The Second Time

When I was a kid, this simple bit of ingenuity got me into a LOT of trouble:



In the "boobytrap phase" of my childhood, this would be the story of the second time we almost killed a guy. I discovered this little piece of magical mechanical engineering when I was about 12 or so, and couldn't wait to actually apply it to something.

Of course, the first thing we thought of to apply it to was the same thing we always thought to apply things like this to -- our sworn enemies, The Dirtbike Marauders.

After the incident with Victor Bradford, you would think we would have learned our lesson, but you would be wrong. The need was too strong. We were industrious, and full of brilliant ideas just waiting to be implemented. Ideas that would, we were sure, put a world of hurt on our tormenters.

The way we saw it, the problem we had last time was that we were too close when we stuck around to see the results. Well, that and the fact that my brother blew our cover by standing up at the last second, trying to warn Victor away. That would not happen this time. Obviously, we would still want to see the results, but we would remain well hidden, and - new to this plan - far away, no matter what happened.

Our parents had told us to never do that again -- which, by our logic, meant that punji stakes were out. In our infinite wisdom, we reasoned that they didn't exactly tell us to not make any booby traps, just to never do THAT again. We reasoned that as long as we stayed away from punji stakes, the possibilities were still endless.

That, right there, is an example of pre-teen male logic, and why you should always make sure your male children understand the broader implications of what you are saying, and are not simply registering the literal meaning of your words.

If you are too narrow in your definition of what they are not to do, they will weasel around it. Then, when you express your disapproval, they will come back at you with the following retort:

"Well, YOU SAID we couldn't do THAT, and we DIDN'T."

To which you will always be forced to reply "You know DAMN well what I meant!"

At that point it is over. You have lost. You may not think you have lost, but you have. You have failed in getting your kid to think, and you have become reactive. Your only recourse is the punishment of the ruling dictator, and your kid will, until the day he has kids of his own, think he was right and you were wrong. It's like trying to get three wishes from an evil demon. You have to be very careful how you phrase your commands, or they will come back to bite you in the ass.

Anyway, since the punji stakes were out of bounds now, we decided we'd go in the other direction -- up. More specifically, into the trees. We figured that the dirt bikes went by so fast there was virtually no chance anyone would get caught in the trap, since they'd be long gone before anything happened. On the plus side, we'd still have the fun of getting to see the boobytrap tripped, and maybe give the dirtbike assholes a good scare.

We needed something to drop from the trees, but we were unsure as to what.

We considered a rock.

Too round. Too hard to tie a rope around.

A bucket of water.

Not bad, but not really as destructive as we wanted, and we knew that any bucket stolen from the garage would be instantly noticed by my father.

As an aside, there was no way you could even touch something in the garage without my father immediately knowing about it. It was like some sort of disturbance in the G-Force -- if you took something, he would jump from his chair and run to the garage, quickly scoping things out with his "something-is-missing" radar. Regardless of how messy it appeared, he knew where everything was. There was a certain chaos-theory-like orderliness about it that I cannot, to this day, explain.

Eventually, we ended up raiding the fort of the big kids. Dangerous work, but at this point, necessary. We scored a cinderblock. One of those big, I-beam shaped ones with the double holes. Perfect for getting a rope around.

We scoped the woods until we found what we needed, two trees, one close to the trail, with some overhanging branches, and one a bit farther back into the woods. We rigged the trigger on the tree farthest in, and the trip wire extended across the trail to a tree on the other side. We use a nice black nylon 60lb-test fishing line that Marky took from his stepfather's tackle box. Marky's stepfather lacked my father's sixth sense, so we were ok in that regard. I think my father may have actually felt a twinge and checked his own tacklebox, but he probably thought it was just a false alarm since everything seemed to be in its place.

When we were done, we had something that looked similar to this:



Note: The above drawing was altered for clarity. In the actual version, the
ropes were almost impossible to see, and the brick was so hidden by leaves
that you couldn't actually see it unless you stood directly under it and
looked up.

We were set. This time, there would be no getting caught. We had smartened up, and brought a pair of binoculars to watch from a distance. We set up on the crest of the hill going into the woods on the other side of a large field. This gave us a birds-eye view of the trail, and everything around for about 180 degrees. The sun was behind us, we were up on a ridge, and we were in the shade, not easily visible. A perfect vantage point.

