STORIES FROM THE DISTANT PAST: CHAPTER FOUR OF MY COLLECTED SHORT STORIES: MY FRIEND DARRELL

MY FRIEND DARREL

Darrel Bergt, my best friend of my early youth in Anchorage, Alaska, was also my envy. His hair was just a little curly while mine was not; when he'd get up in the morning he could go straight to the breakfast table without having to comb his hair and it would still look OK. I had to wet my hair and comb it or it would have cow licks sticking out in all different directions.

His father, Percy, was an executive at the local power or light company, I think. His family always seemed to have nice things, and I enjoyed playing at his house because of the many toys he had that I didn't. He was one of four children: Three boys and a girl corresponding in ages, roughly, to the four children in my family. Darrel, like I, was the youngest. His sister dated one of my older brothers for a short while. When I was about nine and his parents lived far out of town, one of Darrel's older brothers lived with my family for a year or so while working or going to school in town. He always had a sack in our refrigerator with lunch meat, cheese and mayonnaise and I always snacked on them when I would get home from school. I didn't know he often complained to my parents that someone was eating his lunch fixings. Until one day, when I opened the refrigerator door, I found he had pinned a large note to his lunch sack: "LEAVE MY FOOD ALONE!" Which I did after that.

Our two families were very close. We visited frequently at each other's home; our parents played Pinochle together every week. Darrel and I were inseparable.

Both of our families belonged to the First Methodist Church. In 1948, this was a small log cabin on 9th and G streets. My dad was choir director; my mother was the church pianist. The elder Bergts sang in the choir. So at Sunday morning services, Darrel and I, then about six years old, sat in the front row together, unattended.

During one service in the spring of '48 he and I sat together at the front of the church whispering, giggling, tickling, fidgeting, squirming and doing all the other things that young boys will do when told to be quiet and sit still. Which, of course, we didn't.

My mom glared at me many times throughout the service, to no avail. I knew well what the glare meant, but we were having too much fun for me to let a glare stop me. During the prayer she even came over to us and whispered to me to stop creating a disturbance or I would be punished after the service. Still, to no avail. And during the sermon there were more glares and finger wagging in my direction; but I was oblivious.

After morning service the pastor always walked down the aisle to the church door which he would dramatically open while my mom played the traditional recessional, and the congregation would obediently rise from their seats and file out the door, stopping to shake the pastor's hand while he rejoiced in their attendance. They would dutifully praise his sermon, thank him for the service and move on out the door. And always, my parents were the very last to leave, since my dad would talk to the choir about the next choir practice and my mom would be playing the recessional.

Except on this morning: This morning my mom jumped up from the piano stool, grabbed my hand and raced down the aisle ahead of the pastor. My little feet barely touched the floor as we flew towards the back of the church. The amazed pastor followed quickly, his black robe flowing in the turbulence created by our hasty retreat.

My mom flung open the door with great drama - the pastor could take a lesson from her flair - and stopped on the small porch. There, in full view of the pastor, the congregation, all the other children (my friends, who ALWAYS had to sit with their parents in church and ALWAYS had to sit still and be quiet: A fate I had never had to endure), my mom pulled down my pants and whacked me repeatedly on the rump, all the while telling me that I had better never again disregard her warnings, and had better listen to her every word, and if I ever again embarrassed her at church she would beat me "within an inch of my life" - one of her favorite expressions that I heard her use on me many times throughout my youth - all the while whacking me with her hand. I, of course, refused to cry or say I'm sorry. After all, my friends were all watching in horror mixed with glee!

How the screw had turned; their weekly envy of my freedom in the front row quickly became their delight that I, and not one of them, was getting the tar beat out of me in front of everybody. And of course, I could hear other parents admonishing their children - my friends - that this is what happens when you don't listen to your parents, and I was only one step away from becoming the city's worst juvenile delinquent, and so on.

