To be eighty-six years old and feel this.
Seymour
Just as the first snows stick to the ridges above town, Idaho Power shuts off the electricity to the double-wide. The propane tank in the front yard is still one-third full, so Bunny heats the house by turning on the oven and leaving its door open. Seymour charges his tablet at the ice rink, and gives his mother most of the money he makes.
MATHILDA: cold tonite been thinking of u
SEEMORE6: cold here 2
MATHILDA: when its dark like this I want to take off clothes run outside feel air on my skin
MATHILDA: then get back in bed all cozy
SEEMORE6: rly?
MATHILDA: u have 2 hurry have 2 get here i can hardly stand it
MATHILDA: have 2 come up with ur task
On Christmas morning Bunny sits him at the kitchen table. “I’m giving in, Possum. I’m going to sell. Find a place to rent. After next year, you’ll be off, and I don’t need a whole acre to myself.”
Behind her the gas whooshes blue inside the open oven.
“I know this place has been important to you, maybe more important than I realize. But it’s time now. They’re hiring a housekeeper at the Sachse Inn, a longer drive, I know, but it’s a job. If I’m lucky, between the job and the house sale, I can pay off all this debt and have enough left over to get my teeth fixed. Maybe even help with college.”
Out the sliding door the lights of the townhomes flicker behind an icy fog. A terrible sensitivity has been building inside Seymour: a hundred voices in the basement of his head speaking all at once. Eat this, wear this, you’re inadequate, you don’t belong, your pain will go away if you purchase this right now. See-More Stool-Guy, ha ha. Out there, in the ground beneath the toolshed, waits Pawpaw’s old Beretta and his crate of hand grenades, nestled in their five-by-five grids. If he holds his breath, he can hear the grenades rattling lightly in their places.
Bunny sets her palms flat on the table. “You’re going to do something special with your life, Seymour. I know it.”
* * *
He stands in the night in his windbreaker at the corner of Lake and Park. Christmas lights dot the gutters of the Eden’s Gate showroom at perfectly spaced intervals. Black cameras have been mounted under the eaves, and stickers shaped like badges gleam in the bottom corners of windows, and complicated-looking locks protect the front and rear gates.
Security systems. Alarms. Getting in there and leaving something behind without being noticed is not feasible. But the west side of the realty office and the east side of the library, he observes, are less than four feet apart. In the space between, there’s hardly room for a gas meter and a frozen stripe of snow. Smuggling an explosive into the realty office might be impossible. But the library?
SEEMORE6: I came up with a spot
MATHILDA: a target?
SEEMORE6: a task, my way 2 disrupt machine 2 help wake people up begin real change
MATHILDA: what have you
SEEMORE6: 2 earn my way 2 the camp
MATHILDA: come up with?
SEEMORE6: 2 u
The PDF Mathilda sends via Pryva-C is full of typos and klutzy diagrams. But the concept is plain: fuses, pressure cookers, prepaid phones, everything duplicated in case the first bomb fails. He buys one pressure cooker at Lakeport Drug and a second at Ridley’s and two padlock hasps at Bergesen Hardware and mounts these to the inside of his bedroom door and to the door of the toolshed.
Unscrewing the grenades is easier than he imagined. The explosive filler inside looks harmless, like little blond flakes of quartz. He uses an old letter scale of Pawpaw’s: twenty ounces into each cooker.
He keeps going to school. Keeps mopping floors at the rink. All his life a prologue and now it’s finally going to begin.
* * *
In early February he is charging three prepaid Alcatel Tracfones behind the skate-rental counter when he looks up to see Janet in her denim jacket.
“Hi.”
New frog patches line her sleeves. Her hat is the kind of wool that looks so soft that you never want to take it off, the kind he has never had. She has the tanned cheekbones of a skier and looking at her he feels as if he has matured a decade since tenth grade, as if the Janet Infatuation was an era humans lived through a thousand years ago.
She says, “I haven’t seen you.”
Act normal. Everything is normal.
“I never told anyone what you did. If you’re wondering.”
He glances at the soda machine, the skates in their cubbies. Better not to say anything.
“Eighteen kids showed up last week to EAC, Seymour. I thought you might want to know. We got the cafeteria to reduce food waste, and it’s all bamboo napkins, now, bamboo is like regrowable, or what’s the word?”