Boomtown Read online

  Boomtown

  © 2008 Nowen N. Particular (a.k.a. Marty Longé)

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Page design by Mandi Cofer.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, businesses, organizations, and locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Particular, Nowen N.

  Boomtown / Nowen N. Particular.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4003-1345-7

  Summary: On the day of their arrival in Boomtown, Washington, Reverend Button and his family make a grand entrance into town by accidentally blowing up the firecracker factory, and as they settle into the community their escapades continue.

  [1. Family life—Washington (State)—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Washington (State)—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P25625Bo 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008019439

  Printed in the United States of America

  08 09 10 11 12 QW 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my dad, “Sparky,”

  who burned down a chicken barn,

  worked in a match factory,

  and set a paint room on fire.

  (Those are the only incidents we know about;

  there were certainly others.)

  You ignited an entire family of crazy inventors.

  Thank you.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  A Shaky Start

  CHAPTER 2

  The Big Bang Boom Box

  CHAPTER 3

  Walt’s Barbershop

  CHAPTER 4

  The Spirit Has Whiskers

  CHAPTER 5

  The Stickville Slugs

  CHAPTER 6

  The Amazing Chang

  CHAPTER 7

  A Boomtown Christmas

  CHAPTER 8

  A Gift from the Hopontops

  CHAPTER 9

  The Boomtown Museum

  CHAPTER 10

  The Great Room

  CHAPTER 11

  Spring Fever Festival

  CHAPTER 12

  The Investigation

  CHAPTER 13

  Denk

  CHAPTER 14

  Fourth of July

  CHAPTER 15

  The Trial of the Century

  CHAPTER 16

  Jonny’s Testimony

  CHAPTER 17

  Xian Takes the Stand

  CHAPTER 18

  Farewell for Now

  Boomtown Timeline

  Acknowledgments

  If this book is worth reading, it’s because better books have already been written by better authors. Will anyone ever write a children’s book better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The 21 Balloons, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Cheers to C. S. Lewis, William Pène Dubois, Roald Dahl, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle, Dr. Seuss, and so many other favorites. As a boy, these authors introduced me to the great adventure of reading. As a writer, they have shown me how to find Boomtown.

  Neither could I have found Boomtown without the constant support of my wife, Jamie, and my four children, Brandy, Christian, Faith, and Brittany. They championed the project from the very first day, especially my youngest, who read each chapter as it was finished and laughed in all the right places (thanks, Bert!). My father, Bob, is the inspiration for many of the crazy inventions you’ll find in Boomtown—we’ll never for-get the car he built out of spare parts and Elmer’s Glue. Also thanks to my mom, Betty, who taught me to love life in general and books in particular. I’m grateful to my brother and sister and my extended family for their encouragement and humor.

  I am deeply grateful to those who edited the early drafts of this book with brutal honesty and keen insight. A special thanks goes to Faith Longé and Rachelle Longé for technical expertise and guidance. My friends Seth Crofton, Julie McIntire, Shane Taylor, and especially Darin and Janell Jordan and their children, Tommy J. and Julie, and Chad and Lisa Larrabee and their children, Davis, Annabeth, and Mitch, have been cheer-leaders since the very beginning. You have been voted honorary citizens of Boomtown.

  Sam Barnhart, the music minister from Common Ground Church, introduced me to Jennifer Gingerich at Thomas Nelson Publishers. She and her editorial team have been especially kind, finally turning my dream into reality. They prove what the people of Boomtown have always said: Nowen ever succeeds on his own. Every victory is a shared triumph.

  A final nod goes to all the English teachers and history teachers over the years who never quit on me, even though I gave them a thousand reasons to do so. You are the unseen heroes of any book that will ever be written or has ever been written. Keep on teaching! You’re changing the world one dreamer at a time.

  Introduction

  If you are anything like most kids, you will not read this introduction. You want to skip past the boring parts and jump ahead to where the dragon is attacking the castle or the detective uncovers the most important clue. If you are like that, you are among the thousands of children who do not read introductions to books. Tedious paragraphs that explain why reading a particular book is going to be “good for you” is like having your parents make you eat lima beans before you can have dessert. How dreadful. It may be good for you, but it certainly isn’t any fun.

  I used to be like that, but then I grew up and got boring. Just ask my kids, Ruth, Jonny, and Sarah. They’re the sort who love firecrackers and bottle rockets shooting every which way, bouncing out of control. I prefer candles sitting in a window, quiet and predictable. That’s the opposite of what I found in Boomtown. It was a strong dose of medicine, and I had trouble swallowing it.

  As you read this story, you’ll see what I mean. This book tells all about the unusual things that happened to us in an odd place called Boomtown. After reading this account, you’ll probably think I made the whole thing up. It certainly sounds like I did. But I promise you, it’s all true.

