In God We Trust

by Jean Shepherd

  The crowd, seeing this catastrophe unreeling before its eyes, to a man hit the dirt. Those on the fringes dove into snowball bushes; others simply moaned piteously and dug in. It was good training, as events turned out, for later years.

  The Dago Bomb lay on its side, its ugly snout pointing toward the houses which lay across the lawns 200 feet or so away. Cooler members of the mob shouted to those in the houses. “Look out, it’s coming! Close your windows!” The fuse sputtered on.

  Kissel himself, now aware of the nature of the rapidly approaching catastrophe, made a futile but certainly courageous attempt to right the bomb. Someone yelled:

  “Get down, Kissel, you’ll get killed!”

  Kissel fell over backward and lay flattened out on the concrete, waiting for the call of his Maker.

  Then it happened. There are events which lend themselves readily to the descriptive phrase; the words of pen or tongue, and then there are things which happen that cannot be adequately communicated. The incident of Kissel’s Dago Bomb must be classified as one of the truly indescribable. Suffice it to say that the bomb was well made and of an order of efficiency that fireworks manufacturers rarely achieve. With a definite clipped, stinging report the aerial bomb, lying horizontally on its side, propelled its deadly cartridge of dynamite out along the earth, skipping, humming, singing in an instantaneous trajectory that struck terror into the very marrow of the bones of those fortunate enough to be on the scene. This Dago Bomb was obviously designed to send its aerial charge at least 500 feet into the air. For an instant or so we were not aware of what sort of aerial charge it was prepared to deliver. We soon found out.

  The cartridge, which seemed abnormally large as it emerged from the black maw of Kissel’s Folly, skimmed over the sidewalk, parting the spectators like the Red Sea. Over the lawn and the driveway, and with a sharp, audible “click” and whistling sizzle, under Kissel’s front porch. And for a long, pendulous moment the universe stood still. Fingernails clawed the earth, heads burrowed into hedges.

  KAA-ROOOM!

  The first thunderous explosion rocked the neighborhood. The slats of Kissel’s porch bellowed outward; the floor tilted instantly downward. A great yellow, swirling cloud of dust rose over the lilac bushes. A second or two passed as an eternity, and then another, and louder, detonation thundered over the landscape:

  KA-KAA-BAA-ROOOM!

  This time it caved in the rose trellis of the house next door to Kissel’s. The crowd heaved and dug deeper as two more giant explosions—KAA-RAAA-BOOM! BOOM!—sounded almost as one, these two under Mr. Strickland’s Pontiac.

  A heavy cloud of dust swirled for a moment and all was still, except for the pattering of the quiet raindrops.

  Kissel slowly pulled himself to his knees and made his statement, which is even today part of that great legend.

  “My God, what a doozy!”

  Kissel had said it for all of us. As the crowd slowly got to its feet amid the quiet tinkling of glass and the heavy, sensual smell of oxidized dynamite, they were aware that they had been witness to History.

  I idly stirred my third Bloody Charlie as off in the middle distance another muffled blast bloomphed and jiggled the bottles behind the bar. Kissel faded back into his landscape and I pensively chewed a cashew nut as I vainly struggled to return to the Here and Now. After all, fireworks, we all know, are dangerous and childish playthings that have no place in the hard-hitting, On-The-Go Male’s life of today. A passing cab sent a reflected shaft of light across the mirror behind the bar. It broke into a thousand colors amid the bottles, and subtly I was reminded of yet another historic moment in the annals of the Fourth of July celebrations. Those colored lights reminded me irresistibly of my father and the time the Roman Candle struck back.

  The Roman Candle is a truly noble and inspired piece of the pyrotechnician’s art, being a long slender wand that spews forth colored, flaming balls that arch high into the midnight sky, one after the other, with magnificent effect. It is held in the hand, and is one of the few pieces of fireworks that bring out talent and skill on the part of the operator. The Roman Candle is graded according to the number of fireballs it can discharge, ranging from eight to, in some cases, as high as two dozen, but these are very rare and expensive. There are few experiences that rival for sheer ecstatic pleasure and total, unadulterated joy the feel of a Roman Candle in full bloom, sending its fireballs up into the dark heavens with that distinctive—Plock—ssssssss—Plock—ssssssssPlock sound, and the slight but sensual recoil as each colored light arches heavenward. My father was unquestionably one of the great Roman Candle men of his time. That is, until that awful night when he met a Roman Candle that was fully his match, if not more.

