First Light

by Charles Baxter

  Hugh nods. He tries not to peer at Simon’s back-lighted face, which has transformed itself slightly in the service of the role he is learning. Hugh never knows from one moment to the next what Simon’s face will look like; it has an unpleasant plasticity.

  “You’ll come down to help me with the fireworks?” Hugh asks.

  “Oh, I have that all planned.”

  “Good.” He holds on to the door. “What’s the play?”

  “A farce. By an Englishman, Joe Orton.”

  “A big part?”

  Simon shrugs. “A good part.”

  Hugh nods. He looks uncomfortable and he knows it. “Well,” he says, “see you later.” He turns and is about to go downstairs when Simon says, “Hugh.”

  “What?” He glances in again. Simon’s face has changed: now he looks older, paternal. A judge. It’s a father’s expression, and Hugh is horrified to see this look on Simon’s face when that face is gazing back at him. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s child anymore, especially Simon’s.

  “I saw you going up that ladder earlier this afternoon. I was just curious. What in the world were you doing that for?”

  “You and Dorsey saw me?”

  “I saw you. Dorsey was dozing.” Simon continues to give Hugh his father-gaze, the blank look of surveillance.

  “Actually, Simon,” Hugh says, “I went up there to straighten a lightning rod and to check the condition of the shingles. Besides, I was a little bored. Everyone had gone inside.”

  “Yes.” Simon’s face edges toward amusement without exactly expressing it. “I understand that. Every man wants to climb onto the roof of his house. It makes him feel like a homeowner and a desperado, a perfect and impossible combination.”

  “I didn’t know you were watching.”

  “I know you didn’t.” He smiles. “Most people don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t know when I’m watching.” He taps his fingers. “I would have been a great spy.”

  “I was feeling …” Hugh doesn’t finish the sentence.

  “You were feeling old,” Simon tells him.

  The two men look away from each other, and at last Hugh says, “Sure you don’t want any dinner?”

  “Oh, I’ve already eaten,” Simon tells him.

  “What? What did you have?”

  “Whatever it was,” Simon says, “I ate it.”

  At sunset, Hugh turns on the porchlight and carries all the fireworks and the bucket of sand to the backyard, which he had mowed, raked, and trimmed two days before. It occurs to him that it doesn’t make any sense to keep the porchlight on when they’d all be in back, but he leaves it on anyway: there are always intruders and thieves, specialists in holiday crimes. Tina, Amy, and Noah are grouped together near one of the clothesline poles, their heads down as if they’re talking, and when Noah sees his uncle he runs toward him and holds his arms up. Hugh gives the boy one of the bags, and they both walk to the far end of the lawn. As soon as they’ve lowered the bags to the grass, Hugh feels his nephew taking his hand and quickly pressing it to his lips. Hugh has never understood why his nephew loves him so much, but he has seen so many gestures like this by now that he must accept this love as a gift, and so he stands there immobilized, feeling, even after Noah has rejoined the girls, the imprint of the boy’s lips on his hand.

  “Tina,” Hugh says at last, “where’re your Aunt Dorsey and Uncle Simon?” She points and at once starts to giggle. Simon has appeared, walking around the north corner of the house, a carton the size of a chair held between his arms. When he reaches the lawn, he lowers the carton and takes out of it little cardboard buildings with crayoned labels, which he sets up along parallel lines, as if they were part of a small city.

  “Let the fun commence,” he says.

  “Everybody’s here but Laurie,” Hugh says. “Where is she?”

  “Right here, silly,” she says, just behind Hugh. He turns quickly and sees her standing with her hand on her hip and her smile fixed on him. People are always seeing me, Hugh thinks, before I see them. Laurie smiles at his visible shock. “You’re the only man I know,” she says in a half-whisper, “who is startled when he sees his wife. What a faraway man you are. Well. I’ve been putting out the citronella candles. See?” She points to the four red-glass candle holders on the four points of the lawn. The flames flicker inside them, and belatedly Hugh smells their acid fruit scent. He doesn’t like the look of these candles. They’re funereal. Hugh shakes his head, hoping to clear it. “All right,” he says, “let’s do this.”

