Lightning Song

Also by Lewis Nordan

Music of the Swamp

Wolf Whistle

The Sharpshooter Blues

Sugar Among the Freaks

Boy with Loaded Gun

A NOVEL

Lewis Nordan

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

For
Lewis, Josh, and Adam

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About the Author

Lightning Song

O
ne day in the summer when he turned twelve years old and when a fragrance of sweet alfalfa hay and llama musk was drifting through the windows and into the house on a breeze from the pastures and cool shade of the little barn where pigeons cooed in the rafters, Leroy Dearman realized that the day had finally come. What had been planned for so long could now be undertaken. Leroy's mama had company coming over, the Evil Queen, Leroy called her, who dressed all in black, with heavy makeup and real pale skin and long black hair and was known to be modern, with scary ways of speaking and smelly cigarettes from France. She was ugly, too—
U-G-L-Y,
you ain't got no alibi, you're ugly—the school-yard phrase would not leave Leroy's head. The Evil Queen had a new baby, so Leroy's sisters wouldn't give Leroy any trouble, Laurie and Molly, who would want to hang around the baby. Molly was the little one, three years old, bed wetter first
class, redheaded, thick as a stump. Laurie, she was eight, lithe and blonde, that girl could cuss, slap you, too. Leroy's palms were sweating, his heart seemed to flutter. “Creepy-crawly,” he whispered, to give himself courage. The Evil Queen and Leroy's mama had made plans at coffee hour at the church. The Queen, in her frightening modern way, had said, “Lunch, okay, but not at my house. Nobody should be forced to eat in a house where a dentist has slept, it's cruel and unusual, it's disgusting, and not at that sandwich place either, not the Flyspeck Cafe, their pies are good, but oh my God, I cannot, will not, fight with that little bitch about salad dressing again today, I do not have the strength, the war is over and that little redneck in the Howdy Partner apron won, it's inedible, her ranch dressing, it's vile, it ought to be banned by law, get your butt in that kitchen and get me something not outlawed by the Food and Drug Administration and take off that stupid apron before I rip it off your ugly ass and shove it down your throat, do I sound psychotic, Elsie, I hope I don't sound sort of out of my mind, I mean, I
am
out of my mind, I just don't want to sound that way.” Ugly. Creepy-crawly.

Leroy breathed in the familiar fragrances of the farm, and doing this made him suddenly cautious. He decided he'd better check one more time to see if the coast was clear. Leroy's Uncle Harris lived in the attic now and kept magazines up there, grown-up magazines with pictures, Leroy had seen him sneak them in the house along with his newspapers, inside a bag of groceries, beneath his shirt. Uncle Harris was away
from the house today and Leroy meant to see those pictures,
Playboy
and
Penthouse,
he'd seen their bright covers on the magazine stand at the drugstore in the village, so he had an idea what was inside. He had been waiting for the perfect day and now it had come, and as long as he was up there maybe he'd check out Uncle Harris's shirt drawers, too, his pants pockets, beneath his mattress, it couldn't hurt. He caught a glimpse of the vast vistas of boundary violation, open wide.

He walked up to the front of the house where his mama and the Evil Queen were sitting on the shaded front porch in the wicker furniture and said, “I ain't snooping,” just in case. His mama and the Evil Queen were having glasses of iced tea with some mint sprigs that Leroy's mama had picked out in the side yard. They acted like they thought they might be pretty hot stuff, which they weren't, in Leroy's humble opinion. How hot could you be, living on a llama farm? Sunshine filtered through a few low clouds. The temperature was mild, the air was leaf-green and fragrant with buttercups. Here and there a single tree beyond the pasture fence, a thick-trunked black walnut, or a slender willow or tulip, caught an occasional bright ray, like a spotlight. A breeze came up that smelled a little like rain. A swarm of bees circled, looking for a tree.

Leroy's mama—Elsie was her name—she had made tuna salad sandwiches and deviled eggs for lunch. She had cut the crusts off the bread and used sprigs of watercress on the sandwiches, in the place of lettuce, la-di-da. She stood in front of the refrigerator with the door open. She said, “How much do
you hate Kool-Aid?” The Evil Queen laughed, that witchy sound like pigeons in the barn, ooh-ooh-ooh, what was that ugly woman's real name?

Elsie saw Leroy standing against the door frame.

She said, “Leroy, you scared me.”

He said, “I ain't snooping.”

She said, “You are the oddest child.”

The two women ignored Leroy, they were taking a little tour of the farm. Elsie showed the Evil Queen the pantry, the shelves of Mason jars filled with bright fruit, row after row of tomatoes, jars of Blue Lake green beans, new potatoes, okra, yellow corn, speckled lima beans, bread-and-butter pickles. The Evil Queen was a city lady, village anyhow, she said she liked to look at the farm, it was the perfect life, and you're so lucky, and like that.

Elsie said, “Come on outside with us, Leroy.”

He said, “Why? I ain't going to snoop in the attic. You don't trust me. You've never trusted me.”

She said, “Don't say
ain't,
honey.”

