Sally’s Fourth

A holiday tale from Can We Have Archaic and Idiot? 2

Sally’s Fourth

Some people think to remember. Sally was thinking to forget.

With her eyes closed she watched the incandescence in slo-mo. Bright white to pink with flickering sparkles of green. And then the report. A real defibrillator. Solid. Best seen from a quarter mile. Best sitting on the grass. She opened her eyes, plucked from her big box of crayons (96!), made a few notes, a sketch.

Lids tight again. Bright white to pink to purple? One white. Four pink. Forty-eight purple. Fifty-three reports. Salts of magnesium, mercurous chloride, barium, sodium. Strontium! Chinese New Year popcorn in the summer sky. Purple rain. Yes! Another note. Another sketch.

Four coffee-drenched hours of imaginary explosions and multi-colored musings later, Sally finally felt the flickering tentacles of relaxation. Boom! Ah, that’s it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Thud! Crack, crack, crack, boom! Exactly right. Dazzling, just dazzling. Boooooom! A go-for-broke heartstarter!

Now, perhaps, Sally might sleep.

The evening had been abysmally wretched. Beethoven’s Fifth on kazoos. Charlie Parker through a tin horn. How could they do this to her? How could they do this?

With every shipment a plan. A sequence. A score. A thoughtfully contrived sensorial symphony in four dimensions. Timing, elevation, volume, speed, hue, echo. Calculation of effect. Recovery. Breathing and catching of breath. Anticipatory tension and expansive release. Just so.

The Fire Marshall’s son. Who would have suspected?

“Laws, Sally,” she could hear her mother sigh, “You’ll end like Aunt Toop, honey. I swan.”

Tupelo Lehane was the family bugbear. Signs of mischief, whimsy, instability or “nerves” called forth the refrain, “Just like Toop.” This notoriety blossomed in the disappointment following her death, when rumored wealth failed to materialize. Crestfallen would-be heirs circled her coffin like so many late-arriving buzzards, finding bones instead of succulently bloated flesh. The officiating minister mistook morosity for bereavement and delivered himself of a rapturous eulogy but no one was powerfully moved. There was a deep undercurrent of concurrence among the raptorous flock that if a human on earth deserved to be run over by an automobile, it was the woman in the coffin. The knowledge that she had managed to run over herself made her denouement that much more satisfactory.

“Tonight, I was Tooped,” Sally informed Streek, stretched full length on the bedroom rug. Streek’s shrug suggested, “I told you so.”

Cats know things we do not.

Streek, sleek and slinky, still had her girlish figure. It was later, though not much, that she would blow up. Body cavity swelling with liquid seeping from her capillaries. Victim of Feline Infectious Peritonitis brought on by inoculation against Feline Panleukemia. Ah the vicissitudes of unintended consequence! Sally would reflect, blinking through her tears as Streek dropped to the stainless veterinary table, euthanized, that the apparently imminent explosion of her sweet companion’s abdomen was the only explosion she had ever in her life defused. Such is love.

Blast Rawls. Blast him. “Public relations,” she mimicked his slow drawl. “Make folks less nervous.”

Nervous shmervous. There were supposed to be explosions at a fireworks factory. They were in the business of manufacturing explosives. So one storage bunker went up. So what? The only person hurt was Ed, and he knew damn well that smoking was a health risk. Sally had herself seen him reading the Surgeon General’s warning on his pack of Luckies® during a coffee break. Sneaking a smoke in a skyrocket storage bunker was kind of dumb, but that’s the point. It wasn’t the system, it was an idiot in the system. Human error. Period. Finis.

“Does this factory represent a serious hazard to the community?” the TV reporter needled her.

Sally had looked straight into the camera. “No. I think a mishap like this proves exactly how safe the plant is. We experienced a worst case event, and damage was limited to one bunker. The containment quonset held.”

“But a man died in there.”

“We consider it to be a smoking related death.”

“Neighbors seem worried about the presence of huge quantities of gun powder directly across the street from a public high school.”

