by Paul Theroux
“That’s half a pound of crazy shit,” Walter said. “That can do damage.”
“Guy says, ‘Hear about the guy who stuck a bomb up his ass?’ His friend says, ‘Rectum.’ Guy says, ‘Wrecked ’im—damned near killed ’im!’”
Walter pressed his lips together and laughed, holding the bomb, his shoulders shaking.
It was a week before we could test it, a week of school and wrong answers and “Nothing.” A week of “You looking at me?” and “Homo!” and “Banana man!” and “You’re going to hell, Herkis.” And that was the week of the Hop, when I saw Evelyn Frisch holding hands with Ed Hankey and guessed they were going steady.
My head was still hot. I was silent with a pain inside me, the physical ache, the bright wire of misery. And even Walter seemed like a big silly boy who was inviting abuse. At home my mother smelled the burned sulfur on me and said, “Have you been smoking?”
The next Saturday, after Walter got home from church, we waited for his parents to go out.
He said, “You think we should?”
“Would you rather go down to Hickey Park and warm the bench with Burkell and those other geeks and watch Quaglia and Frezza playing?”
He was holding the bomb.
“You want to be a water boy?”
Just listening to me made him chew in anger, and his eyes got glassy with resentment.
We dug a hole in his yard near his mother’s clothesline and buried the bomb, covering it with dirt, letting the wire stick out. We fastened a long wire to it in two twists and connected that wire to the terminals of the transformer, which rested on a small table in Walter’s garage.
From the garage door we could see the pile of dirt.
“One, two,” Walter said. “Here goes.”
The ground erupted with a sharp bulge and bang, dirt flying up, and an elegant mushroom cloud rising, lengthening on a stalk of smoke but not losing its shapely cap that widened to a dome ten feet in the air.
“Bastards!” Walter was shrieking, his fingers in his mouth.
Out of smelly powder and old wire and junk metal we had made something deadly. It was a dark afternoon in late fall, the black bushes bare, the grass wet, and the large black hole we had torn in the ground was still smoking near the clothesline.
That was our first bomb. After another week at school, being jostled and mocked, we made another one. Walter came alive that Saturday after his church service. He giggled with excitement as he packed the wire and the powder into a bigger tube and buried it deeper. He dared me to throw the switch, and when I said, “Are you scared?” he dived onto the transformer and squeezed it and the ground erupted thirty feet away with a half-muffled bang, the spray of dirt, the symmetrical smoke cloud.
“Wicked pissah.”
We spent so much time building the bombs that we became more neglectful at school and careless in our homework, so preoccupied that our science marks suffered. We weren’t studying enough. We were failing the tests and pop quizzes that Hoolie gave us.
“What’s wrong with you?” Hoolie said to me. He took for granted that Walter, being new, wouldn’t do so well, and also because Walter was teased so much he seemed to think there had to be a good reason for it, that Walter somehow deserved it.
We were both bullied more than ever. The reason could have been that we were happy. The contentment that showed in our faces seemed to invite hostility. We didn’t care. Having a bomb made life bearable—more than bearable: it was the answer to all the teasing. I was mocked, Walter was threatened. Walter couldn’t climb the rope in gym class, I couldn’t kick the ball straight at soccer practice. He was flunking history, I was flunking math. We didn’t have girlfriends, we didn’t share in the jokes. He was gawky, I was small.
We were teased because we were friends. “Faggot.” “Homo.” “Percy.” The teachers merely stood by: I deserved to be teased, I wasn’t answering in class. They seemed to agree with the bullies. But I had no one else. We were singled out to be ridiculed, and the other boys joined in. We kept to our corner of the schoolyard with the other misfits, Burkell among them, and Chicky DePalma, who was flunking every subject.
Yet we weren’t afraid. We had a secret: our bomb. Set off inside a desk, the bomb could shatter a wooden desktop and blow a student’s face off. It could smash glass or tear a locker open with a bang that could be heard all over the school. It could blast the aquarium apart in Hoolie’s lab, blind and maim any of those bullies, or blow a hole in Gagliano’s Oldsmobile.
