Chapter Fourteen
Laughing Waters, Roaring Thunder

As part of our summer routine, Pop would empty the piggy-bank, pack Mom, me, and sometimes Jimmy, into the car, and off we’d go into the high country for a week’s vacation. Our destination? A small cluster of utterly charming cabins built in the 1920’s and 30’s, in a remote, idylic place called Cabin Creek, nestled high up in the mountains west of the city.
That year, near Labor Day, Jimmy had been invited. After several minutes of mighty celebration following this windfall news, he and I went back to Mom and pleaded and cajoled her into allowing Mickey to come along, too. We labored to convince her it’d be a great idea, and after a warlike assault on her from two fronts she finally relented and gave us permission to invite him as well. Of course we already had, so all that needed to be done was to have her give Mrs. Fumo a courtesy call.
“You guys promise to stay out of trouble if I let him come?” Mom stated more than inquired as we stood before her like miniature saints that evening before we left for the mountains.
“Well, yeah, Mom. Of course. We’re just going to fish…and stuff,” I assured her.
She gave it a little more thought, closing her eyes, scrunching up her mouth as though she’d just drank a glass of vinegar. “Well, ok, then. I’ll call his mother and ask her. Goddam woman. Probably won’t do much good, though. She’s so uppity…and I still think she goes to that Calvinist church, or whatever it is, up on 2nd Avenue. I don’ care what anybody says.” She mumbled more ugly remarks about the woman as she walked away to look up the Fumo’s telephone number.
“Hot-diggedy!” Jimmy said, punching me in the shoulder.
I wanted to somehow include Carol (who was once again back in the forefront of my thoughts, even though she was nowhere to be found), but for the life of me I couldn’t think up a convincing enough reason to get her invited as well. It had been troublesome enough for Jimmy and me to talk Mom into letting Mickey join us; bringing Carol into the conversation, I knew, would be pushing my dear mother to the limits.
I was certain the three of us couldn’t possibly find anything up there in the wilderness to destroy. There was nothing but forests of pines, the tiny meandering creek a middling walk from the cabins, and a few cows in the mountain meadow pasture a short hike away from the buildings. Ok, the little General Store and office owned by Mr. and Mrs. Trumbull who rented Pop whichever cabin he wanted for fifteen dollars a night. That, too. But surely, in even one of our most awful moments we wouldn’t bring it tumbling down. No, never. It’d be safe.
After the conversation between Mrs. Fumo and my Mom ended, she came back out onto the front porch where Jimmy and I had been waiting with our fingers crossed, and announced the good news.
“That old bat said yes. He can go. Now, let me tell you in no uncertain terms before we even get started here! If the three of you even think

about gettin’ into any trouble, I’ll skin ya’ alive. I promise. You understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“We do, Mom. We’ll be like angels, I swear it!”
“Alrighty then. He’s on his way down right now. The three of ya’ sleep downstairs. We’re leavin’ at five o’clock sharp. Mind what I told ya’! No pranks or trouble.”
I couldn’t let a good idea die. “Can I invite Carol?”
“WHAT?” Mom’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
“Just kidding,” I tried to redeem the question spoken without any thought. Jimmy scowled, and Mom loaded up her rifle.
“You’d best get that girl outa’ your head right this minute, Skippy. Your way too young to be thinkin’ about girls like you’ve been doin’ with that

one all summer. ‘Course you can’t invite her! Whatdya’ think I am…”
And so I received a long lecture, despite my continued explanation that I’d only been kidding about having my heart’s deepest desire come along with us. The goddess who was missing. The creature I loved, who would no doubt spoil any ill-conceived notions us boys might have to burn down Rocky Mountain National Park, or shoot the cows between the eyes with our Whamos, or execute whatever scheme Jimmy might dream up and talk Mickey and me into. Honestly, I knew in the deepest part of me that tromping over the brush-infested banks of Cabin Creek, untangling a fouled fishing line every fifteen steps, falling into the water, getting eaten alive by mosquitos, all of that would only appeal to Jimmy for about ten minutes—if that long. Besides, standing there in front of Mom, I noticed he still had his fingers crossed behind his back. He was plotting something already. A girl among us might make all the difference in the world. Silly me.

