The Instructions (7 page)

12. Remove your four pennies from the plastic sack. Lay your pennies out in a safe place where you can see them. Lay them out so that you won’t knock them into the grass by accident. Lay them out in a row. Any combination of Lincoln-up or Roman-looking-building-up is fine. This is not about symbols.

13. Remove the rubber balloon from the plastic sack.

14. Use the fingers of both hands to pull the lip of the rubber balloon back on itself until the lip of the rubber balloon is at the fat part of the rubber balloon.

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15. With the pointer- and swear-fingers of both of your hands, stretch the rubber balloon opening wide.

16. Fit the stretched rubber balloon opening over the threaded part of the pouring hole. Fit it over the nipple. Nipple.

17. Make sure that the folded-back lip of the rubber balloon is on the threaded part. If it’s not, then push it down til it is.

18. Turn the whole thing over and look inside. Make sure that the opening is clear, that it is a perfect circle, that no balloon skin is blocking the passage up.

19. Now, hold what you have in your weak hand with your thumb and pointer pressed onto the rubber-balloon-covered part of the pouring hole. Hold it so that the balloon-covered end is facing your chest. Hold it so that your weak pointer is on top and your weak thumb is on the bottom. Press hard. Make sure that no meat on your weak thumb or weak pointer is edging past the pouring-hole in the direction of your chest. Make sure that the rest of your weak hand is either above or behind the sawed-off edge.

20. With the thumb and forefinger of your strong hand, pinch the balloon.

21. Pull back on the balloon.

22. Let go.

23. Look at the pennies you lined up earlier. Understand you hold a gun.

Now you can hurt things far beyond arm’s reach.

In a few more minutes you will all leave my yard. You will conceal your weapons inside your pockets. If you don’t have pockets, you will use your waistbands. You’ll stick the cap and other garbage 64

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inside the plastic sack, tie the sack off, and throw the whole thing in a dumpster or bin as you were instructed to earlier. You will keep your planks. You will turn them into targets. Draw bullseyes onto the faces of them, and then draw faces in the bullseyes of them. Lean them against the sides of your homes and fire on your targets with your weapons, your pennyguns. Fire first from a distance of ten feet.

Once you hit three bullseyes, move back to fifteen feet. “Hit three bullseyes” does not mean get the penny to lightly graze the bullseye three different times. That will do nothing for you. “Hit three bullseyes” means get the penny to lodge itself in the bullseye portion of the plank or to cut straight through it. You have the power to do that and that is what you should do. Once you hit three bullseyes at a distance of fifteen feet, move back to a distance of twenty feet. Continue to increase the intervals by five feet after every three bullseyes until you are at a distance of thirty-five feet. Thirty-five feet is the farthest distance that you will be able to fire on someone or something from and still be able do it or him any worthwhile kind of damage.

In a couple minutes, I will tell you to leave my yard. I will tell you that I will see you Monday, if not tomorrow, when you will all be stronger than you are today. Before I tell you that though, you need to understand: Hardly anyone in the world knows what you’re holding right now. They have not seen or heard of pennyguns. It is better for us that they don’t know. It is better for us that they have not seen or heard of what you are holding right now. Still, some people do know and some people have heard of and seen and even fired their own versions of what you are holding, so you don’t want to be a show-off. You don’t want to brandish. It could make some people nervous.

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Now that you have been delivered these instructions, you will receive an instruction sheet. It is a copy of the sheet I am reading from.

Each one of you gets one copy. You will take your copy from beneath the paint-can at the gate. Fold it and put it in your shoe. Guard it closely. Do not guard it with your life, but guard it with your face. It is not worth getting killed over, but it is worth getting a broken face over. Tomorrow, you will make thirteen copies of your copy. You will invite thirteen Israelite boys to come to your backyard after Shabbos, like I invited you, and you will deliver these instructions from a high tree-limb, exactly the same as I have delivered them to you. If you do not have a tree with high limbs in your yard, or if the high-limbed tree you do have is unclimbable, sit on top of a swingset or fence.

