By the end of the week, the only interest we’d succeeded in attracting was that of other students. There had been too much huddling and conspiring in hallways, too much blabbing on Kortenhof’s part. We added a seventh member simply to buy his silence. A couple of girls from Fellowship grilled me closely: Flagpole? Uncle? Can we join?
As the whispering grew louder, and as Kortenhof developed a new plan for a much more ambitious and outstanding prank, we decided to rename ourselves. Manley, who had a half-insolent, half-genuine fondness for really stupid humor, proposed the name DIOTI. He wrote it down and showed it to me.
“An anagram for ‘idiot’?”
Manley giggled and shook his head. “It’s also tio, which is ‘uncle’ in Spanish, and ‘di,’ which means ‘two.’ U.N.C.L.E. Two. Get it?”
“Di-tio.”
“Except it’s scrambled. DIOTI sounds better.”
“God, that is stupid.”
He nodded eagerly, delightedly. “I know! It’s so stupid! Isn’t it great?”
NINE OF US were piling out of two cars very late on the last Saturday of the school year, wearing dark clothes and dark stocking caps, carrying coils of rope, and zipping up knapsacks that contained hammers, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, and customized floor plans of the high school, when a police car rounded the corner of Selma Avenue and turned on its searchlight.
My instinct in police situations, honed by years of shooting off fireworks in a community where they were banned, was to take off running into the dark of the nearest lawn. Half of DIOTI came loping and scattering after me. It was a long time since I’d run through dark lawns uninvited. There was dew on everything, and you could encounter a dog, you could hook your foot in a croquet wicket. I stopped and hid in a group of rhododendrons where Schroer, the Monty Python disciple, was also hiding.
“Franzen? Is that you? You’re making an incredible amount of noise.”
In my knapsack, besides tools, I had Easter candy and green plastic Easter hay, five rhymed quatrains that I’d typed on slips of bond paper, and other special equipment. As my own breathing moderated, I could hear the breathing of the squad car’s engine in the distance, the murmur of discussion. Then, more distinctly, a shouted whisper: “Ally-ally-out-’n’-free! Ally-ally-out-’n’-free!” The voice belonged to Holyoke, one of our new recruits, and at first I didn’t understand what he was saying. The equivalent call on my own street was ally-ally-in-come-free.
“The story,” Holyoke whispered as we followed him toward the patrol car, “is we’re tying a door shut. Gerri Chopin’s front door. We’re going to the Chopins’ house to tie her door shut. We’re using the ropes to tie the door. And the tools are for taking off the hinges.”
“Michael, that doesn’t make any—”
“Why take off the hinges if we’re tying—”
“Hello!”
“Hello, Officer!”
The patrolman was standing in his headlight beams, examining knapsacks, checking IDs. “This is all you have? A library card?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked in Peppel’s bag. “What are you doing with such a big rope?”
“That’s not a big rope,” Peppel said. “That’s several small ropes tied together.”
There was a brief silence.
The officer asked us if we knew that it was after one o’clock.
“Yes, we do know that,” Manley said, stepping forward and squaring his shoulders. He had a forthright manner whose ironic hollowness no adult, only peers, seemed able to detect. Teachers and mothers found Manley irresistible. Certainly, in spite of his shoulder-length hair, my own mother did.
“So what are you doing out so late?”
Manley hung his head and confessed that we’d intended to tie the Chopins’ screen door shut. His tone suggested that he could see now, as he couldn’t five minutes ago, what a childish and negative idea this was. Standing behind him, three or four of us pointed at the Chopins’ house. That’s the Chopins’ house right there, we said.
The officer looked at the door. We would seem to have been a rather large crew, with a lot of ropes and tools, for the task of tying one screen door shut, and we were less than a hundred yards from the high school in prime pranking season. But it was 1976 and we were white and not drunk. “Go home to bed,” he said.
The squad car followed Kortenhof’s station wagon back to his house, where, in his bedroom, we decided not to make a second attempt that night. If we waited until Tuesday, we could get a better cover story in place. We could say, I said, that we were observing an unusual stellar occultation by the planet Mars, and that we needed tools to assemble a telescope. I insisted that everyone memorize the bogus name of the bogus star: NGC 6346.
Luckily, the sky was clear on Tuesday night. Davis escaped his house by jumping out a window. Schroer spent the night at Peppel’s and helped him push the family car out of earshot before starting it. Manley, as usual, simply got into his father’s Opel and drove it to my house, where I’d climbed from my bedroom window and retrieved pieces of my hitherto useless telescope from the bushes where I’d hidden them.
“We’re going to watch Mars occult NGC 6346,” Manley recited.
I felt a little guilty about abusing astronomy like this, but there had always been something dubious in my relationship with nature. The official fifty-year-old enjoyed reading about science; the unofficial adolescent mostly cared about theatrics. I longed to get my hands on a bit of pure selenium or rubidium, because who else had pure selenium or rubidium in his home? But if a chemical wasn’t rare, colorful, flammable, or explosively reactive, there was no point in stealing it from school. My father, my rational ally, who by his own testimony had married my mother because “she was a good writer and I thought a good writer could do anything,” and who’d chafed against her romantic nature ever since, encouraged me to be a scientist and discouraged me from fancy writing. One Christmas, as a present, he built me a serious lab bench, and for a while I enjoyed imagining myself keeping a more rigorous notebook. My first and last experiment was to isolate “pure nylon” by melting a scrap of panty hose in a crucible. Turning to astronomy, I again was happy as long as I was reading books, but these books reprinted pages from amateur stargazing logs whose orderly example I couldn’t follow even for one minute. I just wanted to look at pretty things.
Riding with Manley through the ghostly streets of Webster Groves, I was moved for the same reason that snow had moved me as a child, for its transformative enchantment of ordinary surfaces. The long rows of dark houses, their windows dimly reflecting streetlights, were as still as armored knights asleep under a spell. It was just as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis had promised: there really was another world. The road, devoid of cars and fading into distant haze, really did go ever on and on. Unusual things could happen when nobody was looking.
On the roof of the high school, Manley and Davis gathered ropes to rappel down exterior walls, while Kortenhof and Schroer set off for the gym, intending to enter through a high window and climb down on one of the folded-up trampolines. The rest of DIOTI went down through a trapdoor, past a crawl space, and out through a biology-department storage room.
Our floor plans showed the location of the thirty-odd bells that we’d identified while canvassing the school. Most of the bells were the size of half-coconuts and were mounted in hallways. During a lunch hour, we’d given a boost to Kortenhof, who had unscrewed the dish from one of these bells and silenced it by removing the clapper — a pencil-thick cylinder of graphite-blackened metal — from its electromagnetic housing. Two teams of two now headed off to disable the other bells and collect the clappers.