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Cannon
by Terry Sanville
I awoke in darkness. Somewhere in the early shadows birds sang. An orange light shaft slid across my bed. Grandpop hobbled out of the bathroom and I remembered where I was.
I’d been on summer vacation in Huntington Beach for three weeks, yet that room still felt strange. But it wasn’t the strangeness that woke me. It was the thing Jeeder and I had talked about while messing around at the penny arcade.
I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, laced up sneakers and joined Grandpop in the kitchen. He always got up an hour before dawn, to read his Bible and fix Gandmom and me breakfast: crispy-fried slabs of scrapple, eggs scrambled in bacon grease, and homemade cinnamon rolls.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Yeah, just a little.” I remembered my mother’s warning, “Coffee’s bad for a ten-year-old boy…it’ll stunt your growth.”
Grandpop poured me half a cup of chicory-flavored mud and continued reading. I smeared ketchup on my gray scrapple and dug in.
“C’mon mother, get your bones up,” he called, snapping the Bible shut. By the time she’d got out of the bathroom, he’d maneuvered his ’54 Mercury into the back alley and headed off to work at the broom factory.
I gulped down the last of my coffee and waited for Grandmom to finish breakfast. Finally, she pushed her plump body up and began setting out bowls and the fixin’s for the day’s baking. I slid toward the back door.
She caught me with my hand on the knob. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“Up ta Jeeder’s to play.”“You just leave those folks alone. It’s not even eight. Besides, I need you ta help with these cookies.”
“But Grandmaaa,” I started in, but the thought of cookies hot from the oven stopped my whining. She would let me eat one from each batch, “To test ’em ta make sure they’re good enough for regular folks.” Jeeder and I would have plenty of time to…. I decided not to think about it ’cause I’d just get antsy again.
We finished two batches of chocolate chip and started on chunky peanut butter when Jeeder thumped on the kitchen door.“Yeah, come on in.” I hollered.
He pushed inside and squeezed behind the table. “Mornin’, Mrs. Freese.” The layers of fat under his chin quivered when he talked and he had floppy arms, like the old fisherwomen on Huntington Pier. He eyed the cookies.
Squashing the last peanut butter mound on the tray with the tines of a fork, I looked at Grandmom pleadingly.
“All right, you can go,” she said, laughing. “At least now you won’t be wakin’ the dead.”
She gave each of us two warm cookies and we flew out the door into the morning sunlight, striding across the wet lawn to the back alley. We munched our chocolate chips and headed for Jeeder’s place, four garbage cans down.
“You still wanna do it?” he asked.
“Yeah, but we can’t until after lunch when Grandmom’s watching her stories.”
“I know that, stupid. But we can fix up the cannon now.”
We turned into a driveway and crossed a plot of dirt to the tool shed. His pop kept it padlocked, but Jeeder knew the combination. After a few twirls of the dial, he had it open and we ducked inside, inhaling the stench of paint thinner and old grease. His father was a mechanic and some jalopy normally crowded the alley with its hood up and engine in pieces. But that week we’d been lucky and had a clear shot.
A workbench filled the wall opposite the door. The window above it looked onto a yard with clotheslines and lawn chairs. A machine resembling a coffee maker was clamped to one end of the bench. I checked it out.
“That’s what my pop uses to fill his shotgun shells,” Jeeder said. “Hang on a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He returned with a shoebox and laid it on the bench carefully. Flipping the lid off, he removed a piece of yellow cloth and spread it flat. With cupped hands, he lifted out a cannon and centered it on the cloth. Its barrel was a bit longer than the span of my hand, shined like a new penny, and rested on a wooden carriage with spoked wheels.
“Pop gave me this last birthday,” Jeeder said. “It’s just like ones used in the Civil War.”
I ran a hand along its barrel. “It’s called a gattlin or gamblen or somethin like that, right?”
“Yeah, prob’ly, I guess And look at this.” Jeeder unhinged the canon’s back end.
“This sucker really works, see? The fuse goes right in here.” He took a steely out of his jeans pocket, rolled it into the cannon and closed the breech.
“KAPOW!” he shouted. I jumped back, colliding with the wall. “Scared you, ya big baby.”
“Well, just going kapow s’not gonna make it work.”
Jeeder nodded. “First we need some gunpowder.” He pried off the lid to the shotgun shell loader. “Gimmee one of them.” He pointed and I handed over an empty Gerber’s jar that once held strained spinach. He filled it from the machine. Removing the steely from the back of the cannon, Jeeder closed the breech and poured gunpowder down its throat
“How much does it take?” I asked.
His T-shirt and jeans were covered with black dust, the jar almost empty.
“That looks like enough,” Jeeder said. I figured he should know since he was two years older than me and went hunting with his pop all the time.
From the shoebox, he took something that looked like a Q-tip and rammed it down the barrel a bunch of times. “Got to tamp it just right.” He rolled the steely into the cannon, wiped it with the yellow cloth and stood back.
“Now all we gotta do is stick some paper in that fuse hole, light ’er up, then run like hell.”
I nodded. “But we got lots more to do….”
We left the tool shed and were playing marbles in the sandlot nearby when Grandmom called, “Johneeeeee….”
“Ah, she probably wants me to run to the store. I’ll come get ya after lunch.”
