Innocence Lost

By Sean Michael Bradley

I have always tried to keep my memories of our old family cabin special, filled with campfire stories and fishing trips or visits from bear cubs and nightly raccoons. But if you were to talk to my family about the old cabin – the cabin we traveled to for 10 summers – only one thing happened there. Only one thing defined that decade of our lives. The outhouse incident. It was the summer of 1977. I was 12 years old. My younger brother and I were shooting at targets with our BB guns when we ran out of bull’s-eyes. I ran off to our shed to fetch the army surplus targets. While searching through piles of old boxes, I stumbled onto a grand treasure: an old Playboy magazine. I quickly forgot the targets and burst out into the back yard, dashing for the shooting range to share my discovery with my brother. Whoa! My father was standing right there with my brother refilling his Red Rider BB gun with the aid of a paper funnel. I stopped short and made a beeline for the nearest shelter – the outhouse. So there I was, 12 years old, standing in the outhouse with a Playboy magazine. The unprecedented magnitude of the situation was not lost on me. I locked the door. My heart raced as I opened the forbidden “Entertainment for Men” tome. It’s funny the things you remember from childhood. Our family had what must have been the most pleasant outhouse in the world. It had no smell whatsoever – save for the oddly comforting aroma of old Field & Stream magazines. My mother said it was magic, and my father said it was his outhouse design. Whatever it was, I was about to change it forever. The Playboy was from 1970. I clearly recall that. I also remember the exact page I opened up to. Not so much for the page itself; more for the little subscription postcard that slid out … in slow motion. I watched it take flight, bouncing off my elbow as it silently drifted into the blackness of the open void. There, sitting face up, on a dark sea of the things you find in the bottom of an outhouse, was the postcard. The word Playboy seemed to be mocking me from the depths. Somehow, a small beam of sunlight was splashing playfully across the card. I was doomed. Without a second’s hesitation I scrambled back to the shed. I returned the magazine to its box and reached for the rake. I was not going to have my reputation sullied by a magazine that I didn’t even get a good look at. Yikes! The rake was gone! In fact, there wasn’t anything in the shed that could reach the offending postcard. I would have to make a break for the cabin to search for something there. As I peeked out of the shed, I saw the missing rake … in my father’s hands … between the cabin and me. I had to think fast. This next part of my life was like an out-of-body experience. I could see myself picking up the rock, but I couldn’t stop what I was about to do. It took two hands to pick it up. I held this boulder above my head, screaming like some crazed Charlton Heston as I used every ounce of strength to hurl the stone onto the pathetic scrap of paper. At the time, my idea seemed solid: Drive the evil card into the depths of the outhouse hole, sinking any evidence of wrongdoing with a rock and drowning it forever. Some of those things did happen. But there’s more. Remember the first time you saw slow-motion films of a droplet of liquid falling into a still pool? This was like that, but change the liquid to a thick mud-colored soup, and trade the droplet for a bowling ball. Oh yeah – picture this happening inside a phone booth. When it was over, I opened the door to the outside world and breathed in the glorious air. My parents were standing there staring at me. “What happened?” Dad asked, a concerned and confused look on his face as though he was viewing an escaped circus freak. Mom stood looking past me, over my shoulder, her hand over her mouth. The outhouse looked like some kind of movie prop rejected by the director of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” “I don’t know,” I replied, shrugging. Dripping. It seemed like this answer would be enough. It was not, of course. I don’t remember when I stopped trying to clean the outhouse. We threw my clothes away. I learned they make special products to deodorize outhouses; none of them worked. A few years later, my parents sold that cabin. They claimed it was because the drive was just too long. I knew better.