On ‘Plainview 7’ Marty screws up. I won’t say anymore than that. Go read.   Plainview 7 – April 2007   My childhood ended like this: it was one of those stupidly hot days in Spring that after the winds of winter felt like a hundred degrees, and I was in my shirt sleeves cycling up to see Pete Mayer at the golf course. It was nowhere near warm enough for that, but it was just a relief to get the fleeces and dufflecoats and parkas off and into something that didn’t make me feel like I was wearing a pile of tyres. When the sun came out, I could feel its heat, and it was startling and strong. It was a Saturday. Me and Pete had been booked to caddy a couple of businessmen around the eighteen holes, and we were pretty useful. We knew that course like the lines on the palms of our hands and, depending on how they treated us, we could give enough advice to make a real difference to their final scores. I was going up early. Dad was holding a meeting in the front room – just a few of the Party faithful – and Mom had gone into domestic overdrive. Charlie and me had seen the writing on the wall and made ourselves scarce. Neither of us particularly enjoyed being paraded as models of the fine, upstanding youth of America. So we were out of there. I turned up into the drive that led to the club, and I could feel my whole body just relax. I could goof around with Pete, catch a few words with his dad and earn some bucks in the process. Life at home was pretty strict, and Pete seemed to have a far better time of it than I did. I took every opportunity to remind him of that, and sometimes in his dad’s hearing. If I was being too blatant about it, he’d look up from whatever it was he was doing and fix me with a hard ‘don’t show disrespect to your parents while I’m around’ stare, but otherwise, he’d cover his smile and get right on. I dumped my bike by the porch of the Mayer residence and knocked on the screen door. There was no answer, so I hollered. Deafened by the ensuing silence, I mooched around the back, then off to the first tee. That’s where I found them, sitting on their haunches, contemplating a set of muddy tyre tracks that wobbled their way down the fairway until the dog-leg at seventy yards. "Geez, that’s a mess," I said. Chris Mayer stood up, holding a clod of excavated earth. He weighed it in his hand and then threw it as hard and as far as he could. I saw where Pete got his throwing arm from. "Some out-of-town kids came up here last night to raise Kane." "Did you call the sheriff?" "Soon as we heard them," said Pete. "They got a car to us as soon as they could." "That’s what they said." Mr. Mayer balled his fists. "Took them forty minutes, by which time they were gone. I got their number, but there wasn’t much else I could do." I knew he didn’t hold with guns. My dad had an automatic pistol, but I wasn’t rightly sure that he’d ever fired it, even at a target. "What can I do?" I asked. "Apart from getting your dad to tell the county sheriff to stop blackballing me?" He stopped, took a big breath, then turned away. "Sorry, Marty. Not your fight, or your fault." "It’s okay, Mr. Mayer. I understand. Really I do." "Yeah, I know," he muttered, then looked down his ruined fairway. "Best thing we can do at the moment is remove all the loose clods and barrow them away. Then I guess I can call the returfers and get them cut me some fresh. We’ll do repairs to the tees and the greens first, then try and iron out some of the damage on the rest. Pete, scoot over to the clubhouse and get them to cancel any bookings for today. Marty, up for a day’s hard work?" "Yes sir," I said. "Wheel barrow’s in the tool shed. Bring some sacks and forks, and the half-moon iron, too." I looked back once I’d reached the trees. He was still staring off into the distance. He must have been as mad as hell. In his position, I would have been too.     We worked our butts off. We hauled and dragged and shovelled and cut and tamped, and by evening time, the course was playable again. The seventh green, where the kids’ car had done several tight handbrake turns, was a touch lumpy, but we were all too dog-tired to take a roller out and flatten it down. "You’d better give your folks a call, Marty. Let them know that you’ll be late." "Ain’t that the truth? I don’t think I can stand, let alone pedal." We’d crashed out on the grass in front of the house and didn’t look like moving till Fall. "I’ll fix you boys some supper. You’ve earned it. Then I’ll drive you home, Marty." "That sounds good," I said, and yawned. The air was cool and on the verge of becoming cold as the sun slipped down to touch the top of the trees. I was on the edge of sleep when I roused myself and got on the phone to Mom to let her know what happened. She tutted about the chores I hadn’t done at home, but I diverted her with some talk on how good it was to help some non-church friends, and what a real service it was to them. Mollified, she rung off, and Mr. Mayer came in and started rattling pans around. No matter how often I saw it, it always surprised me that a man could do the cooking for a family. Sure, at barbecues, Dad was king – even had the apron to tell everyone so – but otherwise I doubted his ability to boil an egg. Mr. Mayer, by necessity, had had to learn or live on carry-outs for the rest of his life. It was no gourmet feast we had that night, but it was more than serviceable for two growing young men. There was plenty of starch and grease to fuel me up, and chops enough for an army. Even my jaw was tired as I pushed my plate away. "That was great, Mr. Mayer." "I’d better get you home, Marty, or your father’ll have me up on abduction charges. I’ll