Indian Hill (30 page)
“Deb, could you please tell me when the grub’s done, I’m gonna lie down.”
“Don’t you think that we should get you cleaned up before that?” she asked with genuine concern.
“I’m pretty drained. Adrenaline crash can be tough,” I responded.
She nodded but I could tell that she still didn’t think that this was a prudent course of action. If I waited an extra second I’m sure I would have gotten the whole spiel on infection and bacteria and bogeymen under the bed. But in truth I just needed to get out of that room and that seemed the most graceful way to go about it.
“Deb, please make sure that you guys prepare enough food for the newcomers, make sure that we have some cake too, they’re going to be upset and maybe you guys could bond over some chocolate or something.”
“You really don’t understand women, do you?” she responded.
“Please tell me that’s rhetorical, cause I don’t have enough in me to go a round or two with you.”
Apparently she didn’t see the humor, she turned her head so fast to go in the other direction that her hair whipped up and slapped me across the face. Wait, she probably did mean that. No, I was way out of my league on this ship. The men I could handle, we each had a job to do, and we knew each other’s roles. But women, well she was right, I had no clue. All I knew was that they were soft in all the right places and they smelled pretty. Sometimes it’s good to be a man.
I had just meant to rest my eyes and actually join in for dinner, if for no other reason than to let the new women meet me so that they could put some of their fears to rest. But coming down from adrenaline can be as bad as any drug; it took my body a full sixteen hours to recuperate. I awoke in time for brunch the following day. I must have been out cold, because I hadn’t even awoken when someone, probably Deb, had dressed my wounds. So she pretty much got her way anyway. Ah, natural order was restored in the world. The new women had arrived right after dinner the night before. Farley had been a decent host, he hadn’t abused any of them, but they were summoned for his every beck and call. To him they were pretty much glorified servants. A couple of the original girls giggled a bit when they noticed my embarrassment when the new girls came up and bowed to me. I could have done without that.
“Please,” I said “Get up.”
“Yes master,” they said as one, they obviously had a lot of practice.
“And no more of that master crap either,” I said as my cheeks reddened even more.
“I think he likes it,” Tanya giggled as she nudged Stephanie.
Deb didn’t see the humor. She threw a glance at Tanya, but she merely shrugged it off. However when Deb gave that same glance to the newcomers, they scurried like mice caught in the pantry.
“Deb, please make sure that doesn’t happen again. I definitely don’t need or want that kind of attention.”
“What kind of attention do you want?” she asked
“Why are you starting with me, I just got out of bed, and all I want to do is go eat some blueberry pancakes. Did someone piss in your Cheerios?” I hadn’t really meant to add that last bit, but the day had already gotten off on the wrong foot, there was no reason to stop now. But much to my surprise she acquiesced. I’ll never understand women.
“I’m sorry, the stress of this place is really starting to wear my soul thin. Not only do I have to worry about your fights and what could potentially happen to the rest of us, but also I have to deal with this household. I must quash a dozen fights a night. Women just weren’t meant to live communally. I’m sure for the most part guys would be fine. But the jealousy runs rampant in this household. They practically kill each other just to decide who is going to bring you juice in the morning.”
“I had no idea it was like that,” I said, astonished.
“You see what I want you to see. Most of these girls won’t even talk to me. Most of them downright hate me.” She was beginning to cry.
“Why?”
“Because of you,” she moaned.
I might be slow but I caught on pretty quick this time. They were jealous because she had been with me. So now she was caught between the rock and a hard place. She couldn’t get solace from the women and she couldn’t get comfort from me.
“Well we might as well make it worth your troubles,” I said.
She looked up at my eyes and wiped a tear from hers eye. “Do you mean it?”
“You can sleep with me, but I mean sleep and nothing more.”
Her face fell a little bit, but I’m sure the mechanics in her mind were working overtime. She had her foot in the door, and I’m sure she was under the belief system that she would be able to throw that door wide open given a little time. Lord knows I wanted the comfort, there was still no guarantee I was ever going to see Beth again. The way these women were acting I might be lucky just to make it to the next bout. I was feeling more anxious now than I ever had since being on this ship. I was so close. There were only nine of us left. But what was I getting close to? I knew that I would get to see Beth, but then what. I’m fairly certain they weren’t going to give us a shuttle and let us live happily ever after on Pluto or something. Would they bring more people to fight? Would they just leave us in the houses until we died gracefully of old age? Or would they just kill us when our entertainment value was gone? These were aliens and so were their thoughts. There was no way to predict what they were going to do with us. I was trying not to think that far ahead but it was difficult. I wanted to see Beth so bad, but there were eight of the biggest baddest killing machines who had other thoughts. Yeah, I definitely wanted the comfort and companionship of Deb; would I be strong enough to resist? If I let her back in now and then won the tournament, then what? It was there and then that I made my decision to find a way off of this bucket. Whether it was on a shuttle or a body bag I was sick of being the aliens’ entertainment. Now I just had to find a way out. It was long into the night when my door opened. Deb had not forgotten our agreement, and the night would get longer still.
