by Dean Ing
At Charlie’s toss, the glider darted downslope instantly, rolling over and over as if spinning around an imaginary tree trunk, then stuck like a dart in the grass but, being stout pine, without damage. “Wait, I can fix that,” Charlie cried, and raced to recover the thing. He had seen Aaron adjust models a dozen times.
Aaron watched until he saw that Charlie, with scant knowledge of flight adjustments, was bending a wing’s edge exactly the wrong way. “You’ll make it worse, guy,” he said, and received a disgusted who’s the expert here glance. “Okay, then,” he shrugged, “but you will.”
“I reckon I know how to fly my own airplane,” said Charlie hotly, and prepared to make another toss.
And in that moment, Aaron Fischer made a grand discovery. It is this: To Avoid Ever Repeating A Cheap Mistake, Make That Mistake More Expensive. “A nickel says it’s gonna do a worse barrel roll than before. A nickel, Charlie. Five cents cash. Or . . .” And Aaron sounded the cluck of a hen.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed at the hint that he might be, in the slang of that era, “chicken.” Without forethought, his teeth gritted, he said, “Make it a dime.”
“A quarter,” Aaron said calmly.
“A dollar,” Charlie said in a hoarse whisper, and followed that with what was, for Charlie, a mighty oath. “A D-Word dollar, and we’ll see who’s chicken!”
Aaron spat in his open palm and stuck his hand out to be shaken, and Charlie shook it, and only when Aaron stood away and folded his arms did Charlie pause to consider the size of the bet his mouth had made for his pocket to risk. But he had enlarged the bet himself—twice, in fact. He tossed the glider again, and this time saw it flutter down in exactly the kind of tight spiral Aaron had predicted.
No words were exchanged until Charlie returned with the nonflying toy and, on his face, a look of abject disgust. Instead of the “told you so” that a lesser failure deserved, Aaron sighed. “Happened to me a few times too,” he said. “Maybe we can fix it.”
“It’s no good,” said Charlie.
“It might be. Tell you what: I’ll buy it from you.”
Charlie’s sharp glance searched for sarcasm. Finding none, he said, “What for?”
“For one dollar,” said Aaron, and saw understanding flood his pal’s face. “Then I get to try and fly it myself.”
Silently, sheepishly, Charlie handed over the toy and watched as Aaron began to make changes. A wingtip was shortened by grinding it against the cement sidewalk. A wooden edge was smoothed, then bent correctly. The little glider’s balance was changed with half a piece of chewing gum that Charlie, on Aaron’s instructions, pried from the underside of a park bench and squeezed to regummify it. After two more tests a piece of gravel the size of a pea was added to the gum and this time the model flew an almost straight lazy glide down the hill.
By this time Charlie’s mood was greatly improved. “If we catapult it, maybe it’ll climb,” he said.
“Wings are too short now,” was the reply. “It’d need something more powerful than a catapult.”
Charlie, with sudden enthusiasm: “A dogapult!”
Hearing this gibberish, Aaron said, “Are you nuts?”
Charlie dug into his pocket for the wad of rubber. “Five feet of rubber tied to a rod stuck in the ground is your catapult. So twenty feet of it would be my dogapult.”
Aaron had suggested more power, but this was far beyond his ideas and it engaged his imagination. Minutes later they had driven a stout oak stick into the soil, tied loops at the ends of the rubber, and fixed one end of the loop to the stick above grass level. And every time one of them murmured “dogapult,” the other would cackle.
Finally, when the remaining loop had been slipped into a notch under the model’s nose, Aaron backed away holding it by the tail until the rubber was stretched several times its ordinary length. He called, “C’mere, Charlie, you do it, it was your idea.”
Charlie needed no more encouragement than this. The rubber’s tug was like a live thing, and on its release the glider sprang away with the speed of an arrow. Given so much power and cheers from both boys, it flew up and up above the tops of the park’s oak trees with one broad, glorious barrel roll, then slowed and turned its nose down halfway across the park, plunging into a treetop thirty feet above the ground. And there it stayed, barely visible among oak leaves in a prison of twigs.
