Lightning Song (9 page)

Elsie's hair had grown long this summer. It was sun-blonde, like honey, Leroy realized. Just this summer his daddy had taken him to a bee-tree and showed him honey in the comb. He had watched it pull in wide strands from the nest and into the sunlight to take color. His daddy had said, “This is the color of your mother's hair.” Now he understood what he had meant, that his mother was a desirable woman. He also understood that she was now betraying his daddy. He thought of the bedtime story he had heard so many times, the llamas singing to the setting sun. He didn't know what to do about any of these things. His mama's pretty hair was all he could look at or think about.

With these thoughts in his head, he watched his mother's
hair rise from her shoulders, as if by magic. It was the oddest thing. At first he doubted his eyes, and then he knew it was true. Her hair floated behind her like Superman's cape. Blue sparks leapt from her head. The crack of thunder and the flash of light came together. Elsie and Uncle Harris jumped back from one another as if they had been caught.

Harris said, “Your hair!”

Elsie said, “Eek.”

He quick-kissed her again, smack, and they laughed together.

Leroy stepped back from the kitchen door and into the living room so he would not be seen. He stood with his back to the wall, like somebody was measuring his height. He heard his daddy turn off the water in the shower and fumble around in there for a towel. He knew Swami Don was getting out of the shower so he wouldn't get struck by lightning. Leroy thought it might have been better if Swami Don had been struck.

Laurie called from her room. She said, “Mommy!”

Elsie called back, “It's okay, honey!”

Laurie said, “Molly peed in her pants!”

“I'm coming,” Elsie said. “It's okay.”

On the roof above and on the tin roofs of the farm sheds Leroy heard the soft incessancy of hard rain. It grew harder then and fell like hammers upon the house. This had been a summer of storms. His head suddenly ached, as if the hammers pounded directly on his skull instead of on the shingles.
In the skies outside the window he saw occasional bursts of lightning, with a low complaint of thunder far behind, like an afterthought.

Swami Don came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. His withered arm seemed to Leroy especially small, so pale.

He said, “Everybody okay?” He was smiling to show he was okay, it was just a storm, no big deal.

Elsie and Harris were standing far apart now, Leroy noticed. They were smiling, too, nothing going on in here. Elsie noticed Leroy as he slithered himself around the doorjamb and came into the kitchen.

Elsie said to Leroy, “Well, when did you come in? I thought I was going to have to go looking for you.” She said to Swami Don, “That one got us, I think.”

“Did it ever!”

Harris said, “You should have seen your wife's hair.”

The two girls came out of the bedroom and into the front of the house with the others. Molly was holding her wet pants in her hand. Leroy looked and noticed that his mama's hair was floating again. Just then the house was struck a second time. A flash of fire, a sudden crash. The telephone rang one long ring. The lights went out. Then the strangest thing of all. As if it were an afterthought of the huge surge of electricity, a large friendly-looking ball of fire plopped down out of the chimney, onto the hearth. It lay there, yellow and red but in texture looking like a large globule of water. It wallowed upon the floor, so it seemed to Leroy.

Harris said, “Would you look at that!”

Elsie said, “Why, I never.”

Leroy thought he recognized it, it was the fireball he had seen drift down into the woods, the one he had been looking for. He looked at Laurie. He said, “The mother ship.” Nobody paid him any attention. He couldn't help but look for some sign of recognition in her eyes, some explanation for everything. The fireball was about the size of a basketball, shaggy with flames. It kept rolling about. It didn't dissipate quickly. Leroy went into the living room and sat on the rug and leaned against an old leather ottoman. Molly was completely naked by this time. She had decided to take off all her clothes once she got her underpants off. Everyone watched the fireball bounce in a slow, leisurely way, benign as a sleepy otter, across the floor. It bounced right across Leroy's legs. He didn't feel a thing. It left a little yellow stain on his pants leg that faded away after about a second or two. No one moved. Before it had traveled far, the fireball broke up into a hundred smaller pieces of fire, the size of marbles. These pieces floated about the room for ten seconds or more. They rolled around on the floor and knocked into one another. Then they were gone.

