By Any Other Name - 5. Chapter 5

We scoped out the square, but it looked totally empty. The tower clock now read twelve-forty five. With any luck, we'd be back to the truck by one-thirty.

"Ready?" I asked Joey.

"Yeah. Let's go."

We stepped out from behind the tree and hastened along the sidewalk, hoping that we were as nearly invisible as we thought. I don't think I'd ever make a good burglar, because it's really unpleasant to skulk about in the dark hoping no one will notice you. And nothing makes a place more uncomfortable than the knowledge that you really don't belong there, doing whatever you're doing.

We arrived back at the hardware store, and I looked up to see a dark shape at the edge of the roof, outlined by stars. We moved left a little, and there was the clothesline, hanging down from above. We quickly pulled off our bags and attached them to the line, and they were whisked upward and away.

"Got 'em", Dev said into my earphones.

We could have just left the bags in the alley, but if something happened and we had to run, I'd lose my drill and my tools. They weren't that heavy, and sending them up to the others was not that big a deal. They would be leaving some of the things they had brought in their bags up on the roof, so carrying ours would be no problem for them.

"We're heading for the grandstand now," I told Dev. "Sing out if you see anything, okay?"

"I will. Rich and I are watching, believe me."

"Yeah," Rich added to the circuit. "You guys be careful."

Joey and I went back to the alley, and I grabbed up the gas can by its handle, while Joey slung the two bags over his shoulder. I grinned at that, because bag number four was pretty bulky, and Joey looked like dark Santa Claus about deliver his nasty gifts. And in a way - for Brad Kisner - that was even true!

"Let's go," he said, starting forward.

We crossed the street to the green, and walked through a gap in the line of shrubs that ran along the sidewalk. The grandstand loomed at the end of the green, in front of the courthouse, and we quickly crossed the grass to stand in front of it. I grunted, and set the can down. Rich was right - it was heavy!

"Damn molasses," I whispered. "Stuff weighs a ton!"

I heard Joey laugh softly, and he motioned for me to pick up the can again. "It's only about forty pounds. Come on. We're not there yet."

I grunted, but grabbed at the can's handle and hefted it again. Rich had toted this thing from the pick up truck all the way through the woods to the hardware store. I had to give that boy some respect for that!

We went around to the side of the stand, where there was a gap in the blue bunting covering the framework, and Joey bent low and started underneath. I went to follow, and found I had to set the gas can down and sort of drag it along the ground. There were upright supports everywhere, and I had no idea how far we had gone between them when Joey called a halt.

"We should be just about beneath the podium."

There were gaps between the floorboards above us, but all I could tell by peering through them was that we were not beneath the grandstand's canopy. I could see stars, very faintly, above us.

Joey turned to me. "Go ahead back out, and go to the podium. Take your tools with you. Let me know when you're there."

I nodded, fished my roll of tools out of sack three, and turned back the way we'd come. In a few seconds I was out, and walking around to the side steps. There were five of them, which I took slowly, looking about as I ascended.

Everything had gone smoothly after encountering Cupper Dawson and Annie Liggett behind the Come On Inn, and I have to admit it was spooking me a little. Bent Fork was probably just as quiet at this time of night, but I'd never been in the town square there so late, either, so I didn't know for sure. It just seemed ridiculous that we could walk around and do all this stuff, and there was no one to take notice. It was kind of eye-opening, in a way. I knew I loved it here in the sticks for the peace and quiet, but seeing how laid back it really was - and how safe our lives were compared to city folk - it was a little scary, too. If we could take advantage of the way life was here, others could, just as well.

Made ya think.

I crossed to the podium and squatted beside it. "I'm there," I said into the mic. "Right beside the podium." I took out my flash, and aimed the red light down between the floorboards.

"I see you. We were close. Stay there a minute while I move the stuff over underneath you."

I could see a trace of Joey's red flashlight through cracks in the boards, and heard him grunt. "You weren't kidding about the gas can."

