Part Two
The naysayers
It got light pretty early and without even waiting for breakfast, I fired up the Schwinn and beat it over to Tuna’s house. It probably wasn’t even six o’clock and the slug wasn’t awake yet by the time I made it over there. I didn’t knock or anything. I just barged in and went right by Tuna’s nightgown clad Ma who was not quite ready to meet the morning, let alone some rude fat kid, and went straight to Tuna’s room after exchanging pleasantries with her on the fly.
“Wait till you see THIS,” I said to him.
“I can wait and I will,” he answered, through puffy lips and sandy eyes. “Don’t tell me. You got yourself a pet gopher in your pocket or something even weirder than that.”
I probably had that coming. I think I was the only kid around that had a Boston Bull Terrier named “Bozo”, a huge brindle-colored English Bulldog named “Blister”, a big, bushy yellow cat named “Toby”, a white rat named “Gus”, and a pet tarantula named “Tommy”. I even had a June Bug I kept in the refrigerator. I tied a three foot length of black thread to one of his hind legs and once and awhile I’d tie the string to my little finger and take him outside to fly around a little. I was into pets.
“No, I ain’t got no gopher. Here. Get up. Look at this,” I said, rattling the road map in his face. “ That damned canal DOES go to Mexico. Kinda.”
“Holy crap! Are you still on that Mexico business? “
“Yep. I am. And that’s not all. I figured out how we can get there. Easy. Nothing to it. All we need is a boat.”
“What do you mean,,, WE !”
“We, as in you and me.”
He was sitting up in bed now. Good sign. That told me he was more or less awake.
“Why do I have to go,” Tuna whined. ( He was good at that. He had that curled lip whine down to an art form. ) “I don’t care anything about Mexico. Why would I want to go someplace I don’t even care about?”
I tried to explain, it wasn’t the “PLACE”,, it was the journey. The adventure. The shear audacity of it all. It wouldn’t matter where we were going. It was all in the GOING. Could have been Fargo or Philadelphia. What difference would it make?
“I smell bacon,” he said.
“You aren’t listening to me.”
“Right.”
Tuna’s Mom cracked the door open and stuck her head part way in. “Breakfast is ready,” she said. “Would you like to eat some breakfast with us, Pete?”
My Ma didn’t raise no dummy that would stand on rules of social conduct when his belly was growling. Melon balls will only take you so far. I was out in the kitchen and slammed into a chair at the table by Mr. Wagner’s left elbow before Tuna even got his useless self out of bed.
“So what are you boys up to today,” Mr. Wagner chirped, a smear of yellow egg yolk stuck to his lower lip.
“Oh, nothing much,” I answered. “I’m trying to talk your son into going to Mexico with me, but he’s not exactly overwhelmed by the idea.”
“Mexico, huh?” He said that with that little sideways sneer of his that as much as came right out and told you he thought you were dirt. “Pretty good hike, don’t you think?”
“Don’t plan on hiking,” I said. “I plan on sailing.”
“Sailing, huh? As in boat ?”
Mr. Wagner put his fork down; reared back in his chair some, looked me dead in the eye, and started to vibrate. Slowly at first. But then it began to build until after a few seconds he just busted out laughing and spewed bits of bacon the full length of the table. Tuna walked in about then and asked what was so funny. “Your buddy here is a regular comedian,” Mr. Wagner managed to choke out between guffaws. “We live smack in the middle of a desert and he wants to SAIL to Mexico.”
“Yeah,” Tuna said. “I know. Thinks he can make it all the way to Mexico goin’ down the Grand Canal.”
That really set Mr. Wagner off. His face got really dark red. No. More like purple. And for a while there it looked like he couldn’t breathe. When he finally got himself squared away he wiped the tears off his cheeks and took a sip of coffee. “Oh, Lord,” he gasped. You do have quite the imagination, Pete.”
“I ain’t IMAGINING nothin’,” I said. “It’s right here on the map in black and white. Well,, more like blue and white.”
