Lightning Song (11 page)

He said, “Ah, well, yes, you see there, hm, all right, very well, shotgun seat, is it, hm. Perhaps we should take a step back here”—he looked at his wife in the backseat—“won't take a minute, dear, we'll be off shortly, you'll see. Ah, now, young man, it is important for you to recognize that you, in the innocence of your youth, you know not the first thing about automobile travel, am I right, you may answer truly, mustn't be ashamed, there, there now, it's all right to make a mistake, no harm done.”

Leroy looked out the busted windshield. He could see the New People's cottage, with its blistered paint and torn screens
and collapsed steps and a refrigerator on the porch. The cottage was in worse shape than he had fully realized. The chimney had collapsed and most of the bricks still lay on the porch roof. Through the windshield the shack looked like a badly-pieced-together jigsaw puzzle. It looked pretty much that way without the windshield. He imagined he could see his Old Pappy standing on the porch smiling at him. He thought about waving to him and then decided not to, it might scare him off.

The New Guy said, “Now are you interested in this grief therapy, young man, or not, it's your choice, make up your mind. Up to you. Don't have all day here, don't you know.”

Leroy took his eyes off his Old Pappy.

He said, “Yessir.”

“All right, then!” the New Guy said. “Very well indeed. First off the mark, let's get this intrusive automotive issue off the table, clear the air, don't you see, what, what? You don't say ‘the shotgun seat.' That expression, my dear boy, has lost currency entirely, gone out of style, it's dated,
passay voo
, as the French are fond of saying. It's considered very old-fashioned, you see, even in the American South. You'll look, quite frankly, like a fool if you are allowed to continue saying ‘shotgun seat' in this modern day and age of ours. You don't want to look like a fool, do you? I didn't think so. All right then. Straight to the point: what you say is ‘the suicide seat.' Not
shotgun
,
suicide
. That's what you'd be sitting in, you see.” When the New Guy said “you see” it sounded as if he were saying “you sam.” “You're sitting in it right now, you sam.
Suicide
would be the proper modern phraseology for where you wish to sit, you sam. Do you understand it a little better now? I'm just trying to be of help in your time of need, you sam.”

Leroy said, “Yessir.”

The angel in the backseat said, “You were always wonderful with children, darling.”

The New Guy said, “Everyone ready? Here we go!” He twisted the screwdriver in the ignition and pumped hard on the gas while the motor turned over.

He said, “It ain't been crunk for a while.” When he said this he wrinkled up his nose and spoke in an exaggerated nasal sort of way. Then his face brightened. He said, “Oh, my, the American South! Its language! Its idiom! Its rhythms are music to my ears!”

He kept twisting on the screwdriver and pumping on the gas. The battery was low, and the engine was sluggish, the smell of gasoline filled the car. It made a sound like whuh-whuh-whuh-whuh, and for a minute Leroy thought it might not start. Then all of a sudden the enormous engine started in a rush. It sounded like a hurricane. The wilderness echoed. Oily smoke blew out the tailpipe in a huge cloud.

The New Guy hollered above the roar, “Sound like she might be 'bout ready for a tune-up. Whoo doggies!” Leroy thought the New Guy might have learned Southern speech from reruns of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

The New Guy kept pumping on the gas so it wouldn't die. It sounded like a jet plane ready to take off. The car was rocking.
The trunk lid was up and bouncing. He put his foot on the brake. He slipped the transmission into reverse.

He said in a loud voice, “Are you ready, my angel?”

“Ready, dear,” came the voice from the backseat.

To Leroy he said, “This always helps me in a time of grief.”

He floorboarded it.

The Crown Victoria was a huge car. Leroy had never realized just how big cars could be. This was surely the biggest he had ever seen up close. It was massive. It had eight cylinders and three hundred horsepower. It weighed two tons. It was sunk into a foot of wet clay mud. The wheels started spinning, mud started flying, good Lord. Leroy could hear the mud flying, slapping the underside of the car. The wheels slung mud so far up under the car it flew out the front end and straight up in the air. The sky seemed to be raining red mud. It flew all over the hood and all over the cracked windshield. The front window was completely covered with mud, it was completely opaque. It didn't matter. Leroy held on. They were in reverse. They were rocking. The tires were about to find traction beneath the mud.

