The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Read online

  This observation resonated with me, and probably Randy, too. My parents’ divorce left deep scars on my soul, and Randy was in the throes of his parents’ own ugly separation. Eventually, his parents’ divorce would get uglier while we were in high school, a particularly rough time in Randy’s young life. But at least we had each other to lean on back then. Divorce eviscerated our nuclear families. I eventually learned that my step-dad Steve was a much better husband for my mother than my birth father, but I wasn’t aware of that as a kid. What kid is aware of this type of thing? All I knew was that family business was messy.

  “Families can suck,” I replied.

  “Yup,” Randy added, then popping his lips.

  “Not all families are bad,” Brian said. “Mine’s pretty good.”

  “You’re lucky,” Randy said.

  Tony must have sensed the dour direction our conversation veered into, so he sat up. “Say, tell me more about this backpack filled with money you found.”

  “Well, like I said earlier, I found it. The Thousand Oaks Gang—”

  “Thousand Oaks Gang?!” Tony laughed, like that moniker was the funniest thing in the world. “What a stupid name!”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It is kinda stupid. Our neighborhood is called Thousand Oaks and most of these jerks live in Thousand Oaks, so I guess it’s a convenient name and all.”

  “Seems right,” Tony said, lighting another cigarette, sucking it to life, blowing a grey cumulous, nicotine cloud into the rafters. “Continue.”

  “We were hanging out after school when they surrounded us. We thought they were gonna pound us, but then a security guard chased us all away. And when I started to run, the backpack was just there on the ground. I didn’t even think about it. I just grabbed it.”

  “Then while we were hiding underground, he opened it. It was filled with money and weed,” Miguel added.

  “Wait a minute—” Tony interrupted. “Did you say weed?”

  “Yup,” Miguel said, pleased with himself.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Tony said, turning to me.

  “I don’t know. It’s at the bottom of the bag. Want it?”

  Tony froze, paralyzed with excitement from his good fortune.

  “Fuck yeah, I want it!”

  I grabbed the backpack, which was sitting on the floor behind me, and unzipped it. I dug through its contents—paper bills, other sheets of paper, empty potato chip bags, and even felt the cold metal of the 25-caliber American Derringer pistol—then pulled out the stinky bag of marijuana. I gladly handed it to Tony.

  “Here ya go. You deserve it.”

  “Thanks, little dude!”

  “No problem,” I replied. “Glad to start getting rid of some of this stuff. They’ve been hounding us hard for this backpack. They even beat us up behind the 7-Eleven. I guess that’s why I thought it would be good if we came out here to escape. Maybe even bury the money—”

  “Like pirate treasure!” Brian blurted. “I’m gonna bury it good.”

  We all laughed. Brian’s enthusiasm for burying treasure was a little ridiculous, yet endearing.

  “They don’t know you’re out here?” Tony said, sucking more on his cigarette.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t know how they would know we’re way out here.”

  “Yeah, improbable,” Tony said. He picked up the sack of marijuana and pressed it against his face, taking a deep whiff. A satisfied look appeared on his face, as if just the scent of it intoxicated him. “But I will say one thing. If they ever did find you out here, and I’m not saying they would...”

  Tony stood up with the bag of weed and walked to the kitchen. His shadow danced against the wall, then stretched up to the rafters.

  He continued. “But if they ever did. Don’t try to get away from them across the water. You’ll probably drown.”

  “Drown?!” I cried out.

  “Yeah,” he said, opening a kitchen drawer and setting the bag of marijuana inside. He closed the drawer and walked back over to where we were. He stood there, his hands on his hips. “Lots of hydrilla underwater. Your feet could get tangled and you could drown. Or there are sharp rocks just under the surface around this part of the bay. Just sayin’.”

  “Good to know,” Brian said, as if filing this bit of information away in his Boy Scout brain for another day, just in case of an emergency.

  I looked up at Tony, who was still standing and looked as if he was ready to leave. “You’re not staying here with us?”

