Lightning Song (19 page)

Swami Don moved from his chair and sat beside her on the foot of the bed. He leaned into her body, his face in her black hair. Her hair smelled like baby shampoo. She kissed him at the corner of his mouth and moved away.

She said, “I don't think so, cowpoke.”

He said, “We could punch in a little late.”

She leaned back from him to see him clearly.

She said, “It ain't no crime to be selfish, but it ain't a good way to finish this nice conversation we're having neither.”

Swami Don thought of Darla's child somewhere, her son, a thousand miles away, in a tract house in a treeless landscape beneath the western moon, a little boy asleep in a kind stranger's bed, as his brother, Harris, had once been, as he himself had been. He wondered about that child's future, the betrayal he was yet to commit or endure.

They left the motel room together and walked out in the direction of their cars. The rain was falling hard. His family was at home getting struck by lightning, probably.

The two of them stood in the shelter of the motel eaves, watching the sheeting rain before making a dash for the parking lot.

Darla said, “Eventually there ain't nothing to do but make a run for it.”

Lightning flashed in the distance.

She said, “Book!”

They took off, laughing, running, rain pouring down their necks. They splashed through the parking lot, veering off this way and that, he one way, she the other, in the direction of their separate cars.

Above the sound of the rain and thunder, Swami Don heard the fine, profane twang of her wonderful voice—he thought of her only as Roxanne. She would never be Darla to him again. He was unable to make out what she said through the rain and wind. He jumped in the pickup and waited to see her headlights come up. When he saw her pull out of the parking lot he aimed the nose of the pickup in the direction of her taillights, through the storm.

Later that night, as he made his rounds with the clock, he saw her feeding brass rods into the number three machine. She noticed him and waved. She was smiling. The machines were running full power, all of them at once, and the noise was too loud to talk, so he didn't get a chance to ask her what she'd said in the parking lot. He picked up a straw broom, which he found leaning up against the number seven, and with it swept up the brass shavings, like spun gold, all over the floor around her work space. He dumped them into a barrel that was already filled to the top.

She mouthed, “Thank you,” above the racket of the machines.

He mouthed, “I love you!”

Her face brightened and she laughed.

Leroy's daddy was a happy man.

U
ncle Harris's little car pulled away from twirling lessons, down the road, leaving Leroy behind and in love. Uncle Harris pressed the button of his amazing car horn—ah-ooga! and the strains of “Dixie” and fields of cotton!—as he sped away, carrying with him the sounds of bright laughter on the summer air. Deep somewhere in the heart of him Leroy understood many things for which he had no words just then. He understood that love is a hopeless dream, that it is seldom what it seems but only evil done in a holy name, he understood, at least in this dark, unlighted place of his knowing, darker than mere instinct or intuition, that no good ever comes of love but only pain, or from what we call first love anyway. Dimly he perceived the life draining and inevitability of disappointment and heartbreak, the constant pain of surprise at the shattering of illusion. He knew he and his sisters
had been dumped here so that his mama and uncle might have privacy to kiss.

And yet this mattered not at all, none of it, not a whit, to Leroy Dearman. Nothing could have mattered less. It did not matter that there was no chance on earth that this girl, already a woman, could ever feel for him what he felt for her, that if there should ever be such a chance it would signal pathology, not hope. It did not matter that he had just committed himself to baton twirling, the pure purview of girls and sissies, and had even briefly longed to be a girl himself and denied, through self-loathing, a gender he had been cursed through accident to own. He was in love. Nothing else mattered but love, the hopeless pursuit of it and inevitable loss of what was before not even imagined.

He followed the others. He tagged along behind Ruby Rae and her multitudinous entourage of female twirling disciples, miserable wretch that he was, the only boy in this bright procession—baton twirling being too sissified a pursuit even for the well-known sissies of his school and the Episcopal church. This didn't matter either, not in any way that would cause him to turn back, to change his mind.

