Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“A fuse won’t work. We need to put a wire inside and somehow get it to burn.”

“Like a filament in a light bulb,” Walter said. “Connect a small wire to two thicker wires to make a circuit. The thin wire will burn.”

“How do we set it off?”

“Control the flow of electricity.”

Walter’s thumb was pressed against the handle of the transformer. He began to giggle, as he did when he was watching a bonfire, the times I called him a pyromaniac, the excitement that made me happy and scared John Burkell.

“Use the transformer. Or are you too chicken?”

“Up your bucket,” he said.

Walter detached the wires from the track. He snipped off a small piece of wire from a spool — the sort of multistrand wire we had on our lamp cords. He untwisted it and separated a single strand, then attached this narrow wire to the two thicker wires trailing from the transformer, connecting them, like the filament in a light bulb.

“Stick it on the floor,” he said.

He pushed the handle of the transformer and all the lights went out.

“Walter!” his mother screamed from upstairs.

We put a new fuse in the fuse box, and the next time we used a narrower wire, which glowed and burned like a bright strand of hair when he gave it juice.

“The bridge wire,” Walter said, poking at the ashes. “That’s our detonator. Thanks, Hoolie!”

We made another one, twisting the wires into a circuit, then slipped it into a cigar tube. Holding the tube upright, we packed it with the mixture of sulfur and powdered aluminum. When it was taped and thick, with the loose wire attached like a fuse, it had the look of a real bomb.

“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.”