MUD HOLES AND BULLET HOLES: A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS

Buckle up, kids. This is a wild ride.

This story begins, as so many great stories do, with a guy just sitting at home, minding his own business. It was summer of 1982 and I was that guy. I was home, by myself, on a Saturday night, waiting for Saturday Night Live to come and basically leading a polite and wholesome life.

My parents were at a local bar, doing what I now realize parents do, which is getting liquored up every chance they get. I don’t know where my younger brother and sister were, and I would not have known where my older brother was either, had he not suddenly burst in the door, covered head to toe in mud.

“Come on, man! I need your help!”

He wasn’t lying.

Details are sketchy as to why, exactly, he had been driving our Jeep across a patch of private property with a female cohort, but let’s just assume they were looking for a place to canoodle. Unfortunately, before any canoodling could commence, he got the Jeep stuck in a muddy low water crossing. Of course, as any person who has ever gotten really stuck in a mud hole already knows, the process of determining you are, in fact, really stuck is a messy one. And if you’re really familiar with being really stuck, you know the process almost always includes the fun-filled standing-behind-the-rear-wheels-when-the-driver-floors-it-and-laquers-your-entire-body-in-mud part.

Walt was really, really¸ stuck.

Unable to get the Jeep out on his own, Walt had walked from the mud hole to the house (don’t really know what became of the girl; don’t care; she’s not the one who ended up in the emergency room; not sure if it’s legal to use semicolons like this; oh well). Fortunately, he used his time on foot wisely and came up with a plan.  And by “fortunately,” I mean “fortunately for him; not so much for me.” And by “plan” I mean “reckless, Hail Mary-type last gasp premised solely upon a drunk teenager’s faith in miracles.”

His “plan” was for me to drive both of us, in my mom’s van, over to his friend’s house, where he hoped his friend would actually be, so that the friend would let us use his Jeep to pull our Jeep out of the muck. This was, of course, before the time of cell phones and texting. We couldn’t even call him, given the late hour and fact that his dad was perhaps the only human being scarier than our dad and we wanted no part of pissing him off by calling after hours.

As we approached his friend’s house – we’ll call the friend “Skip” – we could see Skip’s Jeep in the driveway, meaning the first of the plan’s several required miracle wishes had been granted. We parked on the street and tiptoed up to Skip’s bedroom window. I’m a little hazy, but I think we could even see him through the window, asleep on his bed. Which made it all the more frustrating that he wouldn’t wake up, despite some seriously loud, potentially-waking-the-Dad-Beast-level knocking. But that was all explained when he finally did wake up and came over to the window, giving us a whiff, from several feet away, of his alcohol-soaked breath.

We explained to him, several times, what our situation was. Once he was able to translate our regular English into whatever language his brain was speaking, he enthusiastically volunteered his services. But first, he would need a jump start because the battery in his Jeep was dead.

Not a problem. Which is not to say it was silent problem, especially not with Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Drunk on the case. Those two yay-hoos made more racket than a busted chainsaw, causing me to age several decades from stress, certain Skip’s dad was gonna wake up and kill us where we stood with his death-ray eyes which we always suspected he had, but never had any proof, but now that we finally did, we were dead and the secret would die with us.

We got Skip’s Jeep started, at which time he told us to remind him not to turn the motor off or we’d have to jump start it again.

Not a problem.

Walt climbed in the passenger seat of Skip’s Jeep – Yes, Skip drove. It was a different time. – and I followed in the van. We left the van at the gate to the property and the three of us drove out to the mud hole with Skip. Once there, Skip turned his Jeep around and backed it up to the edge of the water, so we could hook his rear bumper to Walt’s rear bumper. As he was completing this maneuver, I reminded him not to kill the engine, so two seconds later he killed the engine.

Not a problem. I would run down the dirt road and get the van. Be right back.

At this point, it’s worth noting that, earlier that day, I had been able to put weight on my right ankle for the first time since tearing ligaments in it a month before. I’d actually played a little basketball and was feeling pretty good about it. Admittedly, my good feelings were bolstered by the expectation that I would not be stepping in a hole out in a field that same night, so perhaps my optimism was premature.