I laughed. "It's only about forty pounds!"

"Fish got big lips, too," he returned. "Tell me something I don't know." There was more grunting, and then a satisfied breath of air. "Okay, I'm there. Let me see how these boards look. Hmm."

I turned my own flash off. I could see the red light of Joey's flash playing back and forth through the cracks between the floorboards.

"Okay. How about that wax paper on the podium? Is it thick, like we thought?"

I reached out a finger and prodded the covering on the side of the podium. "Yeah. Pretty thick stuff."

"Good. Get your tools out and start taking the cover off the side."

I unrolled the leather toolkit, and pulled a flat-bladed screwdriver from its loop. The paper covering the podium had simply been stapled on, and I used my light to locate each staple, and pried them out with the blade of the screwdriver. I collected the staples and put them in an empty pouch in the toolkit, so that none would be left laying about to draw attention. I was then able to open up the side of the podium.

"It's open, Joe."

"Good. Stick the shaft of your screwdriver down between the floorboards about at the middle of the inside, so I can mark it."

I did that, saw the red light move about, and heard the rough scrape of a carpenter's pencil being drawn in a circle around my screwdriver shaft.

"Okay, pull it up. I'm going to push the line through now. Grab it, and pull it up about six inches."

I returned the screwdriver to its loop, and took out the small roll of Gorilla tape.

I heard more scraping sounds, and then something poked up between the floorboards. I grasped the airline and pulled it up about half a foot. "Okay."

"Good. I'll hold it, and you secure it."

I let go of the airline, and pulled about a foot of the sticky tape off the roll and cut it with a razor blade knife. I took that length of tape and wrapped it around the airline, and then took the excess on either side and flattened the tape to the floorboards. This was good stuff, and would stick to almost anything. I gave the tape around the air line a final pinch, and nodded to myself.

"Done."

"Great. Come on back and get the payload."

I had to grin at that. The payload. Joey was going to be a science nerd of some sort, someday, whether he knew it now or not.

I left the tools and scrambled back to the steps and down them. Joey met me at the gap in the bunting, and passed me the fat, Santa Claus bag he'd carried over from the alley. I took it and went back to the podium, and withdrew the large plastic trash bag from within the sack. The contents were lightweight and soft, and easy to handle. The bag had been set up back at the shack, sealed tightly with epoxy cement, and the fitting that would attach to the air line also cemented into place.

I went back to my toolkit and opened the little pocket that held the ferrule and the threaded cap, and took them out. The tube of sealant was in a loop next to the pocket. I got that, too, and laid all of them onto the leather kit, between the wrenches.

Next, I grabbed up the razor blade knife and took my flashlight around to the front of the podium. The waxed paper covering the podium was fairly thick, and we didn't want that to interfere with the working of our device. The paper on the sides and back of the podium didn't matter, but we had to be sure that the front would come off when we needed it to.

I took the knife and, pressing the paper gently so that I could feel the framework behind it, drew the blade slowly along the top, leaving the paper at each corner untouched. I did the same for the bottom of the front, and then the sides, leaving one-inch strips in the middle uncut. The paper on the front of the podium was now held in place only at the corners and in the middle of the sides.

I stepped back and played my flash over it - the cuts could hardly be seen. Hopefully, no one would notice.

Then I squatted at the side again, and set my light down so that the beam played over the airline. Carefully, I took the big plastic trash bag and turned it so that the fitting was down, and worked the bag into the interior of the podium. It was a tight fit, but the bag was lightweight stuff, and the contents of the bag were soft and easy to manipulate, and I got it all inside. I had to lay down on my stomach to connect the fitting, first pushing the cap onto the air line, and then the ferrule. I opened the tube of sealant and swiped a little around the front of the ferrule, and then pushed the end of the airline into the fitting on the bag until the ferrule seated in the concave opening. Then it was just a matter of sliding up the threaded cap, turning it down hand-tight, and giving it one final turn with a wrench from the toolkit.