  He was so irresistibly drawn to Fireworks that, as I have mentioned, he became the proprietor of a Fireworks Stand early in my youth, and this made him a marked man in the neighborhood. A Fireworks Stand is a unique commercial establishment that has, like the May fly, a short but very merry life. For those who have never seen a Fireworks Stand a brief description would not be too far amiss. They were usually wooden stands, ex-fruit dispensaries, or what-have-you, covered with red, white, and blue bunting, over which a large red-on-white sign simply stated FIREWORKS. The interior of these stands was usually a blazing inferno because the July sun knows no mercy. They were dusty and hot, but the shelves were lined with the greatest assortment of bliss and ecstasy this side of the Biltmore bar. Space does not allow a full description of all these magnificent creations. The Mount Vesuvius, for example, a silver cone that when lit and placed on the ground spewed forth a great shower of gold, blue, and white sparks high into the air, emulating the eruption of its namesake. The racks of slender, sinuous Roman Candles, of several calibers, and the lordly monarch of them all, the Skyrocket. Skyrockets were available in a wide variety of potency and weight, just as the rocketry of our Space program of today. The tiny twenty-five-center hardly larger than a Five Incher, wired to a yellow pine stick topped with a red nose cone, was made to be launched from an upright, empty quart milk bottle, and on up the scale to the big Five Dollar Rocket that stood a full four feet and was launched from a special angle-iron and handled with extreme care, it being possible to bring down a passing DC-3 with the proper hand on the sights.

  The Pinwheels also came in many sizes and colors and could, if misused, be spectacularly disastrous. I personally saw one Pinwheel climb right up the side of a garage, over the roof, and spin a block and a half down the alley before it finally burnt itself out, and then only after burning down 300 feet of fence and two chicken coops.

  There were many other forms of fireworks of a lesser nature, such as Red Devils, which were a particularly nasty piece of business, being red paper-covered tablets designed to be scratched on the pavement and ground under heel to a sputtering, hissing, general nastiness. They did not explode; merely hissed and burned and gave stupendous hotfeet to anyone who happened to step on them. Of course there were the more prosaic Firecrackers and Cherry Bombs of all sizes and varying degrees of destructiveness, and the odds and ends for grandmothers, girls, and smaller kids; the Sparklers, the Cap Guns, and the strange little white tablets, aspirin-size, that when lit produced a long, sinuously climbing white ash and were called “Snakes.” All of these and more my father dispensed over the counter from his Fireworks Stand out on the state highway, where the heat waves rose and fell and the Big Time Spenders bought the stuff by the bags full for their blondes and their egos.

  I was considered unbelievably lucky that my Old Man not only owned a Fireworks Stand with all that great stuff on the shelves, but that I actually was allowed to slave away my life in it. Some of my golden moments were spent dispensing Torpedoes and Cherry Bombs and black powder Five Inchers to various slope-browed delinquents of all ages on long, hot, late June and early July afternoons when other kids were out hitting out flies and fistfighting.

  As the actual Fourth drew closer, our stock of fireworks slowly dwindled until the actual day of
the Fourth itself, our peak moment. Fireworks Stands work strictly on speculation and my father ordered his stuff from the General Motors of the fireworks world, an outfit called the Excelsior Fireworks Corporation. They did not take any unsold material back, which meant that as the Fourth drew to a close what was on the shelves was ours to shoot, to explode, to detonate, to revel in, to memorialize America’s struggle for Independence.

  It was the Depression, of course, and few families had more than a couple of dollars or so to spend on gunpowder, and our entire neighborhood would wait for our return near midnight from the closed stand on the last moments of the Fourth of July. About 11:30 P.M., the sky above filled with bursting aerial bombs and Skyrockets, and off in the distance the rattle of Cherry Bombs and Musketry thrumming darkly, my father would say: “Let’s close up,” and immediately begin to load what was left of our stock into the Oldsmobile. Usually we had left a few of the greatest, heaviest, and most expensive pieces as well as several pounds of torpedoes and Sons O’Guns, a few huge rockets, and a couple dozen big Pinwheels and a rack or two of heavy-caliber Roman Candles.