Outside Elsie showed the Evil Queen the shed with tools and fence wire–stretching equipment and farm implements hung up on hooks along the wall. Leroy had to tag along, his sisters, too. He should have gone on and snooped in the attic when he had the chance. They went in the little barn, filled with sweet hay. The baby llamas came up looking for gorp, the sweetened grain Elsie gave them as treats. Pigeons cooed in the rafters. Leroy thought the Evil Queen might rise up into
the rafters of the barn and perch there with them, that woman was ugly. Elsie held out a zinc bucket of the sweetened grain for the Evil Queen to dip her hand into. Her nails were long, they were enameled with deep purple polish. The Evil Queen scooped up the gorp and held it in her hand and when she felt the gentle lips of the llama suck it away like a little vacuum cleaner, she made that funny little witchy sound again, ooh. She did sound like the pigeons. She said, “I thought it would bite! I thought it would be all slobbery! Ooh.”

Creepy-crawly, it was the attic calling for Leroy,
Penthouse, Playboy
. Leroy turned and walked away from his mama and the Evil Queen and went inside the house, the call was too strong to resist any longer. He let the screened door slap shut behind him when he went inside. He stood beneath the trapdoor and pulled a kitchen chair into the hallway and stood on it. He grabbed the hanging rope on the trapdoor and jumped off the chair and swung down like Tarzan on a vine. The door pulled open from above and slid down the metal gliders into the hall. Leroy went up into Uncle Harris's attic room. Behind him as he went he heard the soft, frantic bleating of one of the llamas, a young female up near the second row of pens, not far out in the pasture. He knew the animal had gotten her head stuck between the squares of wire, one of the young llamas, trying to reach a clump of sweeter grass. He imagined her little anvil-shaped head hooked in the fence. He imagined one of the male llamas pacing back and forth. It spat several times. Leroy reached the top of the stairs and rose up into the attic.
Uncle Harris's made-up bed with two pillows, the bedside table, the little bookshelf with a few books, a rocking chair with a caned bottom and a ladder back, and the tasseled lamp with a fringed shade meant nothing to Leroy now. Not the tiny chest of drawers, the oval hook rug on the floor, the steep A-frame of the attic itself, its bare board floor and exposed beams, not the trousers on the chair, nothing held meaning for Leroy. He was looking for magazines. The magazines were there, Leroy had not been mistaken about that. They glowed in the dark, they were plutonium, that end of the attic room was bathed in a strange light, their colors shone like a cache of gold in a fairy tale, a sound of deep-throated electrical thrumming emanated from the stack. He had suspected they would be here. He had seen them come into the house, oh, he had known they would be here, all right. He just had not known they would be so easy to find, so immediately in full view. He had expected to have to search for them, maybe not to find them at all. He realized now that he had halfway hoped he would not find them. There they were. They were not strewn about, not hidden away. There were no drawers to search through. As if they were as innocent as any other detail of the llama farm, they sat quietly glowing and thrumming in a stack on Uncle Harris's bedside table.

Leroy noticed that he was trembling. He listened to be sure no one had entered the house. He knew that his mama must have unhooked the she-llama from the fence by now. The tour with the Evil Queen could not last much longer. His legs felt
weak. He sat on the edge of Uncle Harris's bed. The magazines were inches away. He could smell them, a manly perfume, like musk. They glowed with a rich yellow light. He tried to regularize his breathing. He breathed deeply a few times, and this caused him to feel light-headed. He picked up one of the magazines. He held it in his lap, not even open. Every place the magazine touched him felt like electricity. It buzzed, it crackled at his touch. He forced his eyes down, forced them not to close in fear, he looked at the magazine.

On the cover stood a woman wearing a western vest, she had on very tight shorts, which seemed to have come unzipped. Leroy hated to have somebody point out when his pants were unzipped, so he said nothing. He almost said, “Hi,” but managed not to say this either. He held the magazine in his lap. He looked at the cover for a long time. For a long time he only looked at the strip of flesh from her throat to her belly button, where the vest was parted. He hoped that by looking hard he might cause the vest to open farther. It did not. He looked briefly at the half unzipped shorts and averted his eyes. He wasn't sure he was ready to work his magic there, it seemed a little risky. He studied the woman's face. He wished he knew her a little better, maybe he wouldn't feel quite so awkward looking at her like this. She was smiling, he noticed, a nice smile too, real sincere, she had excellent teeth, extra white and not a bit bucked. He thought his own teeth were beginning to buck out a little. He pushed at them with his thumb, he did this whenever nobody was looking, trying to
coax them back in a little. Anyway, he was glad she was smiling, that was a relief, it pleased him to think she was happy. He wasn't sure why she was so happy, come to think of it. It didn't make much sense for her to be this happy, under the circumstances. Somebody had taken her picture before she really even finished getting dressed. It seemed like to Leroy she might be embarrassed, or even angry. He knew he would be angry, he'd die of embarrassment if somebody took his picture with his pants unzipped. He looked at the photograph more closely. Something wasn't right here. Those clothes, for example. They weren't even her clothes. Those shorts couldn't have belonged to her, they were much too little. Look at that, they wouldn't meet at the waist. No wonder she couldn't get them zipped up right. Somebody had put this lady's little sister's shorts in her dresser drawers and made her think they were her own, then when she went to put them on, took a picture of her in them. Man, that was low, that was mean. That really fried Leroy. This was one of those jokes that just wasn't funny, if you wanted Leroy's personal opinion. His penis was stiff and aching and he had to adjust it to one side of his pants, but that didn't keep him from feeling indignant about the practical joker who popped in on this perfectly nice lady and took her picture while she was getting dressed in clothes about ten sizes too small for her. How could you stand it? How could anybody ever go to school again, face your friends? It was awful. Boy, that riled Leroy, that really fried him, how could anybody trick this nice lady like that?