The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) by Bill Bryson

were much worse. They only emerged from the ground every seventeen years, so nobody, even adults, knew much about them. There was endless debate over whether the “killer” in “cicada killer” signified that they were killers of cicadas or that they were cicadas that killed. The consensus pointed to the latter.
    Cicada killers were about the size of hummingbirds and had vicious stingers fore and aft, and they were awful. They lived in burrows and would come flying up unexpectedly from below, with a horrible whirring sound, rather like a chain saw starting up, if you disturbed their nests. The greatest fear was that they would shoot up the leg of your shorts and become entangled in your underpants and start lashing out blindly. Castration, possibly by the side of the road, was the normal emergency procedure for cicada killer stings to the scrotal region—and they seldom stung anywhere else, according to informed reports. You never really saw one because as soon as one whirred out of its burrow you pranced away like hell, pressing your shorts primly but prudently to your legs.
    The worst chronic threat we had was poison sumac, though I never knew anyone, adult or child, who actually knew what it was or precisely how it would kill you. It was really just a kind of shrubby rumor. Even so, in any wooded situation you could always hold up a hand and announce gravely: “We’d better not go any farther. I think there might be sumac up ahead.”
    “
Poison
sumac?” one of your younger companions would reply, eyes wide open.
    “All sumac’s poisonous, Jimmy,” someone else would say, putting a hand on his shoulder.
    “Is it really bad?” Jimmy would ask.
    “Put it this way,” you would answer sagely. “My brother’s friend Mickey Cox knew a guy who fell into a sumac patch once. Got it all over him, you know, and the doctors had to like amputate his whole body. He’s just a head on a plate now. They carry him around in a hatbox.”
    “Wow,” everyone would say except Arthur Bergen, who was annoyingly brainy and knew all the things in the world that couldn’t possibly be so, which always exactly coincided with all the things you had ever heard about that were amazing.
    “A head couldn’t survive on its own in a box,” he would say.
    “Well, they took it out sometimes. To give it air and let it watch TV and so on.”
    “No, I mean it couldn’t survive on its own, without a body.”
    “Well, this one did.”
    “Not possible. How are you going to keep a head oxygenated without a heart?”
    “How should I know? What am I—Dr. Kildare? I just know it’s true.”
    “It can’t be, Bryson. You’ve misheard—or you’re making it up.”
    “Well, I’m not.”
    “Must be.”
    “Well, Arthur, I swear to God it’s true.”
    This would cause an immediate stunned silence.
    “You’ll go to hell for saying that if it’s not true, you know,” Jimmy would remark, but quite unnecessarily, for you knew this already. All kids knew this automatically, from birth.
    Swearing to God was the ultimate act. If you swore to God and it turned out you were wrong, even by accident, even just a little, you still had to go to hell. That was just the rule and God didn’t bend that rule for anybody. So the moment you said it, in any context, you began to feel uneasy in case some part of it turned out to be slightly incorrect.
    “Well, that’s what my brother said,” you would say, trying to modify your eternal liability.
    “You can’t change it now,” Bergen—who, not incidentally, would grow up to be a personal injury lawyer—would point out. “You’ve already said it.”
    You were all too well aware of this, too. In the circumstances there was really only one thing to do: give Milton Milton a knuckle rub.
    Only slightly less threatening than poison sumac were pulpy red berries that grew in clumps on bushes in almost everybody’s backyard. These, too, were slightly vague in that neither bush nor berry seemed to have