Amp'd (25 page)

 

THINGS I COULDN'T HOLD ON TO WITH ONE HAND

Black-light poster

Black light

Painting of a racehorse

Laptop

External hard drive with Dad's scans

My CDs and Dad's LPs

Dad's Olympic memorabilia

A life in thirty-five-millimeter slides

Buttonless shirts

Zipperless sweatpants

Laceless footwear

One fancy Hugo Boss suit

One box of ridiculous self-improvement books

One box of armless sports trophies

Bottle of Fleischmann's

Vicodin (30
×
500 mg)

Pot (half ounce, give or take)

 

ROCKETS

Will tries to encourage me to return to work at Ick Ick, but that seems as ill advised as a retired boxer's comeback. Without the zoning-in qualities of Hocus-Focus and even-numbered multiples of Vicodin, I'd be a shadow of my former fish-target-locked self. But I agree to meet him there for lunch, arriving all dappered up in one of Dad's old suits and his white patent leather shoes. I'm surprised by how happy everyone seems to see me, even Percy. Lilith hugs me tightly, pressing her tits up against me, and I can feel her nipples harden. When I move in for a second clinch I see that look in her face that would precede a hard face slap, and I abort my approach like a seasoned pilot, changing my heading for lunch with Will on the dam.

“You were pretty mad yesterday.”

“Everything I owned was in a van. Then it wasn't.”

“I get it. Your father, the house you grew up in, your stuff. All gone in a hurry.”

“Don't forget the broken window I used to enjoy rolling up and down.”

“I'm mad too.”

“But look at the bright side: you have a window.”

As we walk I find myself scanning the fish ladders to test if I can still spot
Acipenser pseudoboscis
without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs. But here in the off-season the sturgeon are content to flap around downstream until their genetically programmed hormones tell them it's Amok Time at the top of the river.

“These things kill fish,” Will berates the dam. “Not just live fish either, but all the fish that would have been born here, at the top of the river, but won't be. Generations that were supposed to happen. And they won't, because they'll never make it to spawn.”

“It's like a generational cock blocker, this dam.”

“All so the power company can generate electricity at a penny a kilowatt.”

Will marvels at the dam's engineering the way a medical school teacher extols the virtues of anatomy right before dismantling a cadaver. “It's designed to curve upstream so that the force of the water presses against the arch, actually making it stronger as it pushes into its foundation. Up here”—he indicates the rim under our feet—“is where it's strongest … but the deeper you go, the greater the stress.”

“And the more you talk about this stuff, the more my stress levels go up.”

We walk quietly for a bit. I believe I see a pair of fish struggling through a fishing weir, but that's probably a drug-deprived hallucination.

“So, when you bailed me out,” Will finally exhales, “what did the sheriff tell you about me?”

“That you never served. That you blew off your arm making a bomb.”

“So you think I'm a liar.”

“I'm not one to judge. I told a little boy with cancer that an alligator ate my arm.”

Will explains, telling me about growing up in his hometown, considered the geographic center of the United States: Lebanon, Kansas. That's also where he worked for the family business, making fireworks. I guess any handmade explosive device takes a certain amount of improvising, so I'll give him IED too.

“That is one sweet misdirect,” I gush.

“Well, you get treated better if you have a good story.”

“Hence the alligator that ate my arm.”

Will knows more than just how to blow things up. Depending on how it's packed, he elucidates, gunpowder can serve as both propellant and explosive, launching a sphere packed with explosives into the sky and then detonating. How you distribute the powder inside determines what pattern the explosion takes—lay it out in the shape of a star, you'll get an exploding star; ditto a map of America, an American flag, and presumably anything else uniquely American, like jazz hands. The colors come from burning metal salts—different salts make different colored flames—and powders have different burn rates, trailing a slow burn or gone in a flash. Most importantly, everything is made of wood or paper or any nonsparking material, lest an unintentional clattering together of, say, metal containers result in a stray spark that leads to an unplanned detonation. It's all a far cry from my own experience, letting firecrackers explode between my fingers.