“Well, you told me to,” said Charlie.
Aaron had suffered such losses before. “I’m not going up there after it,” he announced. “It’s lost for sure.”
But the amazing flight of the glider had already given Charlie an appreciation of the power of his invention. “Not if it’s up to Charlie Hardin,” he said. “Let’s go back to my lab’ratory. My dogapult put that durn thing up there and my dogapult will get it down again.” And before they had walked a city block, Charlie made his plan clear.
CHAPTER 9:
LINT IS AVENGED
Along streetsides and in vacant lots, Austin’s weeds included a fast-growing vine with gourds the size of a baseball. The gourds were easy to find because they were of no practical use. Green and striped with a tough shell, the little spheres were heavy with seeds and stringy wet stuff, but they would bitterly disappoint any boy who broke one open expecting it to taste like a tiny watermelon.
Charlie knew this when he collected one of the gourds on his way home. “We need a pouch to hold this in the dogapult,” he said, tossing the thing to Aaron.
“And a forked branch,” Aaron replied. “As big as a crutch. But if your mom sees you with a slingshot that big she’ll scalp you.”
Charlie agreed with a nod. “Even if all I’m gonna shoot is some ol’ branches instead of climbing to the top of that tree. A guy would have to be crazy to go up there.”
“Or real, real dumb.”
“Yeah.” Then Charlie brightened. “Hey, you think maybe for a nickel I could get Roy to—”
“No, Charlie. Nuh-uh. Roy might be worth something to somebody, someday. Besides, this way will be funner,” said Aaron, tossing the gourd back, continuing straight ahead as Charlie turned toward the Hardin driveway.
Charlie paused. “Where you going?”
“Down to the creek to find me a crutch so I can play wounded soldier. No skin off my nose if somebody I know can use it for his dogapult.”
Charlie watched his pal amble down the street and, as Lint trotted out with salivary greetings, held up the gourd. He hurled it toward a neighbor yard with a command to “fetch!” and the terrier bounded away in pursuit. Gourd, stick, ball, or brickbat, they were all the same to Lint; if his master could throw it, Lint would capture it.
Boy brains are wonderful in the different ways they work, and more so in the different ways they play. The focus of thought in some boys, tight as a burning glass, might sizzle on one point for an hour or more, but Charlie’s thoughts leaped like a kangaroo. In his case, a few minutes in fruitless search for a leather slingshot pouch produced enough boredom to approach pain, and curlicues in his strips of rubber reminded him of pretzels his mother believed she had hidden well in the pantry. Nibbling pretzels into shapes that formed numbers and letters diverted him toward algebra, which interested him long enough to wade through half of his math homework, but the plight of two trains leaving the same station in different directions at speeds X and 2X sent him scrambling to assemble sections of track for his spring-wound model locomotive. When the locomotive left its track and sped away under his bed, Charlie wriggled among debris to retrieve it. He discovered, in addition to enough dust-bunnies to stuff a sofa pillow, a long-lost tennis shoe, which was not only worn out but by now several sizes too small. And emerging from under his bed, Charlie looked at the tennis shoe tongue he gripped and saw that it could form a slingshot pouch big enough to enclose a baseball.
No wonder, then, that while Aaron Fischer was securing a forked stick of pecan that a boy might carry publicly in the role of fictitious wounded soldier, Charlie trimmed the elastic of his s
lingshot, ruined his appetite, did much of his homework, cleared the dust-balls from beneath his bed, discarded an old shoe, and linked the slingshot’s flexible parts together with stout fishing line. It may be enough to note that to get anything done in this world, the Charlies benefit from the Aarons, and Aarons need their Charlies.
Charlie would have denied that every time he walked past the park for the next few days, he breathed a silent “yes!” when he spied the short-winged glider twisting lazily in its treetop. Retrieval was his mission, and no wind or squirrel or tree-climbing fool would have earned his thanks for doing the job.
