My Turn in the Barrel - A Story from the Idiot Land of Teenagerdom

Just as the light is dying in the fire, sparks reaching for their ultimate
big brothers winking a million light years away.

An island in the middle of a salt water lake. Rabbit Island.

A couple of nitwit kids, discussing the important things in life.

"I hate that, first thing after you wake up in the morning, having to take
a piss through a hard-on."

Laugh from the other side of the fire. "Yeah, lean over the bowl and hope
you don't piss on the wall."

Or, later...

"I stood behind Gail the other day, lined up for lunch, she pressed back into
me, she's just tall enough for the cup of her ass to rub across my dick." He
fell quiet thinking about the pressure, and the warmth.

"Yeah, Pam was behind me, I could feel her nipples through my shirt."

The discussion turned to cigarettes, hanging out on the roof of the school
after the scout meeting let out, smoking and acting like we knew what we
were doing.

There were a handful of us, the latchkey brigade, time on our hands and trouble
on our minds.

At least the rest of them had the full family complement. Someone had
misplaced my nuclear family pieces, somewhere along the way. I had to make
do with just me and my mom.

And half a dozen kittens our cat had laid in my mom's closet. On top of her
dress shoes for work.

The island's part of a little chain that runs from the bottom of Lake
Charles halfway to the gulf. Most of the islands aren't big enough to do more
than jerk the engine handle out of your hand when you hit them going too
fast, glorified sand bars.

But there's a handful solid enough to hold trees and grass and defy the tides.
You can camp on them, which is what we were doing.

Of course, most adults would have been smart enough to wait 'til duck season,
when at least you didn't have to worry about the fucking mosquitoes. We were
tough, we thought. And we were going through a phase. Mack Bolan books,
special forces, navy seals. Spare cash went to the adds in the back of Soldier
of Fortune and trips to the Army surplus store.

Back when the Soviet Union was still hanging around, and every boy we knew
figured that we'd end up being drafted into World War III, so we might as
well get ready for it. Our dads had all had their turn in southeast
Asia, the draft wasn't in place but it was only a matter of time.

After all, why else would D.C. be spending all that money on nukes, if they
didn't want to use them? No way were they going to let their dicks hang out
ready to be cut off, they'd line up a couple million warm bodies ready to die
to protect their tough guy attitude. Can't let the Russkies win, son, you've
got to be ready to do your bit.

We bought that shit, back then. They're always selling, and kids are always
ready to buy. Especially when there was a whole industry telling you how
heroic your dad was for dying in the jungle.

My dad caught a bullet sitting in the passenger seat of a helicopter. He was
coming home.

And he did, I guess. At least no one could spit on him. Pine boxes are good
for something.

Boy Scouts were supposed to be the good boys, and girls on the distaff side.

We weren't really that good at it.

Oh, Jason ended up as an eagle scout, and if I'd had the patience to finish
out my project, I'd have got there too. The camping part, and getting the
badges doing rough science and engineering, that we could do.

It was the attitude we never quite got a handle on. Walk into winter camp
with a boombox on one shoulder and an axe on the other, four boys doing our
best imitation of a Coppola movie introduction, and you start to get a bit
of a reputation.

We didn't bring the attitude to Rabbit Island, though. There wasn't anyone
to show off to. And, no matter what kind of dipshits we might have been to
everyone else, for us we did the right thing.

It was that or get thrown in the lake until you cooled down. Either way.

Eric and Lewis were asleep. Eric's parents were dentists, Lewis's dad
an architect. What they were doing hanging out with me and Jason I have no
idea.

No, I remember now. It was the games. D&D, Star Frontiers, Top Secret. We
were game geeks, and we were band geeks, and we all had a couple hours every evening to hang out in the church's rec room and play games until
our parents came to pick us up.

The island was a natural extension of all that. Game geeks, scouts in the same
troop. The oddballs, the agnostics in a Catholic school where the vast
majority of our peers still bought the party line.

We had each other's backs. We had to, no one else would.

The island trip was a lark. Jason's dad had an old johnboat, an Evinrude
pull start with about a half a gallon tank. We carried the johnboat down to
the bayou running behind Jaime's house, threw the engine on the back. Then
ourselves and our junk and we were off for an adventure.

The bottle hidden in my bag was a first. The cigarettes were easy, no one
batted an eye when you bought a pack 'for my mom'.

Getting a bottle meant I had to sneak it out of my grandmother's pantry. Easy
enough to do, she'd never miss it, Christmas was the only time she used it
for the egg nog, and she's just assume one of her sons had taken it.

It was a pint of Jim Beam. We didn't know anything to do with it except pass it
around the fire, sipping from it and lying to each other about how good it
was.

I guess we were lucky there were four of us, and it was half empty to begin
with. Any more than that, and we wouldn't have made it off the island.

Not that Jason did, not really. I think he's still there, in some ways. In
a lot of ways.

