THE BOMB HOLE INCIDENT
A Short Story by C.D. Reimer
Copyright 2011 C.D. Reimer
Smashwords Edition
This 2,050-word short story is being published for the first time.
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My family would go to Gilroy every Fourth of July to buy fireworks, as this was the only place in Santa Clara County where you could buy them legally. Grandpa told me that there used to be fireworks stands on every street corner in the county, where you often got a bigger bang per buck than today’s safe-and-sane whimpers. A law was past many years ago to restrict the sales of fireworks because too many houses and fields caught on fire from people misusing them, except the law punished everyone rather than those who were guilty. After my parents bought the biggest box of fireworks that was big only in its price, we went over to Grandpa’s place to eat hot dogs, hamburgers and potato salad, wait until darkness came—which always took forever—before we could shoot the fireworks from off the curb in his front yard, say our goodbyes and return home before midnight. My parents would never allow me to bring home any leftover fireworks. I guess they didn’t want me to become a suspected terrorist like my best friend.
Derek often got the unsafe-and-insane fireworks from Mexico: large bricks of firecrackers in red-, blue-, and green-colored papers that go bang-bang-bang like machine guns, cherry bombs that could blow your fingers off in a bang loud enough to shake all the windows in the neighborhood, and scores of bottle rockets to whistle off into the night sky. He bragged about his connections to the Mexican mafia to get whatever he wanted, and even claimed that he could get a North Korean nuclear bomb through the Chinese Triad in San Francisco.
Not that I believe him.
I’m still waiting for him to cough up some authentic Chinese firecrackers, although he claims those are made in Mexico as well. When he wasn’t shooting off his mouth or the Mexican-made fireworks, he was making his own fireworks at home to blow them up in the bomb hole out in his front yard. Chemistry was the only subject at school that he cared enough about to earn a decent grade. Everything else he deliberately fails on purpose. Why that doesn’t raise any red flags with school administrators during the War of Terror was something of a mystery to me.
On the last day of summer before our senior year at high school, we stopped by Seven-Eleven on the way to his place to shoot off his last stash of fireworks. Just for the occasion, we both got “the bomb”: a Super Big Gulp cup with equal portions of non-diet sodas. That combination had a peculiar punch bowl taste that quenched our thirst .
Derek’s old man wasn’t home when we got there.
Opening the floor access panel inside the hall closet, Derek pulled out the wooden crate of fireworks that he had hidden down there. The crawl space underneath the house was dry and cool enough to store the volatile chemicals that might explode on their own in the summer heat. This was the least likely place for his old man to look if he knew about the lab. He closed the access panel with a hollow thump. We went outside to the front yard to remove the dead piece of sod that protected the bomb hole opening. He claimed that he dug the hole three feet down with a posthole digger and dropped a “cold fusion” nuke to create the semi-spherical chamber at the bottom.
Not that I believe him.
I just wasn’t stupid enough to call home a liar to his face since he punches harder than his drunken old man punches him. I’m sure this was an old gopher hole and the semi-spherical chamber was blown out by his early experiments. The initial excitement of blowing up stuff in the bomb hole wore off in a hurry.
The spinning roses of flaming colors illuminated the bomb hole opening with an eerie glow. Sparklers dropped down into the bottom like flares into the darkness, showing the remains of previous experiments in a stuttering glow. I could’ve sworn I saw the remains of dead toads blown to bits and pieces. Derek used to tell me that getting a toad to swallow a lit firecracker was a neat trick in itself. We then shot off all the firecrackers inside the bomb hole, sounding like bullets thudding into the earth.