Sally softened, nodded, “I know folks worry about their children. I know they hear the words ‘gun powder’ and focus on the word ‘gun.’ But this isn’t about guns. We make beautiful fireworks. Fireworks for celebration. Fireworks to make little kids laugh. This is about fun,” she paused, shifted from upbeat to serious, then added, “and jobs. The fine young women and men who graduate from Jefferson Davis High School next month deserve a career with an All-American company that cares. Rawls Rockets® is that kind of company.”

The reporter turned to the camera, “That’s the word from Sally Lehane, vice-president of Rawls Rockets®, scene of an explosion this morning which claimed the life of twenty-seven year old Edgar A. Pallas of Lenoir, North Carolina. Back to you, Tom.”

“We have an opening just now,” Sally blurted, but the camera’s red eye was dead. As the reporter thanked her, she noticed his gaze had settled on her missing left fingers.

“My parents bought me a chemistry set when I was twelve,” she explained.

Should she have mentioned Olmsted?

Bad enough to flack for Rawls after the explosion in April. Where was he when the cameras rolled? Training with the Compotes (“We are True Men!) in Montana, that’s where. Sharing paranoid black leather and rubber rumors around a left-wing anti-machismo campfire, that’s where. (“Out of the closet and into the trenches!”) That’s where. But this! This was too much. The Fire Marshall’s son for God’s sake!

Rawls had asked her to represent the firm at Greenville’s Independence Day festivities. “Do I need to make that an order?” he had joked. Half joked, anyway.

“Shouldn’t you be there? It is your company, after all.”

“Sal, you know how Greenville feels about ...” he trailed off.

“Greenville’s bluenoses don’t know a blessed thing about your Compotes.”

“Capotes, Sal. You know it’s the Posse Capote.”

“Well, they don’t. Or about your personal preferences.”

“But I do. It would work against me. I’m sure of it.” Rawls grinned that great big friendly used-car-vendor-grin of his. “Besides, Sugar, you wrote the score.”

Coming from a straight man that would have been actionable sexism in the workplace. Rawls was not, decidedly not, straight. Sally let the “sugar” pass, and went straight for the sweet and low.

“Tell me Honey Bunch, does this fall under ‘out of the closet,’ or ‘into the trenches?’”

“Please.”

“Vacation. Three weeks starting July 20?”

“Um....”

Sally had spun on her heel and headed for the door before he sighed, “Okay. Three weeks.”

Hence her attendance. Picnic, parade, park. Hence her painful witness. The Fire Marshall’s son! Hence her headache. Hence her all-nighter with the big box of crayons and two pots of organic Kona.

At five-thirty, before turning in, she dialed Rawls. When his sleepy voice curled confusedly out of the earpiece she spoke. “Never ever more.”

“What? Who is this? Sally? What time is it?”

“Tooped again.”

“Hold it, hold it. I’m not awake yet.” He coughed. “You were run over? You’re in a hospital? Greenville? What?”

“Nearly killed me.”

“You left your car in neutral on an incline? And bent over to pick up a nickel on the pavement? Like your Auntie? And it rolled right over your hea...”

“Too literal, Rawls. You’re much too literal. ‘Tooped’ as in ‘depressingly snookered,’ ‘distressingly debilitated,’ ‘chain jerked.’ Okay? Never again. The Fire Marshall’s son for Christ’s sake!”

“The who?”

Sally blew an exasperated puff of air and scrunched her eyes. “The Fire Marshall’s son wanted to set off the fireworks in Greenville last night and his uncle the mayor said ‘Why not?’ So everything was ruined by an idiot redneck. Everything!”

“You mean they let some little kid handle our stuff? That’s breach of contract! I’ll sue those homophobic sons-of bitches. I’ll sue their damn pants off!”

“You’ll have to get their pants off some other way, Rawls. Arrested development, maybe, but this kid is thirty-two. He didn’t even look at my plan. He didn’t have a stop watch. He didn’t even take the sequencing fuse clusters out of the box. He just pulled one rocket after another out of whatever crate happened to suit his fancy and lit them with his cigarette. Kools®, I swear they were Kools®.”

