Lightning Song (4 page)

“Okay.”

The children turned to leave the store.

“Ah!” Mr. Sweet said, and the three of them stopped. “Sweets for the sweet, as the queen said of Ophelia.”

He rocked his way along the counter to a great block table on which rested a huge slab of chocolate fudge with a gray dusting of sugar over it. He took a candy knife and slowly, meticulously sawed off three equal-sized pieces. He put each piece into a thin wrapper of waxed paper and rocked back along the counter to where the children stood. He handed each a little package of candy.

“One more thing,” he said, holding up his finger and rocking over to the drink box. He pulled out three cans of root beer and handed them across the counter to the children. “Little something to wash it down,” he said.

Leroy said, “Okay. Bye.”

Mr. Sweet said, “Of course the queen was talking about flowers, not candy, but the sentiment remains.”

Leroy said okay again.

He and the girls stood in the store with their candy and root beer.

Finally Leroy remembered and said, “Thank you.”

Laurie and Molly said thank you, too.

Mr. Sweet spoke confidentially to all of them. He said, “Now if anybody asks, you tell them Mr. Sweet thought he was selling you some pickled pig's feet. Okay? Can you remember that? That'll be our joke. Tell your mama I sold y'all some pickled pig's feet. All right then, eight o'clock, on the dot, I'll be looking for that supper.”

T
he cottage had been neglected pretty bad, that was the first thing Leroy and his sisters noticed when they got back to the New People's house. They were finished with their candy. They drank their root beers and threw their cans in the ditch. It could use a new roof, the cottage could, even Leroy could see that. The chimney was crumbling, a few bricks lay on the roof. He noticed a busted-out window screen. No flowers had been planted, no dog ran out barking, no chickens or ducks scattered in their path, no yellow cat stood ready to wind around their legs, no new paint freshened the porch, the yard was unmowed. A few junker cars sat in the yard on flat tires, Johnson grass was growing up through the engines. What kind of folks were these? The children were standing just outside the gate. Leroy was a little scared all of a sudden. He wasn't so sure he wanted to go through with this after all. He was glad he had his sisters with him, even if they were pains in the butt. Laurie's boot was beginning to smell a little like pee. Molly bounced up and down on her toes. Leroy had to hold her hand
to keep her from running ahead. She said, “Go.” Leroy looked at Laurie. He said, “Want to?” Laurie looked thoroughly disgusted with Leroy. She said, “Gimme my boots, shitheel.” Leroy took this to mean yes. She looked inside the one boot and jerked Molly's underpants out and slung them in the ditch, along with the root beer cans. Leroy took a step back in case she was in a slapping mood. She put the boots back on her feet and gave him one of those you'll-pay-for-this looks. Molly said, “Go, go!”

They walked through the front gate and kept on walking, all the way around to the back of the house. An old garage, rank with mildew and rot, seemed ready to collapse there. It looked like it had just started to squat down to take a dump. Bamboo fishing poles could be seen racked in the rafters, decayed and ancient. No telling who they once belonged to. They walked along together in a clump, suddenly shy, even Molly. They came to the back porch, which was not screened in but open. The water well for the cottage stood near the porch beneath a little tin-roofed shed. They could hear the pump motor running under there, like a deep-throated sewing machine. Leroy imagined the cool water being sucked up from beneath the earth and sent gushing through pipes into the New People's house. They walked up the steps and stood there at the rear of the cottage. They kept standing there. No one moved to knock. No one turned to leave. They fidgeted. They looked at the door. They scuffed their shoes on the porch floor. Laurie said, “Do it.” Leroy breathed one deep
breath and rapped lightly on the doorjamb. He might have answered her back if he hadn't smelled up her boot with those underpants. He stepped back from the door and waited, they all did. They stood like ducklings behind a hen. No one answered, no one came to the door. Leroy said, “Nobody home.” Laurie said, “Again.” Leroy kept standing there for a while. All right, he'd knock again. Rap rap rap, he knocked, good and loud, he let that door have it. Molly became restless. She wriggled and squirmed and would not be held by the hand. She pulled away from Leroy and sat on the old porch floor. Leroy said, “Be good.” Molly said, “Okay.” After a minute or two she scooted on her butt across the porch and sat at the bottom of the steps, in the dirt, playing with whatever fell near to her hands. Leroy kept his eyes on her. She was always into something.

