Getting to the swanky part of town was easy, then. And Reichert had been kind enough to bully his parents into getting him a car that’d been painted a nice, bright white.

Jumping from my hill, I felt the wind in my hair and heard only the smallest chuffing from my engine. Once I got the flying part down in my wings I’d been busy tweaking other parts of the outfit; removing wind resistance, increasing lift, and now making the engine quieter with a crude muffler made of an old battered Boy Scout canteen and a pair of socks.

I soared, and quietly. I knew the wind made noise in my ears, but I also knew that everyone else below couldn’t hear me as anything more than a distant car on a far-away dirt road, the kind of thing no one ever thinks twice about.

There’s a section in every town in America, no matter how small, where the wealthiest live. The other half. You know who I mean. Them. The guys you wish were your best friends. The folks who don’t have to worry about how to get the money for their kids’ prom dress or college tuition. I flew there.

After maybe five minutes (twenty by car, an hour and change walking, thank you, by-the-crow-flies travel over trees and the roads) and a little down the dirt road, I saw it.

The biggest house in town.

And parked just outside of it was my target.

A nice, white blob in the moonlight with four wheels, parked in the driveway of the four truly nice, rich-people-type houses in town, all of them on the same street, all of them every bit as arrogant as that statue in that poem we hadda read when I was in the ninth grade- Ozymandias? Yeah, that’s it. The houses on that street literally looked down the hill at the rest of us, telling us we might as well just give up at any chance of being as perfect, rich and wonderful as they were.

In retrospect, I probably should have cased the area a bit better. It literally never occurred to me that the car out on the driveway wasn’t Reichert’s spiffy roadster convertible, but instead was his parents’ Boattail Speedster. The thing’s a classic today, I understand.

All I knew was that I saw it, and went into the routine I’d practiced about a hundred times: approach, swoop up, swoop down, and…pull the cord.

A dozen pounds of very, very smelly and dirty innards from a recently dead group of farm animals poured out of the sealed bag strapped to my gut. I’d practiced the run with water at least a dozen times to get my posture and adjustment correct on the pouch to make sure not a drop got spilled on me. I wasn’t exactly prissy about such things, but blood and shit mixed together do not make the kind of combination you want to bring home to mother. Plus, I figured, they were going to be looking pretty closely at anyone who had a reason to hate one of the city’s favorite sons. And if one of them smelled like the same stuff that got dumped on his car? Well, that’d be the end, now, wouldn’t it?

So, I played Dan Dare bombing the Treens- remember him? Somebody told me they were still making them video-game things about him all the way up to the early 80s- only instead of flying a a glorified B-17 bomber like the Anastasia over the surface of the planet Venus, I was flapping a set of homemade wings and dive-bombing the most expensive car in five counties.

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Payback, honey, payback.

It all came out, and I heard the splat as it all hit the very, very expensive upholstery and everything else inside the very, very expensive car.

Direct hit, and a quick heading home!

I got home feeling like I could run a mile. Ten miles! A hundred! I felt like the choir from the Baptist church down the road was inside me signing at the top of their lungs! Part of me wanted to jump off of the roof and see if I could fly without the wings like the Airman! Hell, even if I fell and hit the ground I don’t think I would’ve felt a thing. I felt that good! I wished it was two in the afternoon instead of the morning- I would’ve told Mom, Pop and everyone else I could’ve found that I was the most amazing person in the world, that the world was a wonderful place [even for a Jew in the South!], and that everything was fantastic, wonderful, amazing, and that for the first time in my life, I had gotten even with someone.

Unfortunately- well, you may have already guessed it. Even by moonlight, one oversized white car looks pretty much like another. And when you dropped pig and cow organs, blood and shit on a car on a nice, hot southern midsummer night and it sits there for about four hours, getting soaked up by the upholstery, the carpeting, and even under the paint, the dash- well, I’ve heard since then that the particular make of car I did hit went on to be a classic, but I’d be very surprised if that particular vehicle ever ended up in anyone’s collection after I was done with it.

I didn’t realize just how big I’d messed up my life until I got to school the next morning. I got to school with a nice, showered-up body and freshly-laundered clothes, and saw both of the town’s cop cars parked in front of the doors at F.O.H.S.

You’ve got to understand why this was such a big deal; the town had room in the budget for exactly four policemen. And for some reason, every one of them were at our school, manning each of the four entrances, and smelling each student as we went in.

Yes! You heard it right, Jane old girl! Where nowadays they put the kids through metal detectors, these cops were honest-to-goodness leaning in and smelling each of us as we walked in the door! The greasers thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw, and cracked joke after joke when one of them was told to stand aside because they smelled like they hadn't showered in a week- which some of them hadn’t, truth be told.

But smelling like sweat, dirt and motor oil wasn’t enough to get a conviction, not even in the loose definition of law that got used in those days if you pissed off one of the more powerful citizens in a small Southern town. It wasn’t until I passed my smell-test. Oh, and I was so very glad I’d gone and showered, and made sure that crap wouldn’t splash on me, and that I’d dumped the bag down the river after! I’d only wanted to spare my dear, poor Ma the smell, but that day it may have saved my life and family’s reputation. At least, for then.

Once we were inside I started to overhear the buzz about why we were being given the F.O.H.S. version of the third degree. It turned out that instead of hitting the rich-kid’s toy, I splatted a bunch of cow and pig innards on his parents’ set of wheels!

And oh, did the fur fly then!

Apparently, Mr. Reichert had gotten up to drive his very expensive set of wheels to the mill he owned where over half the people in town worked. Yes, it wasn’t too far past the depression and we were happy to have jobs, most folks agreed. It was one reason that the Reicherts had so much pull in the town, doncha know. It’s the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules.

And one rule right now was that the Reicherts wanted to know just which miscreant had gone and destroyed their amazing car, the nicest car in five counties, symbol of how the Reicherts were everything you were not, and couldn’t hope to ever be. Shame there wasn’t a private school to send their child to so he wouldn’t have to mingle with the riff-raff like me, but there it was.

They never quite had enough to actually bust down my door and put the cuffs on me. But Pop, when he came come from work that night? Around the dinner table he started just casually talking about what he’d heard from guys on the road crew talkin’ about that day....