Suddenly the Crown Vic seemed to take flight. It dug out backwards. They were taking off, they were airborne, almost. Smoke and steam boiled out of the hood. The trunk lid was going wild. The New Guy cut the wheel hard to the left. Leroy held on. The car went immediately into a high-speed spin. It tilted wildly, but there was no danger of turning over, the car was too heavy for that. They were roaring around in a
backwards circle. Mud flew up onto the side of the house, all over the porch, the refrigerator, everywhere. The car was leaning, the tires were smoking, the noise was overwhelming. Leroy's groceries flew around the inside of the car for a while and then right out the window. They disappeared beneath the wheels and the mud.

Leroy was rattling around in the front seat of the car, which was generating all three hundred horsepower in reverse. There were no seatbelts. He fell onto the floor and climbed back onto the seat again. He looked in the backseat. The angel was pinned to the car's door. The wings were askew. He looked out his side window. Around and around the Crown Vic flew in reverse. The exterior world was a blur. The house, the well house, another car, the trees, the road, the mailbox—all the images appeared at once and blended together. The Crown Vic clipped the mailbox and sheared it off its post. Leroy looked at the New Guy.

The New Guy was just barely in control. He was hanging on for dear life, gas pedal to the floor, hands gripped on the steering wheel. He was riding it out. He was working through his grief, whatever it may have been, taking care of this boy who had stopped by, in case he had grief to work through as well. The gas pedal was on the floor. The car was roaring. The New Guy was looking not into the rearview mirror at where he was going but straight ahead, into the mud-splattered glass. He knew where he was going. He didn't have to see to get there. He was rewinding his life. He was watching his past fall
behind him, or in front of him. He was on a beeline for innocence, pre-grief. The look on his face was earnest. This was serious work, even Leroy could see all this.

The car engine roared, the wheels spun, mud flew, and they went backwards, backwards, in dizzying flying circles. They drove this way for a very long time. The Crown Victoria completed many circles, a hundred at least, it seemed to Leroy. They ran the car into one of the other junkers and sent it spinning, they ran into the house and knocked off the porch. You never heard such a noise. The refrigerator turned over and fell out in the yard. The roof of the house came down on top of the Crown Vic. A couple of chimney bricks crashed right through the rear window and landed in the backseat. The angel missed getting her head bashed in by about a foot. No one seemed concerned. The car spun around one more time and finally stopped. The radiator was billowing steam. The temperature gauge was all the way over on H. There was a smell of gasoline. The car could catch on fire, Leroy realized. Some mud had gotten into the car, all over the seats, all over the headdress and wings, all over Leroy. This ride was over. The Crown Vic was pretty much finished forever. Everyone was still alive, and there was no fire, so that was good. Leroy sat for a while. No one spoke. The world spun more slowly, then ceased to spin at all. It must have worked, Leroy had to admit. Some miles must have been taken off their lives' odometers. He looked over at the New Guy, who was sitting behind the wheel, not fully conscious. The ride had been hard
on him, had battered him pretty badly. Leroy straightened himself up in his seat. He felt better, he sure did. The grief therapy had worked. At last the New Guy began to stir. He regained full consciousness and turned to Leroy with a smile. He said, “You won't forget what I told you about automotive terminology, will you, young man?”

T
he day the story of Aldo Moro's kidnapping in Italy broke into the news, Uncle Harris ran into the house from his car after the usual morning drive into town. He was waving newspapers and shouting. “Kidnap!” he cried. “Danger! Death threats! Romance!” To Leroy his uncle had never seemed happier. Even the kisses scarcely seemed to matter in the face of Uncle Harris's unbridled enthusiasm. How could Hannah ever have kicked out a man like Harris, with such infinite capacities for enthusiasm over death? It was too bad Uncle Harris arrived after Old Pappy had already died, Leroy thought. If he had been around for the death and resurrection and re-death, the mouth-to-mouth, the corpse spirited away in an ambulance at midnight, all the rest, well, the party would never have ended. Harris spread the papers on the table. He seemed to be offering a special gift to the family. He pointed to the headline.
Aldo Moro Kidnapped in via Fani.
He
made everyone look. He said, “Photos, page B-12. Let's see.” He turned through the pages, looking for pictures. He found them. A file photo of Aldo Moro, in a dark suit. And then a picture of the car, riddled with bullet holes, dead and bleeding bodyguards lying nearby on the pavement. “Molly,” he said. “Look, honey, look, it's better than Gary Gilmore!” His face was bright as a child's. All over he seemed to glow. There might have been a bright light behind him.

