The Rolling Eye
by Don Drewniak
Suggested:
Read The Rolling Nickel before reading the
following story.
It was about 7:00PM
four days after Manny mooned the churchgoers. I
was part of a group playing cards in the big tent
opposite the one in which I was staying. In the
group was a kid named Bill who was thirteen-years
old and about my size.
We stopped playing when one of the kids said,
“Hey, Bill, what’s wrong with your eye?”
“It's a glass eye.”
Of course, everyone stopped to look at Bill’s
eyes. Sure enough, one of them looked different
than a regular eye.
“A glass eye?” asked one of the scouts.
“Yep,” replied Bill.
Then came a truly dumb question from another one
of the group. “Can you see out of it?”
“No.”
“What happened to your real eye?”
“It got infected and it had to be removed.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Next came a game changing question from a third
member of the group. “Can we see it?”
“Sure.”
With that, Bill put his hands up to his eye,
fiddled around a bit, and there it was in the
palm of his right hand. It was round and white
with a blue circle for a pupil. We all examined
it.
“Can we look inside your head?” asked
the same kid who wanted to see the eye.
“If you’re brave enough.”
I wasn’t. Only two were. As the question kid
bounced up to look inside Bill’s head, he
accidentally knocked the eye out of Bill’s
hand.
Clink!
Next came a protracted rolling sound. Then
nothing.
“Don’t move!” yelled Bill.
We froze as he dropped to his knees and began to
look around.
“See it?” someone asked.
“No,” came a worried reply.
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure, you dope.”
“Hey!”
After crawling around with no luck, he asked the
rest of us to help. “But go slow and be
careful and someone please gimmie a flashlight.”
One of the kids opened his trunk (we all had
trunks with locks) and pulled out a flashlight.
“Here.”
Bill grabbed the light and pointed it at a
knothole that was about an inch in diameter. it
was close to impossible to point the light into
the hole and look into it at the same time. Not
only that, but the light only covered two or
three inches in each direction.
No eye in sight. We tried fishing with a bunch of
different sticks. No eye.
I suggested we get Scoutmaster King. Off went two
of the posse.
“What’s the problem, men?” asked
the Scoutmaster. We all began speaking at the
same time.
“Whoa, just one of you.”
Bill proceeded to explain what happened.
After asking for the flashlight (it was really
more of a demand), King scoured the lantern-lit
floor. Nothing. Next, he peered into the hole.
Nothing. Then he tried fishing. Nothing. He
headed out of the tent telling us that he would
be back.
He returned in short order with the two
assistants. Each of them tried their luck to no
avail. They held a small conference before King
said, “Okay, men, carry everything out of
the tent.”
There goes the night.
By then, all the scouts were in the tent, so the
emptying was completed quickly. Next came the
disassembling of the tent. The tent seemingly
objected to being pulled apart and fought us the
entire time. Finally, there was nothing left
except the platform.
The plan as presented to us was that the
assistant scoutmasters would stand at either end
of the front of the platform. All of the scouts
would fill the space between them. On a count of
three from Scoutmaster King, we would lift the
platform just high enough for him to put jacks
from the pickup trucks under the front support
beam. The jacks could then be used to lift the
front high enough to let one of the scoutmasters
crawl under the platform and retrieve the runaway
eye.
“Hey, Dad,” interjected Johnny, “wouldn’t
it have been easier to just pry up the board with
the knothole?”
Silence dominated for about ten seconds.
“Why the f…,” began Scoutmaster
King.
I was convinced Johnny knew the easy solution all
along, but purposely kept it to himself. That
gave me a measure of confidence that he would get
us to the Girl Scouts camp.
The knothole board was pried up. A flashlight
search immediately revealed the eye to be about
five inches from where it had rolled into the
hole.
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