Lightning Song (13 page)

Mr. Sweet said, “Well, shoot, you ain't wearing your headdress. I'm disappointed.”

The New Lady noticed Leroy over by the gum and candy display. She said, “Ah! Le Roi, so good it eeze to see you.” What language she was speaking Leroy wondered, but he really couldn't say.

He said, “Hey.” He didn't turn around, though, he just kept looking at the gum. He wasn't sure how to act after their wild ride together. In a way, all he wanted to do was to hang around them. He felt safer with them than anywhere else. He realized this was an odd thing to be thinking.

The New Guy said, “Rah-ther, old chap, tallyho, all that, special occasions, what, the headdress, you sam, special occasions.”

Leroy had to look now. He saw Mr. Sweet squinch up his eyes. He looked to Leroy like he wondered how the New Guy knew his name was Sam. Mr. Sweet said, “Used to be a Pentecostal Holiness preacher out near Notasulga had him a headdress, too. Looked a lot like the one you had on in here one day last week. You ought to heard that man explain the Pentecost. Explained that sapsucker better'n I ever heard it. Y'all folks know anything about the Pentecost, do you? Are you religious people at all? I'll explain it to you sometime if you want me to, I got it committed to memory, it's easy once you get the hang of it. He said that headdress was just chicken
feathers but that was okay it was for the Lord. He was near-bout seven feet tall, Pentecostal preacher, they usually short, is my experience, not no seven feet anyhow, nowhere near. His wife played the piano and the Dobro, real musical gal, you'd of liked her. Church in the Wildwood, which I always thought was Church in the Wildroot, like the hair tonic, she could make that Dobro talk, brother. Look like Jack Sprat's wife, gland problems, real pretty in the face, though. She could make that Dobro talk, you better believe it. Another lady fell out and started talking in tongues one night, Dobro done that to her. That's the power of the Dobro, in the right hands, that's the power of the Dobro, the way that preacher's wife could play. Preacher he said, ‘See she don't swaller that tongue she's talking in.' He also said, ‘She ain't got no panties on, so keep her legs together while the spirit moves her.' He could explain the Pentecost so you could understand it, any idiot could understand it once he got through explaining it to you. He didn't preach no hellfire, just only God's love for the least of these my brethren. Plus he run the road grader for the county, hard worker, every road stayed cleared—this was back before most of these roads got blacktopped. You could see the marks of a scraper blade gouged into the banks of every hillside around here, wherever you went. You'd look at them scraper gouges and you'd say, Now I understand the Pentecost. I said to him one time, ‘How come you to wear a chicken-feather bonnet?' This was long time ago. I was just about the same age back then as this little shit-for-brains.” He
smiled and indicated Leroy with a jerk of his head. “Preacher he said, ‘I got me a good deal on it. You won't get no better deal on a chicken-feather bonnet than I got on this here one.' I said, ‘Did Jesus wear a warbonnet his ownself?' Preacher said, ‘Not likely. They weren't as many chickens back then.' I said, ‘Was they any banties?'”

Leroy knew which preacher Mr. Sweet was talking about. He had never met him, he'd been dead since before Leroy was born, but he knew who he was. This preacher had been a friend to Swami Don, Leroy's daddy, long time ago, but not as long as Mr. Sweet thought it was. Mr. Sweet was no good with dates. This preacher had helped Leroy's daddy after Old Pappy shot him. Then he helped him again after Old Mammy died. Preacher helped him and Harris get set up in the foster home with the captain and the belle. Preacher was easy to talk to, everybody said so. He was respectful and kind. He encouraged Swami Don to cry if he felt like it, didn't mean he was a sissy, told him to speak all his angry thoughts to him. He said he didn't want to risk getting Swami Don beat up or killed, but that if he ever felt safe enough to do it, he probably ought to tell his Old Pappy how much pain he felt, inside and outside. He ought to try to tell him he wished he'd been a little less careless with his life. Leroy had overheard his Daddy tell Uncle Harris that this preacher was the reason he was able to talk straight with Old Pappy later on, out at the halfway house, that night on the coast when Swami Don was a boy and needed somebody to talk to, when he woke up that night,
scared, after Uncle Harris stole Hannah away from him. He gave the preacher all the credit in the world, he said. People still talked about that preacher, not just crazy old Mr. Sweet.

