Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (8 page)

“By the way, I’d tap the ground with it, if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Oh, there’s a few snakes in there,” she said, motioning to the forest. “You can’t be too careful.”

Val looked up from her bag of Charles potato chips. “What?!”

“Don’t worry,” Aunt Jinny replied patiently, “they’re not poisonous. They’re mostly just garden or hognose snakes. Tap on the ground and they’ll run the other way. Here, I’ll show you.” She grabbed the shovel and tapped the ground lightly as she disappeared into the woods. “See?” she called out. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

“I did not come here,” Val stage-whispered, “to be bitten by a rattlesnake and die with my pants down in the middle of nowhere!”

Aunt Jinny returned and handed Val the shovel. “Go with him.”

“I’m not watching my brother go number two!”

“I didn’t say ‘watch him,’ but you can tap with this while he does his business.”

Val sighed heavily, grabbed the shovel and pushed me in front of her as we crept hesitantly into the woods.

As someone who locked the bathroom door at home just to wash my face, this was mortifying. Fortunately, Val was too busy slamming the handle against the ground, as though she were beating out some Indian-style Morse code, to notice what I was up to.

“Look for an escape route,” she whispered.

“But we can’t just run away.” I paused. “Can we?”

“If we can make it to the main road before dark, we have a chance,” she replied. “Some nice trucker will take pity on us, and we can probably make it home in time for
Mary Tyler Moore
.”

AUNT JINNY rose the next morning at six, banging dishes as she made coffee in a dented tin pot. “Who wants pancakes?” she hollered.

Val and I awoke with a start, suddenly aware that we had made it through our first night.

We smiled sheepishly at each other. What had we been so worried about? We slept like logs, we’d both finally managed to go in the woods. A profound sense of pride filled me as I realized that, although nature had not bent to my will, I had found the power to rise to the occasion and magically withstand such extreme conditions.

The day had dawned sunny and warm once again. After taking turns bathing in the river, we devoured Aunt Jinny’s delicious breakfast of eggs and canned corned beef hash, chatting up a storm. Maybe this camping thing wasn’t so unbearable after all.

“Let’s hightail it down to the lake,” Aunt Jinny said as she collected the paper plates, “so we can get an early start on our fishing.”

Val glanced at me. “Fishing?”

Aunt Jinny walked over to the car and loosened the knot on the rope holding the trunk of the Plymouth closed. She yanked out two fishing rods and a plastic tub labeled “bait.” “You’ve never been fishing?”

“No,” Val replied in her most sincere tone, “and that’s kinda on purpose.”

“Well, today, on purpose, we’re gonna catch lunch. It’ll be fun.”

What little fish I had had at the age of ten had primarily come in a can, so the notion of eating something that had, moments before, been an unsuspecting resident of the lake seemed not only disgusting but a tad barbaric.

“Since you only have two fishing rods,” I piped up graciously, holding up the
Mad
magazine I had just bought with my allowance, “I’ll bow out. I have a lot of reading to catch up on.”

“Nonsense. You can use mine,” Aunt Jinny said, handing one rod to Val, who held it as far away as possible, obviously assuming it was loaded. Aunt Jinny handed me the tub of bait. “Here, hold this.”

I gingerly took the container. A thin layer of Tupperware plastic was all that separated me from a teeming horde of slimy annelids.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, they’re just worms,” she barked. We walked through the woods to the shore and sat down on the bank of the river. The morning sun glistened atop the lake.

Aunt Jinny popped open the covered bowl. The live worms were crawling over one another in a tangled, oily mess. Val and I nearly vomited. She extracted a worm and grabbed the hook swinging from the end of Val’s rod.

“Watch me, now.” She stabbed the worm with the hook.

I blanched. “You killed it.”

“That’s horrible!” Val shrieked.

Aunt Jinny sighed. She grabbed the other pole and repeated the process. “They’re just worms. Living things eat other living things. It’s the cycle of nature.”

She showed us how to cast the line into the lake. The first time, Val hooked the back of my shirt; the second time she caught it on a stump. By the fourth attempt for both of us, we deposited the hooks more or less squarely in the water.

Aunt Jinny beamed. “See, it’s not so hard, is it?”

We had to admit there was a certain satisfaction in landing the worms in the middle of the lake. Now, as long as we didn’t actually catch a fish, this whole thing would be reasonably pleasant. We could sit on the bank of the river and sing the greatest hits of the Cowsills.

“Let’s play Name That Tune,” I piped up.

Aunt Jinny shushed me. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but we have to be very quiet. You’ll scare away the fish.”

We sat for nearly twenty long minutes in silence until a distraction arrived, in the form of a family of campers who had come to fish across the river. The kids seemed wholly at home, baiting their own hooks and casting their lines effortlessly into the water. I saw Aunt Jinny watching them, a slight look of envy on her unguarded face. I caught Val’s eye as if to say, “Well, what do you expect? They’re wearing
overalls
.”

As twenty minutes became an hour, the sun began to disappear behind clouds, the humidity slowly rising as the sky became a mass of light gray.

“This is boring,” Val declared. “I should have brought my
Tiger Beat
.”

“What is so boring about enjoying nature?” Aunt Jinny replied.

Everything
, I thought to myself. Nature is dirty and unpredictable and lacks climate control.

“Nothing,” I said brightly, knowing this couldn’t lead anywhere good.

“Not if you want to go insane,” Val said. “What are we gonna do the rest of the week?”

“Well,” Aunt Jinny replied with a sigh, “I thought we’d fish some more, and go hiking.”

“That’s it?” Val said. “For six days? Can we hike to the mall?”

