second book in Penny Crusade trilogy
Never let a woman pack your camping gear. Especially if the woman is your mom.
I was staggering and tripping over big rocks, moving along a rocky river bottom behind the other guys, carrying about 20 pounds of stuff in my Scout pack. It didn’t weigh as much as the newspapers I carried on my route (103 customers six days a week, 76 on Sundays) but it was a capital B Burden! The other guys, especially John Stone, had lots less to manage.
While I packed, Mom added two pair of undershorts and tee shirts, a clean pair of starched blue jeans (as if I was going to a party), peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a canteen and a First Aid kit, my Scout cooking pans, and a couple cans of corned beef hash.
“I worry so much about you out there alone.”
“Mom, please don’t worry. I’m not gonna be alone, I’ll be with the guys.”
“I’m your mother, I worry. And those kids will just get you in trouble.”
I threw in a few candy bars and –- Big Mistake –- filled the canteen with Pepsi instead of water. By noon it was undrinkable flat warm stuff and then I became really thirsty.
Norm Jackson carried a USA war-surplus duffle. Even though Ben’s mother helped him pack, his pack was half the size of mine.
John Stone, the real Indian in our bunch, had a knife on his belt, and his Daisy Red Ryder air rifle slung over his shoulder. He didn’t even bring underwear. “Who needs that?” he said.
(When I told my mother that. she said “all civilized” men wear underpants.)
I wish I could be uncivilized and free.
You’re born into this world where all these rules and laws are made for you and you disagree with lots of them, but they still make you live by their rules. It’s not fair. Who makes all the damn “rules?” Not Ben, even if he thinks he does.
It was August, 1952, and we were camping out in the last week before college began. Our last year at College High we were twelfth graders, the big guys. In September I’d be s freshman again. No more playing, just getting ready to have real jobs and work.
Ben would learn to run his family’s business; Norman would go to OU like his brother had, and John Stone would work for his dad. Me? I had to follow Norman and study accounting and law, so we could be FBI guys and carry real weapons.
The idea of this campout was that John Stone would show us how to live in the outdoors like American Indians for four days and nights -– or, as Ben joked, until we got filthy.
The riverbed was jumbled with flat rocks and a thread of shallow water running through. I, in one of my rare moments of brilliance, refilled my canteen.
In pools between rocks, we saw trapped catfish. Their sluggish bodies moved faster when John’s hands slipped without splashing into the water. He had experience fishing barehanded for giant catfish in the hollow banks of the Red River. Some weighed hundreds of pounds. Good eating.
John captured four one-pounders.
He put them on a string to carry, dipping them in the water occasionally to keep them alive until dinner.
Late in the afternoon, Norm jumped atop a big boulder. The way he stood there, legs spread, hand shading his eyes, he looked like Lewis or the other guy, discovering the Pacific ocean.
I have no idea what he was looking for. Maybe moonshine stills. He had this fantasy, that if he could capture some moonshiners, he’d have earned the right to join the FBI. That’s because he met a real FBI man in a clothing store, where he sold ties and they went to have a beer. Turns out the FBI was working in Bartlesville for some reason.
Ben said, “They don’t know we won the war; they’re still looking for Nazi spies!”
Norm said the agent told him there were Communists here. Here! Heartland America! Bartlesville is a “Great Family Town” as the Chamber of Commerce calls it.
Norm could easily be an FBI guy; he always looks so damn noble. He even has a square chin with a dimple like a movie star.
“Hop up here,” he said, and Ben scrabbled up ungracefully. I wondered how to look graceful getting up, I tried to jump up in one dramatic leap and fell on my butt.
Norm pointed up the river to where it bended right. There were trees on both banks, but on the right side the limestone bluffs towered over them.
“Watch this,” John Stone said with a touch of excitement in his voice, which was rare for him. Norm held out his lucky penny so the sunlight hit it from the side. We saw the Indian head on his penny and beyond that the river bluff.
Above the trees I saw what looked like the quiet profile of a mighty Indian chief. The pine trees on top made it look like he had a feather headdress above his bald forehead.
“That must be a Spirit Rock,” John said. John Stone is a full-blood Osage Indian, so he knows this stuff. (Or knows enough to fake it…) He and Norm saw this place the previous week.
An hour later, standing atop the Indian head, on a flat shale outcrop about thirty feet long, a hundred feet or so above the river, I felt like a warrior (named “Hondon”) scouting the land.
I looked downriver to where we entered the river bottom, low water this August. From there the ground flattens and spreads into a valley.
Our Oklahoma country is flat prairie land. It rolls gently like the ocean until it meets these hills. We flatlanders call them mountains. Compared to real mountains in Colorado these are pimples. When we get up on a high hill we can see for probably 15 miles in each direction.