And I wish we were talking about those “pretty” kind of fireworks, instead of the kind I know we're talking about.

I finally confront him. “Will, I don't want to help you blow up the dam.”

“I never said anything about blowing up the dam,” he states flatly. “
You
keep bringing that up. Are you sure
you
don't want to blow it up?”

“Wouldn't that kill all the fish in the immediate vicinity?” I argue. “And won't they just rebuild it?”

“The government programs that went dam-crazy fifty years ago don't have those kinds of resources anymore. If this dam were to vanish overnight—”

“Or as the case may be, explode…”

“They'd never build another one. And in just a few generations, the fish would be restored to something much closer to their natural population.”

“I can see how, on paper, I look like a good partner for this: between us we have two hands, and that's a plus. I'm also angry and you want to tap into that. But let me point out, if you got a partner with both arms then you'd have three. Also, I'm not consistently that angry. To get the best out of me you'd have to keep making me angry, like the Hulk.”

“Sometimes I'm so sick of the way things are, I just want to disappear,” he muses. “Let's forget it,” he says, and I do.

But I'm aware that I'm angrier now than when Will and I went shooting with Dad, and was angrier then than when we'd first met. The trajectory of my anger leads up, like a rocket—and rockets don't come down; they explode spectacularly.

*   *   *

There's no further talk of dam demolition as Will and I spend the next week living at his place like newlyweds, cooking together, our two hands in concert preparing meals—I hold and he chops, and together our hands cup meat into meatballs—and then washing and drying, until we plop in front of the television and argue over the remote. When Will goes to work I do the laundry, even taking the time to carefully fold—a degree of difficulty that makes it an act of love. I even dress up in Dad's suits to look nice for him when he comes home. Will won't take rent money so I pay for everything I can: groceries, movies, gas, towels for the guest bathroom, and dinner out at Dim Sum & Then Some, where I steal their pen. I'm Will's sugar daddy without the sex in return.

With pot and pills lost to van-ransacking junkies, I resume jogging to burn off the excess energy, good arm churning, nub a stubby metronome ticking back and forth. The Vicodin withdrawal renders me occasionally irritable, which I tamp down with Fleischmann's and lemonade. I can tell Will interprets these hot flashes as rocketing anger that will burst spectacularly in the destruction of his dam. Because that's what anger does. The angry man rationalizes his bad behavior; he steals from work and cheats on his wife, is rude to people who try to help and yells at someone who doesn't deserve it. Sulks mightily, throws things with his good arm, says “Fuck you” to a sheriff. And pours Fleischmann's down to its final eleven drops. But no amount of anger could make me blow up a dam. That would be crazy.

“We're out of Fleischmann's,” I hear my father's voice emit from my face, as I grab my coat and head for the door.

Grief is something entirely different from anger. It too might be cause for rationalization but is strengthened by desperation as the losses pile up until there's nothing left to lose. I've lost nearly everything: my father, twice—first to the stroke and then frustratingly brought back a little at a time only to be taken all at once; rejected by my mother, banished from the home where she raised me; lost to my sister who, two thousand miles distant and silent, might as well be dead. And of course my arm, and with it whatever small dignity I'd managed to cling to stolen by a viral YouTube sensation.

The last remnants of my old life are Mom's zinnias. Somehow those are enough, those tiny blooms a living generational link to my lost home and a past from which the trajectory of my future had not yet been set to lead here.

Until I return from the liquor store and find them gone, eaten by Will's cat, shreds of stems in dirt all that remain.

I wake Will and tell him, without a trace of anger, “Let's blow that fucking dam.”

His response—“Whatever”—makes me wonder if this was actually my idea all along.