Eric and Lewis asleep, Jason and I talking in the dark, where neither of
us could be embarrassed by what we were saying. I don't know anything about
how girls do it, but boys have to talk about this shit, too. Hard ons, and
the fact that you wake up in the morning with a full bladder and a rock
hard barrier to empty it.

Girls, the great mystery. I haven't seen any of the girls we went to school
with since we graduated. My wife isn't from here, and boy am I glad of that.
Jason found a girl, an army brat who's 'from' Missouri with a lot of stops
in between.

Eric and Lewis shook the dust from their shoes five minutes after graduation,
and I haven't seen them since. And I don't blame them for it. Most of the
town's shocked as hell that I came back.

I had to. I can work from anywhere, but gravity and the weight of the island
called me back. Told me I need to be at home.

Booze, cigarettes, music. We were arguing about the difference between Cream
and Rush. Jason'd picked up the bass that summer, he was a french horn and
occasional piano man before that, but the electric bass was devouring him
now. So, Geddy Lee.

I turned him on to Jack Bruce. Eventually, it took him a while, but last time
I saw him Wheels of Fire was his current obsession. Like Paul McCartney
cruising L.A. with Pet Sounds on a turntable in his trunk, you can never quite
tell when an album's gonna catch you. The ultimate time machine.

Or like when I read the covers off Huckleberry Finn, or Dune, or
Swiss Family Robinson. Obsessions. That summer, I fell into computers. I
had an XT with a breadboard and a head-full of 8088 assembly.

It passes the time.

The fire reached for the stars, and the bugs reached for our faces. The
constant buzz. "What was that?"

Foghorn, tug boat pushing barges up the channel for the plants on the west
bank of the lake.

Little bit of wind, constant companion on the water at night.

Water splashing. Against the side of a boat? We'd pulled the john boat up
the beach, well above the high tide line. No way it was ours.

And we'd have heard an engine.

Young and dumb, I reached for a knife. Jason brought a hand-axe, one of
those multi-use things, just big enough to cut up driftwood for the fire.

"Do we..." "Shh..." Lewis and Eric slept on.

Barefoot, no moon, just the glow of the light behind us. The sand crunched
under my feet. I just hoped I didn't step on an oyster shell, they
cut to the bone and hurt like a son of a bitch.

I led the way down to the beach. Nothing about bravery, we weren't
thinking that way, I just happened to be closest to the little path through
the salt grass.

'Try and walk on the outside of your feet,' I told myself. I remembered that
from somewhere, some story talking about how to make sure you stayed quiet.

Not that it mattered, barefoot over sand in the dark, we might just have been
quiet like the ninja in our dreams.

There were shadows on the beach. I stopped, just behind a scrub willow with its
roots sunk beneath the sand to the gumbo mud. Jason stepped around, just
enough to see for himself.

Shadows, two figures and a boat. They were pulling on the boat, higher sides
than our johnboat. It was one of those big black rubber inflatables, the
engine pulled up high out of the water.

Jason knelt, one knee down in the sand. I followed him.

"Damnit, Jean. What the fuck are we doing out here?"

"Pissing on a grave. What the hell do you think we're doing?"

"At least let me light the lantern."

"Not 'til we're off the beach."

The one with the unlit lantern led the way south, toward the Gulf. Thankfully,
away from where we'd set up our camp.

We waited. The shadows disappeared, a bare few yards down the beach.

But we knew when they got off the beach. The lantern was bright enough to tell
us that much. I could see their faces, and the cigarette the big one lit from
the lantern flame when he got it going. Big kerosene storm lantern, the kind
with the pressurized jet you had to pump.

"Jean, really?" I could hear the smile in Jason's voice, even if I couldn't
see it.

Jean, indeed. If you need an alias, there are worse choices than Jean
Lafitte. Just don't expect anyone between New Orleans and Galveston to take
you seriously.

We followed their path down the beach. With the lantern lit, so long as we
stayed quiet...

We were pretty good at that. We'd had some practice. There was this tradition
of raiding the houses that neighbored the boy scout camp...

The island wasn't big enough to hide anything on. And it wasn't permanent
enough to bury anything. You can't do much with a waterline just a foot down.

We thought. The big one had set the lantern down, they both started digging.
When the shovel blade hit steel, it rang over the whole island.

After a bunch of work, the two men grunted, cursed, carried a fifty gallon
barrel into the lantern light. One of the big old drums, not the blue plastic
ones they have now. It'd be green in the daylight.

The clamp ring was rusted shut, but they'd brought a pry bar and hammer.

Whatever was in the barrel, it must have been worth something, 'cause they
weren't paying attention to the noise any more. The barrel rang with each
strike.

Until it pinged when the ring gave way. Then it started back up again; the
lid was rusted in place.

Jason and I had both quit laughing. We were enthralled. What the hell could
those two dudes want?

We didn't have to wait long. With the lid off, the one who called himself
Jean reached in and pulled out a plastic bag. Just one.

I don't know whether I believe that pirates ever buried treasure. Not back
in the old days. But we found out what sort of treasure a modern pirate would
bury.

