Fat Lightning

Fat Lightning

Howard Owen

New York

To Karen, with love

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.—Revelation 9:2

NOW

CHAPTER ONE

“Manley James found it all on Monday afternoon.

“He saw the buzzards floating overhead like his grandchildren's kites every time he looked up from painting the barn that morning, dark shadows on the bright blue October canvas.

“He saw them out the kitchen window while he ate the luncheon-meat sandwiches his wife fixed for him. And he smelled the smoke, even inside. Thicker than usual. Finally, at 1 o'clock, drowsy and wanting a nap, he decided he'd better see what Avery Booth was up to.

“As he got nearer, the smoke became heavier, and he had to take out the handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose while he steered the pickup with one hand. The cinders burned worse than they ever had before. Rounding the last turn into Red Top, Manley saw that the buzzards' attention were attracted by something off to his left, something he could get a whiff of even from the road, even through all the smoke.

“Up ahead, he could barely make out the house through the haze, and he thought at first it was on fire. But then he saw that the smoke was coming from out back, on beyond the barn, and he realized that it was the sawdust.

“The only sounds Manley James heard were Avery's old mongrel barking, hoarse and steady as a clock, and a kind of sizzling sound behind that. He got out of the truck and fought the smoke until he reached the barn where so many people had stood and sat that summer, and then he saw that the big orange mountain wasn't there any more.

“It seemed to have imploded, like one of the buildings Manley would see once in a while on TV. He walked up to the edge of it, and he could see that it was burning in serious now, exposed to the air after smoldering underneath all that time.

“He was about to turn around and go looking for Avery Booth when he saw something shine in the midst of all the gloom. He couldn't make it out until he got 10 feet away, and then he saw that it was a ring, and that the ring was attached to a finger and thus a hand sticking out of the smoldering sawdust.

“Manley ran, wheezing, to his truck, but before he could get in and start back to call the fire department or the rescue squad or the sheriff, he noticed the buzzards again. He walked out across Avery Booth's yard, over toward where they were circling and squatting and eating. And this time he didn't have to get 10 feet away, or even 100, before he saw what it was, before he saw that it wasn't a dog or a possum or even a cow that the birds were feasting on.

“‘Great gawd awmighty,' the old man said. He'd broken into a sweat that a breeze now turned into goosebumps. And when one of the birds, startled by a human presence, gave out with a sharp sound, it was so like a laugh that Manley never looked back until Red Top was out of sight.”

Nancy looks up, relieved. All done. There is polite clapping.

“Anyhow, that's how it starts.”

“Thank you, Ms. O'Neil,” the president of the women's club says, giving Nancy a smile and a slight jerk of her head that tells her it isn't time to sit down, much as Nancy wants to. She hasn't sung enough for her supper yet. “Now, are there any questions?”

Front row, third from the left: “How long did it take you to write ‘Egypt'?”

Hard question, Nancy thinks. “It depends. Either five months” (she realizes she's saying EYE-ther instead of EE-ther and hopes Suzanne and Marilou don't start snickering) “or 20 years, according to how you look at it.”

Nancy can tell that this is taken for Writer Being Cryptic, but before she can explain, another hand shoots up, third row from the back, in the middle:

“Where did you find the time?” There's a murmur around the room, as if that was everybody's next question. If they only knew how long it had all been building up, how I'd work it all out in my head, just like it happened, Nancy thinks. A frontal lobotomy wouldn't have made it go away.

She resists the urge to tell the woman, “The time found me,” and gives her stock answer about time management and an understanding family.

Everything changed so fast and so much afterward, and so much of it was tied to writing, that she never wanted to put a piece of paper in a typewriter again.

And, if Holly hadn't died in February and if Sebara hadn't reappeared in April, almost 20 years to the day after it all started, it might still be locked up inside my head, Nancy thinks to herself. So, like Dr. Jamison suggested, she just turned on the computer and let it flow, stranger than fiction.

Second row, all the way to the right: “Does being a librarian help you as a writer? I mean, all those books and all …”

Yeah, Nancy thinks to herself, if I'd really wanted to get away from writing, why did I get a master's in library science, the cheapest master's in the Western Hemisphere? Just look at my paycheck if you don't believe it. Like the doc said, there must have been some subconscious part of me that still wanted to write, in spite of everything that happened.

She staggers through 20 minutes of it, her first reading and Q-and-A, her words echoing off the 20-foot ceilings as the air conditioning goes on and off every five minutes. Finally, mercifully, the club president says, “One more question.”

A woman about 50, about my age, Nancy thinks, raises her hand:

“I've heard that some of what you wrote about in ‘Egypt' was from first-hand experience. Could you talk about that?”

Had to happen. Richmond's not that big …

“No,” Nancy tells her, trying to be polite. God knows, she thinks, I don't want to hurt the feelings of any potential $19.95-a-book customers. “I don't think I could talk about that. All I can say is that I've known some interesting people, and a piece of some of them is in the book.”