  “Me first,” Simon says. He has a cherry bomb in his hand and is inserting it through the door of one of the buildings he has made. “This,” he says, “is the Beirut Hilton, which rises, many gleaming stories high, into the air above the Paris of the Middle East.” He looks over to Tina and Amy and gives them a cue with his finger.

  “Yankee go home, Yankee go home,” the girls chant.

  Simon lights the fuse and runs back toward the house. Hugh waits, looking at the windows painstakingly drawn on the walls of the Beirut Hilton. It’s a dud, he thinks, and then the Beirut Hilton blows up. The explosion is concussive, and Hugh feels it against his body as a force wave. The sound hits both his eardrums and his head; a person doesn’t need ears to hear such a thing. The cardboard rips, splinters, flies up in thumbnail-sized pieces in irregularly circular arcs, leaving a halo of cardboard pieces of different sizes on the ground and a small ball of pale blue smoke rising into the air. Hugh thinks of his neighbors’ windows but then instinctively looks toward the children. He hears Simon clapping in the aftermath. In the diminishing echo, the shocked crickets have fallen silent.

  On Noah’s face is an expression of the purest radiance, an angel look. His eyes are closed, and he is swinging his head slowly back and forth. When he opens his eyes, he looks toward his mother, then Simon, and then his uncle. His eyes are wet.

  “Filthy Americans,” Simon says. “Imperialist lackeys. Death to the nest of spies and traitors.” He cues the girls.

  “Death to the nest of spies,” Tina says. Amy can’t remember the phrase, and blows her line.

  Simon is putting a second cherry bomb into a building labeled AMERICAN EMBASSY. In a guttural voice, he says, “Down with Yankee imperialist aggression. Down with American meddling.”

  “Death to the Shah,” Tina says.

  “Wait a minute,” Hugh interrupts.

  Seeing the expression on Hugh’s face, Simon switches back to his own voice. “Just kidding, Hugh. Just a joke. They aren’t American embassies at all. Just little cardboard boxes. Or maybe Cuban enclaves in Grenada or Nicaragua. How’s that? Is that better?”

  “Hmmm.”

  Simon lights the fuse to the bomb in the American embassy. When the embassy blows up, Hugh is watching his nephew. The expression of pleasure on the boy’s face is so naked and pure that Hugh feels something like embarrassment in seeing it. The explosion is a blessing, a rupture of the air that somehow makes its way into the boy’s interior silence.

  Hugh looks over at his two daughters, who are holding their ears and shrieking happily. He feels the weight of the day lifting, buoyed up by the children’s happiness.

  “How about a rocket?” Hugh asks.

  “There’s too much daylight for rockets,” Laurie tells him. “What else have you got?”

  “Well,” Hugh says, “there are the fountains.” He puts his arm into one of the bags and pulls out a long cylinder called the Tiger Roaring Fountain. He sets the fountain down on the burned whitened grass where the Beirut Hilton had been, and he lights the fuse. The fuse burns down to the tube, and then the device begins to spurt upward a thick shower of brilliant red sparks.

  Over the noise of gunpowder igniting, Simon’s voice rises, accented. “This is the blood of the blessed martyrs fountain! This is blood shed for the holy cause of Islam! All hail the great Islamic Revolution!”

  “Cut it out, would you?” Hugh shouts, interrupting h
im. After fifteen more seconds of sparks, the Tiger Roaring Fountain expires with a few final broken bursts.

  “No more blood,” Simon announces sadly after the mild applause dies away. “No more martyrs.”

  “You boys.” Laurie is bending down to the lawn and picking up a glass of iced tea. “How you like things that go off.”

  “Uncle Simon,” Tina shouts, “what can we blow up next? Maybe the airport?”

  “Definitely the airport. The Athens airport, over here. I think we’ve got that nice car bomb you made this afternoon. We’ll just put this small explosive device here, in the trunk …”

  “It’s not an explosive,” Hugh says. “It’s just a toy.”

  “Tell that to the people in the airport. Imperialist running dogs.”

  “No,” Hugh says.

  “No, what?” Simon is about to light the car bomb.

  “No car bombs.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the Fourth of July!”

  “So?”

  “We’re supposed to be celebrating liberty, not terrorism!”