  “Nah, I gotta get home. I have work early in the morning. But I’ll come back over in the fishing boat around eight or so. Give me some green so I can buy you more stuff.”

  He extended his hand. I rifled through the backpack and pulled out a wad of cash—not even counting it—then crammed it into his hand.

  “Gnarly,” he said, shoving it in his pocket. “Good night, ass bandits. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  He pointed to his forehead with his index finger, chopped the air with a tiny salute, then left the house. The Bronco soon roared to life outside and he backed away without turning on his headlights. The rumble of the engine faded into the distance down the gravel driveway. The hinges of the metal gate squealed as he opened and closed it. Then he was gone, the rumble of the Bronco dissipating into thin air.

  I turned to my friends and we must have all had the same look, one of weariness and sleepiness. The moon’s pale light shown through the windows of the lake house, casting its night spell. We couldn’t help but stretch our arms and yawn, victims to exhaustion.

  “Maybe we should try to get some sleep,” Randy suggested.

  It seemed like a reasonable thing to do, so we all made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the hard wood floor—Brian and Randy with their sleeping bags, and me and Miguel with our rolled-up towels as makeshift pillows.

  “We should do some exploring around the property tomorrow,” Miguel suggested, which also seemed like a reasonable thing to do. We all agreed.

  “And map where to bury our treasure!” Brian added.

  We all laughed, then talked a little longer about girls and comic books and movies and arcade games. Eventually everyone was asleep except for me and as I laid there on the hard wood floor, I listened to the owl sing his night song some more.

  Hoo huh hoo. Hoo huh hoo.

  The next thing I knew, I was swimming in the darkness of my sleep.

  12.

  I awoke to the sound of Pop Tart wrappers rustling and tearing. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and sat up, the shafts of morning light blasting the room through the bay windows. All three of my friends were sitting up and eating Pop Tarts, already wide awake and ready for adventure.

  “How long have you been up?” I said wearily. I wasn’t a morning person, per se. My three friends shrugged as they chewed their breakfast. “Got one for me?”

  Randy picked up a package on the floor and tossed it to me, my breakfast tumbling into my lap. Then he pulled the second Pop Tart from his own packaging and inserted it halfway into his slit of a mouth, pushing it slowly the rest of the way with his index finger, like a letter being inserted into a mail slot. A look of contentment bloomed on his face, his jaw gnashing his breakfast.

  Miguel jumped to his feet, one of his hands over his groin area. He was distressed to say the least.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” he said, dancing a urination two-step. “I gotta pee!”

  “You always gotta pee,” Brian replied. “And there’s no bathroom in our Cabin of Seclusion. No electricity either.”

  “Then where do I go?”

  “Out of doors, I guess,” Brian said, shrugging his shoulders. “In nature. Where else?”

  “Nature?”

  “Outside, you dufus!”

  Miguel sprinted for the back door, flung it open, and ran outside. The three of us just had to see where he was going to whiz, so we hopped up and positioned ourselves by the back door, peering out the door window, and ea
ting our Pop Tarts while witnessing Miguel’s desperation for bladder relief. He ran like a madman to the nearest tree—his arms and legs flailing like a crazed windmill—and whipped out his whizzer. The sight of him gleefully relieving himself on the cedar tree initiated my own bladder’s natural response.

  “I think I gotta go, too,” I said, patting Randy and Brian on their shoulders, then joining Miguel by the whizzing tree.

  Miguel continued to urinate for what seemed like an eternity, even long after I was done with my own liquid elimination.

  “I really had to go,” he said, then sighing, the spot at the base of the tree where he peed a muddy swamp.

  “I see that,” I said, pulling up my shorts and walking away.

  A little way in the distance, just off the north face of the peninsula where the Meyer lake house occupied, stretched a different pier than the one Tony tied the motor boat to during our lake tour. And out in the calm waters of Canyon Lake, Tony sat in his motor boat, slowly navigating toward the pier, his sunglasses reflecting sunlight and his cool, teenaged irreverence. He had several groceries bags in the boat and what appeared to be an ice cooler, most likely filled with sodas for us. As the boat got closer and closer, the gurgling outboard motor belched louder and louder, until he cut it. He floated the last few feet, then secured the boat to the pier with a length of nylon rope. Miguel and I ran down to meet him.

