The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

before, would appear and ask you where you were going.
    “Might go down to the Trestle,” you would say thoughtfully. The Trestle was a railway bridge over the Raccoon River from which you could jump in for a swim if you didn’t mind paddling around among dead fish, old tires, oil drums, algal slime, heavy metal effluents, and uncategorized goo. It was one of ten recognized landmarks in our district. The others were the Woods, the Park, the Little League Park (or “the Ballpark”), the Pond, the River, the Railroad Tracks (usually just “the Tracks”), the Vacant Lot, Greenwood (our school), and the New House. The New House was any house under construction and so changed regularly.
    “Can we come?” they’d say.
    “Yeah, all right,” you would answer if they were your size or “If you think you can keep up” if they were smaller. And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighborhoods met—at the Park, for instance—where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three-quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.
    Life in Kid World, wherever you went, was unsupervised, unregulated, and robustly—at times insanely—physical, and yet it was a remarkably peaceable place. Kids’ fights never went too far, which is extraordinary when you consider how ill-controlled children’s tempers are. Once when I was about six, I saw a kid throw a rock at another kid, from quite a distance, and it bounced off the target’s head (quite beautifully I have to say) and made him bleed. This was talked about for years. People in the next county knew about it. The kid who did it was sent for about ten thousand hours of therapy.
    We didn’t otherwise engage in violence, other than accidentally, though we did sometimes (actually quite routinely) give a boy named Milton Milton knuckle rubs for having such a stupid name and also for spending his life pretending to be motorized. I never knew whether he was supposed to be a train or a robot or what, but he always moved his arms like pistons when he walked and made puffing noises, and so naturally we gave him knuckle rubs. We had to. He was born to be rubbed.
                      
    WITH RESPECT TO ACCIDENTAL BLOODSHED, it is my modest boast that I became the neighborhood’s most memorable contributor one tranquil September afternoon in my tenth year while playing football in Leo Collingwood’s backyard. As always, the game involved about a hundred and fifty kids, so normally when you were tackled you fell into a soft, marshmallowy mass of bodies. If you were really lucky you landed on Mary O’Leary and got to rest on her for a moment while waiting for the others to get off. She smelled of vanilla—vanilla and fresh grass—and was soft and clean and painfully pretty. It was a lovely moment. But on this occasion I fell outside the pack and hit my head on a stone retaining wall. I remember feeling a sharp pain at the top of my head toward the back.
    When I stood up, I saw that everyone was staring at me with a single rapt expression and inclined to give me some space. Lonny Brankovich looked over and instantly melted in a faint. In a candid tone his brother said: “You’re gonna die.” Naturally I couldn’t see what absorbed them, but I gather from later descriptions that it looked as if I had a lawn sprinkler plugged into the top of my head, spraying blood in all directions in a rather festive manner. I reached up and found a mass of wetness. To the touch, it felt more like the kind of outflow you get when a truck crashes into a fire hydrant or oil is struck in Oklahoma. This felt like a job for Red Adair.
    “I think I’d better