Free The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard Page A

sideways on the breeze behind so they approached like sidewinders on the silver path of water, heading so straight on into Doodlum County, making their weekly practice run on the drawbridge where George Doodlum Addison sat looking down into the cars passing underneath, hoping for a shot of hem-hiked leg, or, if he was lucky, a peek down Claudia Doodlum’s sundress she always puckered open for his pleasure; here they came, approaching at a speed faster than the sound they made, so that all you thought you could hear when you saw them coming was the empty air in the seam of light they were splitting to get to where you stood until they would be long passed overhead whenthe steady leaving roar would follow the explosion so quaking that in the Doodlums’ den there was a crack running down the far wall in the shape of the California coastline that inched a pinch farther down every week they flew. Here they came.
    Bill was out on the end of his dock with his toolbox, digging and putting together like a military drill a short-stocked thick black pistol with a breeched barrel big enough to accept a cartridge the size of a soda can. Don’t stand directly behind me, said Bill when the jets were about six seconds away, and Powell did not.
    The jets were so low their exhaust boiled in the treetops just as Bill fired his piece. The thing going off like a firecracker in a paint can was the first blast in a chain of explosions that included two sonic booms and a sound that sent Bill and Powell running into the garage to spend the rest of the morning drinking long-necked beers behind locked-shut doors, sometimes leaning to look out the windows a little to the north and a little to the south, one way to check for the Navy to come and the other expecting Miss Louise and a carload of women wired up on double-octane church caffeine coming over for a lunch of peanut butter–fig preserve sandwiches like Miss Louise had said they would.
    Bill smoked one-after-another cigarettes, working the side of his chest, pumping one-lunged smoke streams, saying he had only thought a flare would scare the jets off, honest to goodness, he said. Powell said he wassure they would have heard a crash if there had been one after the jet engine sucked in the flare, and Bill said maybe not, not if the jet had headed right out over the ocean. Powell said there wasn’t even a sign of a parachute, just that horrible grinding noise they heard for a long, long time. It had rained shredded motor metal confetti in the field across the road. If we can stand it until tomorrow, Powell said, maybe we’ll see in the paper if the Navy is missing a jet or not, and Bill said HAH ! to that. Bill said he knew firsthand how two years before a jet had run off a runway in Virginia Beach blowing up a lady in a station wagon going by, with the two pilots hanging by their straps in a tree with no heads on, having gotten them lost during ejection. Bill saying the Navy cut off all the roads, and the next day where it all happened was nothing but a plowed-under ground with a man riding a tractor laying in rows of peanuts with nothing in the paper. All in one night, Bill said, opening two more long-necked beers.
    They sat in the dark garage, Powell on Lisa Lee’s hope chest and Bill on his own, sometimes leaning out the windows to look a little while north, and then a little while south. What did exactly it sound like to you? Bill asked Powell. Powell said he didn’t know, but at first it was like somebody running a giant vacuum cleaner that sucked up something like a bottle cap but heavier, more like a fifty-cent piece, except it was a sound loud enough to hear for ten of fifteen miles.
    Powell said, What about you, Mr. Doodlum? and Bill said Call me Bill. Bill said, It is a funny thing about sounds, what a sound will push up out of you like something squeezed from a blister. Bill pulled two more beers from the walk-in. He said, You know Louise is a Carter from Carter, you know about