The next morning at precisely 4:33 a.m., as promised, Mom woke us up, fed us each a bowl of Wheaties, and then packed us, bleary-eyed, into the backseat of the station wagon. Mickey, Jimmy, and I slept for most of the interminably long trip, but awakened just east of Estes Park, a world renowned resort that, rumor had it, had been built by Buffalo Bill many years earlier. I didn’t think that was true, but we raced through the charming town anyway on the way to our bucolic destination. Cabin Creek lay a few miles farther west up the canyon which had been carved a trillion years or so ago by the St. Vrain River. That, I believed, was true. Though it wasn’t the Mississippi by any stretch of the imagination, the St. Vrain was an impressive body of water nonetheless, rifling down the steep, narrow, granite-walled canyon on its way to the plains below.
“They pulled two fisherman out of the drink a couple of months back,” Pop said, turning his attention to the baskseat briefly as we passed alongside a particularly nasty looking area of rapids. “The papers said the men must have slipped on a rock casting their lines out. River was higher then. Run-off was still heavy in June. I can’t figure out for the life of me, though, how two grown men could both fall in at the same time,” he finished up.
Jimmy had his nose stuck out the window by then, staring down at the broiling foam below us. “Maybe somebody murdered ‘em an’ tossed ‘em into the river.”
I thought that was a possibility.
“I doubt it,” Pop answered him after a short pause and a laugh. “People don’t murder fisherman. Least ways not up here. Never heard of any

murder in these parts that I can remember.”
“Well, maybe you have now!” Jimmy quipped. His statement gave rise to a series of unbelievably ridiculous questions and answers. Us four men—mom could have cared less, and was still dozing—discussed criminal activities possible in “these parts” for the remainder of the drive, none of which bore any resemblance to reality, probability, or even rationality.
A couple of miles up the highway Pop stuck his arm out the window, signaling our turn, and we rolled across the river over a narrow, ancient bridge built out of timbers and a lot of prayers. Ten minutes later we crossed another tiny bridge spanning Cabin Creek, and Pop pulled to a stop in front of Mr. and Mrs. Trumbull’s General Store. He left the car, and five minutes later, exited the store, motioning that our cabin was “Laughing Waters”, fifty yards up the dirt road. Good fortune. Of the half dozen cabins, Laughing Waters was the nicest—two stories tall, with a rock fireplace in the living room, and a real toilet—inside.
Jimmy, Mickey, and I whooped it up and left the car at a dead run, thankful to be free of the rear-end paralyzing confinement of the backseat. I whisked the keys to the cabin out of Pop’s hand as I passed by him, tripped Mickey as I passed by him, and arrived in a dead heat with Jimmy at the base of the flight of rough pine stairs leading up to the entry door. We looked quickly at one another, then galloped up to the top.
Laughing Waters sat nobly among the stand of trees, tucked into a natural hollow in a steep, rocky hill leading off into the forest. The old cabin smelled more delicious inside, even, than the fragrant pine-scented outdoors. I stepped across the doorway threshold into a large, open room. On the left lay the living room with the massive stone fireplace. A pair of antlers sacrificed God knows how long ago by an elk, hung over the firebox and its highly polished, hewn mantle. On the floor in front of it, a ten foot-wide, oval rag rug had been placed for the comfort of guests to lie on and gaze into the roaring fire on chilly autumn, and freezing winter evenings. To the right stood the dining room with its rows of sparkling clean windows overlooking the breathtaking vista outdoors, and beyond the dining room, a small but functional kitchen with its wood-burning stove, a geriatric ice box, and another smaller table for quaint, informal breakfasts. A backdoor with gingham curtains partially covering the glass led out to a leveled-out spot for chopping wood, and beyond…the infiniteness of the forest.
The wide staircase leading up to the three bedrooms separated the living room from the dining room like a priest standing between a blushing bride and her groom. This was indeed God’s country, and my Laughing Waters had a peaceful sanctity about it that humbled and performed magic on me whenever I entered it.
Mickey bounded up, shoving me into the interior where I landed flat on my stomach at the foot of the stairs. “You cheater, Skip!”
“All’s fair in love and war.” I laughed and picked myself up, raising my fists in mock reprisal. “I’ll fight you for the top bunk!”
“You’re on…”
“You boys get back down here right this minute,” Mom’s voice came echoing through the door. “You think your father an’ me are gonna’ carry all this stuff up them stairs, you’ve got another think a comin’. Hurry up, now.”
We abandoned the battle for the bed and raced back down to do the grunt work. The sound of our shoes clattering back down the wooden steps made their own wondrously muted echo against the rocks in the hollow.
Pop had already opened the rear door, and he passed the lighter containers of supplies to each of us as we arrived, and then took a box under each arm himself. Several more trips and the job was complete. We all gathered in the living room to catch our breaths, where Mom made an announcement in the midst of all our huffing and puffing.
“You boys take the end bedroom. Your father and I’ll have the other one on the south end. Your aunt Corey and Sylvie are coming up later this afternoon. They’ll get the middle room.”
“Aunt Corey?” Jimmy and I exclaimed in unison. We meant Aunt Corey and

