Saucer in the Dunes

24 Cemetery Road

Trickery was a favorite revenge in Kingston among us kids. I was finding this out first hand. During my grounding a summer visitor came to town, JT's cousin. He was none too popular and was a bully to boot. Of course Ronnie was having none of that. He had already been into it with Ronnie and Jimmy and, well, now they had to pay.

The plan had been to sneak into the cemetery where the boys were camping. We would spread out as far as we could get and plant strings of firecrackers. We had not yet figured out how we were going to light them with only the one book of matches between us. We had grandiose ideas of waking all the guys in the middle of the night to the sound of the firecrackers from the woods all around them. We hoped it would sound to them like gunshots. Then we would come screaming from the woods covered in our old sheets and run through the cemetery before heading back home.

The following afternoon we would meet them at the trestle and hear of their night fright while we kept it a secret to ourselves. I did not like JT and both Ronnie and Jimmy disliked that big mouthed cousin of his, Wiley, who visited every summer, and the Durley's, well no one liked them, they were the rudest bullies of them all.

"I would have done almost anything to make them look like the asses they are and was about out of good ideas until Jimmy thought this up," Ronnie said slapping him on the shoulder.

Until I moved into Kingston, Jimmy was the new kid. He was from Augusta. His father worked at a paper mill south of us somewhere. It was Jimmy that got into an argument with Wiley about ghosts. JT was there and nearly started a fight between them too when Wiley was forced to back down to Jimmy's dare to tent out in the old Confederate cemetery.

Ronnie told me that Jimmy believes in ghosts. He has more books than I have ever seen a kid of his age have and sometimes when I am over there we look through them. He has a whole section on ghosts and monsters. It is something I have never thought about one way or another. I use it to tell ghost stories around the barbecue pit in the sunken park back in Atlanta but I never believed in them. Jimmy did, and even if he had to fake being ghost he was going to prove his point.

He passed the paper bag of firecrackers over to me.

"How many packs you think we got left?"

"About fifteen or twenty."

Jimmy grinned a little as he puffed on his filched cigar.

"Hey girls! I just figured out how were going to lit them up!"

Jimmy pulled the cigar out of his mouth and tapped the ash away from the tip revealing a bright orange glow in the darkness.

"Here, take these," he said, handing over his pack of matches, "you know, just in case."

"Gimme my sheet."

I dumped the contents of the bag onto the ground between us, holding my stinking sweet cigar in the corner of my mouth the way the Clint Eastwood did in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Jimmy took his sheet and grabbed a hand-full of the small packs of fire crackers and put them in his lap.

"We need to split up," I said.

"I'll walk up Deacon's Road and cut into the woods over there and come down that hill to the cemetery," Ronnie directed.

"You come up Cemetery Road right there behind the church and hide behind those bushes between the church and the cemetery."

I nodded confirmation of my directions.

"Jimmy will cut down Deacons Road with me only he won't cut into the woods at the hill, he will follow it all the way around the bend, then cut through the woods. If you cut into the woods right at the far side of that curve that will just about put you dead center on the back of that cemetery. I think you have to cross some old earthworks from the Civil War that are still in those woods. It's what my dad used to say anyway."

Jimmy nodded as well.

"I'll start lighting mine one at a time, then a few at a time , then a few more as I get closer. When you hear mine go off then you set yours off, then Jimmy will do the same thing and we will just go back and forth. It'll sound like a civil war battle, like a bunch of muskets going off in the woods."

"Light em keep moving forward a little for the next one," Jimmy agreed.

Ronnie took to his feet to finish what he was saying.

"When you hear mine going off without letting up it means I'm about to run out of the woods. Go ahead then and light the rest of yours, then run around that hedge and out into the cemetery and take back off toward the church. Jimmy will come right through the middle. We can meet up down on Seven Forks in old man Winsome's melon field, we'll meet right there by the gate. Even if they chase us they'll give up before then."

"And that's if they figure it out," I seconded.

"Shit," Jimmy smiled again, pleased with our devilish plan, "they're going to run home crying to their mama's when it's all over with."

We all laughed a little louder, even than before. The moon was a half crescent and it shown brightly in the nearly clear sky. We picked up our things and hustled through the park into the darkness of Busby Street, away from the yellowish street lights.

In a few moments we were in sight of Cemetery Road and only a few minutes from Bethel Baptist where the Durley brothers were camping along with a few of the other kids who took Jimmy's bet last Saturday afternoon and lost. Like I said, I had missed the whole thing since I was grounded but it sure must have been a showdown. No one ever had any money and it didn't matter anyway to Jimmy who had all the money he needed and enjoyed thinking up tortuous feats of strength and bravery for anyone who lost a bet.

The Durley's were superstitious, most of us were, but they were prideful about their superstitions, and thought up all sorts of elaborate explanations for their beliefs. It always boiled down to the fact that their family had lived in the area the longest so they knew practically everything there was to know.

The Durley's would never be good friends of mine. Their father worked at the same paper mill where Jimmy's dad worked and had been there long enough to be promoted a few times. Their increase in money only served to make them bigger jerks to everyone else. It had not helped their parents stature in the small community either. Even my mom in her short time there bugged me about hanging around with the Durley boys, even though I had not once mentioned them even in passing.

We walked in the middle of Cemetery Road by the light of the half moon, now almost directly over head. We passed the first Civil War cemetery on the right, the Union, surrounded by a heavy black wrought iron fence and in another second we were at the edge of the Confederate cemetery on the left, surrounded by the same style of fencing the national guard men had to come paint every couple of years. There we stopped and regrouped to quickly go over the plan one final time.

Jimmy stood on the fencing and craned his neck into the darkness.

"There," he whispered, "I can see them."

I tried to climb up next to him but he held his hand to my chest to keep me down.

"They must be about ready to go to bed. The fire is about to be burned out and I can only see Tony and Keith, maybe JT but I'm not sure."

"Where?" I hissed.

Jimmy moved to let me up on the fence where he was, then he began unwrapping his firecrackers carefully. All I could see was a faint glow through the trees and the small regular shaped stone slabs sticking up out of the grass in neat rows.

"What time do you have?"

"Twelve forty-five," I answered peering at the silver flex-banded watch my dad had given me about a week before. 

"Let's go."