The Smoke Bomb Conspiracy of Lefsechip County

by Trygve Hammer

On the first day in May when temperatures reached what anyone’s mom would consider shorts and t-shirt weather, five middle school kids sat on an eight-by-eight-foot plywood platform under the rafters of the Severn family garage in Grain Belt, North Dakota, and compared notes on what they had discovered while stuck at home in the spring of COVID-19.

Rakish and rake-thin Curtis Severn had found, in that very garage, three boxes of Playboy magazines dating from the late 70’s to the mid 90’s. He studied them furiously and arranged them in order of excellence under his bed, where his mother discovered them. They weren’t there anymore.

Byron Chaudry—dark haired, dark complected, and probably the only kid in town wearing a collared shirt that day—found a loaded handgun in his father’s nightstand and a Bible—King James version, Catholic edition, with a soft black cover and thin gilded pages— under his mother’s side of the bed. Scandalous, seeing how his parents were pacifist Muslims. He read the entire Bible like a spy perusing top-secret documents inside an enemy headquarters, sitting with his back against the bed and returning the Good Book, with its attached ribbon bookmark exactly as he had found it, at the slightest indication that one of his parents had come home from work.

Helena Krum would disclose only that she had found excellent blackmail material on her two older sisters. She would probably need it, she said, because they were angry at her for noticing—out loud, in front of their parents— when her soon-to-graduate sister had returned from a long walk with her shirt misbuttoned, an orphan button hole at the top and an orphan button at the bottom.

Eighth-grade Winston Weide, studiously neat next to his rumpled sixth-grade brother Jack, was slow on his natural turn to share. The curve of Helena’s neck, from the bottom of her blonde bob to the shoulder strap of her white sundress had stolen his attention, and there was that small warm spot where her bare knee touched his. He barely noticed when Jack announced that the Weide boys hadn’t found a darn thing.

“Smoke bombs!” Winston said. “I found a rolled-up, crinkly paper bag of old smoke bombs. They’re stashed in the back of the bottom drawer in our China cabinet.” “What?” asked Jack. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because you would’ve lit the whole bag on fire.” Jack pouted and Curtis said, “Go get ‘em, Win. Let’s play some hot potato.”

Even as he lowered the makeshift two-by-four ladder and climbed down, Winston thought it was a bad idea, based mostly on the fact that Curtis had come up with it. But the others were excited to kick around some smoke bombs, so he crossed the hedge, slipped in the back door, and was relieved to hear his mother involved in an online meeting. He was also relieved that the bag was even older and more dried out than he remembered, so the smoke bombs were most likely long forgotten. By the time he returned to the open bay door and found his friends standing in a loose circle on the garage floor, Winston thought lighting some smoke bombs might not be such a bad idea after all.

He took his place between Helena and Byron, pulled a faded red smoke bomb out of the bag, and set it at his feet. Curtis, who could be counted on for matches more reliably than a Boy Scout working on his arson merit badge, tossed him a pack from Castro’s Car Cigar Bar in Little Havana, South Dakota. Winston lit a match, sparked the fuse, and waited to kick the little red ball as soon as it began spewing smoke.

It didn’t smoke. It flash-boomed like a small grenade. Winston staggered back with a dark spot in the center of his vision, ringing in his ears, and an acrid but sweet burning in his nose. Helena gripped his upper arm with both hands and he tried to flex his bicep without giving away the effort to do so.

Byron had cleared out of the garage. He walked back in wide-eyed and brushing something invisible off of his shirt. “That is not what I was expecting,” he said.

Jack just let out a long “Hooooo!” and high-fived with Curtis, who testified that he’d never seen a more awesome firework malfunction.

The spot in Winston’s vision dissolved, the ringing in his ears subsided, and Helena released her grip on his pathetic bicep. “There must have been something wrong with that one,” he said. “Maybe that’s what happens when they get really old.”

“I think we should test the next one outside,” Helena said. “That was way too loud.”

