School was out for the next two-and-a-half months, meanin’ I had to keep myself busy doing whatever I could lest the wife put me to work around the house. Couldn’t have that, so I decided to pick up a guitar and start learnin’ me some chords out in the shop. I would tinker a bit with the piles of scrap I had layin’ around, and try to shape my fingers into geometries that somehow mapped out mathematical intervals inside an octave split twelve ways. Funny how I’d never really thought much about how music was just math you could hear. I also built a pneumatic cannon that could launch cans of soup about four hundred yards. Then modified it so you could unscrew the barrel and replace it with another caliber just right for a D-cell battery. Uncle Dave and I discovered you could fire one of them sumbitches right through a high-intensity prismatic aluminum stop sign from about ten feet away. Steel mailboxes would just fold in on themselves like you were steppin’ hard on an empty tall boy. Mud Creek saw its fair share of mindless vandalism over the next few months, no doubt about it. Somethin’ really magical about a southwest summer by god. To quote St. Fante; Oh, Gala Day! Gala Dream!
Uncle Dave would drop by nearly every night, listenin’ to me try and bang out two chords in succession, with an ever encouraging, “JeeeeeeeZHUS, Ollie”, or, “Are you just TRYIN’ to give me an aneurysm?”. And we ticked the boxes on the calendar just waitin’ for July 26th, when we could get back out there with the talkin’ board and see if them boys were gonna show up again and hopefully bring us some new tunes.
If we got too antsy just sittin’ round the shop we’d take the cannon out and fuck shit up proper. I’d throw the air compressor in the back of the truck, and we’d drive around takin’ turns pretendin’ to be ‘ol Anton from No Country for Old Men. We’d roll up on a mailbox, and whoever was in back would fire up that compressor and say, “I need you to step out of the car, sir. Would you hold still, please?” And then we’d blow that thing to kingdom come and laugh our heads off like a coupla dramamine jackals.