Jack's New Power by Jack Gantos Page A

Another. Killing them properly is all in the wrist. If I swatted them with too much force, I splattered fly juice all over the wall and had to scrub them off with a rag dipped in bleach. It worked better to snap my wrist very crisply, like hitting the triangle in music class.
    Whack! Whack! Whack! I became bloodthirsty. One at a time wasn’t good enough. I lined up two at a time. Three at a time. I swatted them out of midair. Eventually I became so fast I grabbed them with my bare hand and held them underwater in the sink until they drowned. By the time my frenzy was over, I counted 173 dead. But it didn’t make a dent in the fly population. One hundred and seventy-three flies immediately buzzed through my window and took their place. I tried to rally my lizard workers to eat more. But they were stuffed, and when I smacked the ruler around their tails they wouldn’t even tremble. I accidentally hit one and cut its tail off. I picked it up and pressed the broken part against the tip of my nose. The lizard blood was thick and gummy. The tail wiggled around like a tiny bullwhip. “Mush. Mush!” I shouted and lowered my nose so the little whip lashed their backs. They didn’t even twitch. They stuck to the wall like refrigerator magnets.
    I collected my flies and pressed them into my diary. Crunch! It was like making a fly sandwich. Then I took a pen and wrote 173 on the plastic flyswatter flap. I planned
to kill one million, save them for proof, and get into the Guinness Book of World Records.
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    But after a while the flies were no challenge. I had to move up. I had to find something more difficult to exterminate. I was getting older and killing flies was a kid’s game. I went out to the back yard. We had an abandoned well filled with bats. The well opening was cemented over except for a hole the size of a brick. Every evening a ribbon of bats flew out of the hole to eat insects. They spread out and darted overhead, cutting the air up into little jigsaw pieces. Now they were difficult to hit. That was a challenge.
    The only problem was that Dad had told me not to mess with them. “They are animals,” he said. “You never throw rocks at animals.” He told me this after he caught me whipping broken shards of bathroom tile at them. He said he was worried about me hurting the bats, but I knew it was really that he was worried about where the pieces of tile and rocks would land. There were a lot of houses around and he was touchy about breaking windows.
    Johnny Naime told me that it was impossible to hit a bat with a rock. “They have built-in radar,” he explained. “You can throw rocks at ’em all day and never hit them. You can’t even shoot a bat. They move faster than bullets.”
    Cool, I thought. They were just the challenge I was after.
    I got a yardstick and poked it down into the hole and stirred it around. I didn’t hear anything. I put my eye to the hole and looked in. I was a bit afraid one of them
would come shooting out and bite me on the eyeball, but I knew that was impossible. Dad said they ate only bugs and vegetables.
    Just then BoBo II brushed against the back of my leg. I jumped up into the air. “God! You scared me.”
    Betsy had got him as a birthday gift. She named him after her other black spaniel, BoBo I. That was a mistake. BoBo I was a loser, and this one was even worse.
    He rolled over and fell asleep. Something was wrong with that dog. It needed vitamins. And it smelled.
    Suddenly a bat flew up out of the hole and fluttered back and forth overhead. I picked up a bunch of rocks and fired at it. I didn’t even get close.
    Then a stream of them came out in a steady black line. They zipped back and forth above the house eating millions of flies. “Eat more!” I shouted. “Get fat! Slow down and I’ll nail you.” I threw about a hundred rocks. Everything missed. They were about a million times harder to hit