JJ’s summer

"I ran *huff* as fast *huff* as I could!" I sputtered as I stood on the front porch of the tan double-wide trailer, hands on my knees and gasping for breath. The sweat from my brow burned as it dripped into my eyes. Jimmy came running up behind me in no better shape than I was. "Billy, what the heck are you running up here all hot and bothered about," Mom asked as she opened the cracked screen door to let us inside. "Come on in and cool off, let me get you a.." 

"Mom *huff* she found him! She found JJ!" I interrupted.

Mom took a moment to let the news sink in. "Slow down, breathe Billy. You and Jimmy sit down and tell me what's going on." Mom ordered.

Earlier that day:

Jimmy and I were always getting into trouble during summer break and this year was no exception. We grabbed a couple of Coca Colas from the Get-n-Go as we headed for the woods along Flatrock Creek. The ice-cold soda cans were beaded with sweat as we meandered off the hiking trails and deeper into the woods. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the shade of the trees was a welcome relief from the pounding August sun.  We approached the trickle that was once a swift running river. The river had swelled with ice-cold runoff after the winter snow melted, but the lack of rain and relentless summer heat had gradually shrunk the river to levels locals claimed they’d never seen before.

"What do you say we find that fridge we found buried in the riverbank and see if we can get the door open" Jimmy said, as he took a swig from his can. The cold soda went down quick in the hot afternoon sun. Jimmy was bigger than most of our classmates, which could be attributed to his love of french fries drenched in ketchup.  The armpits of his blue Star Wars shirt were dark with perspiration.  His long black hair was matted to the sides of his face.

"Nah, we already tried digging that stupid fridge outa the muck, Jimmy. What are you hoping to score, a ham sandwich?" I laughed as I slugged him in the arm. I crushed the empty soda can with my hand and chucked it over a rivulet of water near the shore and on to a silty dry patch of sunbaked riverbed.  

With the river running as low as it had in decades, there were countless treasures to be found at the bottom of the river. Mom was pissed that I'd already ruined one pair of sneakers this summer, so the ones I had on were an old pair that were half a size too small and had lost almost all of their tread. I needed a new pair of shoes to start the school year. School didn't start for another few weeks and neither me nor Jimmy were excited for Ninth grade. Eight grade was a drag, but at least we were kings of the middle school. Freshman year was starting from the bottom again.

"Let's go further upriver and see what we can find" I suggested. 

I grabbed on to the muddy end of a tree trunk to ease my way down the river’s edge toward a sand bar. I spotted rocks and what looked like white sticks sticking up through the sand and mud in the distance.

"Come on you chickenshit, what's the matter with you?" I glared at Jimmy as he stood on the bank above me. 

"No way man, let's go back to the Get-n-Go. I'm hungry." Jimmy whined.

Jimmy was always hungry. "I'm gonna go check it out. Those might be bones over there." I waved my arms up and down at Jimmy like I was a spooky ghost trying to haunt him. "Besides you already spent all your cash on pop." I said as I turned back toward the riverbed.

"Those aren't bones. It’s just more sticks, rocks and clam shells." Jimmy said. 

"Suit yourself" I said. 

The silty mud by the shore grabbed my shoes, the suction and caking brown mud making me feel like Godzilla stomping cars with heavy feet the first few steps to the dry riverbed. I found a stick and scraped off some of the muck from the trend of my shoes. A tractor tire half buried in silt leaned against a tree trunk on the opposite side of the river. It looked like a donut dipped in coffee. About 10 yards away on the sand bar the shapes I saw from shore started to come into focus. 

The desiccated white end of what looked like a leg bone was sticking up out of the sand. Probably a deer that had died trying to cross the river. 

"Check it out Jimmy. I found the remains of your mom’s old boyfriend" I laughed as I picked up the bone and waved it at him. 

"Maybe you finally found JJ". Jimmy laughed. JJ was a 5th grade classmate of Billy and Jimmy. A quiet kid that had transferred in partway through the school year. JJ didn't have many friends and nobody seemed to notice that he went missing that spring. The police searched the woods for weeks, but eventually had to give up and everyone presumed JJ had drowned or run away from home. 

