Fat Lightning (14 page)

“Wanna go home,” the boy bawls, and his father picks him up impatiently.

“It's just the river,” he says, but the boy continues to cry. Finally, Nancy takes him.

“Am I your buddy?” Sam says, loud enough for Nancy to hear.

Nancy feels herself blush. She turns and starts walking back uphill through the mud, hoping she's remembered the trail.

They return to the house, Nancy partly carrying, partly pulling Wade, while Sam walks by himself, 100 feet back. Once, she and the boy take a wrong turn, and Sam just says, “Left.” She turns that way and finds the trail again.

By the time they get back, they see that Sebara and Lot have been busy. They've taken one of the half whiskey barrels that Aileen and her sisters used to set out flowers in the yard, emptied the dirt from it, and have dragged it over by the barn. They put it in the middle of the area facing the fast-approaching appearance of Jesus-on-the-barn, where the clay has been pounded into a brick-like, flat surface smooth as a hardwood floor by several thousand shuffling feet.

Sebara has gone into Monacan and bought a can of red spray paint and some stencils. She's in the midst of making a sign on a piece of plywood that Lot has brought out of the barn. By the time Sam, Nancy and Wade have cleaned up and come outside, it's 6:45, almost time for the first pilgrims. Lot's gotten good at estimating when the light will strike the barn just right, and he figures it'll be about 7:30 tonight. When they come around the corner, they see the sign, nailed to a tree behind the whiskey barrel: FOR THE CHAPEL OF JESUS-ON-THE-BARN.

Sebara has disappeared for the moment. Lot sees his relatives looking at the bucket and the sign.

“I don't reckon this is fancy enough for the Baptists and Presbyterians and all in town,” he says, giving that mocking smile that sends up storm warnings for everyone who knows him.

“It's fine, Uncle Lot,” Sam says. “Everybody ought to worship their own way.”

Lot's on the verge of a diatribe about religion when Sebara comes around the corner. She has on the red robe, and she's put on eye shadow and makeup. She has a Bible in her right hand.

“Don't you look pretty,” Lot says.

“Mr. Chastain,” she says to him, smiling, “you'll turn my head.”

Sam, Nancy and Wade stay, and the pilgrims start arriving. They are mostly country people who've driven a long way. The men get out and stretch, leaning on their cars. The women take the children with them and get as close as they can get to the barn. They are mostly shy, but one or two ask Lot if it's his barn. Some of them seem suspicious of the black woman in the choir robe.

At about the time that the sun strikes the barn through the trees, Sebara steps up on the stool she's put beside the whiskey barrel. She begins to speak, in the same sing-song voice that she uses for her congregation on Wednesdays and Sundays:

“And the LOOORRD looked down (pause) and he SAAIID to himself (pause) my PEOPLE have become sinners (pause) that COOOVET their neighbors' things (pause). I will SHOOOW them a sign (pause) that the WOOORD is still the word (pause) and the BLOOD of the lamb (pause) will NOOOT be mocked by men (pause). By the NAAIILS in my hands (pause) and the THORNS on my head (pause) I SIGNIFY to you (pause) that the DAAAAY is coming soon (pause) when the FIIRRST shall be last (pause) and the LAAAST shall be first.”

While she talks, the sun does its magic, and the crowd lets out its breath in unison as the figure appears. It reminds Nancy of the reaction to a particularly good fireworks explosion at a Fourth of July celebration. Sebara's rhythmic speech, almost like a chant, has made it appear that she has brought Jesus here personally. Even Lot, who has seen the vision appear every night since April, murmurs to Sam, “Ain't that something?”

She's somehow timed her sermon so that it ends at just about the same time that the last light fades. She closes with an invitation:

“We will BUUIILD him a chapel (pause) to HONOR his coming (pause) to SHOOW our appreciation (pause) for his GOODNESS and mercy (pause) that the AANGEL of death (pause) might SPARE our souls (pause) when the ROOOLL is called. Amen.”

She makes a waving gesture toward the sign and the bucket. People file by, offering mostly bills. A husband gets ready to put a dollar bill in and his wife grabs his hand and whispers to him. He reluctantly produces a five and drops it in instead.

“Praise Jesus,” says Sebara Tatum.

