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Fort Mayfield was the sort of town where every lawn was trimmed, every mother owned pearls, and every father came home from work at exactly five-thirty wearing a suit that had apparently survived the day without acquiring a wrinkle, a stain or any evidence of labor. It occupied that pleasant portion of West Texas where the television suburbs ended and the caliche began. On one side of town stood shaded two-story homes with attached garages and milk delivered to the porch. On the other stood oil tanks, pump jacks and enough open country for a boy to become a federal concern before supper.

The year was 1958, more or less. Fort Mayfield had recently acquired color television, aerosol cheese and a 1972 AMC Matador police car, and nobody considered any of these chronological difficulties polite enough to mention.

The Montgomery family lived at 211 Pine Street in a white house with dark shutters and a front walk that curved for no reason except that straight sidewalks were thought to encourage communism. Monty Montgomery sold insurance downtown and regarded fatherhood as a series of brief conferences conducted beside fireplaces. His wife, April, kept a spotless home, wore dresses to operate the washing machine and could produce a plate of cookies within forty seconds of hearing a juvenile lie. Their older son, Golly, was fourteen, handsome and decent, and had reached the age when he understood the world well enough to be embarrassed by it. Their younger son, Motcat, was ten.

Motcat was not evil. Evil requires planning, patience and some awareness of consequences. Motcat possessed none of those. He was a cheerful little accelerant who moved through Fort Mayfield setting fire to circumstances that had been perfectly stable until he arrived. He had large innocent eyes, untidy hair and the unusual gift of looking surprised by events he had personally placed in motion.

On the Saturday morning in question, Motcat was sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal when Monty entered wearing a cardigan and carrying the newspaper.

“Good morning, son,” Monty said.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Any plans today?”

“No, sir.”

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This was technically true. Motcat had no plan. He had three model-rocket engines, a roll of copper wire and an appointment with three other boys behind the Almost United Methodist Church, but those were merely ingredients. The plan would be whatever happened when they were combined.

Monty opened the paper. The front page of the Fort Mayfield Picayune-Intelligencer announced that the Russians had launched another object into space. A photograph showed a metal sphere above a headline warning that American schoolchildren were now behind in science, mathematics and possibly treason.

“You know, Motcat,” Monty said, entering the tone he used when a lesson had volunteered, “this country needs young men willing to apply themselves to science. The future may belong to the boy who looks up at the stars and asks, ‘Why not?’”

Motcat stopped chewing.

April, who knew her youngest son better than the federal government did, turned from the stove.

“Perhaps he could ask why not after he cleans the garage.”

“A boy needs ambition, April.”

“So did Napoleon.”

Golly looked at Motcat. “What have you got in that paper sack?”

“My lunch.”

The sack made a metallic clank.

“Iron,” Motcat explained.

Five minutes later he was pedaling toward the church with the sack hanging from one handlebar and his father’s confidence in American science ringing in his ears.

Behind the Almost United Methodist Church, Clink Mercer, Otis Pugh and Dewey Furr were waiting beside the remains of the Women’s Missionary Auxiliary rummage sale. Clink had contributed a dented washtub. Otis had brought two galvanized trash-can lids. Dewey had acquired six feet of garden hose and a department-store mannequin named Miss Mayfield Cotton, who until Friday had modeled foundation garments in the window of Bland’s Dry Goods.

“Did you steal her?” Motcat asked.

“Borrowed,” Dewey said. “They weren’t using all of her.”

The mannequin was missing one arm.

The boys’ original purpose had been to construct a flying saucer for Monday’s elementary-school science fair. Then Teddy Jackal arrived.

Teddy was Golly’s friend in the same sense that termites are friends of a house. He wore his hair neatly combed, addressed adults as “sir” and “ma’am,” and could make a suggestion that resulted in property damage without ever touching the property.

“Why, hello, fellows,” Teddy said. “My, what an educational little project.”

“It’s a spaceship,” Motcat told him.

“Of course it is. I suppose a really scientific spaceship would fly.”

“It’s for display,” Clink said.

“Very sensible. Static exhibits are ideal for younger children.” Teddy smiled. “Golly and I are building a radio at his house. It may receive Moscow.”

Motcat looked at the washtub.

“Ours is going to fly.”

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Teddy’s work was finished. He went to the Montgomery house, complimented April’s dress, called Monty’s lawn “a credit to the neighborhood” and then spent the afternoon teaching Golly how to conceal a burned-out vacuum tube in a flowerpot.

The flying saucer required propulsion. The three rocket engines were judged inadequate after Otis pointed out that Miss Mayfield Cotton weighed nearly as much as his aunt. Clink suggested gasoline. Dewey suggested dynamite because Dewey’s father worked for the highway department and had given his son a dangerously optimistic understanding of public inventory. Motcat, remembering an advertisement in the back of a comic book, said they needed atomic fuel.