  “A revolution is a revolution!” Simon shouts, lighting the cherry bomb in the car. “Bombs bursting in air!” Hugh raises his head, closes his eyes as the bomb explodes, tearing apart both the car and the Athens airport next to it, and blowing out several cardboard people inside the airport onto the grass. Hugh looks up and sees a flock of sparrows. He wants to see them form into a pattern, an arrow or a letter, but flocks of sparrows never make formations, he reminds himself; they go where they want to. Let them stay up there, he thinks; never let them come down.

  “Almost time for the rockets,” Dorsey says. “Any last explosives?”

  “One,” Simon tells her. “This one is for the American consulate and apartment building. See the windows?”

  “Just light it,” Dorsey tells him.

  “See the balcony I added on?”

  “Just light it.”

  He puts the cherry bomb into a cardboard revolving door. “American hands off Central America,” he says.

  It explodes, and Dorsey says in the jarring silence that follows, “All right, damn it, you boys have had your fun. I’ve always said you can’t trust men with fireworks. It gets them excited and crazy. See what a mess you’ve made of things? Damn it all, stand back.” She walks out on the grass and pushes both Hugh and Simon toward the house. “Go sit down. Both of you. I will be the pyrotechnician from now on.”

  “Aunt Dorsey,” Tina shouts, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m taking over, honey. It’s time for the women.”

  “Spoilsport,” Simon mutters. “We still had the Marine barracks and the BOQ, and the USIA transmitting tower, and the busload of nuns, and the missionary flotilla. You agreed, honey,” he whines. “It’s realism. It’s so contemporary.”

  “We didn’t agree,” Dorsey says. “You just want to see me squirm. And you want to terrify the children.”

  “They love it,” he tells her.

  “Shut up,” Dorsey says. “Don’t be a creep. Sit down and eat something. I saw some candy around here a minute ago. Just because this is an American holiday doesn’t mean you have to be ironic. Now where are those goddamn rockets?”

  “Over there,” Laurie points. “In the box.”

  “Come on, Laurie,” Dorsey says, pulling her sister-in-law along with her. “We can’t trust the men to do this. We’d only have a war on our hands. Come on.”

  Hugh looks over at Simon, who is now sitting with Noah on the grass just under the linden. Together, they make such a composed traditional picture, a Fourth-of-July father and son, that Hugh wants to leave them there forever.

  Dorsey has taken Laurie out to the back of the lawn and is making hand gestures like a blackjack dealer; Laurie makes several return gestures, then runs into the house and comes back with an empty Coke bottle in her left hand and several nails in her right. Dorsey has hung a Happy Lamp on the clothesline and has lit a Buzz Bomb, which leaves a spark trail of indigo and concludes with a report that shakes the bathroom window directly behind where Hugh is sitting.

  “All right, everybody,” Dorsey says. “Here’s a Chrysanthemum we’re setting off.”

  “What’s a chrysanthemum?” Tina asks her father.

  Before Hugh can reply, the Happy Lantern hanging from the clothesline starts to spin, radiating snow, and seed, and fire sparks; then the lantern itself drops down, and inside the folded paper white insect sparks jump in anxious fading paths.

  “That’s no chrysanthemum,” Hugh says.

  “No, but this is,” Dorsey announces, and the shell ignites with the sound of a giant cough, throwing the charge into the air, which bursts open into trailed circles of red, white, and blue. Hugh hears his daughter oohing, and for the first time he notices that Amy is clutching her stuffed monkey.

  “And this,” Dorsey says, lighting a multi-cylindered platform arrangement, “is called the shell of shells. Like—” The sound of the shell erases her voice. The shell fragments into a cluster of stars accompanied by volley shots, followed by a screaming descending cry. Simon and Noah begin to clap together.

  “Pa-boom,” Tina says.

  “Pa-boom.” Amy repeats it, her voice higher than her sister’s, and thinned by excited child fright. Hugh sees Amy trembling intermittently with late-night shock.

  “This,” Laurie says, hardly visible behind a cloud of bluish smoke, “is the Hen Laying Eggs.”

  It lifts up; in the air the eggs, white spherical fires, drop down in smooth quiet arcs, blink, go out, and are gone.