It was impossible not to share his uncle's enthusiasm, even if Leroy had no idea who these people were. The president of the Christian Democratic Party of Italy? What did it mean, even? Kidnapped? Uncle Harris read aloud from the paper. The obituaries were old news, history, unimportant, now that Aldo was in the custody of renegades. Ann Landers, farewell, Heloise, horoscope, so long it's been good to know you. All of Harris's energies now were directed at Aldo Moro, at the drama of European shores. “A screech of tires,” he read to Elsie, to the children, to whoever would listen, “a sudden confusion, a car crash.” He said, “Oh, boy, listen to this: ‘A burst of gunfire filled the quiet air of via Fani. The car carrying President Moro careened out of control. All five bodyguards lay dead, in pools of blood and shattered glass. The President was dragged from his car and thrust into one of the attackers' cars. Two cars sped away in separate directions.'” He looked up. The glow on his face might have been rapture. “Have you ever heard of anything so wonderful? Leroy, you're old enough to appreciate this. Isn't it great? Wouldn't you have
just loved to be there when those guns went off, when that car careened out of control? Can't you just hear it now? Rat-a-tat-tat, screech, oh, man. Oh, I know I would, you bet I would have loved to be there. I can't believe I missed it. I miss everything. That's what you get, being born in the South. Nothing ever happens. Just a bunch of rednecks is all we have in the South. But Italy! Oh, Leroy, you appreciate this, don't you, the cradle of civilization, violent decay, sweet romance, you see what I'm getting at here, don't you, son, I'm not alone in this, am I, I'm not just an oddball here, am I, Leroy?”

Leroy wanted to assure his uncle that he was not a solitary oddball, that in a cottage just across the llama pasture lived a pair of oddballs who were in an entirely separate league, that Uncle Harris had nothing to worry about if he ever needed the company of other lunatics. The thing was, Leroy was beginning fully to appreciate the value of such nuttiness. He couldn't explain it, any more than he could explain the existence of swamp elves, but there they were, there everything was, even the violence, the drama, the fall of heroes, the romance of foreign shores. All of it made sense in some insane way. Maybe when he was older he would understand, maybe understanding was irrelevant. It was no wonder that his mother had fallen in love with Uncle Harris.

And in love with him she surely seemed to be now, more than ever. She looked at him with new eyes, even less critical eyes than those that were attracted to Harris in the first place.
Aldo Moro changed everything. If the obits and horoscope and the execution of Gary Gilmore had sparked little interest in her, leaving her with mere physical attraction, then nothing could have suited Elsie so well as the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. Now she had got it, every fiber of her being seemed to announce. Now she was fully in tune. Grog rations, puppet shows, secret kisses, these were the preliminaries. Now she was ripe for possibilities beyond anything she had previously given serious thought to. Harris had sown the seed, the harvest was due. She became as interested in Aldo Moro as Harris was. Her interest was not merely a tagalong to Harris's lead. Leroy watched her assume the lead position. Her interest became stronger and weirder than even Harris's. Each day after this first day she jerked the papers out of Harris's hands before he could open them. She tore through, devouring each word, analyzing each photograph, calling the newspaper office to complain of various things, a paragraph omitted from the story off the AP wire that she had picked up out of another paper. Everything else became less important to Elsie than Aldo Moro. Molly moped about the house, sucking her thumb and wetting her training pants. Elsie scarcely noticed. Aldo, Aldo, Aldo—she seemed to think only of Aldo. She spoke his name to herself at the kitchen sink. She watched the television news every time it came on.

The words themselves, via Fani, the Red Brigade, the ruling party, even the name Aldo Moro—had there ever been so
beautiful a name? she asked Leroy one day—“It rolls from the tongue,” she said. “Such a romantic language, Italian. Such a beautiful language.” This went on for days.