Tonight, the first night on which Israelites have received these instructions, is May 27, 2006. Do as you’re told and one week from tonight, 183 Israelite boys will be armed with pennyguns. Two weeks from tonight, 2,380 Israelite boys will be armed. Three weeks from tonight, 30,941 Israelite boys, and four weeks from tonight, just three days beyond the summer solstice, 402,234 Israelite boys will be armed with pennyguns. Well in advance of the start of next school year, all the Israelite boys in North America, if not the world, will be armed with pennyguns. Never again will we cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children.

Bless Adonai, who helps us protect us.

Blessed is Elohim, Who blesses our weapons.

Chazak! Chazak! Venischazeik!

Say it.

Now leave my yard. I will see you Monday, if not tomorrow.

You will be stronger tomorrow than you are today.

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Brodsky had a megaphone on the shelf behind his desk. It was mostly white, but the mouthpiece and the trigger were red to match the jerseys of the Aptakisic Indians. It should have been Main Man’s. If people tried to stop him from singing through it, he could switch on the siren and scare them away, and if they kept on coming, he could blow out their eardrums. He wouldn’t get messed with so much.

“Look at me,” said Brodsky.

I like your soundgun, I said.

“It’s a megaphone,” he said. “It’s not a gun.”

It’s shaped like a gun, I said. It’s got a trigger and it shoots sound, I said.

“That doesn’t make it a gun,” he said. “Guns are weapons.”

Hot-glue gun, I said. I said, Nail gun. I said, Staple gun.

“It’s a megaphone, Gurion.”

He was trying to be nice. That’s why he said my name. I didn’t want him to be nice, though. It banced up the roles. So I didn’t look at him. I looked at the family picture next to the megaphone.

Ben was in it. I knew him before he died. He was a scholar and he was loyal to me. We had Torah Study together at the Solomon Schecter School, before I got kicked out.

Ben drowned at camp at the beginning of summer. No one knows how. He was missing for two days and his head was bruised when they found him in the lake. They thought he knocked it 67

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diving off the pier at night, but a drunken boater might have hit-and-runned him. Whatever happened, Brodsky’s face changed.

I only ever saw Brodsky once before Ben died. It was at Ben’s bar-mitzvah. I got invited to more bar-mitzvahs than any other Schecter fourth-grader because Rabbi Salt had promoted me to eighth-grade Torah Study and it was a custom at Schecter to invite everyone in your Torah Study class.

Before Ben got killed, Brodsky’s face was either joyous or sad, and the muscles in it made the bones and the skin fit themselves to those emotions. Even though Ben’s death made Brodsky bitter, his bones and skin were already finished being formed by the muscles, and it was too late for him to make convincing faces that were not joyful or sad. Like the one he was making right then: he meant to make a tough, sass-killing face, but he looked like a wifeless old cousin trying to hide his loneliness.

He said, “Tell me why you fought these boys.” When he said

“these boys,” he poked the CASS with his finger, like Ronrico and the Janitor were right there on the page in front of him. Like it wasn’t just their names, but them. I got a rush from thinking about it. My name was on the page, too. And my actions—

Desormie’s version of them, at least.

Brodsky said, “This is your sixth fight in the nine weeks you’ve been at Aptakisic.”

It was my twenty-ninth fight in the nine weeks I’d been at Aptakisic, not counting exchanges like the
Emotionalize
one with Boystar. It was the sixth I got caught for. But what was impor-68

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tant to me was that Brodsky’d poked the CASS again when he’d said the word
this.

“Next time it’s an OSS,” he said.

How long til I get expelled?

“We don’t want to expel you,” Brodsky said. “Are you trying to get expelled?”

I said, Let’s call my mother.

“Let’s have a conversation first,” he said. “Let’s talk about why you keep fighting.”

I’m not telling on anyone, I said.

“So Ronrico and Michael started up with you, then.”

