Five Brothers and a War

Target Practice, van Pelt-Style

He pinned them on the room side of the two doors—from the living room and from the dining room. Considering that no one was hurt, much less killed, the signs apparently worked. He did, however, get some uncomplimentary observations from those who were confined to those two rooms. Every 15 minutes, or so, he had to move locations, thereby creating a natural opportunity to declare a “cease-fire.” Aside from the annoyance of being trapped in the two downstairs rooms, another undesirable side effect of having the outside doors open so long was that there were more flies in the house. Kees was admonished in the strongest terms not to use his spitball launcher on those flies. But target practice was never finished and one day he got bored with the normal routine and found great delight trying to get a little pellet through his open bedroom window into the room on the top floor of the row of townhouses in the next street. Kees Tadema had his room there, the brother of the girl Jan had a keen eye for and later married, Immie Tadema. The van Pelts knew the Tademas quite well, but shooting pellets into their house was breaking new ground in their neighborly relationships. Kees van Pelt was challenged by the new concept, and tried to work out the arc the pellet would have to take in order to make it through the third floor window. The distance was pretty significant: the length of the van Pelt back yard, then across the vacant lot used as a vegetable garden, then across the two sidewalks and the actual road surface of the Speenkruidstraat, and finally across the length of the Tadema’s front yard—all together, right at 54 meters.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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