Milk Chicken Bomb Read Online Free

making a mess of the playground. They said taking that many flyers was like stealing, even though flyers are free and in piles that say Take One. And after we’d cleaned up the whole playground we had to go down Main Street and apologize at the insurance office, and the bank, and the First Evangelical Church. When they told Mullen’s dad he laughed, but the way people sometimes laugh on television, when you can tell they’re only actors.
    I have to go home soon, Mullen.
    No, come on, she’s still doing stuff, he says. I bet she’ll smoke another cigarette soon. Look, she has sawhorses inthere. You think she might saw something up? Maybe she’s got one of those circular saws.
    I have to go home, Mullen. Seriously.
    Since when does it matter when you go home?
    I stand up and hand him his comic. I’ll see you tomorrow.
    Yeah, tomorrow.
    I walk down to the end of the block and turn around. Mullen’s still sitting there, pretending to read his comic, watching the woman in the window.

An old man with patches on his elbow leans on McClaghan’s counter, looking at the lighters in the rotating shelf. One of those flat hats on his wrinkly old head, all covered in buttons. Annual Rotarian Convention, and Legion Number 19, and Vets Get Set. He takes a scratchy old Zippo lighter out of his jacket. A flint, he says to McClaghan, I need a new flint for this.
    Where’d you get this? McClaghan takes the lighter, turns it over. Mail order?
    Antwerp, says the old man, I got it in Antwerp. Pressed into my hands out of gratitude.
    McClaghan spits in his jar.
    McClaghan’s jar is the worst thing in town. You always have to go to McClaghan’s hardware store after school, though, for model-airplane paint or thirty-five-cent gum or hockey tape, so you always have to see the jar. He leaves it on the counter right beside the hockey cards, this beet-pickle jar two-thirds full of old-man phlegm, brown tobacco juice, stubby toothpicks. He takes it everywhere. Any time you walk by, there’s McClaghan out on the step, under the 40% OFF sign, listening to his radio, spitting. But spitting on the sidewalk is bad for business I guess, so he spits in the jar. You can hear it all up the street, the hack and plop of old-man spit landing in that beet-pickle jar.
    McClaghan rummages in his drawer. Pulls out envelopes, paper boxes. Opens them, frowns, puts them back. The old man puts all his nickels on the counter, one at a time, lining them all up and trying to get them all straight, but his hands shake and push the nickels all over the place.
    In McClaghan’s hardware store they’ve got everything you could ever want. Table saws and new bicycle chains, and four-man tents and car batteries, rubber boots, fishing rods, pickaxes and wheelbarrows – everything. Stacks of plywood and two-by-fours, router bits, camping stoves and jerry cans. They’ve got a paint-shaker, just about the loudest thing I ever heard, shakes so fast you can’t read the label on the can. And all that stuff is great, but the best part about McClaghan’s is fireworks.
    So, McClaghan, Mullen says, pulling his elbows, his chin, up on the counter. McClaghan’s counter is way taller than it needs to be. How about some of those roman candles you’ve got back there? I bet those pack a whole bunch, yeah?
    McClaghan wraps his fingers around the jar. Out. Both of you, beat it.
    How much does one of those big boxes cost, anyway?
    Split, kid! McClaghan barks. We scoot outside. Sit down on the sidewalk. People sure get worked up about stuff, says Mullen. Hey, you want to come for dinner with the Russians? Me and my dad are going over, well, pretty quick I guess.
    Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I say. We walk past the Lions Club playground. Two kids crouch on the teeter-totter. Neither one wants to go up because they know the other will hop off and crash the hard seat down on the hard ground. They just bob up and down,