Dave comes over to roll the box with me only because I promise real fireworks later.
He doesn’t like my pretend games of space ship and submarine inside the large box that the outboard motors come in for my uncle’s boat store next door to my house, and neither doe my uncle, Harry, who is upstairs trying to sleep after his second shift job out at the airport.
I make Dave stay.
We both hear the scrap of wood as Harry yanks open the second floor window. I peer out the handhold in the box and see his head sticking out the window upstairs. He can’t see us – except maybe where Dave’s feet stick out one end of the box. But he knows we’re inside and yells for us to stop making such a racket.
I try to wait him out, the way I sometimes do, hoping he’ll get bored or tired and head back to bed. But he’s in a mood, refusing to leave the window until I show myself, so I do, easing out the wide mouth of the box, standing at the slate walk that runs around the house from the front porch along the side to the back porch and then into the boat yard next door, Harry’s head framed by one of the two windows of his bedroom on the boat store side of the house.
Harry looks and sounds old, his eyes wrapped in weariness churned up by annoyance, sweat glistening on his forehead exaggerating the hairline his baldness creates, the frown crinkling his face to make him look much older than he really is.
“How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet?” he asks.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Harry. “I didn’t think the box would make that much noise.”
“It’s not the box; it’s you. I can sleep a wink for you’re your giggling. Why aren’t you at school?”
“It’s Fourth of July,” I tell him.
I want to see it’s a holiday and if we weren’t out of school for the summer, we’d had the day off anyway.
“We’re just playing space ship,” I tell him.”
“Space ships don’t giggle,” Harry says. “Why don’t you place space ship in a park somewhere?”
“We’re gonna,” I say. “Later, Uncle Ed promised to take us to Garret Mountain to watch the fireworks.”
“Fireworks are all we need,” Harry mumbles. He always mumbles when he’s talking to himself. “Who do you have in that box with you?”
“It’s only Big Dave. You know the kid from down the street near the liquor store?”
“Tell him to get out of that damned box. If he gets hurt, I’ll have a hell of a lawsuit on my hands.”
I kick Dave’s big feet sticking out the end of the box. His feet jerk. He does not yet get out until I kick him again harder, then he moves, crawling out on his back, crab-like, so large he must be a lobster. He has to roll over to stand, and once standing, he looks smaller than he is, slumped shoulders, head down, looking the way I should look whenever my uncle scolds me; I never do.
My uncle sighs.
“Okay. Now put the box by the trash where it belongs.”
“But…”
“Do it!”
When my uncle goes, shutting the window with a definitive creak, Dave asks: “What now?”
“I guess we’re going to have to play with the real rocket ship,” I say.
“You said you wanted to save that for later.”
“Well, now I don’t,” I say.
I’m not good at saving things, good or even bad. I get things over with so I don’t have to think about them all the time, worry over them, whether they will happen or not. If I’m going to get ice cream, I get it, and eat it, and forget it when I’m done. When I’m going to be punished, I want to get the pain over with so I can get on with whatever I need to get on with.
Frankly, I’m surprised I waited as long as I have with the rocket ship. It’s different somehow. It took me a long time to make and I guess I don’t want it all to go up in smoke so quick, or forget about it after it happens.
I don’t tell Dave any of this.
I just tell him to come with me and I head around to the other side of the house, and the cellar door that used to be metal and slanted, a storm door like Dorothy needed before she wasn’t in Kansas any more. Now it is wood and straight, with a door lock I picked open as soon as my grandfather installed it to keep me from getting hurt after I fell out the kitchen window and through the open door to hit my head on the stone steps. He couldn’t fix the stone, so he fixed the door so that the next time I fall out a window I don’t land so hard.
I keep looking for the blood on the stone stairs I know is not there and feel the bump on the back of my head that always is.
Down the steps, then left, into a dark room of stone floors, and walls and brick beams holding up a wooden ceiling, walls lined with trusted and dented metal shelves on which my uncle and my grandfather store everything they think they might need some time; then never do, each thing covered in dust and layers of grease or oil: machine parts, boxes of nails or screws, tiles and brackets, cans of paint so old they won’t open, and when they do the paint has turned to rubber.
A lot of stuff sits on wooden planets along the floor, packed up outboard motor parts, and tools grandpa hasn’t used since he stopped building houses, as covered with dust as the stuff on the shelves, yet somehow more desirable, spirits of some former life grandpa still regrets giving up.