The plastic bag was a two gallon ziploc bag, and inside it was what we guessed
was a kilo bag of cocaine. It had to be, that was the money drug then. What
made Miami Vice.

The guy had barely reached into that barrel. How many millions of dollars
worth of white dreams were sitting in the middle of Lake Charles, on a barrier
island that could disappear with the next hurricane?

Jason grabbed me, my arm just below the shoulder. I'd been about to step out
into the light.

Pure shock. There's no way in hell our little corner of the world was that
important.

Oh, sure, if you need something smuggled there's an awful lot of marsh between Mobile and Brownsville. An awful lot of beach and little canals and bayous that, back then, were well away from the DEA's control. Out of sight, out of mind.

We just never believed that anyone would actually take advantage of it. Yet
here we were, moonless night watching a couple of would-be cocaine cowboys
raid their stash.

"Think they'll notice, Jean?"

"Nah, no way. Think they've got inventory numbers? The bags are in there like
rice in a sack. We got this."

Ok, raiding someone else's stash. I turned to Jason, could just see him
shake his head and pull me back toward the sand.

We waited them out. Obviously, they weren't hear to explore the island in
the dark. We laid down in the grass above the boat. I prayed I didn't find
an anthill in the dark. Fire ants would have made the wait a hell of a lot
more torture than I could have dealt with.

God smile on a fool, we got lucky. It didn't take long for them to put the
barrel back in the hole. "Jean, do we cover the hole with something?"

"Tide, wind, a couple days and no one's gonna ever know we were here. Carlos
won't send his boys for another month. By that time, we're in L.A. with models
and bands and shit."

"I always wanted to rock and roll. We're gonna be famous."

MTV had a hell of a reach back then. And Guns 'n Roses, Motley Crue, all the
rest of the strange brew in L.A. had cast their spell.

Apparently everybody in the country knew where to go if you wanted
to turn a quick buck with a kilo of Peruvian marching dust burning a hole in
your pocket.

I sat there in the dark, watching those two idiots make their way back to
their boat, wondering just how on earth they thought that Carlos, whoever
he was, didn't know the same thing? How many people knew where that barrel
was?

And how many of them were getting ready to show up on steady video rotation,
video broadcast to the world twelve times a day for the next six months? I
might have only been fourteen, but even I knew there was always a catch.

We listened to them, talking about the videos they'd bankroll, the models
they'd fuck, the fame they'd be rolling in. They had it all planned out.
The stories rolled across the water as they rowed their rubber boat back
to the mainland.

We'd still be there, stuck in awe and laughter. But eventually reality kicked
in.

I said before that we weren't all that good at the attitude part of being
Boy Scouts. I like to think we made up for it, that night.

I'd brought a knife, the kind with a hollow handle that held a flint,
a first aid kit, a wire. Jason'd brought his axe. Lewis had brought a
trenching tool. I snuck back into the camp, where Eric and Lewis were still
snoring away, and borrowed his little shovel.

Then Jason and I dug up the barrel, underneath the light of an old 6 volt
flashlight.

And we dumped every bit of it into the lake.

I wonder if anybody ever found any of those bags? I doubt it, most of them
were taking on water before we got to the bottom of the barrel. Neither
one of us wanted to take a chance with punching holes in them to make sure.

By the time the sun was coming up, we could roll that barrel into the lake
and watch our little packets of mischief make their way for the Gulf.

The other thing I said was that I think Jason never quite left the island.
That's not really true.

There was a part of him that questioned whether or not we should have taken
our own little piece of the pie. Sell off a bit, here and there, pay for
college maybe. Or even just pay for a car that didn't die every couple thousand
miles.

It ate at us, in different ways. By the time Jason turned eighteen, he'd
cleared his end of it, joined the army. He made full bird colonel in the sands
and mountains of the Middle East.

I buried myself in binary, html, digital this and systems that. I watched
others make their big score, the accident of being Yahoo employee number
fourteen, or a Google investor before anyone knew what a search engine was.

It eats at you, lottery dreams like that. So far as I can tell, striking it
rich doesn't have anything to do with talent, or skill.

All you need is the sort of dumb luck a bunch of teenagers had one night when
we watched a couple of dime store pirates help themselves to a pocket full of
powdered kryptonite.

Not that I'm complaining. It wasn't the last time I did something like that.
Not too many years after that, I'd moved down to Corpus with my mom to finish
my last couple years of high school. The Soviet Union had fallen apart, in
an astonishing display of how many lies our side and theirs could tell.

Rumor had it that Carlos bought a submarine in Vladivostok. Cheap.

People who worked on boats laughed at the rumors. But then one night we were down in the four-wheel drive section of the national seashore, Padre Island.

And a homemade torpedo motored up onto the beach, full of the same sort of
little white packets as that barrel in the middle of Lake Charles.

But I always promised Scott I'd never tell that story, not 'til long after the
guilty are long gone and buried, and there's no one to come after us anymore.