I pulled the map out of my pocket, pushed my plate aside, smoothed the wrinkles out on the tablecloth and laid out the map so Mr. Wagner could see what I was talking about. I traced the route of the Grand Canal with a fingertip and spoke like I knew my stuff. “See this? That’s the canal right down below Tenth Street there where I live. See where it goes? It runs all the way over passed Glendale there and joins up with the New River. Then it goes down and runs into the Agua Fria River. That runs into the Gila River down there by Buckeye, and from there it goes across to the Colorado River here by Yuma. After that, it’s a snap. Couple miles, looks like, down that river and there you are in Mexico.”
I sat back with my arms folded across my chest like I had just explained the principles of nuclear fission and smug in the belief that I had just proved to old man Wagner that I wasn’t the dumb kid he thought I was, and I certainly wasn’t dirt.
“You for real with this?” he eventually said. “Or are you pulling my leg. You see how the blue line that’s the canal is all solid and from New River on the blue lines are dots and dashes? You know what those dots and dashes mean?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I think it means not very deep.”
“Uh-uh, wise guy. Now pay attention and you might learn something for a change. It means intermittent flow. That means that unless there’s a big storm runoff or something, those water courses are bone dry. If you want to go to Mexico you better figure on a long hike just like I said.”
I always thought Mr. Wagner looked a lot like an owl. A skinny sick one. His nose sort of hooked down at the end like an owl’s beak. And he wore those weird looking little glasses that kind of perched on his nose so he had to look over them to see you good, which made you wonder why he even bothered with them in the first place. Those glasses made him look like that old guy in that Charles Dickens book. And when he talked his screechy voice sounded like somebody was standing on a cat’s tail. It was very easy to not like Mr. Wagner very much.
Tuna wanted to go to Cottonwood Pool after breakfast. In summer he lived at the pool. Tuna was big into swimming. That’s why we called him “Tuna”. The guy swam like a fish. But I had other ideas. “Let’s ride down to the canal first,” I said. “I want to show you something really neat and I gotta go home and get my bathing suit anyway.”
My house was on the corner of Minnezona and tenth street and the canal was only another block south, so it wasn’t all that far out of the way. But just the same, here came the resistance. That was the way Tuna was. He had to argue with almost anything I said. I was used to it. So it didn’t matter all that much.
“There ain’t nothin’ down at the canal I ain’t already seen, and there ain’t nothin’ all that “neat” down there that I gotta see it again.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
What I had to show him was that big grove of Tamarack trees that grew along the north bank on the upstream side. Sure. He knew all about those trees. But he would look at them altogether differently once I explained to him just what a bonanza in building materials those trees represented. But I would have to bring him along slowly and carefully. Maybe even work it so it sounded like his own idea.
It was complicated. The plan I had in mind was not possible without help, and lots of it. And Tuna was the key to the whole venture. If I couldn’t get him on board right off the bat I’d have to forget the whole thing.
I couldn’t let that happen. I could already see it in my mind’s eye. Just like Huckleberry Finn, I would have a raft. A big one. Just like him and Jim had. I’d build it with logs cut out of those tammy-trees and sail off on a grand adventure. All the way to Mexico. And we’d be famous. They would probably put us on the cover of LIFE MAGAZINE and we would be invited to have lunch with President Truman and his homely daughter. Maybe they would even want to make a movie about it.
They were called “Tamarack” by the locals back then. I had never heard of a Tama-RISK tree in those days, and certainly not a salt cedar tree. But no matter. Whatever you called them, the trees growing along the canal were something special, as tammy-trees went, because the trunks were very straight, about twenty feet or more tall, and about as big around as my right thigh. They didn’t look like any other trees I had ever seen and there were plenty of them. Without doubt, they would make perfect logs to build a raft out of.
The dirt banks of the canal were steep sided and elevated above street level some five or six feet. You had to get a pretty good head of steam up to hit the well-worn groove our bike tires had cut over time, and make it to the road bed atop the bank with enough speed to keep from falling over. We both made it up okay, like we had done a hundred times before, and stood astraddle of our bikes to watch the swirling water below. I didn’t say anything about the trees. Instead, I pointed at the water and sort of let out a sigh. A pitiful one. I was looking for maximum effect here.
“I know damned good and well that water doesn’t just disappear,” I said. “There’s just too much of it. I know it goes all the way to Mexico.”