“Oh.” Rawls was awake now. Had cognified that he was dealing with wounded pride versus imminent death. “You’ll survive.”

“God, I hate menthol!”

“Sugar, you’ve got to recognize that no matter how much planning we put into our displays, not everyone is going to follow our recommendations. Remember it’s their loss, not ours.”

“Not yours you mean. I was humiliated! Nevermore!”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry they didn’t benefit from your creative work.”

“Put it in the contract.”

“Sal, we’ve been over this.”

“Put it in the contract.”

“My attorney doesn’t think ...”

“What does your attorney think about the Trojan Hearse?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But, of course, he did. And he knew she knew. And she knew he knew she knew he thought his phone was tapped and he wasn’t about to discuss the Capotes’ doomsday truck bomb plans for the benefit of FBI tape recorders. He was doubtless seething at her mere mention of its code name.

“I’ll think about. We’ll talk about it. Okay?”

“Think hard, Rawls. I’ve had it.”

But, that is not what this story is about. This story is about a thought Sally Lehane thought the night of the Fourth or perhaps early on the Fifth. That thought was this. “How bright would fireworks have to be to be seen from space?

It was the kind of a passing thought that most of us have from time to time. Like, “How far is far enough?” Or,

“Why is the threshold of differentiation between discrete events located precisely between hither and yon?.” Or maybe,

“What if the inverse square law was inverted?” That sort of thing.

Think about it! We would be weightless on earth and infinitely heavy when out in the ether. Headlights would be brighter at a distance and diminish as they approached. Just before a car ran you down it would disappear. Would its mass approach zero as well?

Usually such thoughts evaporate quickly and cause no lasting damage. In rare cases, however, an enabling thought ambles along just before the first thought escapes and buys it a drink. “Stick around,” it says. “I wanna talk.”

Just so. About a week after the Greenville debacle the lights went out in Mir. A cosmonaut unplugged the main computer. Claimed it was a mistake. More likely one of those adolescent pranks men are given to when they are left alone with a few buddies. Virtual vaseline on the cosmic toilet seat. Booger jokes. [For readers with short memories, the Mir blackout was a real thing back in the 90s.]

But the thought of those space men whizzing around overhead with their lights out infected Sally’s musing with a terrible urgency. Right now! They are in the dark! Today! Tonight! How big a skyrocket would it take? Or, rephrased, what is the minimum luminosity required for such visibility?

Obviously, a megaton or so of fission would flick astronautic Bics. But (And please, please don’t get the impression that Sally didn’t simply adore enormous explosions. Ever since she blew off her fingers as a child she had been perversely drawn to cataclysmic detonation.) but ... she was realistic. Folks get a little jumpy when you start lobbing nukes. Her dream was of a plausibly scaled fireworks event bright enough to be seen and enjoyed from space. This meant the dispersal of the fiery flower would have to be high enough and broad enough to register as more than the bright pinpoint flash of a mere explosion.

Her brother, a geometry teacher, provided a math tutorial. Inverse square law and so forth. He was good at that sort of math, when one could drag him away from his lawn tractor, or lately from his obsession with ice axes. [Another story in the aforementioned collection.] From there it was a fairly simple calculation, pro rata, from her long experience with more traditional rockets to her projected mega-boom. Foil sparkles, chemical colorants, brimstone, blinkers, fissile sub-sections, time delay fusettes and streams of glory were business as usual for her practiced hand-and-a-half.

All totaled, added and checked. The explosive force required four thousand pounds of the particular black powder immediately available to a certain young executive in upper management in an upstate South Carolinian firecracker factory. As synchronicity, Thor, the luck of the draw and the author of the present tale would have it, the charge compacted within the Trojan Hearse topped out at four thousand, one hundred and seven. Is the conclusion to this episode in even the remotest periphery of doubt?

