Ma looked at me, and I looked at Ma. She shook her head and I shook mine. Then she said, ‘Next year.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Next year.’

She held up her glass – we were drinking Bucket Lucks that night, as I recall – and I raised mine. We drank to victory in oh-thirteen. And that was how the Fourth of July Arms Race began. Mostly I think it was that fucking trumpet.

Pardon my francais.

The followin June, I went to Pop Anderson and explained my situation; told him how I felt the honor of us on the west side of the lake had to be upheld.

‘Well, Alden,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what shootin off a bunch of gunpowder has to do with honor, but business is business, and if you come back in a week or so, I might have somethin for you.’

I did just that. He took me into his office and put a box on his desk. Had a bunch of Chinese characters on it. ‘This is stuff I ordinarily don’t sell,’ he said, ‘but me and your ma goes all the way back to grammar school together, where she spelled me by the woodstove and helped me learn my times tables. I got you some big bangers they call M-120s, and there’s not much bigger in the loud noise department unless you want to start tossin sticks of dynamite. And then there’s a dozen of these.’ He brought out a cylinder sitting on top of a red stick.

‘That looks like a bottle rocket,’ I said, ‘only bigger.’

‘Ayuh, you could call this the deluxe model,’ he said. ‘They’re called Chinese Peonies. They shoot twice as high, then make a hell of a flash – some red, some purple, some yella. You stick em in a Coke or beer bottle, just like with ordinary bottle rockets, but you want to stand well back, because the fuses are going to fizz sparks all over the place when they lift off. Keep a towel handy so you don’t start any brushfires.’

‘Well that’s great,’ I said. ‘They won’t be blowin no trumpet when they see those.’

‘I’ll sell you the whole box for thirty bucks,’ Pop said. ‘I know that’s dear, but I’ve also thrown in some Black Cats and a few Twizzlers. You can stick those in chunks of wood and send them off floatin. Awful pretty, they are.’

‘Say nummore,’ I told him. ‘It’d be cheap at twice the price.’

‘Alden,’ he said, ‘you never want to talk that way to a fella in my line of work.’

I took em back to camp, and Ma was so excited she wanted to set off one of the M-120s and one of the Chinese Peonies right away. I didn’t often put my foot down with Ma – she was apt to bite it right off your ankle – but I did that time. ‘Give those Massimos half a chance and they’ll come up with something better,’ I said.

She thought it over, then kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘You know, for a boy who barely finished high school, you’ve got a head on your shoulders, Alden.’

So here come the Glorious Fourth of oh-thirteen. The whole Massimo clan was gathered over at Twelve Pines like usual, must’ve been two dozen or more, and me’n Ma was out on the end of our dock in our lawn chairs. We had our box of goodies set down between us, along with a good-size pitcher of Orange Driver.

Pretty soon Paul Massimo come out to the end of his dock with his own box of goodies, which was a bit bigger than ours, but that didn’t concern me. It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, you know, but the size of the fight in the dog. His two grown boys was with him. They waved, and we waved back. Dusk commenced, and me n Ma started shooting off Black Cats, not one by one this time but by the pack. The little kids did the same over on their side, and when they got tired of that, they lit up their big sparklers and waved em around. The son with the trumpet blew a couple of times, kind of tunin up.

A bunch of the younger ones heard it and come out on the Twelve Pines dock, and after some talk, Paul and his grown boys handed each of em a big gray ball that I recognized as M-80s. Sound carries across the lake real well, especially when there’s no breeze, and I could hear Paul tellin the little ones to be careful and demonstratin how they was to chuck em out into the lake. Then Massimo lit em up.

Three of the kids threw high, wide, n handsome like they were s’posed to, but the youngest – couldn’t have been more than seven – wound up like Nolan-friggin-Ryan and chucked his right onto the dock between his feet. It bounced and would’ve blown his nose off if Paul hadn’t yanked him back. Some of the women screamed, but Massimo and his boys just about fell down laughin. I judge they might have had more than a few shots. Wine, most likely, because that’s what those dagos like to drink.

‘All right,’ Ma said, ‘enough friggin around. Let’s show em up before that tall one starts honkin his goddam horn.’

So I took out a couple of the M-120s, which were black and looked like the bombs you sometimes see in those old-time cartoons, the ones the villain uses to blow up railroad tracks and gold mines and such.

‘You be careful, Ma,’ I said. ‘Hold onto something like this too long and you’d lose more than just your fingers.’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said. ‘Let’s show those spaghettieaters.’

So I lit em, and we threw em, and ka-pow! One after the other! Enough to rattle windows all the way to Waterford, I should judge. Mr Hornblower froze with his trumpet halfway to his lips. Some of the little kids started to cry. All the women ran down to the beach to see what was goin on, if it was terrorists or what.

‘That’s got em!’ Ma said, and she toasted to young Mr Hornblower, standin over there with his trumpet in his hand and his thumb up his ass. Not really, you know, but in a manner of speakin.

Paul Massimo and his two sons walked back to the end of the dock, and there they huddled like a bunch of baseball players when the bases are loaded. Then they all walked up to the house together. I thought they was finished, and Ma was sure of it. So we lit up our Twizzlers, just to celebrate. I’d cut squares of Styrofoam from some packin material I found in the swill bucket out back of the cabin, and we stuck em in those and pushed em out into the water. By then it was that deep purple time that comes just before full dark, awful gorgeous, with the wishin star up there in the sky and all the others ready to peep out. Neither day nor night, and always the prettiest time there is, that’s what I think. And them Twizzlers – they was a lot more than pretty. They was beautiful, floatin out there all red and green, waxin and wanin like candle flames, and reflectin on the water.

It was quiet again, too, so quiet you could hear the thumps of the fireworks show gettin started over Bridgeton way, plus frogs startin to croak again along the shoreline. The frogs thought all the noise n ruckus was over for the night. Little did they know, because just then Paul and his two grown boys come back down to their dock and looked across at us. Paul had somethin in his hand almost as big as a softball, and the grown boy without the trumpet – which made him the smarter of the two, in my opinion – lit him up. Massimo didn’t waste time but slang it underhand, high above the water, and before I could tell Ma to cover her ears, it went off. Holy Jesus, the flash seemed to blot out the whole sky, and the blast was as loud as an artillery shell. This time it wasn’t just the Massimo women and girls who came to see, but damn near everybody on the lake. And although half of em probably pissed their pants when that fucker went off, they were applaudin! Do you believe that?

Ma n me looked at each other because we knew what was comin next, and it surely did: Captain Hornblower raised his fuckin trumpet and blew it at us, one long blast: Waaaaah!

All the Massimos laughed and applauded some more, and so did everybody else on both sides of the water. It was humiliatin. You can understand that, can’t you, Andy? Ardelle? We’d been outexploded by a bunch of Eye-Tie flatlanders from Rhode Island. Not that I don’t like a plate of spaghetti myself from time to time, but every day? Get out!