They went to Rusty Nail Feed and Seed, where Motcat purchased five pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer with seventy-three cents, two returnable soda bottles and a Canadian nickel. The clerk asked what he intended to fertilize.

“Space,” Motcat said.

The clerk had worked retail for thirty-two years and had long ago stopped following customers beyond the point of payment.

The boys packed fertilizer around the rocket engines, wired them to a discarded automobile battery and fastened the washtub between the trash-can lids. They dressed the mannequin in a football helmet and a choir robe, because space travel was dangerous and God was watching. The garden hose ran from the saucer to a bicycle pump, which Clink believed would provide cabin pressure. Otis lettered UNITED STATES OF FORT MAYFIELD on the side in house paint.

It was, by the engineering standards of ten-year-old boys, ready for launch.

They dragged the machine to the old municipal water tower at the edge of town. The tower had been empty since 1949, but it was tall, accessible through a hole in the fence and therefore irresistible. Their theory was that a spaceship launched from higher ground had less distance to travel. By four o’clock they had hauled the saucer onto the maintenance platform and aimed it generally east, toward the Soviet Union and Mrs. Bledsoe’s chicken yard.

At that same hour, Officer Virgil Sledge was parked beneath the cottonwoods beside Fort Mayfield Elementary, completing a report on a stolen mannequin. His patrol car was the town’s new AMC Matador Enforcer, a black-and-white four-door sedan with a 118-inch wheelbase, heavy-duty suspension, heavy-duty brakes, heavy-duty cooling and a 401-cubic-inch V8 producing 255 net horsepower. It could accelerate from zero to sixty in less than seven seconds and exceed 120 miles per hour, which was useful in a community whose fastest criminal owned a Cushman scooter.

The Matador had been purchased after Mayor Buford Mayfield attended a law-enforcement convention in Dallas and became convinced that Fort Mayfield lay one interstate exit away from organized crime. Officer Sledge loved the car. At idle it had the deep, contained tremor of something chained beneath the hood. When he pressed the accelerator, the TorqueFlite 727 automatic dropped a gear with the decisiveness of a trapdoor.

The police radio crackled.

“Unit One, report of four juveniles carrying what appears to be a body up the water tower.”

Sledge looked at the empty mannequin report, then at the Matador’s long hood.

“Unit One responding.” The entire “Unit One” nomenclature was unnecessary, as Fort Mayfield had only one patrol car and therefore only one unit.

He covered the two miles in approximately the time it took April Montgomery to notice that the good choir robe was missing.

On the tower, Motcat connected the final wire.

“Shouldn’t we have a countdown?” Otis asked.

“We already counted when we were climbing the stairs,” Motcat said.

He touched the wire to the battery.

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All three rocket engines ignited. So did the choir robe, the fertilizer sack and a family of swallows beneath the platform. The saucer did not fly toward Russia. It rotated violently, struck the railing and descended from the water tower like an appliance being evicted from heaven. Miss Mayfield Cotton separated from the craft halfway down. Her choir robe continued toward Mrs. Bledsoe’s chicken yard while the naked mannequin landed across the hood of the arriving Matador, her remaining arm extended through the red police beacon.

Officer Sledge braked from forty miles per hour with the superior stopping power for which the Enforcer package was already becoming respected. The Matador stopped. Miss Mayfield Cotton did not. She slid across the hood, struck the windshield, saluted Officer Sledge and vanished over the roof, coming to rest behind the car with her remaining elbow over what would have been her anus, had she been anatomically correct.

The saucer landed in Mrs. Bledsoe’s chicken yard, where it removed the door from a henhouse and broadcast twelve chickens across Pecos County. The old civil-defense siren, struck by one of the trash-can lids, began wailing for the first time since installation. People poured from their houses expecting Russians, tornadoes or a sale at Bland’s. What they saw was a smoking water tower, a naked one-armed woman in a football helmet lying behind a police car, and four boys descending a ladder with the solemn haste of junior executives leaving a bankrupt corporation.

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Officer Sledge lined them against the Matador.

“Names?”

They gave them.

“What were you boys doing?”

“Science,” Motcat said.

Sledge examined the fertilizer, wires, battery, rocket debris, stolen mannequin and damaged municipal warning system. There are moments in police work when the facts arrange themselves into a shape no statute was designed to hold.

“Get in the car.”

The Matador’s rear seat was black vinyl, broad enough for four elementary-school suspects and separated from the front by a steel screen Fort Mayfield had ordered despite never having transported anyone more dangerous than a drunk livestock auctioneer. Motcat sat behind Officer Sledge. Clink, Otis and Dewey squeezed beside him. Through the glass they watched the fire department arrive and run over the garden hose.