Late on a Sunday afternoon the boys finished their preparations and trudged up the steep slope of the street, Aaron drawing the pity of strangers with his wrist-thick crutch of hardwood that was too long to fit his armpit properly, Charlie pulling a discarded golf cart. When Aaron asked what the wheeled bag was for, Charlie explained that it was supposed to be a caisson. “But it’s really to keep the sling stuff and gourds in,” he admitted.
“You got me there. What’s a caisson?”
“Beats me,” said Charlie, “some kinda box I guess, but in that army song they say those caissons go rolling along, and if you can be wounded, I reckon I can roll a caisson.”
“What kind of army?” said Aaron.
“Artirrily,” said Charlie. “They shoot big cannonballs.”
“It’s artillery.”
“Yep,” was Charlie’s reply as he freed a gourd from its vine and dropped it into the bag. Aaron opened his mouth, then closed it again and handed Charlie a gourd that had thought it was safely hidden.
With a half-dozen of these vegetable cannonballs they reached the oak that still unfairly held the glider captive, and only after tying the rubber cords in place did they find—as they might have found sooner if they had rehearsed in the “lab’ratory”—that the sturdy forks of pecan wood did not bend in a way to let them aim directly upward. They walked off some distance, then moved again. The best spot for aiming, they saw, was in the lowest depression of the park with a direct view of a small toy of pine caught high in an oak.
It was clearly a two-boy task, and Charlie made the point that the inventor of a thing, the one who gave it its very name, should naturally be first to test it. So it was Aaron who sat cross-legged with the pole of the slingshot propped against one shoulder and anchored between his feet, gripping the pole tightly while Charlie chose the biggest of the gourds and settled it into the shoe-tongue pouch.
Their first attempt was weak because Charlie failed to stretch the rubber strips far enough. The little gourd described a lazy curve into the tree’s lower branches and fell back as if to mock them.
“My turn,” said Aaron, transferring the pole to Charlie, choosing a smaller gourd and improving his aim by closing one eye and squinting with the other, tongue caught between his teeth, nodding to himself, with all the other preparations a boy needs to show the world that he is an expert not to be trifled with.
As Aaron hauled back mightily, Charlie shifting a bit against the heavy tension, a breeze moving the treetop, the glider moving to and fro, any exact aim of a gourd was sheer luck. But Aaron’s luck was wonderful, and awful too. As the tension departed, Charlie tumbled backward. The little striped globe whirred away and bullied a leafy twig aside before striking the glider with an audible report, continuing in an arc that took it into another tree half a block distant and several seconds later.
“Now you went and did it,” said Charlie, as pieces of the ex-glider fluttered earthward. And then he heard the faint commotion as their falling ammunition made its way down through the distant tree, and his frown evaporated. “You hear that? It musta gone a mile!”
“It went pretty good,” said Aaron, strolling to collect the shards of a toy that, while he had aimed at, he had never expected to hit.
“My dogapult could shoot clear across town, I bet,” Charlie said, ignoring the debris. “Whatta you think?”
“I don’t think it’s fixable, guy, but I didn’t mean to.”
“Fixable? It doesn’t need to—oh, that thing,” Charlie scoffed, his head already filled with fresh possibilities. “Never mind, what we need is to find out how far a Hardin dogapult can throw a hand grenade. You know, one of those,” he said, indicating the rest of the gourds. “I bet we could get a patent and sell it to the army tomorrow, but we have to test it for distance first.”
Charlie’s enthusiasms often moved faster than others chose to follow, but Aaron was adaptable. If Charlie could think beyond the ruination of a new toy, Aaron would help him do it. “We shot high, but if you wanta shoot for distance it might go a lot farther,” he said, and with that the Hardin dogapult had a new goal.
An invention gains a great deal of importance by being labeled a military device, and the boys argued in great detail over which direction to launch their ammunition, what location to view it from, whether the grenades should be smaller or larger, and which launch angle would shoot the cargo across the greatest distance. They settled on a sloping spot with an iron-hard shrub so gnarled that the dogapult pole, wedged firmly between its branches, could be erected without a boy to anchor it. The “grenade” was to be launched at a shallow angle in the general direction of Charlie’s own home.