  “Top of the morning to you!” he said, lifting a brown, paper grocery bag to Miguel, then one to me. “What are you ass bandits up to?”

  “We had to take a whiz,” I said, extending an arm for another grocery bag.

  “That’s natural,” Tony said, sliding the ice cooler on the pier, then climbing out of the boat.

  “Thanks for bringing us supplies,” I said.

  Tony lifted the cooler. “No problemo. I can buy a lot with a hundred bucks.”

  The three of us trudged back to the lake house. Inside, Tony set the cooler on the kitchen counter. Miguel and I set the grocery bags on the floor where we slept, and where Randy and Brian patiently waited.

  “You gonna hang with us?” Randy said to Tony, rubbing his hands over his close-cropped hair, as if that would make it look better. It didn’t seem to move at all.

  “I can’t right now. I gotta work. But I’ll be back tonight with Victoria. How’s that?”

  “Vic-tor-ee-uh,” Randy cooed. That made Tony laugh.

  “Settle down, Romeo. She’s my girl.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Just a clarification.”

  “What time will you be back?” I said.

  “Oh, right after nine o’clock. Cool?”

  “Coooool,” I replied. “But what do we do until then?”

  “I don’t know. Go explore. It’s beautiful out here,” Tony said, then he flashed us a peace sign with his right hand. “Later dudes.”

  He quickly left, the back door slamming. We stepped over by the door and watched him through the window walk down to the pier, jump in the boat, and cruise away quickly after pulling the starter cord. The boat skipped across the wake of another motor boat with a trailing water skier, then disappeared around the peninsula. We looked at each other.

  “Time to explore!” Brian exclaimed. “Let’s go!”

  “What about our stuff?” Miguel said, looking back at our supplies and backpacks on the floor.

  “No one is coming around here. Nothing to worry about,” I told him, which eased his apprehension.

  Outside, it was an unusually cool morning for summer with a gentle breeze coming in from the Hill Country and across the top of the now placid lake water. We walked down to the pier and examined its sturdiness compared to the rickety one on the other side of the peninsula. But since it appeared to be a dead end for fun—mostly because Brian couldn’t swim—we decided to not cross it. We walked down a grassy slope to the pebbly shore. The vast amount of smooth rocks next to the water invited us to play a game of skipping rocks, so we each hunted and pecked for the perfect, flat, smooth rocks to throw. A feisty game ensued but quickly subsided after a few rounds. And as we tossed the remaining rocks back on the ground, I spotted something very unusual. I knelt on one knee and carefully picked it up. What I found astonished me: a large snail shell.

  I stood up and examined the peculiarly large shell, the exterior pearlized in swirls of pink and white, its size close to that of a small peach. With my friends around me, I turned it over, then brought it closer to look inside the opening.

  “It’s like the shell in that stupid book Lord of the Flies,” I said, pretending to put it to my lips so I could blow it like a trumpet.

  “Ewww!” Miguel protested, which made me laugh of course. Unlike the rest of us, Miguel was rather squeamish, almost comically so, even with an abandoned snail shell. The slimy slug was nowhere in sight and yet he still recoiled in terror.

  “You mean, like the conch?” Brian said. “I wanna see it.”

  I handed him the large snail shell, so he could examine it himself. He looked it over, then handed it back to me, pleased to have witnessed such an anomaly.

  “I never finished that book,” Randy said. “Too depressing.”

  “That’s the truth,” I confirmed. “It’s a bummer.”

  “You gonna toss the shell in the lake?” Randy said, a mischievous look on his face.

  “Nah,” I said, putting it in my pocket. “Gonna keep it as a souvenir.”

