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Deep Dark Secrets

Everyone has had bad or unpleasant experiences that they wish hadn't happened. Things they want to forget about. Things they don't want to talk about. Things they have never talked about. Deep, dark secrets. Well, I am no exception. I have a few of those too. It's part of life I guess. Most of my deep, dark secrets will stay that way, deep and secret. However, there is one incident that happened during this time frame. I have never spoken a work to anybody about it before. Not to any of my friends or relatives, nor to my siblings. Not a single word to anybody about it, for nearly sixty years.

I think I can share it with you now for several reasons. First, many, if not all, of the people that were involved in this event are most likely dead by now, so there is nobody left to press charges. Second, even if somebody was still around to press charges, the statue of limitations for this "incident" has long since expired. They can't do anything to me now; it's simply too late. Lastly, it will illustrate to you that I, as many of you suspected, am quite human and can screw up just like anybody else. After you have read it all, you will understand why I have never mentioned it to anyone before.

It all started out innocently enough (these things usually do, you know). I was with my friend Herbie one day playing at his house. We lived a block apart, Herbie and I, and there was a large prairie between his house and mine. We often "baited" this stretch of prairie. By that I mean we would put pieces of cardboard, tarpaper, or roofing shingles on the ground throughout this prairie. The local snakes would find these pieces and crawl under them during the day to avoid the direct heat of the sun. This practice made the finding of snakes a lot easier. Just lift one of these pieces and more often that not, there was a snake right where the covering had been. Herbie was a journeyman snake handler just as I was.

On this particular day, we noticed two older boys out in our field. They were catching snakes and putting them into a paper shopping bag. I thought the kid with the shopping bag to be somewhat clumsy. Every few moments he would pick up the bag slightly, only to drop it again. He did this repeatedly. Very strange I thought. Anyhow, we were curious, so we went over to where they were. "Whatcha doing?" we asked. We knew perfectly well what they were doing. They were catching snakes and putting them into a shopping bag. "We're catching snakes and putting them in this shopping bag" one of the boys answered. "Can we help?" one of us asked. "Sure, if you want to" they responded. So we went to work.

In no time at all, we had more snakes than they could handle or keep control of. The boys said, "enough, hold it". They had a shopping bag about one third full of snakes and that was apparently enough. "Whatcha gonna do with all these snakes?" we asked. "We're taking them to the zoo" one boy responded. We must have looked puzzled or something because the taller boy turned to us and explained. "We take these snakes to the Brookfield Zoo and turn them in at the gate, then they let us in FREE." (there's that word FREE again. I was much too young to understand how expensive FREE can be). "What does the zoo do with all these snakes?" we asked. "They feed these little snakes to the great big snakes," one of the boys said. "Food is getting scarce, they are having trouble feeding all the animals" the other boy said. Well that made sense. We knew that big snakes do eat littler snakes, we had seen it happed in the prairies. The war in Europe had started and there was a lot of talk about running out of food and gas and this and that. The whole thing sounded true we thought. Get some snakes and take them to the zoo and get in FREE. "Hey, we can do that too" Herbie said. It made perfect sense. We never questioned it any further.

One day about a week later Herbie says to me, "Let's go to the zoo." Good idea I thought. The Brookfield Zoo was in Brookfield, Illinois, about thirty to thirty-five miles from my house. But we had bus transportation all the way there. We could take the Belmont Ave bus east to Naragansett, the Naragansett bus south to North Ave where we switched to the suburban bus system. We could continue south on Ridgeland Ave to Archer Ave then west on Archer to Brookfield. Nothing to it. Between the bus, streetcar, and elevated systems, you could travel anywhere you wanted to in the city and suburbs of Chicago. As kids, we used to go all over. We would go to Wrigley Field or Comisky Park for ball games. We would go to Riverview Amusement Park for two cents a day with fifty cents, have a whale of a good time, and come home with change. We would go downtown to one of the museums, or out to North Ave beach, just all over. Although many people had automobiles, the normal mode of local travel for most people was the public transportation system. It was no problem traveling to anywhere, from anywhere, but often, it did take a lot of time.

To go to the zoo, I had to first get permission from Mom who made sure I had enough money for bus fare and a hot dog. She didn't give me any money mind you, she just counted my money to make sure I had enough to get there and back. Herbie had to do the same thing. With permission established, we then got two paper shopping bags, putting one inside of the other for a double strong bag.

