Portrait of a young con artist
Chapter three:
Fourth of July
Uncle Ed's voice roared across the yard.
"I didn't see where the sound was coming from at first, but I knew he wanted to skin me alive," Kenny said later. "Then I saw him hanging out the upstairs window. We had woken him up."
Ed had not yet spotted Kenny or Kenny's friend Dave inside the box at the foot of the house. But he could see the box.
"How were we to know that rolling around in the boxes from the outboard motors would make so much noise," Kenny said. "Ed normally slept like a log and took grandma four or five times to get him up for work."
"I know you're out there, boy," Ed yelled again, the echo of his outrage bouncing back from the neighbor's houses, threatening to wake up the rest of the neighborhood.
"He knew what we were up to," Kenny said. "From where he was he could see our box and the rest of the boxes he had ordered me to break up the night before."
Ed normally checked on these things, and completed the tasks Kenny neglected. But a boat delivery the day before and the promise of a long weekend had caused him to deviate from his usual diligence. So Kenny and Dave had found the boxes unmolested in the morning.
"So we figured we'd make use of them before Ed finally cut them up," Kenny said. "These boxes were big enough to fit both of us, and we use them as props for a variety of imaginary journeys. Sometimes, they served us as a submarine -- sometimes as a space ship. We always got over excited, sounding out the explosions when we sank a Nazi destroyer or blew up an invading flying saucer from Mars. It was one of these outbursts that reached him, and woke him, and inevitably got him mad."
"If you don't get out of that box right now, you'll be sorry when I come down there and drag you out," Ed shouted.
Dave quivered. Kenny told him not to move.
"But he'll come down here," Dave said. "I don't want to be here when he does."
"And maybe he won't," Kenny said. "He really wants to go back to sleep. Maybe if we stay still long enough he'll...."
"KENNY!"
"Since I hadn't fooled him anyway, I climbed out the side of the box," Kenny recalled.
"Did you want me, Uncle Ed?"
"Who you got in there with you?"
"It's only Dave."
"Tell him to get out of there. You think I want a lawsuit on my hands if he gets hurt."
Dave climbed out, too, though shaking a little, more than a head taller than Kenny, but twice as skinny.
"We were only playing rocket ship," Kenny said.
"Too bad," Ed said. "Toss the box out."
"But..."
"Do it!"
"We carried the box to the trash, Uncle Ed watching every step, and when we'd finished, he slammed the window shut," Kenny recalled.
"So what do we do now?" Dave asked, looking nearly as crushed as Kenny felt.
"Here it was the Fourth of July and we had nothing better to do than stand looking stupid in the middle of the yard," Kenny remembered. "Uncle Ed didn't let us play in his boats, saying we would break them, and he wouldn't let us play in the boxes he threw out."
"I guess we got to play with our other rocket ship," Kenny said.
"Here?" Dave said. "But I thought you was gonna save that for the Quarry?"
"We might wait all day for that," Kenny said. "Besides, I have a feeling that if we don't do it now, we might not get a chance to. Uncle Ed's bound to ground me for waking him up. So I'll go down into the cellar and get it, you go get some matches."
Dave left as Kenny circled the house to the cellar door, and eased down the dank stone steps into the dark to where he had hidden the rocket ship.
"I remember feeling my way along the dusty shelves," Kenny recalled. "The place was thick with cobwebs and the smell of old coal dust. My family had converted the place to oil before I was born, but the coal smell stayed in the place and in the winter came up with the heat. I remember panicking a little when I couldn't find the pipe at first, and swiping my hand around until I came in contact with the cool metal. I pulled it out very slowly. I kept thinking it might blow up in my hands if I was to bump it on something."
His grandfather had frequently cautioned Kenny about the dangers of gunpowder.
"And since we had emptied about twenty of Grandpa's shotgun shells into that pipe, I thought any false move might blow up the house," Kenny said. "I figured that would be enough to send that old pipe straight to the moon."
Outside, Kenny deposited the homemade rocket on an old tree stump along the side of the house. Weather and a resident colony of ants had shaped a large brown hole in the middle, into which Kenny trust the end of the rocket, leaving only the top exposed and the long fuse made of gunpowder and coiled toilet paper.
Dave lumbered down the slate path from the front of the house, ceremoniously carrying a box of white tipped wooden matches.
"He looked scared," Kenny recalled, "and his hands shook when he handed me the box."
"I don't know if we should be doing this, Kenny," he said.
"Why are you always trying to spoil things?" Kenny barked. "You know how long we planned this. You know we wanted to set this thing off on the Fourth of July."
"At the quarry, not here. What if we hit something?"
"What can we hit?"
"Any one of the houses around here."
"It's pointed up, isn't it? That's the direction it should go."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Will you stop with the negative thinking. It'll go up. Just stand back a little while I light the match."
Kenny struck the white tip against the slate walk, a flame sparking to the match to life. He protected the flame with the palm of his hand until he brought it to the tip of the fuse. The toilet paper, spiked with gun powder, sizzled with a blue glow and then burst into a steady, hungry flame that rushed towards the base of the rocket along the path of the fuse.
"RUN!" Kenny yelled.
The two boys tore towards the back of the house, but mistimed the fuse and the whole earth shuddered under their feet as a cloud of dark gray smoke tinted with fire filled the space formerly occupied by the tree stump.
Woodchips rained down on their heads, and over the rear yard, each smoldering with a tinge of the original flame, raining down on the neighbor's yard as well, over Mrs. Gunya's prize flowers, over Mr. Brett's tool shed, over grandfather's boats.
Ed's head didn't pop out the window, the whole man roared out the back door, t-shirt and boxer shorts flapping for the whole to see.
"What the....?" he sputtered, staring at the smoldering landscape as if he had finally come to believe the warnings right about a Soviet attack, his terrified expression thick with visions of nuclear holocaust.
"He looked a little confused when he saw me and Dave standing in the middle of a yard full of smoldering woodchips," Kenny recalled.
Kenny's face was flush with awe. He did not stare at his uncle, but up passed the roof line of the three storied house.
"You've should have seen it," he said, his voice so hushed by the experience his uncle apparently struggled to hear.
"What was that? What should I have seen?" Ed demanded.
"The rocket," Kenny said. "It went higher than the house. I never did see where it came down."
"What are you talking about, boy?"
"The rocket. Dave and I made."
"Rocket?"
"Out of pipe and gunpowder."
"I never saw Uncle Ed's face so white," Kenny recalled. "He seemed not to hear the telephone ringing in the house or Grandma's voice shouting to be heard, even though she was the one hard of hearing and not the people on the far end of the line."
"I didn't really think powder was any good any more," Kenny told Ed. "Boy was I wrong. I'll bet you that old pipe really did hit the moon."
Ed held the palms of his hands to each of his temples. Grandfather appeared at the back door.
"That was the Millers on the phone," she said, talking about the family three houses down. "They said a pipe just crashed through their kitchen window."
"RUN!" Kenny screamed, yanking Dave by the arm, dragging the protesting boy through the boat yard to the street and then down the hill to the river.
"I kept thinking maybe we'd build a raft like old Huck Finn did," Kenny recalled. "Or maybe we'd head over to the rail yard hop a freight train. Neither one of us figured we'd ever go home again."