Having the secret made us feel powerful. And the bomb components were easily hidden—the jar of sulfur, the bottle of powdered aluminum, the potassium permanganate, the length of wire, the tubes, the transformer from the train set. The real secret was the detonator—the cord, the twist across the tips, the sizzle of the bridge wire. Anyone could make a pile of explosive powder, but we had invented a detonator.
The secret also made me silent.
“What’s so funny?” my mother said.
“Nothing.”
I had been thinking about our bomb, seeing mayhem—a bloody wrenched-off leg sailing skyward, teachers howling, the cloud of smoke, the deafening bang. All that made me smile.
We kept the loose pieces in a shoebox and were happy in the certainty of what we could do with it—shatter Hoolie’s lab, blast the papers off Gagliano’s desk, scorch the smile off the bullies’ faces. In my imagining, Quaglia asked, “The hell’s that supposed to be?” as with a big bang and a flash of fire his bloody fingers were blown in five directions. On the soccer field, under a car, in the schoolyard, the dirt flying up, the slow cloud rising.
We had our own bomb. But we didn’t talk about it in a gloating way; we hardly talked about it at all, where it was or what we were going to do with it. It was enough to have it, an exploding thing, not a warm bright reassuring flare or fire, but a dark bomb that broke forth from underground with a bang like the crack of doom.
“You are such an asshole, Herkis,” Quaglia said to us in the schoolyard. “And you’re his faggot friend.”
We kept smiling, were almost gleeful when we were bullied, because the bullies were too stupid to know that we could dismember them with our bomb. We had a weapon fiercer than their abuse.
We were proud of having devised a cheap and lethal way of getting everyone’s attention, of making them afraid, of destroying them. That no one had the slightest idea of this made us even prouder.
Not much at school had changed. We were doing poorly in our studies. My mother blamed Walter. “He’s a bad influence.” Walter’s mother blamed me, probably because I ate hot dogs.
But it was simple. We hated school, we saw no point in it. Even as, in Walter’s basement, we were measuring chemicals, soldering wires, tinkering with the transformer, packing tubes with the powder, stockpiling bombs that resembled thick taped firecrackers, and—when Walter’s mother was out—exploding them, we were flunking science and in danger of having to repeat it at summer school.
“You better smarten up, fella,” Hoolie said to me.
The bullies repeated it. “Smarten up, fella!”
“I’m very disappointed in you,” Hoolie said to Walter.
We reveled in his disappointment. We were not miserable anymore—we were confident, perhaps overconfident. Having the bomb made us insolent at times. “Bold,” the teachers said, with a bad attitude.
“And that became known as the Westward Movement,” Mr. Gagliano said in history class.
Walter smiled, hearing it.
“Mr. Herkis, what do you find so funny about that?”
“Nothing.”
“Stand up!”
Walter stumbled getting to his feet, and stood there leaning, gnawing a bitten finger, his hair spiky, his chafed and knobby wrists showing beyond his shirt cuffs.
“We are studying American history. Lewis and Clark. Jefferson. The Westward Movement. And instead of taking notes, you smile.”
“I was taking notes.”
“Don’t yo
u talk back to me!” Gagliano was angry. “Get up here!”
As Walter stumbled forward, Frezza goosed him.
“Stand on one leg and repeat after me: ‘I’m dumb.’ Say it.”
“I’m dumb,” Walter said, tottering, wagging one hand for balance.
“Dumbo,” Quaglia whispered, his yellow face forward, his chin on his hand.
“Dumb ass,” Ed Hankey said, his scummy tongue between his teeth.
Gagliano was staring in fury while Walter leaned blotchy-faced in shame, his shirttail out, his ears red and veiny, his eyes wide open in fear, like someone about to be whipped.
I raised my hand.
“What do you want?”
“‘Dumb’ means you can’t talk,” I said. “So how can he say ‘I’m dumb’ if he’s really dumb?”
“Stand up!”
I did so, trembling, feeling fragile, my throat burning, my face hot, my eyes glazed.