“Ahh, geez,” Tuna growled. “You still beatin’ on that same old horse? Didn’t you hear what my Dad said? “
“You mean about that ‘intermittent’ stuff? Yeah. I heard that. But I been thinking about why that is and I got it figured out. The canal dries up in the wintertime, right? It only runs like this in summer,” I said, pointing at the water again. “So that’s where the ‘intermittent’ stuff comes from. It’s dry in winter and wet in summer. There ya go. Intermittent explained.”
Tuna didn’t say anything. He just kinda looked at me and you could tell he was chewing on that explanation. I decided to take advantage of the moment and press ahead.
“So if a guy wanted to float down the canal and on down the rivers, he would have to do it in the summertime. Like now. Couldn’t do it in winter. And besides that, we gotta go to school in winter. So if we are gonna do this, we need to get crackin’.”
“Do what?”
“Build a raft and go down the canal. What do you think I’ve been talking about?”
“Beats me. This is the first I heard anything about building no damned raft.”
“Well sure. How else would we do it? Just think about what a great adventure that would be. We build a little house on it that we can sleep inside or hide in there if it’s raining or something. And at night we just tie up to the bank, make a little fire and roast dove breasts like we do sometimes. It would be great.”
Tuna didn’t know it yet. But I had him. I could tell. I could see that blank look with his eyes all out of focus and everything. He got that look anytime his brain was working on something complicated, like how to peel an orange. Oh, he wouldn’t admit it. He would still have to argue about something and tell me why this was something we could NOT do. But I knew that in the end, I had him. I think it was the vision of being tied up to the bank and roasting doves that got him. Tuna loved those roasted doves.
We did that from time to time; riding our bikes along the canal banks all the way over to the Biltmore Golf Course where those naval orange trees grew oranges the size of grapefruits, sniping a few doves out of the trees along the way, breasting them out and roasting them over a small fire under a shade tree somewhere. We might have two or three on a stick each, and eat a couple of those humongous oranges for desert. It was heaven.
He shook his head like he was trying to snap out of a coma or something, and then started in. “And just where the hell would we get this raft,” he said. “You know it would have to be a big deal raft. You can’t just float down the canal in an orange crate.”
“Yeah. I know. We’d have to build it.”
“BUILD IT. With what?
I pointed passed him to the tamarack grove up the canal a few yards. “Those,” I said.
He turned in the direction I was pointing and started to laugh. “What do you mean, THOSE? That’s a regular damned forest. How do you make a raft out of that?”
“Cut them down. Fasten them together. Shove it in the water and away we go. It ain’t complicated.”
“Just like that, huh? You’re nuts, Pete, ya know that? You know how long it would take to cut those things down and make a raft out of them? It would take all the rest of summer vacation.”
“Well, maybe it would, if it were just you and me workin’ on it. But it wouldn’t take no time at all if we had all the guys workin’ on it with us. I bet Toby would help. So would Karl, and fat Herbie Gottchauk that lives next door to me. The Walters brothers, and the Lindauer boys would too.”
We started down Minnezona headed for Cottonwood Pool at a leisurely pace. Tuna was quiet for a long time. He was what you would call, pensive.
Around Ninth Street he started to talk again. “The Lindauer boys don’t like you much. And Teddy is kinda wimpy anyway. I don’t think you could talk them into cutting down any big trees like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “So forget the Lindauer boys then. There’s lots of other kids that would want to be part of something big like this.”
“You know,, when you say something like “ big like this”, tell me straight out, you don’t REALLY mean it when you say you want to go to Mexico, right? It’s more like we just float down a ways and hole up in a shady place somewhere and kinda camp out, right? Eat some doves. Maybe bring along a watermelon. Maybe twist out some muskrats. Stuff like that, right? “
“No. For real I’m talkin’ Mexico,” I answered. “You can’t go to all the trouble of building a big honkin’ raft just to float down to the Indian School or something. You have to go for the big score. A once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s now or never. Here’s your chance at being famous. You wanna be famous don’t you ? You don’t get to be famous just floatin’ a mile down the canal. Anybody could do that. You have to go all the way. You win prizes and people give you money and stuff when you’re famous. You get to ride around in parades and wave at people from the back seat of a big black Packard convertible while they throw flowers at you. You can’t do something like that when you are all grown up because people would say you are nuts.”
“They will anyway,” Tuna said.