The Fourth, From Folding Chair to Taillights

The chair’s webbing is a faded green, and one of the armrests has a crack running the length of it, a thin line where the plastic has split but not yet given way. It comes off the shoulder of a man in a shortsleeve shirt, and he lets the legs drop into the grass. The ground is still warm from the day. The grass was cut in the morning, and the clippings have dried into a gray powder that puffs up around the feet of everyone who walks past.

The ballfield is on the edge of town, where the houses thin out and the road gets a shoulder of gravel. The outfield fences are the old kind, twelve feet tall and painted a green that has gone almost white in patches. The pitcher’s mound sits empty, a bare brown circle in the middle of all the grass. Nobody pitched here tonight. The bases are gone, taken in for the season or maybe just for the week, and the chalk lines have faded to ghosts. The field has become a parking lot for a few hundred folding chairs.

They arrive in no particular order. A grandmother in a van with the seats folded down, carrying a blanket over one arm and a loaf of something in foil. A teenager with a backpack full of watermelon, the rind already cracking. A man who works at the feed store, still in his work boots, setting up a cooler with ice that sloshes when he sets it down. The chairs face the same direction, toward the spot where the fireworks will leave the ground, out past the fence where the mowed grass turns into wild grass and the wild grass turns into the black line of trees.

There is no hurry. The sun has maybe two hours left, and it sits on the horizon like a held note. People talk across the rows of chairs, calling names, asking who brought the lighter fluid. The smell of charcoal smoke starts to mix with the smell of cut grass. Somebody has a radio, but the batteries are low and the music bends and wavers, and no one is listening much anyway.

The Test

As the light finally starts to go, the far edge of the field begins to glow with the yellow haze of bug lights. The mosquitoes arrive on schedule, thin and hungry, and the slap of palms against arms and ankles becomes a kind of percussion. Children stop running. The youngest ones are collected onto laps, wrapped in blankets that smell like closets. The talk gets quieter. Everybody is watching the same two things: the darkening sky and the spot behind the fence where nothing has happened yet.

And then it happens. A single firework goes up, before the show is supposed to start, before anyone has announced anything. It is always the first one, and it is always a test. The shell climbs without a sound, a white dot against the last blue of the day, and then it bursts a second too early. The sparks are thin, the color is weak, the boom comes late. Somebody’s dog barks once. The crowd offers a polite, scattered cheer, the kind you give a child who has just made a basket. The test has told the people who run the show everything they need to know about the wind and the dampness, and they go to work.

There is a long pause after the test, longer than anyone expects. The mosquitoes get bolder. Someone lights a citronella candle, and the orange flame is suddenly very bright against the dark. The children who are too old for laps sit cross-legged in the grass, pulling sparklers from a paper package. A pack of sparklers appears on the lap of a woman in a lawn chair, and she lights one with a cigarette lighter. The first child holds it away from his body like a small torch. The sparks are white and furious, spitting onto the grass, making his face glow for a second before he waves it out. Another kid gets one. Then a dozen. The adults watch the sparklers as much as the sky, because the sparklers are the only thing in the world that is doing anything.

The Show

When the main show starts, it starts fast. A rapid thump of three mortar launches, one after another, and the sky is suddenly full of red and white and blue, all at once, overlapping, too much to take in. The boom arrives a moment later, shaking the chairs, vibrating through the grass and up into the soles of shoes. The crowd does not cheer. They make a sound that is more like breathing in together, a single long ah, and then the next one goes up and they do it again.

The fireworks keep going for what feels like a long time, and then goes quiet for a second. A child?s voice cuts through the dark: “That one was a bunny.” No one knows what that means, but everyone understands. The smoke drifts across the field, smelling like spent matches and sulfur, and it catches the colors from the flashes, turning briefly pink or green before the wind tears it apart.

The finale arrives the way finales always do, with a rising tempo, the shells coming faster and faster until the sky is not dark between them anymore. The whole field is lit in white pulses. The last one is a huge, slow bloom of gold that hangs there as if it is deciding whether to come down. It is still falling when the silence begins pressing in again, soft at first, and then the night is back. The smoke hangs low over the outfield, drifting toward the houses, and the crowd claps, a long and genuine applause. Someone yells a word that no one can make out. A child says, “Is it over?” and a parent says, “Yes,” and the child starts to cry a little, not because of the noise but because it is over.

The Exit

The chairs fold up with the same aluminum click they made when they came out, but faster now, and from all over the field at once. Coolers are shut, blankets are shaken, flashlights are turned on and off and turned on again. The field lights are still off, so the only light is from the bug lights and a hundred little flashlights walking toward the lot. The snow of dried grass rises again, stirred by the shuffle of feet.

The cars start all at the same time. The gravel lot empties onto a two-lane road that was never meant for this many cars, and for a while the headlights stack up, one row behind the next, waiting for the line to move. People roll down their windows and say goodnight to each other across the gaps. The fireworks are still smoking out there, a haze hanging over the field where the chairs used to be. The grass is patched with bare spots where the coolers sat, and the dandelions in the outfield have been flattened into little rings.

From the road, you can still see the last of the smoke if you come over the rise. The taillights stretch ahead, a long red cord pulled taut into the dark, and the stragglers are still backing out of trackside parking, their tires spinning on gravel that sounds like water. Somewhere behind all of it, a car door slams, and a voice calls out a name, and the night takes it. The field is empty by midnight, except for the cigarette butts and the pop tabs and the paper wrappers that the ground crew will find in the morning, and the smell of burnt powder that stays for a day. The folding chairs are back in trunks and garages, and the last firework is already only a memory that someone will tell to someone else tomorrow, while the sky is blue again.