Fireworks Over Toccoa (7 page)

“Yeah, spaghetti is as close as most Americans get to Italian food.”

“Well, you’ve completely ruined me for spaghetti.”

“I’ll leave you the rest of the bag.”

“I don’t think it’ll turn out the same. I’m a famously poor cook.”

“I don’t believe that for two seconds.”

“Oh, just ask
my
mother.”

“When I was a kid, fireworks always seemed like such a mystery. My father used to say to me, ‘If you love them, you can make them.’ Cooking is just like making fireworks. After you learn the recipes, you try to forget them and you trust your instincts—you give in to them. You take a little of this, and a little of that, separate and distinct sensations, and you mix it all together and,
boom
, you create something wonderful that didn’t exist before.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “I’ve seen you eat. I’ve seen what fireworks do to you. I bet you’re an amazing cook.”

For some reason, she felt the blood rush to her face. She wondered if he could see it in the candlelight.

Jake poured more wine for Lily into a Duralex bistro tumbler made from tempered French glass. Then he poured more into his own. Although she was aware of a dull, distant sense of guilt about not sharing the fine 1937 Haut Brion with Paul as Mrs. Keener had intended, Lily felt certain she would have more regret about not opening the bottle here and now. In this place, with this meal, with this man who had prepared it.

“Sounds like a very wise man, your father.”

“Yeah.”

Lily raised her glass.
“‘A moment in the sky, forever in the heart.’”

Jake touched his glass to hers and drank.

“My father camped a lot when I was growing up,” Lily said in a far-off voice. “Usually with men from his company, but one time—I remember it now like it was yesterday—one time, he took me with him. Just me. And we sat outside at night, like this, and we ate brook trout, which we’d caught that day and roasted over an open fire on a piece of cedarwood. We were right up there, right on that ridge.” Lily pointed to the northwest, to the peak of Currahee Mountain, and then took a bite of risotto and a sip of the Haut Brion, a sublime combination.

“You know that spot well.”

“I see it most every day.”

Jake could hear in her voice how special this place was to her. “Sounds like your father is a busy man.”

“After law school he went to work for Coke. He’s head of international marketing. He was mayor of Toccoa when I was in junior high. Now he’s state senator for our district. But his biggest job is being married to my mother. She’s the one who really runs things around here. She’s had us all working overtime lately getting ready for Paul’s return.”

“Your husband.”

“Yes.”

“How long has he been away?”

“About the same amount of time you were gone. Three years.”

“That’s a long time.”

Lily took a moment, looked off, and then came back to him and met his eyes. “Do you think you’ve changed, Jake? Since you were gone? Do you think you’ve changed?”

“I think people at home think I’ve changed,” he responded in his measured way.

“You sound like you don’t agree with them.”

Jake knew precisely what she was asking, her concerns about what the man she married would be like, though he was not exactly sure what she wanted to hear. He thought about his response for a long moment.

“Have you heard from your husband?”

“I’ve gotten a postcard or a letter from him at least every other week.”

“That’s a lot.”

“I’ve spoken to him on the phone seven times. Hawaii, Philippines, New Guinea, Morocco, En gland, Italy, Germany.”

“He must be a high-ranking officer.”

“Paul is a business executive with Coke. He provides support services for the armed forces. If you ever drank a Coca-Cola overseas, I’m sure Paul had a hand in setting it up.”

“Ah, he’s a ‘Coke colonel,’” said Jake, referencing the nickname given to the Coke men by GIs. Jake had certainly had his share of Cokes while overseas. He’d been amazed how quickly the carbonated beverages often showed up in the most forsaken places, sometimes just hours after the fighting had stopped. After Jake fought to secure the beaches in North Africa, among the heavy weapons and provisions brought ashore by military craft was all the equipment and materials necessary to construct and run a complete Coca-Cola bottling plant, everything necessary to supply the troops with bottles of the carbonated beverage. The images of body bags being loaded onto boats that were simultaneously unloading big canisters of Coke syrup and crate upon crate of those empty famously contoured glass bottles was something Jake would never forget.

