“
Kenny, used a ramrod to force the ammunition down the length of the barrel of a gun that everyone referred to as Nuke-U-Ler. “Okay,” Kenny said, his speech slightly slurred, beer cans scattered around his feet, “now I just open the valve here on the propane tank and set the pressure regulator to sixty PSI.” Buster struggled to write this down in his notebook, his fingers frozen at the tips, and asked, “Now what does PSI stand for?” Kenny looked up at Buster and frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. Buster nodded and made a notation to look it up later. “Open the gas valve,” Kenny continued, “wait a few seconds for it to regulate, then close the valve and open up the second valve here. That sends the propane into the combustion chamber.” Joseph, missing two fingers on his left hand, his face round and pink like a toddler’s, took another swig of beer and then giggled. “It’s about to get good,” he said. Kenny closed the valves and pointed the contraption into the air. “Squeeze the igniter button and—” Before he could finish, the air around the men vibrated and there was a sound like nothing Buster had ever heard before, a dense, punctuated explosion. A potato, a trail of vaporous fire trailing behind it, shot into the air and then disappeared, hundreds of yards, maybe a half mile across the field. Buster felt his heart stutter in his chest and wondered, without caring to discover the answer, why something so stupid, so unnecessary and ridiculous, made him so happy. Joseph put his arm around Buster and pulled him close. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?” he asked. Buster, feeling that he might cry at any moment, nodded and replied, “Yes it is. Hell yes it is.” Buster had come to Nebraska on assignment from a men’s magazine, Potent, to write about these four ex-soldiers who had been, for the past year, building and testing the most high-tech potato cannons ever seen. “It’s so goddamned manly,” said the editor, who was almost seven years younger than Buster, “we have to put it in the magazine.” Buster had been in his one-room apartment in Florida, his Internet girlfriend not returning his e-mails, nearly out of money, not working on his overdue third novel, when the editor had called him to offer the job. Even with the terrible circumstances of his life at the moment, he was loath to accept the assignment.
”
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