Okay, bit of an exaggeration. It's not the whole house, it's just a back room & it's only 40 or 50 cases of the stuff. He usually has a few loose sticks lying around the living room & kitchen, that & the jacket with the dozen explosive cylinders attached to wiring he keeps carefully hung by the door. It makes him feel safer to wear that jacket, he says. People give him plenty of room at stores & bars. & people get real quiet when he comes in too. "It's a civilizing effect," he says. "I'm actually providing a public safety service." I asked the girl at the Quik-E-Mart whether she felt safer when he came in, but she didn't say anything, her eyes got kinda wide & she gave her head about twenty quick shakes.
I asked him once why he felt it necessary to have all the explosives here in a residential neighborhood. He said, "gophers." Said it was his constitutional right as a farmer to keep any & all implements needed. He does have a couple of tomato plants & a couple of string bean vines out back, so I guess he has a point. "Free nation's gotta eat," he says.
A lot of us were upset when those kids broke into his house & stole that one case & used it to blow up half the elementary school at night. Especially sad for the janitor (& his family) who they've only found pieces of. The guy down the street said he felt bad too, but I shouldn't blame the explosives. "They're just things, inanimate objects. Wouldn't have done any harm to anybody if it hadn't been for those criminals who set 'em off." Sometimes he calls them criminals, sometimes lunatics, sometimes lunatic-criminals & blames society's lax control over criminals & lunatics for the damage.
"Besides," he said, "probably would never have happened if they'd wired explosives all around the school, or the janitor had been wearing a jacket like mine. He kind of brought it on himself."
We had a neighborhood meeting after his nephew got drunk & mistaking a cat for a gopher, set to doing some gardening. The police left him alone after he explained that he was going to teach his nephew some stuff about dynamite safety when his nephew gets his new arm. The elected officials we talked to were pretty sympathetic, but they explained that the explosives industry is very strong politically & any effort they made to limit or curtail dynamite ownership would be evidence of their UnAmericanism.
Most of the people who live around his house have moved. "It's their right," he says, "fuckin' commie pussies." The evacuation has dropped home values pretty drastically in my neighborhood, but what're you going to do? Always a price to be paid for living in a free society, right? Everybody's always saying, "freedom isn't free."