Racks of candy next to grocery store checkout counters are the bane of parents everywhere. You can bet it wasn't a stupid person who realized that kids would help drive impulse candy purchases. You can also bet that it was a stupid person who bought the can of Bubble-Tape from such a rack in which Jeremiah would place entirely too much faith and subsequently cement his place firmly in the archives of my childhood memories. The can of Bubble-Tape cost me 50 cents. It cost Jeremiah significantly more.
Since the heart-wrenching burial of my unfortunate pants and my protective instincts of the tender bits that had so recently cowered within them, I wasn't interested in trying out another rocket right away. Instead, we decided that propulsion would be more fun if it happened all at once rather than over a period of time. It followed logically that we should see what would happen if we pounded all the propellant out of the little tubes with a hammer and lit the resulting pile of explosives on fire. I still had some cannon fuse after all.
Happily we made our way to the shed, where my dad kept his blacksmith tools. There's no place better to beat propellant out of cardboard tubes than on an anvil with a giant blacksmiths hammer. In seconds there was a neat little pile of propellant, mixed with chunks of the cement-like mixture that caps each end of a model rocket engine. It was a small pile, so we pounded out a few more tubes until it grew to sufficient proportions. It didn't occur to us to filter out the chunks. What did occur to us was that we needed some sort of a vessel to transport our little sulfur-smelling pile of powdered doom.
Luckily, I had just the thing: My can of Bubble Tape. There was still a good bit of gum in the can and I was loathe to throw it away, so Jeremiah and I each took half of the remaining roll and commenced gnawing on the resulting wad. Then, ever so carefully (not because we were concerned for our safety but because we didn't want to lose any), we scooped the pile into the can, checked our pockets for matches and cannon fuse, ducked under the electric fence and headed out to the big horse pasture behind the shed.
Jeremiah wanted to light it and I, feeling a bit like a mentor, was happy to let him. Very gently he stuck the fuse into the pile of powder. Gingerly he lit the strike-anywhere match and brought it to the fuse, which came to life triumphantly and began its sparkling march towards the powder. To our credit, we both ran away and hit the deck like two smart people with reasons to live. Peeking out from behind our bowl-cuts we saw the little tendrils of smoke from the fuse get closer and closer, over the lip of the can, into the powder and then.... nothing. Nothing happened at all.
We waited a while. That was a smart thing to do. When we were sure nothing was going to happen we investigated and found that the fuse had slipped out just short of the pile. We reloaded and tried again. Light, run, duck, cover, peek... nothing. We investigated again but this time we couldn't find a reason why it hadn't worked. It should have worked, and in hindsight it was probably just the universe preparing its own punishment after having let us soak up too much good luck for the day.
Jeremiah was fed up with the fuse not working so he lit a match, tossed it at the can, and bolted. I dropped to the ground in a ball, and laid there like a frozen moose turd. Nothing happened. I stood up. Jeremiah, in a display of abject stupidity and lack of self-preservation instinct, lit yet another match, leaned over, and dropped it directly into the can. I was probably some 10 feet away at this point, but I saw the match falling in close-up high-definition reality. I was unable to move, as if in a dream. When it hit the powder, a lot of things happened in about 1/10th of a second.
Had we left the powder on the ground it might not have been so bad, but since we'd contained it in the little plastic can the entire giant explosion was directed upwards in a sort of upside down cone of doom. Jeremiah took the blast full in the face like Yosemite Sam with his head in a cannon. Why he chose to lean directly over the pile I'll never know. The blast knocked him over backwards, pelting him with hot bits of cement even as it heated the air around him to temperatures rivaling that of the sun. His arms and legs waved wildly like ribbons in a tornado and the wave of heat smacked into me like a wall.
I opened my eyes to find Jeremiah rolling around on the ground. As he opened his mouth and commenced wailing like a banshee with a nail in its foot, the giant pink wad of bubble gum in his mouth contrasted dramatically with the sheer blackness of his face and I stared at the spectacle stupidly for a second before I did the logical thing and panicked.
Water! He needed water for his face. We were literally twenty feet from, and in plain sight of, a swampy area big enough to ice skate on in the winter. I overlooked that fact. We were also about 50 yards from a pond that I swam in almost every day. I overlooked that fact as well. As Jeremiah staggered around gnashing his teeth, I lit out to get a bucket of water from the shed.
I was in a full sprint when I came to the electric fence and I leaped over it like a gazelle. Almost. Instead of soaring gracefully to the other side, the knot in the lace of my sneaker caught on the fence and jerked me to a stop in midair. That wouldn't have been as much of a problem except that as soon as I face-planted into the dirt my body made a nice path to ground for all that electricity that was stored in the fence. There I lay, one leg strung up on the electric fence, thrashing around like a wounded beaver. My wad of gum went flying.
Somehow I got free, and I remember briefly wondering if I'd peed. I hadn't, which was lucky; that would have been embarrassing. I ran, dazed, to the shed where I searched around for a container. In my frazzled state I determined that the plastic bubble container from a package of disposable dust masks would do the trick. I took it to the hose, filled it up to capacity (which was about 10oz of water), and headed back to the pasture, walking quickly and trying desperately not to spill it.
When I got to the fence I couldn't jump, so I ducked under. Not far enough. In my hastiness and inability to multitask, the back of my neck grazed the fence and the resulting jolt struck me like a sucker-punch in the back of the head. It knocked me on my face on top of what little water remained, and by the time I struggled back up and made it to poor Jeremiah, I had about three drops of water in the container and a soggy shirt.
Maybe the jolt from the fence had helped clear my head, because I remembered the pond. I took off my shirt, put it over the soot covered smudge that I assumed was Jeremiahs face, and led him down to the edge. When he knelt down and plunged his head into the water a cloud of blackness spread out from him like an oil slick the likes of which causes Greenpeace to scrub penguins.
For a split second, I entertained the possibility that everything would be okay. That notion passed the instant Jeremiah pulled his head out of the water.
Previous: Part 4: The Pants Debacle
Next: Part 6: The Aftermath
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