Next we went into the field and started hunting snakes. In no time at all we had perhaps a couple dozen snakes in the bag. That's when I made another discovery. These snakes could actually climb up the sides of the shopping bag and escape. For a while there, they were getting away as fast as we were catching them. Then I remembered the "clumsy kid" from a week ago who kept lifting and then dropping his shopping bag. I tried it and it worked. When you gave the bag a little jolt of some kind, the snakes climbing the walls would loose their grip and fall back to the bottom. This was great. We continued hunting and catching snakes while at the same time one or the other of us would give the bag a quick jerk at short intervals. This prevented any escape attempts and in less time than it takes to tell about it, we had a shopping bag that was maybe one third to nearly half full of black and green garden snakes.

Next, we walked the couple of blocks to the corner of Belmont and Oketo where we waited for the bus. We quickly learned several ways to give the shopping bag a small jolt and keep the snakes under control. It had become a reflex reaction for us. The bus finally came, we got on, paid half fare which at that time was either three cents or a nickel, I don't remember. So there we were, fat dumb and happy, on the first leg of our journey. Two pre-teen kids going to the Brookfield Zoo, riding on a public bus, with an open shopping bag half full of live snakes.

The first leg of the trip was uneventful. We got off the Belmont Ave bus to transfer to the Naragansett Ave bus going south. These public buses were arranged with a majority of the seats on each side of the bus facing the front. However, they also had a bank of maybe five seats in the front and five more seats in the back of the bus that faced the aisle. Then you had a door in the front of the bus where you got on and paid your fare, and a second door located near the middle of the bus where you could get off.

The second bus came, I gave the bag a little shake, we got on the bus, gave our transfers to the driver, and sat down in one of the front aisle seats. This bus was pretty full and most of the other seats were already taken. We rode for a while, giving the shopping bag a little shake now and then. It was about that time I noticed this lady sitting in a seat across the aisle. She was looking at us, no, not just looking, she was staring at us and she had a look about her like she wanted to say something. I looked the other way pretending not to notice. I deliberately avoided her stare. This went on for a while, then she broke the silence. "Hello boys" she said. Now here was an adult, we were kids, and when an adult says something to you, you had better acknowledge. We said "hello" while still trying to act indifferent. "Where are you going?" she asked. "To the zoo" we said. Several more innocent type questions followed.

With conversation going on, I got a chance to take a good look at this lady. She was an ordinary, middle aged woman, and she had one striking feature. She had a rather long face. By that I mean her face was long from chin to forehead. Then, she wore her hair in an upsweep and that exaggerated her appearance and made her face look even longer yet. Then she had eyebrow makeup that made her eyes appear abnormally large. My study of this woman's features was interrupted by her next question. "What do you boys have in your shopping bag?" she asked. "Aw, nothing" we said. I regretted that answer before I finished giving it because I knew that wouldn't hold her. We probably should have told her the truth, that it was somebody's lunch. That was the honest intention. These little guys were lunch for the big guys just like them at the zoo.

The bus had stopped, people were getting on, and a lot of people got off leaving empty seats in the rear of the bus. Herbie gave me a nudge and glanced towards the back. I gave the bag another shake, got up, nodded to the lady and we moved to the aisle seats in the back of the bus. That was the end of that, or so we thought.

On the way to the back of the bus, I noticed six nuns sitting in the side seats and two priests sitting behind them. I remember noticing the last two nuns sitting in front of the priest, one was fat and the other was skinny. Laurel and Hardy were popular at the movies at the time. We never knew their names; we knew them only as "Fat" and "Skinny". That's the way we identified, and it was quite natural for us to identify a stout and a slim pair of people in the same way, "Fat" and "Skinny". Of the two priests, one was quite young, obviously brand new. In fact, he sparkled like a shiny new penny. The other priest was much older and obviously had seen some extensive service in the priesthood. Both priests wore those black, broad brimmed hats, the kind you think of as being worn by a Friar from a Spanish mission someplace out west.

