by Gary Paulsen
But when I turned to sit I saw that she had followed me and she sat at the same table.
“Hi. I’m Elaine.”
I couldn’t say anything. She was about my age and when I saw her closely in the better light from the ceiling Coleman lanterns she looked even more beautiful. Her eyes seemed to be made of cool ice and she was wearing a blue dress that matched the color perfectly.
“Elaine Peterson.”
Still I sat silent. Shyness, always a problem with me, now became a terminal illness. I thought I would burst, that in some way the shyness would stop my heart. I could hear it beating, whumping, and the beat seemed irregular and it seemed entirely possible that I would just sit there, like a turd, and die. I took a breath, held it, controlled my voice as much as possible, and blurted my name.
She smiled. “We live near Greener Lake—about four miles from the Larsons.”
I asked her why I hadn’t seen her at the movie—or thought I did. It came out: “Haven’tseenmovieyou?” Or something near it.
“I’ve been staying with my grandmother in North Dakota. It’s over west of here a hundred and fifty miles.”
She said it like it was another country and I thought I might tell her that I had lived in the Philippines for almost three years and in Texas and had seen California and pretty much everything in between but nothing, absolutely nothing came out.
I don’t know how long we could have gone on like that, her talking, me with my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, wishing I could disappear, but time kicked in and took over. It was late and the band started on its last dance, a slow waltz, and the movie was done and the rest of the kids came out of the back room.
Harris spied me instantly and took in the situation in a glance. He came up to the table—the ubiquitous bottle of orange pop in his hand—and plunked down in a chair.
I made eye motions at him to leave but he ignored them and spoke to Elaine.
“How do you like my cousin?”
She smiled. “He seems nice.”
Harris shook his head. “That’s what I thought but he ain’t right.”
I pushed at his shoulder.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“In the head. He ain’t right. It was something to do with when he was borned. They cut the cord too fast or something and his brain didn’t get into the light. It happens all the time. Brains got to get into the light or they don’t work right. You remember that Severson kid? How he kept leaning left and ate his snot all the time?” Harris pointed at me with his chin. “It’s the same with him.”
“Not true...,” I said, or attempted to—it really came out as more of a blapp. The shyness had gotten worse and I was now in the position of having to convince Elaine that I was indeed “right in the head “ and did not eat my snot, without being able to speak but it was too late. Elaine was studying me with a new look, one of pity, and she smiled—not unkindly—and nodded and left me sitting there with Harris, fuming.
“I’ll get you for this,” I told him.
“Ahh you didn’t want to mess around with Elaine anyway. Pretty soon you’d just want to go down there all the time and then I’d have nobody to play with and there you’d be, hanging around their mailbox hoping to see her...”
“I’ll get you for this,” I repeated. “I really will.”
And as luck would have it I got my chance the very next day.
“I ain’t gonna do it.”
Harris stood by the side of the barn, looking at the wire that came from an insulator near the door and led out into the pasture.
Knute had turned the pigs out into a part of the cow pasture to root and dig for a while. Rather than put up hog fence he bought a battery-operated electric fencer and some insulators and wire.
Inside the barn he put a dry-cell, six-volt battery and the fencer to keep them out of the weather, then brought the wire out through a hole.
We had half a good day watching the sows figure the wire out. They learned fast and one of them, old Gertie, learned on the first day to cake mud on her head, let it dry, and then push at the wire with the dry mud insulator to get out of the pasture and into the cornfield.
The chickens hit it a few times, squawking and jumping with feathers flying, and even Buzzer accidentally brushed the wire. When it popped him he took it as an attack and went after it, which of course made it worse and made him more angry so that he attacked harder, biting and clawing at the wire until finally he admitted defeat and walked away from the fence. Every hair on his body was straight out and I believe if anybody had crossed him right then he would have killed.
It was while Buzzer was fighting the wire that the idea came. We had tried touching it with the backs of our fingers and pieces of grass but the results were inconclusive. I had always been of a scientific nature, believed in the worth of experiments, and I wondered what would happen—watching Buzzer and the fence at war—if somebody actually peed on the wire.
Specifically I wondered what would happen if Harris peed on the wire.
I knew it would not be an easy experiment to conduct and set about doing it carefully. The subject would be reluctant—downright negative, as it turned out—and there would have to be some form of inducement so attractive that it would overcome the reluctance.
As it happened I had the “dourty peectures.”
The power of these pictures to control and induce were beyond question. I believe if given enough of them Harris would have walked into a bonfire—indeed, I would have done the same thing. The quality of the pictures wasn’t great. They were black-and-white and small and grainy. But they worked. It was impossible to look at them and still breathe correctly. My dilemma was mostly one of quantity. I knew I could get the experiment to work, but with how much effort?
How many pictures would it take?
I had, altogether, seven of them and since I was interested in them myself—purely from an artistic viewpoint, of course—I didn’t want to completely deplete the collection.
