--- G R E G O R Y   B R O W N

They came bouncing and strutting through the holiday cheer like renegade gypsies. Just two kids moving with the confidence of four; they couldn't have been any taller than a tombstone. One, stretched out and spindly, had his back pockets stuffed with sparklers. The other one, the fat one, was unarmed. He had a silly-putty face that sagged and drooped, tipped and twisted, sprouted up and just all together danced in sporadic directions: the skin pink and blotchy like melted peppermint candies; the eyes appearing, disappearing and reappearing in between the sweet, shifting folds. A real pink putty tornado of flesh, combined with a real pissy, wanna-be-bully demeanor.      I'd seen the fat one before: Elmer Barns, I think. The little one was familiar, too. He was hard to place, though, and overshadowed by his loutish companion. Plus there was something, a nagging, little thing about the way his head caught the wind and blew in every direction that made me wonder if he was worth trying to remember.      A concrete path stretched forward at an angle and sliced the park in two triangles. A pristine white gazebo with ornate lattice work loomed on one side. A swing set and a slide huddled on a patch of mulch chips on the other side. Tea tables filled the gazebo, which teemed with conversation and rolled with the creaking, unsure movements of people who had reached a point in life when their bodies struggled to keep pace. It was the Fourth of July. On the tables sat pitchers of lemonade. Sweat ran down the pitcher sides, collecting in little cool pools around the clear plastic bases.      The big one dropped back and let the thin kid snake up in front on the concrete path. He was lithe and moved with a smoothness people noticed in rural New England. Arms flailing, the big one charged his friend. The impact crunched. It sounded like a dog chewing rocks or a church pew groaning under the weight of a hog-bellied lady in a sweat-soaked sun dress. Laughter rang out, and feet dug and hung on the pavement.      "Look out stupid," jeered the big one, his honey-combed cheeks stuffed with M&M candies.      "Why do you have to be like that?" asked the little one, hand buried deep in his back pocket. "Why now?"      "Clam up and get over on our side of the path," said the fat one.      "We don't have a side"      "We'll have one soon."      The small one threw a hand up between the two. "Shhhh."      The fat one stopped cold. "What'd you say to me?" He asked. His big fists ground together.      "Be quiet," the small one said. They're looking." "Who cares?"      "Do you think they know?"      "Don't be a baby."      The thin one stood up straight, braced for a confrontation, turned big, and looked at the ground.      Four streets surrounded the rectangular park. It was early and the wind low, and sets of red, white, and blue streamers hung limp from the street posts and the stop signs at each corner. There were no fences around the park; it looked open to everyone. A line of gravel, clogged with litter, held the grass from the asphalt.      There was a school, Purefin Primary, on the street bordering the park to the north. Below the park, to the south, a block of trailer housing wilted under the sun. Each property was squeezed by a sagging plastic fence, but, despite the pressure, nothing worthwhile ever seemed to ooze out the front doors. Mountains of toys—dented slides, rusted wagons, orange plastic shovels, neglected rocking horses, bent tricycles, splintered Wiffle Ball bats—clogged the backyards. Each trailer had a picnic table with a coffee-tin ashtray sitting proudly on it, labels peeled half back from the leftover damp of June and a pungent mix of tar, ash, and despair leaking out above.      "You still got it right?" asked the fat kid.      The thin kid dug deeper in his back pocket and nodded.      "Good," the big one said. "Don't worry about those foggies then."      "I don't know, Elmer. What have they really done to us?"      "Oh, God. Just shut your mouth up and do what I say."      "But what if . . ."      "Shut it." Elmer rolled the palm of one hand and over the knuckles of the other and listened to the pops. "We've been talking about this for weeks. It's just a little jolt."       A black iron Civil War-era cannon with a tarnished bronze plaque perched itself on a base of loose rocks in the middle of the park. Some days the cannon pointed at the school, other days the trailer housing. Most nights the older kids heaved against the gun and spun the big steel beast towards the houses east and west, where eyes peeked out from behind flower-print shades during the day and retreated inside to eat beef stew with onions and sleep at the first sign of night.      Irving Tanner was the worst. He had a nasty overbite and a set of putrid teeth stained with tar and surrounded by little flaps of sagging skin. His voice roiled, thick with thorns, and his temper sharpened as he aged. Tanner often forced his wife to watch the school and the park and the trailer doors creaking open. Tanner made her sit in their house on the corner and peer through the kitchen window, taking notes and copiously recording the time while he cracked his fists off the white-wood railings and bossed the gazebo around like he sat on some invisible throne. One summer, his wife took to calling it Independence Day instead of the Fourth. Tanner hit her so hard that the cannon outside nearly cracked. She started watching and scribbling even when he was out of town evaluating meat-packing plants from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania or over at the little league field swearing at the chubby first baseman and his other teammates.       There was a playground on the park, and a group of parents were queued up behind the swings, autopilot turned full on. Big John pulled his son's swing back. He paused, waited for his orders, and let go. Large George, on cue, pulled the next swing back and let it loose. Big Susie hitched her load up, pulled it straight back and high as she could. Down the line it went. Children ticked back and forth, up and down the sky on a conveyor belt.      "All right dad," Little John said, a little too flat.      "Again mom, again. Just like that, again," said Little Susie, looking past the park and out of the town.      "Higher. Faster, dad." Small George's feet soared through the sky. "more. More. More!"      From the swing set, Big John was looking at the gazebo. I drew a line from his eyes. Dead bulls-eye on old Tanner's turned-up gums. Tanner didn't miss a chance to sit in the middle of the gazebo and tell stories. There, everyone loved him. His arms floated through the air and his head bobbed from side to side, and he gave others something to pay attention. He was too smart for his own good; had a big mouth and a sick smile, the smile of a slave-driving man. Even the adults still squirmed under Tanner's crooked grin.      