| Good To The Last Puff
As I walked back to the house after feeding Sniffy, my faithful dog, I smiled contentedly. It was a great feeling to be eleven years old on such a fine spring day as this. Soon I'd be on the school yard, running and yelling and throwing a baseball. Yes, it was going to a good day.....No, by Gosh!! It was going to be a great day!!
Well....at least it would have been a great day. If only the God's hadn't caused me to glance downwards at that particular moment!
It was a pack of cigaretttes lying there in the grass. Chesterfield Kings. Un-opened, the celophane wrapping still sealed tightly. I stopped short and looked at them.
"Hmm!" I said to myself as I casually looked around to see if I was being watched by any brothers or sisters. There was no one in sight. The coast was clear! In the blink of an eye the cigarettes were hidden away on the inside my blue jeans. It was kinda' uncomfortable that way, but it was a good hiding place while I said good-bye to Mom before walking to school.
Later that day during recess, I told Billy, my friend who lived just a couple houses away from me, what I'd found. Neither of us had ever tried smoking before. We decided right then that it was something we wanted to do, and we made plans to sneak out behind my Dad's barn after school and give it a shot.
Grandma Collier was baby-sitting my younger brothers and sisters when Billy came over that afternoon. We told her we were going outside to play in the back yard. We were happy to see Grandma there, figuring she'd be a lot easier to sneak away from than my parents.
Heading out the back door, we nudged each other in the ribs with our elbows and raised our eyebrow in conspiracy.
The cigarette's weren't at all what we'd expected. The blue smoke burned our mouth and nose and made our eyes run with tears. Neither of us was going to say we'd had enough though, so we continued to light them up, taking a couple of puffs from each before discarding it and reaching for another. It really wasn't that much fun. But we were sneakin', and that's what mattered most of all!
As we stood behind the barn, nearly hidden among tall shoots of green rye-grass, the ground around our feet littered with cigarettes, barely smoked, and dozens of blackened match sticks, we were oblivious to the fact that our goose was well on the way to the oven. It'd already been seasoned and basted, too. It was about to be cooked!
The little voice with the loud bellow scared the both of us and we jumped backwards in fear.
It was Diane! My onery little sister! Her leering face with it's long blond hair was poking through the weeds not three feet away from us! We'd hadn't even heard her sneakin' up on us! She'd caught us completely by surprise!
"Where'd you come from?" I said after catching my breath. "Git outta here or I'll beat ya" up!"
"I'm tellin!" she said again, this time with a wrinkled up nose, curled lips and a sassy little wag to her shoulders.
"You better not or we'll get ya!" I threatened. She made a ugly little face then turned and ran away.
"Do you think she'll tell?" Billy asked. I could see that he was starting to get a little nervous.
"Naahh!" I said. "She knows better'n ta mess with me! We'll be okay." At that point in my young life I still didn't know Diane very well.
It wasn't even two minutes after I'd built up Billy's confidence like that, just enough time to light up a couple more smokes, before Grandma Collier's large form appeared like black magic above the tall grass. She too had managed to sneak up on us, and believe me, she wasn't even trying!
Without a single word, not even a grunt or a snarl, she snatched the nearly empty cigarette pack from my now trembling hands and stuffed it into her apron pocket, for evidence I presumed. Then she spent a silent minute or two stomping still smoldering cigaretts butts into oblivion with her high topped shoes before marching the both of us back to the house on our tip-toes, holding us firmly by our shirt collars.
She still hadn't said a single word!
Precious little Diane, sweetheart that she was, stood waiting just inside the back door with a smug look on her face when we arrived somewhat unceremounisly. I glared at her as we were swept bye, still on our tip-toes, but it was a useless gesture. She just smiled back a wicked little smile and waggled her shoulders again.
I knew my friend and I were in bad trouble because Grandma, up to this point, still hadn't said a single word. That alone was a very bad sign. But when I glanced over at Billy and noticed that her knuckles, where she had the grip of death on his collar, were whiter than snow.....when I looked up at her face, and saw instead the face of God....I realized I had never known, up to this point in my young life anyway, what the word trouble really meant.
I silently said good-bye to my allowance, to my bike, to my baseball mit and to my fishing pole. I said good-bye to ol' Sniffy and to my friend Billy, who was silently saying his own good-byes, too.
And through all these good-byes, these desperate last thoughts of two good-as-dead eleven year-old boys, Diane just stood there, arms crossed, shoulders wriggling back and forth, her nose wrinkled into a self-satisfied little smirk and her "I told you so!!" look on her face. From that day onward I never again had much control over my little sister!
It would be several years, about twenty in fact, before I'd gather up enough courage to try smoking again.
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It was a rather nice morning in late spring, with blue skies and plenty of nice clean fresh air. The grass was green and Mom's Iris bed was already glowing with huge yellow & brown flowers.