I filled the ice bucket, tucked it into its spot in the limo, and arrived at the modest house on a couple of acres just outside town promptly at 1:00 Saturday afternoon. The day, as promised by the weather forecast, was fall-crisp but warm. A handful of bunny clouds decorated the blue sky, and a tang of wood smoke hung in the air. A perfect day to celebrate sixty years together.
I jumped out and opened the rear door of the limo to be ready for the happy couple. Joni, in white capri pants and sandals, came out alone first, bringing an overnight case and a sack presumably holding the non-alcoholic apple juice. And maybe bran flakes. She confided that things weren’t going too well so far. Her mother’d had a bad night with indigestion and gas, and her father had taken out his dentures and now couldn’t find them.
She rolled her eyes in a gesture of frustration. Okay, there were undoubtedly drawbacks to an anniversary at this age, but I still envied their getting to sixty years together.
“The reunion and limo are still going to be a surprise to them?”
“They know there’s a surprise, but they have no idea what it is. Mom kept dropping hints about Red Lobster last night. But I’m sure everything will work out just fine.” Joni closed her eyes and passed a hand across them as if trying to erase some worrisome vision. Her lips moved as if she were repeating some soothing mantra to herself. Then she said it aloud, firmly. “I am serene. I am very serene.” She opened her eyes. “Oh, and if I didn’t tell you before, their names are Frank and Dottie Mackie. She’s 86, and he’s 89. And I’d probably better warn you. When Dad gets mad he tends to take out his teeth and throw them.”
“Is that why they’re missing now?”
This time it was a roll of eyes. “Yeah.”
She went back to the house. I did a double take when she herded her parents out the front door a few minutes later. They were already blindfolded, small, wiry people with big black blindfold-masks that almost covered their faces. And staring out from the masks were painted-on, ghoulish white eyes. Apparently Joni had shopped the Halloween costume section at the dollar store for blindfolds.
Their steps were uncertain in the blindfolds. The older woman wore a dark blue dress and low black heels, the man slacks and a tie, neither outfit exactly reunion-in-the-woods type gear.
“Okay, you can look now!”
Joni helped her mother with the blindfold, the father yanked his off.
“Surprise!” Joni yelled.
To my relief, they’d apparently found her father’s dentures, because a full supply of teeth gleamed when he grinned. “Hey, Dottie, lookit! A lim-o-zeen!”
Hopefully he wouldn’t find reason to take the teeth out and throw them again. I gave my best bow and motioned the couple toward the limo. “Welcome, Frank and Dottie. Your chariot awaits! Happy anniversary.”
The wiry little woman beamed. “We are going to the Red Lobster!”
Uh-oh.
“Oh, this is much more exciting than that,” Joni assured her. She nudged the couple toward the limo door, and I helped the woman inside. “But now you have to put your blindfolds on again. Because where we’re going is a very special surprise.”
The older couple grumbled about the blindfolds, but finally everyone was settled. Joni pulled out a ragged scrap of notebook paper and pulled me away from the door so her parents couldn’t hear the conversation.
“This is the map my brother-in-law Bob drew. I figured we’d better have something since it’s been years since I’ve been up there. We just go out the main road to here, then turn right, and then up in here turn left.”
I knew enough about the area outside town to follow her moving finger to the first turnoff, but I told her that when we got out in the woods she’d have to provide directions as we went. “No problem,” she assured me.
The partition was open, so I could hear the festivities in back as I drove. Which were not all that festive, unfortunately. Joni poured apple juice. Dottie said it wasn’t as sweet as the kind they usually bought.
“That’s because it’s sparkling apple juice, Mom. Just try it.”
“This blindfold hurts my ear,” Frank grumbled.
“I get car-sick when I can’t see where I’m going,” Dottie said. “If I get dizzy, I throw up.”
I was feeling a little dizzy myself, seeing those ghoulish eyes every time I looked in the rear view mirror. Dottie and Frank might not be looking at me, but those bloodshot eyes in the masks glared at me with ghoulish precision.
We turned right off the main road, and soon made another turn. Brother-in-law Bob apparently had a lower standard of what constitutes a road in “good shape” than I do. The rain had left mudholes on almost every shady corner, but I resolutely edged through them. If a motor home had made it, surely the limo could too.