  My Old Man, eyes gleaming, cheeks flushed, would hurl us homeward through the dark, on his way to the most glorious moment of his entire year. He was in the saddle and was prepared to split the skies with a shower of sparks and fireballs and the eardrums of the neighbors with giant Dago Bombs. Every year the neighbors waited for this great moment, and the Old Man knew it. He was a magnificent sight, surrounded by boxes of ammunition as he singlehandedly bombarded the heavens on behalf of Freedom and the Stars And Stripes. He was a true artist of pyrotechnics, and rose to his absolute fullness of artistic power when clutching a Roman Candle, his body swaying sinuously with the innate rhythm of the born Roman Candle Shooter as he sent ball after ball arcing higher and higher into the midnight skies, to the roar of the crowd.

  Fourth of July was almost always a day of intense, ragged excitement for everyone, usually skirting danger on one side and ecstatic celebration on the other. It caused a kind of homicidal recklessness to set in to the Individual, and certainly the Mass. The night my father encountered his devilish, avenging Roman Candle was no exception. All day cars had carried off great loads of our wares, but now it was over, and the neighborhood was about to witness my father’s annual debauch. They stood on porches and in driveways and watched from windows as in the vacant lot on the corner my father hauled out his boxes of surplus fireworks.

  He programmed his displays like a true showman, starting off with a few nondescript Pinwheels and Mount Vesuviuses, gradually working up through the lesser Skyrockets and Aerial Bombs to his final statement, a brace of great Roman Candles, twenty-four-ball beauties fully five feet in length and two inches in diameter; spectacular examples of the ancient art of fireworks.

  I stood in the darkness with my brother and the other assembled urchins of the neighborhood, watching my father in his finest hour. He was ten feet tall, at least, the biggest father in miles around, until that incredible moment the Roman Candle struck back.

  The applause had grown from stage to stage, through the Skyrockets, and now he stood in the center of the arena, the flickering lights of distant aerial displays outlining him against the night sky as he took his last two magnificent Roman Candles that he had saved purposely for the last, the largest and most powerful of the lot. He was one of the few Roman Candle men who ever dared to use both hands simultaneously, timing each ball to rotate one with the other, thereby achieving an almost continuous display of spectacular Roman Candle artistry.

  It was now no more than a minute or two before midnight, and another Fourth of July would be history. He was a stickler for time, and the dramatic effect. Carefully, and of course theatrically milking the moment for all it was worth, he lit both Roman Candles, held his elbows sharply out from his body as they hissed briefly. The crowd surged forward, waiting for his usual masterful display. They knew this was his Grand Finale.

  The first ball—PLOCK—arched green and sparkling from the left hand, high up over the telephone wires and toward a distant cloud, PLOCK—the right hand spit a golden comet. My father, his left hand spinning simultaneously, sent it even higher than the first. His timing was magnificent! PLOCK—the left hand shot a scarlet streak upward even higher, PLOCK—again the right hand, PLOCK—now they were coming faster and faster as my Old Man picked up the beat, and the crowd sensed a performance in progress that was to become classical in its execution.

  On the far horizon the steel mills caught the reflected light of the flickering lightning of a gathering summer storm, PLOCK—my father sent another ball blazing white into the northern skies, PLOCK—a blue one, this time toward the Big Dipper. PLOCK—a green arrow darted toward the moon. The audience swayed in unison as my father, both arms weaving magically, the beat and the pulse of his synchronized Roman Candles paid homage to General Washington and the Continental Congress; the Boston Tea Party and the Minutemen. It was almost midnight now and my father, instinctively showing the great finesse and technique of a born Roman Candle Beethoven, knew that he was down to the last two balls.

  PLOCK—the right hand sent a yellow star into the firmament. PLOCK—the left. And then something was wrong. The left-hand Roman Candle faltered. A few tiny sparks sizzled briefly. He spun the tube out and upward again; down, out and upward, meanwhile the right-hand weapon—PLOCK—sent its pellet upward. Suddenly, without warning an alien sound:

  K-tunk!

  And from the south end of the left-hand Roman Candle a large red ball emerged. From the wrong end! He leaped high, but it was too late. The ball skittered along his forearm, striking his elbow sharply, and disappeared into the short sleeve of his Pongee sport shirt!

  The crowd gasped. A few women screamed. Children suddenly cried aloud as my father, showing the presence of mind of a great actor in the midst of catastrophe, shot his final ball from his right hand toward the North Star, as simultaneously the red ball reappeared from between his shoulder blades, his Pongee shirt bursting into spectacular flames. With a bellow he raced up the sidewalk, over the lawn, and trailing smoke and flames he disappeared into the house. A brief second of silence, and the sound of the shower could be heard roaring full blast from the darkened home.

