Lightning Song (12 page)

Elsie's interest outlasted Harris's. Harris had gone back to Miss Manners and the cryptogram.

“Isn't Italian just the most beautiful language in the world, Harris?” she said.

He looked up from the sports page. He snapped the paper once and then folded it. He was wearing his favorite Hawaiian shirt. He scratched his head. He said, “Well, yeah, I guess so—”

Leroy wondered if his mama didn't need a good fast backwards drive through the mud in an oversized car to calm her down some.

“What a wonderful man he must have been,” she said, “this Aldo Moro, what a handsome man, to have so melodious a name.” Elsie could think of nothing else but this. It was all she could talk about. She could not get enough of it. Leroy followed her around, he didn't know why. He was as entranced by his mother's transformation as she was by Aldo Moro. She told him things she thought, revealed her fantasies, and yet she did not have to do so. Leroy knew them already, seemed to know her thoughts as they came into her head, almost to read her mind. Elsie imagined tuneful voices, speaking in sorrowful Italian. She imagined violent words, also in Italian, no less beautiful. She imagined dark eyes and raven hair, spaghetti cooking on an iron stove, fruit vendors, good shoes, silk suits, she wasn't sure what else. Leroy could have been wrong about
some of this. He wished he knew more about Italy so that access to his mama's sweet imaginings might not suffer these imaginative bumps.

It didn't matter, to Leroy or to Elsie. He knew in broad outline anyway the secrets of her private heart. She whispered the name of Aldo Moro. She fell in love with him. She imagined that she was his wife. She wrote his name a hundred times on a sheet of lined paper. She wrote her own name, then, as if she shared his name, Elsie Moro—Elsie didn't quite fit, didn't sound quite right, unless you whispered it in Elsie's own silent fantastic version of the Italian language, an accent of sorts, with a faint echo of
mamma mia
somewhere in the background. Leroy creepy-crawled. He found her diary hidden away in a drawer she thought he did not know about. He imagined her thoughts, her feelings. He saw that she had written the names with an unaccustomed slant in her handwriting, so that she might believe she had written in Italian. He knew that in her imagination she could speak Italian, and in her dreams.

The fear grew in Leroy's heart.

One morning Elsie told Leroy one of her dreams. She said she saw an image of Aldo Moro in an attic room of the farmhouse where she lived, with its steeply sloped eaves for a roof. The room she described sounded just like Harris's room. She said this was the way she imagined Aldo, in horrible captivity. He was chained to a chair. He was tragic and handsome. He was at the mercy of whoever wanted to abuse him, use him, in whatever way they wanted.

Leroy said, “Did he look anything like Uncle Harris?”

His mama looked at him quizzically for a moment, then her eyes seemed to lose focus. She seemed to have forgotten Leroy was standing there. She turned and seemed literally to drift away from him on a current of air.

Later she saw a photograph in the newspaper in which Aldo Moro looked almost the same as in her fantasy. Leroy looked at the photo. He did look a little like Harris, older, of course, handsome, with dark, dark eyes. Leroy heard her whisper, “Aldo, Aldo.” He saw her hold the index finger of her hand in a certain way, finger out, thumb crooked. He saw her pretend to thrust something into her purse. Leroy understood the meaning of this game. In her fantasy Elsie carried a pistol. She was Aldo's kidnapper, his wife, and his bodyguard. She was all things to Aldo Moro. Aldo Moro became almost a real person in their lives, that was the way Leroy thought of him. When he imagined his mama with Aldo, he imagined that she wore Italian-looking clothes and high heels. The clothes were a little vague in his mind, but black and sort of flowing. She wore dark glasses and scarves. He imagined secret meetings and intrigue. He imagined blazing pistols, grateful kisses. Probably his mama imagined these things, too. Probably she ached for this lost man, alone somewhere among enemies. Leroy knew that at night she wept into her pillow, prayed for his safety. Leroy himself also wept and prayed. No one knew where they had taken him, the papers said. Where was the ransom note? Where were the political demands?

Later they all learned that Aldo's wife was named Noretta. Leroy imagined that his mama thought of herself by that name. Maybe she pretended Noretta was the Italian word for Elsie, anything seemed possible to Leroy.

Elsie said, “Nobody knows where he is, nobody who loves him. But he's somewhere. Right now, right this very minute, he's
somewhere
.”