I’m not a rat, I said. I said, I wouldn’t rat on myself if I started up with
them
.

He said, “I’m not a villain, Gurion. You can talk to me. I’m not your enemy.”

I said, I never said you were a villain.

“You’re implying I’m your enemy?”

I said, Talk to me like I’m a kid. Don’t talk to me about implications.

He said, “Rabbi Salt has told me you’re the most promising student he’s ever known. He has gone on
at length
about how articulate you are. Ben, may he rest in peace, was very fond of you and—”

Can we call my mother?

“Won’t you be a mensch and talk to me?”

I said, Ben didn’t deserve it.

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Brodsky said, “That’s not what I mean, Gurion.”

I said, That’s the only menschy
thing that I have to say to you.

I said, You keep me in a cage.

Brodsky balanced his elbow on the desk and held his open hand out with all the fingers spread, like he was going to explain something important to me, but all he said was, “The Cage is not a cage.”

Right, I said.

I had sarcasm in my throat. That happened sometimes when I’d get treated like a shmendrick by sincere people.

Brodsky looked hurt by it, and he wouldn’t stop performing the explaining thing with his hand. It made me want to have an intermittent explosion. If he saw me explode, he would be too frightened or too pissed at me to be hurt. I didn’t really care what Brodsky thought of me, but I didn’t want to hurt him. There was already too much sadness in his office. It would steam off the bright pink top of his head, then condense and fall in droplets into the carpet and onto the furniture and get on you.

The second time I saw Brodsky was at Ben’s shiva, where I heard him say to Rabbi Salt that he wished it was himself who got killed instead of his son. It made me think of the part in
Genesis
Rabbah
where Hashem shows Adam all the different versions of the future that could happen. I don’t know what Hashem used for a screen, but I hope it was the sky, and that Adam watched it while he floated on his back in a scumless lagoon.

In one of the movies, David ben-Jesse slayed Goliath and 70

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became King of Israel. In another one, David died at birth. The version where David died is the one that Hashem said was fated to happen. But Adam told Hashem that he wanted David to live, because the Israelites, without David, would never have an empire and never build the Temple. So Hashem let Adam give seventy years of his life to David. That’s why Adam lived to be 930 instead of 1000.

There in Brodsky’s office, I started thinking of how almost anyone who Hashem showed David’s futures to would do the same thing as Adam did, and how, if I knew a different version of the future, I might have known that if Brodsky died instead of Ben, it would have been worse for the Brodsky family and the world. I might have known, for example, that if Brodsky’d died instead, Ben would have saved the next Hitler from drowning at day camp. But that still wouldn’t make it any easier to find the justice, because why did Adam have to give up seventy years of his life for David to live? Why couldn’t God pull seventy years out of the serpent or a Sodomite? And so why did any Brodsky have to get killed at all? Why couldn’t it be that Ben would be changing into swim-trunks in the locker-room while the next Hitler drowned? Why should there have to be a next Hitler?

None of those questions can get answered any easier than the others, but if Hashem was showing me futures, I would ask Him all the questions, and He would not be able to tell me the answers because either He doesn’t know, or because understanding those things would kill a person, or make the person something less 71

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than a person. And though I would, like I said, give David my seventy, it would piss me off, and I’d cut straight to the point and ask the main question. If all of this was happening in ancient scripture, I would ask it loud. It would be a lamentation.

Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?

And the answer would come from God or a judge or commentary in the margins. And God or the judge or the scholar who’d comment would say, “It is good to try to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether or not you do justice.”

I was thinking too much about Ben to explode, so I dug my last wingnut out of my pocket and dropped it in the palm of Brodsky’s explaining-hand.

“I don’t want this,” he said. I was chomsky to think he’d appreciate a wingnut. He tossed the wingnut back so it would land in my lap, but before its arc ended, I knocked it sideways with a sudden backhand. It bounced off the wall and landed in a planter that held a fan-shaped tree from Asia.