"I'm done," I said into the mic. "The bag is inside, and connected."

"Great," Joey returned. "Come back and help me. Don't forget to put the paper back on the side of the podium."

I smiled at that reminder, but took no offense at it. With what we were doing, everything needed to be checked twice.

I put away the wrench and the sealant, and pulled out the little staple gun, and carefully reattached the paper to the side of the podium. Then I closed up the toolkit, put it in my sack, and headed back to the stairs.

"Hey, you guys! Wherever you are, freeze!" It was Rich's voice over the headset, and it sounded urgent.

I'd just reached the stairs, and I ducked back behind the bunting and squatted low. "What's happening?"

"There's a car coming up main street," Dev returned. "Stay down!"

I moved to the front of the stand and peeked over the railing. I could hear the car now, and see the headlights coming up the street to our left. It drew up to the stop sign there, and paused a moment. I felt my heart beating like mad in my chest, but couldn't move a muscle. I just watched the car, sitting there at the intersection.

The interior light came on, and I could see two people inside. They had something out and were looking at it. They talked back and forth for a bit, and then one of them pointed straight ahead, and the other seemed to be in agreement. The interior light went out, and the car surged forward. It crossed the square, and vanished up the other side of main street. I listened to the sound of the engine as it faded away, until only the sounds of the summer night remained.

And then I started to breathe again.

"Somebody was lost, I think," Dev said. "I was watching them through the binoculars, and I think they had a map out."

That made sense. The main streets of both Bent Fork and Muskrat Hill had once been a part of Route Two. But as that road became a busier thoroughfare, people in both towns got tired of the constant traffic through their central squares, and had gone after the state to create a bypass for the road so that regular traffic passed around the towns. Those bypasses had been built around ten years earlier, but even so, people got turned the wrong way now and then, and still wound up in town.

I heard Joey sigh over the headset. "Let's wait a moment, to be sure."

I had to smile at the sound of his voice. "Piss your pants?"

He laughed. "Damn near." We waited a moment longer, but the car did not reappear. "Okay. Come on back and help me."

"On my way."

At the other end of the airline leading up into the podium was a disposable canister of helium at 50 pounds of pressure. We'd experimented at the shack, and found fifty pounds to be about right for what we needed. Joey had strapped the canister to an upright, and mounted the receiver to the exhaust valve atop it. This part of the project had been tested back at the shack, but we could not test it here because we only had the one shot.

But how it worked was simple: at a certain moment, we would push the button on the transmitter that sent out a digitally coded pulse, which the receiver here on the canister would take as a signal to act. It would send current from the little nine-volt battery to the solenoid on the exhaust valve, and the valve would open, allowing the canister of helium to empty itself all at one time. That rather forceful shot of gas would jet up the tube into the trash bag above, and explode it with sufficient force to expel its contents in every direction. But only the paper covering the front of the podium had been weakened, and hopefully most of the force of the blast would go that way.

Hopefully. That part of the project had not really been tested, and there was no small amount of hope involved that what seemed to us should work, would.

Joey finished what he was doing and pulled out the telescoping antenna on the receiver, and turned the unit on. We both held our breaths for a moment, but nothing happened except that the little green LED that signified power to the unit lit up.

"I'm gonna need a serious nap after we're done," Joey said then.

There was a laugh on the headset, followed by Rich's voice. "I know just the thing to reduce stress!"

"You're on," Joey returned, and I could hear the grin in his voice.

I helped Joey to move the remaining equipment back about six feet from the canister, and then I went back up onto the stand and shone my flash down between the floorboards just beneath the edge of the canopy framework, right behind the podium. Joey marked the spot, and then I moved over to where the frame uprights supporting the canopy met the floorboards on the left side, and shone my light there.

"Great," Joey said. "Now hang tight a minute while I see if I can find a gap to put the hose through."