pop the trunk and you can get your bike in." Pete looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and shrugged. "I figure I know what I’ll be up to." "See you in school, Pete." The sun was all but set and the sky was a deep and perfect blue. We rattled down the drive to the main road in companionable silence. A car, a convertible shot past us on its way up to the club. Its lights were off, but I could see the passengers, all boys a touch older than myself. Mr. Mayer stamped hard on the brakes of his car. "That’s them," he said. "I’d swear on it." I dug the seat-belt out of my chest and turned around. "You sure? It’s getting dark out there." "Damned if I’m going to let them do this to me a second time." He gunned the engine and raced to front gates. He did a sharp U-turn and headed back up the drive. "Got a phone on you, Marty?" I patted my pockets. I couldn’t remember if I’d picked it up that morning or not. But it was in my coat pocket, and my coat was hanging in the hall at home. "Damn again. You call the sheriff this time and get his lazy ass down here or you’ll get your father on him." "Sure, I can do that, but what’ll you do?" "I’ll think of something," he said through gritted teeth. "Where the hell have they gone?" He was racking up the fines, but I wasn’t going to report him. I wound down the window and shoved my head out. Aside from us, I could hear another engine racing away. I pointed: "Right next to your house." "Pete," was all he said before I was thrown back against the window frame. I hung on as we cornered on two wheels. The convertible was tearing round the Mayer house, and the boys in the car were throwing beer bottles at the windows. Pete was at the front door, gamely projecting cookware at them when they came into range. Wisely, he wasn’t venturing out. We had to assume he’d called the cops. We also had to assume that it’d be a good half-hour before they could be bothered to turn up. The Mayers weren’t Reconstruction, so why hurry? "Let me out," I said. "I just thought of something." Our appearance, lights full on, had attracted their attention away from the house. A couple of bottles tinkled on the gravel road in front of us, accompanied by a lot of incoherent yelling and hooting. Mr. Mayer stopped long enough for me to jump out, but it was clear what was on his mind. He was going to ram the boy’s car, anything to drive them away from his son. I ran back into the trees that hid the house from the course. Somewhere near I’d a buried cache, but it wasn’t going to be so easy to find it in the gloom without a torch. After a few moments of running from tree root to tree root, I found the gnarly pine I was looking for. It had been a while, over a year. The grass had grown tightly together and I had to force my hands into the soil to rip up the turf. Six inches down I found a black bag double-wrapped around a big plastic tub. I ripped the bag away, heaved open the tub. It felt cool and dry inside. I’d always added a desiccant, and the tub was watertight. There were food bags with various chemicals in, and a few empty steel tubes, sawn from scaffolding poles. But there was one complete pipe bomb, filled with black powder and primed with permanganate. I had a loop of cannon fuse, too, commercial stuff that burnt an inch a second. I figured ten-fifteen inches, the length of my forearm or a bit longer, but I didn’t have a knife. I tried to bite through it, but that wasn’t going anywhere fast, so I improvised. And all the time I could hear the bangs and crashes of two cars hitting each other. I had to hurry. I took the free end of the fuse cord and pushed it home through the cap of the bomb and into the primer. Then I measured out a length and put a knot in it. I had matches in a little tin box, complete with a striker glued to the inside of the lid. I grabbed it and ran. By the time I got back, the cars were fender to fender, locked in a pushing match on the Mayer’s front lawn. There was blue smoke and shattered glass. Pete was beside himself, screaming abuse, whilst his father kept on shouting over and over for him to get back into the house. I got out a match, struck it, caught the wavering flame, and applied it to the knot in the fuse cord. It fizzed. The excess fuse fell away, and I tried to make myself heard over the din. "Hey, punks! Eat this." I threw the bomb as cleanly and sweetly as I had done making that fifty-yard pass into the Bloomfield High in-zone. Touchdown. It slotted right into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. Now, as bombs go, I couldn’t have made it much clearer if I’d stencilled ‘bomb’ on the outside of the tube in white paint. They had about ten seconds to react, the first five of which were spent just staring at the sparking coal of the fuse. They got out pretty quickly after that. As the driver bailed out, Mr. Mayer’s car surged forward, giving the convertible an almighty shove. It rolled clear of the house, which was good, and Mr. Mayer braked, which was also good, because when the bomb went off, red-hot shards of metal zipped through the convertible’s fuel tank to make a second explosion. A dirty orange fireball lifted into the sky. Not perfect, but it was immensely satisfying all the same. I’d never actually blown anything up before, and I stood oblivious to the hail of car parts raining down about me. The boys – maybe seniors by the look of them – weren’t too quick to recover. Perhaps they’d had the fight knocked out of them. Chris Mayer got out of his car. He even remembered to turn his engine off. He walked up towards me, then stood next to me to survey the scene. "Martin Sorenson, what have you done?"