Boys Life

in a fit of rage and ripped the rest of it away; he gripped at the very air but found no handholds there. And then the pain crashed over him like one wrestler bodyslamming another and Mr. Moultry was left gasping and breathless but still with two broken legs and a bomb ticking next to his head.
    “I believe,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and he yawned at the lateness of the hour, “I’d best come on down.”
    It might have been New Year’s Eve before Mr. Lightfoot reached the bottom of the stepladder, the tools in his belt jingling together. He grasped his toolbox and started toward Mr. Moultry, but the poster of the bug-eyed minstrel on the wall caught his attention. He stared at it as the seconds and the bomb ticked.
    “Heh-heh,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and shook his head. “Heh heh.”
    “What’re you laughin’ at, you crazy jigaboo?”
    “Thass a white man,” he said. “All painted up and lookin’ the fool.”
    At last Mr. Lightfoot pulled himself away from the picture of Al Jolson and went to the bomb. He cleared away some nail-studded timbers and roof shingles and sat down on the red dirt, a process that was like watching a snail cross a football field. He drew the toolbox close to his side, like a trusted companion. Then he took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his shirt, blew on the lenses, and wiped them on his sleeve, all at excruciating slowness.
    “What have I done to deserve this?” Mr. Moultry croaked.
    Mr. Lightfoot got his spectacles on. “Now,” he said. “I can.” He leaned closer to the bomb, and as he frowned the small lines deepened between his eyes. “See what’s what.”
    He took a hammer with a miniature head from his belt. He licked his thumb and-slowly, slowly-marked the hammer’s head with his spit. Then he tapped the bomb’s side so lightly it hardly made a noise.
    “Don’t hit it! Oh Jeeeeesus! You’ll blow us both to hell!”
    “Ain’t,” Mr. Lightfoot replied as he made small tappings up and down the bomb’s side, “plannin’ on it.” He pressed his ear against the bomb’s iron skin. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I hears you talkin’.” As Mr. Moultry agonized in terrified silence, Mr. Lightfoot’s fingers were at work, moving across the bomb as one might stroke a small dog. “Uh-huh.” His fingers stopped on a thin seam. “Thass the way ta your heart, ain’t it?” He located four screws just below the tail fins, and he lifted the proper screwdriver from its place on his belt like a glacier melting.
    “You came here to kill me, didn’t you?” Mr. Moultry groaned. He received a punch of insight. “She sent you, didn’t she? She sent you to kill me!”
    “Got,” Mr. Lightfoot said as he made the first turn of the first screw, “half that right.”
    Eons later, the final screw fell into Mr. Lightfoot’s palm. Mr. Lightfoot had started humming “Frosty, the Snowman,” in his somnolent way. Sometime between the removal of the second and third screws, the sound of the detonation mechanism had changed from a tick to a rasp. Mr. Moultry, lying in a stew of sweat, his eyes glassy and his head thrashing back and forth with dementia, had lost five pounds.
    Mr. Lightfoot took from his toolbox a small blue jar. He opened it and with the tip of his index finger withdrew some greasy gunk the color of eel’s skin. He spat into it, and smeared the gunk onto the seam that circled the bomb. Then he took hold of the tail fins and tried to give them a counterclockwise turn. They resisted. He tried it in the clockwise direction, but that, too, was fruitless.
    “Listen here!” Mr. Lightfoot’s voice was stern, his brow furrowed with disapproval. “Don’t you gimme no sass!” With the miniature hammer he clunked the screw holes, and Mr. Moultry lost another few ounces as his pants suddenly got wet. Then Mr. Lightfoot gripped the tail fins with both hands and pulled.
    Slowly, with a thin high skrreeeeek of resistance, the bomb’s tail section began to slide out. It was hard work, and Mr. Lightfoot had to pause to stretch his cramping fingers. Then he went back to it, with the determination of a sloth gripping a tree branch. At last the tail section came free, and exposed were electronic circuits, a jungle of different-colored wires, and shiny black plastic cylinders that resembled the backs of roaches.
    “Hoooowheeee!” Mr. Lightfoot breathed, enchanted. “Ain’t it pretty?”
    “Killin’ me…” Mr. Moultry moaned. “Killin’ me