The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  The worst chronic threat we had was poison sumac, though I never knew anyone, adult or child, who actually knew what it was or precisely how it would kill you. It was really just a kind of shrubby rumor. Even so, in any wooded situation you could always hold up a hand and announce gravely: “We’d better not go any farther. I think there might be sumac up ahead.”

  “Poison sumac?” one of your younger companions would reply, eyes wide open.

  “All sumac’s poisonous, Jimmy,” someone else would say, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “Is it really bad?” Jimmy would ask.

  “Put it this way,” you would answer sagely. “My brother’s friend Mickey Cox knew a guy who fell into a sumac patch once. Got it all over him, you know, and the doctors had to like amputate his whole body. He’s just a head on a plate now. They carry him around in a hatbox.”

  “Wow,” everyone would say except Arthur Bergen, who was annoyingly brainy and knew all the things in the world that couldn’t possibly be so, which always exactly coincided with all the things you had ever heard about that were amazing.

  “A head couldn’t survive on its own in a box,” he would say.

  “Well, they took it out sometimes. To give it air and let it watch TV and so on.”

  “No, I mean it couldn’t survive on its own, without a body.”

  “Well, this one did.”

  “Not possible. How are you going to keep a head oxygenated without a heart?”

  “How should I know? What am I—Dr. Kildare? I just know it’s true.”

  “It can’t be, Bryson. You’ve misheard—or you’re making it up.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Must be.”

  “Well, Arthur, I swear to God it’s true.”

  This would cause an immediate stunned silence.

  “You’ll go to hell for saying that if it’s not true, you know,” Jimmy would remark, but quite unnecessarily, for you knew this already. All kids knew this automatically, from birth.

  Swearing to God was the ultimate act. If you swore to God and it turned out you were wrong, even by accident, even just a little, you still had to go to hell. That was just the rule and God didn’t bend that rule for anybody. So the moment you said it, in any context, you began to feel uneasy in case some part of it turned out to be slightly incorrect.

  “Well, that’s what my brother said,” you would say, trying to modify your eternal liability.

  “You can’t change it now,” Bergen—who, not incidentally, would grow up to be a personal injury lawyer—would point out. “You’ve already said it.”

  You were all too well aware of this, too. In the circumstances there was really only one thing to do: give Milton Milton a knuckle rub.

  Only slightly less threatening than poison sumac were pulpy red berries that grew in clumps on bushes in almost everybody’s backyard. These, too, were slightly vague in that neither bush nor berry seemed to have a name—they were just “those red berries” or “that bush with the red berries”—but they were universally agreed to be toxic. If you touched or held a berry even briefly and then later ate a cookie or sandwich and realized that you hadn’t washed your hands, you spent an hour seriously wondering if you might drop dead at any moment.

  Moms worried about the berries, too, and were forever shouting from the kitchen window not to eat them, which was actually unnecessary because children of the 1950s didn’t eat anything that grew wild—in fact, didn’t eat anything at all unless it was coated in sugar, endorsed by a celebrity athlete or TV star, and came with a free prize. They might as well have told us not to eat any dead cats we found. We weren’t about to.

  Interestingly, the berries weren’t poisonous at all. I can say this with some confidence because we made Lanny Kowalski’s little brother, Lumpy, *3 eat about four pounds of them to see if they would kill him and they didn’t. It was a controlled experiment, I hasten to add. We fed them to him one at a time and waited a decent interval to see if his eyes rolled up into his head or anything before passing him another. But apart from throwing up the middle two pounds, he showed no ill effects.

  The only real danger in life was the Butter boys. The Butters were a family of large, interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would all go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

  In between times they would menace us. Their speciality was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

  Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn’t, or possibly just didn’t, speak. (It was never clear which.) Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.

  The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

  I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

  “But you’ll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It’ll be just as boring for you.”

  “Don’t care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a long time before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, sometimes inadvertently. It wasn’t even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M. C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

  In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy poontang sissy,” he said.

  Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

  What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

  Chapter 3

  BIRTH OF A SUPERHERO

  EAST HAMPTON, CONN. (AP)—A search of Lake Pocotopaug for a reported drowning victim was called off here Tuesday when it was realized that one of the volunteers helping the search, Robert Hausman, 23, of East Hampton, was the person being sought.

