The Yardbird

A cabin party gets out of hand during the summer of 1970.

Image by Dave Boardman from Pixabay

Fish splashed all around me as I twirled lazily across the lake, the hot black rubber of the inner tube warming my back. I stared up at the sky’s clear, unbroken blue, and the hawk circling above the trees on the shoreline. A boat roared past me, churning up a wake so big that it tossed me off my inner tube, and I sank into the cold water, aquatic plants tangling around my ankles as I fought my way back up. I lay with my torso awkwardly stretched across the inner tube, which I gripped with both hands, its sun-warmed surface even hotter after my cold plunge.

Matt and Jeff sat in the boat, watching me as I scrambled.

“You sons of bitches,” I said, and they laughed.

“Come on,” Jeff said, “Let’s go back to the cabin.”

“Now?” I said. In spite of the sudden chill I was feeling, I wasn’t ready to leave the lake.

“Casey said he’d be up by four,” Matt said. “It’s ten to.”

I frowned inwardly when I heard Casey’s name, but kept it to myself. It had sounded like fun when Matt first told me Casey wanted to party with us, but now I wasn’t so sure. The boys helped me and my tube into the boat, and I was careful to keep it away from their fishhooks as we motored back to our side of the lake.

“Would you look at that!” Matt said, easing off on the throttle. The boat’s wake lapped the shore as Matt let it glide closer to the dock where a massive blue heron stood, its feathers trembling gently in the breeze, calmly watching us. Its knifelike beak gleamed in the sun. I wondered why it wasn’t fishing.

“What should we do?” Jeff said.

“Nothing,” I replied. “It’ll go away on its own.”

“I don’t want it to go away,” Matt said. “I’ve never seen one this close before.” He turned off the engine, and we floated a few feet from the dock. In one swift motion, the heron’s long neck stretched like a whip and plunged into the water, an aggressive stab that ended with the heron raising its head and swallowing a small fish whole.

We watched in silence as the boat drifted closer to the dock. The heron squawked, ruffling its feathers, but it strutted away, its neck bobbing with each angular step.

By the time we moored the boat and climbed the wooden stairs up to the cabin, Casey’s ‘59 El Camino was parked behind it, a keg of beer sweating in the cargo bed. Casey leaned against the car’s gleaming Harbor Blue body. Car colors always had such great names — Highland Green, Grecian Gray, Roman Red — and I thought, what a great job that must be, making up names for colors.

Casey wore a denim shirt and jeans, the sunlight tracing the outline of his shaggy blond hair. I didn’t tell him it made him look like a golden retriever. We all thought Casey was a bit of a dweeb, and the harder he tried to look hip, the dweebier he seemed, but he was old enough to buy beer and knew where to buy dope, so we let him hang around.

“Hi, Joanie,” he said to me, grinning. Secretly, I was glad he was 1-A.

Matt helped Casey lug the keg into the cabin while Jeff installed the tap. Inside, my parents’ cabin was all knotty pine and plaid, and stuffy, since I’d forgotten to open the windows before we went out on the lake.

Red gingham cafe curtains covered every window in the cabin, and the fridge was the old-fashioned kind with a round compressor on top. It contained a rainbow of clear glass soda bottles, each color representing a different flavor of Nehi, a supply my parents had laid in for us. We’d have to drink some of it before we left, just so they wouldn’t get suspicious.

Jeff put Disraeli Gears on the hi-fi while we sucked the foam off our beers and Casey rolled joints.

“Can you believe Cream broke up?” Jeff asked as a ring of smoke filled the room.

“Clapton always bails when a band starts to get good,” I said. “He did the same thing with the Yardbirds.”

I looked over and saw Casey grinning at me again, but I ignored him.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jeff said.

“The hell I don’t,” I replied.

“That’s what we should call that heron that was on the dock,” Matt said, inhaling from a joint.

“What?” I asked.

“The Yardbird,” he said.

Later, after we’d grilled the hot dogs my parents had left in the fridge, and the sun had gone down, Jeff and Casey went out on the lake while Matt and I stayed behind. While Matt was passed out on the sofa, I picked up the phone to call my friend Sharon, who was staying with her parents at their cabin on another lake about two miles down the road. It was a party line, so while I waited for it to clear, I listened as old Mrs. Dahlgren complained to the county sheriff’s office about “rowdy boys on the lake.”

“It’s not illegal to drive a boat,” the sheriff’s office said. “Stop tying up the line with these calls.”

When the line was free, I gave the operator Sharon’s number, and when she picked up, I could hear her family laughing in the background, and I pictured them there, sitting around a campfire near a picnic table heavy with potluck trays, and suddenly wished I were there.

“When do you think you can get away?” I asked Sharon.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” she said. “Definitely not tonight. Why? Is there something wrong?”

“I just wish we hadn’t invited Casey,” I told her. “I can’t wait until he gets drafted.”

“Don’t say that,” Sharon chided. “It’s bad karma for you.”

“I just don’t like him,” I said. “Matt wanted one last weekend for us all to hang out before his big Hommes du Nord trip, but spending a whole weekend with Casey?” I was careful not to mention the keg and the ditch weed, in case someone was listening in on the party line.

“He is a dweeb,” Sharon conceded. “Just hang in there for now. I’ll join you tomorrow, and I’ll see if Carolyn and Betty want to come too.”

“Yes! I really want the three of you to come.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Sharon said.

