Another summer is another funhouse, inviting me in then scaring my pants off. This is the summer of the African killer bees, making their relentless flight north, advancing at two hundred aerial miles a year from Brazil, to which a genetics professor named Warwick Kerr had imported them in 1956 before they managed to escape their confines.
This 1950s sci-fi plot—absentminded professor, cage door left ajar—is instantly recognizable from many of the titles on Mel’s Matinee Movie. But the bees are real. And so I lie awake at night wondering if that distant buzz is the air conditioner kicking on or the ineluctable arrival of the bees, who in May were reported to have killed “dozens” and left “a trail of havoc and death” across South America. Seven U.S. senators led by Bob Dole have called for the United States to ally with Mexico, Canada, and the nations of Central America to take “joint defensive measures” against the killers. In the meantime, I run in fear from the spilled Sunkist, the dropped Popsicle, or anything else that might attract a bee bent on homicide.
Even Bush Lake beach is suddenly a place of foreboding. God knows what is hidden beneath its Coppertone-slicked surface, for this is the summer of killer sharks as well as killer bees, death from below and death from above, so the only safe place would seem to be my bedroom. Up here, Tom and I polish our pitch to Dad, begging him to take us to Jaws, despite the terrifying ads in the Star but also because of the terrifying ads in the Star: THE TERRIFYING MOTION PICTURE FROM THE TERRIFYING NO. 1 BESTSELLER.
“You’ll be terrified,” Dad tells us. “You’ll have nightmares.” But I’m having them anyway. A child does not rise in the night to tinkle in his closet because his dreams are reassuring. Mercifully, Dad will not be swayed. And so I have the best of both worlds—bravely asking to see a terrifying movie without actually having to see it.
That leaves one more menacing summer ritual to be endured and enjoyed at the same time: the Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July is frightening for all the reasons it’s alluring. Staying out after dark playing with some kid’s contraband arsenal of explosives—Polish cannons, cherry bombs, smoke bombs, sparklers, spinners, snappers, poppers, snakes, sky rockets, bottle rockets, firecrackers, and the A-bomb of driveway ordnance, the M-80. The M-80, according to South Brook lore, was developed for use by the U.S. Army and is equal to a quarter stick of dynamite.
To hear Mom tell it, the Fourth of July is a festival of carnage, a celebration of lost eyes, burnt eyebrows, dismembered fingers, and blown-out eardrums. She’s right, of course. During the so-called fireworks season of 1975—June 23 to July 20—more than 4,500 people will be treated in America’s emergency rooms for fireworks injuries. Half of all those injuries are to children under the age of fifteen. Three out of four injured are males, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the females—I am left to conclude—are little sisters who had a smoke bomb rolled under their bedroom door. According to the National Fire Protection Association, six people will be killed and eighty-five seriously injured celebrating our nation’s 199th birthday, and by serious injury they mean blindness, loss of an eye, or “traumatic amputation.” Isn’t that the only kind?
Tom is one of the neighborhood kids who has managed to procure explosives on the Fourth. He has a long string of ladyfinger firecrackers flung over his shoulder like a bandolier. He doesn’t say where he got them, and I don’t ask. I’m torn between telling on him and earning his respect. But telling on him would make me a narc and a chicken, so I follow him out of the house with a book of matches from Mom’s supply above the range.
Mom and Dad are on the screened porch with Mr. and Mrs. Leon. They live in Saint Paul. Mr. Leon looks like Walter Matthau from Earthquake and played minor-league baseball in the Phillies farm system. He works with Dad at Mickey Mining. Mrs. Leon went to school with Mom in Cincinnati, and they retained their love for each other in addition to all those other Cincinnati products. On the patio, smoke is issuing from the Weber—and also from Mrs. Leon, who looks elegant and sophisticated with a cigarette in her hand, like a model in a Sports Illustrated Virginia Slims ad.
I follow Tom to the top of the sledding hill, to the crest of the hill for which Hillcrest school is named. We are protected by woods on three sides. I give Tom the box of matches. The gold cover says CAMELOT—ADVENTURE IN DINING. Also KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.
Tom lights a firecracker and lets it sizzle in his hand for a second before tossing it into the woods behind him. He hands me one. I light the fuse and let it burn down in my hand for a single second before flicking it aside like a spent cigarette. Tom throws one at my feet and I jump away. We rifle them into the air and watch them go off against the chalky clouds. We lob them down the sledding hill like grenades, just as the Creek Freak’s three sons—the Dunleavy boys—ride by on their bikes. They live in the neighborhood on the other side of Hillcrest Elementary but are heading toward South Brook. They speed away from the popping dirt as if they’re being shot at by snipers.
When the string of ladyfingers is spent, we go home, straight to the upstairs bathroom, to wash the sulfurous smell off our fingertips, which have somehow remained intact. They smell like the lyrics to “Killer Queen”—of gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite, and laser beams. Mom and Dad and the Leons are still on the screened porch, untroubled by the distant report of firecrackers, unaware that we ever even left. I’m on the bed still fizzing with adrenaline when Tom looks out the window and says, “Oh no.”
His face has gone pale, ghostly white save for the freckles, which look like pepper on a paper plate.
“The Creek Freak,” Tom says. “He’s walking up the driveway.” By the time I peer through a gap in the blinds, the Creek Freak’s on our doorstep, his ten-speed parked in our driveway.
The doorbell rings: bing-bong. Tom shuts our door. It rings again, angry and impatient: bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong.
We listen through the bedroom door. We hear the slap of the screen door that leads from the porch into the house. We hear Mom’s feet in the front hall, her pleasantly puzzled greeting at the door: “Hello.”
Separated from the conversation by a full floor (and an inch of bedroom door laminated in simulated wood grain), I can’t make out everything being said. The Creek Freak sounds a bit like Charlie Brown’s teacher. But it’s clear he’s accused Tom and me of throwing firecrackers at his boys and he demands to know what Mom and Dad intend to do about it.