“Are we under arrest?” Dewey asked.

“You are being detained,” Sledge said.

“What’s the difference?”

“Your parents will hear ‘arrest.’ The newspaper will hear ‘detained.’”

Officer Sledge started the 401. The entire back seat vibrated.

Motcat’s eyes widened. “Gee.”

For the first time all afternoon, he was impressed by machinery someone else had built.

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At the police station, April Montgomery arrived wearing pearls, gloves and the expression of a woman prepared to identify a body or create one. Monty came directly from the office. Golly and Teddy Jackal followed on bicycles.

Teddy removed his cap. “Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery. I was terribly sorry to hear about Motcat. Golly and I spent the afternoon quietly working on radio communications. I only hope someday Motcat learns to benefit from the excellent example you’ve provided in your home.”

April looked at him for a long moment.

“Teddy,” she said, “if you ever become a lawyer, civilization is finished.”

Officer Sledge explained that no charges would be filed if the boys returned the mannequin, repaired the chicken house, cleaned the water tower and wrote letters of apology to the Methodist women, the fire department and the surviving swallows. Monty thanked him. April asked whether the boys could remain in jail until Wednesday.

That evening Monty summoned Motcat to the den. A fire burned in the fireplace despite the fact that it was September in West Texas and the outside temperature was ninety-four degrees. Fathers in Fort Mayfield could not deliver wisdom without a fire. It was in the building code.

“Son,” Monty began, “there’s nothing wrong with curiosity. Many great discoveries began with a boy asking whether something could be done. But growing up means learning that ‘Can I?’ and ‘Should I?’ are different questions.”

Motcat looked down. “Yes, sir.”

“Science without judgment can be dangerous. And following someone else’s suggestion doesn’t relieve you of responsibility.”

From the hallway, Golly glanced at Teddy.

Teddy whispered, “Your ol’ man certainly knows how to reach him.”

“You’re going to help repair the damage,” Monty continued. “You’ll pay Mr. Bland for the mannequin, apologize to Mrs. Bledsoe and spend the next month doing chores. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Monty placed a hand on his shoulder. “Someday you’ll be old enough to think ahead.”

Motcat nodded with genuine remorse. “Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“When I am, can I get a Matador?”

Monty closed his eyes.

The episode might properly have ended there, with gentle music, restored order and April discovering fertilizer in the sugar bowl. Television towns depended upon the promise that boys learned lessons permanently and that next week began with no criminal record. Fort Mayfield, however, stood in West Texas, where lessons often required repetition and adolescence added horsepower.

Six years later, Motcat, Clink, Otis and Dewey were arrested again.

By then they had reached puberty, acquired driver’s licenses and replaced the water-tower saucer with what the Picayune-Intelligencer described as “an unauthorized mobile broadcasting facility.” Their purpose had been to expose the mayor’s secret plan to sell the municipal football field to a shopping-center developer. Their method involved breaking into the school television studio, borrowing the civil-defense transmitter, disabling two patrol radios and suspending a papier-mâché likeness of Mayor Mayfield from the courthouse flagpole. The inventory in the cargo area of Motcat’s Jeep Cherokee included ammonium nitrate fertilizer, copper wire, three rocket engines, a car battery and Miss Mayfield Cotton, who had been retained through the years as a silent partner.

Those articles looked whimsical when four ten-year-olds possessed them. In the hands of four sixteen-year-olds, they caused Officer Sledge to draw his revolver and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to place a long-distance call.

The chase lasted eleven minutes. The Cherokee managed fifty-eight miles per hour downhill. The Matador, still black-and-white and by then carrying 89,000 hard municipal miles, reached sixty before Officer Sledge had finished telling them to stop. Its 401 roared across the flats south of town, the heavy-duty suspension settled through the curves, and the brakes brought two tons of police car to rest across the road while the Jeep expired in a cloud of steam and cinnamon-colored dust.

Once again the four boys were placed in the same broad black-vinyl back seat. They were taller now. Their knees pressed against the steel screen, their hair touched the headliner, and none of them asked whether they were under arrest.

Officer Sledge looked at them in the mirror.

“Science?” he asked.

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Motcat considered the fertilizer, the transmitter and the mayor dangling over the courthouse in his underwear.

“Civics,” he said.

Sledge put the Matador in Drive.

Fort Mayfield disappeared behind them through the rear window: the water tower, the courthouse, the clean lawns and the Montgomery house where April still wore pearls and Monty still believed the right talk beside the right fireplace could straighten out any boy. Perhaps he was correct. Motcat had finally learned the difference between Can I? and Should I?

He simply found both questions less interesting than How fast will it go?

The Matador’s secondaries opened, the 401 answered, and Fort Mayfield’s finest carried its most promising young scientists back to jail.

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