The “hole” was actually a tire track – probably left by one of the Tweedle Twins’ Jeeps – and the resulting crack could be heard clear back to the mud hole. And just in case they couldn’t hear the crack, they could definitely hear the shrieks of pain.

Skip was the first one on the scene. And because he was – and still is – an awesome guy, he didn’t just lend a hand, he picked me up in his arms and said he would me back to his Jeep. (Seriously. My ankle was fucked up. I was dying). At about the halfway point of our journey, Skip revealed to me – in an oddly pleasant, albeit beer-breathed, voice – that he was recovering from hernia surgery.

“WHAT?? WHEN??”

“Oh, last week.”

“PUTMEDOWN! PUTMEDOWN! PUTMEDOWN!!”

True to his word – and totally ignoring mine – Skip carried me all the way back to his Jeep. Walt ran up the road, without incident, and drove the van to the mud hole. They jumpstarted Skip’s Jeep, hooked up to Walt’s Jeep, and pulled it out of the muck.

We now had three cars, but only two drivers. I don’t really remember how we worked that out, probably because of all the blinding pain and whatnot. So, I’m just gonna make up this part.

Walt got in the van and followed Skip (and me) in Skip's Jeep back into town, where they dumped me off in the ER driveway like the freaking Mafia and then continued on to our house to return the van. Then they went back to the mud hole, where Walt fetched the Jeep.

Or something like that; again, don’t care; I had my own situation to contend with.

Inside the ER, the doctors were struggling with my diagnosis, unable to decide between “Fucked Up” and “Super Fucked Up.” Actually, that’s not true, because I was only 17 and they couldn’t even look at me until my parents came down and signed a release for treatment. They wouldn’t even give me an aspirin or a drink of water. Meanwhile, my ankle was pulsing like that guy’s stomach in Aliens, but that was the least of my problems, because I was about to have to call my dad down at the bar and tell him I was in the ER.

Let me be clear. It was not a pleasant experience to call my dad in the middle of the day for even garden-variety reasons. My dad regarded incoming phone calls as intrusions on par with an IRS audit. I did not expect his reaction to me interrupting him at the bar would be of the “Oh my god are you alright?” variety.

I was not wrong.

He and my mom arrived at the ER about 30 torturous minutes later. They were both a little wobbly and it was not lost on me that, besides the ER staff, I had yet to be in the company of a sober person that entire night.

Now, my dad is a lawyer and kind of a jerk, so it was not surprising that he would want to know what happened, even before signing the release. I know that’s not normal, but it was certainly my normal. That said, I was not prepared to have to tell him three times what happened before he’d sign, each time poising his pen over the signature line for a couple of tantalizing seconds before stopping, shaking his head, and repeating, “Now what happened?”

It would be easy to blame the alcohol, but the bottom line is this: He understood what happened. Completely. He just couldn’t believe I hadn’t done anything to make it happen. Not only was I considered The Child Most Likely To Bring Shame Unto The Family Name, but in his mind the only way any teenage boy ended up in the ER on a Saturday night was via immoral or criminal behavior. And he was right, to a point. He just failed to realize he had the wrong immoral/criminal teenage boy in custody.

Finally he signed the form and the docs took care of me. Diagnosis: Super Fucked Up. Torn ligaments and a tiny piece of bone broken off, which to my knowledge is still floating around in there today.

Just as Mom and Dad and I got home, we caught a glimpse of our Jeep fleeing the vicinity. Apparently, Walt saw us driving up just as he was pulling up and decided to haul ass rather than face the music. Dad kicked Mom and me out of the car and sped after him. What followed was a farcical, Benny Hill-style car chase, with the two of them criss-crossing the neighborhood and Walt trying to stay just far enough ahead so that he could “honestly” say he didn’t know Dad was behind him. Eventually, (I think) Walt got away, because Dad came home empty handed. Walt returned some time later and, amazingly, is still alive today.

A year later, Walt would shoot me in the leg with an air rifle while I sat at the kitchen table. I got in trouble for that, too. The BB is still in my leg.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s a BB in my left thigh and a bone fragment in my right ankle. And yet, if you ask anyone who knows both us, they’ll tell you that he is the responsible one.

They’re not wrong; they’re just not as right as they think they are; sort of.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver