A little more

     I met him officially at Kristin's house. Her dad worked long hours in the city and when he got home he always poured himself a glass of cheap brown liquor and lit a smoke and went straight to his bedroom. Kristin was adopted and when she was pretty young her mom ran of with her dad's best friend. The shitty part is they didn't run very far. Kristin's mom and her dad's ex best friend were now happily married and living in a big house at the front of the  neighborhood so Mr. C had to drive by every day on his way home from work. Kristin's house was kind of the neighborhood hang out because we could get away with just about anything and her dad gave us money for food and didn't care too much  when we pilfered his smokes. Winston's, yuck. 

      I had seen the guy with the Indian tattoo around before, at parties in the corn fields and sitting on picnic tables at the big beach passing bags of weed and flashing his tanned arms and brown front tooth. There were two beaches in te neighborhood. The big beach with permanent year round piers and a musty old clubhouse that could be rented out for parties and neighborhood meetings, and the little beach with just one small seasonal pier that was removed at the end of summertime. Lake Catherine is in northern Illinois and is part of the Chain 'o lakes that is made up of like seven different bodies of water connected by these little channels. The big beach was where kids (and a select few creepy adults) hung out on warm summer nights and drank beer bought at Jack's country store  and made plans and talked shit. Jack's used to be a little  crumbly shack with narrow isles and little baskets of penny candy. Now it's a real deal convenience store with big shiny glass cooler doors and a counter with a hot dog roller machine. Eventually we would make a plan to rob the place with guns and a get away bike and a secret trail but I'll tell you more about that later.  Let's get back to the summer of love, or should I say the summer of stupid fucked up trouble that turned into almost a whole year of bad decisions that ended up affecting the course of the rest of my entire life. 

     I walked into Kristin's room and he was siting there on the floor with a leather covered 3 ring binder that looked like one of those mom style day planners except that instead of plans there were thick sheets of pastel paper inside with perfect little perforations making little 1/2 inch squares and in the little pouch on the inside front cover a stack of teeny tiny plastic ziplock bags.