  “There’s Mr. and Mrs. MacDiarmid,” Tina says, pointing to Hugh’s neighbors, who stand together, their hands clasped, behind where Simon is sitting with Noah. In the evening light Hugh can see almost no distinct features of their faces or the rest of their bodies, and with his vision of them obscured by smoke and darkness, the generalized outline of the man’s shoulders and the curve of the woman’s hair, and even the shy way they hold hands summon before him the presence of his parents. Almost invisible, withdrawn, for a moment they are his parents, and when Mrs. MacDiarmid waves, using all the fingers of her right hand, Hugh lets out an abrupt, involuntary, “Oh.”

  In the next thirty minutes the two women set off everything else they have: the bottle rockets, chasers, dancing butterflies, a Chinese fountain called a Screaming Meemie, Roman Candles, a whistling cicada, and for the grand finale a ten-shot “aerial surprise.” Off in his corner with Noah, Simon is muttering about “no surprises in the aerial surprise,” but from where Hugh is standing Simon’s voice is hardly audible, soaked into the smoke that rests unmoving in the breezeless yard.

  Then they are all looking up at the sky as a plane passes over, its lights blinking yellow and white and red, and beyond the plane the stars seem immobilized in their usual darkness. In the middle of the cloud of gunpowder and the exploded rubble of the fireworks at their feet, Dorsey is explaining to Tina and Amy about the constellations: there, she says, pointing a bit toward the east, that’s Cygnus, the Swan. It’s sometimes called the Northern Cross. At the head of the swan is Albireo, a double star. And over there, close by it, that little box of stars, that’s Lyra, the Lyre. A lyre’s a harp you can carry around and play by yourself. And over there, north, there’s Cassiopeia. It looks like a chair. See? See? It’s named after the woman, Cassiopeia, who’s sitting in the chair. But you can’t see her unless you imagine her and then she’s still not there.

  The two girls nod, rubbing their eyes. Hugh takes their hands and leads them up the back steps. He pulls them through the storage room to the kitchen stairs up to the second floor. Amy says, “Daddy, carry me.” Slowly he picks her up, astonished by how weightless she seems to be, and holds his other arm out so that Tina can clasp his hand as they go up.

  In the bedroom, they undress vaguely and absentmindedly. Hugh gives Tina instructions while helping Amy into her Wonder Woman pajamas. Tina insists on the air conditioner, which starts up with a rhythmic r
attle. The two girls get into their beds with their eyes closed but their heads held up, like small queens. Hugh sits on the side of Amy’s bed, smoothing her hair and kissing her good night. Then he wishes Tina a happy Fourth of July, and she reaches up and squeezes his hand. Hugh is halfway out of the room when Tina says, “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “Was Aunt Dorsey making that up?”

  “What?”

  “About the constellations. The swan and harp stuff.”

  “No. That’s real. It’s called Cygnus and the other one’s called the Lyre. I’ve heard her say that before. I’ve seen pictures of them in books.”

  “I was wondering.”

  “She knows. That’s her life. She knows everything about the stars that there is to know.”

  “Did she name them herself?”

  “No. Someone else did.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Go to sleep.”

  She turns her head softly on the pillow away from him. Smoke from the backyard has made its way into the room, so that the thin line of light from the hallway seems smeared and haloed, like the light in a barroom around midnight. It bothers Hugh that his daughters’ bedroom has pool hall air in it. The old machine, if it still works, will wheeze the air clear in a few minutes. He hears Tina say a two-syllable word to him after the door is closed, but he can’t make out what it is and he won’t open the door to ask her. On the stairs, he passes Laurie, who is headed up. They raise their eyebrows to each other as they pass and smile businesslike complicit smiles, but they do not stop—Hugh has already decided that he won’t say anything to anyone until he has cleared up the back lawn—and it isn’t until he is already outside again that he even registers that there is a smudge or a bruise on the side of his wife’s face.

  He wakes at three. The night air has cooled but not enough to keep him asleep. He hears a faint rumbling of thunder or fireworks, he can’t be sure which. He rises from the bed wearing his boxer shorts and feels the warm smooth texture of the oak floor under his feet as he makes his slow night way toward the hall, then past his daughters’ bedroom and the solidly closed door of the guest bedroom, to the stairway down to the kitchen.