Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“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.

He knew before he’d been posted to Bangkok that you invented a city, any city, from the little you learned every day by accident. This one you had to make for yourself out of noodles and flowers, a glimpse of the river, an odor of scorched spices, office talk, moisture-thickened air that made you gasp, and neon lights shimmying in puddles — beauty in half an inch of dirty water. Or something you’d seen nowhere else, like the gilded shrines on street corners, flowers and fruit left as offerings, piles of yellow petals, people at prayer, their faces the more soulful for being candlelit in the night.

Then you flew back home and told people, and that was the whole city for them, what you remembered. In Bangkok, the availability of food, of pleasure, of people, made Boyd Osier a little anxious and giggly. Strangers smiled and seemed to know what was in your mind. Take me! Taxi! Massage! What you want, sir? You could possess such a place, the people were so polite.

Believing that it was his last assignment, his working life coming to an end, Osier was more attentive in Bangkok than he’d ever been, with the sorrowful clinging gaze of taking a last look. His company had sent him there. It made components for cell phones, the plant in an industrial area outside the city near the old airport, Don Mueang. The work was American; his life alone was something else. Or was he too old for another overseas assignment without his wife?

Osier’s fear was that retirement meant his life would become a vacancy long before he was dead. If he wished to see where the years had gone, he only had to look at his unusual, carefully kept diaries. Instead of pages of scribbles, they were pictorial, a page of sketches a day. He had a small but reliable gift for caricature. His sketches were a relief from accountancy, though perhaps (he told himself) they were another kind of accounting, evaluating the day by illustrating it, the things he saw, the people he met, putting what they said into balloons. He told Joyce he did it for her, because when he was away she always asked, “What’s it like there?” But he knew he kept the pictorial diary for himself, to test his talent without any risk, and to record the passage of time, in sketching that had the calming effect of autohypnosis.

Before he left for Bangkok, Joyce had said, “The place I want to live is somewhere I wouldn’t mind dying.” That rang true, because in other overseas posts, those short assignments when he’d been auditing the company’s books, he’d thought, I would hate to die here — Ireland, Holland, Vancouver, the outsource centers they had developed. Something about the damp, the dark weather-pitted gravestones he’d seen under dripping trees, the insistent cheerfulness of people in the wintry gloom, indoors most of the time, so many of them careworn young people, resigned to their captivity. But Bangkok was his first hot country.