Leroy looked at his daddy for an answer. Anyone with the right response to this riddle would surely win his mama's true and eternal love.

Swami Don said, “Well, sure, Elsie. Of course he's
somewhere
.”

She said, “But don't you
see
? He's in some particular place. He's outdoors. He's indoors. In a chair. A bed. A forest glen.”

Molly said, “He's going doodies.”

Leroy said, “Forest glen?”

Laurie said, “Oh shut up, Leroy.”

Leroy said, “You shut up.”

Laurie said, “Do you want me to slap the shit out of you?”

Elsie said, “He knows whether it is raining or if the sun is shining.”

She looked at them with pleading in her eyes. The tragic Noretta had begun to appear on the television news each night begging for her husband's life.

Leroy's daddy said, “Everybody's got to be
somewhere
, Elsie.”

Harris said, “It's too bad, you know, that there's not a private bathroom in the attic.”

T
here was a hillside with a steep face sloping down into a ravine that might once have been an old riverbed. The ravine cut along the edge of a deep woods. If you walked far enough into the woods you would come to the river. The sky was clear, the sun was bright. Swami Don was thinking of this as he and Leroy stood at the kitchen sink together. He was also thinking of the day he got shot, the clear wide skies of brilliant blue, the sweet smell of cordite in his nostrils, the little slap dance he did with his hand against his face as the shotgun blast spun him dizzily in a circle on his toes and caused his hand to leap up to his mouth.

Later his Old Pappy had said, “You know, it's a shame you didn't work your mouth into an
O
right about then. It would have made one of them loud pops, like you hear in a skilled hambone demonstration.”

Swami Don was still lying on the white sheets in the county
hospital when Old Pappy said this. He was drugged and sleepy.

He said, “Hambone?”

His Old Pappy was sitting in a plastic chair beside the child's bed. He started a slow, desultory hambone: hand to leg, up to his chest, slap slap slap hambone. Swami Don watched and listened through a haze of gentle drugs. Hambone, hambone, have you heard, his Old Pappy sang. He slapped his hand from leg to chest, leg to chest, doubling now on the leg, holding his mouth in an
O
and popping that, like a cork being pulled from a champagne bottle, hambone. The tempo of the hambone rhythm picked up. Papa gonna buy me a mawkin bird. Hambone, hambone, hambone. Swami Don had drifted off to sleep as his Old Pappy slapped his leg and chest and sang in an increasingly lively rhythm.

Swami Don looked at the little boy, his son, drying a plate with a dish towel. The days had lengthened, and though the hour was late the summer sky glowed with yellow light from the setting sun. They washed, they rinsed, they dried, they put away the supper dishes, breathed the steamy water, the detergent smell, noted their pruny hands.

Swami Don said, “You know, I've got an idea, Leroy.”

He wiped off the sink with a wet dishrag.

Leroy gave him a look.

“Now don't say no until you've heard me out.”

He laid down his dishrag and walked through the house.

Leroy saw what was coming. He watched his daddy as he
searched around for a key on his key chain and finally found the right one.

Swami Don went to a closet in the back of the house and unlocked the door and pushed back some winter coats in plastic bags. He lifted out a rifle and a box of ammunition from safe storage. The long barrel of the rifle he managed to keep pointed upward in a safe-seeming way. Leroy saw what was coming. The dreaded firearm safety demonstration.

He said, “No way. Forget it.”

His daddy slipped the yellow pasteboard box of cartridges into his jacket pocket and propped the rifle against his hip so that he could jack the lever of the rifle and open its chamber to be sure it wasn't loaded.

Swami Don said, “Firearm safety.”

Leroy said, “I'm not going to shoot that gun.”

Swami Don said, “We'll take a few potshots. It'll be fun.”

“It's not fun.”

“Every boy ought to know something about—”

“Arrgh!”

“—firearm safety.”

Leroy said, “You can't make me. I'm not going to do it.”

“Leroy, please,” his father said.

“It's too heavy,” Leroy complained.

“Target practice, honey—”

“It hurts my ears. It kicks too hard.”

The only time he had actually gone shooting with his father
he had pretended to get gunpowder in his eyes. He had walked around with his hands out in front of him for two days. He wouldn't go to school. He bumped into things, like a blind man in the comics.

Swami Don stood in the hallway with the gleaming rifle. He looked like a big wilted flower.

Even Leroy felt sorry for him.

