At Sea by Henry Simpson

At Sea by Henry Simpson

I may have interested Mario in camping by blabbing about nature, observing wildlife, hunting with a .22 rifle, hiking, swimming, sporting a big knife on my belt, strip poker, ghost stories, pissing out campfires, meeting girls, and so forth. Mario then asked if I could show him and his pals Sal and Emil how to camp. I had free time that summer before school so I said yes. So, Emil had a ‘47 Plymouth for wheels and a California drivers license. The only one who worked was Sal, a heavyweight high school dropout who worked on his dad’s tuna fishing boat. I picked Black Rock as our destination. It was a back country canyon with a stream running through it, ponds for swimming, lots of trees. Minor inconveniences were no restrooms or running tap water, which meant doing pooping in the bushes and bringing drinking water. No big deal. A week later, we were speeding along in Emil’s car in San Diego’s back country, when we came to a barely legible, bullet-riddled sign marking the turnoff:

BLACK ROCK
No Firearms Allowed

Mario shouted, “Turn left, Emil!” Emil screeched to a near stop, turned left, and followed the road down into a canyon of oak trees and empty campsites. I directed him to a campsite near a stream I remembered. I unloaded my gear and set up my pup tent. The others had no tents or sleeping bags. All they’d brought were six-packs of beer and boxes of cereals, junk foods, and snacks. We settled at a picnic table. Sal told me he wanted to sharpen his tuna knife. “What’s that?” I said. He opened a leather case and displayed a handle attached to a semicircular blade as sharp as a razor. Weird knife.  I told the boys to gather kindling and wood for a campfire. They wandered away together muttering.

Left alone, I relaxed, feeling proud of myself for planning ahead and leading this clueless crew. I chowed down on hard tack biscuits, beef jerky sausages, opened a can of peaches with my Scout knife, and scooped them out with a knife blade like a mountain man. Still hungry, I decided to try a beef stew only-add-water-to make-complete meal. All it required was water and heat over an open flame for ten minutes. I took my canteen down to the stream for water. Yikes! It was now  a puddle of stagnant water. So I returned to the campsite and used bottled water, set up my camp gas stove for a flame, cooked the beef stew, and ate. Not bad, but not exactly great either. I lit my gas lantern and awaited the firewood seekers return. Several minutes later, I heard distant voices. They grew louder as they came closer, and sounded angry. Then Mario appeared, followed by Emil and Sal.

“We went to the end of the campsites,” Mario said. “No place to swim.”

“Guess it’s too late in the season,” I said. “It’s better during spring when there’s more runoff from mountain snows.”

“So, where do we swim?”

“We don’t.”

“That’s not all, man. Campground’s empty. Ain’t no chicks. This dump sucks big time. Shit, Gary. This fucking camping trip is one big fuckup already and we only just started.” He waved his finger in my face. “You ain’t as smart as you think.”

“Well, I . . . ”

“Hey, Emil. What do you think?”

Emil shrugged and scratched his butt.

“Who’s side you on, Sal?” Mario said.

Sal said, “Don’t shit on Gary. He nice Boy Scout, good boy. You go to sea with me on fishing boat, learn to get along with crew.”

I said, “Where’s the kindling and firewood, Mario?”

“Kindling?” Mario said.

“Twigs and small stuff, for starting fires. You have to build a small fire with kindling before you put the logs on top.”

“That’s stupid. Pour gasoline, light a match, it’s fire.”

“So, no kindling or firewood. I can light up the camp stove. We can all gather around it and pretend it’s a fire, sing camp songs if you like. Or maybe you’d like to cook something to eat.”

“I’m starving,” Mario said. We got corn flakes, wieners, hot dog buns, TV dinners, bread, pasta.”

I lit the camp stove, opened cans of chili beans and chili, set them on the grill with the wieners and buns, and soon had a meal with a scent of cooking in the air. They ate the food from the cans and hot dogs on buns. Spirits improved.

“Hey,” Sal said. “I saw a bear up there in the woods.”

“Are you sure it was a bear?” I said.

“Big and brown, moving behind trees.”

“How far away?”

“Not much.”

“How big compared to a tuna fish?” Emil said.

“I ain’t lyin’,” Sal growled.

“Do bears eat people?” Mario said.

“Grizzly bears and Polar bears do for sure, but they’re not . . .”

“Shit, man,” Mario said. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Sal said, “Sleep in car. Keep me company. Let Boy Scout fix if bear come sniffin’.

After that, there was a long silence, and I watched the boys look around at each other in the darkness illuminated by the light of a single gas lantern on the table. I heard a howling sound.

“What’s that?” Emil said.

“Probably a coyote,” I said.

“A wolf?”

“None around here. Coyotes are smaller than wolves.”

“Do they attack people?” Mario said.

“Almost never. They fear people.”

“Why they howl like that?” Mario said.

“Who knows? Maybe because they’re lonely.”

“Call the pack together before they hunt?”

“Wolves maybe. Coyotes are loners.”

“You said there were no wolves,” Mario said.

“Don’t get all worked up, Mario,” I said. “You’re scaring yourself.”

After a long silence, Emil said, “Are there any rattlesnakes here?”

“Yes, there are,” I said. “Try not to step on one. If one bites you, I have a snake bite kit.”

“How’s that work?” Mario said.

“It’s got this little razor. You carve X’s in the bite marks and suck the poison out with this rubber thingy or your mouth, and then someone takes you to a hospital emergency room. If you get there in an hour or so, you’ll recover. If you wait too long you may lose an arm or leg or your dick if you’re unlucky enough to get bitten there, or even die.”