Sylvie, but the single name expressed our surprise perfectly. They were twin old maids, sort of.
Aunt Corey was my father’s ancient, sweet natured sister, widowed at about the same time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, I think. Sylvie…or Sylvia…was Pop’s niece, a few years younger than himself, with the temperament of a beetle in a frying pan. I got nervous just watching her shake. Her husband, some guy I’d never seen, and barely ever heard of, had run off with another woman many years ago. She and Mrs. McGuire had become sympathetic friends over that disclosure a long, long time in the past, but whereas Mrs. McGuire tried to drown the memory of George by having an affair with Old Crow, Sylvie denounced any worldly attempt for relief whatsoever. Save fishing. She was in love with the sport, though she would never stoop to sitting on the bank of a lake to perform her magic with the rod and reel. Stream fishing was her passion, and she was good at it.
Despite the furious shaking of her fingers and the horrible twitch of her facial muscles, the woman was capable of baiting a sharp hook with the precision of a watchmaker. She knew trout more intimately, I think, than she could possibly ever have known her husband. Knew where they loved to rest, close to the shadowy banks of the creek, what bait they were most apt to go for at any given hour. I think she even knew the names of each and every one of them. She loved fish, or at least catching them, and it was she who taught me how to mercifully beat their heads against a rock after I’d snagged one and reeled it home.
“They suffer, Skip, when you pull them out of the water. They can’t breathe,” I remember her saying in her trembling voice on our very first outing. It occurred to me at the time that it might be terribly more merciful not to bother catching them in the first place. But then again, it was no fun at all to sit on the bank of the creek and just watch them swim by.
I inured myself to the barbarity of the sport for hers and Pop’s sake, I suppose, and in time became one of the world’s finest trout murderers. A compassionate killer, once a year, along the banks of Cabin Creek.
Aunt Corey and Sylvie arrived as promised later in the afternoon while Jimmy, Mick, and me were off chasing chipmunks and running down the list of possible activities for the upcoming week. Fortunately we’d all had the foresight to bring our Whamos and plenty of quarter-inch BBs—just in case we ran across a bear or a mountain lion. But whereas Jimmy and Mickey wanted to decapitate Chip and Dale whenever they poked their heads out of their dens, I amused myself by zeroing in on less sentient things, like boulders, tree branches, and sometimes bald eagles soaring thousands of feet higher than my pellets could possibly reach.
“Those little buggers are hard to hit,” Jimmy cursed after having no luck blasting even one of them into kingdom come several hours into the hunt.
“Yeah, well if you’d be a little quieter when you snuck up on them instead of acting like a white man, making all that noise, you might have better luck,” Mickey advised him.
“Yes,” I added, “the Indians use to walk over this ground without making a sound. They never spooked even the smartest animal. Sister Mary Dolorine is an Indian, you know.”
Jimmy looked at me, lowering his slingshot to his side. “You mean she comes up here an’ hunts squirrels?”
“No, dummy. I just was thinking of her when I said that. I’m sure she’d never shoot an animal, even if it was a mean old grizzly about to tear her head off.”
“I sure would!” Mickey roared. “I’d do it in a minute!”
“Me too,” Jimmy said with an agreeing laugh.
“Sure you would. You’d die, too. They say it takes an elephant gun to kill a Grizzly,” I said to him.
“Oh, bull!” Jimmy began.
“Shhh! Listen! Something’s up there,” Mickey whispered, pointing to a boulder plugged into a rise fifty yards up the hill. “I caught a glimpse of it…it was big!”
Mickey’s admonition for silence was an old ploy, I sensed. The bogeyman thing, meant to scare the wits out of Jimmy and me. Tired of the chipmunk hunt, I played along.
“I think I saw something, too. Let’s just ease ourselves back down the mountain for a ways, and then run like hell for the cabin”. As we feigned great fear and began to back down the way we’d come, the thing Mickey had spoken of poked its massive head out from behind the grey boulder, exactly where he’d pointed a second earlier. I’m not sure if it was hungry, angry that we’d been taking pot-shots at its little friends, or simply curious concerning our presence, but whatever its interest in us was, we screamed bloody murder and lit out like three Bambis for the safety of the cabin.
Not caring whether it was pursuing us or not, we arrived at the back door within seconds of one another and burst into the kitchen, frightened out of our skins. Our four adult chaperones dropped their conversations and cans of beer all at once upon our arrival, and peered across the room when we slammed into the kitchen wall.
“What the hell?” Pop was the first to speak. Mom sat across from him with a frown on her face, and in between them, dressed in their woodsmen best, sat my aunts. Or great-aunt and cousin, or whatever it was they were to me.
“A Grizzly!” I shouted. “Close the damn door, Mick!”
Mickey darted back, and after a quick glance outside, slammed the door shut. The three of us entered the dining room, dispensing with any greetings, and related how after innocently target practicing at knotholes in trees, this eight foot-tall, ferocious bear had snuck up on us out of the blue.
The evening passed, after a fine dinner and tons more bottles of Coors for my parents and aunts…or, whatever…and Sylvie related several suspiciously colored accounts of how she’d stumbled across a Cardinal’s list of man-eating creatures in this very wilderness. Pop tried to best her stories with even more colorful ones of his own, while Jimmy, Mickey, and me sat listening in awe. Mom and Aunt Corey cleaned up the dinner dishes and then bravely took an evening stroll together into the darkness of the woods behind the cabin.

