The Roman Candles (standard:drama, 1963 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 04 2009	Views/Reads: 3032/1966	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Fireworks often illuminate more than the night sky. Can you imagine what it feels like for the truck drivers who have to deliver the stuff? I'll bet you can't!!!

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

Norma had grown up like any other farm girl, quick and quiet about her
chores.  When her mother died, she taught herself to sew and cook, to 
roll cigars for daddy from the crisp, cured tobacco leaves.  She dug 
potatoes and slopped the three pigs, fed the dog, swept under the beds 
and scrubbed her daddy's overalls clean.  When Norma was fourteen, she 
cast a stare and a smile at a farm hand.  Two seconds later, she found 
herself flat on her back in the hay with something hot and heavy on top 
of her.  The pitchfork handle slid into her thrashing hands and its 
tines rammed deep into the raper's buttocks.  He ran screaming for half 
a mile before the pitchfork fell out on its own.  Nobody said a word, 
but the boys steered clear of Norma after that. 

Drought dried up the farm and Daddy died of the shingles.  Upstate, in
Covington, Uncle Tim let Norma share a room with his own 21-year-old 
daughter who worked in the fireworks factory.  Norma's skill in 
fashioning cigars was just what they needed. 

Now she wasn't Norma any more.  She was scattered ... 

Tears came from somewhere and moistened the ashes, which clung to Pike's
brown suit.  Inside, he was remembering the times he had come within 
inches of disaster.  The knot inside his belly reminded him of that 
night in Okefenokee swamp a few months back. 

Pike was barreling along the Tamiami Trail from Fort Lauderdale to
Naples, when he smelled smoke.  He ran his truck well off the road into 
a marshy patch and began to check it out.  No sign of smoke.  The smell 
faded away.  He gunned the engine, but the wheels just spun in the mud. 
 He rocked the truck up and back, but it wasn't enough.  The tires dug 
deep into the mire and blue smoke began curdling from their sipes as 
they spun deeper and deeper.  Finally, the drive shaft jammed against a 
rock and that stopped the engine with a loud backfire, shattering the 
dusk. 

Before the echo died, Pike came back to reality.  This time, it wasn't
anything as tame as nitrostarch or dynamite or TNT.  It was ammonium 
nitrate, the chemical that blew away Texas City together with five 
thousand of its population.  Packed high behind him were sacks of pure 
dry crystals, hungry as tinder for a spark.  If it went up, they would 
hear the blast in Miami, an hour's drive away.  The truck shuddered and 
settled a little.  Pike took a good look at his surroundings before 
total blackness set in. 

"I forbid you" said the landscape, and stagnant water lay stealthily in
the bog.  Clumps of amputated rushes drooped among hummocks of sere dry 
brush.  Barren trees shamelessly revealed straggles of abandoned nests 
and old moss.  Dry, rotten wood stumps erupted from soggy mire, 
stretching their drowned roots, grasping for nourishment. 

Here was fresh cow-dung, among the goat-turds.  A sulfury miasma
percolated from the drainage ditch.  Putrid piles of rotting straw 
rustled with sluggish snakes.  Oily ichor oozed from beneath a vagrant 
boulder, sunk like a dying iceberg in the umber sea of rusty weeds. 

"Do not pass," said the landscape, "or I will feed upon your boots and
taste the flesh of your calves, suck you down to your thighs and feast 
upon your belly."  Here and there, the bog regurgitated marrowless 
bones and brainless, eyeless skulls.  A slimy gray jelly clung to each 
bank of the ditch. 

Pike gave no further thought to climbing down from the truck.  Instead,
he switched on the headlights and began flashing the bright and dim 
lights alternately with the foot pedal.  A moment later, he smelled 
smoke again: this time it was a short in the electrical wiring.  The 
lights dimmed perceptively as the acrid smell intensified.  Pike 
finally shut off the lights and the ignition, rolled up the windows, 
locked the doors and lay down on the cracked leather seat to sleep.  He 
never carried a flashlight.  They would have to find his truck in the 
morning. 

The seat was lumpy and his dreams were not pleasant or fulfilling.  He
woke once in a cold sweat, to the rustling sound of some animal 
sampling the fiber sacks.  Nitrate would be spilled all over.  He slept 
again.  In another dream, he felt himself becoming seasick and woke 
startled to find the truck heeling over and rocking back upright.  A 
series of heaves shook him around once more and he realized that some 
large animal -- animals? --tugging on the cargo caused the truck to 
reel.  If they pulled hard enough, it would keel over.  Now he was 
really seasick, and it wasn't a dream! 

Soon he was heaving with the truck, vomiting a thick yellow puddle on
the floor of the cab.  Squinting against the deceptive black shadows, 
he could make out huge ungainly shapes in the fog.  They were the size 
of oxen or steers, in a cluster, pulling together on one sack.  The 
phosphorescent nitrate crystals showered down their forelegs and 
littered the marsh with a shining carpet.  If the truck went over on 
its side, steel might strike a chance rock and provide the spark. 

The truck leaned over further with each tug.  A flashing blue light
suddenly lit up the cab, driving Pike into a panic.  Seconds later, 
flood lamps illuminated the truck from all sides.  The rocking stopped. 
 Muffled voices and shouts came to Pike through the early mist.  Before 
he could gather up the energy to shout back, the truck was surrounded 
by firemen, police, medics, men in boots and stetson hats, a reporter 
with camera and microphone, as well as steel-jacketed members of the 
bomb squad. Weeks later, when all the publicity had died down, Norma 
married him.  Now she was dead. 

He rose clumsily from the ashes, and kicked the debris around some more.
Finally he came over to me.  His eyes were bloodshot and each cheek 
carried a heavy smudge of ash.  His voice was hoarse. 

"What the hell are we supposed to do now?"  Pike was eight, maybe ten
years older than me.  I didn't know what to answer.  Nobody had begun 
to clean up the mess yet, but security guards and insurance agents 
stood at every door and window -- what was left -- with a crowd of 
gawking onlookers beyond the ropes, out in the street.  I knew nobody.  
Pike went over to talk with some official and I left the two of them 
poking around in the scummy ash.  A couple of firemen came in and began 
hacking at one of the blackened walls.  In one corner of the building 
-- the one with the Roman Candles -- a young woman dressed in a 
tight-fitting body stocking was raking a metal detector over the 
debris.  It took me a little while to realize she was listening for the 
buzz of dental fillings, earrings, a belt buckle -- anything made of 
metal that could identify a corpse.  Outside, in the sunlight, an ice 
cream vendor had stopped his truck and was ringing the shrill bells. 

I came to a decision.  As an appraiser, it wasn't worth my effort to
evaluate this mess.  They  could pay the money to somebody else.  I 
waved goodbye to Pike without a word, turned in my badge at the door 
and began walking toward the bridge.  Maybe later, on the other side of 
the river, I might sit quietly and think about it. 

Seattle, March 2, 1989 - Gerald X. Diamond - Rev: June 27, 2009 - All
rights reserved


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