In the fast-fading light, Sam, Nancy and the now-sleeping Wade wait a few minutes for the hundred or so cars to disperse.

“So,” Nancy says to Sebara, “you intend to build a chapel here, through donations?”

Sebara lifts the robe over her head and gives it a shake.

“Indeed we do,” she says. “And we don't have much time. In a few more weeks, the sun won't even shine on the barn any more until spring. And who knows if Jesus is goin' to come back or not then?”

She leans against the side of Lot's truck to take off one of her high heels.

“Work,” she says, looking up at Nancy and giving her a wink, “for the night is coming.”

Since Lot returned at noon, with Sebara's Lincoln following close behind the familiar pickup truck, Billy Basset has been keeping a low profile. He needs to think.

He's seen the two of them working together to clean the old house, and he's seen the fixed bed in the back room. He knows his days of plundering silverware and silver dollars are over, at least for now. He came by in the afternoon, asking Lot if he needed any help. Lot said he didn't, not even thanking him for feeding Granger, and Sebara just looked at him, the kind of sizing-up look that Billy gets when he's buying an ounce from someone who doesn't know him.

Still, Billy feels as if the black woman might be on to something. He decides to stick around, half out of the profit motive and half out of curiosity.

He's in the back of the crowd, one of the few teen-agers there, when Sebara gives her first sermon at the barn, and he watches as people lay a coating of green on the bottom of the old whiskey barrel.

At dark, he goes back down to the river to camp out, not knowing when or if he'll be able to slip back into the big house again. He's eaten some beans and franks cooked on his Coleman stove, washing them down with a Budweiser from a six-pack he has cooling in the nearby river water, and is just lighting up a joint when the tent flap opens. It's Sebara.

“Lot said you stay here,” she says to him.

“He said I could,” Billy says, thinking he's about to be sent back across the river.

Sebara lifts the joint out of Billy's fingers and takes a toke that makes the end of it glow bright red. Billy imagines he can see the only source of his evening's entertainment visibly shrinking.

Sebara finally lets out a cloud of blue smoke. It comes out both nostrils and her mouth, rising into the already hazy air inside the tent.

“Good stuff,” she says as she looks around. “You ain't going to be able to stay here much longer. Be getting cold pretty soon.”

“I'm going to Florida,” Billy says, since it's the only place he can think of. He knows he's probably going back to his mother's.

Sebara squats down and leans close to him, looking at him straight on.

“I seen you,” she says softly. “I see everything. You be hanging around the store, selling that stuff to the other little peckerheads. You ain't hanging out up here for your health, for sure.”

She reaches in the pocket of the jeans she changed into after the crowd left and pulls out a small stub, a roach Billy knows he forgot to take with him when he was cleaning up one morning.

“Ought to be more careful,” she says to him, and then: “How'd you like to have some cash in your pockets when you go to Florida, river boy? A lot of cash.”

Billy looks up and sees a smile start to form on Sebara's face and feels one creeping onto his. A kindred spirit.

“Just be cool,” she tells the boy. “I got to get back inside. Told the old fool I was going out to the car to get some stuff. He'll be wondering. But I got things for you to do, things that'll pay good. For you and me.”

She slips out of the tent. Later, Billy goes outside, stoned, and lies on the ground. He's happy that the familiar burning smell of the sawdust pile is missing, although it did keep the mosquitoes away. A shooting star flashes past almost horizontal to the ground. Billy thinks it's a sign.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Nancy feels that she and Sam are walking on eggshells, and she's hoping it will all resolve itself. She realizes she's a coward. Although she visibly flinches every time Wade says “Buddy,” she's not sure what she wants to do.

Sam is spending more time at the Civitan Club, often not coming home until Nancy's already asleep, his exaggerated attempts at tiptoeing making every board in the old house creak. If he had come in riding a pogo stick, he couldn't have awakened her more thoroughly, Nancy thinks more than once.

And he seems to be getting more obsessed with his dream of dunking a basketball. He's spending more and more time working out; he's gone in the mornings, even Sundays now. Still, when Nancy asks how he's doing, he's evasive, says he's not ready yet, that he has a ways to go before he can actually get far enough above the rim to dunk. He claims he's still losing weight, but Nancy can't really notice any improvement there. It would be easier, he tells her, if only his hands were large enough to palm the ball while he jumped.