Anyway, we were high above farm fields divided by line fences. The grazing grass in the fields was brown from lack of rain, except around the muddy farm ponds that stained the grass greener. In one field brown cows moo and snooze and in another black and spotted cows grazed. They lay in cool shade under the trees around a farm pond.
Beyond that we could see our town –- Bartlesville. I was born there. The Phillips Petroleum building, at 12 stories, was the tallest building. My dad was working over a ledger in an office on the seventh floor. The offices were air conditioned during the War. He and twenty other accountants sat in shirts and ties, with suit jackets off, scribbling numbers in big gray ledgers. The numbers told how many barrels of oil were pumped in the oil fields and pipelined to the refineries where gallons of gasoline were made to be sold in the company’s gas stations at 21 cents a gallon, up a couple after the War was over.
In the top of the Indian’s skull was a depression about a foot deep and ten feet across.
John held my hands and Ben’s over the basin. A breeze blew out of the rock. Looking closer, I saw a one-inch hole.
“There’s a cave under here,” Norm said with the bossiness of a guy born to be right in every thing.
“It’s an outlaw cave!” Ben said, his eyes gleaming, throwing his arms around every-which-way like a spaz.
Bank robbers used to work throughout the Indian Territory because there weren’t enough lawmen and everyone knew the outlaws hid their loot in caves.
“We didn’t find an entrance,” John Stone said. I felt a little left out that he and Norm had been exploring without me. But it was okay, Ben wasn’t with them either!
Norm and John helped gather dead wood and build a fire in the center where the shallow depression made a good place to rest.
With the fire burning good, we found a steep path –- John called it an old Indian trail –- down to the river. It wound around the rocks and roots we braced our feet against or grabbed for support.
At the bottom, John dropped his pants and shed his shirt and jumped in a deep pool. We did the same. The water on the surface was warm. Near the sandy bed it was cooler.
Looking up from down there I could see only part of the cliff, not enough to recognize a face. We washed the sweat out of our clothes, then toted them back up to spread flat to dry.
On the way up, John saw a large depression in the stone, maybe a cave, but he couldn’t reach it from the path.
I hid my heavy pack below the top. Hondon didn’t need all that civilized stuff.
We didn’t bring sleeping bags because of the August heat. While the fish cooked on flat rocks in the fire, we used John’s big knife to cut springy branches from evergreen trees and piled them for mattresses.
Those fried catfish were our first meal in the Great Outdoors. Delicious. This was the way to live! Ben was nervous –- “The catfish os a scavenger like a pig,” he moaned, “and we’re not supposed to eat those” -– but after he tasted the white flaky flesh, he ate his share and smacked his lips.
“So, catfish is not like a pig, Ben?” Norm asked, grinning.
“My rabbi would love it,” Ben said, pretending to shovel food with both hands into his open mouth.
We watched the sun sink into heat waves over the far horizon.
The sky turned from deep blue into black, and filled with stars.
I left a roll of toilet paper in my pack but John told us to use a handful of grass to wipe our asses. I went into the trees and hung my butt over the edge of a log Nothing but farts. I wanted to be sitting on the throne at home.
Later, we lay around the crackling fire and watched the sparks rise. John Stone whittled a piece of wood, making a pile of long curly shavings that he fed to the fire.
Ben stared into the fire. I stared at the stars.
“You read any good stories lately, Hank?” Ben asked sleepily.
Science fiction magazines had begun to show up on the shelves of the combination cigar store where old guys played dominoes and newsstand: Astounding, Startling Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction….
Two days before, I found an old issue under a pile of Real Crime magazines and the guy behind the bar sold it to me for a dime. As soon as Ben asked, I saw the cover of the 1948 issue of Startling Stories behind my eyes; on it a beautiful blonde woman in a bathing suit screamed silently because a mechanical monster with lots of eyes and tentacles had grabbed her boyfriend, presumably for fuel. Nearly all issues had a cover like that even when the story didn’t have a nearly naked blonde woman in it. All women, even with their blonde heads covered with a helmet, and captured by aliens wore bathing suits. Red.
“Yeah! It’s really good,” I told him, “There’s this kid and he’s really smart and the only kid in this really ancient civilization. It’s millions of years from now and the whole planet is desert and nobody alive except in the city where he lives.”(*Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke.)
“He’s the only kid?” Norm asked. “Why?”
“Yeah, that’s because the human race has become infertile.”
“They can’t have children?” Ben said, waking up
“Yeah, because they’re so old. They live for thousands of years.”
“Oh sure,” Norm said. He made a loud yawning sound. Branches creaked as he stretched.
“So this guy – ”
“What’s his name?” Norm asked.
“Uh...” I can’t remember. Who cares? “It’s Al…” Loud snort from Norm. “No, it’s Alvin.”
“Al was real smart. He goes exploring and he discovers this really ancient cave under the city, that’s been hidden for millions of years and there’s some kind of ship inside...
“Millions of years?” Norman asked, snickering.