He heard Laurie say, “Look.” He turned and saw that she was pointing at the kitchen window. Leroy looked through it. Though the cottage was small, the kitchen seemed to be its largest room. Looking at it from outside, through the window, the kitchen floor seemed endless, with a wide expanse of yellow linoleum. A heavy porcelain sink stood on one side of the room, with big old-fashioned iron faucets, and near it a cheap, grease-covered stove, so unlike the brilliant Chambers oven in his mother's kitchen. Against another wall stood a round-shouldered old refrigerator. The cabinets were cheap, too, falling off the walls practically, a hinge broken, a door sagging, white-painted metal. A kitchen table covered with
oilcloth stood just inside the window. Something seemed to have congealed on it. A man was sitting at the kitchen table. Leroy's insides jumped a little when he saw him. It was the New Guy. One of the New People. He seemed unaware of their presence and not to have heard their knocking, though the table where he sat was very close to the door. He was elegant, it was the only word for it. Leroy wasn't sure he had ever heard the word
elegant,
and yet it was the first word that came to his mind. Maybe his mama had said the New Guy was elegant, he must have gotten it from somewhere. Nothing about the shabby kitchen seemed in keeping with its inhabitant. Leroy couldn't get over it. It was like finding a king in a pauper's cottage, what the hell was a pauper's cottage, every fairy tale Leroy had ever heard was required just to give words to what he was looking at. The jacket that the New Guy wore seemed made of silk, though Leroy had no idea how he knew this.

He said, “What's that, that thing he's wearing?”

Laurie said, “Ascot.”

“Ascot,” Leroy repeated, as if the word were part of an incantation. A red ascot. He looked at his eight-year-old sister. How did she know these things?

He looked back in the window. He and Laurie might as well have been watching television on a large screen with the sound turned off, as if in a department store window, a little family of urchins who had never seen such a thing.

The New Guy was crying. Weeping would be a better word.
Leroy was having to search through his whole vocabulary all of a sudden. Wailing, that was another word for what was going on in there. He was crying like nobody's business, like Leroy had never imagined anyone on earth ever crying, no sniffles at first, no tuning up to it, just all-out wah-wah-wah, straight out of the gate. He cried and cried and cried. He was a snotty mess he cried so hard. There ought to be a law against crying this hard, forget about it. You couldn't hear him, no sound could escape through the closed window or door, but he was truly going at it. He was howling like a dog. You could see it, head thrown back, really like a dog in the moonlight, sure enough, dog at the railroad tracks, hear that whistle blowing, coming 'round the bend. Laurie said, “Now that son of a bitch can flat cry.” The New Guy fell out of his chair. Even Laurie was taken aback by this. You couldn't give this guy enough credit for what he knew about crying. He was the world's best, held the record, champeen, forget about outcrying this one. He rolled around on the kitchen floor, crying good-godamighty. Leroy and Laurie stood on tiptoes to see him down there. They pressed their faces to the window. They shaded their eyes against the glare. The New Guy thrashed about, he rolled under the table and back out again, he kicked his feet, he went on howling in silence, he banged his head on the floor. He rolled up under the windowsill, mostly out of sight now.

Laurie said, “Shit, I can't see.”

Leroy said, “Okay, okay.”

He put his arms around her waist from behind and picked her up and held her so that she could better see the action down low.

She said, “Better, much better.”

Leroy said, “What's he doing now?”

“He just spit up a little.”

After a while the howling man rolled back out into the middle of the floor and was easier to see. He got to his feet again. Leroy said, “Oh, good.” He could let Laurie stand alone again. Again they both pressed their faces to the window. The New Guy staggered around his kitchen for a while. Leroy and Laurie kept on watching, their eyes shaded against the window glare. The New Guy held his heart with both hands. He tore his hair. He hit himself in the face with his fists.

Leroy said, “I don't think this would be as good without the, uh—”

Laurie said, “The ascot.”