After ninety long minutes, during which time the family across the lake reeled in three fish and I slapped repeatedly at my skin, wondering if my decision to be the blue plate special on the mosquito menu actually beat being coated in sticky pesticides, my rod suddenly snapped to attention.

“Finally!” Aunt Jinny crowed. “See, isn’t this fun? Now, just pull it toward you gently.”

“Wow,” Val marveled as the fishing line unspooled frantically until Aunt Jinny grabbed the spinner, “so there’s really a dead fish on the other end?”

“No,” she replied, tugging on the rod. “It’s not dead yet. We’ll have to kill it.”

Having not quite thought this part through, I guess Val and I assumed that biting down on the hook somehow euthanized the fish and he immediately went to sleep, dying a quick and painless death as his relatives said their tearful but resigned good-byes, secure in the knowledge that their loved one had died a hero. The reality of a wounded fish struggling on the other end of the line was something else altogether.

Aunt Jinny grabbed the pole to steady it. “Come on, you can reel him in.” It lurched as I felt the fish’s panicked thrashing. As the fish and I struggled against each other, I was gradually overwhelmed by a God-like sense of power. I controlled the life of this aquatic beast. His future was in my hands. And I now decreed that he must die.

I pulled back on the rod, determined to bring him in. I had obviously snagged a forty-pounder. This would be a masterful moment, one I would tell my grandkids about as they sat at my knee, spellbound.

I slowly began to reel the fish in, with Aunt Jinny’s hands over mine, guiding me. As the line got tighter and closer, I pulled away from her. “Let me do it.”

The fish was now close to shore and fighting desperately to free itself. I am in control, I intoned silently, summoning my mystical powers. Nature will bend to my will. I imagined the jealous looks from the yokels across the lake as I held up my trophy.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp, blinding pain in my cheek. A bee had stung me. I screamed involuntarily, jerking the fishing pole back as my hand flew to my face.

As if winged, the fish on my line took flight, sailing out of the water straight toward us as I dropped the pole and fell to the ground clutching my cheek.

The five-pound trout flew over my head and hit Val squarely in the face, its gills slapping her ear and blood from the gash in its mouth streaking across her chin. She tasted the blood and screamed as if it were her own.

The trout landed on the ground just as the rod that Val had been holding suddenly leaped to life. It flew into the water and was dragged out into the middle of the lake as the fish on the other end raced to freedom.

Val ran to the water and dove in, clothes and all, scrubbing her face violently like Lady Macbeth with bad aim as she attempted to eradicate the fish blood now creating a large decorative stain on her cheek.

“Oh, that is the
limit
!” Val screamed, pounding the water with her fist.

I moaned and rocked in place, hysterically pinching the area around my wound. It felt as though someone had plunged a red-hot poker into my face.

“I’ve been stabbed!” I shrieked.

“How can you possibly think this is fun?” Val shouted at Aunt Jinny. “It’s no
wonder
you’re alone!”

Aunt Jinny stood staring at the scene, immobile, apparently debating whether to help one of us, attempt to retrieve her fishing pole, or simply get in her car and drive away.

As I clutched my rapidly swelling cheek and sobbed, the specter of a vacation with Mother and Dad suddenly took on a sheen I had never before considered. At Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, we had running water. And beds. We went boating, ate dinner in the Golf and Tennis Club, and watched the Monica Lewis Trio perform. True, there could be moments of extreme awkwardness—but we didn’t have to shit in a hole.

I felt a sprinkle of water and glanced up at the now rapidly darkening sky. It had begun to rain. So much for this magical outcome.

 

 

VAL AND I sat in the tent as the downpour droned on, the heavy rain pelting the tarp. It had been two hours.

“I have to go make a phone call,” Aunt Jinny said, avoiding eye contact with both of us.

Was she mad? Disappointed? Humiliated? Had that other family pointed at her and laughed at the woman saddled with the idiots, as they merrily hauled in another impressive catch?

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Where would we go?” Val said morosely. “It’s like a mudslide out there.”

Aunt Jinny was wearing a baseball cap and a slicker as she pushed open the tent flap and disappeared. We heard the car drive off, its engine backfiring.

“You sure did it this time,” Val announced.

“Me? I’m not the one who made her feel bad!”

Val looked down, remorse suddenly filling her face. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. But I mean, come
on
.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Do you think she’s coming back?” Val asked.

“I don’t know.”

We began to contemplate how we would find our way home or fend for ourselves in the wilderness if she didn’t return. Maybe we could swim across the lake to the other family and beg them to take us in. This would be humiliating, but they obviously had plenty to eat.

“Guess we can count our five dollars good-bye,” Val said wistfully. We both began to ponder the staggering loss of these holiday gifts, as Val dabbed a fresh coating of moist baking soda on my bee sting, a remedy Aunt Jinny had shown her how to apply. My face now resembled that of a chipmunk who’d been storing all his nuts on one side.

“Why do you think she never got married?” I asked. Before this week, I had never given her marital status much thought. To me, Aunt Jinny was just the resident spinster. Didn’t every family have one?

“Well, I would imagine,” Val replied, “that it’s not easy finding somebody who likes pretending they’re a POW.”

 

 

AUNT JINNY returned a few minutes later, to our considerable relief, and the moment there was a break in the rain that afternoon, she packed us up and we drove home. Her phone call had been to our parents, telling them to meet us in La Cygne. She was obviously hurt, and our ninety-mile-an-hour drive home was cloaked in uncomfortable silence as the flat Missouri and Kansas scenery screamed by, punctuated only by the shrieks of the wide-eyed occupants of other cars as the wind shear from the Plymouth nearly blew them off the road.

Finally, in an attempt to break the tension, I spoke up.