Lakewood

Chapter 12

United States Attorney General, Harold Titus, said in the morning paper that he is “going to hand down indictments on twelve people.” I disagree with the Watergate break-in. It was wrong, but the way government functions, I doubt anyone will ever be convicted and go to jail. Nixon just needs to ride out this storm and help the G.O.P. elect the next president. I like that bad actor from California, whatever his name is. He was on TV one night, talking about cutting taxes, individual responsibility, and freedom. I don’t believe Agnew can get elected. He looks mean, like a junkyard dog.

When I was a young boy, Kimberly and I used to sit on the bottom step of the long mahogany staircase in the front of the house, with a map of the United States and talk about places to visit. She wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be an astronaut.

Now, in 1973, things are not the way I wanted them. Not by myself.

I’ve always wanted my life to be like Robert Young and his family—eating breakfast together, coming home after school to my mother and an afternoon snack, playing games in the backyard with Kimberly, and throwing the baseball before dinner with my father. Maybe I should grow up. It’s never going to be like that. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. I’d like to prove him wrong.

§

Will Croon said once, “If you don’t fight, people will hound you for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter if you lose, just as long as you put up a good show.”

I don’t know how that pertains to anything in my life or what I’ve written so far. It just popped into my head.

One summer weekend, Will and I visited his grandfather, who was not much fun because, as I said, he did almost nothing all day long except chew tobacco and spit off the porch railing.

But on one particular day, he said, “The raccoons keep crawling under my house at night to loosen the boards to get in the house. They’re causing general mischief. I saw one of those bastards last night drinking from the sink, then skittering across the kitchen floor. By the time I found my pistol, he’d run off. I’ll tell you boys what. I’ll give you a dollar bill for every raccoon you can catch.”

“A dollar for each of us?” Will asked.

“No. A dollar for each raccoon. You two figure out how to split the dollar.”

“Dead or alive?” I asked.

“It don’t matter. I prefer dead.”

We ran off with an old shotgun to hunt raccoons, but we couldn’t find one anywhere. We checked the barn, the creeks, and some rotted out trees. Then after about three hours of walking through the woods and along the back roads, Will and I found a dead raccoon lying in the road.

“He looks like he got run over last night,” Will said, shooing away the flies.

I carried him by the tail all the way to the old man’s shack.

“How’d you get a raccoon in the middle of the day?” his grandfather asked.

“We saw him scamper away and up a tree. Robert was the one who kilt him. One shot. That’s all it took,” said Will.

“I didn’t hear no g*n shot,” his grandfather said.

“We kilt him way over by Muses’ Lake. That’s about three miles away,” Will replied.

“I know where it is. I reckon it’s that far an’ with the tree line an’ all.”

His grandfather gave us a dollar, then we ran off into the woods with the shotgun and the raccoon. When we were about a quarter of a mile away from his grandfather, Will propped the raccoon up against a tree, stood back about thirty feet, and blasted him with the shotgun.

“Two coons in one afternoon,” said the old man.

We repeated this throughout the day until all we were able to bring back was the raccoon’s tail.

“Where’s the rest of the critter?” he asked.

“I got trigger happy and blasted him into a hundred pieces,” Will said. “I can take you out to where the rest of him is at. It’s a nasty mess.”

“Naw. I don’t feel like walking all that far. From now on, you got to bring me the whole coon. Not just the tail and an ear.”

§

Will’s cousins are twins and three years older than Will. They live deep in the woods where they run a corn whisky still with their father—White Lightning. His name isn’t White Lightning, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was. Either way, they distill corn into moonshine. Their father used to say that Will was almost named Daiquiri because on the night he was born, Will’s father got drunk on daiquiris at The Alibi Tavern. I never heard much about Ralston and Buddy Lee’s mother, except one time when Ralston said she ran off with a man, a war hero, with a stubbed arm and a burnt face.

The first night I stayed over at Will’s grandfather’s house, they tagged along, saying I was the first Yankee to ever set foot in their granddaddy’s house, and only the second to set foot in his yard without being plugged with rock salt.

“Being that he was an insurance salesman, he was lucky it wasn’t buck shot,” Buddy Lee said.

There was only one bed in the house, which the old man slept in, and an old smelly sofa, which Ralston and Buddy Lee fought over, but finally gave in to sharing. Will and I slept with blankets on the dusty floor, which was hard as frozen walnuts.

§

It’s late and I’m tired and the leather sofa looks pretty nice tonight. My pillow and blanket are already waiting for me.