Chapter 2: Reservoir

It took a couple long minutes, laying in bed the next morning after my eyes opened, to wipe the silly grin off my face. I hadn't been sure what I would find come morning. Hell, I wasn't sure I'd find morning!

Ned popped his head over the edge of the bed as soon as he heard me moving around, and I reached down and patted his head. He'd need to go out as soon as I was dressed. In fact, that made me think about what I'd have to do starting tomorrow. His big exercise of the day usually happened after school, but now that I was working, I didn't know if I'd be able to run with him in the afternoon. I'd have to start getting up early enough to take him for a run before work.

"Might as well get started today." I told him.

By Kendall family tradition, the first day of summer vacation was a day off for mom. I was on my own for breakfast. Instead of heading down for a shower and some breakfast, I threw on a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt and headed out the door with Ned. I grabbed the tennis ball off that was Ned's current object d'fetch off the porch, and headed up Lacker, past the Ralston's, towards the intersection with Weisse Boulevard.

Weisse was a diagonal cross road that abutted a bunch of cross streets running west, but also hit Lacker and Burnside running East. It was a pretty ambitious bit of running, and maybe I was biting off more than I could chew, but day two of my return had me determined to make sure my life turned out different this time, and that particularly included not becoming the slug I had been in my first life.

I set what I thought was a moderate pace for myself, throwing the tennis ball ahead for Ned and letting him chase it down and run it back. Weisse was a pretty busy road, and was paved, so I held the ball until we got to Burnside. Ned was ready for a little more ball chasing by then, so we went at it again, still with a little more care than we had used on Lacker. There were more houses here, and less open area to throw the ball that wasn't someone's yard.

Mom's car was still in the driveway when I got back to the house, so I decided she wasn't planning on making a complete escape for the day. I grabbed a drink of water in the kitchen and took a glance at the clock above the stove. Damn! It wasn't even 7:30 yet!

After a nice hot shower and a change of clothes, I decided I was hungry. I hadn't heard any sounds of mom stirring upstairs yet, but I figured she'd stir plenty quick if she smelled breakfast cooking.

I had another of those 'pause and think' moments while I tried to rebuild for myself some memory of what I knew how to cook at this age the first time around. I'd been a bachelor most of my life, and was a decent cook, but as I remembered it, at fourteen I had mastered French toast, pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon.

I didn't want to risk using the bacon I found, as there was only the one package, and I didn't want to risk discovering it was meant for something else. We had plenty of eggs though, so I decided to scramble some of those and began looking around for things to scramble up with it. There was a quarter of an onion, wrapped in cellophane in the fridge, part of a green pepper, and some leftover link sausage that must've been a part of yesterday's breakfast.

I felt safe using leftovers, and while I had our cast iron frying pan heating up on the stove, I thought about making coffee. If Dad were back, there would already be coffee on, and Mom drank it, so I felt safe in making a pot. The question was, would they care if I started drinking it? Again I tried dredging through memories that were mine once removed. I drank it when we went camping I remembered, and when Dad and I went hunting it was considered an essential, and I drank it black.

The next question was, did I know how to make coffee in this old electric percolator style coffee pot? Mr. Coffee was a decade away, and I'd certainly get some serious questions if I up and started talking about French coffee presses and coffee bean grinders!

I didn't want to sweat the onions before I added them, but I did want to heat the sausage a little and cook the green pepper some to soften it slightly. I did the sausage first, throwing the chopped up pepper bits in with them when it was time. While that was going on I cracked six eggs into a bowl and added a little salt and pepper as I scrambled them.

Mom came downstairs as I was finishing the eggs. I'd decided to add some toast at the last minute and four slices were already done and another four were almost set to pop.

"Sammy, this is a surprise!" Mom said.

"Morning Mom. When I got home and got cleaned up, I was too hungry to wait."

"You've already been out?"

"I woke up early and decided to take Ned for a run. I figure I'm going to need to do that every day, since I don't know how tired I'll be at the end of the day, once I start work. He needs his exercise, and its probably the only way I'll be able to give it to him every day."

I must have pleased Mom with that breakfast, and the explanation, because she offered to do dishes after we ate, and didn't say a word about my cup of coffee. I did my morning chores, which was mostly making my own bed, cleaning my room and making sure the garbage was out if it was garbage day. We didn't have a lawn to mow, but I did have two cars to wash, alternating one a week. That was a Sunday chore though, so unless Mom asked for something special, I was done when I came down from my room.

