Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Rip It Up

WATCHING THE BLACK locomotive come chattering out of the tunnel, one-eyed, trailing smoke, its sharp chin forward, worrying back and forth on its seesawing side cranks, and looking lethal as it bore down on the solitary figure standing on the tracks at the level crossing, I turned the music up and said, “So long, dead ass.”

John Burkell was biting his necktie in fear. He murmured, “No,” into the wet stripes, as though I had asked a question.

Walter Herkis lifted his uncertain eyes to me, and now the music was so loud I just shrugged and made a face, meaning, “So what?”

“Okay, die,” Walter said, turning back to the train.

As Burkell chewed his tie, the train shoved the little figure along, toppling it sideways and off the table. And I felt a kind of joy, watching Walter’s big confident hand on the transformer, now slowing the train.

“So long, dead ass!” Walter screeched. The other screech in the room was the phonograph, a 45 of Little Richard singing “Rip It Up.”

Walter’s mother called out, “What’s all that racket down there?”

“Nothing!” Walter looked at me for approval as he put another figure on the track, one of the toy pedestrians from the scale-model station. I was energized by the brainless clacking train and Little Richard, by Walter’s high spirits, thrilled too by John Burkell’s fear.

“Vito Quaglia would shit a brick if he knew you just killed him,” John said. “Even in fooling. He’s psycho.”

“He’s a banana man,” I said. “Who’s next?”

“I hosey Ed Hankey,” Walter said.

“Hankey’s a pissah. He can rotate on this.”

John stuffed his tie back into his mouth and looked around as though expecting to see big lisping Ed Hankey bulking at the back of Walter’s basement behind the model train layout, the toy hill, the toy town, the level crossing, where the train was bearing down on the image of Ed Hankey. Walter pushed the transformer handle to Full Speed and the front wheels jumped, almost derailing the shivering train, until the plastic figure spun on its back into the plastic trees.

“‘And ball tonight,’” Walter said, with the song. “That bastard. Let’s do the jocks.”

“I have to go home,” John said. His eyes, crusted with what he said was conjunctivitis, made him look sleepless and even more fearful. He slung his green book bag over his shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

When he was gone, Walter smiled at me. “He’s having conniptions.”

“Candy ass,” I said. “He’s wicked scared.”

But even so, I knew that we were much the same, anxious pimply fourteen-year-olds gathered after school, taking refuge from the ball field and the bullies, safe in Walter Herkis’s basement. Burkell chewed his tie, Walter bit his fingernails, I wore glasses and tried to rub the nearsightedness out of my eyes — my first year of glasses. We were miserable in much the same way, and misery made us friends. We hated school, every bit of it, the tough boys, the coy girls, the sarcastic teachers, the terror of the older students. The smell of the oiled wooden floors, the varnished desks, the urinal candy in the toilets. And the schoolwork itself — hated it most of all, because we were so good at it and made ourselves so conspicuous we pretended to have lapses of memory when we knew the right answers, Burkell in history, Walter in science, me in English, though I loved cooking chemicals in science, too. This infuriated the teachers, who seemed to know we were playing stupid. But it was dangerous to look bright.

“And here’s the rest of the jocks,” Walter said, dropping six small figures onto the tracks as he pushed the handle of the transformer once again, and the speeding train plowed into them, scattering them.

The music had stopped. I swung the arm of the phonograph and set the needle onto the edge of the record.

“Burkell’s chickenshit,” Walter said, picking up another figure. “Here’s Evelyn. Your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

But the music and the sound of the train drowned out my words as the locomotive sent Evelyn Frisch off the tracks.

“Don’t make me come down there,” Walter’s mother yelled. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing!” Walter called out. “Did you finish the book?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was the homework, The Human Comedy by William Saroyan.

“I don’t get it,” Walter said.

“It’s junk,” I said, and Walter looked shocked. “Homer’s a banana man.”

We were eighth-graders at Miller Baldwin Junior High. Walter was new to the school, someone the others had never seen before, a Seventh-day Adventist. He was depantsed the first day at recess, and cried. Then they knuckle-punched his arm with noogies. He was mocked for being tall and, his first day, for knowing the answers in science. He liked me because I didn’t mock him. He wore his pants so high you could see the tops of his white ankle socks. I was his only friend. We hiked in the Fells most Saturdays, we built fires at the Sheepfold. I liked him because he had more comic books than Burkell, and Elvis records, and a ham radio. And a whole big table of model trains that he ran with a transformer lever he worked with his thumb.

After he knocked some more figures down, he played “Rip It Up” again. I sat on his stool and touched the transformer.

“It’s hot.”

“Because it’s a transformer, shit-for-brains,” he said. “It’s the coil. The coil heats up from the molecules that are backed up by the wire density.”

I squinted at his precise explanation.

“It’s the resistance of the eddy current in the coil, because it’s stepping down from AC to DC at a lower current. Ask Hoolie.”

