Chapter 1: Bomb Fire

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     "Keety,  just accidentally kick it into the pit!" commands ten-year-old Beatrice Reed to her lanky blond friend in the smoky glow of a roadside flare.

"But Beat, that big cherry bomb will burn my shoe," worries Keith Mazurkewicz, instead skidding his sneaker into the dusty track of Tea Street as the little kids skitter out of the circle of light into the chilly dusk of early spring. "It might even explode."

"Nah, it only looks like a bomb," Beat explains, tapping the black canister with her own shoe as the younger children creep back into the charred sweetness and spreading warmth of the kerosene smoke ring. "These pots just burn slowly."

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     The road crew had yet to cover the drop inlets for the paving of the dirt road along the Middlebrook. Tea Street connected the former Old York Road, now called Talmadge Avenue, to the gap through the Watchung Mountains at Chimney Rock Road. This was the path the redcoats had taken to attempt and fail to breach the breastworks atop First Watchung while George Washington's eight thousand ragtag troops recuperated behind the ridge from the hard winter of 1777-78. The naming of the street was lost in the nearly two centuries since, but the tea was just as likely from color of the spring runoff as it was from the Boston harbor act that had initiated the colonial hostilities. These same muddy waters would soon run beneath Tea Street in a drainage pipe to save the basements of Downs Manor from repeated flooding.
     It was an exciting time for the children of that new subdivision. A line of excavators and bulldozers became the preferred jungle gym for after supper jaunts in the lengthening evenings. Piles of gravel and dirt afforded great fun for king-of-the-hill or bicycle jumps. The pièces de résistance arrived the night before the paving started and in the form of Dietz #87 cast iron smudge pots set in front of each of the open manholes.

__________

"Holy smokes!" Keith exclaims, leaping back as the flames shoot up into the air. 

"Yeah, that's enough cardboard," Beat calls to the little kids again scurrying away from the bomb fire. 

"See you tomorrow," he calls back as he runs off toward his family's house halfway around Hanken Road with his little brothers in tow.

"Chicken shit,"she mutters before rounding up her sister and brother from the edge of the firelight and steering them home.