Four Fourths

by Michael Martone

July 4th, 1979, Baltimore

That summer, I read all of Chandler, Hammett, Cain, one paperback book after the next in an old eight-story apartment building on St. Paul Street called the St. Paul. On the fourth floor, I had one room and a bathroom that served as the kitchen, the hotplate on the toilet tank top.  My apartment had been a bedroom in a bigger apartment next door, cannibalized into its own space generating rent, ninety-five bucks the first of the month.  I had filled it up with used office furniture, dinged gray-metal bookcases and a store-cut foam mattress on rough pallets on the floor.  Out the one window, I could see over Love Grove Alley to North Charles Street and the park beyond with the statues of Confederate generals and Edgar Allen Poe who looked in stone a lot like John Wilkes Booth.  It would be easy here to say it was hot that summer, but it wasn’t.  For some reason it wasn’t hot and not even cool but cold.  The room’s one doorway had two doors—a solid oak one that could be left open for ventilation and still be screened by the second one, a painted pine plantation shutter that let in some air and the echoing sound from the hallway.  There was another door in the room leaning up against a wall next to the bookcase stacked with the detective novels I was reading.  I had found the door in the basement.  I liked to look around the old building, see how it had been renovated over the years, how everything fit together.  There in the basement with the storage lockers, the coin laundry, and the old coal bunkers was a room made out of warped studs and unfinished drywall.  The door was open.  A janitor’s room once, I guessed.  There was a bed frame, a broken chair.  I looked behind the door, closing it and discovered the inside side covered with bits of paper glued or thumb tacked or stapled to the wood—gum wrappers and cigarette packs, ticket stubs and matchbooks, a ferry schedule, racing forms, magazine advertisements, paper watch-faces, fortune cookie fortunes, and mass cards.  A private’s sleeve chevron stripe, oyster shells, dominoes, a child’s block (the letter M), several kinds of keys and coins, a comb with some teeth missing where the brad went through.  And everywhere between the paper appliqué and the odds and ends were dozens of every kind of screw and nail holding nothing, it seemed, but screwed or pounded into the inside of the door at different depths for their own sakes.  I unhinged the whole door one night and took it back upstairs to my room.  I’d read in bed.  I read the door and my books.  It was cold that summer.  I’d turn the page and look up, get distracted by the door.  Something new, I’d find it there.  Stamps.  Baseball card.  Time card.  Bottle cap.  Betting slip.  Evidence.  The fireworks that Fourth of July were being launched from Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street not that far away.  I had found the way up to the roof.  I bought a folding beach chair, aluminum tubes with webbing, and took it, a blanket, and a book with me to the roof.  I unfolded the chair on the wooden boardwalk that seemed to float above the gravel roof, sat down and waited.  It was cold.  I said that.  I wrapped up in the blanket, read.  I was the only person on the roof though I could hear the crowds of people down below making their way up St. Paul and 33rd Streets to the stadium.  It took a long time to get dark, and I read The Big Sleep until I fell asleep.  I woke up finally in the silence after the loud cracking booms of the firework finale stopped, the smoke of all the explosions, black on the black night sky, drifting south toward the Inner Harbor.