“Okay; everyone stay back for this one.” Winston drew another faded smoke bomb from the paper bag and walked to the center of the driveway. He set it on the ground and struck a match. The fuse flared, Winston retreated, seconds ticked and the smoke bomb exploded just as violently as the first one had. All that remained was a burn mark on the broken concrete, and the kids gathered around it.

“This is so much better than I thought it would be,” Curtis said.

His mother stepped out of the house in a long pink t-shirt with a sleep mask pushed up on her forehead and her dirty-blonde hair piled on one side of her head. “Holy Hell!” she said. “It sounds like someone’s lighting cherry bombs out here.”

Five pairs of eyes exchanged looks that said two words: cherry bombs!

“Pretty sure that was Cody throwing something from his pickup, Mom,” Curtis lied.

“The Sheriff ’s kid?” Ms. Severn looked skyward with a clenched jaw and shook her head. “I swear I’m gonna strangle that kid before he can reproduce.” Then she turned and padded back into the house.

The sheriff ’s kid was actually burning along the undulating gravel hills of Lefsechip County Road 13, along with some of his own home-school discoveries, in a dark blue 1984 Ford F-150 with a purposely damaged muffler. High school senior Cody Johansen had a bag of weed, an unregistered pistol, and a thermos of vodka under his seat, a set of handcuffs in his glove compartment, and three sticks of dynamite in the F-150’s mounted toolbox. The dynamite, weed, and pistol were from two locked trunks with poorly hidden keys in his father’s basement man cave. Apparently, an effective sheriff needed a lot of crimefighting contraband. The vodka had been lifted from the Sheriff ’s Department holiday party, where no one was in charge of securing the bar. The handcuffs had just been in the pickup for as long as Cody could remember.

He made a rolling stop and turned, in a cloud of dust, with stock-car noise and a spit of gravel, onto the highway that led back to town. He was engaged in a fantasy of hot pursuit in his practically guaranteed future as the county’s fourth straight Sheriff Johansen. His great grandfather Lars had started the enterprise and initiated the practice of hiring deputies who would never be capable of mounting an effective election campaign against an incumbent sheriff. That had worked well enough for Grandpa Oscar, and then Cody’s father had added the regular “discovery” of large marijuana patches or bundles of drugs on election years.

What the current Sheriff Johansen hadn’t foreseen, and now his second greatest pet peeve after his slowing metabolism and growing appetite, was the ridiculous name change from Barley County to Lefsechip County on his watch. It had all been part of a marketing ploy by the giant Crispee snack company to introduce their new Lefse Chip product in a heavily Norwegian market. The county was renamed for a period of not less than five years, and the county seat changed its name from Grain Belt to Crispee. In return, Crispee Corp. paid for upgrades to schools and bars throughout the county.

To make matters worse, the annoyingly good-natured Ole Olafson, who was opposed to the project but couldn’t resist a good joke, was president of the Crispee School Board at the time. He campaigned and cajoled, and the next thing you knew all of the Crispee sports teams were competing as the Wayfarers. Opposing basketball coaches claimed it was apt, considering how often Crispee players strolled down the lane without bothering to dribble.

Things took a darker turn when the volleyball girls traveled to Towner to take on the Towner-Granville- Upham Titans. Waiting for them in the locker room was a gift basket full of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla wafers and a note that read, “Please enjoy these crispy wafers. If only you could be so sweet—or so light.” Infuriated, the Wayfarers ate the wafers down to the last crumb and vowed to destroy the evil Lady Titans. Unfortunately, the wafer sugar-high lasted for only one set, and the thirsty, fatigued, and defeated Wafarers dragged themselves to the bus without bothering to shower.

Five years later, the town was quick to drop its shameful corporate moniker, and the sports teams returned to competing as the Grain Belt Brewers. Ole Olafson was then on the County Commission. He campaigned, once again successfully, to keep the Lefsechip name. After all, he argued, there was barely any barley grown in the county anymore, and the sheriff ’s girth proved that free Lefse Chips in county offices hadn’t been as unpopular as some had claimed. So Cody Johansen’s father continued to patrol in vehicles with a department logo that featured potatoes and a rolling pin instead of stately sheaves of bearded barley.

