There's being vindictive, then there's this.

To this day I have mixed feelings about the act of vengeance I took on a school bully. He had something coming to him, but perhaps this was a bit too far.

For many people at my high school, Jimmy Hester, "Hess" to his friends, was a holy terror. In junior high, it was taking your lunch money. As we got older, it was shoving you against the lockers at a minimum, or some other form of public humiliation. He was big and tough, the rest of us were all smaller.

I was not alone in being a target of Hess. My circle of friends, we were smart and "weird" back then, they saw regular abuse too. A punch to the gut, carelessly swinging his hand into one's crotch, dumping chocolate milk on us; Hess' juvenile antics knew no bounds.

So now you know the background. It was not a single event that inspired my revenge, but rather the culmination of years of persecution. We had regular discussions about what subtle things we could do to him as revenge.

"You'll only set him off," my friend Danny warned. "Besides, after we graduate in a few weeks, we'll never see him again."

"Unless we need fast food," I chimed in. We shared a laugh, taking solace in the idea that this was as good as it ever would be for Hess. He ruled the school, but he was going nowhere in life. We knew that.

Still, it didn't seem like enough for the guy, to get off so easy, without feeling even a little of the sting that he would inflict on us. I must admit that I silently obsessed over what to do to exact a measure of justice for all of us on our tormentor. It had to come before school was out; I knew I probably would never seen him again after that, or at least held out hope I would never see him again.

An off-hand comment would provide the solution.

I was driving Danny home that Saturday night, after we had gone out for wings. He lived on some god-forsaken road in the middle of nowhere. We rounded a curve and were greeted with a powerful, unmistakable odor.

"Ugh! Skunk!" I said, half-gagging. The squished remains of the animal lay in the middle of the road.

"I'd love to put that thing in Hess' locker," Danny said casually as we drove over it. "The whole school would reek for days."

"Ha, that would be great," I chuckled. "But how would we get it in there? The school's locked."

That should have been the end of it, with Danny agreeing that it would be funny, but not possible to pull off. But it wasn't the end of it.

We drove a little further, the skunk was smelly but distant memory. Then a car turned awkwardly onto what seemed to be a farm path in the distance in front of us. There were no houses around, and it struck me as odd to see a car turn off the road and into the woods.

"Wonder where they're going," I said.

"Party," Danny said. "They go up there all the time. Probably a kegger or something."

We were simultaneously struck with some spark, an inkling of an idea. I slowed down and looked over at Danny, who was looking at me.

"Bet Hess is there," Danny said.

"Yeah," I said, my mind churning as I thought about the roadkill skunk, not more than a mile back. "You know...."

Danny laughed before I could put the thought into words. "That's just evil!"

There wasn't an immediate consensus about what exactly we were going to do with these putrid remains of a skunk, but we quickly agreed that we would have to somehow carry it. It wasn't going inside my car. And that's when the inspiration hit.

"Not in your car," Danny said, grinning. "But how about Hess' car?"

"In the trunk!" I said. "Like under that mat where the spare is."

We found an old shopping bag in my car, and used a stick to scrape the skunk from the road. My eyes were watering, my gag reflex was in overdrive, but somehow I managed to maintain the contents of my stomach. I volunteered to carry it, as Danny was turning all kinds of shades of green and was on the verge of vomiting . Some smells are powerful, this one peeled off your eyelids and incinerated the hair in your nose.

I judged the walk back to the party to be roughly three-quarters of a mile. More accurately, it was 4,000 feet of misery. It would be worth it, I told myself as the bag swung in rhythm with my strides, wafting the odor into my face at regular intervals.

As we crept up on the party, it was our good fortune that Hess had arrived later than many of the other people. His car was parked further away from the bonfire they had built. There was no chance of being seen, and the group was making too much noise to hear us. We had no trouble getting into his trunk, he left his car unlocked.

I lifted the mat in the trunk, and found a safe place toward the back, behind the spare, to conceal our nasty package. Between our snickers both of us were still fighting off powerful gag reflexes, until the deed was finally done. We practically frolicked the whole way back to my car. We wouldn't be there to witness the discovery, but surely it would come up at school on Monday.

"Wait," Danny said as we were about to get back into my car. "Our clothes reek."

So at roughly 11:10 p.m. on a deserted back road in rural America, we stripped down to our skivvies and tossed our clothes down over a steep bank. Mine were ripped jeans and an old shirt, I could have cared less, save for the complications of returning home with no clothes.

Neither of us had anything to worry about. We were, at least to our parents, relatively good kids. No one was awake at either house to greet us. It was, and still remains, a perfect crime.

The payoff was better than either of us could have possibly imagined.

Hess told others that he thought he hit the skunk with his car. Since he had a few drinks and the drive home was a little hazy, he wasn't sure. He never bothered looking in his trunk. The natural process of animal decay continued unabated, in the early summer, in the trunk of his car for the week.

For his part, Hess would come to school smelling of air fresheners, his car shiny and spotless from repeated washings, and yet the demon odor remained.

The next Monday, Hess was driving his parent's station wagon to school. He tried to get there early, but his friends spotted him. It was a far cry from his sporty-looking 1993 Volkswagen Jetta.

"Nice wheels, Hess!" I heard one of them shout. Hess dutifully responded with his middle finger. "What happened to your car?"

"I'm selling it," he growled. "I can't get the smell out of it. I was supposed to go out with Julie on Saturday, she wouldn't even get in the car."

I shut my eyes and bit my lip, it was too good. Even his own girlfriend had turned against him. His friends laughed heartily at his misfortune.

The beauty of this act, even to this day, was that Hess had so many people wanting to get even with him he would not have possibly figured out who did it. The new buyer got a great deal on it, and he was the one who likely discovered the cause of the smell. By then, school was over, Hess couldn't go through the halls trying to pound information out of all of us.

Years later, I can say that I am not sorry about doing it. I don't feel all that bad for him. Perhaps a little for his dad who took a loss on the car. We never confessed to it, and we never will.

I still chuckle under my breath just about every time I smell a skunk nearby.