  Stunned for an instant the crowd remained silent, but then loosed a great roar of applause. They knew they had witnessed the finest performance of a great artist. Midnight tolled, and the Fourth was over.

  “Would you care to order, sir?”

  I was jerked back into the present by the waiter, who had shoved a huge menu in front of me.

  “I guess so,” I answered, “it looks like my date is not going to show.”

  It was just as well. Outside in the clanging street the blasting continued, and here in Les Misérables des Frites the bottles rattled. I sat quietly for a moment and watched the heat shimmer on the taxicabs outside, and then, raising what remained of my Charlie, I said to myself:

  “Well, here’s to the Fourth,” and began to read the menu. It was time to eat.

  XVII I SHOW OFF

  Flick looked puzzled.

  “A Bloody Charlie? How the hell do you make a Bloody Charlie?”

  “You mean you don’t serve Bloody Charlies here?”

  Flick rummaged under the bar and finally found his Bartender’s Guide.

  “Forget it. You will not find it listed in that rag.”

  I could see that Flick’s professional curiosity was piqued.

  “Do you mean a Bloody Mary?”

  “No, I said a Bloody Charlie. Charlie, as in Charlie Company. If I recall rightly, Flick, you were in the Artillery. ‘C’ for Charlie.”

  “Well, all right, how do you make a Bloody Charlie?” He sounded skeptical.

  “Okay. If you have the makings, I’ll be glad to whip us up a couple.”

  “This I have to see.”

  “Okay. I will need vodka, which I see you have, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, and perhaps a bit of salt. And one other sp
ecial ingredient.”

  Flick set the tomato juice, the vodka, the Worcestershire, and a salt shaker on the bar next to two tall glasses. I waited for him to bite.

  “Now I suppose you’re gonna tell me I need one a them fancy French liqueurs, or something.”

  “Not exactly. Do you have any olives?”

  “Olives! I got plenty a olives.”

  “I will need four. Two for your drink and two for mine.”

  “Why two?”

  “It is important that you use only two per drink. No more, no less.”

  I poured a jigger of vodka into each glass, filling them with the ice-cold tomato juice, a dash of Worcestershire in each, a pinch of salt; then very precisely I dropped two olives into each drink. A few quick swirls of a red plastic swizzle stick, and then:

  “Cheers, Flick. Enjoy. Here are two classical Bloody Charlies.”

  “They look like Bloody Marys to me.” I sipped mine appreciatively, smacking my lips loudly, ostentatiously.

  “No, Flick, there is a crucial difference. These are Bloody Marys with balls. I have invented it. I call it a Bloody Charlie.”

  Flick sipped his for a moment and said:

  “You always did have a dirty mind.”

  I set my drink down precisely on the bar, saying as I did so:

  “No, that is not exactly true. In fact, I well remember when I could not even understand the simplest, most basic obscenity. My innocence led me into considerable difficulty.”

  XVIII UNCLE BEN AND THE SIDE-SPLITTING KNEE-SLAPPER, or SOME WORDS ARE LOADED

  Every family has a Joke Teller, and he is usually bad news. That’s right, bad news. But the kind of bad news that sneaks up on you and gets you before you know what’s happened.

  Joke Tellers are not to be confused with Storytellers. The difference is not only a matter of technqiue, but of degree of desperation.

  Uncle Ben was our family Joke Teller, and he was so far out on the fringes of the family solar system that nobody ever mentioned him, even in passing. Uncle Ben would show up at about every third or fourth family affair. He would arrive about one-third Bagged, as is the case with most Joke Tellers. He was not the Drinking Uncle, because he didn’t really drink. He just absorbed the stuff. He didn’t really knock it down, like Uncle Carl, who would fall down and holler and try to climb up the coal chute and all that kind of stuff. Uncle Ben just quietly drank. He just had a red nose, and sat, and he always looked like … well, have you ever seen a brass lamp? Uncle Ben had a kind of Brass-Lamp look. He’d just sit there and glow, and like most Joke Tellers was indecisively fat. And all he would do at any party was tell jokes. Not funny stories—Jokes. And I mean the worst kind. I mean the kind of jokes that should be fumigated before they are allowed in the house.