I could see Joey's light moving around underneath, and then it disappeared. "Found it. Can you see the light?"

I looked around, but could not see the red beam anywhere. "No. I don't see it."

Joey swore. "Isn't the inside of the stand also covered with wax paper?"

"Yeah, it is."

"That must be it. Go to the left corner and undo the paper there."

It was my turn to swear. "I didn't bring my tools back with me."

"Oh, crap. Meet me at the gap in the bunting, and I'll hand them to you."

I returned to the side of the stand, and Joey was there to hand me the rolled-up toolkit. I took it, and returned to the corner beneath the front edge of the canopy. Taking the screwdriver, I carefully pried out the staples, and pulled back the paper.

And there was Joey's red light, inside the framework, shining up through a large gap in the floor. "I see your light now."

"Great. This is even better than I'd hoped for, actually. It means that when we run the hose up, it'll be behind the paper, and there'll be no chance of someone spotting it."

I was relieved. Joey had been certain there'd be gaps we could run the hose through, but if he'd been wrong I would have had to go back to the hardware and have Dev lower my drill and bits. I had a one-inch spade drill bit I'd brought along, just for such an eventuality. But it seemed that luck was on our side here.

"Wait there, Kelly, and I'll pass you the hose."

A moment later the end of the hose came through the gap, and I grabbed it and pulled it up. It was just half-inch inch garden hose, with a standard female screw fitting at the end. I pulled about five feet of it up through the hole, and then laid it on the floorboards.

"Wait a sec, Joe, while I get one of these chairs."

I went and grabbed a folding chair from the line at the back of the grandstand, and brought it forward to the front of the canopy. The blue waxed paper only covered the walls, and the framework overhead supporting the canopy was all open. I retrieved the hose, stood on the chair, and pulled the hose along the overhead supports to the middle of the grandstand, just behind the podium. Then I jumped down off the chair and went back to the hole.

"It's about in the right spot."

"Good. I'll be up in a second."

The hose would carry the first element of our gift to Brad. Straight molasses would not only have been expensive to buy in a five-gallon quantity, it would have been almost impossible to pump through a regular garden hose. The stuff was five times as viscous as sixty-weight motor oil, and twice as viscous as honey. The four of us had learned a lot about the viscosity of liquids while researching our project, and we'd had to experiment a lot to arrive at what we'd brought with us.

Fortunately, we did not need the dense syrup in uncut form. It wasn't the thickness of molasses we needed, it was the stickiness. Fortunately, molasses mixed well with water, and you could cut the thickness of the stuff quite a bit while still retaining the stickiness. That, we had done.

Joey arrived next to me, and played his light carefully over the upper framework, shielding the red lens behind his hand. "Oh, cool. We can get this whole thing up, and put the paper back, and the only way someone will see the shower head is if they actually climb up into the rafters."

It wasn't a bathtub-type shower head he meant, but a high-volume garden sprayer head that we had also found at The Thinking Place. It was stainless steel, and despite the dents in it, it was watertight and worked just fine. We'd spray-painted it black so that it would be less visible. Joey had brought it with him, along with the mounting bracket to install it. The head was six-inches across, and it was rated at twenty-four gallons per minute. It produced a heavy, rain-like spray that covered a wide area, and so aiming it would be basic - just point it at the podium. At six feet it soaked an area eight feet across - more than enough to get anyone even close to the podium.

I went back to my toolkit and got the power screwdriver, and held the chair steady while Joey mounted the shower head. He got the bracket up, fastened the stem behind the head into it, and directed me to go and stand at the podium so he could aim it. Then he tightened the mount so that the head wouldn't move.

"I wish we could test it," he said, waving at me.

"Not on me!" I stepped away from the podium, and he laughed.

"Come on and let's secure the hose and put the paper back."

Joey attached the hose to the stem and tightened the fitting, and then I handed him clamps, which he used to fasten the hose to the cross member. While he finished that, I got out the stapler gun and reattached the paper over the run of the hose coming up through floor.