They haven't made love during the week after their tryst in the front seat at the drive-in, and Nancy is starting to think maybe she imagined it, that it was something she dreamed up for a character in the novel she's writing.

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-September, Nancy takes Wade and goes to visit her family in Richmond. Sam is spending the whole day at a pig-picking his club is holding, keeping watch over the skewered animal as it cooks all morning and part of the afternoon, drinking a beer every hour, then every half-hour. Nancy figures this will be a good time to go see her parents.

She never makes plans to call Buddy or see him, but it's as if something pulls her off the road on a second's notice when she sees a pay phone booth, and before she knows it, she's calling the now-familiar number, but no one answers. She gets back in the car, both disappointed and mildly relieved that she's been saved from herself.

When she gets to Suzanne and Pat's, she sees that Candy's car is in the driveway, along with another one that seems vaguely familiar.

She still has the key to her parents' front door, and she always just lets herself in. Everyone seems to be on the back porch, from the noise, so she goes back there, leading Wade, who hangs on to two of her fingers and keeps saying, “Grandpa, Grandpa.”

Suzanne comes around the corner and greets them both, but she has a worried look on her face and blocks Nancy's access to the porch, where the noise has suddenly died.

“I told Pat we ought to have asked you about this beforehand,” she says. “But he said it'd been so long ago, that it wouldn't matter.”

While she talks and Nancy tries to figure out the bottom line, Wade wanders out on the porch where he sees his grandfather and his Aunt Candy and his Aunt Marilou. Better yet, he sees another familiar human being sitting beside Aunt Marilou, holding her hand.

“Buddy!” he exclaims.

“I see you all have already met,” Marilou says dryly to Buddy Molloy.

It turns out that Buddy has been dating Marilou for a month now, but that everyone in the O'Neil family has kept it from Nancy. “We just didn't want to ruffle feathers, honey,” Suzanne tells her.

With only seven people present, it's impossible to keep Nancy and Buddy away from each other completely, and it makes things so awkward that Suzanne finally exclaims, while they're all sitting together at the picnic table outside over hot dogs and hamburgers, “Would you all stop? Would everybody just act natural? You're making me as nervous as a whore in church with a bastard on each knee.”

Everyone except Nancy laughs. She leaves the picnic table, and Buddy follows her. He catches up in the old bedroom that Nancy shared with Marilou when they were growing up.

“I didn't mean to,” he tells her as she slaps his hand from around her shoulder. “If I'd have known what it would lead to.… She just looks so much like you.”

“How many more times were you going to fuck me before you told me?” she spits out.

“I ran into her at the mall one day,” he says. “We talked for half an hour. Before I knew what I was doing, I asked her out.”

“And she said yes?”

“She thinks we haven't seen each other in years … or at least she did.”

Buddy puts his hand lightly on her shoulder, and she lets him leave it there this time.

“I know we can't get back together,” he says, almost whispering. “Ever since the reunion, though, I've been thinking about you. Before then, too. But then it got really bad. And Marilou is so much like you. It's like a chance not to screw it up this time.”

“And what about me? Have I had my chance?”

Buddy doesn't say anything, can't think of anything to make it any better.

Nancy goes back outside, tells Marilou it's all right, then walks over and throws up on one of her father's prize rosebushes.

“Well, Wade,” she tells the boy on the way back to Monacan, “it looks like it's just you and me. No more Buddy.”

“No Buddy?” the child asks. He never says the name again.

Nancy is working on her novel the next day when Carter comes by. Wade's asleep, and Sam is gone, dressed to run another endless series of hundred-yard dashes. The secret, he has told Nancy, is in converting horizontal speed into vertical speed; the faster you run, the higher you jump.

Since she and her family moved to Monacan, Nancy has written almost 100 pages. Over the months, she's built a story around characters that are obviously styled after Buddy and Lot, although it hurts her to think of the former right now. The story is about a father who has been committed to a mental institution and his divorced son who gets him out and with whom he is living. Nancy is repulsed by Lot the person but fascinated by Lot the character, and she feels she must get as much of Lot's character as possible into the story if it's going to succeed.