Heaven's Fire (2 page)

*****

Unlike the TV8 on-air talent,
Simon Aamot of the ATF understood exactly what he had just seen on his television screen.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had jurisdiction over the fireworks industry, and Simon was an explosives specialist out of the Milwaukee office, just north of Liberty.

What he didn't understand was how the camera operator
--who was obviously right there--
could have stood and filmed it all without doing anything.

You know, something simple like bending down and pulling the burning garbage
away from the shells
, so they weren't all blown to hell and back. Or just nudging it unobtrusively with his foot to Pat Firenze, so
he
could dispose of it. Or just getting the hell out of there, though that was one of the problems with shooting fireworks from a barge: Where do
you go if something goes wrong?

Even assuming the crew had loaded the first group of shells in the mortars, there would
be
hundreds more in the box, waiting to be reloaded by hand as the initial ones were fired. If all of them had gone up, it would have been one hell of a mess
and
the end of Simon’s night off.

He looked at the beer in his hand, the Oreo cookies on his
chair
and the Irish setter on his couch. The dog was working at getting a cracker and peanut butter off the roof of her mouth and didn't look up.

Okay, admittedly, the night wouldn't have been a huge loss, but the Firenzes would have been.

Simon had been in charge of an investigation of an explosion at
the
Firenze
's fireworks factory
two years earlier--one
that had killed
Pasquale's brother
, Francesco.
Since then,
the ATF agent had
spoken at the safety seminars the Firenzes held for their guys, eaten at the Firenze dinner table with the family, and talked late into the night sipping homemade wine on the Firenze porch.

To paraphrase Dickens, it had been the best of times
as well as
the worst of times. For Simon, anyway.

*****

Pasquale Firenze reached around to peel the Lake Days T-shirt away from his sweat-sticky back and gave a sniff.

His new deodorant had failed, like those TV ads
warne
d. Not that it mattered anyway--he was alone on the barge. No one to smell him or to see him. Nobody to nag, no cameras to play to. All peaceful-like. Just a man and h
is fireworks, like it should be here in the first year of a new millennium.

Let
his son
Pat do the publicity bullcrap for Bryan Williams, who was in charge of Lake Days. Who in hell wanted to watch fireworks on the television anyway, that’s what Pasquale wanted to know.

Pasquale had been a natural showman from his birth nearly seventy years before. A show-off his mother had called him. Show-off or not, he knew instinctively what people wanted from his fireworks, and it wasn’t something they could get through a TV screen.

They wanted to be afraid.

Just a little afraid, but enough. That’s what made his fireworks different. They scared people. They were big and they were noisy and they were lighted by men with torches, not computers with wires.

So what if a shell broke low? You made it work, like Pat had just done. You
made
it perfect, even if it wasn't.

To Pasquale, fireworks weren’t just something you watched, they were something you felt and smelled and tasted. They thumped you hard in the chest when they went up, and rained black powder and fire when they came back down. In the shower, hours after a show, he would suck in the smell of them, taste the grit in his mouth, and be happy.

Pasquale chewed on his lip now and looked out over the water toward the boats pressing in. The fireworks barges were set in a triangle inside the breakwater, with the north and south barges forming the base of the triangle closest to the shore. Pat was on the north barge with the fireworks for the body of the show, and Pasquale's daug
hter Angela and her husband Ray--Tudy's son--
were on the south barge with the shells for the grand finale. The center barge, Pasquale's barge, carried the big twelve- and sixteen-inchers, and formed the peak of the triangle, pointing east out across the lake.

Pasquale had done it that way so the big shells would be farthest away from the crowd on shore, just in case something went wrong. There was a crowd on the lake, too, though, and the Coast Guard had been running back and forth all night, herding the pleasure boats back a good two, three football fields away from the barges.

A muffled thud sounded just then, and a rocket went up from one of the spectator boats. Pasquale spat into the water and eyed the shell as it angled toward Angela and Ray's barge, then splashed into the lake, well short, thanks be to God.

Stonatos
, he thought. We’re sitting on two, three tons of powder out here, and it’s like they’re lighting giant matches and tossing them at us.

A Coast Guard boat motored past, looking for the
stonatos,
as Pasquale eyed the shells now breaking again over his son's barge. Too slow, he thought. He'd told Pat a million times: It's like music, Little Pat. We're building to a "crescendo."

Shaking his head, Pasquale pulled out his radio.

*****

Angela Firenze Guida listened, shaken, as her father gave Pat instructions over the radio. When she'd heard the explosion, she'd worried that--

Ray whistled for his wife from the mortars.
"
Hey, Angie. Get your gorgeous butt over here. We go in three.
"

She stumbled to her husband.
"
But did you see what happened? Fire in the box. Your father and Pat could have been killed.
"

"
Yeah?
"
Ray looked up from the sandbag he was adjusting at the base of the first finale mortar.
"
Makes you wonder who packed the shell, doesn’t it?
"

Getting no answer, Ray fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag. In it was a battered p
ack of cigarettes with a silver
lighter tucked between the pack and the cellophane.
"
You got a flare or we going to use my lighter?
"

"
I have a flare, and you know you shouldn't smoke around the shells.
"

"
You don’t want me to smoke anywhere.
"

It was true. Angela hated that Ray smoked cigarettes. The smell clung to everything.