"All done," Joey said, stepping down off the chair. He played his light above, and you really couldn't see the hose at all, and the shower head only if you knew exactly where to look for it.

I felt a tingle of excitement. It's one thing to dream up a crazy adventure, and another entirely to see it all coming together. This was going to work!

Joey picked up the chair and returned it to its spot in the line, and then both of us went back beneath the grandstand.

"How's it coming?" Rich asked, across the radio link.

"You can hear us talking, can't you?" I asked.

"Yeah, but it's not the same as seeing."

"The head is up," I told him, "and the hose is run. We just have to set up the pump, and then we'll be done."

"I'm going to sleep well tonight," he returned.

I nodded. Me, too, definitely.

Back under the stand, we hauled out the last bag. It was another heavy one, because it contained both the pump and the other battery from the busted UPS. The pump was a small electric oil scavenger pump, rated to deliver 50-weight motor oil at nine gallons per minute. Another lost soul from The Thinking Place, it had needed a new electric motor, which had set us back thirty bucks. Unfortunately, everything under the grandstand had to be viewed as expendable, because there was no way we'd ever get any of it back. So that thirty bucks represented most of our actual loss in this project, as everything else had come from The Thinking Place except the molasses and the water.

Again, a small receiver was used, which would activate the pump at a command from the roof of the hardware. The tiny radio receivers and transmitter we were using were Chinese, and dirt cheap, and Rich had a box of them in his bedroom, and said he'd never miss the few we'd leave behind. We fastened the pump to one of the uprights as high up as we could, cut the garden hose, and pushed it onto the output fitting of the pump, and secured it with a hose clamp. More hose was attached to the input side, secured with a clamp, and then the other end placed down into the five-gallon gas can full of the water-molasses mixture, so that it was lying on the bottom. We used a length of clothesline to secure the can to the upright, just to bar the possibility of any sort of tippage. I opened the vent cap so we'd have a good air-draw, and then Joey connected the battery, and turned on the tiny receiver.

"Okay, Rich," he said, adjusting the mic on his headset, "Take transmitter three and give me a two second press on the button."

"Okay...hold it. Got it. Pushing...now!"

The pump hummed softly for two seconds - not long enough to do much - and then stopped. The pump was self-priming, and had a lift of 20 feet, more than enough to take our mixture to the shower head. And while the pump could only move motor oil at nine gallons a minute, it handled our diluted mixture much more quickly. Tests back at the shack had emptied the entire five gallons from one can into another in just under fifteen seconds. Anyone standing at the podium was going to get very wet, very quickly. And, very sticky!

"It works," Joey said. "Let me place the voice transmitter, and we'll be done."

This last was simply a tiny microphone on a tiny circuit board, with a single AAA battery for power. The antenna was just a foot-long length of wire hanging off one end. The whole thing was the size of maybe four postage stamps, but it had a range of a quarter-mile, more than enough to reach the roof of the hardware store. We wanted to hear what anyone on the grandstand might be saying, so that we could better gauge when to activate our various little surprises. We couldn't take the chance that they might turn off the podium microphone when things started happening.

Joey fastened the thing over one of the spaces in the floorboards near the podium, with the mic pointed up into the gap, and put a fresh battery into the holder. There was no 'on' switch - putting the battery in activated the unit. Joey looked over at me, and pushed the mic on his headset closer to his lips. "Rich? Turn your receiver to channel two. I want to test the pick-up mic."

"Okay, Switching."

Joey gave a big sigh, lifted the front of his mask, and grinned at me. "I can't wait to get back to the shack and cuddle with my guy."

I heard Dev laughing over my headset, and then his voice. "That came across clearly enough. Whatever you said put a big grin on Rich's face!"

"How could you see it?" I asked.

"We got our masks pulled up. No one can see us up here, and it's too damn hot to keep those things on for no reason."