And a big chunk, she thinks to herself, of one in particular, one black-eyed, red-haired demon that wouldn't stay buried.

Lot Chastain, she wishes, rest in peace. Please?

1971

CHAPTER TWO

The window was up, because it was one of those rare April days when springtime in Virginia is more than a myth, so Nancy heard the Duster that Sam had bought the month before as it pulled into the gravel driveway, scattering a spray of stones into the grass, and she heard him slam the door, hard. It wasn't yet two, so she thought maybe the night pharmacist was sick and Sam was taking a quick hour off before he had to pull double duty again.

She could hear him fumbling with the keys. Sam said that having to have a deadbolt made him feel as if he were living in New York City instead of Richmond, but it was he who had insisted on it when they moved to the North Side four years before. Nancy was a city girl; a bump in the basement or a car door slammed three houses away didn't bother her, then.

The floor squeaked as he walked across the carpet and up the stairs, same as always.

Wade, who had learned to say “Daddy” before even “Mommy,” called out to Sam as he passed by the upstairs bath, sputtering the word with water dripping down his face. But Sam walked right past, still wearing his white pharmacist's coat with the name bar. He usually took it off before he got to the parking lot as he left work. He didn't speak to either his wife or his two-year-old son, just walked straight into the bedroom.

Nancy heard closet doors and drawers being yanked open. She gave Wade's hair a rough drying-off, left him sitting in the tub, and walked down the hall, expecting the worst.

Sam was standing in front of his sock drawer, picking out all the pairs he could find and throwing them into the biggest suitcase they owned.

Nancy watched him pack a dozen pairs of socks and five or six singles, in case they matched. Then he started on the underwear.

“Sam?” Nancy said. “Honey?”

He didn't answer the first time, so she tried again.

Finally: “What?”

“Are you running away from home?”

He almost smiled.

“We all are,” he said. “We're moving.”

Nancy looked at her husband for a sign. He used to play practical jokes. But all she saw now was a mind already made up.

She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Where?” for lack of anything better.

“Monacan. You better get moving. Bus leaves in half an hour.”

What finally did it was tampons.

Sam Chastain was, until April of 1971, head pharmacist for one of DrugLand's two West End stores. After two drinks, he would tell anybody who would listen that he wasn't really a pharmacist, just an office manager, the guy who hired and fired the checkout girls and counted the inventory. Most of the clerks missed a couple of days a month with cases of the flu that usually struck on Fridays or Mondays, according to which way the weekend needed to be stretched.

Sam really hated Mondays. On Mondays, any underpaid DrugLand worker was liable to call in sick.

He felt things should resolve themselves without human intervention whenever possible, at home or at work, so he never fired anyone, no matter how many times they shagged and spilled beer on the Work Ethic. When Sam Chastain came home and started packing, Nancy knew things had gone far beyond irritating.

The Monday it happened, he told Nancy that Etta Culbreth had called at five minutes 'til 9. It was supposed to reach 80 degrees by mid-afternoon, which it did, not a cloud in the sky. She called to tell Sam she was stuck in Virginia Beach with car trouble. Her transmission, she thought. It meant that Sam would have to stock the store, between prescriptions, while the girl who wasn't planning on being sick until Friday ran the cash register.

He was in the small section of the store that actually sold products related to the human body. He was tearing into a box of super tampons when he looked up and saw he was waist-high to Miss Mosby High of 1956, who was in town shopping. Corinne Cobb was wearing a pink miniskirt that hinted she had a better body than she did in high school, where Sam worshipped her pointed, bra-contoured breasts and golden-haired presence from afar.

Nancy was pretty sure that Sam was not cool in high school, not like Buddy and she had thought they were. In the yearbooks she looked at, Sam was on the track team and the debate team, but he wasn't in any of those spontaneously posed pictures that every yearbook staff always has taken of the “right” crowd. He was voted Most Studious.

But Sam always felt he was a late bloomer, somebody who would someday make all those cheerleaders and majorettes moan, “I didn't know THAT was Sam Chastain.”

Now, though, on his knees wrestling with a box of super tampons, a little bit of a beer gut hanging over the belt of his white shirt, he saw the look on Corinne Cobb's face just before she turned and walked away without a word, and he knew that his life might not be yielding all he'd hoped it would. He feared that maybe he was the same boy he was in high school, 14 years ago, and it really pissed him off. He blamed DrugLand for placing him, a Trained Pharmacist, in such a compromising position.

Sam left the keys with the clerk and called Tim Litwin, his supervisor. He told him he had the flu.

Then he picked up his coffee mug and his briefcase, and he left.

From Richmond to Monacan was only 35 miles, but the suburbs fell away to country just past the last shopping center. By the time Sam, Nancy and Wade had gotten 10 miles from their brick colonial on the North Side, the woods were already starting to take over.

Wade sat in the back, just happy to be going to Grandma and Grandy's. Nancy looked out the window at a succession of cinder-block houses, dammed-up ponds and service stations and wondered what the hell they were doing. The woods were the light, new green of spring, with white dogwoods everywhere.