A lot of American companies were sending their products to the men on the front lines. But the “Coke colonels,” Jake had noticed, worked hard not only to keep Allied soldiers sated but also to keep the company’s sixty-four overseas bottling plants operating throughout the war, especially those in Coke’s biggest European market, Germany.

Jake found it perplexing and strange that an American company seemed at once both patriotic and traitorous, but he had learned that despite what many thought, nothing in war is ever black and white. This was one of the reasons it was so hard to talk to people back home in Lawrence County who saw it that way.

Did he think her husband had changed? Did he think
he
had changed?

How could he explain what it was like to look into the eyes of a man trying his hardest to kill you? The bright flash from the rifle, the slow-motion terror of shell casings popping, one, two, three, and lead slugs flying by so close you can feel the hot air on your cheek. And then watching up close as the slugs hit the man next to you? How could Jake explain? There were no words to convey these feelings, no pictures to do them justice.

Jake took the night air deep into his lungs, his eyes refocusing on her. “I think the whole world has changed,” he said. “Those of us overseas. And those at home. Everyone. Everything. And the thing is, not everyone knows it yet.”

Though she wasn’t sure exactly why, Lily felt herself tearing up. She turned away from him and willed the tears to stop. What he said really struck a chord with her. On the outside, everything was as it always was. The world seemed to stand still in Toccoa, and when she looked around and took stock of her life everything was as it should be. But on the inside, buried deep, she knew there’d been a shift of some sort. That warm current again. It wasn’t something she was consciously aware of, like oxygen in the air, but every time she breathed in she knew it to be there, knew it was in the composite coursing throughout her body. It was subtle, indistinct, but nonetheless profound.

As the emotions washed over Lily, churning inside her, she realized that seeing the firework from her front porch earlier in the day had made her aware of something that had been hidden away inside, shoved and stacked into some secret niche. Meeting this man, being out here with him tonight, it was all coming to the surface, this deep restlessness, and it was stirring her in unexpected ways.

She didn’t know if Paul would be different, but the honest fact was,
she
felt different than she did three years ago. How much was due to the world changing and how much was her she didn’t know. But the drift was present and palpable.

The conversation could have gone in one of several directions. Lily chose one. “So do you have a girl, Jake Russo?”

“I have my work.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s enough.”

“I think I’d get lonesome traveling around by myself,” she said gently.

“I think I’d get lonesome living with my spouse gone for three years,” he said even more gently.

“He’ll be back in a few days.”

“And then—?”

“And then…” She trailed off, looking away from him. It was pretty bold for him to question her like this, something to which she was quite unaccustomed. No one ever spoke to her with this kind of frankness and sincere interest. And she never spoke back to anyone this way. Still, for some reason, she wanted to be as honest with him as she possibly could be.

She reconnected with his eyes. “And then, I begin my life. We’ll start a family. He’ll build his career.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Yes. I’m part of something. I have a house, a husband, a community. My life is…planned.” Lily meant for this to sound effortless, obvious, just as it did when she spoke to people at church or Keener’s Market. But somehow as she was talking to him, it didn’t come out that way. She felt him looking not just into her eyes but also beyond them, as though he could see into her. “And yours?”

“My plan? My plan is my fireworks.”

“And then—?”

“Then?”

“I mean, how long are you going to be on the road?”

“I don’t know. Guess I don’t have much of a plan, least not beyond what’s in my truck.”

They shared a smile, the sad, whimsical smile of two strangers who shared a moment of truth the way only strangers can. Then they continued eating the risotto and drinking the Bordeaux, each enjoying the experience, however transitory, of being close to another person after so long a time spent alone.

After lingering over the remaining wine, Lily cleared the table while Jake drew more water from the stream. Together they washed the tin plates and forks in a metal bucket of soapy water and then rinsed them clean.

