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Acrid Blue Smoke


December 7, 2018

 Dear Pen Pal,
     

     You were always the daring sort of guy. Not exactly the most intelligent, but always ready to prove me wrong when I said you shouldn’t do something because you might get hurt--and then fervently deny it did.
 

      “So what?? What’s one finger joint when you have ten of them?” you said cockily, holding your hand up to me and displaying the loss to the middle finger of your left hand. 
     “Shit, it was nothing!”
 

     Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what your dad said after vaulting the 12 steps to your upstairs bedroom, in one leap, on Des Moines Street where you sat with your ears ringing, the room filled with acrid blue smoke, and your left hand minus a fingertip. I remember you calling me from the hospital and saying, 
     “Guess where I am, or You’ll never guess where I am,” something to that effect anyway.
 

     After exhausting the list that included, jail, prison, a detention center in New Mexico, a psychiatric facility in Saint Louis, a straitjacket, an underwear model audition, a Des Moines Buccaneer’s game, stuck under a car, walking a dog that was not your own--or mine, washing a toilet, scraping a boat bottom under a boat on a lift in Louisiana, smoking dope, back living in Jackson Hole Wyoming, thinking about getting married, learning to tie your shoes, fogging up a window in somebody’s apartment, changing taillight bulbs in an old GMC pickup, driving to Waukegan, Illinois for something, reading Hamlet Shakespeare’s longest play, learning Braille, writing the story of your life, writing about the time you broke: a bone, a heart, a law, a promise; thinking about your weirdest family member that was not yourself, choosing where you would want to be exiled and what essential items you would take with you, building a snowman (hey, it’s you I’m talking about here) I ran out of patience with the game and finally just asked you, “Okay, okay--where are you? The hospital?”
 

     “YEAHHHHHHHH!” you gleefully answered as though I had won the lottery, “I’m in the hospital!”
 

     “What? You’re so full of shit,” I answered you back, shaking my head in disbelief, although knowing so well the possibilities were endless given your penchant for derring-do and other stupid stuff like driving a riding lawnmower into an open basement and tipping upside down--or is it downside up-- in that case? “Why are you in the hospital? Swallow another screwdriver? I told you they are cocktail drinks--not real screwdrivers, you dummy!!”
 

     “No, no, no, no, no--” you laughed, “Remember that cannon you made in junior high and gave me?”
 

     I immediately remembered the crude cylindrical steel ‘pipe-like’ thing  I had given you that I had turned on a lathe as a classroom project. 
     
     It was a sad piece of work that earned me only a passing grade and not the accolades like did the coffee tables and gun cabinets that my classmates had turned out with layers of clear epoxy, brass hinges and drawer pulls, and ornate engraving. It would’ve been better for you had I tossed it in the trash bin at school than take it home. Oh well.
 

     “So, yeah--I remember it,” I said, not wanting to imagine what you had done now to yourself. “What   did   you  do?”
 

     “I blew the end of my middle finger off with it--up in my bedroom,” you said, rather too joyfully, in my way of thinking--but stopped, remembering who I was talking to. 
“Wha? What happened? What?”
 

     You went on to tell me that you had emptied some firecrackers of their silver powder and put it in the cannon, as I envisioned it, knowing what your upstairs looked like.
 

     “And then I pushed some paper wadding down the barrel, on top of the powder, but the only thing I had to use to make it tighter, was a steel punch I had in my room,” you went on to say.
 

     I started shaking my head in amazement, seeing him shove a steel rod into a steel hole with firecracker powder in it. I saw him look into the small diameter tube he held straight up from his lap with the palm of his lefthand, his fingers guiding the steel punch straight, his eyes, forehead and long dark hair a target over the projectile he was thrusting hard down the barrel ....
 

     “Then I jammed it in real hard and ...” you said, pausing a moment for effect, “My ears were ringing ... There was all this blue smoke. And Dad was shaking me, yelling something at me that he said later was, “What happened?? What happened?? Are you okay??”
 

     “I couldn’t hear anything, but I guess I had a silly look on my face as I sat on the bed, looking at the end of middle finger of my left hand without its fingertip. It didn’t even bleed. It didn’t even hurt.”
 

     “You could’ve killed yourself, you fookin’ moron!” I shouted into the phone, now cognitive of the very real danger to himself that he had miraculously avoided. “That punch would’ve hit you between the eyes and killed you!”
 

     “Yeah, it stuck in the bedroom ceiling,” you said, happily. “Dad had to use a plier to pull it out.
     

     You told me he had been sleeping on the couch in the living room and when the explosion occurred had leaped up and ran up the steps. Must have been a flashback of his WWII days in Burma, you think? Bet his heart was beating ninety.

Comments

So I'm wondering if this was the person you corresponded with while he was incarcerated. The use of the second person was perfect for this kind of writing!

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