Armed with a schedule from NASA’s website, a thermos of organic Kona, peanut butter, soda crackers and a bag of country music cassettes, Sally steered the Hearse (an aluminum step-van, contretemps its evocative code name) from its secure bunker at Rawl’s just before midnight. Attached the U-Haul loaded with foil, chemicals, brims, blinks, fiss-, fus-, et. al. to the rear and headed west. New Mexico, here we come.

Sally fretted, though not about Rawls. Call the cops? Report a stolen truck bomb? Right. No way.

Her fret was this: Had Georgia O’Keefe ever once painted a cloud? She rather thought not. Prayed not. Clear sky clear to the stratosphere, that’s the ticket.

Five nights hence, on August 4, at 1:37 a.m. EDT, Mir would be directly overhead in Roswell. (If you are among the vanishingly small group of readers who believe that Mir is (or was) in a geosynchronous orbit, be still! You will only spoil the story for everyone else.) The town would soon have a new phenomenon tacked to its strange reputation.

Sally believed with Frederick Law Olmsted, and Lord knows, I believe they are right, that fireworks prevent tyranny. So, for that matter do—probably—gay militias, free public libraries, political cartoons and religious heresy.

All day on the third of August Sally worked her magic, assembling the elements of pyrotechnic wonderment atop the base charge. The Capote bomb had been encased in a section of iron sewer pipe. With the top cap removed the explosive force would be more or less channeled up - not unlike the cardboard wrapped fountains and cones of more immediate familiarity to the public at large. If the side walls held, the vertically directed force would be sufficient and Sally was certain that her upper addition would create a display somewhat over a mile in diameter.

At home Rawls fumed. Transmitted a red-alert to the Posse Capote. Began a nationwide search for the nondescript delivery van with a faded Little Debby logo on each side panel. Fifty seven soldiers of forzando, brave as may be brave, trained as they may be trained, seemed a tiny team to span a vast continent. Where did that woman go?

And his loss in Lenoir. Sally hadn’t understood that Dead Ed was more than a friend and employee. Something deeper and more intimate. Something close to a soulmate in the depth of shared madness.

Yes, a golf partner.

Now, who would share cart rental at the club? Who would understand his handicap? Gone in a puff of smoke.

On Monday afternoon Sally dropped off the now empty U-Haul at a small service station on the outskirts of Roswell, drove some distance out of town on U.S. 380, then down a quiet gravel road into the desert. She methodically double-and-triple checked the maze of fuses atop her quiescent volcano, humming with Emmylou Harris. “Meet me at the Wrecking Ball...” She drank insipid diner coffee, ate soda crackers and watched stars appear.

At 12:30 a.m. EDT (10:30 p.m. local) two members of the Posse Capote drove past, their route on the Federal highway taking them within a half mile of the missing van.

At 1:10 a.m. Sally set her timer, slung her daypack over a shoulder and walked quickly toward the main road.

At 1:35 Mir, together with its hobbled computer, dysfunctional power system, failing oxygen generators and nervous cosmonauts, rolled lazily as it hove into Roswell’s vicinity.

At 1:37 the stillness of the desert night was rent. A column of fire divided the night, brought daylight blue, half-blinded bats, somewhat confused a drunk careening home from the Hot Spot Tavern, and dazzled Sally, the only sober and attentive onlooker. The package blossomed perfectly, spreading its lightning design across half the sky. Reds and yellows in meticulously ordered concentricity. A magenta finish. Just so.

The windows of Mir had swung moon-ward. The cosmonauts, in any case, were asleep, readying themselves for the next day’s docking with a replacement crew. Sally’s magnificent explosion made the news wire, but editors ignored the story, having done Roswell to death in the early summer hoopla of Saucerite congregation.

Tooped again.

The burned out step van would never be traced, numbers long since filed from motor, axle and chassis.

Sally hitched to a bus station, and Greyhounded home, where Streek, already off her food but showing no other symptoms, stood beside the automatic feeder, and cried.

*****

Copyright 1999 & 2009

Cecil Bothwell

All rights reserved