I couldn't argue with that!

Joey was still smiling. "And I mean that, Rich. You and me, got it?"

"I'll be there!"

Joey sighed. "Okay, go back to channel one. We're done here. We'll be on our way back after we clean up."

We gathered up our stuff, and checked the stand above with our flashes to make sure nothing was getting left behind. Everything looked just as it had when we'd arrived. The additions we'd made were hidden away, and shouldn't be discovered.

We took our sacks - much lighter now - and headed back to the hardware store. The tower clock said one-forty - we were not too far off schedule. On the roof of the hardware, Dev and Rich would be placing their equipment back into their bags. Nothing would be left behind but the motorized pulley, which was screwed down to some part of the roof structure, anyway. The line upon it, which stretched away to the bell tower, had to stay, too, and we hoped no one would spot it and decide to investigate.

The guys met us at the ladder, and the four of us went back to the rear of The Come On Inn, turned into the woods, and headed for the truck, and home.

* * * * * * *

Joey and Rich were not the only ones that wanted to cuddle as we settled in to go to sleep. We were all tired, but there wasn't a one of us that wasn't just too keyed up to drop right off to dreamland. This night had been an adrenaline rush from start to finish.

And we still had to pull this thing off yet!

"I'm beat," Dev said softly, nuzzling my cheek with his nose. "But I don't think I can sleep. I'm too wound up."

"We need to sleep," I said simply, nuzzling him back. "Just put it all out of your head."

He laughed at that. "Can you do that?"

I smiled, and kissed him. "No. That was advice for you."

I could hear Joey and Rich whispering together, and imagined that they might be having the same conversation.

"Just close your eyes," I continued. "Listen to the crickets. It's really very restful."

And it was. The soft sounds of the woods at night had always been restful for me. They spoke of life, and a sort of contentment that I knew did not jibe with what was really going on there in the darkness. The endless struggles to eat, and mate, and maintain existence went on after dark, just the same as they did during the day. But the cast of characters was different, and the sounds they made as they went about their business had become a deceptively peaceful tune that humans had associated with a time of rest.

I felt Dev nod, and hold me a little tighter, and then the pleasant warmth of his face near mine. I closed my eyes, and listened to the cricket's converse, while my brain reviewed the night's activities, and pondered the as yet untested ones that would come with the new day.

We'd had no trouble finding the pick up truck, the path we'd made through the leaves in the woods still fairly clear under the red beams of our flashes. It wasn't until we were away from where we'd parked, and well on down Route Two towards home, that I finally stopped feeling like I was holding my breath, and relaxed. What we had done, and what we were going to do next, had really settled in then, as well as the realization that there was no turning back now. We were set up and ready to go, and to not do this thing now, to not to follow through, would be a kind of defeat that I just could not live with.

Yes, what we planned to do could get us in serious trouble if we were found out. The rift it might cause between me and my dad was scary to consider. He trusted me, pretty much, and it hurt to feel like I was betraying that trust now. But...some things you just have to do.

Standing up for who you are justifies who you are. Letting others attack you, and beat you down because you happen to be different, or because they don't like you, or because you just don't live the way they think you should, is the same as admitting that who you are is somehow wrong. That who you are is not just as good as who everyone else happens to be.

I wasn't having that, not anymore. You can only ignore but so much, and then you have to do something, or just kind of fade away. We were not wrong to be who we were. We lived peaceful lives, and bothered no one, and all we wanted was the same right to be us that people had been fighting for since it all began.

What we planned to do might not even register with Brad as revenge. He might not even suspect it was us who had engineered what was to come. This was going to be so far above the petty stuff he and his buddies had been doing to us that it would be almost impossible for him to believe that the four homos he had so much contempt for had had anything to do with it at all. If we were not caught in the act, if we got away clean, there was more than a fifty-fifty chance that Brad would never know who had done him dirty.

But we would know.

And that was all that really mattered.