“Now de fun part,” Jubal said with a big grin. He pointed at one of the BBs and fired. Kelly jumped a little as the BB vanished with a bang, about as loud as a firecracker.
Jubal grinned wider as he aimed and shot at the rest of the BBs.
“De air, it be compress, see? Den when de bubble go away… Boom!” He was happy as a kid with his first air rifle, only Jubal’s BBs exploded.
“Let me see it, Jube,” Travis said. Jubal handed it over. Travis studied it, then hit the squoze button to create a bubble. He looked happy, too. He slowly turned the dial, and the bubble shrunk.
“So you can make them larger, too, right?”
“Dat right, Travis. Jus’ click dat little clicker dere de odder way, to de lef…”
Travis held the Squeezer in front of him, squinting, and he turned the wheel…
He didn’t turn it much, maybe about an inch. If an inch in the one direction had made a golf ball squeeze down to a BB, it seemed logical that an inch in the other direction would expand a golf ball to… oh, maybe a softball. None of us but Jubal knew the scale was not linear, and Travis had inadvertently moved the switch two clicks to the left instead of one…
[107] The Richter scale, for earthquakes, is logarithmic, which means an 8 is ten times the force of a 7…
Jubal’s device was not logarithmic, it was exponential. Which meant the expand/contract wheel on the Squeezer was now one hundred times more sensitive…
The weird thing is that nobody saw it for a couple of seconds. The bubble, floating three feet above the business end of the Squeezer, suddenly seemed to warp in a weird way. I felt a breeze strong enough to muss up my hair, and saw Kelly’s hair blown around, then I finally looked up.
And saw myself, looking down.
It took another second for my mind to adjust to what I was seeing. Somebody had hung a perfect mirror, three feet above us. Looking up, I saw five people with their mouths hanging open, sitting in chairs around an upside-down picnic table.
When Travis saw it, he gave an involuntary twitch… which probably saved us all from “a world a hurtin’,” as Jubal said later, because his thumb twitched on the push/pull button, and the bubble immediately rose to about fifty feet over our heads, just as I had been reaching up to touch it. The bubble had been that close.
“Jesus,” Travis whispered, still staring up.
And I saw his finger going to the off button… and I lunged toward the Squeezer in his hand as Jubal shouted, “Travis, no!”…. and Travis pushed the button.
I’ve ridden out two hurricanes… from a safe distance inland. Mom maintaining the Blast-Off wasn’t worth dying for. Neither of them were square hits, but I know what a seventy-mile-per-hour wind feels like.
This was worse.
With no warning at all, like a flash of lightning, we were swept up in a howling gale. There was a clap of thunder, too. I was lifted along with my aluminum chair. Kelly was blown into the air with me, and we managed to hold on to each other’s hands. For a second or two we were swirling around in the funnel of a tornado, like Dorothy Gale, only she had a house all around her when she took off for Oz. [108] Something bumped me in the side, hard. It was the picnic table. Leaves and dirt sprayed over us. I realized we were both in the air, maybe ten feet off the ground.
Then, almost as quickly as it began, the storm let up. I felt myself falling, still holding on to Kelly’s hand.
I fell headfirst into the swimming pool.
I could hardly tell up from down, there was so much trash swirling around. I had lost my grip on Kelly’s hand, and that worried me. But I finally got myself oriented and kicked for the surface.
I came up looking right at Kelly, who spit out some water, brushed her wet hair out of her eyes… then pointed behind me and shrieked. I turned around and probably shouted, too, because a giant alligator was no more than five feet from me, and it seemed to be headed my way…
Goddam rubber alligator. I’d disliked it from the first time I saw it.
“Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay?” It was Travis shouting, I could see him running along the edge of the pool. I looked around and saw Jubal and Dak, chins out of the water. The pool surface was almost solid with dry leaves and grass and sticks and even some fairly large branches. I saw the picnic table, floating with just an inch of the table-top above the water. I saw an empty cardboard box that used to hold Krispy Kremes.
What I didn’t see was Alicia.
We all started calling her name. Travis was looking frantically around him, in case she hadn’t been thrown into the pool. Dak immediately began diving, and I tried to, but the water was so thick with dirt and leaves she could have been two feet away and I wouldn’t have seen her.
I came to the surface about the same time Kelly did. She shook her head, looking scared, and I probably did, too. It had only been fifteen or twenty seconds, but it felt like an hour. I saw Dak surface… and then Alicia came out from under the floating picnic table. I relaxed slightly. What a relief.
“She’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!” Dak shouted, and swam to her as best he could with all the debris in his way. Travis was running around the [109] pool to where Alicia was, and he got to her before Dak and pulled her from the water.
“Call a doctor! Call nine-one-one!” Dak was shouting. Travis had her in his arms and was examining her face.
“It’s okay, Dak,” Alicia called out. “I’m not hurt bad.”
Dak pulled himself out and ran to her, and hugged her.
“Just a bloody nose,” Travis said. “I don’t think it’s broken.” Then he turned away from the two and looked bleakly at the ground. It was easy to see he was kicking himself for the dumb stunt he just pulled. Well, he ought to, I thought. But we got lucky, like I said. If that bubble, which must have been five hundred feet across, had been only three feet above us when it vanished, and the air all around us had instantly rushed in to fill the vacuum…
That’s what it was, of course. That’s what Jubal and I had seen just at the moment it became too late to do anything about it. If squeezing a bubble compressed the air that was trapped inside, then expanding one with only a golf ball’s worth of air inside to the size of the Goodyear blimp was going to make one hell of a good vacuum.
Travis had been thrown against the brick barbecue and managed to hang on until the wind died. Just about everything else in the backyard lighter than Jubal or the picnic table had been swept into the air, most of it coming down in the pool. All five of us landed in the pool… another stroke of luck, I realized, that the pool had been filled the day before. I had come down headfirst, from at least twenty feet in the air…
TRAVIS’S HOUSE HAD three full bathrooms, all of them with big showers. Kelly and I took one. It wasn’t until I got there that I began to feel any pain. Excitement desensitizes you, I think, pumps some good chemicals in your blood so you can keep functioning, injured, until you’re away from danger.
Then the chemicals go away, and you start to hurt.
I had my pants unzipped and was starting to pull them down when I felt a sharp stab in my side.
[110] “I think I may have cracked a rib,” I said. My shirt was torn on my left side, and there was some blood. Kelly carefully lifted the shirt and we looked at a rough scrape there at the bottom of my rib cage. The flesh around it was already a big purplish-yellow bruise. Kelly pressed gently above the bruise.
“Does it hurt when I do this?”
“It would if you pressed any harder.” She moved her hand below the bruise.
“How about this?”
“Yes.” I looked at her face, soaking wet, hair tangled with some dried leaves stuck in it, looking intently at my bruised side. Her shirt was open and her nipples crinkled from the water and the air conditioning, which Travis liked to keep set around the North Pole. She looked up and smiled. She reached down into my pants.