matches he found earlier. He tucks his pajama shirt into his pajama pants; drops
both the bag and the matches into his shirt, and prepares to get out of bed.
This is an operation for Marty, but not a painful one, as people sometimes seemed
to think. There is no feeling of any kind in his legs, so there can be no pain. He
grips the headboard of the bed, pulls himself up to a sitting position, and then
shifts his legs over the edge of the bed one by one. He does this onehanded, using
his other hand to hold the rail which begins at his bed and runs all the way around
the room. Once he had tried moving his legs with both hands and somersaulted
helplessly head over heels onto the floor. The crash brought everyone running. “You
stupid show-off!” Kate had whispered fiercely into his ear after he had been helped
into his chair, a little shaken up but laughing crazily in spite of the swelling on
one temple and his split lip. “You want to kill yourself? Huh?” And then she had
run out of the room, crying.
Once he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, he wipes his hands on the front of his
shirt to make sure they’re dry and won’t slip. Then he uses the rail to go hand
over hand to his wheelchair. His useless scarecrow legs, so much dead weight, drag
along behind him. The moonlight is bright enough to cast his shadow, bright and
crisp, on the floor ahead of him.
His wheelchair is on the brake, and he swings into it with confident ease. He
pauses for a moment, catching his breath, listening to the silence of the house.
Don’t shoot off any of the noisy ones tonight, Uncle Al had said, and listening to
the silence, Marty knows that was right. He will keep his Fourth by himself and to
himself and no one will know. At least not until tomorrow when they see the
blackened husks of the twizzers and the fountains out on the verandah, and then it
wouldn’t matter. As many colors as there are on a dragon’s breath, Uncle Al had
said. But Marty supposes there’s no law against a dragon breathing silently.
He lets the brake off his chair and flips the power switch. The little amber eye,
the one that means his battery is wellcharged, comes on in the dark. Marty pushes
RIGHT TURN. The chair rotates right. Hey, hey. When it is facing the verandah
doors, he pushes FORWARD. The chair rolls forward, humming quietly.
Marty slips the latch on the double doors, pushes FORWARD again, and rolls outside.
He tears open the wonderful bag of fireworks and then pauses for a moment,
captivated by the summer night-the somnolent chirr of the crickets, the low,
fragrant breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees at the edge of the woods,
the almost unearthly radiance of the moon.
He can wait no longer. He brings out a snake, strikes a match, lights its fuse, and
watches in entranced silence as it splutters green-blue fire and grows magically,
writhing and spitting flame from its tail.
The Fourth, he thinks, his eyes alight. The Fourth, the Fourth, happy Fourth of
July to me!
The snake’s bright flame gutters low, flickers, goes out. Marty lights one of the
triangular twizzers and watches as it spouts fire as yellow as his dad’s lucky golf
shirt. Before it can go out, he lights a second that shoots off light as dusky-red
as the roses which grow beside the picket fence around the new pool. Now a
wonderful smell of spent powder fills the night for the wind to rafter and pull
slowly away.
His groping hands pull out the flat packet of firecrackers next, and he has opened
them before he realizes that to light these would be calamity-their jumping,
snapping, machinegun roar would wake the whole neighborhood: fire, flood, alarm,
excursion. All of those, and one ten-year-old boy named Martin Coslaw in the
doghouse until Christmas, most likely.
He pushes the Black Cats further up on his lap, gropes happily in the bag again,