He followed behind this beautiful girl, this Ruby Rae with the magical name, to the end zone, beneath the goal posts, morose and quiet among the giggling and the chatter. He was a living portrait titled
Lost Hope.
He knew the depth of his moral failure at wanting what he wanted, at going to these
humiliating lengths in pursuit of mere proximity to a person who could not love him. If their ages were reversed he would be a stalker. And worst of all, Leroy knew this: he knew he was the only child in this company of children, no matter their sex, who had made the commitment to become a twirler without having a baton. He was in love, no one could have denied it, for even this absurdity made no difference to Leroy.

Later, or maybe even in this moment, Leroy knew that he owed much to his mother, to his Uncle Harris. He wanted to give them the credit they deserved. They were exactly like him, for one thing. He could look at himself in these unproductive dangerous moments of his own life, stepping off a cliff of some kind for a hopeless dream, and see the urgency of their own need, their kisses behind the refrigerator, their harmful fantasies built upon alcohol and paper umbrellas. He looked at them and saw himself, he looked at himself and saw them, and these merged identities taught him something he had not known before or even suspected a need of. For a long time he was not even sure of its name. It was something of forgiveness, of remission of sin, of relaxation of the general requirement of perfection in others and the self.

They made mistakes, obviously, his mother, his uncle, his dumb-moose father who stumbled clueless through their lives, but in this moment they were pure and true, all of them. Through neglect, somehow, they were perfect parents, Harris a perfect uncle to Leroy, exactly when he believed he needed them most. When Harris and his mama saw Leroy see
Ruby Rae and fall in humiliating love with her, and later when his father saw the same, Leroy's face aflush with testosterone, and animal groanings speaking in his blood, they understood the depths of his need and chose to neglect rather than to smother him. With a word any one of them could have destroyed him, with a single knowing smirk, one misplaced joke or teasing elbow to the ribs. Any small thing that placed excessive or improper emphasis on what was already, in Leroy's heart, excessive and improper, despite all its necessity, would have made returning to his parents' home an impossible burden.

They did nothing of the kind. They did not make secret gestures of intimacy between one another, either, no special glances, no casual touching. For whatever reasons, the two of them understood the vulnerable position he occupied. For this Leroy vowed forever to be grateful, despite what was to happen later.

“I'll twirl,” he had said.

He did not look at them when he said this, he could look at no one but Ruby Rae.

His mother said, simply, “You'll have a good time.”

Ruby Rae stood on a step stool of the kind bandleaders use, with her baton in one hand. She waved both her arms above her head, like a tree swaying in the wind. This seemed to be a well-known majorette signal of some type. She blew hard on a steel whistle to get attention, to call order to the throng of children.

Uncle Harris had said, “If, later on, you find out you don't like it—”

“I like it,” Leroy replied.

Ruby Rae's leotard was purple. Little was concealed. Ruby Rae picked up a megaphone from the ground beside the step stool. She spoke through it, though there was no real need.

She said, “Okay, listen up, twirlers!”

Leroy stood in a clump with the others on the field. He looked straight into the barrel of the megaphone, the wide funnel-opening that led through darkness to the narrower end and its unsolved mysteries.

Deep inside the cylinder he could see her lips, Ruby Rae's perfect mouth. He imagined himself small enough to crawl inside the megaphone, down its beautiful tunnel, headfirst. He imagined himself coming to its mouth, the smaller hole that emptied out of the pipe, her tongue, her teeth, her red lips. He imagined himself nestled there, inside the safe barrel, his earnest self, his face pressed against the smaller opening so that his lips rested against Ruby Rae's lips. She could not speak or sleep or breathe without kissing Leroy. He was her master and her slave.

Ruby Rae shouted through the megaphone, “Let's see those batons, twirlers! Show me your batons!”

At this command, all the twirlers, except Leroy, of course, held their batons high. He cut his eyes from side to side, watching the batons in hideous envy. His sisters, everyone held up batons, everyone but himself. They shook the batons
above their heads, they celebrated their batons in joy beneath the laughing sky. Leroy was impotent, spiritually bereft, helpless, with no baton.