“Smart guy!” Gagliano said. His head was skull-like, bald with wisps of hair, his teeth discolored, his mole vivid on his pale cheek. “Know what you need? A swift kick. And I’m the one to do it. Know what we did with pipsqueaks like you in the army? Whaled the tar out of them, that’s what. Sit down, the two of you. You make me sick.”
Like that, we had new names, Dumbo and Pipsqueak. We were goosed and kicked in the ankles as we went from class to class. Burkell was so afraid he avoided us.
But we were defiant. We had a weapon.
Bombing was not a decision we discussed. It was an unspoken plan that we’d use our bomb against the school. The question was where? The science lab was too obvious, and though we were failing in science, we liked Hoolie. Maybe at morning assembly, but where to plant it? In the schoolyard at recess was easy, but the area was too spread out. How could we get the whole school watching? We somehow shared these thoughts without uttering them.
Sitting on the bench during soccer practice one afternoon at Hickey Park, we listened to Gagliano screaming, the muscles tightening in his throat and narrowing like cords.
“You gotta do better than that against the Hobbes,” he yelled, as Frezza stumbled trying to head the ball.
The Miller Baldwin–against–Hobbes game marked the end of the soccer season, a day when the stands were filled with students, and even teachers and parents cheering, the whole school watching the junior varsity, Quaglia and Frezza and Hankey trying to impress them.
Staring ahead at the dank field, the dripping trees, the muddy boys, and tight-faced Gagliano, I said, “We can do better than that.”
Walter looked at me. And, like that, the decision was made to explode a bomb at the soccer field during the big game, plant it somewhere everyone could see it. Not kill anyone but make a big bang, maybe hurt them a little, certainly scare them.
“Gonna rip it up,” Walter said in a lilting way, “and ball tonight.”
On the field, near the goal mouth, when both teams were massed at a scoring attempt, the whole school watching. The bomb would be buried about six or eight inches, and when the players were bunched in that area, as they often were during a close kick, we’d throw the switch.
I saw it all: the screaming fans, the game in progress, Gagliano clawing at his baldness, Quaglia booting the ball or Frezza heading it, all the cruel boys, and Evelyn and her friends in the stands, the sun shining, the band playing . . .
Then boom! Hell on the field.
We would be hiding behind the changing room, and when the bomb went off and everyone rushed onto the field, we’d simply unplug the transformer and leave the burned wires behind. The whole event would be so sudden and so loud, so smoky and concentrated at the goal, that we’d have time to slip away—just duck through the gap in the fence into Water Street, cut through back yards to the Fellsway, and take the bus home.
The wire would be found, but with nothing attached to it except, Walter said, maybe a message: Up yours.
I said, “They’d recognize our writing. They’d get fingerprints. They’d trace us.”
“I don’t care if they find me,” Walter said.
“It’s better if they don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because then we can do it again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Walter said, biting his fingers.
We stole a spool of extension cord from the projection room of the school auditorium. We needed almost two hundred feet of cord, so that we could stay as far from the bomb as possible. And then we made more bombs, just for practice. The best were aluminum cylinders we found in Walter’s basement—the same shape as the cigar tubes but fatter and longer. They were thin, so they blew apart easily. We had considered using iron pipes and glass jars, but we knew they were more destructive than we wanted. We could have made a killer bomb, filled a glass jar with explosive powder and rusty nails, one that would fling broken glass and metal and cause serious injury. We gloated about this and sometimes talked about the places we could set it off, the damage we could cause.
What we wanted most was the terror of a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and some minor injuries. We did not want to hurt anyone seriously or kill anyone. We wanted everyone to be afraid. Who did this? What crazy bastard?
We did not mind if we were suspected of doing it. We wanted to be feared for being crazy, being angry, for having the skill to make a bomb.
One day after school we went to Hickey Park and measured the various distances, to see if we had enough wire.
Mr. Gagliano came out of the changing room carrying a gym bag. “What are you boys doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You know, if you weren’t so lazy you’d be playing in the big game on Thursday.”
This was a lie. There was no way we could have played. He wanted our school to beat the Hobbes. He was on the side of the jocks against us.
“You could make yourselves useful. You could be water boys.”