The New Guy said, “I say, have a listen, here, please, tell me what you think, advise me here, you sam. Just now the señorita and I were making our way along a road we'd not driven on before when we saw the most amazing thing, I think you'll agree, hot as blue blazes out there, don't you sam, still as a grave, what, scarcely enough air to breathe, all that, red dust kicking up behind the car, the señorita's hair was blown by the wind in a pretty way, you sam.” He looked at his wife lovingly. Leroy noted that she was a señorita today, all right. She had on a wide-brimmed black hat with a round, flat top. He supposed she could be a señorita in that hat. A bullfighter, maybe. She smiled and leaned her head back and shook her hair, as if to demonstrate something, Leroy was not sure what.

She said, “Me I was say to zee señor I joos love zees Mee-see-see-pee of yours! Zee sky she pour over you like zee blue cascade.”

Mr. Sweet narrowed his eyes. He wasn't sure he understood Spanish well enough to follow this part of the conversation. That's what his expression told Leroy, who was thinking along similar lines.

As if to prove that he was no señor but a British lord, the New Guy pulled out a briar pipe and clenched it between his big white teeth. It was already filled with tobacco. He struck a large kitchen match and set it to the bowl of the pipe and
sucked vigorously at the stem until the store was filled with fragrant, chocolaty-smelling puffs of pipe smoke. Leroy looked at the New Guy's long-fingered, slender hand casually gripped around the pipe's bowl. The New Guy said, “So, in any case, crossing the swale just now, a few meters down this particular road, you sam, I espied a devil of a piece of material. Photography, don't you see, cameras and all that, what. A homemade saw-rig with an old car hooked on for power. Marvelous! Know anything about that apparatus, Sweet? Any ideas? Know who that marvel belongs to? Think it would be all right for a chap to photograph? Eh? Eh, what, what?”

Mr. Sweet said, “Pitchers?”

The New Guy explained that he was a photographer. “An artist in film, you sam, black-and-white mainly, some color, no purist here, no prima donna, what.” He was touring “the American South,” as he said. He wanted to know everything about it.

The señorita said, “We only joos, how you say, arrive zees shores, and already I seemply sheever weez an unbearable seenz of life.”

The New Guy said, “Oh, quite, straight to the mark, yes indeed.”

Mr. Sweet said, “You know, you ain't fooling me none.”

The New Guy said, “Dear me, bad luck, drat, quite rotten, my, my.”

The señorita shook her head. She was very sad, Leroy could tell.

Mr. Sweet said, “I place that accent somewhere in the lower Delta. Yazoo City? Are y'all river rats?”

Nobody answered, but that was all right. Mr. Sweet locked up the store and they all went out together. The four of them crowded into Mr. Sweet's old GMC pickup with STP stickers on the bumper. They drove out the road where the New People said they'd seen the homemade saw-rig. They parked on the side of the road and piled out of the cab. The New Guy photographed the saw-rig. Then for the next couple of hours Mr. Sweet led them through barbed-wire fences and onto posted property. He showed them a low spot in the hills where a fresh spring muddied the earth. He was old and he had that built-up shoe but he could still walk on uneven ground pretty well. Every now and then the New Guy had to hold Mr. Sweet's arm. Mr. Sweet led them past clearings where a fragrance of mint leaves was all they could smell. He took them to an abandoned barn where he got them to help him pull away a tangle of vines on an exterior wall to show them an enormous sign that said
DRINK MILK
. The words were spelled out in a million Coca-Cola bottle caps nailed to the wood. He took them down to the branch of a creek Leroy had never known existed. He showed them deer tracks. He showed them a sign, out in the middle of the creek, that said
NO WALKING ON THE WATER.
He showed them a bee-tree and stuck in his hand, in a deep hollow in the trunk, and pulled out a dripping honeycomb. Bees crawled all over his arm and face and did not sting him. He showed them a tiny graveyard
in the briar patch where the headstones were all of wood. He said, “This here's my daddy. Over yonder's my granddaddy. Like to burned up every motorcar in town gittin over them two.” He showed them a small lake, a waterfall that fed it, a beaver dam in the middle. They saw a beaver swimming in the stream, big as a yearling calf. They walked deep, deep into the woods until Leroy believed Mr. Sweet was lost and ashamed to admit it, or mentally unbalanced and unable to know how lost they'd become.