  It was 1949, and we’d had enough of the craziness of California. So I decided to move my family to upper eastern Washington to a town called Boomtown. We were looking for-ward to wide-open spaces, quiet streets, picket fences, rows of charming houses, and snow at Christmas. The plan was that I would be the pastor of a small-town church with quiet small-town ways. Janice would escape the pressures of being a minister’s wife in a large urban congregation, while our three children would find friends their own ages. We pictured an idyllic postcard life surrounded by rolling hillside farms and simple, charming people. That’s what we were looking for, and that’s exactly what we found—along with a few hundred unexpected surprises.

  Boomtown turned out to be a place where everybody’s favorite thing to do was to blow stuff up. I was also surprised by the ethnic makeup of the town; in spite of their varied backgrounds, men and women and children worked together as a community of equals. They valued education more than money, worked hard, stayed married, loved their children, cared for the environment, and honored
the heritage of other cultures.

  You may ask, “How is that possible?”

  I see your point. A place like that can’t be real.

  But it should be.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Shaky Start

  I almost died today. Not quite, but almost. Not by any of the most common methods—heart attack, car accident, drowning, old age—that sort of thing. My survival was measured in inches. If my truck driver hadn’t tackled me; if he didn’t have the foresight to jump on me and knock me into the water; if he had hesitated even for a moment, this book would be five sentences long and it would end with dot, dot, dot . . .

  Obviously, I didn’t die, or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this story and telling you exactly what happened. I’m not sure you’ll believe it. I’m not sure that I do.

  It all started early Friday morning on the last day of our journey from California to Washington. We had stayed over-night at the Travelodge in Wenatchee, where we’d arranged to catch up with our moving truck and driver. From there we followed in the shadow cast by the lumbering, bright orange vehicle as it made its way up Highway 97 toward our new home in Boomtown.

  Ruth, our oldest at age sixteen, and her younger siblings, Jonny and Sarah, ages thirteen and ten respectively, kept their noses pressed against the windows of our old Chevy station wagon.

  “Look, Mom, apple trees!”

  “Look over there—pears and peaches and raspberries.”

  “Look at all the cows and horses and sheep. And what are those, Mom?”

  Janice answered, “Those are llamas, dear.”

  Sarah said, “Really? A herd of llamas? Can I have one?”

  “Of course not. They’re only for looking at.”

  “Can I have a cow instead?”

  “No dear, you can’t have a cow.”

  “What about a sheep? They aren’t very big. I could keep it in my room.”

  I interrupted the negotiations. “Be serious, Sarah, what would you do if you had a sheep for a pet?”

  “They make wool, don’t they? I could cut off the wool, and Mom could make yarn out of it. She could knit sweaters. That’s what people do in small towns. They have sheep and they make sweaters.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know how to knit.”

  “She could learn.”

  “Maybe she will, but you still can’t have a sheep. They’re very messy.”

  “That’s okay!” Sarah answered. “So am I. You’d hardly notice.”

  “No!”

  We drove past sparkling canyon streams, scrubby pine forests, and golden wheat fields. It was all so beautiful. The kids had lived their entire lives in the crowded city streets of California. Janice was from San Francisco, and I was from New York. The only place you could see animals in New York was at the zoo or in the subways during rush hour. With thirsty eyes, we drank it all in.

  Janice sighed. “Wide-open spaces. Bright blue sky. Puffy white clouds as far as the eye can see. It’s like paradise.”

  The moving truck continued its lurching trek north as we rolled through the small mining town of Ainogold. Our arrival included curious onlookers who stopped to stare at the strangers. New neighbors perhaps? Not this time. We halted at the single traffic light and continued on.

  A few months later, someone in Boomtown told me the interesting history of how Ainogold got its name. “It happened nearly a huner’t years ago during the days of the Yukon Gold Rush. A certain prospector named Coyote Jones came up from California to stake his claim. Spent all he had buying the land and securing the equipment he needed to dig his mine. Ah heard he was up in the hills almost a year and a half ’fore he came back down to the main camp without nary a nugget to show for all his trouble. He weren’t the only one. Must have been two huner’t other miners with the same bad luck. Coyote Jones said, ‘There just ain’t no gold!’ Get it? ‘Ain’t no gold.’ Ainogold!’ The name sorta stuck and they been callin’ the place Ainogold ever since.”

  After leaving the little village, we traveled alongside a wide river with rugged cliffs rising to our left and open fields to the right with an occasional farmhouse dotting the landscape. Our map showed Boomtown only eight miles farther up the road. I made the announcement, “Only a few more minutes and we’ll be there!”

  We turned east onto Blasting Cap Avenue and Jonny cheered as the tires bumped across the Ifilami Bridge and over the Okanogan River. We were greeted by a brightly painted sign that said Welcome to Boomtown! Underneath were the words Home of Chang’s Famous Fireworks Factory. There was also a round logo with the portrait of an Asian man painted in the center. I had to assume it was the face of the aforementioned Chang, founder of his Famous Fireworks Factory.