Winston and Helena lagged slightly behind the others through the alley as they walked toward the railroad tracks, which Curtis claimed was the best place to blow stuff up. Winston had the bag of cherry bombs in one hand, while the hand on Helena’s side remained free for her to grab if she stumbled or a chasm opened in the earth beneath her cute strappy sandals—her description, not his— and painted toenails.

Helena moved so close that their forearms touched and whispered, “I don’t think Curtis’s mom was wearing anything under that t-shirt.”

“I didn’t notice,” Winston said. He didn’t think it was cool to observe the way a thin t-shirt clung to the curves of a hot mom’s body, or even to acknowledge that your friend had a hot mom.

“Oh, bull,” Helena said. “She had you more dazed than that first cherry bomb.”

“No, I—”

Cody Johansen’s pickup fishtailed into the alley and skidded to a halt in front of the group. Cody jumped out, left the door open, and put himself between his vehicle and his targets. He was in his usual uniform: a trucker hat, cowboy boots, and a t-shirt and jeans that looked as if they had been snatched away from overly possessive mountain lions.

“Where you going, Injun?” he asked Byron. “Taking your friends to a powwow?” He hopped around in poor imitation of a Native American dance, modulating his whoops by tapping four fingers over his mouth.

Winston’s heart pounded and his legs turned to lead, but Helena seemed unfazed. “You’re an idiot,” she said, pointing at Cody. “Byron’s from Pakistan. He’s not any kind of Indian.”

“Well, if it isn’t Helena Handbasket.” Cody smirked at his own lame joke and then frowned as his audience failed to react. “Looks like you’ve got more balls than all of these boys put together.” He looked straight at Winston. “I think Weide might pee his pants. What’s in the bag, Wimpy?”

“Cherry . . . tomatoes,” Winston said, relieved that his body had loosened enough to say anything. He wasn’t looking directly at Cody, and so he was the first to notice that the pickup was backing away, gaining an inch or two per second in velocity with each passing second. It set Winston to laughing.

“You think something’s funny?” Cody stepped toward him. “I’ll punch the funny right out of you.”

Winston pointed. “Your pickup.”

The F-150 had rolled about thirty feet and was beginning to turn so that the tailgate took aim at the dumpster behind the hardware store and the open driver’s side door arced away from Cody, who sprinted after it so fast that the trucker hat flipped off his head and sat facing them in the alley. Byron snatched the hat and they all ran past Cody as the bulky dumpster clunked a fresh dent in the tailgate and the driver’s side door swung closed in front of him.

They ran to the railroad tracks, and then another quarter mile down them to where there was no street access and no houses nearby. They sat in the middle of the tracks and gasped from exertion and laughter. They laughed about the pickup, they laughed about the dumpster, they laughed about Helena’s scolding and Winston’s laughing. They laughed hard at what a cherry bomb did to the trucker hat and even harder at the results of the hat versus two cherry bombs twisted together by their fuses. With each retelling, the story got funnier and the players more heroic, and Winston grew more certain that no one had noticed how frozen he had been in his fear.

“You know,” Byron said, “we don’t have a hair on our butts if we don’t blow up Cody’s bird feeder.”

“Yeah, as if you have a hair on your butt, Byron,” Curtis said. “Let’s do it.”

“We can’t do it now,” Jack said, and Winston was relieved at his little brother’s atypical caution.

“You’re right,” Helena replied. “If we’re going to blow stuff up in the sheriff ’s backyard, we should do it in the dark.”

“Let’s do it tonight, then. It will be dark enough by eleven-thirty.” Winston couldn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth. He hoped one of the others would veto the idea, but the plan just gained momentum. Helena announced that Winston could light the cherry bombs in the bird feeder, but she was going to light one on the Johansen’s deck because she was the only one who hadn’t lit one yet. Everyone was sure they could be at the pile of tires in the implement lot that bordered the Johansen’s yard by 11:45 that night. Winston advised everyone to stuff their beds in case a parent peeked in to check on them.