Leroy looked at Laurie, then back into the window. Every day his sister grew stranger.

He said, “Right.”

The New Guy's ascot was coming undone. He staggered around for a while longer, aimless. The red tie flopped this way and that. Laurie said, “I wish he'd just take the damn thing off.” He bounced slowly off the refrigerator, off a wall, the stove, like a pinball in a dream. He stopped and leaned heavily on both hands against the sink. His head was down, his back to the window. His chest was heaving. He stood there for
a while, until his breathing grew more regular. He seemed to collect himself.

Leroy said, “What's he doing?”

Laurie said, “He's collecting his thoughts. He's thinking of the bleak future, he's wondering if life's worth living, whether its dim hopes aren't really self-deluding dreams and not worth all the pain of going on, he's coming to the bitter realization that we're all alone in the world.”

Leroy just shook his head, he let it drop. What was the point? She was a space alien.

Slowly the New Guy opened a drawer beneath the sink and reached inside. The children peered through the window in interest. He withdrew a sharp knife with a long blade, ten inches at least. This part was bound to happen, Leroy thought. You couldn't do creepy-crawly without somebody dying or ruining their whole life, oh well. The New Guy held the knife in a stabbing position above his head and began his terrible silent wailing again. Crying with knives, Leroy noted. Definitely worth remembering. The New Guy placed the knife to his throat, the sharp point of it pressing a deep indentation into his neck. A trickle of blood appeared. No one moved. Two doors led out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house. Through the door at stage left a woman entered from the bedroom. Leroy and Laurie nodded, yes, all right, a new character. The New Lady, in fact. This beautiful dark woman was wearing only a bra and panties, her hair was wild. She too was carrying a large knife of some kind, a hunting blade, huge,
gleaming steel with a big bone handle. Leroy could see a dark shadow at the crotch of the woman's underpants. Well, at least they fit, at least nobody was sneaking around trying to take her picture. And although she could have stood to dress up a little, what she was wearing made some sense. Anybody might walk around in their drawers, Leroy supposed. Now this woman was wailing also, as anguished as her husband, she was going at it, they were the perfect couple. Still, the children couldn't hear much.

Leroy said, “Can we turn up the sound?”

Laurie said, “It doesn't work.”

This new character, the New Lady, or maybe even the Wild Woman, seemed to be threatening something, it was hard to tell what. Man, not hearing anything was turning into a major inconvenience, no two ways about it. Who do you call to get this sort of thing fixed? Leroy wondered. The Wild Woman was speaking to the Weeping Man and holding her knife out in his direction. She was acting like she might stab him. She might as well go on and do it, Leroy thought, get it over with, okay, stab him, go ahead. The two New People seemed to face off, to scream at one another for a while. At last the New Guy took the knife from his throat. He didn't want to quit stabbing himself, you could tell, just when he'd started to do some damage. He quit, though, he was a good sport about it. He looked like, Oh well, shit, all right, if it means that much to you. He looked depressed and defeated. He would not kill himself today, his new posture seemed to say. Okay, he quit,
jeez. The Wild Woman, she lowered her knife. She looked like she guessed she wouldn't kill anybody either. No point in killing him if he wasn't going to kill himself. It could have made more sense, frankly. Leroy's head was spinning. It was never quite clear what she had planned to do with the hunting knife in the first place. A better sound system would have made all the difference in this particular case.

The man laid his knife on the sink. He was tired, you could easily see, all that bawling's got to be hard on an older guy, so yeah, he was pooped but not bad, he seemed like he was in pretty good shape, he could cry a little more if he had to, he had probably trained for this sort of thing, sort of a professional, our viewers are advised not to try this stunt in their own home. The New People stood around in the kitchen and talked for a while, smiled a little. They liked one another, you could tell that. Before long they were just chatting, kind of regular. She checked his throat where he had pricked himself with the knife. She licked her thumb and wiped a little dried blood away. He was okay, they seemed to agree, sure he'd be fine. He patted her on the butt. Though they seemed sad, they were all right. They walked together out of the room. She was still carrying her bone-handled knife.