Mr. Hoolie was our science teacher, someone we exasperated by pretending not to know the right answers. I was impressed that Walter used the terms so easily: “voltage,” “molecules,” and “wire density.” The idea that electricity was reduced by flowing through tight coils of hot wires was something new to me.

We were unhappy, restless, lonely boys, and this wet afternoon in October was typical, taking refuge in the stinks and sparks of science. Walter was hunched over the transformer. He then disconnected the wires from the side of the track and lifted them, making a bright arc.

“Spark gap,” he said, smiling at the thread of smoke. “Now there’s no one else left. Just us.”

“You wish.”

Almost the first person I saw the next day was Vito Quaglia, and remembering how we had run him over with Walter’s train, I began to smile.

“The fuck you lookin’ at, four eyes, you fucken pineapple.”

“Nothing,” I said, and tried not to show my fear.

Quaglia was a skinny yellow-faced boy given to casual violence — not strong but reckless and slow-witted, usually open-mouthed, with a chipped front tooth that gave him a fang. He wore his shirt unbuttoned, a dirty T-shirt under it. His wild hair made him look fierce. He was always in trouble and had nothing to lose by more trouble. Though he was failing in most classes, Quaglia excelled as a soccer player — fast, a ruthless kicker — and as a result was popular with some of the teachers. His friends were either almost as tough as he was or else his fearful flatterers.

“Pineapple was making a face at you,” Angie Frezza said.

“You make one more face at me and I’ll put my foot so far up your culo you’ll have to open your mouth for me to take my shoe off.”

Frezza laughed at this and then said, “Mannaggia, look at the knockers on her, Vito,” offering him a picture torn from a magazine.

Quaglia opened his mouth wider, as though to see the picture better, showing his chipped tooth.

“Where’s your fairy banana man friend?”

Though I was hot and anxious, I pretended not to hear, made myself small, and slipped away as he looked closer at Frezza’s picture of a woman in a tight sweater.

He meant Walter, who was bullied because he was new, because he was weak, and especially because the word got out that he went to church on Saturdays. “Your wacky religion”—he couldn’t go to soccer games on Saturdays. Everything about him was noticed: he couldn’t eat meat, didn’t drink Coca-Cola because of the caffeine, couldn’t go to dances; he was a little too tall, and his clothes didn’t fit. His ears turned red and he went breathless and silent when he was bullied, suffering it, his ears reddening even more, and hadn’t fought back when he was depantsed.

“Quaglia hocked a louie at me in the corridor,” Walter whispered in English class. “At the bubbler.”

“He’s a pissah,” I said. “Tell him to rotate.”

Vito and Frezza always sat at the back of the class.

Mr. Purcell said, “Jay, do you wish to share your thoughts with the class?”

“No, sir.”

“Then sit up straight and pay attention.” He was holding a book. “Has anyone finished the book?”

He meant The Human Comedy. I did not raise my hand. I simply sat, breathing through my nose. It wasn’t that I hadn’t liked the book; I knew the book was bad. I could not have said that of the previous book, Silas Marner, but this one was unbelievable, sketchy, sentimental, and written like a lesson. I knew the fault was with the book and not with me.

My certainty that it wasn’t good made my head hot, as though I had been told a lie. I could have written an essay on why I didn’t like it. Instead, all of us had to write about why it was good. That was another reason I hated school, finding it unfair. But my disliking the book was a secret that also made me feel powerful, superior to school, but also out of place, like an outlaw. I believed in Little Richard more than I believed in Homer Macauley.

“Do you have something to say, Jay?”

“The teacher calls Joe Terranova a wop in chapter twelve,” I said.

Quaglia slammed his loose desktop and said, “Mannaggia!”

“Quiet,” Mr. Purcell said. “But the teacher was reprimanded for it. And what did the principal say?”

I had said enough. I had only wanted to shock the class by using the word “wop.” I shrugged, as though I didn’t know.

Mr. Purcell was holding the book open. “He said, ‘This is America, and the only foreigners here are those who forget this is America.’”

“And go to church on Saturday,” Vito said in a harsh whisper.

In science, the next class, Mr. Hoolie showed us a large glass ball filled with water.

“I’m taking for granted that you read the assigned pages,” he said, attaching a rubber tube to the glass ball. “This will show us two things. What two things? Anyone?”

“Air displacement,” Corny Kelleher said.

Mr. Hoolie took up a piece of chalk and wrote Air displacement on the blackboard.

“And?”

The answer was lung capacity. But I merely sat, squinting.

“It was in your homework,” Mr. Hoolie said.

“Air temperature?” Kelleher said.

“Lung capacity,” Mr. Hoolie said, and wrote the words on the blackboard. “Who’s first? Evelyn?”

We watched as Mr. Hoolie inserted a mouthpiece into the rubber tube, and then as Evelyn Frisch took the tube in her dainty fingers and placed it between her lips, there were murmurs from the back of the room.

“Settle down, people,” Mr. Hoolie said. “Go ahead, Evelyn. Blow as hard as you can.”

Vito muttered something, making his friends laugh.