  “Dad!” shouted Jonny. “Did you see that sign? They’ve got a fireworks factory! You never said nothin’ about a fireworks factory!”

  “I never said anything about fireworks,” I replied, correcting his grammar. “It’s because I didn’t know. The search committee from the church didn’t mention it.”

  “But where is it? I want to see it!”

  “I don’t know, Jon. Let’s get settled in our new house first. We’ll have time for fireworks later.”

  Actually, we didn’t have to wait very long. Following the hand-drawn map the church secretary had mailed to us, we turned left onto Dynamite Drive and saw the huge factory looming in front of us. Just beyond it to the right we could see Chang’s Black Powder Plant, with trails of smoke snaking upward from its twin cones, like two smoldering witches’ hats. Even from inside the station wagon, we could smell the pun-gent odor of sulfur.

  But it was the fireworks factory that commanded our attention. It was five stories tall and built entirely out of red brick, with what seemed like a hundred windows along each side and almost three hundred feet in length. On the roof were four towering smokestacks that had the name of the company painted in black. The stacked-up letters spelled out Chang’s Famous Fireworks Factory, big enough that you could see them for miles. Black wrought-iron stairs climbed the outer walls like spider webs, and we could see dozens of workers busily moving up and down carrying supplies and equipment like ants in an ant farm. Several railcars were parked along-side the building and were in the process of being loaded. Everywhere you looked, there was bustling activity.

  I was so busy studying the building that I almost slammed into the back of the moving truck when it lurched to a sudden halt. From behind the truck, we couldn’t see why. We sat for a minute wondering what was going on until I pulled over to the shoulder, shifted the gear into Park, and turned off the ignition. I opened my door and climbed out to investigate. Janice and the kids quickly unbuckled and opened their doors to follow me.

  I turned back to them. “You can stay in the car. I’m just going to talk to the driver.”

  “Stay in the car, Mr. Button?” responded Janice. “You want me to keep three kids trapped in a hot station wagon while you go running around a fireworks factory?”

  “I’m not going into the factory, Janice. I just want to find out why the moving truck stopped.”

  Jonny and Sarah ran up beside me. “We want to find out too!”

  “And me,” added Ruth.

  Overruled, I shrugged my shoulders and walked around the moving truck to the front, with my family right behind me. We found the driver talking to a Chinese man wearing a white lab coat and surrounded by three other men who were dressed similarly. The lab technician—that’s what he appeared to be—held a clipboard and was gesturing to an object anchored in the center of a wide, shallow pond situated in front of the factory.

  “Excuse me,” I inquired, “is there a problem?”

  The Chinese gentleman answered politely, “No, sir. But as you can see, we were about to conduct a test. Pardon us, but if you need to get past this point, you will have to go back to Blasting Cap Avenue and drive around through the town. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

  Jonny, his eyes alight with excitement, pushed past me and asked, “
What are you doing? What kind of test?”

  In the center of the road was a small console on a metal stand. Sprouting from the console was a nest of black and red wires connected to a black box and running across the ground. The wires led to the pond, and from there they dis-appeared underwater. I guessed they were connected to what appeared to be a small boat. The boat was heavily anchored—we could see the ropes—and inside the boat was a silver tube lying on its side, about the size of a small water heater, with a metal bell at one end and a cone on the other.

  “Jonny,” I said, ignoring his enthusiasm, “how many times have I told you not to interrupt when adults are talking?”

  “But, Dad . . .”

  “Don’t argue. These people are busy, and we need to get out of their way.”

  The Chinese gentleman smiled. “It’s quite all right. We’re never too busy for curious children. My name is Han-woo,” he said, extending a hand toward Jonny. “And who are you?”

  “My name is Jonathan, but people call me Jonny. This is my big sister, Ruth, and my little sister, Sarah. I call her ‘Sorry’ though.”

  “Sorry?” Han-wu asked.

  “Yeah, because she’s always saying, ‘I’m Sorry.’ Like the time she broke open a pen to find out where the ink was coming from. It made such a mess, we had to replace our sofa and the carpet.”

  Sarah laughed and said, “I’m Sorry!”

  Ruth added, “Then there was the time she tried to wash the cat—except she couldn’t find the soap, so she used Vaseline instead.”

  “Vaseline?” exclaimed Han-wu.

  “Yes, Vaseline, a whole jumbo-sized jar of it! By the time she finished, the cat was so slippery it took us a week to catch it. Then it took another month to wash out the Vaseline. You can’t imagine how hard it is to wash a wet, oily cat.”

  “I’m Sorry!” Sarah giggled.

  “Oh, sure, you’re Sorry,” said her mother. “Like the time you wanted to see what would happen if you put marshmal-lows in the clothes dryer.”

  “Or when you jumped out of the baptistery closet during Communion and Mr. Gray dumped an entire tray of grape juice cups all over Mrs. Larson’s new white dress,” Jonny said.