Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“It’ll explode, you crazy bastard.”

“Think I give a rat’s ass?” He snatched the can and in the same motion flung it into the fire. We ran behind a tree, crouching, awaiting the explosion.

Nothing happened for a long while, long enough for us to suspect that it wouldn’t blow. We got to our feet and tried to get a glimpse of the Cheez Whiz can discoloring in the flames, and as we peered, the can split with a disappointing pop, sending blue and gold sparks out of the fire pit, and an uprush of smoke and ashes.

“You’re a pyromaniac,” I said.

That pleased him. With pained eyes, his mouth twisted, his teeth clenched, Walter looked fiercely happy.

We were standing over the fire now, poking at the crater the exploding can had made in the fire pit. He jabbed his stick into the side of the split-open can and lifted it to admire it.

“I want to blow them all up,” he said.

Finished with the futile voodoo of running over bullies with Walter’s model train while listening to Little Richard sing “Rip It Up,” we made that our plan. But an aerosol can was not enough. We wanted to make a real bomb. But how?

“What about match heads?”

We tore the matches from ten matchbooks and snipped off the heads.

“‘Draw me,’” Walter said, reading the advertisements on the loose matchbooks. “‘Learn to write this winter. Make money in your spare time.’ It’s not working.”

The match heads fizzed and fumed, brightened and then shriveled black.

“Do I smell smoke?” Walter’s mother called out. “What are you two doing down there?”

“Chemistry,” Walter said, and frowning at the ashes, “This shits.”

There was no bang, no sound at all, just the brightness of the match heads, little pills alight.

“We need a detonator,” he said. “Not a fuse but something inside. A hot wire.”

Yet we were happy. It was the pleasure of being in the windowless basement, listening to Little Richard screaming, not being at school. School was disturbing in ways I could not put into words but could see clearly: the throng of reckless boys, the short-haired jocks, bigger boys, scrutinizing and sneering girls, the more beautiful ones the scariest, the loud boys, all of them like monkeys, even the teachers. Every day was a struggle, and the all-day occasions of ridicule made me hate myself for having to cope with them. What sustained me was that it was so much worse for Walter, almost two months into his transfer to Miller Baldwin and still being picked on.

The teachers picked on Walter too, especially Hoolie.

“Herkis, still biting your fingernails? Get over here. Let me see.”

He snatched Walter’s hand and made a face.

“Bitten to the quick. Sit down!”

Walter couldn’t help it. The more he was mocked, the more he chewed. He was mocked for not eating meat. Mocked for Saturday church. Mocked for not dancing. He was a freak. “You’re going to hell, Herkis! You’re probably not even an American.” And I was his friend.

We had quit the Boy Scouts. We now liked dissecting frogs and mixing potions, heating test tubes over the blue flames of Bunsen burners. The lab was the refuge of the geeks at Miller Baldwin, and we were the geeks. Science class was one of the classes Walter liked, and I did too. It was simple science, but it was smelly and involved bubbly liquids in heated test tubes, a bowl of mercury, dry ice. I liked the stink of the room, the tadpoles in the aquarium, the model skeleton hanging by its skull, the jars of chemicals with yellow labels, the brass microscope, the lenses and prisms. The slop of a purple mixture in a beaker, the hiss of the Bunsen burner, the drip of osmosis, and “It’s a bladder.”

Even the wildest boys in the class sat still and watched as Hoolie melted lead in a crucible. We were all in awe of the unexpectedness, the sizzle and smoke of an experiment, the surprise, the dazzle of science.

I wanted to be a scientist, not for the discoveries, not for money, but to make fires and boil flasks and liquefy metals in a clay dish, to stir green smoking chemicals in a big black kettle and mix explosives. That was my secret: science, with its riddles and surprises, was the nearest thing on earth to magic.

Hoolie was turning a crank today, making a big clear light bulb flicker.

“Why does a bulb glow?” Hoolie asked. “Anybody?”

It was the hot wire coil of the filament, tungsten, a hard-to-melt element on the periodic table, sealed and mounted in a circuit in the vacuum of inert argon gas in a bulb with no oxygen. Chapter five.

“Because the wire is heating up?” Kelleher said.

“Good. What do we call the wire? Anybody. Frezza? Zangara? Miss Frisch?”

“The circuit?” I loved her lost tongue lisping in her pretty mouth.

“It’s part of a circuit. But what do we call the wire, and what is its chemical composition? Walter?”

Walter shook his head.

“Jay, can you help us?”

“No, sir.”

“This was your homework! I’m wasting my breath. Take out your notebooks.” Hoolie sighed and wrote filament and tungsten and conductor on the blackboard, and he sketched a light bulb, the wires, with arrows indicating the electric current.

Frezza put up his hand. “So why don’t the bulb explode?”

It was the question I would have asked, if I had asked any questions. I listened carefully to Hoolie’s answer, about the gas, the vacuum, the absence of oxygen, the circuit.

“This filament is a kind of bridge,” Hoolie said.

At recess, in the schoolyard, Quaglia flicked a Zippo lighter in Walter’s face and said, “Herkis, you pineapple, what’s the chemical composition of this?”

“He bites his fingernails,” Frezza said. “Herkis, bite my gatz.”

Walter flinched and backed away, and then Quaglia lit a cigarette and palmed it and puffed it, eyeing Walter. “What are you looking at, shitface?”

Zangara said, “Plus, he’s going to hell for his fucked-up Saturday religion.”

On the way home, Walter nudged me and took a fat envelope out of his pocket. He lifted the flap and showed me the bright yellow powder.

“Sulfur. I hooked it from the lab.”

It was important to Walter that we steal everything from Hoolie’s science lab.

“For the bomb.”

Later in the week, another awful day at school, Walter stole another envelope, this one containing gray powder. And a small jar.

“Powdered aluminum. Potassium permanganate.”

That Saturday at the Sheepfold we mixed the chemicals in a little mound and lit it with a slow fuse of match heads and got a sudden bright blaze that surprised us with its force, crackling in the air. We looked around to make sure no one had seen us. We packed some more of the mixture into a metal cigar tube and used another fuse of match heads to light it. It flared, melting the metal, but did not explode.

“The detonator’s crappy. It’s just a fuse.”

Later that day we went back to Walter’s basement and worked the trains, the usual game of running over kids from the school and killing them, the bullies, the snobs, the jocks, the teachers, almost everyone we knew. It had begun as an excitement, but now it seemed a sad pastime, reminding us we were geeks.

“We need a hot wire, a real detonator, something to burn inside the tube. If it’s sealed under pressure, it’ll blow up.”

It was the feeling inside me, a wire that heated and burned and glowed and made me angry, reddened my face, made my hands damp. Walter had one inside him too, a hot wire, like a filament in a bulb that made him breathless and hot and tearful.

The train was going round and round, knocking down the little figures on the track, Walter twiddling the transformer.