The bus made a couple more stops after that, then the lady got up and began moving towards the rear door. It appeared to me that she was going to get off the bus. But she didn't stop at the rear door; she kept coming and then sat down in an aisle seat directly across from the two of us. First she smiled at us, then she started after us in earnest. "What are your names boys, What do you have in the bag? Where do you go to school boys". She kept it up and kept it up. "What grade are you in at school boys? What do you have in the bag?". "Are you two brothers? What do you have in the bag?". She was relentless. "Why do you keep shaking that bag boys? And what do you have in it?". She asked several more questions of the same type and then said something to the effect that "my curiosity of the moment has the best of me and I just won't stop till I know what you boys have in that shopping bag". Oh my God, we were cornered. With no apparent way out, I looked at Herbie. Herbie looked at me. Having reached a silent agreement between us, I gave the bag one more shake and then moved it out to the center of the aisle and placed it right in front of the curious lady.

The Sound of Silence

Now you should have seen this lady. She sat upright in the seat, reared her head back, and she had a smile so broad that I'd swear the corners of her mouth touched her ears. Her nostrils flared slightly, and I will never forget those great big eyes, so wide open and just shining with victory. She had persisted with us, and she had won. Here was a lady in total triumph. She sat there just briefly, savoring the moment (keep in mind now, she had just outflanked two ten year old kids). Still smiling, she leaned forward and grasped the shopping bag by its handles. With one handle in each hand, she spread the bag open, bent over slightly and peaked inside.

The first thing to leave her was her smile, which was replaced by a look of total bewilderment. In rapid succession that look of bewilderment was replaced by a look of recognition. She had at last identified what was in the bag. In turn, her look of recognition was replaced by a look of extreme fright. Then her look of fright was in turn quickly replaced by a look of absolute terror.

All through her transition from bewilderment to terror, her already large eyes kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Her mouth was just an ordinary mouth with a broad smile to begin with. When the smile left her she opened her mouth slightly. Then like her eyes, her mouth kept getting bigger and bigger, opening wider and wider. For a minute there, I thought I could actually see her tonsils. I was captivated by the transformation of her long face to a face that was predominately half eyes and half mouth. And her nose? Well, her nose was there on her face alright, but with her eyes and her mouth the way they were, her nose was, how shall we say, insignificant. With her gaping mouth so wide open like it was, I was also expecting some kind of sound. But nothing came out of her. She remained silent, apparently too frightened to speak. Then, still clutching the bag with both hands, she got up off the seat and stood in the aisle. She was holding on to the bag to tightly that her knuckles were turning white. She began to shake, like she was cold and shivering. And then, it happened.

Although I was half expecting it at any moment, I was still surprised when she actually did it. She drew a deep breath, then she let go with an ear piercing, blood curdling scream, the likes of which I had never heard before. Oh, it was a whopper. Every dead Indian buried within a ten-mile radius must have rolled over in his grave on that one.

The bus driver slams on the brakes. Everybody was thrown forward towards the front of the bus. People sitting on the side seats were restrained by the seats directly in front of them. People sitting in the aisle seats were thrown into a side wall and into each other. I was thrown forward into a side wall and Herbie was thrown right into me. Everybody was thrown forward into something or someone. Everybody that is, except the lady. She was standing in the aisle and had nothing in front of her to be thrown into. When the bus stopped, she didn't. I tell you true, when the bus driver slammed on those brakes, that poor lady went flying. The BAG went flying. What was IN - THE - BAG went flying.

Right after the bus stopped completely, there was quite a murmur from the crowd of passengers in the bus. You know about the "murmur of the crowd" don't you? That's everybody talking at once but you can't make out a single work that's being said. Then there was a scream. Then another scream and still another. Pretty soon, everybody was screaming. Have you ever seen one of Verdi's Operas? The kind where you have thirty to forty people on stage, one person screaming louder than the other? Well, let me tell you, did we ever have Opera. It was truly a chorus of panic, fear, and outright terror. The men were worse than the women I thought. I remember looking right at a man just a he drew a deep breath. He was terrified and he let out a great big scream. Now he may have been a man, and he may have had a man's voice, but he sure sounded like a soprano to me.

I stepped into the aisle and looked towards the front of the bus. The lady was up forward in the aisle laying flat on her back, breathing rapidly and staring straight up at the ceiling. I could see snakes all over the place. They were all over the aisle, in the seats, on people, just everywhere. I saw a man frantically brushing himself off with his hands while at the same time screaming at the top of his lungs. A woman was panic stricken because she had just pulled a snake out of her hair. There was such chaos and confusion going on, the whole bus was up for grabs.