I looked around the fine white and brown grains of sand some more and saw what looked like two or three smaller white bones in addition to the skeletal remains I was waving at Jimmy. There were plenty of deer and other critters that called the woods along Flatiron creek home and it was common to run across remains. I chucked the bone at Jimmy as I walked back up to the shore. 

"You missed me by a mile dude, where'd you learn how to throw like that?" Jimmy laughed. 

"Shut up and pull me up" I said as Jimmy reached out his hand and pulled me back to shore.

We walked further upriver until came across a tent hidden in a grove of trees. It was one of those dome tents like we used to take camping when Dad took us to the Black Hills. Several fallen leaves were permanently caked on the surface of the pale green tent indicating it had been here for some time. There was a wisp of white smoke coming from the ring of rocks that was presumably a campfire this morning. We could hear a gentle sobbing coming from behind the tent. 

"Let's get outa here Billy" Jimmy whispered in my ear. I had the same thought, but something about the sound of a woman sobbing tugged at me and I had to know more. It was the same sound Mom made the day after we moved into the trailer park following the divorce. 

"It's just a woman crying Jimmy, ain't nothing to be afraid of" I whispered back. 

"Who's there?" I heard from behind the tent. "I can hear you whispering. Leave me alone." The sobbing had stopped and I could see a stick poke at the remaining coals that were nothing more than snowballs of ash. 

"C'mon, let’s check it out". I tugged on Jimmy's shirt.

"No way Jose" Jimmy said as he yanked the Star Wars shirt out of my hand. "You go on and check it out, I'm staying here". 

"Chickenshit" I snickered as I ventured slowly up to the side of the tent. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and ran my fingers through my long brown hair. I was overdue for a haircut and didn't have a comb to make my hair look good. I'm not sure if I was trying to impress or was just nervous and wanted to look like I had my shit together.

"Oh Johnny, why did you come back" I saw the fourth-something woman look up at me with long stringy blonde hair sticking to her neck. She was wearing tan cargo pants with a torn pocket on the side with a tee shirt. I couldn't help notice she wasn't wearing a bra. I felt sympathy more than attraction and wanted to leave, but her eyes caught mine and I could see she had been crying for some time. 

"Excuse me ma’am, but are you ok?" 

"My little Johnny, I found him. I lost him when he was twelve. I'm..." she trailed off as she took a swig from a clear bottle.

"What are you talking about?" I could see another empty bottle of vodka that had rolled away from the fallen log that was her camp chair. 

"I finally found him. I found his bones. Down there" her hair fell down over her eyes and she pointed downstream toward a sand bar that jutted far out into the river.

"Whose bones?" I asked. 

"Johnny, my, sweet Johnny " She wailed and started to get up before stumbling to her knees. "Why, he would be about your age now"

"My age? You don't mean JJ who died a few years ago?" I took a step back in disbelief that this could be the mother of their classmate who disappeared four years ago. 

She then crawled over and reached into the tent, and as she turned to look at me her bloodshot eyes opened wide.  “I found him.” she said as she held out a human skull in the palm of her hand. The sun had bleached the skull white and i could see brown silt from the river in the eye sockets.  The teeth still had silver braces attached. 

I stumbled backwards tripping into Jimmy and we both fell. We scrambled to our feet and ran. The greenish brown mud from the river bank was caked on my sneakers making them feel like they were full of lead buckshot. 

"Oh Johnny!" I hear the lady wail as I trying to regain my footing. I slipped and fell on my hands as a chunk of muck sloughed off my right foot as I ran over fallen tree branches. 

"Come on Jimmy, we gotta run back to my place!" I yelled not knowing how far behind me he was other than I could hear footsteps and tree branches snapping behind me. We ran, jumping over downed trees and rocks that created an obstacle course to navigate. Tree branches scraped against my sunburned arms, but I didn't feel a thing.

I ran as fast as I could back to town. What was I supposed to do? The Sherriff wouldn't believe me if I told him, he knew my brothers and me were trouble. The only person I could think of that would believe me was mom.

The police found Emma Jamison passed out behind her tent later that day. Once she sobered up, they pieced together that she'd spent the last four years searching for her son after he disappeared. Johnny Jamison had finally been found after all these years.