  —The Des Moines Register, September 20, 1957

  AT EVERY MEAL SHE EVER PREPARED throughout my upbringing (and no doubt far beyond), my mother placed a large dollop of cottage cheese on each plate. It appeared to be important to her to serve something coagulated and slightly runny at every meal. It w
ould be understating things to say I disliked cottage cheese. To me cottage cheese looks like something you bring up, not take in. Indeed, that was the crux of my problem with it.

  I had a distant uncle named Dee (who, now that I think of it, may not have actually been an uncle at all, but just a strange man who showed up at all large family gatherings) who had lost his voice box and had a permanent hole in his throat as a result of some youthful injury or surgical trauma or something. Actually, I don’t know why he had a hole in his throat. It was just a fact of life. A lot of rural people in Iowa in the fifties had arresting physical features—wooden legs, stumpy arms, outstandingly dented heads, hands without fingers, mouths without tongues, sockets without eyes, scars that ran on for feet, sometimes going in one sleeve and out the other. Goodness knows what people got up to back then, but they suffered some mishaps, that’s for sure.

  Anyway, Uncle Dee had a throat hole, which he kept lightly covered with a square of cotton gauze. The gauze often came unstuck, particularly when Dee was in an impassioned mood, which was usually, and either hung open or fell off altogether. In either case, you could see the hole, which was jet-black and transfixing and about the size of a quarter. Dee talked through the hole in his neck—actually, belched a form of speech through it. Everyone agreed that he was very good at it—in terms of volume and steadiness of output, he was a wonder; many were reminded of an outboard motor running at full throttle—though in fact no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about, which was unfortunate as Dee was ferociously loquacious. He would burp away with feeling while those people standing beside him (who were, it must be said, nearly always newcomers to the family circle) watched his throat hole gamely but uncertainly. From time to time, they would say, “Is that so?” and “Well, I’ll be,” and give a series of earnest, thoughtful nods, before saying, “Well, I think I’ll just go and get a little more lemonade,” and drift off, leaving Dee belching furiously at their backs.

  All this was fine—or at least fine enough—so long as Uncle Dee wasn’t eating. When Dee was eating you really didn’t want to be in the same county, for Uncle Dee talked with his throat full. Whatever he ate turned into a light spray from his throat hole. It was like dining with a miniature flocking machine, or perhaps a very small snowblower. I’ve seen placid, kindly grown-ups, people of good Christian disposition—loving sisters, sons and fathers, and on one memorable occasion two Lutheran ministers from neighboring congregations—engage in silent but prolonged struggles for control of a chair that would spare them having to sit beside or, worse, across from Dee at lunch.

  The feature of Dee’s condition that particularly caught my attention was that whatever he put in his mouth—chocolate cream pie, chicken fried steak, baked beans, spinach, rutabaga, Jell-O—by the time it reached the hole in his neck it had become cottage cheese. I don’t know how but it did.

  Which is precisely and obviously why I disdained the stuff. My mother could never grasp this. But then she was dazzlingly, good-naturedly, comprehensively forgetful about most things. We used to amuse ourselves by challenging her to supply our dates of birth or, if that proved too taxing, the seasons. She couldn’t reliably tell you our middle names. At the supermarket she often reached the checkout and discovered that she had at some indeterminate point acquired someone else’s shopping cart, and was now in possession of items—whole pineapples, suppositories, bags of food for a very large dog—that she didn’t want or mean to have. She was seldom entirely clear on what clothes belonged to whom. She hadn’t the faintest idea what our eating preferences were.

  “Mom,” I would say each night, laying a piece of bread over the offending mound on my plate, rather as one covered a roadside accident victim with a blanket, “you know I really do hate cottage cheese.”

  “Do you, dear?” she would say with a look of sympathetic perplexity. “Why?”

  “It looks like the stuff that comes out of Uncle Dee’s throat.”

  Everyone present, including my father, would nod solemnly at this.

  “Well, just eat a little bit, and leave what you don’t like.”

  “I don’t like any of it, Mom. It’s not like there’s a part of it I like and a part that I don’t. Mom, we have this conversation every night.”

  “I bet you’ve never even tasted it.”

  “I’ve never tasted pigeon droppings. I’ve never tasted earwax. Some things you don’t need to taste. We have this conversation every night, too.”

  More solemn nods.

  “Well, I had no idea you didn’t like cottage cheese,” my mom would say in something like amazement, and the next night there would be cottage cheese again.