We said nothing.
“Even so, I want you in the stands. Cheering for the team. You’re going to be there?”
Saying yes was a thrill.
He started away and turned his head to say, “If you can’t be athletes, you can be athletic supporters.”
And he laughed. It was the sort of joke the others made. But we laughed too—we were gladdened these days when anyone teased or mocked us; it made us stronger and single-minded, because we could say afterward, It’s your own fault.
We had no friends left, no one we could trust. Burkell hung around and said, “Want to come over to my house and read comic books?” Corny Kelleher said, “I’m looking for guys to collect money for the Jimmy Fund at the game.” And Evelyn Frisch looked at me in a resentful way, because I had stopped talking to her.
Comic books! The Jimmy Fund! Girls! What were they to us, in Walter’s basement, making extra bombs, filling cylinders, twisting wires, testing detonators. We felt like adults—we had power, we were to be feared, and we took pleasure in the fact that no one knew it.
Working on a bomb a few days before the game, we heard the sound of Mrs. Herkis’s high heels on the floor—a sound I had grown to like for the way it suggested her swinging legs—and then her voice at the stairway: “Walter, I’m going shopping. Remember to lock the door if you go out.”
When she had gone, Walter said, “Let’s test this one.”
“I hosey the transformer.”
Walter smiled. We wired a bomb and carefully buried it in the usual hole, covering it with loose dirt. Then we crept into the garage. Walter handed me the transformer. I took it and started counting. I pushed the lever and the ground erupted. Dirt was flung up and a cloud of smoke began to rise as I dropped the transformer.
“Wicked pissah! Let’s do another one.”
“We only have two left.”
“The last one’s for the game.”
“You do this one.”
He rushed over, red-faced, laughing, to look at the damage to the hole, the burned wires, the flecks of metal, the hot steaming earth. He was laughing as he placed
the new bomb into the hole. “I want you at that game!” He snipped off the charred strands of wire and peeled the plastic from the gleaming strands. “Okay, I’m going to the game.” He began to twist the wires, connecting the bomb to the trailing wire to the transformer.
He was still talking as the bomb went off, a flash of fire, white and red in the middle of where his hands were, the bang and the brightness. We had never seen a bomb explode above the ground before, and this was very loud and very fiery, followed by a ball of smoke that swept across Walter as he fell back screaming.
He was not dead, but maybe he was dying. He was crouched, clutching his stomach. I ran to him, not knowing what to do. His screaming and crying somewhat reassured me—it meant that he was alive. But his face and his shirt were blackened, soot on his chin, the front of his jacket scorched. But what scared me most were his hands. Shreds of skin hung from his fingers, the skin blackened, his fingers and hands pink and raw, looking badly cooked, like hot dogs tossed on a fire. There was no blood, but the sharp smell of burned skin and hair was just as bad.
Kneeling there, Walter sobbing in pain, I heard a shriek—Walter’s mother at the window. And in seconds she was out of the door, rushing up to us, pushing me aside and still howling, dragging Walter into the house.
I coiled the remaining wire, to hide it, and when I came to the transformer I saw that I had left the lever pushed forward. Walter had been connecting live wires. I could hear him screaming upstairs.
“You’ve been smoking cigarettes,” my mother said when I got home.
“No.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Nothing.”
But the next day everyone knew. “It wasn’t me,” I said, but the way I said it hinted that it might have been. The news was so strange and unexpected that now I was teased in a different way, as equals tease each other, admiringly, almost affectionately. I said nothing more about the bomb, just sat, made no explanation. I wanted them to think that it was all my idea. That I had a bomb. That I had blown Walter up. That, if I wished, I could blow them up.
Hoolie said, “You think you’re so smart,” but I could tell that he was worried.
A few days later Walter came to school, his hands bandaged so thickly he looked like he was wearing mittens. Part of his face was burned, his chin peeled and red, his hair scorched. But there was defiance in his eyes. He lifted one of his mittens to Quaglia and said, “Rotate.” I envied him a little, because, being badly injured, he looked like a hero. But I was his friend, someone else to be feared, who might do it again.