Now, I don't mind telling you that my mom could do a pretty fine job of paddling a kid's butt. She had had three older boys on which to practice, so whenever she needed to discipline me she had years of experience. Her hands, and her heart it often seemed, were callused. And although my cries and pleadings to stop, and my tearful expressions of sorrow, usually would have gotten through to her heart, this Sunday morning I was as determined to bravely endure without crying out as she was determined to make sure everybody heard me say I'm sorry.

After what seemed like all Sunday morning, but was most likely only several minutes, I could bear the pain no longer, and cried the words for which she had been waiting, "I'm sorry, mom. I'll sit still from now on. I promise."

She stopped the whacking and pulled up my pants. I wiped at the tears, now steadily streaming down my face, and searched the sea of faces for Darrel's. He was staring at me, a look of satisfaction on his face: His mom hadn't beaten him in front of the masses! I knew that I would never forgive him for that look.

And I never forgot that beating in front of the church and the embarrassment I felt that Sunday morning: To this day I will not set foot inside a church.

The Bergts built a new house on a bluff overlooking Turnagain Arm many miles out of town and moved there when I was eight or nine. Before they moved, Darrel and I had visited back and forth at each other's house and played in each other's neighborhood. We had bulldozed and excavated his yard and my yard with our toy road graders and bulldozers, built roads and runways, reenacted major battles with our toy Civil War and World War soldiers, and carried on like young boys will do. But after he moved he never wanted to come into town and play in my yard anymore. It was more fun at his house, he said, because there were acres of woods in which to play, and freshly dozed mounds of dirt in which to build cities and forts, and we could explore for hours without getting bored. And I agreed.

So I began spending weekends at his house. I'd take clothes to school with me on Friday and ride home with him on the school bus after school. I hated that bus ride because the other children seemed so unruly and boisterous. Darrel didn't like them, either, and we kept very much to ourselves on the bus. But as soon as we reached his long driveway, as soon as we got off the bus and started the quarter mile trek to his house, we forgot all about the bus ride and the other children and would break into a run, challenging each other to see who could get to the front door first. Then, we'd play all Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, take our Saturday night bath together - where we'd reenact every naval battle in the history of mankind - and I'd meet my parents at church on Sunday morning, ending the weekend of nonstop playing at Darrel's.

His mom always fixed a huge breakfast for the family on Saturday mornings: Eggs, bacon or ham, toast, juice, a large glass or two of water "to keep our system clean," and some sweet treats. The toast, she always said, was to make our hair curly. It had apparently worked for Darrel and I needed little encouragement to eat my fill.

They had drilled their own well and had sunk 200 feet or more of pipe in order to get water to the house, which was built directly over the well. Shortly after they moved in, they noticed a significant drop in water pressure. His parents were very concerned that they may not have dug deeply enough and had run out of water in that well. This would mean they needed to dig another well away from the house. So they had a contractor come to the house to test the well, and he said it had quite an adequate amount of water in it.

Mrs. Bergt had noticed that the well water, which at first had been very clear and had had a sweet, refreshing taste, had taken on a murky look and now had a strange taste. But the contractor found the well water to be clear and clean.

So, they pulled out the pipe, section by section, to inspect it. And in one section they found a dead, drowned rat plugging the pipe.

I never enjoyed drinking the water there again. To this day I don't drink water unless I absolutely must. It always seems to taste funny.

And while my chest hair must have received benefit from all the toast I ate on Saturday mornings – it is curly to a fault - my head hair is thin and straight.

Just like a drowned rat's.

- - - - - - - - - -

Sometime during our junior high school years Darrel’s family moved from Alaska, back down to the South 48, and he and I lost track of each other. But I did learn many years later that he had become an Air Traffic Controller at the airport in Oakland, California. While living in San Francisco during the 1970s I called him there – and received a very terse, uninterested reception. We have never spoken together since.

His brother Neill, I heard, founded and was president of Markair Airline in Alaska during its brief lifespan. I guess the Bergt family was as nuts about airplanes as the Browns were.