“Yeah. These secret passageways, tunnels and giant caves were all built millions of years before and then forgotten, but they still work, and he gets in a train and tells it to go. It takes him across the world through an underground tunnel to another place where people live and the people in his city didn’t even know about them.”
“Because, remember, millions of years had passed,” Norman said.
“Yeah, and these people were real smart but different than the people in his hometown, and they don’t live as long but they can talk by telepathy.”
John asked, “What’s that?”
“They can read each other’s thoughts,” Norman told him and yawned.
“Yeah, and they don’t want the people in Al’s hometown to know about them,”
“Why?” Norman asked, yawning again.
“I forget why not. Al and this other kid he meets go exploring and find a space ship.”
“It was built millions of years ago,” Norm explained.
“But it can still fly. And they talk to it with their thoughts and it takes them wayyy out.”
“Millions of miles.” Norman said.
“Yeah, even further, and...” Hearing Norm whisper to John, I stopped talking. Maybe Hondon shouldn’t read so much science fiction. Or get excited when he talked about what thrilled him.
“Wow,” Ben said. “That’s a great story. What happened next?”
I kept my mouth shut. About time! Darned if I’d let Norm make fun of me just because I read lots of stuff that he didn’t. He read magazines like National Geographic, which was mostly boring but did have some photos of naked women.
Norm spoke up: “Go on, Hank, tell us more.”
“Yeah,” John said, pretending to be eager,
Norm added, “I got to know how it ends! Really!”
I knew Norm was grinning.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
Above us the night sky stretched from horizon to horizon. Like we were in a giant frying pan with a lid and the lid was full of stars. It looked like there were more stars than bubbles in a Pepsi when you add salty peanuts and shake it.
“There must be a million stars,” I said.
Then wish I hadn’t.
Silence. Norm snorted: “No there aren’t a million stars! You don’t even know what a million is!”
“I bet there are.”
“Start counting. You can’t count more than a couple thousand.”
A big streak opened the night sky. Then it closed like a zipper.
...“What the?”
“Giant comet.”
“I don’t think so,” Ben said. His words were gasps. “If that was a c-c-comet, my name is C-C-Cleopatra.”
We stood up to see better, our eyes feeling out into space. The streak had made a quiet whoosh, like a breeze through the trees. But there was no breeze.
Over to the left and below us, fifteen miles away, we saw the street lights of Bartlesville. Some car headlights -– a cop car patrolling, teenagers on dates. Most houses were dark except where people were sick. The War ended years ago, but habit kept people from turning on too many lights.
“What was that?” I asked after a few moments.
Mister Know-it-all, assumed I had asked him, fount of all wisdom; he said, “This ls the time of year for meteors.”
Ben: “I never saw any that big”.
Norm: “How much of everything have you seen, Ben?”
“How far up so you think it was?” I asked
“A thousand miles maybe,” Norm said.
It looked a lot closer but I didn’t say so.
Ben raised a hand above his head and said, “Our atmosphere is only forty miles deep.”
“So?”
“It was burning. The atmosphere sets them on fire when they hit it going that fast.”
Norm flopped down on creaking branches; for him, the discussion was over.
Not for me. “It might crash somewhere,” I said.
Ben said, “Unless it burns up first.”
Norm yawned.
The rest of us lay down again.
I asked “Did you make a wish?”
Nobody replied. I made a wish fast, a prayer-wish: “Dear God, I wish I could go to the stars!” I felt surrounded by stars, like I was out deep in them instead of lying on my back on planet Earth. This was how it would feel...but much colder and lonelier, millions of miles from anything...
Ben said quietly, “Do you think there are other people out there somewhere?”
“There’s gotta be,” I said.
“Maybe on Mars or Venus,” Ben said. I had loaned him the book Princess of Mars by the guy who wrote Tarzan stories.
“No there aren’t,” Norm said.
“You believe we’re all alone, that it’s just us?” John asked.
“I know it.”
Ben snickered quietly. It was good that Ben didn’t take Norm seriously every once in a while because Norm took himself way too seriously.
“Someday we’ll go there –- to the stars,” I said, my throat aching from wanting it so bad.
Norm said “Rocket ship Hank!”
Ben snickered again. John muttered something.
“With atomic-powered rockets,” I said I feeling their sarcasm. “We could!”
“Here goes Hank Hinkle on his atomic-powered rocket ship, up up and –- KAHWBAWOOM!” Norm had fun making the sound effect of my ship blowing up. This from a guy who read all his older brother’s Oz books! Magic’s okay; science fiction isn’t.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash, thought it might be another comet and jerked my head sideways. There was a slight glow above the hills behind us, then it faded, and was gone.
Heat lightning probably.
I stared at the stars and kept wishing to be there. If I couldn’t do that, the rest of my life would be like...like, if I needed to poop but could only pass gas.
First Chapter from the novel Penny Crusaders Discover Sex and Save World