 

DAMOLITION

If you can turn explosives into fireworks, it stands to reason you can reverse engineer fireworks into explosives, just as you can pull apart a half-eaten BLT to rescue the bacon. Hitting more than a dozen fireworks outlets we load up on enough rockets, mortars, and shells to arm a third-world power—skyrockets and repeaters, fountains and spinners, and even “Exploding Rifle Targets”—which, if I'd known about them before our mock biathlon in Crawlywood, would have made it even more fun and dangerous for a small boy.

The same way Will and I collaborated to prepare meals in the kitchen, we put our good arms together and unpack, unroll, and otherwise dismember these legal fireworks until what we have left is a discarded pile of paper, plastic, sticks, cones, and fuses on one side, and a ten- or twelve-pound pile of illegal gunpowder on the other. I'd like to think we can create something flashy and spectacular to elicit
oohs
and
aahs
from an appreciative crowd; but since the explosion will happen at the dam's weakest point—underwater—any fancy starbursts or roundels, willows or palms, would be as pointless as a fireworks display in blazing daylight.

With enough explosive powder gathered, we start packing our first “chube,” brightly colored chew tubes for hamsters that Will found at a pet store. Once filled, each end is carefully sealed with perfectly fitting plugs—black acrylic ear gauges, whose unfathomable purpose by design is the stretching of one's ear lobes, here put to good use. When we begin packing the second explosive chube the first one rolls to the floor and is pounced on by Will's cat, who proceeds to knock it from one side of the apartment to the other and back again while Will tries to stop him and I mostly scream
Holy shit holy shit holy shit fuck
before Will is finally able to snatch it away, the cat eyeing it like a prize he knows he'll catch later before trotting away.

“I'm not complaining, but does this mean we built a dud?” I ask.

“It's not nitroglycerine. It's not necessarily that volatile or combustible,” Will explains. “I wouldn't want to make a habit out of that, but if we do this right, it shouldn't explode by contact.”

I'm heartened that not blowing Will's cat through the floor of his apartment indicates we might actually be doing this properly, but I suggest a true test. Which is how we find ourselves early the next morning in Crawlywood, where I once exploded much tinier powder-filled tubes between my fingertips, and where both of us were arrested for doing something incredibly stupid but somehow far less stupid than this.

When Will lights the fuse it occurs to me to ask, “Hey, how is this going to light underwater?”

“I'll come up with something. Probably airtight plastic. You should throw that.”

“But won't the burning fuse melt the plastic?”

“There are ways to do it,” Will seems agitated. “We'll figure it out. Throw that fucking thing.”

“M80 fuses burn underwater,” I recall, and I throw it as far as I can into the trees. It doesn't even have time to land, exploding about a foot off the ground, the shock tearing the leaves from a nearby bush with the efficiency of an atomic-powered leaf blower. Pleased to know we don't have a dud on our hands, we leave before the sheriff can arrive to teargas us.

*   *   *

Back at Will's we make dozens more just like it, packing powder into chubes that we then bind together. At one point Will ties the first assembly of ten around him like a bomb vest and laughs … which makes me uneasy for the first time. Up until now I've put complete faith in Will, ignoring the fact that he once blew off an arm doing something much like this under undoubtedly safer and more controlled conditions. Certainly I knew before now that this was both dangerous and stupid; but like drunken sex with a stranger, focusing on the stupid part allowed me to mitigate any sense of danger, of blowing myself up or catching an STD. Now that it's hot on my radar, I find my performance suffering, my rhythm off, my will to continue gone limp. When Will asks if everything is okay, I blame a headache.

By morning we have thirty brightly colored chubes of river-liberating explosives. It seems insufficient for such a large task but I assume Will knows what he's doing and defer to his expertise. Maybe all we need to do is blow a small hole where the pressure is greatest, and then the onrushing torrent of water will tear the rest of the dam apart as it surges through. But I don't know that; as all this became more real I stopped asking questions. Giving myself over completely to Will in the absence of medical marijuana and Vicodin seemed the best way to replicate the same mindless focus that once allowed me to count fish expertly.