“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 you 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 alclass="underline" 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.