The two kids, half up to the gazebo now, were surrounded on all sides. The curtains to the east and west rustled, and an unnatural stillness grew in the gazebo. The older folks owned the park. This was their weekend. Their time to remember, to stroke up whatever color they had left.      The more cognizant ones might have realized what was happening. It was a time to celebrate, not confront, though. Or perhaps they used the rest of their strength—sapped from setting up, from gabbing and watching, from drooling and sipping lemonade—painting on those guarded smiles that probed and forced even the most innocent to burn with guilt.      Elmer spoke to the pavement, "What have they done to us?" His head shook. "What haven't they?"      The thin one cut in. "That's not what I asked," he said.      "What you asked doesn't matter. What you're going to do does."      The little one's eyes expanded. "What I'm going to do?"      "You heard me."      "How do you know what I'll do?" the small one, feeling empowered, stood to the side and quipped.      The fat one raised a hand and curved his finger towards the swing set. "That's how, why, and what for," he preached. "Do you want to be that someday," his hand moved to the gazebo, "and that the next?"      Elmer looked an old lady serving biscuits in the gazebo dead in the eyes. Her gaze was cool and probing, then flickered inviting, and finally morphed to a guarded warmth. She snarled a smile and picked up one of the lemonade pitchers. The pitcher tipped upright. I couldn't see any cups, but had to assume that after all those years, she knew what she was doing. Her hand strangled the handle. Her eyes stuck to Elmer.      The boy let his puffy sockets sit on her. The stares were drawing notice from others in the gazebo now. Bridge hands went un-played. Gossip ceased momentarily. A cribbage board lay still. Elmer kept looking. And all around the old lady, others looked back.      The little one was off to the side, moving towards the shadowed point of the gazebo, pressed flat against its white walls. He slinked through the grass, his head down and torso pushed parallel to the curve of the ground. Huddled beside the gazebo, he placed a package against the structure. Then his hands were in his back pockets, groping and pulling. One hand darted to the front, and I caught a glint of square silver emerge and ignite with a quick flick of his thumb.      Tanner missed the glint of silver but saw the fuse sparking, and he went Independence Day red in the face. He grabbed up his cane and ambled down the steps. His lips moving like a horse's gums, he sent a steady stream of mumbles into the afternoon, slapping the sultry air with cuss words and gibberish. His lemonade hit the ground and the glass shattered. A meek lady next to him started and called for help.      The fuse burned. The gazebo was bedlam. Inside it, others had dropped their smiles. The bad-off ones came awake, shaken back to the present by their nurses. As he crept away, I watched the small kid, the burn of his task hissing behind, stop and shove a sparkler in to the dirt; it speared the ground like some conquering flag.      Tanner stumbled around, following the hissing burn with his good ear. Across the park, Little Susie, sky high now, was laughing; then she was shrieking and crying—her words catapulting skyward only to swish back and forth down to the brown ground.      The thin kid, having slipped around the sun-spotted cracks in the concrete, was half way to the Purefin school steps now. He was down on one knee, as if a great foot had come out of the sky to press on his back and wait for a decision, as if he was juggling some guilt we couldn't yet understand.      The gazebo shuddered when the cache of fireworks exploded. I barely heard the blast; my focus was on the swings. Big John was sitting dazed. In front of the slide, Big Susie sat Indian style. The rush of air from the bang rocked her body back and forth. Her thumbs stuck in her ears and her fingers folded like wings over her eyes. She looked peaceful. She looked much calmer than Big George, who was running in circles, forced to act alone and totally lost.      I didn't see Elmer again, not for sure at least. It seemed that he had disappeared in the smoke. Dense black clouds rolled up the gazebo's sides and into the structure and polluted the lemonade pitchers.      Tanner bounced off the gazebo's outer edges, unable to climb back within its comforting confines. His darkness stained the white walls. He looked about to teeter over; but somehow, sheer spite perhaps, the old man stayed upright. He wobbled down the path, the smoke chasing him from behind and his feet cuffing off the pavement and hitting silent on the parts where the weeds broke through. His hand dug at his chest. The flannel tightened, brass buttons popping apart as his fingers twisted in the fabric. He seemed to be smiling, or at least trying to.      The thin kid was crouched on both knees on the front step of the school now. His hands were over his face, clasped together, and then they were apart and spread over his ears. His lips raced, and I heard parts of what he said, the words coming in whispers: "Create in me a clean heart . . . and renew a steadfast . . . within . . . Do not cast me away . . . and do not take . . . Restore to me the joy . . ."      Tanner stopped when he got to the cold, black cannon. Blood was trickling down over his temples; I couldn't hear his breathing. His hands pounded down on the iron shaft. The metal seemed to melt under his fingernails as he crawled atop the cannon seeking to steady himself and tore at the black finish like bed covers.      I thought I saw Elmer then. Somewhere near the trailer housing, behind one of the backyard fences, his face seemed to be pressed up and pinched between the chain links, his bulk lost among the plastic animals and toy trains. Then I thought I saw him standing next to me, looking defiant and larger than ever. He was in the gazebo then, visible through the smoke, high above the smiles and tea saucers. Finally, on the school steps he sat crying. I couldn't tell if any of it was him or whether the tears were real.      That night the shades inside Tanner's house fell to the floor; his wife never picked them up. In the morning the cannon pointed straight down, the black melting and dripping along its barrel. The swings stopped moving and the streamers came down, and the planning for next year—the first Independence Day in a very long time—began.