We waited for the dirtbikes. We took turns looking through the binocs. I glanced around for almost 20 minutes, but didn't see anything in particular. Except for the continual buzzing of the insects, it was dead. I was bored, so I gave the binocs to Marky. He was looking through them for a while, but didn't see anything. It was getting on toward 5pm, so we figured we were done for the day. The sun had gone behind the trees, and it was getting a little harder to see. Just when I was getting ready to suggest that we leave, Marky spoke.

"Oh shit," he said.

That was never a good sign.

"What? I asked him. "What? Let me see."

He didn't answer right away, but then he whispered, "Oh....FUCK."

This was a much worse sign, since Marky's stepdad told him if he ever heard him use that word, he would whip his ass, ground him for a week, and wash his mouth out with Ivory soap. As a result, it was not a word he used lightly.

I grabbed the glasses away from him, and focused them across the field. I saw this:


Marky's stepdad, Doug, coming up the trail toward us, only about 12 feet from the booby trap.

He'll see it. He has to. Nothing will happen, I thought. Just to be safe, we started yelling, and running across the field toward him.

He saw us, but didn't understand what we were saying, since we were still about 600 yards away.

We were going to be too late. Our only hope was that he either saw the trip wire, or just happened to step over it, and not trigger the booby trap.

No such luck.

We ran as fast as we could, yelling at him to stop, but he didn't. We reached the edge of the field and had started down the trail just as he reached the trap.

His left foot kicked out and got hung up in the trip wire. The trigger worked as designed, and we watched in horror as the rope holding the cinder-block whipped up into the air and the block dropped. This obviously wasn't going as well as we had hoped.

We thought for a second that his forward momentum had carried him almost past the point of impact, and we were hoping the block would land behind him, no harm, no foul. Just a simple yelling fit, a grounding, and no serious injuries to contend with.

This also did not happen.

The only small stroke of luck was that it missed his head. Not by much I'll grant you, but at least he's not dead or a vegetable today. It did, however, catch him a glancing blow to the left shoulder.

He yelled something that should have, by all rights, resulted in his mouth being washed out with Ivory soap. He grabbed his shoulder and almost fell to the ground. I distinctly remember him yelling at us, "WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT THE HELL DID YOU KIDS DO? YOU COULD HAVE KILLED ME!!"

We knew it was useless to discuss the finer points of intent at this time, so we kept our mouths shut.

We stood there until Doug finished yelling at us, his hand held gingerly to his shoulder. There was no blood, and nothing was broken. At worst, he would have a bruise for a few days.

It was then that Marky spoke.

"We didn't do it," he said.

I looked at him with a mixure of awe and disbelief, and not a small amount of raw admiration and new-found respect.

A baldfaced, transparent lie.

If there was anything I had learned by that point in my short life, it was that the phrase "I didn't do it" was never, ever, under any circumstances, something that was actually believed by any sane parent, even if it happened to be true. In this case, it was patently untrue, and he read it on our faces.

"DON'T YOU LIE TO ME!" Doug screamed. Using his good arm, he grabbed Marky by the back of the neck. He looked at me & Snitch and said, "YOU TWO! GO HOME!"

I didn't need any more incentive than that. I took off like my ass was on fire. When I got home, I went directly to my room and waited for my mother to call us for dinner.

A few hours later, after dinner, I heard the doorbell ring. Another thing in the list of things that are never a good sign.

It was Doug and Marky, and they wanted to talk to my father. Marky had ratted me out. He told Doug that it was all my idea.

After they left, I waited. The wait was the worst. I waited to hear my father yell, "JOHNNY! GET DOWN HERE!" That was what I was actually hoping for. That meant he wasn't too pissed.

If he actually made the trek UPSTAIRS to my room, then I knew I was in Really Deep Shit.

Unfortunately, the yell never came. Instead, I heard him coming up the stairs. The most dreaded sound in my young life. The slow, methodical footsteps that meant I was completely fucked.

I then had to explain to my father that it wasn't my idea -- Marky was lying, and we had both come up with it. I stressed that I was simply the mechanical engineer that made it work.

Unfortunately, the nuances of that argument were lost on him. I was grounded. I got my ass pounded, I lost my TV privileges, and I think he took my bike away. I got the requisite "What The Hell Were You Thinking" speech -- the one I had, sadly, pretty much memorized by that point in my life.

I also had to apologize to Doug, and promise that we would never do that, or anything remotely like that, ever again. (I mostly kept that promise until the incident with the neighbor's cat -- a tale for another time.)

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. It wasn't all my fault, but I share responsibility. In retrospect, not one of our finer moments of brilliant thinking.

That being said, to this day I can't help remembering it without feeling a touch of pride.

After all, that bitch actually worked.