Free King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher Page A

freezing water, yet it warmed my hands like the kind of mittens they should obviously have bought me before dragging me into the freezing winter to go huntChristmas trees from the back of a jeep.
    â€œNothing’s really cold or hot,” he said. “It’s all about the temperature of your hands compared to the temperature of the water. Everything’s relative.”
    When the letter from the principal arrived, asking him to explain to me that the water that came out of the cold tap in our sink really was cold and that I had barely escaped another nosebleed defending the antithesis to that, he resumed introducing me as Lever.
    My dad’s problem was simply impatience with child development. The next time that lesson presented itself, I had relativity down cold.
    Everyone in our high school looked forward to their Senior Sneak. It wasn’t really a sneak, because the administration knew about it in advance and even provided buses and chaperones. Seniors got a day and a half off from school, which, coupled with a weekend, allowed three days and three blissful nights at the Bar D Dude Ranch outside Pendleton, Oregon. The boys came back with stories of sexual conquests in the bunkhouse, in the rowboat, on horseback, and in the baggage compartment of the bus on the return trip. The girls came home with stories of elbowing the boys in the side of the head as they attempted to grope them in the bunkhouse, in the rowboat,on their horses; stories they must certainly have later filed under the comprehensive title “Boys/Men Are Pigs.”
    It was traditional for the juniors to try to prevent the Sneak, but usually the seniors left suddenly under the cloak of a fire drill or late at night, and in recorded memory no one could remember the seniors even being slowed down. By my junior year I knew I was without the requisite talents to make myself remembered and revered at Cascade High in any of the conventional, acceptable ways, so the Sneak presented the kind of challenge that made my teeth itch.
    I began searching for ways to disable the bus. Though I had worked at my father’s service station since the age of nine, my automotive prowess included little more than the ability to fill a vehicle with gas, check the oil, water, and fan belt, fix flats, lube, and change the oil. I also had just enough common sense to know that if I caused physical harm to that bus, our principal, Mr. Evans, would break at least two of his hardwood paddles over my butt.
    I suppose I could blame my father; in fact, he’s not alive anymore, so I will. It was he who told me that one of his college buddies had spread Limburger cheese on the manifold of Crutch’s car right before he and my mother took off on their honeymoon. They drove more than three hundred miles with the windows rolled down, every bit as cold as I’dbeen in the back of that jeep, and delaying the evening’s festivities two or three hours while they huddled in bed thawing out their hormones. If a little Limburger cheese in the right place could slow the adrenaline flow of two virginal honeymooners (hey, they were my parents ) for a couple of hours, a lot of Limburger cheese should slow down a classroom of seniors headed off to create new Rambler sexual myths.
    I purchased the cheese from a local pusher sworn to silence and placed it in a locked room behind the furnace where you could freeze if you crawled in, but where Limburger cheese could slowly warm to a moldy stench over the month and a half before the Sneak was to take place. I brought a couple of other classmates in on my plan, and we began scheming to get the putrid cargo aboard the right bus at precisely the right moment. There were three to choose from: two newer thirty-passenger buses and an older forty-five-passenger one. We ruled out the big one because there were only thirteen seniors and the school would need that one to transport grade schoolers. The other two were identical, so we