Jake scooped several fistfuls of oily dark-roasted coffee beans from a large burlap sack, dropped them in an old portable coffee mill, and carefully hand-ground them to a fine powder. He produced an aluminum
moka
espresso pot, black Bakelite handled, filled the lower chamber with water, packed the middle filter with the ground coffee and inserted it into the lower chamber, and screwed the upper vessel tightly onto the lower chamber base. Then he placed the
moka
pot on the lit camp stove. Having never seen a device like this before, so simple but so precise, Lily watched in silent fascination. After a few minutes, as steam and boiling water rose forcefully from the lower chamber through the coffee and collected in the top vessel, the
moka
pot began to gurgle. Listening exactingly to the sound, Jake removed the device from the heat at a particular moment. Then he poured ample servings of the rich espresso into two clean Duralex glasses.

He unfolded two field chairs and set a couple of the candles in front of them. He opened the door to the cab of the truck and tuned the radio to WHAS, a Clear Channel station from Louisville whose big band programming could be heard throughout the eastern part of the country at night.

Lily and Jake sat together peacefully, a little talked out, and sipped their coffee as Helen Forrest sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” It was strangely moving, ethereal, the haunting ballad wafting out into the moonlit field.

Jake took out his pocket journal, its brown cover supple and felted as a club chair, and a small molar-marked pencil that he kept stuck in the pages.

“I have an idea about something I want to flesh out a little. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

After days in the trenches with nothing to do but think and wait, Jake had gotten in the habit of always having something with him in which to write. In Italy, he had picked up several of these small moleskin journals, which bent and molded very comfortably in a rear pocket.

Lily assumed he was writing a poem or a story, his diary perhaps. She didn’t ask. This seemed a natural part of his rhythm, something he often did. If he wanted to share it, he would. She just leaned back in her chair. There was something deeply comforting about him writing next to her. For one thing, it gave her permission to take in the night and the music and swim in her own thoughts. She’d never had coffee this good before, didn’t even know it could be like this. Thin reddish creamlike foam floating on an oily black syrup. And she’d certainly never seen someone make it with such care. Her father was demanding about his coffee. Rationing be damned, there was always Stewarts coffee in the Davis household. But as far as Lily could remember, she had never once seen her father make it. As far as she could remember, she had never seen anyone, male or female, make coffee this passionately. That was the word for Jake. “Passionate.” Everything Jake Russo did, everything about him, was like that. Fireworks, risotto, coffee, the music he chose, the words he used, the way he moved in those jeans, keenly, purposefully. His touch on her leg, the way he blew on her knee. The girls in town would be so attracted to him.

Or would they? Would they understand him and see what she saw? Or would they think he was just quiet and strange and lonely? He was all that, of course. But those things only contributed to what she found so interesting about him. He was certainly very different from most of the boys she grew up with and knew.

Where did he sleep? In the small overhead cab of the truck or outside, under the stars? She had seen sleeping bags in the back of the truck. Yes, there was more than one. What did that mean? Who was the other one for? Her mind wandered freely.

He would meet someone. Eventually. And in ways big and small that other woman would receive the totality of his nature, his intensity, sensitivity, ability to focus all of himself on a woman as though understanding her and knowing her and feeling what she was feeling was the most important thing there was. That he was going to sweep a woman away, Lily was certain, and it made her content inside to know and think about, that he would not be alone, and that someone else would be so deeply connected to him and share her life with him, but the more Lily knew it, the more it also made her a little sad. More than a little, perhaps. It was wrong to feel that way, she told herself. But there it was. There it was. As plain as the waxing gibbous moon glowing above them. There it was, clear as that.

It seemed to have gotten warmer, stickier. Perhaps it was the coffee. Lily felt the slip under her dress clinging to her body. She tugged on the top of her dress, to let a little more air onto her skin. As she moved her head to inspect the top buttons, something caught her eye in the southwestern sky. She pointed to it.