When I got back to the house, Grandmom was waiting with a dollar and instructions on what to buy at the corner market. I was back in a flash. She re-heated the morning coffee and joined me for a sandwich and a huge wedge of peach pie. Afterwards, she moved to the living room, clicks on the 21-inch black-and-white, and settles back to enjoy her stories – stupid soap operas.
I told her that I was going out to play and escaped quickly. The tool shed door was half open. I slipped inside. Jeeder was polishing the cannon.
“Cripes, I’d thought you’d never finish lunch. Are we gonna do this or what?”
“Yeah, yeah, just hold onto your jockstrap.”
We walked down the alley to our driveway. I peeked around the edge of the fence to make sure Grandmom wasn’t in the back kitchen. We snuck up alongside the garage and pushed in the side door. In the dark, I reached behind a tool cabinet for the fishing net.
“Got it,” I whispered. We backed out and moved to the end of the yard where the fishpond cooked in the sun. It was too big to jump across and was nearly covered with lily pads. Gold and speckled carp swam through the muck.
“I seen him in there a couple days ago,” I whispered. “You go down there and start tossin’ stones. I’ll stay here with the net.”
Jeeder collected a handful of pebbles from a flowerbed and moved off to the far end of the pond. I studied the water as he carefully pitched stones, working his way toward me. Something jumped and I fought back a yell. Bubbles came up between lily pads. Another splash. I shoved the net to the bottom then yanked it out. But all that was inside was green gunk.
“Missed him,” I hissed. “Keep going.”
I worked my way around the pool to another spot where bubbles appeared. When the splash came, I stabbed the net into the water and lifted straight up. It was full of green slime. But there was something else that struggled to untangle its webbed feet from the netting – the ugliest frog I’d ever seen.
I tried not to laugh as we ran out of the yard and up the alley to the tool shed. Inside, I held the net up to the window. The frog was mottled green with large bright eyes that peered back at us, blinking. Its throat worked rhythmically, pumping air.
“C’mon, let’s go.”
Jeeder grabbed the shoebox and a wooden strawberry carton. We tore off up the alley to where it ended at a vacant lot. The wind through the eucalyptus trees blew so hard I could barely hear him.
“Lay the frog down.”
I did as he ordered.
Jeeder covered it with the carton and placed a stone on top. “All right, enemy secured.”
He lifted the cannon out of its box, positioned it on the road, its barrel aimed point blank at our prisoner. I looked around to see if anybody was watching. Jeeder slid nails through the cannon’s spoked wheels, hammered them part way in, then bent them over the rims.
“There, that should hold her.”
He pulled out a scrap of binder paper and matches. Twisting the paper into a wick, he stuck it in the cannon’s fuse hole.
“When I light this sucker, run like crazy.”
I was already backing away and had a refuge picked out behind old man Watkins’ garbage cans. Jeeder struck the match, touched it to the fuse, then scrambled to his feet. We both streaked down the alley, laughing. Nothing happened.
“Damn! Wind musta blown it out.” Jeeder headed back.
I peered from behind the cans. The breeze calmed, as if answering his complaint. He was down on one knee, a match cupped in his left hand. Suddenly he jerked up and thundered toward me. There was a spark from the cannon, a humongous roar. A cloud of smoke and dust hid everything. The blast caught Jeeder still running. His mouth dropped open and he turned to look.
The smoke drifted into the trees. There was nothing to be seen of the cannon, only ragged holes where the nails ripped out.
“Where’d it go? Where’d it go?” Jeeder ran up and down the alley and out into the vacant lot.
I tiptoed to the strawberry carton. There was a jagged hole, halfway up from its bottom edge. In back of the carton, a red splatter ran across the hot road. There were small bubbles in it, like in spit. It smelt sweet. I knelt and lifted the carton. The frog looked up, its body twitching. Half of its back was blown away. It quivered, just staring at me.
I reached out to touch it, my heart pounding. I saw the frog as if looking through a long pipe. A soft hissing filled my ears.
“Hey Jeeder, come here, come here quick.” My voice sounded funny, like a stranger’s.
“Wait a damn minute, I gotta find my cannon. It’s gotta be around here somewheres.”
The blood on the pavement was almost dry. The frog’s eyes blinked more slowly. It stopped twitching. I began to cry.
Jeeder came up beside me. “Jeez, that’s one tough frog. Come on, we gotta get outta here.”
I gently scooped the frog into what was left of the carton and carried it into the vacant lot, left it in the shaded crotch of a eucalyptus. We threw dirt on the alley to hide the blood.
“I…I’d better check in with Grandmom.”
Jeeder nodded. “If she asks, just say it was some car backfiring.”
I snuck into our yard and stowed the net in the garage. My tears had dried and I was wiping my nose on my T-shirt as I entered the living room.
“Lord, you look all done in,” Grandmom said. “Why don’ you take a nap?”
I didn’t argue. In the bedroom, I pried off my sneakers and stretched out on my back across the cold quilt. A breeze blew through the window. Lace curtains shivered and billowed.
Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and one fat cat (his in-house critic). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems, an occasional play, and novels (that are hiding in his
closet, awaiting editing). Since 2005, his short stories have been accepted by more than 85 literary and commercial journals, magazines, and anthologies (both print and online) including the Houston Literary Review, Storyteller, Boston Literary Magazine, and Underground Voices. Terry is a retired urban planner and an
accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.