Leroy looked at the frank and open expression upon his mother's face. In this moment everything made sense. The explanation he had been looking for came to him at last. He had expected to look at her and to see in her vulnerable, beautiful eyes something of her feeling for Uncle Harris, complex and impossible for a child to interpret. Or he had expected to
see the field of llamas running with swaying and innocent necks. He had been very wrong about this. When he looked he saw none of this at all. His mama's expression had nothing to do with Harris. It had nothing to do with the origins of love. And it was not complex or hard to interpret. A child could read it and know its meaning, what the lightning had revealed. His mama did not love his daddy. That was it. Simple as that, a thing he had not known before. Love had not lasted. This was the message in the high voltage.

He said, “Mama—”

She turned and looked at him. Their gazes met and held. Maybe what Leroy read there now was acknowledgment, maybe what her eyes said was “Yes, it's true.” Maybe yes, maybe no. There was really nothing for either of them to say.

O
ne night out on the screened porch when the evening was filled with the small songs of crickets and tree frogs and Leroy was stretched out on the glider, with one foot on the floor, slowly swinging, he heard his daddy telling Uncle Harris about an earlier night, way back when they were boys, down on the Gulf Coast, when Swami Don had woken up, overcome with needs he did not understand. He said he had lain in his bed, in the home of their foster parents, the captain and the belle, and blinked his eyes in the bright moonlight. He saw the straight-backed chair where he had flung his shirt, the lamp shade with pictures of a tall ship in full sail, his dresser with car keys and change spread across the top, his white sport coat crumpled on the floor. He said he remembered that the Gulf breeze had blown in through his open window, fragrant as always, and so he got up out of bed and stood at the window, looking out. “The moon on the waves made you think
you could almost walk to South America,” he said. “Brazil and Argentina lay right out there, just beyond the horizon, I was thinking. The darkness felt like it was sucking at the windows, like the vacuum hollowed out by seawater underneath a lee wall. It seemed it was going to pull me out.” He said, “I'd had a date with Hannah. You remember. This was the night you stole her from me. Her hair, back then, was long and blonde and sun-bleached. I know it's darker now. She wore a white dress that showed her bare tanned shoulders. Her skirt stood way out from the crinoline petticoats beneath it. The whole thing threatened to fly up in her face when she sat down. She kept her hands clasped in her lap so she wouldn't be embarrassed. That's the Hannah I remember. It's no wonder both of us were in love with her. I don't blame you for stealing her. And no wonder she chose you. You were so cool. I mean it. Pegged pants, long DA, open shirt. You were the coolest guy in school. Anyway, there I was, wide awake in the middle of the night, scared out of my mind at nothing at all. There was a flat section of roof just outside my window, you remember, so I stepped out into the Gulf breeze. I had to make sure I kept my balance—with this bad arm, well, you know. I stood there, looking south. I breathed in, real deep. I could smell magnolias and honeysuckle and wild orange, and something sweet coming in on the breeze from the islands. You know what I thought about? I thought of Brazil, of the equator and the tropic of Capricorn, the great Brazilian plateau, the escarpments that end in the sea. I always was a fool for an
atlas. I thought of gold mines and diamond fields and plantations of coffee and wild rubber. I thought of carnauba and barbassu palms and dark servants and stalks of bananas and icy waterfalls and ranches with a million head of cattle. I can't believe I'm telling you this. I imagined bright music and hot-blooded dancers in costumes. I thought of the Delta—not the one down around Belzoni and Itta Bena, I was thinking of the Nile, the wide muddy mouth of the Amazon. Something crashed and scrambled in the top of one of the palmettos that grew alongside the house, right near where I was standing on the roof. It was a big tree, the upper leaves stood close to my face. It scared me, this noise, brought me back to reality, you might say. I looked over at the broad palm leaves. Probably I'd heard a big rat—you remember those palmetto rats, with bead-hard eyes and tails like ropes? One of those old gentlemen had probably been lying in the palm leaves looking at me. I turned around and got control of my bad arm and ducked my head and stepped back through the window into my room. I felt like a fool, naturally. I was feeling pretty foolish already, of course. You and Hannah— At the dance, while I was inside, y'all were out in the car drinking whiskey and Dr. Pepper and making out. I was standing in front of the Red Top bandstand, bouncing this gimpy arm along with the beat of the music and singing at the top of my voice, ‘I'm a lover not a fighter, they call me Johnny Valentine.' I was a proper fool, all right. What I really started out to tell you, though, was that I got this idea, there in my room that night. I got the bright idea that I needed