Sal laughed. “Shit, man.”

After another long silence, Sal stood and grunted, “Beer.” He produced a six pack from a box, grabbed a can, popped its lid. Sal and Mario did the same. Minutes later they were happy, telling jokes and laughing. They finished the six pack and another.

It was completely dark by now, with just the lantern light and getting cold. Emil left the table and sat in his car. Mario glared at me, grumbled, and left, Sal following. I turned off the lantern and entered my tent, relieved to be alone. I checked the car. Emil was not visible, probably lying on the front seat. In back, Mario was snuggled up against Sal, head on his shoulder, both under a blanket. I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep.

I woke up briefly in the early morning from the sound of a car passing by, continuing on, and stopping. After that, the sound of car doors slamming, a radio playing a rock and roll, voices of two men, and silence. Then I went back to sleep.

Next morning, shortly after five a.m. I prepared a camp stove breakfast of pancakes with canned milk batter and reconstituted dried eggs, fried wieners, hard tack biscuits, and cherry kool aid. The boys, silent and moody, ignored the pancakes. They poured kool aid on their frosted corn flakes and picked at the wieners. Afterward, they wandered around, grousing about the cold, camping sucked, miscellaneous complaints.

We heard gunfire. When Emil asked who was shooting, I said someone doing target practice, a guess.

About nine a.m., I hiked up the access road alone. Along the way, two young men were sitting at a picnic table drinking beer from bottles. Shirtless, bearded, and with longish hair, they had tattoos on their chests, necks, arms, and hands. Parked nearby was a Ford pickup with a teardrop trailer. When I returned to the campsite, the boys were sitting at the picnic table. “We took a vote,” Mario said.

I guessed they wanted to go home.  Mario wanted to scarf up junk food and drink home-made wine, annoy his sister, flirt with her girlfriends, try to score. Sal wanted to go to Tijuana, get drunk, visit a whorehouse. Emil wanted to watch TV.

Then I noticed the two men from the other campsite coming up the access road toward us. They were wearing cocked back ballcaps, blue jeans, and leather boots. One had a biker’s knife on his belt and the other a holster with a pistol. Sal suddenly made a run for it, disappearing into the tree line.

The men stopped at the edge of our campsite. The one with the knife lit a cigarette and then walked up so close to me that his smoke stung my eyes and I could smell beer on his breath, see his bloodshot eyes and red face with a jagged scar. He opened his mouth of perfectly even, white, and shiny teeth and said, “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” I said

“What’s your name?”

“Gary. What do you want?”

“You got some mouth on you, kid.” He reared back and slapped me hard across the face. It stung, and I felt like punching him, but held back. He turned to the man with the gun. “This little shit asks what you want, Ray.”

“Ask what he’s got worth his life, Dill.” He grinned, his palm resting on his gun.

The man by me said, “What you got, sweetheart?”

They pissed me off, threatening my life so casually, with deadly weapons. I was unsure if they were serious or just toying with me, like schoolyard bullies. I turned to check on Mario and Emil: gone. “You want our food?” I said.

“Beer,” the second man said.

“We got some left,” I said. “Help yourself.”

Both men went to the picnic table, peered into the supply boxes, and pulled out the beer, junk food, potato chips, and set them on the table. They emptied a box, loaded their stash, and left.

Emil and Mario returned. They abandoned what was left of their supplies and got into Emil’s car. I loaded mine in the trunk. Ready to leave, we waited for Sal. Fifteen or so minutes later Sal returned to the campsite from the access road and joined me in the backseat. He was breathing hard. “Where did you go?” I said to him as we were leaving the canyon.

“I went to see those guys,” Sal said.

“What did they say?”

“Nothin’,” Sal raised his bloody hands.

A few weeks later, the newspaper reported that two fugitives had been brutally murdered by unknown assailants at a camping spot in the San Diego back country. It gave their names and descriptions and said they had conducted a string of bank robberies extending from Seattle all the way down the West Coast to San Diego, and had been on the run with an estimated $1.2 million, which was not in their possession at the time their bodies were discovered. The descriptions matched the two men we had encountered in Black Canyon.

In the months that followed, Emil’s sister Sophia, my on and off girlfriend, dumped me for a high school varsity football player. We stayed friends, but never dated again, and my friendship with Emil, such as it was, went kaput. A year after that, Sophia informed me Emil had passed shortly after his nineteenth birthday, of leukemia. I asked how long he had been ill. “A year and a half since he was diagnosed,” she said. The timing meant he had known he had limited time left when we all went on the camping trip. In those days leukemia was a death sentence, barring a miracle. Her family prayed a lot, to no avail. “You two were friends,” Sophia reminded me. Come to his funeral if you feel like it.

“Will Mario be there?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Gary. Haven’t seen him lately.”

“How about Sal?”

“Salvatore? Hmm. I doubt it. He spends a lot of time out on his dad’s fishing boat. His family’s doing really well, by the way. They’ve bought two more fishing boats and have moved on up.” She laughed. “They’re still in Wop Town but it’s in a better neighborhood, filled with mansions and Caddys and Chryslers instead of Plymouths and Chevys. I sure wish we had such luck in our family.”

“Go to church and pray to your saints, Sophia.”

“Oh, shut up, you heathen. May you suffer in Purgatory.”

“How’s your love life?”

“None of your business. Nice talking to you, Gary, honey.”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Henry Simpson 2024