I had one of the most peaceful rests I
'd
had had since coming onto th
e
ship. I didn’t dream about fights or aliens or even women for that matter. I relived a slice of life, more specifically a small sliver of my childhood. It was a time long before any of th
e
present nightmare materialized. It might just have been one of the best summers in my life, we were
teenagers
. It was the in-between time before we were truly adults and not quite kids, we hadn’t started the heavy experimenting with booze, drugs and ultimately women. We were explorers, oh not your garden-variety ocean explorers or even space explorers. We explored a place called Indian Hill. It was the summer after the ‘initial discovery.’ It was a place probably no more than a mile from our houses but it might as well have been ten thousand miles from any place we called home. Just to get to the ‘Hill’ required no small amount of danger. First was the required pass through Rusty Grant’s territory, he was the local bully and at 16 he was huge and we were afraid of him. But luckily he was slow. So unless one of us was dumb enough to trip, we could generally make that part without too much difficulty. The next major part was the train trestle we had to cross. Dennis had somehow garn
ered
enough courage to make th
e
crossing without too much bellyaching. Although we did our best every time to let him know only wimps were afraid of heights, every single one of us never said so much as a word whi
le we were crossing the trestle though, i
t was all business then. We’d go one at a time, head down, watching where our next footfall would land. The rest of us, whether already over or waiting our turn, kept a vigilant eye out for the train. Even at that tender age I knew what it meant to have your balls crawl up into your belly. The trestle was in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty feet across and fifty feet down into a raging river. That however was not the catch. The catch was that much like Stephen King’s Stand By Me, there was a curve in the track less than a quarter of a mile away. It was a difficult maneuver to not constantly keep looking up at that bend. The biggest fear was being in the middle of the bridge and looking up to see the train bearing down on you. It had happened more than once but luckily none of us had ever gotten our foot stuck, but your heart would still pound for minutes after the event was over. I guess if we were a little brighter we might have gone down to the local train station and gotten a schedule but what kid thinks like that? Anyway we were explorers, danger was our middle name.
Once past the train tracks we would have to traverse the embankment that led down to the river and then cross said river. Enough people had ‘explored’ Indian Hill as to put together a makeshift bridge across the river, but it usually included some pallets or small trees. It was generally not very stable and for some reason or other it was always slippery. More than once one of us had taken a plunge. But once over we felt like masters of our universe. Our parents could never find us here, we were free, at least until dinnertime. When you came up the embankment you would approach a beautiful huge oak tree that seemed so out of place, it was the only tree in the entire meadow. We always thought it looked lonely. Off to either side were the hills that we liked to explore, th
o
se unlike the meadow were covered with trees and hid all sorts of treasures. There were old cars that had been ghost ridden off of small cliffs.
We once found an old boat. I had
no idea how that got there. My mother was pissed when I came home with the ship’s steering wheel. I didn’t have a good explanation for that one. Indian Hill was off limits; I couldn’t tell her that was where I got it. Once in our deepest search we stumbled across an actual log fort. We were amazed, but we were also leery. Whoever made this wasn’t a kid so we threw some rocks at it from a distance to see if we roused anybody out of it. Nobody showed, so we picked our way through the brambles and scrub brush to gaze in. It was a kid’s paradise. It had to be around fifteen by fifteen feet made with some pretty good-sized logs; it stood about five feet tall and was covered with a green tarp. Whoever had built it took great care to make sure it wouldn’t be found by the casual observer. But we were explorers. It was about fifty feet off the normal path and through some of the thickest scrub we had thus far encountered. When we got in we found our biggest surprise. Rusty and his friends had built this masterpiece, and their names were carved into the woodwork. I wanted to leave; I had no desire to get pummeled t
hat
day. But then Paul found the coup de grace, Playboys. That pretty much put an end to any of our thoughts on leaving.. They were three of the most beat up magazines any of us had ever seen. They looked like they had gone through the wash, twice. They were the best things any of us had ever seen. And then Dennis stumbled over a bottle of Jack Daniels, what the hell, we tried it. It burned worse than the
Tabasco
sauce I was forced to swallow when I swore in front of my mother. But the aftereffects were quite soothing. So there we were, dancing around this cabin singing and shouting like Indians. If Rusty and his friends had been anywhere within the vicinity we would have been dead meat. But the gods were shining down on us that day. It must have been the effects of the alcohol but Paul felt the need for some false bravado.
“Let’s take this fort!” he shouted.
“Yeah, we’ll just stay here and defend it with big sticks,” I laughed, “Rusty and his friends won’t mind.”
“No I’m serious,” he said, and by the look on his face I knew he was.
“What do you mean?” Dennis piped in. “Rusty and his friends will kill us.”
“Not if they can’t find us,” Paul smiled evilly.
“What do you mean Paul? They built this place, of course they’ll find it,” I moaned. My mom would kill me if I got blood on my clothes, especially if it was mine.
“Not if it’s not here.” His smile grew even bigger.
“What are you talking about Paul?” Dennis answered. “You dr
i
nk too much?”
“No, no, I mean if we take this thing apart and move it somewhere else,” he said.
All of our eyes lit up then, we would have the coolest fort and at
our age
that still meant a lot.
“But what if they find it, they’ll know we did it,” I pleaded.