Jacob and I became friends when the pear-throwing wars started outside the church. We were in Pioneer Boys, a kind of youth ministry scout thing for boys ages ten to twelve. On Wednesday evenings, when all the parents were making sad sounds in the sanctuary, kids were banished from the building. A long line of pear trees stood between the street and the church, and the pears were small and hard—just right for winging at kids who didn’t know the first thing about taking cover. Sometimes a younger kid would run in crying with a big lump on his forehead, and an adult would come out to check on things. But we would always jump into a prayer circle and look surprised at being interrupted in the middle of a devotional moment.

Jacob, furious Jacob. Calmly fierce and never without a plan working behind his gaze. His parents dropped loads of money for his hobbies and were always gone. Sometimes I thought he might live alone in his big house. The first time he took me there he showed me his ammunition collection—one cartridge for just about every kind of small arm, and other things like drilled grenades and mortar shells.

One day he pulled a trunk full of fireworks out from under his bed and showed me a cellophane-wrapped bag of M-80s his uncle had sent him from Arkansas. He handed them to me and went to piling plastic models of aircraft carriers and destroyers into a wicker laundry basket. We took turns carrying the basket on our long walk to a creek that ran under a railroad trestle, out where the last row of houses was far behind us. There we set the flotilla adrift in stagnant water and got up on the trestle with the M-80s. We lit the waterproof fuses and dropped them over the side, sometimes in air-bursts, sometimes depth charges with underwater concussions that gave a Whump sound and swamped a ship. I asked Jacob if he wasn’t going to miss all of those models he had worked on so much, gluing and painting all the little bits. He shrugged and said he was moving on to fighter jets.

A couple of months after our naval war under the trestle, everybody at the church seemed a little down about how bad the war was going in Vietnam. So the youth leaders came up with the idea of having all the Pioneer Boys hike out to the edge of town to tour the Bobby Wayne Sausage plant. We would start early on a Saturday and get there at midmorning, take the tour while the place was closed, and then have a cookout by the creek that ran past the slaughter-house pens.

The leaders got tired but we didn’t. The man who met us at the plant treated us like we might want to buy the place. He showed us the break room first and gave us whatever we wanted from the vending machines. Then he took us to the start of the processing line. We could see hogs milling around in a dark place under a tin roof, and when we came to the chute with the stun gun at the end of it we all begged for a hog to be brought up for a demonstration. Everybody old laughed. We were shown what flops down where when it’s sawed or sliced and what machines take over wrapping stuff when the people are finished.

We got herded over across the highway bridge and there were already a couple of cars and a van there with people setting out coolers of cokes and wieners. An old guy was trying to make a fire, but Jacob told him we needed to keep our survival skills sharp, so he turned everything over to us. After that we drank all of the cokes and made dough-balls out of the hot dog buns, and the youth leaders retreated to their vans to listen to radio preacher warnings.

That’s when Jacob showed his destiny was to be a general if God had any sense.

You, You, You, he said, pointing. Get more firewood.

Whole logs went on until we had a bonfire going. We chopped levering poles and got burning tree trunks rolling toward the creek bank that was high above the water. With a final heave we sent flaming masses tumbling down. It was the Ka-Woosh sound, followed by a loud hiss, that we cheered.

And then we were old enough and the war was still there. Jacob joined the Air Force right away and I went in with him. He said he was going to work his way up through the ranks to officer training so he would really be respected as a leader.

But it was in San Antonio that I lost Jacob.

Wearing our dress blues on our first free weekend in basic training, we headed straight for all the places declared off limits. What could happen to all of us? Turns out the places were mostly dark bars where buying a drink for a female employee ended up costing a week’s pay, followed by a fight to get out the door. When we got to the bus pickup spot, Jacob was a no-show. Back on base we all laughed about how he was the only one of us to get everything we were all looking for: a girl, and out of the mistake made when we joined.

He’s still married to her. The one postcard I got from him told me she could shoot a pecan out of a tree at five hundred yards and it would come down in shelled halves. I wrote back and said, Send Pears.

I’m not much of a church-goer these days. And the look of sausage now, before it’s cooked and even after, finds me headed out to the garden. I just have to stand there for a while. Looking around.

—From the author’s collection of flash literature, The Light I Want to Keep, forthcoming from MacQ

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Suitcase Full of Clay: An Ekphrastic e-Collection in MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023)

⚡ Roadshow, microfiction by Daryl Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 15, September 2022); one of three pieces by Scroggins selected as Finalists in “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

⚡ Spring, microfiction by Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Writer Boy, microfiction in MacQ (Issue 4, July 2020); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction 2021

⚡ Field Trips, flash fiction by Scroggins in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ New to School, microfiction in Eclectica (Jan/Feb 2018)

⚡ Two Fictions: “Almost Baptized” and “Against the Current” in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Eight Stories: A Mini-Chapbook by Daryl Scroggins at Web del Sol