For the next few days my friends and I were intensely schooled in angling, and true to my mental predictions, Jimmy quickly tired of falling into the creek and piercing his fingers with the hook on the end of his fishing line, which snagged as though every tree he walked under had branches with evil eyes and malicious fingers of its own, waiting for him. Something had to give. As the higher regions of the forest were dangerously alive with any number of beasts intent on chewing us to pieces, we decided on the third or fourth day to visit the cows in the pasture. If any creatures were to be bullied, it would have to be the cows, not us.
We received permission to abandon the fishing expedition, explaining to Pop that morning, our repulsion of beating the brains out of our catches. Sensing a new generation of thinking foreign to his own, but possessing a very broad spectrum of tolerance for kooky outlooks just the same, he let us off the hook, so to speak.
Delighted by our reprieve, and Whamos dangling out of our back pockets, we scuffled down the dirt road past Trumble’s General Store, over a weatherbeaten fence, and into the north forty of the pasture. A wood-paneled station wagon roared past us just before we’d gotten ten feet into Farmer John’s field, and we all turned to watch it speed up the road.
“Damn! Did you see that?” Jimmy asked.
“What? What was it?” Mickey asked him.
“Whoever’s drivin’ that thing is either a midget or else he’s six years-old. I barely saw his hair above the window! Let’s go see who he is.”
We darted back across the fence, up the road past our cabin, and found the car parked fifty yards farther up the bowl in front of the last cabin, “Roaring Thunder”. Sure enough, the driver had just stepped out. Either Rumpelstiltskin or some kid who couldn’t have been over ten years of age.
“Hey, you!” Jimmy shouted. “How do ya’ drive that thing? 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.

Impressum

Texte: Patrick Sean Lee
Lektorat: Self
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.08.2012

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