Free King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher Page B

simply needed to keep our eyes and ears open for clues.
    About a week and a half before D-Day, one of those buddies, Rick Calendar, a tall, gangly blond kid I’d known since before first grade, called me out of the room duringstudy hall and handed me a small, clear vial half-filled with a pea-soup-looking substance.
    I took the vial. “What is it?”
    â€œSmell it.”
    His expression told me that was a bad idea.
    â€œWhat is it?
    â€œ Smell it.”
    I carefully unscrewed the cap, put it to my nose, and nearly snapped my head off my spine pulling away. If that smell were an explosive, it would be an atomic bomb, a hydrogen bomb, and a cobalt bomb strapped together and detonated over a puppy farm.
    Calendar smiled. “Mink scent,” he said. “Boy mink gets a whiff of that and starts combing his fur and preening his whiskers. Time to get frisky .”
    I wasn’t aware mink wore gas masks to have sex.
    There was an invitational track meet down in Boise, a good two-and-a-half hours away by school bus, the night before the seniors were to take off, and we got back to Cascade around midnight. Our intelligence told us they’d be leaving early, before any service stations opened, so we were sure they wouldn’t be using the track bus. That left the other small bus as the target of our olfactory ambush. Larry Logue, the third accomplice, attempted to hide in theschool shop where the buses were parked, but Coach herded everyone out before he locked it up tight.
    I slept fitfully on the couch, rose at about two, and descended to the furnace room. Even with the cheese in a closed container the entire room reeked, and my stomach turned over as I hustled back up the stairs toward fresh air.
    It took forever to get into the shop where the targeted bus was parked. All doors were locked tight, and in the end we had to boost Calendar to a high window ledge so he could reach through a hole that had been broken out by a baseball. We were a good two hours behind schedule when that was finally accomplished. Our plan had been to put a dab of mink scent into each of several small plastic pill cups, unscrew the heat vents, and place the cups carefully inside, but we were now painfully short on time, and as a dim glow spread across the eastern horizon we knew we were only a few minutes from the seniors showing and giving us a mink-scent lunch, so we simply poured it through the grates of the side heater vents, spread the Limburger cheese around under the dashboard, and choking and gagging and holding our breath, ran way faster than any of us had run during the track meet the night before.
    Fifteen minutes later we watched from a safe distance from behind a parked pickup across the street as the seniorsshowed up ready for their myth-making trip to the Bar D, boarded with the most titillating of sexual hopes, and streamed off that bus like lemmings. It was four hours before a service station opened so they could gas and service the other bus, and though we didn’t stop the Sneak, we gave it a significant delay—a victory for the class Principal Evans had, on more than one occasion, called a “nothing” class.
    And here’s the lesson in relativity. In the stifling, musky atmosphere of mink scent, a whiff of putrid, three-month-old Limburger cheese smelled like the sweetest of perfumes. The furnace isn’t hot, if you go to the sun first. Freezing cold tap water isn’t cold, if your hands have been subjected to the bitter elements for five hours ahead of time. And moldy warm Limburger cheese doesn’t smell bad at all in the presence of a dark green potion from Hell.
    Let me tell you what was bad, and I don’t have a relative point to make this good: Principal Evans’s reaction after he had to drive that bus three blocks to the Texaco service station to have it reamed out. (You will notice he did not drive it to Morris and Crutcher’s Phillips 66 service station, and