She just shrugged and Ray, watching her, slipped the smudged lighter out and, with one smooth movement, flipped open the lid and flicked the wheel, sending sparks and an orange flame up into the night. "See? Fireworks? O
o
hh-ahh..."

He smiled at her, and she caught a glimpse of the charming clown he had been back in high school.
"
It’s almost time, Ray.
"

He blew out the flame and snapped the lighter closed, setting it down with the cigarettes before moving toward the end of the quickmatch.
"
You have to lighten up, Angie, you know? Things can’t always be perfect."

He was right, of course. Angela did want everything to be right. And so little in life was. She picked up the red flare, twisted off the end, and struck it on the floor of the barge like a giant match.
"
It’s just--
"

"
Don’t jump the cue now. They’ll count us down,
"
Ray interrupted. His face looked yellow in the light from the torch.

Angela nodded and waited, flare burning at her side. Her father's voice crackled over the radio.
"
Finale in five, four, three, two, one.
"

She touched the flare to the end of the quickmatch and the flame raced down the fuse to the shells. Quickmatch was cotton string, coated in black powder and then encased in paper tubing. The tubing contained the gases from combustion, causing the fuse to burn very quickly--sixty feet per second. Without the tubing, the same fuse would burn closer to one inch per second.

The quickmatch flashed down the mortars set out on the south barge like giant explosive dominos--one row dividing into two, two into four, four into sixteen--sending up shell after shell, faster and faster, to create a spectacular tangle of light and color in the sky.

"Heaven's Fire," her father
called it
, and Angela treasured that ver
bal poetry from the man who had
devoted his life to creating the visual and the aural.

To creating perfection
, because nothing else would do
.

As the titanium salutes started up, Angela Firenze Guida took a step away from her husband and lifted her face to the sky.

*****

Pasquale was watching the lighted windows of the Waverly Apartments as he waited his turn, flare in hand. The white titanium salutes were thundering overhead, building momentum, and Pasquale could feel the crowd holding its collective breath, wondering whether this time, this year, the windows of that building would all come tumbling down. And they’d be here to see it.

Every year, the Monday morning after Lake Days, Mrs. Fetcher from the apartments would call and complain to Pasquale that her scrawny dog
"Coco"
was afraid to go out to do its business.

The way Pasquale figured it,
he
hadn’t done
his
business right if that call didn’t come.

"
You ready, little dog?
"
Pasquale called out across the water. He waved the flare in the direction of the Waverly. His felt almost giddy now, like a young man with his whole life in front of him.
"
You already do your business for the night, Kooky? I sure hope so.
"

The salutes cut off then, and Pasquale, blocking the wind with his body, steadied his hand and touched the flare to the quickmatch. The quickmatch would light the time fuses on each sixteen-inch shell and send them up three seconds apart, just like clockwork.

The fireworks man felt good, focused, like he always did during a big show. Acutely aware of
just
himself and
the job at hand
. He heard only the whoosh of the quickmatch. Then the
"
whump,
"
when the first lift charge ignited. And a whistle as the red shell rose. A sizzle now as the flame marched down the time fuse to the white shell. Pasquale stood back and counted. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand--

Whump. The white lift charge, right on time. Pasquale counted again, for the blue shell this time. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four-one thousand, five...

Something was wrong. Pasquale was already moving forward, fearing the time fuse had failed and knowing he would have to re-light the blue shell by hand. Nobody would even notice, though, if he worked fast enough. If he got there quick enough.

The hot wind died just then, without warning, and in the utter stillness, time seemed to downshift too, like slow motion.

Pasquale was almost at the blue's mortar with his flare, feeling like he was wading through water, when he heard the
first shell, the
red
one,
break overhead. He looked up--had to look even now, with time so precious--and watched the burst unfold so beautiful he just wanted to stop and savor it.

But the seconds were ticking away, and as Pasquale reached the mortar, he heard the white shell burst above him, too. The silver strobes cascading from the center--dangling, floating impossibly long in the sky--giving off just enough light for Pasquale to see the third mortar clearly.

It was just three seconds later--time enough for Pasquale to lean down to the mortar, time enough for the strobes to reach the lake, hissing as they touched--when there was yet another explosion of sound and light. A third explosion--louder and brighter than anything Pasquale had ever known. So much sound and so much light, so pure, so overpowering, that suddenly there was no sound or light at all. Just him. Pasquale.

And the sky.

*****

The noise of the blast was deafening, followed by the stunned hush of a quarter of a million voices temporarily silenced. Then came the low whine of a small plane overhead, the light-bulb message dancing across its wings:
"
Thank you for coming. Drive home safely.
"

Simon Aamot was on his feet in front of the TV screen. Irish, agitated by both the noise of the explosion and Simon’s reaction to it, had jumped off the couch and was alternately barking and snarfling at the open package of Oreos that had fallen on the floor when Simon stood up.