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I was never the best with fireworks.
Which I find odd, in retrospect, because I had nearly flawless hand-eye coordination. Reflexes that would make a hummingbird jealous. I played tennis, and well. But, somehow this quick-speed ability failed me at fireworks.
I learned the hard way, too.
For some reason, as children, when the Hot Holidays arrived, so called because we were allowed fireworks as part of the celebration – and these included Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas which drained into New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth; basically, we begged for fireworks on every holiday – and when we got them, oh how we eagerly hoarded the stash of Wildcats, Roman Candles, and Bottle Rockets.
We did this because we were preparing for battle, specifically with the bottle rockets.
The competition was fierce because the family was large, and so, there was precious time to twiddle thumbs and admire the holidays for their own purposes. Blood was soon to be drawn, when night fell, and there was an entire forest behind the house where our stashes would have to be hidden, kept in utmost secret, until the crucial hour.
I’m not sure who started Bottle Rocket Battle (it was by far and away, the most anticipated and heated of the Fireworks Wars), so I’m going to blame my cousin Michael, or his cousin from his mother’s side, Hubo. (That’s right, his name was Hubo). They’re easy targets. Literally. But more on that in a moment.
Looking back, I wonder why no one stopped us. Perhaps, our families knew we’d learn more if we actually got hurt. At any rate, that’s exactly what happened.
With the exception of the Christmas my mother set the yard on fire with an unfortunate mishandling of a Roman Candle, while trying not to spill her eggnog (it was less egg, more the nog), we held all of our fireworks displays, way out in the country of Winston County, in a section of it called Nanih Waiya, the birthplace of the Choctaws: land of gulleys, poprocks, a park with a large mound where their sacred dead are buried, and the countless number of people the police fine and/or arrest for trying to have sex on top of it, or “smoke the weed,” after the park has closed.
There was family land out there; Ma Onie, for instance, lived out here with two of her children, and about three hundred or so head of cattle. Cattle that were never sold, never killed, just fed, and allowed to reproduce.
The setting-of-the-yard-on-fire was an accidental ritual my Mother introduced, I’m afraid. It was a unique event that I would repeat down at Fish Camp, in Aunt Dot’s yard, several years later on the Fourth, while trying to outshine my cousin Kaye who could do everything perfectly from marriage and babies to coiffed hair and making even bran cupcakes delicious, etc. The difference was this: Mother set the yard on fire in the daylight; I, however, set Aunt Dot’s yard on fire in the middle of the night.
I mean, come on!
You might think fire is easier to spot at nighttime. It isn’t. Should this ever come up in dinner (or water cooler) conversations, you will now be the wiser. I’m still waiting for this tidbit to somehow find its way on Jeopardy.
I remember that Christmas, a distant relative who was traveling (he always seemed to travel on family holidays) and unable to come home sent the children a large box of Chinese fireworks. At first, that meant little to nothing to me, wasn’t fire the same in every language, culture? Wasn’t it like, the one thing you could always count on not being different?
Pretty much. It was the “works” part that was foreign and dangerous and of course, absolutely what any child could ever ask for in a firework, if he or she were prone to throwing them at his or her cousins in War.
This is what we did, this was our game. And these Chinese Reds, Paul called them that, he was fifteen and so, far more intelligent about the world than we were, they flew at a speed that had gotten my sister in trouble on more than one occasion.
See, we’d wait until dark, slip outside under the guise of, you know, shooting some fireworks, so far so good, that was expected. The adults would mill around on the back patio, and we’d shoot out for the pasture. The cows, grown used to the tradition would see us running into their yard, so to speak, and begin the long trek and amble down the other side of the hill, to settle in for the night, and low. We’d head to our respective stashes and the game would begin.
The point?
So, anyway, here’s how you played, and don’t try this at home (unless you have cows, and thus, a large pasture). You’d have your own cigarette lighter, no easy feat in a family of non-smokers – thankfully, we had grills and Buckstoves – and you’d track your opponents down, zero in on them, as fast as you could, light the bottle rocket and throw it at them.
This is the stupidest idea for a game in the history of the world, abridged and otherwise.
Yet, we played it. Year in and year out…until the time when I almost took Hubo’s eye out. It was all our faults, actually. We’d decided to play the game during the day, out of absolute and sheer boredom…I mean, we’d already kicked over all the antbeds and stuck the ends of the bottle rockets into it, allowing the ants to attack the rose-colored wood, and then we’d light the sucker and send them to the moon, pretending they were on a mission from their own Anthropod NASA.
They would never make it to the moon. Half the time, they didn’t make it over the chimney. One ill-fated flight flew slap into the side of the mailbox. There’s always a risk.
So, naturally, there we were, in broad daylight, every antbed left unmade, and what’s a bunch of kids to do? Bottle Rocket Battle.
The problem was, this time, you could totally see your opponents. The bigger problem? Parents milling about on the patio could also now see you. The lovely mystery of stealth, from all sides, was eliminated. The spoils would have to go not to the soft-footed, but to the quickest draw. If we were going to get in trouble for this, I was, at the least, going down in a blaze of glory, for it.
I was, like, having to try and light four and five bottle rockets at a time.
And, then, before I could see him, there was Hubo, one foot in the ditch, and the other on the cold, unloving road, merely a foot or two away from me; he’d been hiding behind that unsightly bridal bush that Ma Onie wouldn’t let anyway cut down, even though the county had told her it was a blind spot. People should drive slower, she said.
The calling of the cows.
He was flicking his lighter, hopping a little on one leg, and I got nervous. I didn’t have time to light a single bottle rocket, so I just threw them all at him, at his face, and the bottom of one, apparently, stabbed him in his eye.
He cried so loudly, we were all around, what, 11 or 12, and with such a wail, that the cows came back over the hill, thinking it was time to eat breakfast. There was hardly a scratch on his eye, I thought, really, but he still came back from the emergency room with an eye patch.
He was the center of attention at school until like Valentine’s Day.
Which we celebrated, quietly, peacefully, and with nothing more exciting than a couple of stupid sparklers. And that was fine by me. I didn’t touch another firework until this past New Year’s, and that I did with my foot, protected safely behind a steel-covered boot, my jacketed arm covering both my eyes.
Which isn’t easy to do when you wear glasses.
The Clever Kris 