There were more roads than I expected up in here, apparently the old logging roads Fitz had mentioned, none of which appeared on Bob’s map. Most of the roads had only signs with forest service numbers, no destinations given, others had no signs at all. A couple times I simply guessed which way to take at a fork in the road, choosing the one that looked as if it might be the more traveled.
Then, when the limo bounced over a mound of bedrock I hadn’t seen, Frank yanked off his blindfold. He took a look at the dark canopy of woods on both sides of the road. “Where are we?” he demanded.
So then Dottie snatched her blindfold off too. “This isn’t the way to Red Lobster,” she accused.
Joni tried to salvage the situation, though she had to give away the surprise to do it. “We’re on our way to your most favorite place in the whole world, where everyone is waiting to celebrate your anniversary. Serenity Springs Campground!”
“This isn’t the way to Serenity Springs,” Frank announced.
“But Bob drew a map, and Andi’s following it—”
“That husband of Suzanne’s couldn’t map his way out of Wal-Mart,” Frank muttered. He got up on his knees to peer out a window. “We’ve got to go back to the main road and get on Blue Creek Road. I know the way from there.”
I had my doubts about this change of route, but Joni, apparently afraid her father might go into a teeth-hurling episode, told me to turn around and go back to the main road. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, given that I’d made some guess-turns coming up, but we finally made it. Pavement had never looked so good.
But soon we had found Frank’s Blue Creek Road and started into the forest again. Up hills and down into canyons, through thick woods and bare, logged-over areas. Basically, this road made brother-in-law Bob’s route look like a Sunday parade route. The underside of the limo brushed dirt in the deep ruts. The mudholes softened to ominous depths. Twice Frank’s memory failed, and we got on dead end roads where I had to scrunch the limo around a few inches at a time to turn around.
Overhead, the bunny clouds, contrary to the weatherman’s cheery prediction, weren’t waiting until Sunday evening and had congealed into full overcast now. I had the uneasy feeling maybe I should have invested in one of those GPS things Matt had been telling me I should get.
What I was also thinking, and finally voiced to Joni was, “Maybe we should go back to the main road, and someone can come down from the campground and lead the way.”
Joni tried to call Bob on her cell phone, but – no surprise – there was no signal for the phone to latch onto here.
She shook the phone as if that would bring it to life. “I don’t understand. I’m always hearing how people call for help from way out in some wilderness, and rescuers rush in to save them. Why not here?”
I was beginning to think Red Lobster would have been a great idea. Usually you don’t need a rescuer on your way to Red Lobster. Or have to worry about dodging flying teeth.
But finally, up ahead, I saw a looming shape. A motor home! Then another. Trailers . . . tents . . . pickups! Music, Alan Jackson singing about the Chatahoochie River. Smoke rising from a campfire surrounded by benches and tables. Dogs, big and little, bounding out to meet us. In spite of the clouds, kids were wading in the small lake.
And finally, Frank and Dottie did get excited. They scooted forward to see through the partition and the windshield.
“They’re all here for our anniversary?” Dottie said.
“Kids, grandkids, great-grandkids. In-laws and outlaws,” Joni said. “Everyone’s here to celebrate with you!”
I parked the limo between two pickups, vehicles big enough to have fenders on a level with the limo’s windows. The whole herd of family members clustered around as I opened the rear door. Frank and Dottie stepped out to squeals of kids, scent of burned weenies, and shouts of Happy Anniversary! Someone started singing “For they’re a jolly good couple.” Flashes flared as half a dozen offspring took photos. I had to get in one of the photos with them, Dottie and Frank linking arms with me by the limo.
Then two big guys made seats out of their linked hands for Dottie, two more made seats for Frank. They carried them to camp chairs set up by the campfire. On a nearby table I saw a three-tier cake, plus several ice buckets with bottle necks protruding.
“Oh, this is wonderful!” Dottie cried, complaints and Red Lobster forgotten. Somebody planted a baby in her lap.
Frank smiled, using all his teeth. A skinny ten-year-old ran up and proudly dangled a fish in his face. “Lookit, granpa, I caught it myself!”
I stayed around for a few minutes, glad to see that everything had worked out so well. The clouds suggested that rain might join the celebration sooner than expected, but from the looks of things this was a survivalist group that wouldn’t give ground to anything less than a tidal wave.