They came into a space where the trees were strange and low, unlike any of the other trees nearby. These trees had been planted. It was an ancient abandoned apple orchard. The limbs swagged to the ground, freighted with ripe red apples that would never be harvested. Mr. Sweet picked up a few of the ripe apples from underneath the tree and handed them around. They stood in the leaf-stained sunlight. The señorita bit into an apple. It cracked like a gunshot. They all ate. Juice both sweet and tart flooded Leroy's mouth. He had never tasted such an apple, such an amazing piece of fruit.

Mr. Sweet led them out of the hills and back to the road. They walked the long walk back to the pickup. Mr. Sweet said, “In Jewish Shavuot, Passover was sort of a party. It was the end of the grain harvest. This was in Palestine. Pentecost wasn't nothing special back then. It was more of just a calendar day. Somebody might say, ‘When did y'all have that last baby?' Or ‘When did you get your new wringer washing
machine?' if you had one, whatever you wanted to ask about, it didn't matter, and you might say, ‘Well, let's see, shit, honey, when was that, back around Pentecost? Or was it when we were farming shares for the rich motherfucker that owns the company store?'”

T
hat day they went out with Swami Don and the rifle Leroy may have been the first to notice the colorless mound far out in front of them in the pasture grass, though it was Laurie who tugged at her daddy's small hand and stopped walking. They all stopped. They squinted their eyes in the sun to see better. Swami Don was carrying the rifle in his good hand. Leroy watched him give the rifle a small shake. Leroy had thought the rise of gray in the pasture was an anthill, fire ants. He had seen them before, many times. The large size of the mound, the color of the earth, had seemed the same. Fire ants excavated such places in the pasture, like miners, bringing deep earth to the surface. Children at play learned to avoid them, Leroy sure had. This was not an antbed, though, and Laurie had been first to sense this. Right away Leroy knew she was right, though he was still unsure what he was looking at.

Leroy's daddy said, “Uh-oh.” They stopped and looked and
didn't say anything else for now. Leroy was beginning to understand what lay out in front of them. The plan had been to walk on out to the outer reaches of the llama farm to take some target practice with Swami Don's rifle. The day was bright blue, Elsie was back at the kitchen table with a pair of school scissors and a squeeze bottle of Elmer's glue, clipping articles on Aldo Moro out of newspapers and magazines and putting them in a scrapbook she'd started. Molly was content to stay with her, but Laurie had leaped up and put on her yellow rubber boots as soon as she saw her daddy go to the closet where the rifle was kept. Rifle fire and ringing ears and a bruised shoulder must have seemed a better way to spend an afternoon than with Aldo. Target practice was a thing Swami Don enjoyed as well. He was always interested in firearm safety—the accident had taught him the importance of it. There was that place in the deep woods where a ravine cut along the edge of the woods and where if you walked far enough you would come to the river. This was the spot where Swami Don always took the rifle to shoot. It was safe, there was a wide clear area, perfect visibility, and a steep clay wall on the other side of the ravine where no bullet could ricochet. Swami Don never used the rifle to kill anything. He shot it a few times a year, kept it well cleaned and oiled. He claimed he kept it around to prevent packs of wild dogs from damaging the llama herd—a pack could take down a weak animal, and sometimes they did, it was true—but really the rifle was just for fun, Leroy knew, everybody seemed to know this.
When there were wild dogs on the loose, Swami Don only always shored up his fences and kept the younger and weaker animals near the barn.

They started to walk again and finally reached the mound in the pasture where the three of them stopped and stood together, Leroy and Laurie clumped up close to their daddy. It was a llama, sure enough. It was dead, one of the baby llamas, the youngest animal in the herd, in fact. The rough earthen-colored fur riffled in the wind. The llama had begun to stiffen, the legs straight out, the lips curled up slightly to show the sweet bucked teeth. The young animal had had its throat torn out. One of the haunches had been gnawed away. The three of them just stood there above the little body.

After a minute Leroy watched his daddy look up toward the woods. He seemed to be looking deep into the shade. He was looking for dogs. The first thing he said was to comfort the children. He said, “It didn't suffer. Dogs make quick work.” Leroy looked at Laurie and saw that she believed none of this. Laurie touched the dead llama with the toe of her yellow boot. He said, “We're safe. They don't attack humans. Not three of us together, anyway.” He gave the rifle another little shake. Leroy stared at the animal's teeth. He was about to ask whether they could bury the animal when all of a sudden Laurie gave the llama a solid kick in the side. Leroy looked at her, he was shocked, he almost told her no, then decided he'd better keep his mouth shut. Laurie's face showed no emotion. She seemed to be testing the reality of something,
the animal itself, its death, something about her own life and death.