An old washing machine sits in the midst of this, complete with ringing, a gift grandpa bought grandma after moving into the new house after the war, a modern piece of contemporary convenience, out of date a decade later, and replaced by a separate washer and dryer, though grandma continues to hang the clean laundry on a line strung across the back yard from the back porch.
Dave, who has to bow his head to get down the stairs, tells me the cellar stinks, and it does. It stinks of mold and coal and oil, of grease and paint and soil, the dark concrete seeped in it, everything curved in or out, or sunk-in with rain water or the bugs. I can smell the wood, aged now, yet once new, and the sweat of the men who labored to build it, and the sweat of the servants who rushed up and down its stairs, a stair case abandoned by grandpa when his youngest son fell down it, the way I fell out the window, and unable to fix the stone upon which his son landed, he fixed the house so that the staircase ceased to exist, with only the pale newer wood of the repair showing on the ceiling where the staircase once descended.
The boiler, massive and black, sat in back like a very fat cat, mum now with warm weather, filling the space it has always filled, before Grandpa converted it from coal to oil, though in winter, both smells rose through the heat grates, bathed me and the room above.
The coal bin remains, too, like a black tooth along the front wall, through a shoot to a door on the outside, and then a door on the inside, a metal door mostly rusted difficult to open, only nobody opened it except for me, and then forcing the old metal to move, causing bits of rust to flicker off, revealing brighter metal beneath like evidence to my crime.
I open it again, and reach inside, fingers feeling the grit of coal from before my grandfather’s time, filled with memory and despair of all those who dug up the coal and brought it here, black death left to die in a cellar that no longer needed it, then my fingers finding what they needed to find, cool metal against my flesh, sift and long, I drag it out.
“Is that it?” Dave asked; I saw it is.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Dave says.”
“It does to me,” I saw, holding it in one hand, heavy like the metal crucifix I sometimes get to hold in church, smooth and potent from the powder I stuffed into it from my uncle’s shotgun shells, too many to count since this pipe is so long and so heavy it needs a lot of gunpowder for it to get off the ground.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Dave asks.
It is not safe; it would not be fun if it was; I can’t tell him that. I need him to feel about this the way I feel about it, the potency of it, before we set it off and it all goes up in smoke.
“Come on,” I tell him. “We’ll do it outside.”
So we go out the way we came; Dave bowing his head at the stairs, me not needing to, still looking for the blood I spilled here and still not finding it.
I take the rocket to the stump on the side of the house, a stump that once was a dead tree when my uncles and aunt were my age, old yellowed photographs showing them sitting on its dead branches, a tree that accepted them as if its children, embracing them, until time fractured each and my grandfather cut it down, leaving only the stump for me to explore, and a place for the armies of ants to build colonies and for the decay that created sawdust and memories, leaving, too, a hole on top into which I fit my rocket, before I light the fuse, hissing as it burns, the heavy meal sputtering smoke and the stench of burning, and I stare at it, watching weeks worth of work coming to an end, I think maybe I should stop it, and save it, I just stare, though about when the fuse burns half way, I wake up and shout: “Run!” and we run, back around the porch along the slate path, passed the trash and the large box that is not a real rocket, and to a space under the window here my uncle sleeps, and into the boatyard, a grave yard on this holiday in summer that is not a holiday from school, and down a narrow alley between the board yard and the gas station, where we once hid from the man we hit in the face with peas from our pea shooter, and then we stop, hiding behind the thick metal bodies of old oil drums now filled with green rain water, and we wait.
“It’s not going off,” Dave says.
“Wait,” I say
“Something’s wrong,” Dave says.
Again, I say, “Wait,” in my head seeing the fuse slowly burning down, its scent burning in my nostrils mingling with the smell of oil, coal, grease and my own sweat.
“We ought to go back and see,” Dave says.
Before I can say, “Wait” again, it happens: a sound like the crack of a whip, louder, rumbling, like the sound of the box, louder, like the fall of a branch in a rain storm, louder, like the sound of an earthquake I have never heard, only imagined, louder, like the collapse of something deep inside me, beyond what I even thought I could hear, the fire works we expect, magnified, louder,
Then, it starts to rain, not water, bits of wood, splinters and dust, sweeping down in one gush of breath, not loud now, like a sigh accompanied by a wave of smoke, gray, black, filled not with coal or oil the way the vents send smells into the house on a cold morning, or fire, a burning, wood and earth singed.
Then comes the silence.
Quieter than any – the land having sucked up all sound even the chatter of squirrels and the drone of traffic from the street.
Then comes the creak of a window opening in my uncle’s bedroom
“Run!” I shout, and we run.
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