After I hung up the phone, I looked out across the lake, pitch black except for the running lights on the boat, which slowly grew larger as Jeff and Casey motored up to the dock.

In the early morning hours, I woke from a dream (my innertube had twirled right over the edge of a waterfall, and the feeling of falling jolted me awake) and sensed someone in the room with me. I flipped on the light and saw Casey bent over me, still with that moronic grin on his face.

“Get out of here,” I said, punching him hard in the groin. He collapsed onto the floor, and I stepped over him as he lay there moaning. I left the bedroom light on and went to the living room, where Matt and Jeff were asleep.

In the violet predawn light, the heron was a dark silhouette on the dock, standing exactly where it had been the day before, perfectly still.

Casey didn’t peel himself off the floor until after 10 am, and when he did, he avoided eye contact with me, which suited me fine. In the afternoon, Sharon, Betty, and Carolyn all rolled up on their bikes, dusty from riding on dirt roads. They filled the kitchen table with Astro Pops and Jiffy Pop and a tray of freshly baked blondies while I handed them bottles of Nehi from the fridge.

I hauled four inner tubes out of the shed, and we raced each other to the lake. Betty and Carolyn wore polka dot bikinis — castoffs from their older sisters — but Sharon’s was brand new from Dayton’s; burnt orange with a halter neck and cutouts on the sides.

Sunlight glimmered on the surface of the water as we waded in. Sharon splashed me, and I waited for her to climb onto her tube before I dove under the water and snatched her ankles, pulling her in.

She laughed as she surfaced. “Joanie, Carolyn and Betty are already halfway out to the middle of the lake!”

We pulled ourselves onto our tubes and paddled out to meet the other girls.

“I’m actually looking forward to starting school again,” Carolyn said.

“What?” Sharon balked. “We wait all year for summer, and you’re wishing it away?”

“I’m not wishing anything away. I’m just not dreading it, that’s all. I think senior year is going to be a lot of fun.”

“But I’m only going to be a sophomore!” Betty wailed.

“You might have a point, Carolyn,” I said. “We won’t have Mr. Henderson this year.”

“Eww, Mr. Henderson!” Carolyn squealed, while Sharon laughed and slapped the water.

“Who’s that?” Betty asked.

“He teaches eleventh-grade math,” Sharon said. “Every time he reads a passage out loud, he takes a long breath and smacks his tongue first.”

“Smacks his tongue?” Betty said, quizzically.

Carolyn and I pressed our tongues to the roofs of our mouths, sucking hard, then opened them suddenly, making popping sounds just like Mr. Henderson did while reading selections from Crime and Punishment.

“Gross, he does that?”

“Constantly. Through every class,” Sharon said.

“I hope I don’t get him,” Betty said.

“You’ll probably get Ms. West,” I said. “But she’s a tougher grader.”

The conversation shifted to other things: Homecoming, Halloween, Sadie Hawkins, the spring musical, prom. A comfortable silence followed, and we floated lazily along, twirling under another sapphire sky.

At dusk, we all gathered at the cabin. Abbey Road spun on the turntable, the swampy beat of “Come Together” thundering from the speakers. Jeff burned the Jiffy Pop, so I put a call into town to order a pizza, but first I had to wait for Mrs. Dahlgren to get off the line.

“They’re having a wild party up at the Sorensons’ place,” she said. “A bunch of kids run amok.”

This time, the sheriff told her they’d send a car out.

“Turn off the stereo!” I said. “And flush the weed. Get rid of the keg, too.”

I snatched the bag of weed from Casey’s hand and dumped it in the toilet, where the green flakes swirled and vanished.

“We’d better go,” Sharon said. She, Carolyn and Betty rushed to gather their belongings and all mounted their bikes. I stood with my arms crossed, watching until their reflectors disappeared into a thicket of trees. I felt something inside me start to squeeze.

“Something the matter?” Matt asked. I shook my head.

By the time the sheriff rolled by, the cabin was quiet and dark, and I breathed a sigh of relief when they didn’t come to the door. They boys went right to sleep on the rumpus room floor, and I shut the bedroom door and shoved a chair under the knob, just in case. Deep in the night, an owl’s hoots echoed across the lake.

In the morning, Matt and Jeff packed the car while I closed up the cabin.

“Where the hell is Casey?” Matt asked as Casey’s El Camino sat under a pine tree, its windows rolled down.

A croaking sound broke the morning silence, followed by a man’s screams. Moments later, Casey staggered up the wooden stairs, blood pouring from his eyes.

“That fucking bird!” he cried.

“The heron? What did you do?” Matt demanded to know. He dashed down the stairs to search for the heron.

Well, I thought, looking at the sticky blood on Casey’s cheeks, He probably won’t get drafted now.

Matt ran back up the stairs, saying he couldn’t see the heron anywhere.

“He must have tried to corner it,” Matt said, “But I think it got away.”

“Fuck that bird!” Casey cried. “I can’t fucking see!”

“We’d better take him to a hospital,” I said. Matt and I helped Casey into Matt’s car, while Jeff followed in the El Camino.

When we arrived at the hospital, the nurses immediately wheeled Casey through a set of double doors, and we sat around on green vinyl waiting room seats until his parents arrived.

Hours later, Matt dropped me off at home. My mother said she’d had a call from Mrs. Dahlgren, and Dad agreed: no more weekends alone at the cabin with boys.

That suited me fine.