July 4th, 1980, Ames, Iowa

That summer, I moved to town a month early before the job started and rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old brick house near the power plant downtown.  At night, I walked to Main Street through Band Shell Park that did have an old band shell used, I found out, for concerts once a week by the city’s band, wearing uniforms left over from the high school production of Music Man, playing Sousa marches and Sound of Music songs at dirge tempo.  In the branches of the oaks beyond the band shell, a cow, a Jersey, perched, or so it seemed, content and grazing.  Boyd’s Dairy’s life-sized sign swayed above the ice cream stand, suspended by invisible wires from old flagpoles.  Boyd’s served four flavors—chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and a daily special that was usually bubble-gum.  I got a scoop of chocolate in a cup, walked down Main Street to the deserted train station and sat on the platform under the overhanging eaves, my back against the wide clapboards and looked out over the double track right-of-way.  I waited for the next train going through, east or west, forty or fifty a day, grain trains mainly made up of closed hopper cars or gondolas painted in ice cream pastel colors hauled by the green and yellow engines of the Chicago and Northwestern, the Cheap and Nothing Wasted, blowing the horns through every crossing all through town and punctuated on the end with a caboose in a blindingly bright shade of safety yellow whose brakeman or conductor in the bay window usually took the time to wave at me as I waved back with my pink plastic spoon.  When I first moved to town, I walked through the park and past Boyd’s Dairy and up Main Street to the Hotel Muhm to have my hair cut by the barber whose shop was in the lobby.  That summer I was reading westerns, starting with The Last of the Mohicans, Shane, and Little Big Man.  I had The Virginian when I went inside and began to read it as I sat down to wait my turn.  Then the barber finished with the customer and the customer paid while the barber dusted the seat of the chair with a towel.  I put a dog-ear in my book and sat down in the empty place, waiting for the barber to drape the sheet around my neck.  “I don’t cut long hair,” he said.  “OK,” I said to the barber standing behind me.  “I said,” he said, “I don’t cut long hair.”  My hair was long, I thought, that was why I came in for a haircut, but not that long.  Before I could say anything more, the barber said, “I don’t cut your hair.”  And I got up and left.  When I opened the door to the flat, I saw the door I found in Baltimore leaning against the far wall of the big empty living room that had been converted into my bedroom by the convertible couch converted into an unmade bed.  I still had to finish the unfinished white pinewood bookcases, staining them later to look like dark oak.  Soon after that, my tooth began to ache, one in back on the left, the lower jaw, from the cold when I had my daily ice cream, and I had to find a dentist.  I didn’t have a car then so I walked into the first office I could walk to.  The dentist was able to have a look right then, no waiting, and I sat in the chair with my finger still in my place in The Virginian.  My wisdom teeth were impacted, all of them, and the dentist recommended they come out as soon as possible and recommended the long holiday weekend.  I had been told that there was a neighborhood parade on my block—bicycles and red wagons tricked out with crepe paper and streamers, kazoo bands, batons, hula-hoops and everyone with little flags.  Recovering after the procedure, I could take my lawn chair and sit by the curb, see the kids ignite snakes on the sidewalk and light sparklers in the daylight, watch the riding lawnmowers trailing bunting and the dogs and cats dressed up like minutemen.  I never made it to the parade, only imagined it in my stupor brought on by the pain pills I was given, the left-over effects of the amnesia drugs that kept me awake for the removal of teeth numbered 1, 16, 17, 32 but left me remembering nothing, nothing of it until I woke up on the train platform, my ear to the ground, the steel wheels stuttering over a rail joint, waiting for this train, convinced that a wave from the brakeman or the conductor was all I needed to get better, the cool mint colors of the cars already gone, forgotten, a balm.

July 4th, 1983, Branford, Connecticut

That summer I rented a house in Branford, a shoreline village outside New Haven.  The house, an old foursquare with a big screened-in porch, was built above a pebble beach overlooking a very calm Long Island Sound.  Long Island itself was in the distance, a thickening of the pencil-line horizon off to the south.  I read, in a hammock strung up on the porch, all of Patrick O’Brian’s books set on sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars that always mention the hammocks strung up between the beams of the lower decks of the frigates, the man-of-wars, the ships-of-the-lines.  I would look up from the book to see the Sound off in the distance—through the screen, the branches of trees, and over the house roofs—suddenly filled up with sails of all types reaching across the cove and then turning and tacking back down east.  Speed boats darted across the wakes, the only wave in the water, going up on step and slapping back down to make a sound that would reach me many seconds after it happened.  When I wasn’t reading, I walked through the neighborhoods of houses, most of them year-round places whose inhabitants lived all the time at the beach so that the novelty of the ocean had worn off.  They vacationed elsewhere.  On the drive across the country to get there, I went through Amish settlements in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and stopped once in one of the stores and bought a big, black, broad-brimmed flat straw hat I wore as I walked through the town, down to the beach with my folding chair and flag striped towel to watch the boats wheel, the fang-shaped sails stirring in the smooth water with the bright sunlight amplifying what little chop there was, a sprinkle of sparkle.  I rolled up my long pants to the knees and waded out into the shallow water. The breeze that pushed the boats blew further out.  The shade from my hat cast a black shadow like a hole into which I could step, fall completely through.  I had driven out to Branford in a ’67 Dodge Dart I inherited from an aunt.  The temperature gauge had never worked in the car until it did one night, instantly jumping from C to H as I drove through fields in Iowa, fireflies sparking off the corn all around me.  The radiator blew, blowing fluid through the hood onto the windshield.  Ever after, mechanics, who loved working on the ancient engine, the old slant-six, clucked when they saw the blood-red rust had painted the engine and its compartment.  From Branford, I drove the Dart into New Haven, stood in line for a seat in one of the pizza places there, something the guidebooks said I should do.  By the end of the summer, I ended up liking Sally’s more than Pepe’s, not so much for the pizza as for the many pictures of Sinatra on the wall there.  I stood by myself in the waiting lines outside, and often sat with strangers inside, taking up the odd seat and only mentioned I was spending the summer in Branford if anyone asked.  I read about old sea battles and walked to the beach and through the town and then back up to try to write something myself—a story or a poem—as I rocked slowly back and forth in the hammock on the porch.  Or, as a change of pace, I hiked up the road toward the interstate, to the Trolley Museum and rode an old street car—the PCC salvaged from Philadelphia, the bright red open-sided convertible car from Brooklyn, or the drab trolley from St. Charles line in New Orleans with the destination placard scrolled to Desire.  The cars trundled through the salt marshes and scrub forest, sparks spilling from the overhead wire on the turns.  At Short Beach, where the track ended, the motorman got out to lower the trailing trolley and then forked up the other one to contact the wire.  He got back inside flipped the backs of the rattan benches to the front, powered up the car then to go back in the other direction.  I turned the lights out in the house the night of the Fourth.  The neighborhood around me was dark, the houses emptied out. The local families going into New Haven to celebrate, a vacation from the permanent vacation the village seemed to live.  There was no moon but plenty of stars drifting south and west.  Far away on the north shore of Long Island the fireworks there began, launched to bloom silently just above a seam in the dark.  The explosions were so small that I couldn’t tell the patterns or be sure of the color only the intensity of light.  The porch screen blurred the little smudges further, framed them in the pricked openings of the wire mesh.  It is all perspective, the miniature bombardment that breathed out and then smeared, falling back into the sea.  Up and down the length of the island, the static scatter of sparks, as if they were signaling each other, a couple dozen patches flaring up, tendrils of one or two high altitude rockets arching back over the lit-up pulse of smoke.  Fleck of rust.  Burning mold.  A random pantomime that seemed to communicate, in some subdued but desperate code, that something urgent was happening somewhere else.

