Our secret hideout at Jared’s place was perfect. There was heaps of stuff to build with and no one knew anything about it. It was way out in the back paddock and couldn’t be seen from his house. To everyone else it just looked like a bulldozed hay shed with the roof half collapsed, old tractors and heaps of old rusted-out machinery. But underneath it all there was a huge cavity. That’s where we’d built our very own hideaway that we could survive in for weeks if we wanted to. We’d been sneaking food and drinks from home for ages and storing them in an old fridge, that looked very similar to an accordion. But best of all was that none of the other kids would dare to come anywhere near it. We’d all been totally banned from going to within a mile of it. Ever since Jared’s spectacular NEAR-DEATH skateboarding accident, down the roof and over a tractor and straight into a really, really big tree.
So it was perfect!!
Our bikes were hidden by an old car bonnet and the entrance was just a quick crawl through the crumbling concrete pipe … under the over-turned truck tray that was squashing lower every day …
. . . a belly slide between the two tractors teetering dangerously on top of each other …
… between the fifty or so razor-sharp harvester blades …
… through the rusted-out, half-squashed, steel water tank and you’re in … simple!
The hideout was our idea of heaven. NO adults, NO school-work and NO horse-shearing, sheep-riding, cow-tossing kids. And definitely NO SOOKY SIBLINGS!
We opened the rusted fridge door and took out a warm can of soft drink each. Then we went to work on our newest recipe for pooper-shooting ammunition.
I figured that Fluff Butt just might be useful after all. Because every time that I’d wipe her butt, I felt like chucking up, it stank so badly. We’d been trying cow pats and garlic, horse dung and onions, pig poop and mint, but there it was right in front of us; Fluff Buttus poopus. I’d collected a nice big bag of Fluff Butt crap from the yard ready to ‘cook up’. The texture wasn’t so good but the smell … awesome!!
As we rolled the new ‘maxi-smell’ slime-covered festering stomach juice cannon balls of dung between our hands, Jared started having a huge whinge about their newest addition to their family … guinea pigs. Once that pet shop had opened up, his brothers had all sucked up massively to their mum for a pet. One of his brothers is a year younger; he wanted rabbits. The twins, DUFAS and DORKY are a year older and they were sucking up for mice. The other two are a couple of years older than Jared and of course they wanted some sort of massive bird of prey that could rip your arm off.
Jared was so peeved. Just because we’d been helping the environment by recycling and reusing manure, his mum thought he shouldn’t get to have a say in what the family pet would be. Just because apparently, the only thing he was interested in was the quality and quantity of dung that it produced anyway. So what did she come home with … guinea pigs?
Apparently the pet shop owner was a tall French guy who wore white overalls. He’s REALLY ugly and has a humongous shnoz with thick square glasses balancing on the end of it and a really poxy looking blonde wig. He couldn’t speak a word of English but had still somehow talked her into the guinea pigs, just like he’d talked my mum into the Fluff Butt. And it wasn’t just us. It seemed that every kid in school had a pet all of a sudden, whether they wanted it or not. Peacocks, goats, cockatoos and heaps of other pets were popping up in every home around here. Jared was whinging on and on about the guinea pigs and how he thought the only thing they were good for was taping to the end of a stick and using as a toilet brush.
Suddenly I was struck like a piñata with a baseball bat. It was brilliant, why didn’t I think of it before? I mean Jared had an excuse. His head is like an overflowing vacuum cleaner bag, full of dust and dirt, but me … anyway. Here we were busting a gut, inventing and building our phantasmagorical world-record-breaking Crap Attack Dung Flinging pooper-shooter. When what would be really awesome was to make something that we could use in total secret; … at school!
I shared the idea with Jared. Who naturally, recognised my brilliance once again. Over the next few days at school, we drew up the plans and worked out the kinks. “Quack!” Jared suddenly coughed under his breath as we felt the earthquake of Mrs D’s bulging legs clumping our way. Sneaking was not a natural ability for her. I calmly flicked over the cover of our secret plans’ folder. “The sum of the angles in a right angle is greater than or equal to the sum of the angles of an equilateral trian … Good morning Mrs Duckson,” we sang in chorus with a broad smile.
“Good morning boys. Keep up the good work,” she answered with an uneasy look of surprise and suspicion.
“Thank you Mrs Duckson.” Yep I reckon it shouldn’t take too long to get her under control.
Back to the plans.
By the end of the week we were ready to put together our very first top-secret, one of a kind, totally wicked, Mini-Pellet-pooper-shooter. Jared had collected up plenty of their guinea pig pellet poop. Wow, those little guys seemed to pump out poop all day long. I don’t think they even slept. Food was constantly being sucked in one end and leaving out the other. We tried drying it out, but it crumbled before we could load it. We tried keeping it wet, but that just made it swell up and then we had to moosh it into the tube. We must have tried mixing it and rolling it in a hundred different ways. But finally we found that the best pellet poop AMMUNITION was if it was so fresh that it was still warm.
We used the tube of a clear pen and carefully filed out both ends. Then, using an ear bud, the inside was coated with cooking oil to make the tube nice and slippery. Jared loaded his shooter with three pellets. It was working; they slipped in easily, sliding back and forth in the oily tube.
“OK Jared, take a deep breath and blow,” I directed. In a split second and obviously without thinking, Jared raised the tube to his lips and sucked in a huge breath …
“Hhhhhh, gulp, gulp, gulp!! ” In an instant, all three pellets disappeared from the tube and shot straight down his throat …
“You suck up a breath before putting your mouth to the tube you idiot!” I said as I fell to the ground laughing. He then went on to swallow another dozen before realising that he just wasn’t getting the hang of it.
I could see that he wasn’t going to get the hang of it right from the start. But I didn’t want to say anything because it really was ssooo funny to watch.
We went back to the drawing board and added a spring to power the shooter. Now we were ready.
Monday morning Jared gathered up a nice big bag of fresh warm AMMUNITION for each of us. We got to school way early and set up our command post under the bushes opposite the toilet block. The trap was set, we waited for our prey.
Fifteen minutes to the bell; the clapped-out old rusty minivan that runs on a secret mix of alcohol and pig poop and is used on weekends to take sheep to the sale yards, rattles up with farmer Nick Young behind the wheel. Nick is the oldest hippie around here. He doesn’t say much and he has this bushy grey moustache and beard that a troop of Scouts could get lost in. He also wears this faded worn-out rainbow beanie with a couple of feathers on the side. No one has ever seen his head without it. Jared reckons his hair has actually grown all through the beanie