  I noticed Randy looking at something behind me, so I turned to see what he was looking at. And there it was out in the water: Sometimes Island. With water lapping at one side, its jagged contours lifted out of the lake like the back of a prehistoric creature, like a dinosaur with a plated spine wading in the water. Cedar trees dotted the top ridge and swayed in the Hill Country breeze. Its presence out in the lake was eerie and mysterious.

  “I really want to explore that island,” Randy said. “Do you think people go on it?”

  “I’m sure somebody’s been on it,” Miguel said. “Somebody’s been on Sometimes Island at somewhere, someplace... sometime.”

  We all laughed.

  “Nice poem,” I said, patting Miguel on the back.

  “Wait a minute!” Brian blurted. “I have something. Wait right here!”

  Brian tore off, running toward the Cabin of Seclusion at full speed, and we weren’t quite sure what he was up to. The three of us looked at each other and shrugged. Seemed strange he would run off so quickly, but we continued to daydream about the possibility of Sometimes Island being occupied at some time in history, maybe by cognizant apes, or long-extinct creatures we didn’t even know about.

  “I bet somebody’s been out there. People like to claim places. Be rulers and stuff. Right, Miguel?”

  “Totally,” Miguel agreed. “History tells us that.”

  “Do you want to go out there?” I said, scratching my head. “Tony said it was dangerous to get too close. Rocks and stuff under the water.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Randy said. “I’m still curious.”

  Just then, Brian came tearing back, one of his arms flapping as he ran, the other arm tucked close as if he was clutching a football. Once he got to us, I saw what he was clutching: a pair of binoculars.

  “Check it out!” Brian said, holding them with outstretched arms. “We can spy on the island!”

  “Coooool!” I said, reaching out for the binoculars, but Randy snatched them away. “Hey!”

  “I wanna see first!” Randy said, raising the binoculars to his face, but he didn’t know how to focus or adjust them. He just randomly turned knobs and flexed the middle hinge. “They don’t work. I can’t see shit!”

  Brian grabbed them back, huffing impatience, then adjusted the hinge before placing them in front of his eyes. “You gotta adjust them to your face, then focus. Like this.”

  Brian looked out at the island and the three of us without binoculars shaded our brows with flat hands, trying to see the best we could. Brian narrated what he was observing.r />
  “I see rocks. Some tall grasses. Some cedar trees—”

  “Anything good?!” Randy demanded.

  Brian slowly lowered the binoculars and stared at Randy.

  “Like what? An arcade?”

  “Nah! Something valuable,” Randy said, smirking.

  Brian rolled his eyes again, then raised the binoculars back up to his face.

  “I see some birds perched up in the trees.”

  “Birds?!” Randy said. “Lame!”

  “I guess what Randy is getting at,” I began. “Does it look like Sometimes Island has ever been occupied by humans?”

  Brian appeared to scan the length of the island and back. “That’s a negative.”

  He dropped the arm with the binoculars to his side. Randy snatched them out of his hand, raising them to his face, and struggled to look through them.

  “How do these things work?” he said.

  We all laughed at Randy’s frustration. I looked back behind us to see what was around, peering at a line of trees up the incline.

  “We should go up there and explore,” I said. Brian and Miguel nodded while Randy continued to fumble with the binoculars. The three of us walked up the incline toward the wooded area, leaving Randy behind. He called out to us.

  “Wait for me!”

  When he caught up to us, we were already deep into the woods. Dried leaves crunched under our feet as we walked farther from the lake house and deeper into the platoon of tall trees. The Hill Country breeze rustled the canopies of the trees, birds occasionally flapping and squawking above us. As we trudged through the leaves and moist soil underneath, the omniscient presence of nature enveloped us, insulating us from the sounds of civilization near the marina and campground. The muffled din of animals and insects unconcerned with our existence greeted us: squirrels cracking nuts, birds leaping from branch to branch, and beetles scurrying along rotting tree trunks.

  “It’s so cool,” Brian said. “I could live out here.” He gazed up at the trees and their interlaced canopies.

  “Kinda creepy,” Randy said, looking around. “What if there was a murderer out here?”