While I was in my room I took some time to study the calendar on my wall. This was May 18th. Two weeks ago, on May 5th, Alan Shepard had become the first American in space. Freedom 7 was the watchword on every red-blooded American boy, and the first time through these events I had very much been one of them. The last two weeks of school, as I remembered, had been chock full of Alan Shepard book reports and essays.

School had gotten out yesterday and Memorial Day was less than two weeks away. The calendar reminded me that the federal law that moved Memorial Day to the last Monday in May hadn't happened yet, so the holiday wasn't going to be a long weekend like I was used to. Still it raised questions in my mind.

"Mom, is my job going to change our Memorial Day plans?" I asked when I got back downstairs.

"No Sammy, don't worry about that," Mom said. "Nileson's is going to be closed on Memorial Day and Mr. Nileson has already said you can miss work on the 29th, so we're still going to be camping for almost four straight days."

This news reassured me and worried me at the same time. Tomorrow, once my new job started, I would be traveling new ground for sure. I'm sure I already had to some degree, my day yesterday had certainly not included my visits with Benny or Carrie. Something as concrete as a Memorial Day camping trip? Those were peak events in my young life, and the upcoming one never happened, canceled around me as I sat sulking in my room.

The same train of thoughts that brought those concerns brought a moment of brightness with it as well. The first time through, Dad and I argued pretty harshly when he got home, and he had taken the belt to me pretty hard, for the first time really. He told me later in life that he regretted it. I sure regretted the pain, and this time through I wasn't going to be getting that!

"What do you have planned today Sammy?" Mom asked.

"Carrie, Benny and I are going to see how many of the gang can meet up at the creek."

"Are you going to spend all day?"

"I guess it depends on who shows up, and what everyone wants to do."

"Why don't you get a couple of packages of hot dogs out of the freezer," Mom suggested. "I'll give you some money and you can stop at the store and get some buns."

It was almost 8:30 by the time I left the house. I jumped on my bike and with Ned loping alongside, headed for Benny's house. Once I was on Burnside I stopped on the way at Roger and Amelia Cort's house to see if they were going to be able to come to the spot. Mrs. Cort answered my knock.

"Good morning Mrs. Cort," I began when she opened the door.

"Well, good morning yourself Sammy," she laughed. "You're awful early!"

"Are Roger and Amelia here?"

"They're still in the kitchen eating their breakfast," she told me. "Go on in, you know the way."

I found I did too, and without having to dredge things up.

"Thank you!" I tossed behind me as I made my way to the kitchen.

"Sammy!" I got simultaneously from the two of them. They were twins, they could hardly help it.

"Hi guys!"

"What's going on?" Roger asked.

"I'm on my way over to Benny's," I explained. "Carrie thought we should all get together at the creek today, and I want to see if you guys can come."

"Hey mom!" Roger yelled, despite the fact that his mom was standing right in the doorway.

"Yes, you two can go," she answered before he could even ask. "Are you spending the day?"

"I think so," I answered. "Mom is letting me take a couple of packages of hot dogs, and I'm stopping at the store to get buns."

"Amy, I'll give you some money and you can get some chips or something at the store to take with you." Mrs. Cort offered.

"Great, thanks Mom, can I grab a jar of relish from the cellar too?" Amelia asked. Only her mother called her Amy. She hated it and preferred Amelia. 'Amy is too plain and ordinary', she would complain. Roger was Roger. 'Just plain old Roger for me. Amelia can be special and outstanding for both of us.'

"Sure sweetie, but take one of the small ones, and be sure to bring back what you don't use." Mrs. Cort cautioned.

"Okay, I'm off to Benny's," I told them, "We'll be there by eleven, if not sooner. See ya there!"

Even if we'd managed to get everyone who was even a peripheral member of the group we usually spent our idle hours with, it would have been no more than a dozen. Erik Osterhaus was in Portland with his parents. Sissy Mitchel was stuck babysitting her baby brother. The Carmody brothers already had plans with some friends from the other end of town. Luther Harwell could come, but he had to be back at four, or as he said, 'My Dad will rain down fire and brimstone on my ass.'