Winston and Jack prepped their beds and crawled out their bedroom window at 11:30. They slid to the edge of the roof and dropped quietly first to the shed and then to the driveway. They retrieved the cherry bombs from behind the trash bin and the ten million candlepower spotlight from its charging station in the garage and arrived at the implement lot to find Curtis, whose mother was out bartending, already waiting. He had a one-gallon ice cream pail that he wanted placed over the cherry bombs on the deck and a handful of wire twist ties which, they discovered, could hold four cherry bomb fuses together. Helena arrived next, still in her sundress and cute strappy sandals. She had taken her sisters’ usual escape route through the attached garage, and she thought the ice cream pail was a wonderful idea. Byron arrived at 11:45 on the dot, cell phone time. He was the only one who had locked a door behind him as he left. His parents were early-to-bed, early-to-rise people.

The Johansen house was on a corner of Main Street just beyond where the road curved out of sight from the business district. It was built into the edge of a depression left long ago by some retreating glacier, so the backyard sat well below street level. A sliding glass door from the basement opened to one end of a concrete patio in the sunken backyard, and a set of wooden stairs at the other end of the patio led up to the deck. At the center of the yard were an apple tree, a lilac bush, and several Adirondack chairs. From a branch of the apple tree hung a bird feeder Cody Johansen had constructed in shop class and used mostly as a bait station to draw targets for his bb gun. The entire yard was shrouded by a ring of bushes and brambles, both evergreen and deciduous, that offered privacy from casual observation and concealment for spying kids. All of the boys had hidden in the bushes on bright summer days to watch Cody’s older sisters (Could they even be from the same gene pool?) sunning themselves in barely-there, two-piece swimsuits.

The plan was simple: Helena would take a bundle of four twist-tied cherry bombs, a book of matches, and the ice cream pail up the stairs to the deck while Winston set his cherry bomb bundle in the bird feeder. Once Helena’s fuses were burning and she was halfway down the stairs, Winston would light his fuses and they would both flee back to the tree line to observe the aftermath. The other three boys would spread out to watch the action and look for trouble, and they would all meet back in the implement lot when it was over.

Winston crawled out of the foliage and immediately realized that he had greatly underestimated the darkness of the enclosed yard. Even Helena’s white sundress disappeared a second after she passed him, and he had to follow the flowery scent and grope his way to the lilac bush like a zombie. He was glad he had held on to the spotlight, because he might need it to make a quick escape. As he made his way around the lilac to the apple tree, his eyes adjusted just enough to see some shapes in the dark. He set his cherry bombs in the bird feeder and looked for Helena.

She was a mere wisp of white until she got halfway up the stairs and into some ambient light from the street. At the same moment, big Sheriff Johansen, guided by the flashlight on his cell phone, stepped gingerly onto the concrete patio in flip-flops, baggy sweatpants cut off just below the knee, and a sleeveless Crispee Wayfarers football jersey. He slid the patio door closed and followed the beam of light from his phone into the yard. Two beer bottles dangled by their necks between the fingers of his meaty fist.

Winston backed slowly behind the lilac bush as the sheriff lumbered toward him and halted at an Adirondack chair. Two beers clunked down and then the sheriff ’s face glowed orange and round as he lit a cigarette that slanted down from his scowl. The phone light went out, a beer bottle hissed open, and the glowing cigarette moved toward the apple tree and paused. The sheriff sighed, and there followed the unmistakable sound of urine splashing on the ground.

Then, on the deck, Helena’s dress reflected the light of a freshly struck match.

She didn’t know.

Sheriff Johansen didn’t notice.

Winston felt cold concrete hardening around him.

Another match flamed on the deck. Fuses sparked then separated when they burned below the wire tie, and the wobbling cherry bombs cast dance-club lights under the ice cream pail. Helena stood transfixed, her hands on her face.

