Lighting Up Parkers

 

When David, Susie, and I were twelve, we came up with a new game to play after dark on Harbor Point. On Saturday nights, after dark, the parking lot at the state park was a make-out spot for local teens. My father had a powerful flashlight with a long chrome barrel that held eight C batteries. I brought the flashlight, and the three of us, dressed in dark clothes, went to the state park. The women’s outhouse was next to the parking lot. We scaled a small tree next to the outhouse and lay on our bellies on the roof, to wait.  The ugly, rotten-sauerkraut smell coming out the roof vent, settled over us. “Nothing smells like a shithouse, except a shithouse,” said Susie.

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“Hold your nose,“ said David. 

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“It’s convenient,” I threw in. “If one of us has to go, we can just . . .”

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“Shhh! Here comes a car,” David said.

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The car pulled into the lot and cut its lights. We could just make out that there were two couples in the car.  We waited ten minutes, trying to quiet our giggles. Then I switched on the flashlight and shined its powerful beam right into the car. This always scared the parkers—the girls would scream, the boys would think the police were on them, and they would speed off. But this time, the two boys left their dates in the car and hopped out, looking for the source of the light. One of them pointed to the top of the outhouse. “There! Let’s get ’em!”

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David jumped off the roof. Susie and I scurried down the tree faster than a cartoon fireman down a greased pole. The moonlight must have glinted off the barrel of the flashlight because one of the boys spotted me and said, “There’s the one with the flashlight!” They came tearing toward me. There was a fence behind the outhouse, the beach was behind my back, and the two boys had split up and cut off the other two directions. I was trapped! There was nothing left to do except to run onto the beach and right out into the water. Surely, they wouldn’t chase me into the lake!

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Wrong! I heard them splash into the water behind me. I waded out deeper and deeper, until I was chest-deep, holding Daddy’s flashlight above my head. I turned to face them. They were standing several yards behind me, standing in the water up to the bottoms of their shorts. We stared at each other a few seconds, then they turned and waded back to the beach. Thank God they didn’t want to get their clothes wet!

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They got back in the car and drove off. When I came out of the water, I found David untangling Susie from a sticker bush where she had hidden. While we walked home, my clothes were dripping, and my shoes squishing. Susie’s arms and legs were scratched up and bloodied, and her shirt was torn. David was limping because he had turned his ankle when he jumped off the outhouse roof. “Maybe lighting up parkers isn’t our best idea,” he said.