Dare understood about the history of man: the potato famine, the Holocaust, the slave trade, Malthusian disasters, the earth’s atmosphere disappearing, rising oceans, nuclear arsenals, government surveillance. After listening to his history lessons, I doubted the stupidity of man could be survived with just a crank radio, a generator, and enough canned food to last a year, but I respected him for trying.
When I was fifteen Dare taught me to hunt with a bow and arrow instead of a gun, and bought me a good skinning knife. In the future he said we couldn’t count on getting ammunition.
He taught me to build lean-tos, though we would probably have to stay in the basement because of the radiation. We tanned deer hides, scraping every bit of flesh and fat from inside the skin, then stretching it to dry, sanding it smooth; put the deer’s brain in hot water and mashed it, then soaked their hides in the mash to tan the leather; sealed the brain oils in by smoking them over a hole filled with coals. The smell would cling to my clothes, seep into my own skin.
Sometimes he’d sell the hides and give me the money.
I bought fertilizer from the garden shop and peroxide from the drugstore; stole M-80s and sparklers and boxes of matches, plastic containers and bottles, wicks and wires and clocks, nails and glass. I couldn’t see how hiding under the house would fix the immediate problem. I’d lie in the stacks at the library, immersed in research. These studies might have remained purely theoretical if Dare hadn’t found my toolbox.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Bonehead, what the fuck are you planning on doing with all this shit?”
I shrugged.
“You don’t know?” he asked. “You don’t know?”
“Blow something up,” I said, annoyed because he could clearly see for himself.
“Blow what up?”
I shrugged again. I’d not been able to find a car and put a rag in the gas tank and light it. I couldn’t use our car because he needed it to drive to work.
“You can’t keep explosive stuff around. You could blow your arm off or worse. You could really hurt someone. Goddamn it. How much of this shit do you have? Why the fuck do you do stuff like this, Bridey? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to.”
He had a look on his face like he was standing in the bright sun.
“Carlos the Jackal,” I said, “would have been more successful if he’d had a better understanding of explosives.”
“Why the fuck do you know about Carlos the Jackal?” he was asking himself in a whisper, the same way he would say, “Why won’t you comb your hair?”
Dare’s face flushed. “Bone,” he said calmly, ran his hands over his head and stood staring at the floor for a minute. He looked like he was going to say something, then went downstairs to the basement, came up with two pairs of goggles, and thrust the box of incendiary things into my hands. “C’mon,” he said.
We walked through the tall grass out into the clearing by the pond. I was barefoot, wearing running shorts and a pink tank top from Kmart.
“Show me what you know,” he said.
I knelt and unscrewed the cap on the metal water bottle full of gasoline, then pushed strips of an old cotton rag into it so they could soak. Once they were saturated I poured the ammonium nitrate into the strips, wound them up, tied them, doused them with more gasoline for good measure, and then jammed them into a wide-mouthed plastic bottle. I had no idea if it would work. Finally I sunk an M-80 into the bottle as a detonator. It was primitive, easier than building model planes. Dare watched me, an expression I didn’t recognize on his face: angry, proud, scared, maybe all three. When I was done he took the bottle, lit the fuse, threw it into the pond, then grabbed my hand and ran to the edge of the clearing.
I started to move toward the pond but he jerked me back. There was a loud roaring whump and hiss and the surface of the pond swelled and burst and shot into a short vertical column that expanded, spraying water and leaves and green slime. The blast cut into us, covered our goggles with algae, soaked our clothes. It was a shocking, terrifying pleasure that sucked the breath from my lungs. For a frozen moment we stood, skin stinging from the cutting force of the water and whatever particulate life it held. The air was still again and a great swell ran back into the pond from the banks. Then slowly the sound of a summer storm pricked our ears, a thick patter of slaps and hollow thuds as bodies of fish and frogs rained down upon us, hitting our heads and backs and arms, landing broken and still in the clearing, dumb like plastic toys, dead before they’d hit the ground. And the pond too—its surface covered with floating fish that had been killed by the force.
“That’s what you don’t know,” he said.