Boys Life

story I found out later, since I wasn’t there.
    Curiosity got the best of Dad. He had to see the bomb. So, as Zephyr and Bruton gradually emptied out, he left the group of volunteers he was riding with and walked a half-dozen blocks to where Mr. Moultry lived. Mr. Moultry’s house was a small wooden structure painted pale blue with white shutters. Light was streaming upward through the splintered roof. The sheriff’s car was parked out front, its bubble light spinning around. Dad climbed up onto the porch, which had been knocked crooked by the impact. The front door was ajar, the walls riddled with cracks. The bomb’s velocity had shoved the house off its foundations. Dad went inside, and he couldn’t miss the huge hole in the sagging floor because it had swallowed half the room. A few Christmas tree decorations were scattered about, and a little silver star lay balanced on the hole’s ragged edge. The tree itself was missing.
    He peered down. Boards and beams were tangled up like a plateful of macaroni. Plaster dust was the Parmesan cheese. There was the meatball of the bomb: its iron-gray tail fins protruded from the debris, its nose plowed right into the basement’s dirt floor.
    “Get me outta here! Ohhhhh, my legs! Get me to the hospital! Ohhhhh, I’m dyin’!”
    “You’re not dyin’, Dick. Just don’t try to move.”
    Mr. Moultry was lying amid wreckage with a carpenter’s workbench on top of him, and atop that a beam as big around as a sturdy oak. It had split, and Dad figured it had been a support for the living room’s floor. Lying across the beam that crisscrossed Mr. Moultry was the Christmas tree, its balls and bulbs shattered. The bomb wasn’t on top of Mr. Moultry, but it had dug itself in about four feet from his head. Sheriff Marchette knelt nearby, deliberating the mess.
    “Jack? It’s Tom Mackenson!”
    “Tom?” Sheriff Marchette looked up, his face streaked with plaster dust. “You ought to get outta here, man!”
    “I wanted to come see it. Not as big as I thought it would be.”
    “It’s plenty big enough,” the sheriff said. “If this thing blows, it’ll take the house and leave a crater where the whole block used to be.”
    “Ohhhhh!” Mr. Moultry groaned. His shirt had been torn open by the falling timbers, and his massive gut wobbled this way and that. “I said I’m dyin’, damn it!”
    “He hurt bad?” Dad asked.
    “Can’t get in there close enough to tell. Says he thinks his legs are broken. Maybe a busted rib or two, the way he’s wheezin’.”
    “He always breathes like that,” Dad said.
    “Well, the ambulance ought to be here soon.” Sheriff Marchette checked his wristwatch. “I called ’em directly I got here. I don’t know what’s keepin’ ’em.”
    “What’d you tell ’em? That a fella got hit by a fallin’ bomb?”
    “Yes,” the sheriff said.
    “In that case, I think Dick’s in for a long wait.”
    “Get me outta here!” Mr. Moultry tried to push some of the dusty tangle of lumber off him, but he winced and couldn’t do it. He turned his head and looked at the bomb, sweat glistening on his suety cheeks. “Get that outta here! Jesus Christ, help me!”
    “Where’s Mrs. Moultry?” Dad asked.
    “Huh!” Mr. Moultry’s plaster-white face sneered. “She took off runnin’ and left me here, that’s what she did! Wouldn’t even lift a finger to help me!”
    “That’s not quite right. She did call me, didn’t she?” the sheriff pointed out.
    “Well, what the hell are you good for? Ohhhhhh, my legs! They’re broke plumb in two, I’m tellin’ ya!”
    “Can I come down?” Dad asked.
    “Rather you didn’t. Rather you got on out of here like any sane man should. But come on if you want to. Be careful, though. The stairs collapsed, so I set up a stepladder.”
    Dad eased himself down the ladder. He stood appraising the pile of timbers, beams, and Christmas tree on top of Mr. Moultry. “We can probably move that big one,” he said. “I’ll grab one end if you grab the other.”
    They cleared the tree aside and did the job, moving the oak-sized beam though their backs promised a rendezvous with deep-heating rub. Mr. Moultry, however, was still in a heap of trouble. “We can dig him out, take him to your car, and get him to the hospital,” Dad suggested. “That ambulance isn’t comin’.”
    The sheriff knelt down beside Mr. Moultry. “Hey, Dick. You weighed yourself lately?”
    “Weighed myself? Hell, no! Why