I saw the skinny nun standing on her seat with both hands held up in the air. She was not blessing anybody; she was in total fear and screaming her fool head off. The young priest was wide eyed, totally bewildered, and he kept making the sign of the cross over and over again in a very rapid-fire manner. I don't know, maybe he thought he could bless the situation into calming down. The fat nun was in a panic too and she had mounted the older priest from behind. She had both arms around his head and had pulled that broad brimmed hat over his face so he could not see what was going on. Now, the older priest, he was not a young man anymore and the panic stricken fat nun had mounted him well. You could see the poor guy really straining and struggling under all that additional weight.

The doors of the bus were opened and people began pushing their way out. Women and children first? Not hardly. A couple of those big guys just bulled their way through. They stepped over people, pushed others aside, anything to get through the door and off the bus. Herbie and I saw an opening and made a dash for it. We got off through the rear door. A short time later most everybody was off the bus. The older priest was the last one off. He was very flush in the face. I don't think it had anything to do with any embarrassment, I think it was due to lack of oxygen. The fat nun had a real strangle hold on this poor guy.

The way the bus was stopped, it was partly in the middle of a fairly busy intersection. Traffic was starting to pile up as horn honking cars and trucks slowly worked their way around the bus. The passengers were congregated around the driver, near the front of the bus. Herbie and I stood back and off to the side. The lady was sitting on the curb with her head in her hands, giving an impression of great exasperation. The bus driver and several of the passengers were obviously asking her questions. She was the center of attention at that moment, and somehow, I got the impression that she loved every minute of it. This went on for a while, then somebody must have asked the right question, or maybe the lady finally came up with the right answer, because the bus driver and perhaps a half dozen of the passengers turned around and looked squarely at the two of us. We had been fingered as the culprits, that much was certain. We took a couple of steps backwards.

As those passengers and the driver mingled with the other passengers, you could see them talking in groups of two and threes, then stop talking and turning to look at us. We took a couple more steps backwards. Then a policeman came; he was nearly out of breath. He was the local cop on the beat apparently. He had a great big potbelly and we surmised that he would not be much of a threat if we were chased. We took a couple more steps backwards anyhow, just in case.

Everybody was standing around the policeman and all trying to talk at once. Then we heard sirens. Here comes the Chicago Fire Department. Not one, but three hook and ladder company's. It was an awful mess. I was personally upset about the Fire Department coming. I liked firemen. At one time, I was even going to be one when I grew up. We had been well-schooled about false alarms and all that. I remember thinking something like "What yo-yo head called the Fire Department? There's no fire here, these are only tiny little snakes, dummy." A couple of the firemen began to talk with the passengers. These guys were lean with flat tummies. Now, here was a potential threat. The saving grace was that they were all wearing those big and clumsy fireman's boots. We surmised those boots had to make it difficult for them to run. We took several big steps backwards anyhow. If any of those guys took their boots off, we could be in serious trouble.

The Wave

You know what it's like when a crowd at a baseball game or a football game makes a wave don't you? Everybody seems to have fun doing it and it is fun to watch. Well, let me tell you about the first wave I ever saw in my life. Here we had all those people standing around the bus with everybody trying to talk all at once. The Fire Department showing up when they did just made matters worse. It took a while, but eventually the policeman asserted himself and took control. The crowd had quieted down and was listening to him. Then he had apparently asked the right question because everyone turned in unison and with their arms out stretched, they all pointed directly at the two of us. The choreography was beautiful, a sight to behold, it was the absolutely most perfect wave.

Perfect wave or not, that was our cue. We bolted and took off running down the street. We turned into the first alley we came to and kept running as fast as we possibly could, never looking back. This alley had businesses located on one side and a residential area on the other side. We cut over to the residential side, jumped a fence and cut through somebody's back yard onto the next street. We kept running. Down that street into another alley. Through another backyard to anther street. That was our escape pattern, street - alley - backyard - street. Now, most of these back yards were fenced in. but that didn't stop us, we simply scaled the fence. There was a movie out at that time, about the British Commandos. I must have seen it four or five times. Every kid in my block was going to be a Commando when he grew up. In play, we practiced jumping fences and other obstructions all the time. I wasn't much over four feet tall then, but I had no problem scaling a six-foot high fence. It was a piece of cake for both Herbie and me. We were young, we were nimble, we were fast, and we were good.