Swami Don said, “It'll be fun. Come on. We'll find some, you know, tin cans.”

He said this, but Leroy knew he had about broken him. His heart wasn't in it. He stood there with the rifle. He wiped off the rifle with a soft cloth. Leroy had won.

The problem was, the rifle was a thing of beauty. Leroy ached to look at it, it was so beautiful. He regretted that resisting firearm safety demonstrations was more important than shooting this magnificent weapon. It was a .30.30 lever-action Winchester with a ten-cartridge magazine and a steel ring with a leather thong depending from it on one side. It glistened, blue steel and walnut. The cartridges were gleaming copper jackets with lead bullets. Leroy loved everything about the rifle, its heft and balance, the fragrance of gun oil, sweet as peaches, the metallic clack of bullets, fed in or jacked out, the crack of gunfire in an open field. Once before, when his father was not watching, he had let the bullets roll out of his hands, off his fingers, like gold coins in a pirate's treasure. The rifle evoked the whole mythology of the Wild West,
boots and spurs, ten-gallon hats, mesas and buttes and land lots of land under starry skies above, creaking leather saddles and stiff lariats.

Why Leroy would not go along with his father on firearm safety demonstrations was one of the mysteries of life. He longed to be his father's son.

While Leroy was standing around in the kitchen resisting the excursion with his father, Swami Don had given up and asked Laurie if she wanted to go shoot the rifle with him and she had said yes. They were already out the back door. Laurie was wearing a print cotton dress that struck her above the knees. She had on her yellow rubber boots.

Leroy walked through the house looking for them. He stood at the back door. He watched them walk across the yard together, to the gate in the fence, out into the pasture.

He called, “Wait!”

He banged out the screened door, down the steps. He chased along behind until he caught up.

Swami Don looked back. He said, “Did you change your mind?”

Laurie looked at Leroy without expression.

Leroy caught his breath quickly.

He said, “No.”

Swami Don looked at him. “No?”

Leroy said, “I don't want to.”

Laurie looked away.

Swami Don had been smiling. Now he stopped.

He said, “Oh. Well, all right then. We'll be back soon.”

The two of them, father and daughter, turned and walked on in the direction they had been going.

Leroy stood and watched, just outside the pasture gate, as Laurie and Swami Don walked slowly away from him. Swami Don carried the beautiful rifle by his side in his good hand. Leroy trailed along behind.

Just then Leroy saw something he had never seen before. It was a wonder he noticed it at all, it was such a small thing. He saw Laurie reach up and take her father's hand. Not the hand that carried the rifle, of course. The other, the withered hand, the pale child-hand that hung lifeless, with curled fingers, by Swami Don's side. The two of them walked along in this way, Laurie and Swami Don, holding hands, like regular people. They might have been any loving father and daughter in the world. It was the first time Leroy had ever seen that history-paled-and-crumpled hand treated like a normal, real extension of his father's life. He realized how often he had seen his mother shun it, how often he had shunned it himself, in ways so small he himself had not noticed.

Leroy took off running. He ran and chased.

He cried out, “Wait! Wait for me!”

Swami Don and Laurie stopped and looked. They let Leroy catch up. When he did, he was breathing hard.

When finally he could speak, he couldn't think of what to say. Even Leroy knew he looked foolish.

Laurie rolled her eyes.

Swami Don said, “Well, uh—”

There was not much else to say.

Eventually, when no one spoke, the three of them began their trek again, across the pasture in the direction of the ravine. Leroy walked a lonely step or two behind.

O
ne afternoon down at Mr. Sweet's store, Leroy happened to be buying bubble gum when the New People showed up. Mr. Sweet was always glad to have company, you didn't have to buy anything. He seemed especially to like the New People. They came in to ask Mr. Sweet's advice on something. Mr. Sweet was in a talkative mood, so it took them a while to get around to what they wanted to say. Leroy noticed that the New People were dressed normally, jeans, a baseball cap, you wouldn't notice anything peculiar about them, except the way they talked. The New Guy had an expensive-looking camera around his neck as well, though this seemed natural enough. It was their speech that struck Leroy as strange. They seemed to talk a little different every time Leroy ran into them. In a way he liked the silent-movie version of them best of all. Well, he wasn't sure. He liked the British accent pretty well, too. Today more than ever the New
Guy seemed to be using his British accent. He could turn it on and off.