Winston dug deep. He wouldn’t freeze. He shouted, “No!” but it came out as a strangled, “Naaagh!” It was enough to break the squeezing fear.

The sheriff ’s face turned to the sound and ten million candlepower of white light blasted through his dilated pupils. Cherry bombs ba-da-da-bammed on the deck and the sheriff spun that direction while reaching for a nonexistent holster on his hip. Untied sweatpants piled around his ankles and he fell flat on his face. Only the beer bottle remained upright. Bound and blinded, the sheriff arched his back and bellowed. He groped for his sweatpants with his non-beer hand and his great white buttocks leaped about like clumsy baby seals racing up a steep beach.

Winston killed the spotlight, struck a match, lit the bird-feeder cherry bombs and ran for cover. Lights came on in the house and squashed the shadows just enough for him to spot a cute pair of strappy sandals disappearing into the brush. He followed them and low-crawled into concealment just as the bird feeder exploded.

A floodlight came on and Mrs. Johansen emerged through the sliding door on the deck screaming into her phone: “Sheriff Johansen’s been shot! He’s in the backyard! Please hurry!”

It was time to clear out. Winston ran back to the rendezvous point and the others were already there. Without a word, they followed him from shadow to shadow and alley to alley until they reached the railroad tracks and turned to the Main Street overpass.

Sirens wailed and whooped from every direction. Two Sheriff ’s Department vehicles turned off of the highway and raced through the underpass. Their flickering blue lights bounced along the store fronts ahead of and behind them. Then came two State Patrol vehicles, converging from opposite directions on the highway. They turned into town and emerged from the underpass as close as linked railcars. Just up the block, the Grain Belt Community Ambulance turned off of second avenue and followed in the wake of the State Patrol.

Then the sirens died and the town settled into post-midnight, small-town silence.

“We should probably go home,” Jack said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this tired.”

“Me too,” said Byron, “but this was the best night of my life.” He turned to walk off, then stopped and said, “I think I hear Cody Johansen’s pickup.”

Sure enough, the locally infamous F-150 was approaching the turn lane to make a left off of the highway and drive right underneath them. Cody was so uncharacteristically cautious at the wheel that, as Winston and Helena stood at the overpass rail to watch him emerge, Curtis was able to reach between them and lob two lit bundles of four cherry bombs directly into the box of his truck.

Cody’s conservatism disappeared at the first detonation. The engine roared and the F-150 shot out of view around the main street curve but seemed to come to a halt with a rubbery squawk and a metallic crunch.

Winston picked up the bag of cherry bombs, hugged Helena like it was his job, and said, “Let’s go home.”

Lights showed inside the Weide house when the boys got home, but they climbed in their window and found their stuffed beds undisturbed. Jack went directly to bed, but Winston got into his pajamas and wandered downstairs to feign surprise that his parents were awake.

His mom said her boys must sleep like the dead, and his dad said that the rumor was that the Johansen kid had crashed into a State Patrol car with some trouble on his breath and worse in his pickup.

When Winston returned to his room, a group text from Helena asked if everyone was okay. Byron’s parents slept through it all. Curtis’s mom wasn’t home yet. Winston replied that he and Jack were fine and Cody was in trouble.

Helena texted that the bed-stuffing idea was genius and that her sisters had accidentally provided cover for her by getting caught sneaking in just before she got to the house. As the older Krum girls were scolded in the basement rec room—so the yelling wouldn’t wake their sweet little sister—Helena had tip-toed to her room.

They said their goodnights.

Then a personal text from Helena: “Next time you should kiss me.”

TRYGVE HAMMER is a retired Marine and 7-12 science educator who lives in Velva, ND. He never experienced middle-school romance, but he did once discover that the bag of smoke bombs he found in the dining room were, indeed, cherry bombs. He is also a candidate for the North Dakota State House of Representatives, where he would represent, among others, the Evil Lady Titans of TGU.