  Just occasionally her forgetfulness strayed into rather more dismaying territory, especially when she was pressed for time. I recall one particularly rushed and disorganized morning when I was still quite small—small enough, at any rate, to be mostly trusting and completely stupid—when she gave me my sister’s old Capri pants to wear to school. They were a brilliant lime green, very tight, and had little slits at the bottom. They only came about three-quarters of the way down my calves. I stared at myself in the back hall mirror in a kind of confused disbelief. I looked like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.

  “This can’t be right, Mom,” I said. “These are Betty’s old Capri pants, aren’t they?”

  “No, honey,” my mom replied soothingly. “They’re pirate pants. They’re very fashionable. I believe Kookie Kookson wears them on 77 Sunset Strip.”

  Kookson, a munificently coiffed star on this popular weekly television show, was a hero to me, and indeed to most people who liked interestingly arranged hair, and he was capable of endearingly strange things, that’s for sure. That’s why they called him Kookie. Even so, this didn’t feel right.

  “I don’t think he can, Mom. Because these are girls’ pants.”

  “He does, honey.”

  “Do you swear to God?”

  “Oom,” she said distractedly. “You watch this week. I’m sure he does.”

  “But do you swear to God?”

  “Oom,” she said again.

  So I wore them to school and the laughter could be heard for miles. It went on for most of the day. The principal, Mrs. Unnaturally Enormous Bosom, who in normal circumstances was the sort of person who wouldn’t get off her ass if her chair was on fire, made a special visit to have a look at me and laughed so hard she popped a button on her blouse.

  Kookie, of course, never wore anything remotely like Capri pants. I asked my sister about this after school. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Kookie Kookson is not homosexual.”

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to hold my mother’s forgetfulness against her for long because it was so obviously and helplessly pathological, a quirk of her nature. We might as well have become exasperated with her for having a fondness for polka dots and two-tone shoes. It’s what she was. Besides, she made up for it in a thousand ways—by being soft and kind, patient and generous, instantly and sincerely apologetic for every wrong, keen to make amends. Everybody in the world adored my mother. She was entirely without suspicion or malice. She never raised her voice or said no to any request, never said a word against another human being. She liked everybody. She lived to make sandwiches. She wanted everyone to be happy. And she took me almost every week to dinner and the movies. It was the thing she and I did together.

  Because of his work my father was gone most weekends, so every Friday, practically without fail, my mother would say to me, “What do you say we go to Bishop’s for dinner tonight and then take in a movie?” as if it were a rare treat, when in fact it was what we did nearly every week.

  So at the conclusion of school on Fridays I would hasten home, drop my books on the kitchen table, grab a handful of cookies, and proceed downtown. Sometimes I caught a bus, but more often I saved the money and walked. It was only a couple of miles and the route was all diverting and agreeable if I went along Grand Avenue (where the buses didn’t go; they were relegated to Ing
ersoll—the servants’ entrance of the street world). I liked Grand Avenue very much. In those days it was adorned from downtown to the western suburbs with towering, interlaced elms, the handsomest street-side tree ever and a generous provider of drifts of golden leaves to shuffle through in autumn. But more than this, Grand felt the way a street should feel. Its office buildings and apartments were built close to the road, which gave the street a kind of neighborliness, and it still had most of its old homes—mansions of exuberant splendor, nearly all with turrets and towers and porches like ships’ decks—though these had now mostly found other uses as offices, funeral homes, and the like. Interspersed at judicious intervals were a few grander institutional buildings: granite churches, a Catholic girls’ high school, the stately Commodore Hotel (with an awninged walkway leading to the street—a welcome touch of Manhattan), a spooky orphanage where no children ever played or stood at a window, the official residence of the governor, a modest mansion with a white flagpole and the state flag. All seemed somehow exactly in proportion, precisely positioned, thoughtfully dressed and groomed. It was the perfect street.

  Where it ceased being residential and entered the downtown, by the industrial-scale hulk of the Meredith Publishing Building (home of Better Homes and Gardens magazine), Grand made an abrupt dogleg to the left, as if it suddenly remembered an important appointment. Originally from this point it was intended to proceed through the downtown as a kind of Midwestern Champs-Élysées, running up to the steps of the state capitol building. The idea was that as you progressed along Grand you would behold before you, perfectly centered, the golden-domed glory of the capitol building (and it is quite a structure, one of the best in the country).