July 4th, 20–, Fort Wayne, Indiana

That summer I went back home to sell my parents’ house, living there, sleeping in my old room, getting the place ready to put on the market.  I had to cull through everything, decide what I would put in the garage sale, what I would give away, what I would cart off to the dump.  My father collected souvenir golf balls he kept in pressed-paper egg crates.  Each ball was printed with a different stencil or decal commemorating some event, a company or tournament logo, sports team mascot, fortune cookie sayings, motivational mottos.  My mother framed pictures using the same frames over and over, stripping out the picture and mat, replacing it with a new mat and photo, then storing the old one behind the new one sealed up inside the brown paper backing.  Opening up the paper backing of a picture was like opening a Christmas present with the gift being the layers and layers of past pictures, of annual Christmas photos, say, July Fourth picnics in the backyard, stashed there.  The Christmas shots were department store studio pictures of the three of us and then just the two of them through the years.  The wallet-sized copies had been sent out in the Christmas cards.  I read science fiction at night, books about the future after a day of grubbing through the past.  I read brittle paperbacks, foxing pocket-book editions I read first when I lived there—Dick and Clark and Asimov and Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles—on the same couch I had read them years before.  I worked on curb appeal, continuing to cut the lawn in a checkerboard pattern like my father had.  I shaped the hedges, cleaned the gutters, painted the shutters, changed the seasonal windsock from Easter’s green and purple to striped and starred bunting of Memorial Day that would do for the Fourth of July.  The backyard butted up against the boundary of an office park with its cluster of brick and glass box buildings sloping away gently down the contour of a hill to a pond where a gaggle of Canada geese milled.  In the parking lot of the nearest building, an endoscopy office, my parents used to watch the fireworks fired from the top deck of the parking garage on the college campus on the other side of the bypass.  It was easy to drag some chairs and a cooler to a spot there and watch the lot fill up with pickup trucks and vans of families arriving to hold vigils of the night coming on, the sun falling toward the campus.  In the dusk, legal bottle rockets lifted off of truck beds.  Firecrackers sputtered on the ground next to the gathering vehicles as they crept along looking for a spot.  Cherry bombs spooked the geese that spat.  In the black windows of the next building over, I could see the glinting rows of computers, their screen savers, I imagined, flickered and rolled.  A contract company of the post office that remotely examined badly addressed mail and routed it remotely to where it was supposed to go.  The screen savers saving the screen, the flashes there reflected in the glass of the windows as if each window pictured its own tiny fireworks display.  I thought about the workers who would be back soon enough at those consoles after the holiday, scanning the lost and diverted mail scrolling on the screens, attempting to read the blots and smudges splattered on the envelopes, the fractals and fragments of the stuttering hands of correspondents from somewhere.  They would try to put a spine in some smear, make fragments mean something once again, the parts more than the whole or at least something whole enough to mean.  Like that “i” there in that cloud of inky sky.  I imagine the dark dot dotting that “i” as a concentrated black hole, an absence collapsing into the zenith of a rocket’s launch, exploding over the straight streak of its exhaust.  For that instant, a lit mass of a million billion pieces flaring then nothing.  More than nothing.  And nothing more.

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