I offered Harris one picture. It was not the best picture—the best picture I wouldn’t have released if Harris had bitten the wire and hung on with his mouth (something I considered suggesting when I remembered what he had done with the first love of my life)—but it was a good picture: accurate in detail, fundamentally sound as far as composition and educational benefits were concerned, and far reaching in its ability to promote advanced stages of hyperventilation.
“Nope,” he repeated. “I ain’t gonna do it.”
But his refusal was soft. I could sense the weakness in it and I countered. The picture I’d offered, plus one other, the one where it was possible to See It All.
“Well...”
I had him.
“First the rules.”
“What rules?”
“You have to pee right on the wire—not just pass over it—and you have to pee on it long enough to get the surge.” (It was a pulse fencer, not on continuously but pulsing at one-second intervals.) “Otherwise it’s not a deal.”
He thought another minute, studying the wire. “That thing put a sow on her knees...”
I shook my head. “She was off balance. Besides, two of the pictures for your very own—that’s a good swap.”
Yet another minute, then a sigh. “All right. Go get the pictures.”
I ran to the house, took out the two selected pictures, put them under my shirt, and trotted back to the barn where Harris was still standing, looking at the wire.
“I’ve got them.”
“Let me see.”
I raised my shirt and showed him the pictures, lowered it. “So go ahead—pee on it.”
He unbuttoned the fly on his bibs and took his business out, then stood there, frowning.
“What’s the matter?”
“It don’t work. Nothing’s coming out.”
“Push a little.”
“I am. It’s scared. It don’t want to do it.”
“If you don’t pee on the wire, the deal is o
ff,” I reminded him, thinking it would prompt action.
“I know, I know. It just won’t work.” His frown deepened. “It’s like it knows what’s coming and don’t want to do it.”
“Two pictures...”
“I’ll have to lie to it.”
“Lie to what?”
“My business. I’ll just have to lie to it and start peeing over here, then swing it around, make the dumb thing think everything is all right.”
He turned sideways, aimed away from the fence, and in a moment it started.
“So turn,” I said. “Before it’s done.”
“It ain’t that easy. Something in me won’t let it happen...”
“Ahh heck, you’re going to run out.”
“No, I’m holding her back. Here, now...”
He turned slowly until the stream of urine was only inches away from the wire, hung there for a second, then hit the wire.
“There,” he said, “now are you hap—”
He had crossed the wire between pulses, when the electricity wasn’t moving through the wire, and the pulse hit him halfway through the word happy.
Later I would come to know a great deal about electrical things. I would understand that water is an excellent conductor of electrical energy but that urine, with its higher mineral content, is even better and what Harris did amounted to hooking a copper wire from his business to the electric fence.
The results were immediate, and everything I would have hoped for from a standpoint of scientific observation, not to mention revenge.
In a massive galvanic reaction every muscle in Harris’s body convulsively contracted, jerking like a giant spring had tightened inside him.
He went stiff as a poker, then soared up and over backward in a complete flip, arcing a stream that caught the afternoon sun so I swore I could see a rainbow in it.
Nor did the spectacle end when he hit the ground. He landed on his side, both legs pumping, then sprung to his feet, running in tight circles holding himself and hissing:
“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God-oh...”
All in all it was well worth the investment and when he finally settled, leaning against the barn wall holding his business, panting loudly, I reached under my shirt to give him the two pictures.
It was not to be, and the exact responsibility of who owed whom pictures would plague us the rest of the summer and perhaps does yet.
As I held the pictures toward Harris and he released his groin long enough to reach for them a shadow fell over us and I turned to see Louie standing there.
He reached down with a crooked, filthy hand and took the pictures, held them up to the light, smiled toothlessly, and walked away toward the granary, putting the pictures in the top pocket of his bibs.
“Damn.” Harris spoke quietly and his voice was shaking. “You owe me two pictures.”
“It wasn’t my fault. I held them out to you. Louie took them.”
“They wasn’t halfway.” He hissed like a snake. “They wasn’t even close to halfway.”
“They were over halfway.”
“You liar.”
“I’m not lying. I handed the pictures over to you and you were reaching for them when Louie grabbed them. I did what I was supposed to do.”
“You did?” He sneered, or grimaced in pain, it was hard to tell the difference. “I peed on the wire...”
Later that night, lying in bed in the darkened room, listening to the drone of mosquitoes fighting the screen, I remembered him hitting the wire and started laughing.
“It ain’t funny,” he said from the other bed. “I’m all swoll up. It’s like my business was hit by lightning.”
“It is too funny. You ran in little circles yelling, ‘Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God...’ “ I had to bury my face in the pillow to hold the sound of laughing down so it wouldn’t wake the grown-ups.
For a time there was silence, then he giggled. “I think I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Jesus, you dope. But he wasn’t in no peach tree...”
And still later, when the giggling had subsided and we were nearly asleep, through a half doze I heard him one more time:
“You still owe me two pictures.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Don’t.”
