The skyline of a city you’ve never visited blazes night-vision green on your TV screen, and the audio track is all thumps and sirens, pippitypops and batterclangs, and you are reminded of the hiss and spit of sixteen flaming fuses on a pack of jumping jacks on that day twenty years ago when you and your best friend Bunk burned six acres of forest to the hot black ground.
Jumping jacks. You buy them on Mott Street from a toothless grocer who natters on about fun-fun and bang-bang beneath a canopy of decapitated poultry. You decide this man is a fool. Jumping jacks may look like firecrackers, but they don’t bang-bang. This man knows not what he sells.
Tear open the red paper wrapping, and a fine peppery dust darkens those candy-cane swirls. The fuses are woven in a gorgeous lace of potential energy. Don’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?
It is a drought-stricken September after a rainless August and a dust-dry July. You and Bunk walk along the trail, kicking through brittle, crackling leaves. Bunk stops, and in his hand suddenly is one of the red paper packages. He unwraps it and says, Check this out, and snaps a flame from his fifty-cent Bic and lights it and tosses it into the air, where it becomes a sparkly gunpowder butterfly — eight jacks per wing on a thorax of fuse — and all this before you can say, Wait.
The sound? It’s a cartoon sound: when a man is startled and his derby hat spins off his head. Fweeee! Math lesson: fweeee times sixteen equals the shit you’re in. But for a moment it equals glory: the fireworks spray spark trails of red and purple and gold and blue as they sizzle and wheel and whirl and spit and squeal. It is a chaos of motion and sound and color that to you (a thirteen-year-old suburban Goodboy) is epiphany, is rapture, is revelation, is power and light. And then it is sixteen spinning fire-sticks MIRVing through the sere orange air.
And then it is sixteen small fires igniting around you. You try to stamp them out; you dance from fire to fire, but flames keep springing back up in the places you’ve just leapt away from. The air turns autumn-smoke gray. At first the smoke teases you with chestnut-cart sweetness, but then it turns to black choking guilt, and panic rises in your throat and nose. Bunk is standing still. Let it burn, he says, and you quit trying to stamp out all those fires, because you believe he knows something you don’t. It’s a moment of self-doubt masquerading as trust in someone else. And then the flames spread, feeding on the forest, chain-igniting, now waist-high, now chest-high, now head-high, now high-high, and you snap back into yourself, knowing that this is fucked up, something is deeply fucked up and about to get a million times more fucked up, and you are a party to all this fucking up, you’ve fucked up, you’re a fuckup, boy howdy you have really fucked things up this time.
Let it burn, Bunk says again, and the deadness in his voice scares you. His mesmerized stare at the flames licking, crackling, devouring — that scares you, too. You don’t understand the hypnotic allure of destruction. You understood that initial rush, that flood of wonder and adrenaline, but not this flat-eyed stare when everything around you is heat and blaze. Destruction scares you shitless, and you run home, alone. You change clothes. You hide your singed-hairless forearms under long sleeves.
The aftermath? You were not caught, Bunk was not caught, no houses burned, and the woods came back strong and true: first as lush, bright green life springing from the scorched ground, then as trees thicker and straighter than before. This, you think twenty years later, was exactly the wrong lesson for you to have learned. Where were the consequences? Where were the fucking consequences?
Today, when skylines burn in night-green, when the president’s faits are accomplis, when smoke rises from spent casings and molten steel and charred skin and newspaper ink and your neighbor’s good morning, you imagine yourself there again, standing in the woods while the trees are igniting, desperately turning to Bunk and finding him lock-limbed in a firegasm, already transformed into someone you don’t know.
It is Bunk’s crackly, dead-leaf voice that now rasps in your ear: We lit that place on fire, man. We burned that motherfucker down.
“Jumping Jacks” is from the upcoming anthology Politically Inspired, edited by Stephen Elliott. The book is due out in October from MacAdam/Cage.