At long last, we came out of an alley and onto another street. We looked both ways on the street and saw nothing. Then we hustled up to a corner and looked in all four directions. Nobody, nada, nothing. We must have stood on that corner for four or five minutes, just looking up and down the streets in all directions while at the same time catching our breath. Nothing, no one to be seen anywhere. Our conclusion was that we had escaped any possible pursuit that there may have been. In fact, we had gotten away clean.

A streetwise city kid never got caught for anything because he was stupid mind you. However, you could, on occasion, get caught doing something if your legs were too short. Well, our legs were certainly long enough that day. We outran them all. Herbie and I rarely ever talked about what happened that day. With the police involved and three fire trucks called out, we were scared. We didn't want anybody to find out that it was us. We just didn't want to get caught and get sent to reform school.

I never saw any of those people again, at least, not that I know of. I don't remember hearing anything about it from the news or the radio either. Neither Captain Midnight nor the Lone Ranger said a single word about it. There was nothing in the newspaper that I could see either. At least, there was nothing in the funnies about it. In all truth, I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the newspaper. None of the grownups in our circle ever mentioned anything about it either. The grownups were our primary source for general news and word about things going on in the neighborhood. Now, you may think a kid is preoccupied with something else while you are speaking to another adult, but I've got news for you. The kid is listening to your every word.

Oh, some time later, as I recall, we heard a rumor that the zoo wasn't taking any snake donations anymore. Now, I don't know if that had anything to do with us and our little misadventure or not. In fact, I don't know for sure if the whole zoo thing was really true in the first place. I do know that we believed it to be true, and that's why we did what we did and got ourselves into that impossible situation.

Thinking about the time back at the bus, all the while this whole ordeal was going on, Herbie and I spoke hardly a word to one another, except for one time. We were standing back away from the crowd just watching when we saw a couple of snakes wiggle their way out the back door of the bus and on to the street. It was then that Herbie said to me "I guess this means we can forget about the zoo". An understatement for sure. Several more of the snakes worked their way off the bus and on to the street as I recall. I remember a woman shopper with a small child in hand had joined the crowd. She was intent on hearing what had happened, and why the bus was stopped in the middle of the street. Meanwhile, her kid had reached down and picked up a snake by its middle. The snake was wiggling like crazy and the kid was pulling on his mother's skirt trying to get her attention so he could show her what he had found. She was obviously annoyed about being interrupted and she looked down at the kid in anger. But when she saw the snake, that was the end of it for her, she keeled right over in a dead faint. The nuns came running to help revive her.

The nuns were simply great during this time; the skinny nun had regained her composure and was busy comforting people. For a while there, the lady had two nuns giving her comfort, which she readily absorbed and seemed to soak up like a sponge. The rest of the nuns were continually busy checking on people to be sure everything was OK.

The young priest was walking around holding his shoulder, obviously in some kind of pain or discomfort. He may have hurt himself in the mad scramble to get off the bus. That is one possibility, and to this day, I truly hope that was not the case. Based on what I had observed first hand about the young priest, a more plausible explanation would be something like this. Due to his youth and inexperience, and remembering the rapid-fire manner in which he was making the sign of the cross, I think this young man had dispensed about six months worth of blessings in maybe twenty-eight seconds flat, and strained something in his shoulder in the process.

The older priest received all kinds of praise for his being the last one off the bus as I remember. He was given credit for making sure everyone else got off first. They spoke of his "personal courage", his being "a man of the cloth", his "bravery", his "love of God" and things like that. Well, it is an honest fact. He was the last one off the bus and I would never ever take that away from him. However, his courage, his bravery, his being a man of the cloth and all the rest of that stuff, had absolutely nothing to do with it. The only reason the old priest was the last one off is because at the time the rest of the people were scrambling to get off the bus, the fat nun had this poor guy pinned to the floor.

And that lady, that nosey busybody of a lady, if she would have only left us alone we would have been OK. But she wouldn't leave us alone. She just had to satisfy her "curiosity of the moment" as she put it. Well, let me tell you. When she looked into that shopping bag and saw what she saw, not only did it take care of her curiosity of the moment, it took care of any curiosity she might possibly have had, for the rest of her natural life.

Thanks for your participation.

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