And so it came to pass that on the Fourth of July, minutes before ten o’clock at night, which was when the stand closed, Fat Boy at the wheel of a stolen white Chevy, Bill to his right, and Chaplin in the back seat, arrived at the firecracker stand.
Fat Boy stayed in the car. Bill and Chaplin got out and went over to the stand wearing Lone Ranger style masks. A fat woman in a muumuu big enough to make a bedspread for most of Bangladesh to lie down on and wrestle a little bit, was buying some Roman candles, some punks, and some matches.
“I just love these here Roman candles,” she said. “You get out where it’s real dark and set ’em off, they’re just as pretty as stars.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the stand worker. The stand worker was a skinny fellow with an Adam’s apple that moved a lot and made him look like a snake trying to swallow a live gopher. When he spoke to the fat lady he seemed about as sincere as a hooker swearing she’d never let anyone come in her mouth before.
The fat lady looked at Bill and Chaplin in their masks. She said, “Boys, it’s the Fourth, not Halloween.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bill said. “We just think we look good in ’em.”
“Well, you don’t.”
“Yeah, and you’re fat as a fuckin’ whale too,” Chaplin said.
“Well, I never,” she said, and got her bag of goods and waddled off to her car and wedged herself inside with a grunt and drove off. Now only Bill and his comrades and the firecracker stand worker were on the site.
The stand worker said, “I ever got that fat, I’d want someone to shoot me, skin me, and tack me on the side of a barn for target practice.”
“Uh huh,” Bill said. “Give me some of them Roman candles there. And a bunch of them Black Cats.”
“How many’s a bunch?” asked the stand worker.
“Two of them long packs,” Bill said.
“Y’all come from some kind of party?” asked the stand worker.
“Somethin’ like that,” Bill said.
The stand worker went at gathering Bill’s order. When he finished, he placed them on the counter. Bill pulled out a pistol and pointed it at him. “While you’re at it, why don’t you just put all your money on the counter too. I’d prefer it in a bag.”
“Why you piece of shit,” said the stand worker.
“Watch your mouth,” said Chaplin, taking out his revolver, “or you’ll find it on the other side of your head.”
“Easy,” Bill said.
“This here is my firecracker stand. What I make here is all I get, ’cept for some little farm jobs I take now and then. I ain’t got a steady job. And you didn’t come from no party neither.”
“We crawled out of that fat lady’s ass when she wasn’t looking,” Chaplin said.
“Pieces of shit,” the stand worker said. “Pieces of shit. That’s what y’all are. You’re robbin’ a man needs all he can get and you don’t even care. There’s niggers wouldn’t do this to me.”
“You’re breakin’ my goddamn heart,” Chaplin said.
“Put the money on the counter,” Bill said.
The stand worker gave Bill a defiant look, reached under the counter and came up with a metal box and opened it and took out the money and put it on the counter. “Get your own sack,” he said.
“You give us a sack,” Bill said, “and put them candles and ’crackers in there too, and if you got any of them little teepee things that spew colors and blow up, put some of them in there, or I’m gonna shoot your dick off.”
At that moment, the elastic on Bill’s mask gave out. The mask sprang forward and floated down and landed on the counter in front of the stand worker. But the stand worker didn’t look at the mask. He looked at Bill’s face.
“Hell, I’ve seen you before,” said the stand worker, proud of himself. “You live across the road there? Yeah. You do. I know you.”
Bill looked at Chaplin. Chaplin and Bill looked at the stand owner, who suddenly grew pale.
“You fucked up,” said Chaplin.
“Don’t,” Bill said, but Chaplin shot the stand owner between the eyes. The stand owner did a short hop backwards, coiled down over his legs as if they were boneless, and lay behind the counter with his head on his knee, one hand reaching up and pulling down a box of firecrackers. Then he was still as the dirt beneath him.
“Oh my God,” Bill said. “You shot him.”
“He knew who you were.”
“I didn’t want nobody killed.”
“Pray over him a bit, maybe he’ll come around.”
Bumfuzzled, Bill stood still as a post.
“Climb over there and get the money,” Chaplin said.
Bill climbed over the counter, got a bag and shoved the money into it, got another bag and put the candles and the ’crackers in it, picked him out a few cherry bombs and the teepee things, put those in the sack. He looked through the dead man’s pockets and found a quarter. He climbed over the counter, tossed the firecracker bag to Chaplin, and they darted out to the car, got in the back seat.
“I heard you shoot,” Fat Boy said. “You shot him, didn’t you?”
“Weren’t no choice,” Chaplin said.
“I didn’t mean for nothing like that to happen,” Bill said.
“That’s what I hate about jobs where you got to have guns,” Fat Boy said. “I hate it.” Fat Boy drove off peeling rubber. “I hate it big. I knew someone was gonna get shot.”
“Well,” Chaplin said, “it weren’t you, so that’s good.”
“It ain’t good,” Fat Boy said. “It ain’t good at all.”
“It don’t matter now,” Chaplin said, counting the money. “Goddamn, we got maybe three thousand dollars here.”
At that moment there was a loud explosion and the car’s rear end did a quick dodge to the right, went off the road and into a ditch, turned over and righted again next to the woods.
Bill licked blood off his mouth and let his stomach fall back down to its proper place. He had taken a bite out of the seat in front of him, but all his teeth were still intact, and his tongue wasn’t bit in two. He only had mashed his lips.
Chaplin sat next to him, very still. The sack with the Roman candles had been in front of Chaplin, and the wreck had driven him forward into one of them; it had fitted itself snugly into his eye socket. He was bent at the waist with the candle in his eye. He had one hand on the candle as if to pull it out, but he hadn’t lived long enough. Blood ran along the candle and down over his hands and spilled into his lap and onto the car seat.
Fat Boy, who had a split bloody nose and a knot on his forehead big enough to wear a hat, turned in his seat, held his head, and looked at Chaplin.
“Shit!” he said. “Shit!”
Bill opened the door, stumbled out and fell down. Fat Boy got out. He leaned against the side of the car. He said, “Blowout. Fuckin’ tire blew out. Dumb shit Chaplin could have stole a better car.”
Bill fell down and lay on the grass for a moment, then got up. He used his pocketknife and a few hard kicks to open the trunk, pulled out the jack, the tire iron, and the spare.
“What you doin’?” Fat Boy said.
“What’s it look like?”
“Chaplin’s dead!”
“He ain’t gonna get no more alive if we leave the tire flat. We got to get out of here.”
Bill put on the emergency brake and set to work jacking up the bumper to get at the blown tire. It was a real job in the dark and Fat Boy continued to wander about the car like a lost duck. He seemed to want to go somewhere but couldn’t quite figure which direction to take.
“Get your ass over here and help with these lug bolts,” Bill said.
Fat Boy lumbered over and got the lug wrench and went at it. He worked the bolts loose, popped two of his knuckles open in the process, pulled the tire off. Bill slipped on the spare. Fat Boy screwed down the bolts and Bill lowered the wheel and Fat Boy tightened them. Bill rolled the bad tire off into the woods and tightened down the trunk lid with a piece of a coat hanger he found back there. They got in the crumpled car, Bill on the passenger side now, and Fat Boy drove them out of there.