”
We all said some version of “Yeah, see ya later,” and watched the embarrassed campground kids pedal away. We wasted little time on pity for their humiliating pedal down the highway and quickly returned to the task at hand.
“Help me hang this from that cable over there,” I said, and handed the pulley to Jeremy. “Randy and Sandy, help Mali get the rope laid out and get Olin tied up. You need to make a seat, like a breeches buoy. We got to hurry.”
“Well, I see you found your male Doe,” Cindy said.
I hadn’t seen her approaching. All the boys except Malachi turned to mush in her presence. She was holding up progress.
I interrogated her, “What are you doing here? Where’s the radio?”
“I thought you still needed a virgin to kiss him and the batteries died because you wouldn’t answer.”
Mali filled her in. “We got another virgin.”
The hum of Hains’s skiff motor approached the ferry dock. Cindy smiled when the sound reached her ears. She had staked claim to Hains Forster. I knew that when she saw Maria sitting on the seat beside him, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Hey, go get the radio. We need it to communicate with the boat.”
I hadn’t made the request soon enough. Cindy walked closer to the water and saw the boat approaching and then turned on me.
“You went to get her? You didn’t need Maria Larking. I would have kissed Olin. He’s not that bad.”
Olin shifted his weight from foot to foot and turned bright pink, accentuating the pimples as blood rushed to the surface of his skin. Mali had done a pretty good job of cleaning him up. His shirt was different and didn’t have stains on it, and the grass clippings had been combed from his hair. He smelled like freshly mowed lawn, gasoline, and Old Spice.
“You had your chance,” I said, as I climbed the creosote-soaked piling to hang the pulley Jeremy held up to me. “Hand me the end of the rope,” I said to Mali, “so I can thread it through.”
“I can’t believe you, Jane Doe. You know she hates me.”
I gathered rope into my hands as my thighs and feet gripped the pole. I was sure I’d have a rash from the sticky creosote, but I was willing to sacrifice for the cause and to keep from losing my footing. I wasn’t afraid of falling in the water. It was crashing into the structure below me that caused the most concern. While trying not to die, I answered Cindy.
“I don’t think she hates you. I don’t even think she knows who you are.”
That was mean, and I knew it. Cindy had been a pain throughout this whole ordeal. She deserved some crap.
“You want Hains to like her. I know you do,” she whined.
“This is bigger than you and your obsession with boys, Cindy. Go get the radio. We need it.”
Cindy bargained, “Tell her to go home and I will.”
Malachi played peacemaker. “Cindy, you said no. We found someone who said yes. Now, if you want to help, we need the walkie talkie. The sooner we get done, the faster she goes back to the campground.”
It worked. Cindy stomped away. We all went back to our respective jobs. Hains pulled the boat up close to shore and let Maria out. She climbed the hill up to the dock.