This was the report I got from Benny as soon as I saw him. He apparently had been burning up the phone lines, not as reluctant as I was to tie up the family phone.

I told him about the hot dogs, and the Cort's bringing relish and maybe getting chips or something. The relish was welcome news, as Mrs. Cort made it herself, from her own homemade pickles, and it was as good as you could get.

"What about Carrie?" Benny asked. When I said I had no clue, he hopped on the phone and called her house. I only heard his end of the conversation of course, but it was brief.

"Hi Mrs. Ralston, is Carrie there?"

"Oh, okay."

"Well, its starting to look like we'll be taking food and stuff, and wanted to check with her."

"Oh, okay. Thank you Mrs. Ralston."

"She's not home," Benny told me. "Her mom says she's over visiting with old man Garrison."

"Oh," I offered, at a loss for whatever else to say in response.

"Her mom says not to worry though, that she'll be bringing something."

We had no sooner finished that conversation, the phone still warm from Benny's hand when it rang, making both of us jump.

"Hello, Argus residence. Benjamin speaking."

"Oh hi Luth!" Benny said, letting me know it was Luther Harwell.

"Really?"

"Even better, Luth! See you when you get there. Do you need help hauling it form the road?"

"Okay, we'll be ready."

I stared at Benny as he hung up the phone again, one eyebrow raised.

"Luther says his dad cut down a bunch of scrub alders on the back of his property a couple of weeks ago, and there's a good bit of it available for us to use as firewood if we want it."

"Great!" I said. "What was even better?"

"His sister Celia is willing to do the driving if we want to pack it up to the creek. They'll be by to pick us up in about five minutes."

It was fast approaching 9:30 by now, and I still needed to pick up the hot dog buns Mom had given me money to buy. I should have time when we got back from dropping off the firewood, especially if Celia would drop me off at the store on her way back into town.

The Harwell's owned the local drug store, and Mr. Harwell was a pharmacist. They had a genuine soda shop in the store that Mrs. Harwell ran, and it was one of our main hangouts, as it was for most of the teenagers in Cold Lake. The Harwells were also the only black family in Cold Lake. Funny, but with the memories I could muster from this life and the first one, I couldn't find a single instance where that mattered to anyone I knew.

It was also an absolute incontrovertible truth that Celia Harwell was about as drop-dead gorgeous a woman as I remembered seeing in either life. Even Carrie couldn't compete. Of course Celia was nineteen or twenty, so she was as far removed from me and my social sphere as Alpha Centauri was from Earth.

I had my bike and Ned with me, so we jumped in the back of the truck along with the firewood and headed out. It was a fast ride by truck, with little or no traffic on our edge-of-town dirt roads. We were there and unpacking the truck within five minutes.

Looking at the pile of alder logs, which ranged from about an inch and a half to four inches in diameter, and a mostly uniform eighteen inches in length, I figured it would take the three of us, Luther, Benny and me, two trips to get it all where we wanted it, but there were two canvas cloths laying in the bottom of the truck that the wood had been laying on, and I figured we could use them to build ourselves a carrier for the wood so we could do it in one trip.

I motioned at the cloths to Luther and he got the idea immediately.

The two tarps were the old olive green that smacked of army surplus, and there were a ton of one inch wide canvas strips sewn into the underside of both tarps about two feet apart. The long sides of both had seams sewn with a heavy black thread that suggested they had been cut from something larger and then their edges dressed.

We laid the two pieces out on the ground next to our pile of firewood and contemplated how to make them work for us. They were both the same size, about twelve or so feet long and three feet wide.

In the end, we just stacked the wood in the center of one piece and laid the other piece on top. Then we twisted the ends like we were wrapping a taffy, and Luther and I each took an end, with Benny delegated to running alongside with a hand firmly on one of the straps to keep the whole thing from untwisting. At a quick jog, it took us ten minutes to make the round trip, and we were back to Celia and the truck. Benny jumped in the back with Ned this time and Luther and I prepared to climb in the front seat with Celia.

"Sammy wants to know if he can get a ride all the way into town?" Luther explained. I smiled.

"Your reputation's going to get damaged being seen riding in a car with me Sammy," she warned.

"Are you kidding?" I responded. "Being seen with the most beautiful girl in Cold Lake? It's going to boost my reputation, not damage it."