Heidi & The Reds

I began to cry as Kasey took one look at me and could not help but laugh. "Oh, I think you should have jumped in the back of that one! Yep, if that wasn’t divine intervention, I don’t know what is," Kasey shouted out.

Before either one of us was able to kill the other, we made it back to the lodge. It took us another good hour and the idea of sleeping in the ditch for pure belief that we had indeed passed the turn-off was tossed around with more seriousness than imaginable. When we made the sharp right and ran down the hill toward the lights of the lodge, the two of us acted as though the journey to Mecca had been attained. We laughed, hugged one another and jumped up and down outside the bingo arena. We did not have to imagine we were women warriors of the mountain; we were women warriors. We had hiked eight miles all for the sake of ice cream, played the parts of the spies slinking through town, survived dead chickens, forgiven one another for each other’s loss of mind and seen what the other was made of. We were survivors. Ed and Nora pulled into the lodge parking lot to pick us up five minutes after we had returned. We drove back to the cabin, the way we had come. Four miles and four minutes later, we sat on the cabin bar stools, eating ice cream and chicken, laughing at our idiocy and moralizing that food could get one into more trouble than a lake full of bats and boys.

The story does not end there. It grows in its true humor and bizarity for peculiar actions often occur in sets of twos and threes when recollecting the life and times of pre-teens. The next day we went down to the lake to go toobing with Ed and Nora. Kasey and I laid out on our towels in the sun, pretending we were not there with parents, imagining we had driven ourselves down alone, or better yet were laying on the sands of Puerto Rico instead of the sands of Skull’s County. The white sand was black, the water was azure blue instead of a murky olive green and we were tribal women of the Congo, fighting off unsuitable suitors as we did tigers, with spears.

Nora swam around the docks and Ed boated off down the outlet on the left side of the Lake. I told him that there was a pretty stream with a series of bridges if he would just follow the stream along the left bank. Since I could remember, Ed had always been the jokester of all jokesters. April Fool’s Day was every day for him and he had a way of setting booby traps and letting us fall into the punch line whenever he had the chance. The moment we weren’t paying attention, clocks would be set back an hour, drinks would suddenly have Tabasco at the bottom and cars would begin to roll just as we were about to step foot inside, never failing to be snickered at in front of school when he had carpool. Our warrior-like success of the prior evening had Kasey and I feeling mighty cocky and we had decided before we packed up to come down to the lake that the day had come for Ed to finally receive his up and comings.

The Congo sounded, the drums beat softly and Kasey and I hauled our beach bags to the unpleasant, quite smelly and almost never used bathroom about thirty feet from the water. There, we pulled out the Noxzema, cloves, red pepper powder, and black eyeliner, all intending to make us look like jungle mercenaries with the war paint to go along with it. Once our faces were finished and our bodies smelled like a toxification tank, we grabbed branches off of the manzanita trees at the side of the brick wall and stuck them over our swimsuits and all around our hair. When we were finished, we had only to make it over to the outlet where Ed had to be well down under the first bridge so that we could jump out in veritable jungle manner to scare the pants off him. The only problem we had not thought out was how to get down to the outlet without having all the homeowners on the beach shrieking with laughter at the sight of us. It could not be done.

Our bare feet ran through the bushes, stomping on mosquitoes, dancing to the beat of the imaginary and yet almost heard African drums. The Noxzema began to melt and the sunbathers watched the scene with wonder and fright. We jetted past the lake and through the manzanitas covering the stream of the outlet until we heard him, whistling, rowing the little boat down under the second bridge. "Ooga, Ooooga, OOOga, Ooooga, Ooga," we chanted with all might turned against our desire to laugh at one another’s appearance. "Ooga, Ooooga, OOOga, Ooooga, Ooga," again we sang until Ed looked up and threw the oars into the bushes. We leaped out into the water, Kasey nearly falling into the jetty. I swerved and danced the dance of the African Oooga Queen. Kasey regained her stance and began to swim in circles about the boat, trying not to wash the conglomeration from her mug. Ed leapt from the boat and began to swim back to the lake screaming as he moved. We each dove down into the hazy waters, past the weeds clinging to the bottom of the lake before the outlet met with the larger body of water. Surfacing at the lake, feet away from Nora basking in her inner tube, we watched as Ed turned around and saw our clean faces and the tops of our heads still adorned with a sprig or too of brush popping up above the water. He began to laugh, laughing with the bellow of a jokester, the sheep that had had the wool pulled over his eyes by the Congo Oooga Queens.

And that’s it. That is the way I will always see Kasey, the African Queen, the young girl devout of the ability to be embarrassed, ready to try new things, eager to live a life she loves, searching to uncover that once again, that moment of sweet natural high, laughter and that sense of the small battle being won.

When the ghosts of my guilty conscience try to haunt me, when I think of my childhood friend, the girl with my accent, my exact taste in music, my knack for dying hair, finding a bargain, the one ritualistically watching Entertainment Tonight, I worry that she will wind up in some sort of jeopardy, after a bad night on the town with a once seemingly kind and alluring Schizophrenic young gentleman. I fear her compassion will get the best of her and then I remember that it was me, who in the time of crisis, wanted to get into the truck, it was me who lay marred at the side of the road via dead chicken. It was Kasey who would not sleep in the ditch. It is Kasey who so boldly asks, "Can I come over to your house today?" It is Kasey who believes the San Antonio River is died green and I later find out she is right. It is Kasey who flies out to the place where promises were practiced and yet painfully not so fulfilled. It is Kasey, who despite her trepidation has caused me to know the value of my life and compelled me to forsake my fears. It is finally my turn to put on that purple gypsy hat; you know the one with the pearl and rhinestone quarter moon on the front to play the part of Madame Zelda.