The Cards

Somewhere in Grady County is buried a tin can. Inside of that tin card is a deck of cards.

 

They’re not playing cards. Or baseball cards.

 

Nope. They’re cards with the photos of naked women on them.

 

I spent ten years of my life looking for those cards.

 

They are still lost.

 

I’ve written before that I spent a lot of time in the woods while growing up. Me, my brother and my cousin who lived a few miles up the road.

 

That’s not true.

 

We didn’t spend ‘a little’ time in the woods. We basically lived there.

 

There were many days during my childhood when the only time I went back to my house was to sleep and make some sandwiches.

 

As soon as the sun rose, I was up and gone. Back to the woods.

 

I don’t know why my brother and I had such a fascination with the outdoors.

 

We didn’t hunt or fish. We had tried trapping a few animals so we could get rich by selling their hides.

 

That venture ended after an unsuccessful attempt to skin and cure a raccoon hide went very badly.

 

But that once botched foray into being rich fur traders didn’t keep us from living out our childhoods in the forest.

 

Mostly we spent our time gigging frogs, catching snakes and trying to cure ‘rabbit tobacco’ into a state where it was bearable to smoke.

 

It never was.

 

But there was one day when I was maybe six or seven years old when our young lives changed.

 

That was the day my cousin showed up with the cards.

 

At first, we thought they were just playing cards. We had played many a game of Go Fish and War at the little camp spot where we kept our tent set up all the time.

 

But these were not playing cards.

 

My cousin never said where he got the cards but we didn’t care. If we got caught, all fingers would point towards him. He was one and two years older than us so we could always claim he corrupted my brother and I.

 

He pulled something from his back pocket and told us that he brought a very special surprise.

 

The cards were wrapped in tin foil like a cheese sandwich. But there was no cheese in that foil. There was something a lot more tasty

 

Naked ladies.

 

Now at this point in my life, I had never seen a human female naked. Well, other than my four year old sister. And that was not very titillating.

 

These women were quite different than my sister.

 

For one thing, the women on those cards had breasts. All kinds of breast.

 

Some big, some small. Some pointing towards the sky. Some pointed towards the ground.

 

I had no idea breasts came in so many different sizes and shapes.

 

Now, believe me when I say that the women on those cards were not all ‘lookers.’ Many were well past the age when you should be taking your clothes off.

 

But they were girls and they were naked and although I was far from puberty,

 

I knew that looking at them was very wrong.

 

I just didn’t know why.

 

We spent many days sitting around the campsite looking at the cards and comparing the different photos.

 

It didn’t take long for us to get bored looking at the same black and white photos of middle-aged women with bodies that were not quite good enough to be in Playboy but who wanted to get their nakedness photographed nonetheless.

 

My cousin said he could not take the cards home. If his parents found them anywhere on him or in his room, he would be kicked out of the house and declared a pervert.

 

We were not about to take those racy photos back to our house. If my mom found that foil package of dirty pictures under my mattress, I’m pretty sure I would have been sent off to a boys-only military boarding school.

 

We were in a pickle, Dick.

 

If we wanted to keep those cards a secret, they would have to be hidden. And hidden good.

 

So we settled on a plan. We would wrap the cards back in the tin foil and put them into a metal tin that we kept our old rabbit tobacco in and bury them.

 

But it had to be somewhere that nobody would ever find.

“We need to make a map,” said my cousin. “A secret map that only we can read.”

 

He had apparently watched too many episodes of the Saturday morning TV show, Ranger Hal.

 

We thought that was a splendid idea. Well, at first.

 

We spent the rest of the day arguing about where to bury the tin. My brother wanted to choose a spot near our campsite so we could find it and dig it up more easily.

 

My cousin disagreed and said we should bury it deep in the woods.

 

I was six so I didn’t get a vote.

 

They finally settled on a spot far from our little tent. It would be easy to find, they said, because we would have a secret map.

 

And we did. My cousin pulled out a piece of notebook paper and a pencil and we marked off where to find it.

 

Ten paces this way. Twenty paces that way. My cousin insisted on making the map as complicated as possible, just in case someone found it and tried to steal our treasure.

 

And it was indeed complicated.

 

By the time we finished and dug a hole to drop in the metal tin, we couldn’t even see our campsite anymore and the paper was crisscrossed with a tangle of lines, directions and a big ‘X’ to mark the spot.

 

We patted each other on the backs for our ingenuity and went home.

 

The next weekend, we decided to head back out into the woods to ‘dig up’ our booty. There was only one problem: my cousin lost the map.

 

We had spent the entire afternoon creating a complicated map of where we buried the naked lady cards and then my nitwit imbecile of a cousin went and LOST IT!

 

My brother and I considered burying him in the woods. Without a map.

 

And then we came to our senses and decided our energy would best be spent not murdering our cousin but trying to find where we hid the tin.

 

We combed every square inch of that forest and found nothing. Well, we did find some fresh new rabbit tobacco. But we no longer cared about that.

 

We wanted to see some boobies.

 

So we spent the entire next day with a shovel digging beside every tree for a five mile radius.

 

Nothing.

 

After weeks of searching for the tin, we finally just gave up.

 

Well, they did. I didn’t.

 

For the next ten years, I dug up about 90% of those woods and found nothing.

 

I don’t know why. I no longer cared about seeing those old boobs. I just wanted to know where that damn tin box is.

 

And I still do.

 

I had to meet a client in Ochlocknee a few days ago and rode by the old spot where our house once was- it had burned down when I was in college.

 

I actually stopped, got out and walked around the old place. And for a brief moment, I had the urge to walk across the road into the woods to search for that tin box with those boobie pictures.

 

I knew it would be a waste of time but I didn’t care. This was like finding Big Foot to me.

 

Maybe I’ll get a shovel and go back. Maybe not.

 

But if I do go back and I do find that old buried tin, I know exactly what I’m going to do with those old, faded naked girl cards .

 

I’m going to show them to my cousin’s mother.

 

That’ll teach him for losing that map.