Long Shot

Nineteen-forty-four was a year of war. On battlegrounds around the world our armed forces fought our nation's enemies; on the playground of Camphor Elementary School, my brother and I fought the Porter brothers. The Porters, Stinky and Lard-O, were a year older than us. They were also bigger and faster and better at all the stuff that counted most in fights, in particular their awesome ability to fling a rotten orange laced with gravel farther and with greater accuracy than we could.

Fights were frequent, but they were never restricted to arm-powered artillery. Not at all. When we were separated from our cache sites of objects to throw, like between the time the school bus picked us up in the morning and left us off in the afternoon, we fought with fists and feet. But, because the Porters could best us in all things, my brother and I never tasted the spoils of victory, only the dust of defeat. Even so, our resolve never waned. Like other kids, brother and I greeted summer vacation with elation. Unlike other kids, our elation was not because school was out; it was because Stinky and Lard-O lived just a half-dozen houses away. Now we could fight every day all summer long. If there were ever to be a time for tenacity to conquer ability, that time had arrived. And this long, hot, Florida summer would be our last opportunity. Stinky and Lard-O's house was for sale. When it sold, they would move to another town and attend another school.

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We drank our milk, ate our Wheaties, and prepared for war. We gathered fallen oranges and grapefruit and created cache sites deep within the tall weeds of the vacant lot alongside our property. We whittled blow guns from segments of bamboo and filched dried peas from Mom's pantry for ammunition. We selected forked branches from oak trees and crafted them into slingshots powered by strips cut from the stack of old inner tubes behind the garage. We snitched nail aprons from Dad's tool box to carry ammunition for our slingshots, this the pea gravel that lined the shoulder of the road running past our house. At high noon on the first Friday after school let out for the summer, we were ready for war. The trouble was we hadn't seen Stinky and Lard-O all week. Something was clearly wrong. Mom was at work, sewing parachutes for the Army Air Corps, and Dad was at the Naval Air Station teaching gunnery to new pilots. Neither of them would be home until later that afternoon. We raced upstairs to their bedroom and opened the top drawer of Dad's dresser. There, nestled alongside his .44 single-action revolver, was a pair of binoculars. With the optics in hand we headed down the hall to our bedroom, removed the screen from one of the windows facing the street, and stepped out onto the roof over the porch. From this lofty perch we could see well into the next block. I adjusted the lenses---ignoring Ms. Singleton sunbathing on a towel in her back yard and her bald-headed neighbor, Mr. Rosenbaum, peeking through her rose bushes---and checked out the Porter's house. Now I saw the problem. Stinky was raking leaves in the front yard and Lard-O was on a stepladder at the side of the house washing windows. I related this observation to little brother. "Reckon they got into trouble?" That was an understatement. When Stinky and Lard-O didn't have us to beat up on, they beat up on each other. "No doubt about it," I said. "Probably fighting. Restricted to their yard. That's why we haven't seen them." "What're we gunna do?" I waved off his question. Fact was, I didn't have a clue, but brother didn't need to know this. Then something else caught my attention: the word "SOLD" atop the Realtor's sign in front of their house. This sight hurt worse than a gut punch. It meant our fighting days with the Porters were over. So, too, was life as we had known it. We returned the binoculars and raced downstairs and out to the front yard. Stinky and Lard-O were restricted, no doubt about that, and with their house sold, they could move away at any time. Life was not fair. After all the battles we'd lost, little brother and I deserved a win. But how? The easy answer was if we couldn't fight with them, the next best thing was to get them to fight each other. The tall posts holding our driveway gates gave me an idea. In the next hour we revisited the inner-tube stash, trimmed a pair of humongous strips, fashioned a pouch, and attached our rubber-powered cannon to the top of the driveway posts. With an evil smile radiating new-found power, little brother grabbed the empty shot pouch and backpedaled until his arms quivered. For a three count he looked great, almost in control. Then he began dancing, fighting the inevitable, until he flew past me and ended up with a face full of rag weed just shy of our sidewalk. I helped him up and answered the question filling his eyes. "We'll use the winch on Dad's boat trailer. I'll load and fire. You get the binoculars and call the shots." Within minutes I had the cannon loaded and had taken ten turns on the boat-trailer winch. Was it enough? Too much? No way to know without trying. I yelled, "Fire!" and then flipped the release on the winch. From his perch on the porch roof, little brother screamed, "Bulls-eye!" "Who'd I hit? Stinky? Lard-O?" "Nope. Ya blew Baldy through the rose bushes." Hmm. That meant the range was one house short. I seated another grapefruit into the shot pouch and took two extra turns on the winch. "Fire!" "Hey! Hey! Hey! You beaned Stinky. The dumb dung's lookin' around tryin' to figure out where it came from." That meant the proper range equaled twelve turns. Now for Lard-O. I reloaded, cranked, and tugged the trailer tongue to the left. Just a tad. 'Sight adjustment,' as Dad would call it. "Fire!" "Oh, Oh!" "I miss?" "Nope, ya grazed him." "So?" "The window he was washing . . . . " "Yeah?" "It ain't there no more." By the time Mom and Dad arrived, we'd stashed all trace of our long-shot artillery and were busy doing our chores. Dad said he’d stopped at the Porter's to say good-bye. They were pulling out the following morning, but Stinky and Lard-O wouldn't be sitting while riding. Mr. Porter had thrashed them for fighting again. Saturday afternoon Mom added an extra quarter to our allowance. "It's a reward," she said, "for making it through an entire week without fighting."