Excerpt from the book:
Left Handed, Four Eyed, Small Town and Catholic
and they call me Lucky???
My
kid brother Bosco found any grown up revolting who stood between him and his
mission to burn down everything, the ultimate pyro. While the archangel (Michael) was getting his pants pressed me and the pyro were outside blowing to
smithereens with firecrackers every toy soldier we could find.
My
arsonist days ended, however, not long after we threw a box of 22 shells into
the incinerator and World War III broke out in the alley. We had failed
to blow them up slamming bricks on the shells.
I
have to admit it, there were times my kid brother scared the Hell out of
me. He was reckless, probably possessed, and not at all interested in
what was going on in the world. But we had a bond, we were both
motherless children, having lost our mother to the duties of rearing the
archangel.
One
day Bosco and I raced down the hallway by the archangel's room and noticed the
massive American Flyer train set, one of our dad's prized possessions, was set
up in the room. Better yet, no one was around.
The
layout was quite a work of art and engineering, qualities found in the Putnam
DNA. A board bigger than the bed folded up against the wall
normally, but today it was down and all the trains, villages and mountains were
in place.
Now
Bosco and I had long debated what would happen if we started a train on top of
the mountain and another at the bottom headed toward each other at full speed.
How much damage could the two trains do to each other when they crashed?
Thanks
to my mechanical skills we had everything working in seconds but when the
trains smashed together nothing broke, they just flopped over sideways off the
track. It was nothing like the movies. What a bummer.
So
Bosco, having morphed into movie director Cecil B. DeMille, restaged the train
wreck scene only this time, to make it seem more real, he loaded one of the
train engines with fireworks. I warned him the M-80s might be a bit too
much but he insisted. He lit the fuse and sent the train flying down the
mountain leaving me seconds to launch the other one up the mountain.
The
two trains weren't even close when the engine simply blew off the face of the
earth, while the rest of the cars tumbled down the mountain with shrapnel
flying all over the room. As we dove under the bed the avalanche of
debris crashed into the other train leaving a tangled mess.
When
dad walked into the room, having heard the house shaking explosion, his stunned
reaction was priceless. His mouth opened to scream but no sound emerged.
The way he trembled and his veins popped up indicated a high degree of
nerve instability so the vocal paralysis was probably a good thing, It
allowed him to calm down before he might have killed us.
We
denied any knowledge of how an entire American Flyer train engine could
possibly dematerialize and disappear, though we did acknowledge our role in the
wreck and agreed to spend our allowances for the next 15 years replacing all
the broken village and mountain pieces.
In
hindsight I realized trusting Bosco's judgment was far too dangerous to risk in
the future.
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