Me, I wanted to get back to the main road before both darkness and rain arrived.
Joni slipped me a check, with a generous extra for the difficult trip, and brother-in-law Bob came over to thank me for getting the limo all the way up here. “You want a job drivin’ cement truck anytime, you just let me know! Bet you needed that map, right?”
“Actually, we didn’t use the map. Frank knew the way. He seems to have a pretty good memory. Though I think it was a different road than the map showed. At least we got here.”
Bob groaned. “He brought you up that old Blue Creek way, didn’t he? No one but hunters use that old road any more. It’s twice as long and three times as rough as the way I marked on the map.”
I got out the map, and he turned it around to align with the directions where we were now. “To get back to town, you start over there—” He pointed to a different road than we’d entered the campground from, then traced the route on the map. “Just go down here, keep to the right, except for here, when you go left. Well, and here, you take the middle fork. Don’t get on the left one, or you may wind up back over on Blue Creek. There are some rough spots this way, but nothing like what you came through getting up here on that old Blue Creek road. And you’ll be back down on the main road in half the time it took you to get here.”
I thanked him, congratulated the anniversary couple again, and started out. I figured that even if Bob’s map-making skills were never going to qualify for any Boy Scout awards, I could follow the vehicle tracks easily enough to take the shorter route back to the paved road.
First junction, ignore that road to the left. Next fork was a little more difficult. The tracks came from both directions. But he’d said stay to the right, so I did.
And rough spots? Oh, yes indeedy. I remembered a line from an old medieval map I’d seen in a book. Here there be Monsters, it said. Maybe no monsters, but Here there be Mud.
And here there be rain. A few sprinkles at first, then big, hard drops, then . . . deluge. And wind! I wondered what was happening back at the campground, but I had more upfront worries of my own right now.
A branch crashed to the road just in front of the limo. Wind-blown rain flooded the windshield. But I kept going, afraid if I stopped the limo might sink out of sight. At a cross-road I checked the map, but this juncture didn’t seem to be there. And the rain had already wiped out all trace of recent traffic. I could barely see the road through the wind-blown veil of rain.
Hey, Lord, I could use a little guidance here!
Keep to the right, inch ahead. Dodge another wind-blown branch on the road. Wow, these ruts were deep, little canyons unto themselves.
Finally, on a harder section that looked like solid rock, I did stop. I didn’t bother to get out of the middle of the road. I hadn’t seen another vehicle since I left the campground. I poured a cup of coffee from the Thermos I always bring along. I got out my cell phone, just in case. The little arrows that say the unit is picking up a signal stayed unseen down in their little cyberspace hole.
Finally, after a half-hour or so, the rain dropped back to downpour level, and I inched the limo forward again. No more tracks of recent usage on the road now, just rivulets . . . make that rivers . . . of running water. Odd looking stump there on the right, ragged and dark-streaked, as if lightning had hit it. Hey, hadn’t I seen that stump before? It was right where—
Exactly, right where the side logging road had dead-ended, and we’d had to turn around when coming up here. Somehow I must have gotten back over on Frank’s old Blue Creek road and taken the same wrong turn I had before. Except now a muddy lake covered the space in which I’d turned around.
Okay, I wasn’t foolhardy enough to enter that murky looking body of water. I’d just have to back up to where I’d made a wrong turn.
I’ve gotten pretty good at maneuvering the limo. Backing up is no problem. But that’s in a driveway or parking lot, and this was a maze of muddy ruts.
The wheels stalled in one rut. I pulled forward, moved over, tried again. Different rut. Deeper rut. Go forward. Couldn’t. Go backward. Couldn’t. In panic I gunned the engine and felt the wheels spin and dig in as if they were trying to burrow to oil well depth.
Smell of something overheating. Tilt of hood upward as rear wheels dug in farther.
Oh, no.
Stuck.
I got out and eyed my disaster. The limo sat at an angle now. Rear wheels buried, front end angled upward, as if the vehicle had mountain climbing ambitions. Mud, like the flames on India’s Harley, decorated the sides. Smoke or steam rose around the exhaust pipe. The engine made small creaky noises as it cooled. Rain pattered on the roof and hood.
A flood of panic rose in yours truly.
Now what?