Though their labor was dull, they spent the time developing a lively argument over the manufacture of the Hardin Dogapult. Aaron was convinced that they could get by for their first army shipments using only a few dozen used inner tubes and a hundred pairs of old tennis shoes, while Charlie insisted that shoes and inner tubes must be new to be worthy of war materiel.
When at last Aaron was argued out of his status as a war profiteer, he trotted to a prominent hackberry tree and climbed it so that it afforded him a view over neighborhood housetops. “Be sure and aim away from the trees,” he called, “and I’ll tell you when to fire.”
Charlie was stung by the notion that someone else expected to be in command. Moreover, he had heard people testing complicated equipment and intended to do this thing right. So when he heard, “Three, two, one, fire” from high in the tree, he only drew the elastic cords back as far as he could.
Then he paused dramatically and sang out, “One, two, three, testing,” and released his ammunition aiming between two tiny branches. “That’s what you say when you test,” he called back.
Because Charlie was heavier and more muscular by twenty pounds, he was able to stretch the elastic farther. When the pouch sprang away, it actually whistled. The little gourd flew fast and high, clearing every treetop in the park long before the top of its flight, drawing a falsetto “Woooooo,” from Aaron.
Charlie had fired from a sitting position but now leaped to his feet and peered into the sky. “How far?” he called.
“Still up,” was the reply. “Coming down. Can’t hardly—” and then Aaron ducked as if someone had dropped a heavy book on his head. A half-second later they heard a clattering crash in the distance, not much different from the sound a sledgehammer might make if hurled against a slate blackboard. Aaron continued to watch, but now seemed to be an unmoving sculpture against the hackberry trunk.
Charlie ran to the base of the tree. “What? What?”
Not so loud as before, Aaron called back, “Hit ol’ man Turner’s roof is what. Knocked a tile plumb off.” As he spoke, both boys could hear the slow distant scrape of large pieces of flat tile as they slid down a sloping roof. Aaron hugged tightly to the tree now as if to hide, though the gourd had struck a full block and a half away, and well below them. Then it occurred to Charlie that even at that distance, Mr. Turner’s house made a sizeable target.
The Turner residence lay across the street from the Hardins. Charlie had maintained no opinion of the childless Turner couple until after the day Lint distinguished himself by digging among Mrs. Turner’s snapdragons and getting caught at it. A few days later Charlie had observed Mr. Turner using a Daisy air rifle, one so new a price tag still hung from its pump lever, and he was using i
t on Lint even though the dog was not even near the Turner turf. A Daisy was spring-powered and its BB would barely pierce a boy’s skin, but it stung like a bee and could be deadly to a bird, or a window. This is why Charlie might never find a Daisy under the Hardin Christmas tree.
Now, Charlie surprised himself with the vastness of the satisfaction he felt, hearing the progress of that tile. “Stay up there and see what this does,” he ordered, already in motion. He snatched up one of the remaining gourds and prepared a launch exactly as before. The two small branches centered his aim again; his second test announcement made it official. Even the wind’s whistle was the same.
But this time, Charlie was up and running instantly toward Aaron’s perch, peering through trees toward his grenade though any glimpse of it by Charlie would have been a miracle.
Before he had run a dozen steps he heard Aaron call, “It’s gonna—” and then the report of a second shattering collision, faint but emphatic “—hit ol’ man Turner’s back porch,” Aaron went on. Charlie had intended to leave matters at this, until Aaron continued his observations. “Uh-oh. Here he comes.”
Charlie molded himself to the hackberry trunk. “Where?”
“Not here, dummy; he just stepped off his porch. Hands on his hips. Looking at his roof. Wow, he’s mad enough to pee steam.” Charlie would have given a lot to be standing where his friend stood with a bird’s-eye view downhill, but these bulletins were satisfying enough. “Gone back inside,” the announcer continued. “Boy, I hope your fingerprints aren’t on those things; the way he was hopping around he was sore as—oh man, here he comes again, and he’s got a rifle.”
For a count of two, an invisible ice cube meandered down Charlie’s back. Then he said, “Maybe like a Daisy air gun?”
“It’s kinda little. Yeah, maybe a Daisy.”