We all liked the Pruetts, who lived in the white house next door, but we never got along with the Weedens, our neighbors who lived in the yellow house on the other side. Actually, Mrs. Weeden was OK, but Mr. Weeden was just plain mean.
The Weeden Wars started with the dogs. The Weedens had this stupid mutt named King who would sit out in the front yard and bark all day long. King would just lie in the grass and bark at nothing. Usually we didn’t care, but every once in a while it would get on our nerves.
One day Dan and I couldn’t take it anymore and we went out and threw snowballs at King to shut him up. It worked. But Mr. Weeden saw us and yelled at us over the fence. A little while later the police showed up at our house. Mr. Weeden had actually called 911 and said we were attacking his dog.
Then a few days later that idiot mutt King came trotting onto our yard and left a big sausage in the grass. The Geezer went out with a hoe, scooped up the doggie souvenir, and flung it into Weeden’s yard. He denies he did so, but come on. There were witnesses.
And a few days after that, Weeden found our dog Fang returning the favor on his grass. The Geezer still denies he trained Fang to do that. But guess what? Weeden called the police again. They came out and talked to the Geezer and we had to build a special enclosure to make sure Fang couldn’t get into the Weedens’ yard.
A year or so went by and nothing much happened, but then one afternoon Jim Crouch brought a BB gun over to our house, and we lined up a bunch of old bottles by the back fence and were picking them off one by one. If you guessed that the police showed up shortly thereafter, you are correct. They confiscated the BB gun and gave Moop a stern warning, which she passed on to me via a spanking with a ping-pong paddle.
Now the war was on in earnest. I didn’t care what happened, I was getting back at that nasty old grouch.
I didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but a great idea just kind of evolved naturally.
I was out in the front yard one summer afternoon shooting my wrist rocket. Steve Pruett also had a wrist rocket and he came over and we were shooting the little hard apples that fell off our apple tree. This was around the 4th of July, and Steve Pruett happened to have a package of firecrackers on him. And he showed me a fascinating trick. If you cut a little hole in an apple, you can wedge a firecracker in. And then you can light the firecracker, shoot the apple straight up in the air with the wrist rocket, and the firecracker will explode it into a thousand pieces, which rain back down on you.
And I thought, what if you didn’t shoot the apple straight over your own head, but instead shot it over something else, like, for example, your neighbor’s house?
I conducted an experiment. It turned out that yes, indeed, if you shot the apple over your neighbor’s house, it would explode and leave fragments of apple all over that neighbor’s roof. Equally important, since bees were known to love tiny bits of apple, it attracted many, many bees to the site of the explosion.
So Steve and I shot dozens of firecracker apples over Weeden’s house and watched gleefully as the apple bits piled up on his roof. We only stopped when we ran out of firecrackers. And then we just sat in the front yard and waited.
Weeden showed up about half an hour later. He drove down the driveway and got out of that beat-up old Buick of his, suspecting nothing. He took a few steps toward his house and stopped. He waved at something, scowling. Then he swatted at something. Then he was running to his front door, waving his arms frantically.
The police came yet again. Yes, I had to clean all the apple bits off Weeden’s house, and yes, I was grounded for two weeks. But it was a total victory in the Weeden Wars, and I had a smile on my face every time I looked at his house for the rest of the summer.
