His wife tossed me a pair of jean shorts. “Here, these are my grandson’s.” I couldn’t put them on fast enough!
The second we jumped in his blue Caddy, the doctor hit the gas pedal hard. “Put on your seatbelt, Jimmy; we certainly don’t need any more trouble.”
Believe me, I was already doing so. He shot through Mashnee’s small streets as more and more neighbors spilled out of their homes in wonder. In the rearview mirror, and in relief, I saw a neighbor’s car joining us, and then another as well. I had a thought that had never-ever occurred to me before: “Thank God for grown-ups.” Wow. Quite the revelation.
We arrived at the accident scene, which still had a surreal quality to it. My first reaction was to wonder how the heck the car managed to wind up that far down the beach? It had to be forty yards from the roadside, easy. How the hell could anyone survive that?
“Now stay inside the car, son, and I mean it,” Doc Miller shouted to me, while grabbing the duffle bag and charging for the beach. I wish I could say I listened to him, but I didn’t. I stepped out of the car but went no farther. And I didn’t look. Truth is, I was just a ten-year-old kid. I’d already seen enough, and I was scared shitless.
Within another minute the sound of sirens could be heard blasting through the eerie silence, followed shortly after (faster, faster!) by the sight of multiple first-responder vehicles, each with lights ablaze. Two fire trucks arrived first; one was the fire chief’s car, followed in an urgent procession of ambulances, police, and what looked like a Town of Bourne tow truck.
Now the whole world was there, including my parents, who made a mad dash toward me with a horrified look on their faces, bringing instant tears to my eyes.
The girl’s name was Lisa Evans. She wasn’t Eddie’s girlfriend as I had assumed, but a new waitress he was driving to her first day of work at The Club, trying to get there extra early, at the behest of his mother, to whom you don’t say no.
By all accounts, the tow truck pulled the wreck safely away from her, and although her leg was badly damaged, and she wound up having surgery, she would not lose it, and in fact, she returned, albeit on crutches, to waitress later that same summer.
Although suffering a pretty severe laceration to his head, Eddie refused treatment at the scene, only wanting to know more about Lisa’s condition, and he was luckily not cited by the police.
One tire was found far down the beach with a large gash, and everyone, including police, seemed just thankful that had it not been for a miracle, somebody might have been buried that day.
Once again I felt the island’s magic; I’d had inklings of it before, especially each morning and night as I jogged my two loops around its perimeter. It empowered me. I was certain. Of course a ten-year-old boy wouldn’t say anything like that, that he felt a certain force, a certain energy, a certain magic originating from a 40-acre piece of land. That I heard it calling me.
The island and I would make a promise,
I promised to never leave.
The island promised to never change.
We both lied.
Chapter 9
Officer
Later that night, while my family was having dinner, there was a knock on our cottage screen door. It was the Bourne Chief of Police.
I looked up from my delicious boiled lobster dinner courtesy of the Lobster Trap Fish Market, my uncle and aunt’s favorite for fresh lobster, and now mine too, and the best-tasting ears of corn I’d ever had, given to me free as a reward, courtesy of Pucker-Up, the island’s mobile fruit and vegetable merchant. By mobile, I mean that the bed of his rickety, old pickup truck was overflowing with produce, and regardless of the fact that he offered vegetables as well as fruit, he was officially known as The Fruit Man.
(I suspected that Pucker-Up told everybody’s mom that their particular ears of corn, or bunch of carrots, or pint of strawberries, or whatever they had just selected for purchase were not only hand picked, they were also “the very best.”)
But at the sight of the chief of police, I immediately turned ashen, figuring bad news was on my doorstep. A duo of horrendous outcomes flashed through my brain: she lost her leg, or I was going to jail. I prayed for the latter.
My dad let him in, with a quick hello.
“Mr. Rocket, do I have the name right?” asked the officer.
“Yes, welcome, and please call me Sonny,” my father retorted.
“May I speak to your son? It’s about this morning’s automobile accident.”
Wow, Nelly. Here it comes. I did do something wrong, I knew it. Shit! I was too slow! I made her leg worse with that stupid shoelace tourniquet! I should have stayed, not run for help!
A million perilous thoughts were fighting for frontal-lobe attention.
“Son…” (I’d been called that several times today.)
“Everyone calls me Jimmyrocket,” I meekly interrupted,
“Ok, Jimmy,” he went on, (oblivious to my proper handle), “I want you to know that Lisa Evans, the girl who suffered injuries in this morning’s accident, is out of surgery and she’s going to be just fine. She had a compound fracture in her lower leg, that’s when the bone badly breaks (yes, I can’t unsee that), so she’ll be recovering on crutches for most of the summer, but she should otherwise be fine. We also understand the driver, Mr. O’Connor, whom I’m told is familiar to you, escaped with only minor injuries. So that’s good news. Lord only knows how.”
He continued, “Young man. You did a one helluva good job today (as my face flushed). Your fast thinking and quick action at the scene made all the difference, and your sprint for help, in your skivvies I understand, for-cryin’-out-loud, made all the difference in the world. It was downright heroic what you did and on behalf of the Evans family and the department, I want to shake your hand and thank you, son.”
He looked over at my dad with a wide grin; my father returned the smile with an even bigger one, as he, firm-as-a-cop (ha, I made that one up) shook my hand then patted me on the back and rubbed my head. As he turned to leave, he again glanced at my father,
“Looks like you’ve got a budding track star there, Mr. Rocket. You ought to enter him in this weekend’s Mashnee Road Race. It’s a pretty big deal here. Lots of local runners participate, and I’m pretty sure they have it divided into age groups. Bet he’d smoke a bunch of them! They won’t like it. Won’t at all. But I sure will!”
He then turned, and looked me square in the eyes, not a regular stare, or mad stare like my dad gave when we did something wrong. It was more like a formal stare, a military stare, a man-to-man stare that made me feel like a returned war hero or something, straightened his posture to full-attention, and gave me a full-on military salute. Man, did that make me feel like a million bucks. Turned out he lived on the island, which, going forward, would be a handy thing to know.
Since it was Wednesday night, it was, as one could already tell from the spicy, steamy, tantalizing aroma which filled every pocket of airspace above the island, Weenie Roast Night. My folks gave us some money, which we instantly judged as insufficient. (Plus, you’d think there’d be a bit extra for the reigning superhero? But no, you’d be decidedly incorrect.) Whatever, we begged for more, and negotiated an amicable settlement.
We were about ready to head for the club and minute by minute the group got bigger and bigger. By then my cousins had come over to meet up with my sister, and then my buddy Dereck, along with his three brothers, Jackie Jr. and the twins, Steve and Ernie, arrived, then two brothers whose family owned a home on the island, joined us, followed by Patrick Flaherty and his older brother, Ken.
Everyone was all a-buzz about what had happened, and we played tag all the way down to The Club, zig-zagging across lawns to our heart’s content, easily generating our fair share of “GET OFF MY LAWN... YOU DAMN KIDS!” complaints.
Guess who wasn’t IT?!
The crowd was big and the hot dogs smelled heavenly as we raced up to get in the long line, then tippy-toed up to see who was working the grille to ask the aforementioned weiner-chef, “Pretty-please with extra whipped-cream and a cherry on top, would you consider grilling my roll, pleeeeeease?”