“Do.”
11
In which Harris discovers speed...
and the value of clothing
Here’s the problem—it’s too slow. Hell, we can ride Bob and Bill and go faster.”
I could have pointed out that since the loft and shotgun incidents there had been absolutely no way we could get close enough to Bob or Bill to touch them, let alone ride them. But it had not been long since lightning had hit Harris’s business, so arguing with him about things seemed too harsh; Harris still walked with his legs apart a bit.
Besides, I agreed with him.
We had pulled two old bicycles from the junk heap and worked almost three days loosening the chains, oiling them, fixing tubes and pumping tires, twisting and aligning handlebars, and greasing bearings—all just to ride up and back on the quarter-mile driveway.
Initially I had in mind a fantasy involving getting a bike fixed and then pedaling the four miles to Elaine’s farm. I had seen her once since the night she’d learned about my brain being late getting into the light, at another Saturday night dance. And while I apparently still loved her with all my heart—or so it felt, judging by my breathing and pulse—she only smiled, again not unkindly, but otherwise ignored me completely.
Love is persistent, however, at least in the imagination, and my brain—light enfeebled as it may have been—would not stop thinking of her golden hair, blue eyes, even smile, and soft voice.
So the fantasies ran. I would fix a bike, I would pedal to her farm—though I had no idea where it was—and coming out to the mailbox she would see me pedaling by and stop and talk to me and find out that my brain was all right and smile at me the other way and we would kiss and we would marry and we would...
All this until we actually got the bikes working and pedaled the length of the driveway and back, grinding along, the wheels so out of line they wobbled, the tires bulging at the sides. After one loop I thought less of love and more of the possible terminal effects of trying to pedal four miles, and that had brought us to Harris’s trenchant remark, which he now repeated.
“Too slow. We need something to get these gooners moving. We need some kind of motor...” He stood with his hands in the pockets of his bibs, studying the yard, and I think had actually scanned it twice when he saw the washing machine.
His eyes stopped moving and I saw him start chewing his bottom lip. It was a habit I’d come to know as an indication that we would soon be in trouble—or more trouble than normal—but one that I also had come to view with some excitement.
The washing machine was by the house. There was no electricity yet in that country and some families still used hand washboards. But Knute and Clair had some years earlier purchased an old gas-engine washer.
It looked like a regular wringer washer except that underneath it had a one-cylinder gas motor with a tiny gas tank and a foot kick-starter that stuck out to the side.
I had seen Clair and Glennis use the washer. It ran with a put-n-put-n-put that became a one-speed drone, controlled by a governor that cranked the washer and wringer assembly with a V-belt off a pulley on the motor.
Harris wandered near the washer and studied it more closely, keeping well clear of the kitchen window where Clair and Glennis were working.
“She’ll do her,” he said, nodding.
“Do what?”
“Pull that bicycle.”
“The washing machine?”
“The motor, you dope. It’s only held on there by four bolts. We’ll take her off and bolt her on a bike and rig up a belt and off we go.”
Off you go, I thought, remembering the horse and shotgun, but I said nothing about it. I was also thinking of one salient fact t
hat perhaps Harris had overlooked.
“The motor,” I pointed out in a slightly superior air, “is attached to your mother’s washing machine.”
“I know that,” he said, looking at me as if I’d gone insane. “We’ll just have to wait until they go to town.”
It was then that I realized the complexity of Harris’s plans. He didn’t just do things as they came along, willy-nilly—often he schemed for days, worked on them. Like the time he tried to shoot a banty chicken out of an old stovepipe with compressed air. It took hours of hand-pumping air into an inner tube inside a stovepipe until it was ready to burst, then getting the pipe situated and catching a chicken and jamming her down into the stovepipe (I suggested Ernie but we couldn’t find him). And even when the results didn’t warrant the effort—he had feathers blown two inches into his nostrils when the stovepipe burst—he was optimistic about the outcome. (“Fastest that chicken ever flew—she had to be doing two hundred when she hit my face.”)
And the plan he set into effect now was such a long-term effort.
From an old swatting machine he found a V-belt pulley wheel about a foot and a half across and used a hacksaw to cut the four center spokes out of it, leaving a four-inch piece on each spoke.
He then pulled the back wheel off the better of the two bicycles and spent hours wiring and friction-taping the pulley to the spokes.
By this time I was bored and looking for other things to do. I sneaked up into the granary, as I often did, and looked at Louie’s diorama and was surprised to find that he had added to it.
There was a new farm, with little trees and a house, and with a start I realized it was our farm. He’d done a model of the Larson place: a miniature copy of the house made of paper and cardboard with trees around it and a model of the barn. There were figures for Clair and Glennis—the two of them standing by the house—and one of Knute working on a small team of horses and another for Louie himself upright near the head of the team. And there were two more figures, near the hog pen, playing in the dirt.