“Mr. Quaglia, one more word from you and you’ll be seeing me after school.”

Evelyn had finished. The water in the glass ball had slipped down. Then it was Walter’s turn. He did it, reddening from the effort, and gasped when he was done. The class laughed, and even Mr. Hoolie smiled.

Next Ed Hankey took the tube and blew, and the water level dropped sharply. He bowed to the class, making them laugh, then sat behind me and flicked my ear with his finger.

“Beat that, banana man,” he said into his hand, and the class bell rang.

“Homework,” Mr. Hoolie said. “The principles of the light bulb, chapter five.”

Walter was hit by a spitball in history class. The teacher, Mr. Gagliano, was asking about the Louisiana Purchase, the previous night’s homework, and called on Walter, who was wiping the back of his head where the spitball had hit.

“Can you tell us about the Louisiana Purchase?”

As Walter shook his head, Mr. Gagliano turned to me. “Jay?”

Thomas Jefferson. 1803. The French sold it after they failed in Haiti. Slavery. Napoleon. Fifteen million dollars. I said, “Nope.”

Something at Miller Baldwin, a caged and hung-up feeling, and a jostling, and a gummy taste of failure I could not explain, made me wish to be mediocre and anonymous, and to hide my head from the ferocity of the school. It made me want to live in a foreign country. While depending on a hidden strength for no one to know me, I succeeded in keeping myself at Walter’s level, though the assaults were worse for him than for me. The rest of the day was the same, the routine of avoiding eye contact, or any contact, threading my way through the students without calling attention to myself. We sat with Burkell over our sandwiches at lunch at a far table, and at recess we stayed by the fence. We knew we had to keep ourselves apart.

The end of the day was the worst class of all, phys ed — Mr. Gagliano also taught phys ed. The embarrassment of changing in the locker room among the shouting boys; the pushing, the actual nakedness, the towel snapping; then the run to Hickey Park for soccer. Two times around the track, and then kicking. The other boys, especially Quaglia and his gang — Frezza, Hankey, Zangara — were fast, deft, accurate in their kicks. Nervousness made me stumble, took away my coordination, and when two teams were chosen and the game started, I sat on the bench.

Gagliano liked the boys who were good at soccer, the Italians especially. Instead of teaching us the moves — passing, kicking, heading, stopping the ball, he yelled at us to do them, and blamed us when we failed. For the games he chose the good players.

I watched the boys on the field, and Gagliano shouting, and just wanted it to rain — thunder and lightning — anything to end this; for someone to be seriously hurt, someone to die.

After the game, two more times around the field.

“Pick up the pace, Jay!” Gagliano screamed at me.

Another awful day at school. Homework tonight, then the same thing tomorrow, a whole day of hiding the fact that I was afraid, afraid of being exposed, mocked, bullied. I was weak — I was reminded of it every minute. Walter was weaker, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was picked on because I was his friend. I slightly disliked him for being geeky and helpless, for depending on me, for not having a girlfriend, for not realizing his religion was weird.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother asked me on Friday afternoon.

“Nothing.”

“What happened at school?”

“Nothing.”

Saturday — a game day — Walter had to go to church. But neither of us was on the soccer team, so when he got home from church at noon, we went for a hike, usually a long hike, eight miles to the Sheepfold, to make a big fire at the campsite there. We sat and watched the ragged flames licking at the smoke, the fire like an expression of our anger.

“Weenie roast.” I sharpened a stick with my jackknife and jammed a hot dog on it.

“You wouldn’t believe the crap they put in those things,” Walter said. “They’ve found human shit in some hot dogs. And thumbtacks.”

This was his Seventh-day Adventist denunciation of meat. Another one was that pork gave you worms, and that coffee was like poison. He ate peanut butter and baked beans and nut cutlets and cheese. He was holding an aerosol can of Cheez Whiz, spraying the stuff on a cracker, as I cooked the hot dog over the fire.

I took the can from him and read the label. “‘Contains cheese product. Salt. Artificial coloring. Emulsifiers.’ This is crap, Walter.” He started to laugh. “‘Do not incinerate. Do not use near fire or flame. Dispose of carefully.’” Walter was smiling. “I’m incinerating it. Because you’re too chicken to do it.”

“No, I’m not. Give it to me. I hosey.”

“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.

“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.”

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 all: 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.

What we wanted most was the terror of a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and some minor injuries. We did not want to hurt anyone seriously or kill anyone. We wanted everyone to be afraid. Who did this? What crazy bastard?

We did not mind if we were suspected of doing it. We wanted to be feared for being crazy, being angry, for having the skill to make a bomb.

One day after school we went to Hickey Park and measured the various distances, to see if we had enough wire.

Mr. Gagliano came out of the changing room carrying a gym bag. “What are you boys doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You know, if you weren’t so lazy you’d be playing in the big game on Thursday.”

This was a lie. There was no way we could have played. He wanted our school to beat the Hobbes. He was on the side of the jocks against us.

“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.