A few girls made inexpert attempts to twirl. In the brilliant sun the batons became many elongated mirrors, casting golden rays back into the blue heavens.

Ruby Rae said, “All
right
!”

In all, there were perhaps twenty-five or thirty children, Leroy and many elementary-school girls of all ages and sizes and shapes. Even one of the midget children showed up, whose parents worked on a transient construction crew and lived in the trailer park outside of town. No one had expected the midget, who carried a half-sized baton, like Molly's. Other unexpected children were in attendance as well. The entire Quong family seemed to have signed up, Chinese children whose father owned the butcher shop in Fateville, and a couple of black children as well whose parents taught at Valley Hill Community College nearby. Mifanwy Moser was there, a girl with a flipper where one of her hands should have been. She allowed Leroy to half believe that twirling might be an activity his father and he might someday share. He imagined becoming skilled and teaching Swami Don many things. One arm was no handicap for a twirler, if Mifanwy was any indication. Leroy tried to believe this.

All of the other children had brought batons, of course. He tried also to believe that his not having a baton might prove no handicap either.

Ruby Rae put everyone into lines—“files,” she called them—in accordance with some principle of age or height or something or other, which Leroy never understood. He stood at the front of his file, scant feet from Ruby Rae, for whom his heart was breaking. She instructed the new twirlers in the uses and history and construction of the modern baton. Leroy had not expected this somehow, this “educational component” of twirling, as Ruby Rae called what she was doing.

“The experiential component will come later,” she said.

She named the parts of the modern baton, shaft and bulb and butt. She explained weight and balance and recent improvements in materials and workmanship. She spoke knowledgeably of the historical relationship, largely misunderstood, she said, between twirling and juggling. She hypothesized a relationship to rain-making and knife-throwing and spear-chucking. Her voice became passionate. Leroy blinked his eyes. She traced the baton to the days of ancient Greece and the original Olympic games. And then, out of deference to the Quongs, Leroy supposed, she traced twirling to China as well, and then to Africa and cannibalism, and cited many sources to prove that the first baton was a human bone.

Leroy looked around him to see whether anyone else had noticed that twirling lessons had taken a bizarre detour. No one seemed affected. They scratched their noses, dropped their batons, pulled their leotards out of their butt cheeks. Who could tell what Laurie was thinking, now or ever. She wore her accustomed ironic smile.

Ruby Rae mentioned many famous twirlers, modern and ancient. She touched upon the baton as a phallic symbol, and its appearance in cave drawings, baton twirling in the Bible, and batons found in crashed spaceships from alien planets in galaxies far away.

Sweat beaded upon her forehead and upper lip, formed a chevron between her breasts, their impossible beauty, moons at the pits of her slender arms. Every child upon that green field, the youngest to the eldest, in every file beneath the Mississippi sun, every race and sex of them, fell in love that day with Ruby Rae. Each had her own reasons. Testosterone was no requirement for love of Ruby Rae.

Nor apparently did it concern any one of them, except possibly Leroy, for whom it made no difference anyway, that Ruby Rae was completely out of her mind. She was mad, despite her youth and beauty. Not at all did anyone seem bothered by this incomprehensible lecture. Nor did it matter that not one word she was saying was true, even if they could have understood it.

Leroy more than any other was stricken, of course, male child that he was, and old enough to perceive, however dimly, his sexual future and the preferences of a lifetime, Leroy who had already given over his whole heart, and as it turned out far more than his mere heart, to the love of Ruby Rae, even before he stepped out of his Uncle Harris's car.

Despite whatever else might be said of Ruby Rae's mental disturbances, the girl could twirl. No one could ever have denied it, least of all Leroy. She was impressive. She could
twirl like an angel. You never saw such twirling in your life. She could have gone professional any day. Uncle Harris was right. Her great beauty and blatant sexuality were part of her appeal, no doubt, but sex appeal was not all of her talent. Ruby Rae was not merely another set of titanic boobs, she was an artist. To watch her twirl was to hear music and poetry, to become the dancer in the dance.