to tell somebody my troubles. I was wide awake, remember, middle of the night, scared half to death, a rat plunging around outside my window, I had all these romantic notions about South America and love, so I rummaged around through my dirty-clothes basket and found a pair of jeans and pulled them on over my pajama bottoms. I slipped my bare feet into some deck shoes, shoes I didn't have to tie, struggled with a tee shirt until I got it over my head. I crept down the stairs like a thief in the night. I took off in Captain Woody's car, full speed ahead, down the beach road to Old Pappy's place, that halfway house for indigent men where he lived, you remember, clean beds, showers, a TV room, two meals a day, cards, dominoes, a few worthless books— I pulled off the beach road onto that dirt lane, hard-packed sand really, that we called Purgatory Lane, and crept down it for a ways, it was so narrow, with nothing but beach sand for shoulders, you could get stuck. The moon was bright, I remember that, the sand was white, the water sparkled. I hated to ring the bell and wake everybody up, all those poor old men, so I went up and tried the door and found it was open. I crept through cubicles—total darkness, almost, moonlight, that was it. I finally found him, came to Old Pappy's little living space. I pulled the chair up next to his bed, sat down next to him, touched his skinny old arm. He screamed, ‘His name was Newgene Slick!' That's what he said, just coming awake. He sat up in the bed. His eyes were big as fish eyes. He looked this way and that. He finally saw me. He said, ‘Hot damn, Gimp! You scared the
pea-turkey out of me.' He rubbed his face in his hands. I wanted to tell him to stop calling me Gimp, but instead I said, ‘Who is Newgene Slick?' Old Pappy groped around on a little table for his spectacles and finally found them and put them on his nose, hooked them over his ears. He said, ‘You come out here in the middle of the night to ask me who Newgene Slick is? How would I know who Newgene Slick is? I never met the gentleman. Never heard of him. Newgene Slick, good Lord.' So I sat down on the edge of his bunk and told him the story of what had happened at the Red Top dance, you and Hannah, you know, all the details. I even told him about the rat in the palmetto, and South America and the escarpments to the sea. I confessed all my heart's romantic dreams. I told him I had thought Hannah would be the girl I would share them with. I told him that some day I hoped I would find the right girl, one who would know how to share those dreams. I went so far as to say I wished he never had shot me, that he'd been more careful with my life, even if it was just an accident. I told him I wished he hadn't given me this lifelong burden to bear. I said all that, can you believe it? When I finished we just sat there. You could hear old men snoring all down the hall. Somebody had a bad cough. Do you know what Old Pappy said? He said, ‘Johnny Valentine?' I said, ‘That was one of the songs, yessir.' He shook his head. He said, ‘What are they going to think of next?' I said, ‘I'm trying to tell you how much I need you right now.' He swung his feet over the side of the bed and dug at his crotch. He said, ‘I don't know about
this place.' He meant the halfway house. He was implying it had bugs. He was saying the captain and the belle should have found him something nicer. We sat for a while, neither of us saying anything. Then he said, ‘Remember that man named Rafe, with the great big hairy dog?' I said, ‘No, I don't think I do.' He said, ‘He shaved that dog except for his neck, made him look like a lion, real hairy dog, used to live on an ostrich farm, them's some mean motherfuckers, an ostrich, kick, you better believe they will, kick your fucking teeth out, looked just like a lion, that dog, couldn't tell them apart. You can make a good living farming ostriches. You ought to buy yourself an ostrich or two when you can afford it, give you something to fall back on.' Light was coming into the sky, already morning. After a while Old Pappy got up and walked down to the toilet and peed and came on back into the cubicle and got in bed again, up under the sheet. He said he had to get his beauty rest. He said, ‘Good night, Irene, I'll see you in my dreams.'”