Laughing Waters, Roaring Thunder, Patrick Sean Lee [free novels TXT] 📗

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?