Lightning Song (20 page)

She had an orderly agenda. Right after her bizarre and sweaty lecture she began a twirling demonstration, the things the children would need to know to begin.

“First, the basics,” she said. “Before you learn to walk, first you have to learn to crawl, don't you?”

The children nodded silently. Leroy nodded along with the rest.

“Well,
don't
you?” she teased.

“Yes, ma'am,” they said in unison.

Ruby Rae cupped a playful hand to her ear, as if she might be deaf.

The children called out in loud voices, “Yes, ma'am!” Leroy shouted loudest of all.

“Well, all
right,
then,” Ruby Rae smiled.

She clenched her beautiful fist and pulled her elbow to her side to show her enthusiasm.

She showed her students how to hold the baton.

“Make a fist,” she said. “Like you're going to punch somebody.”

Everyone held their baton in a fist, as Ruby Rae demonstrated—
everyone but Leroy, of course, who had no actual baton, though he also made a fist and held out his hand as if it clutched this instrument. He performed every function as if he were holding a baton.

“Keep holding it,” she instructed.

The children held on, Leroy as well.

“Now back and forth,” she said.

She twisted her baton back and forth until it gleamed.

“Twist those wrists and don't let go!” she called through the megaphone. “Back and forth! Let's see it!”

Thirty batons flashed in the sun, this way, that way. Leroy twisted his wrist along with the others, though he produced no flashes of light, since he held no actual baton.

Next, the basic roll. Ruby Rae was marching them through the fundamentals. This was a simple, one-handed technique that began with the baton lying flat in the outstretched palm. She demonstrated. All the little girls held their batons in their hands in the same way. Leroy held out his empty palm. He imagined a well-balanced baton to be lying in it. Ruby Rae showed them then how the baton was manipulated with the thumb so that it rolled completely off the palm and around the hand and back into the palm again.

“Ta-dahhhh!” Ruby Rae exclaimed, as she completed her demonstration of the technique.

All the children there on the field tried the same maneuver. Some succeeded, some did not. Many batons dropped to the ground.

One baton did not drop. One baton stayed firm, made the loop. The invisible baton in Leroy's palm became a perfection of the maneuver. It made an easy circuit of his hand, first lying still, then propelled by the thumb, over, careful, over and around, and at the end it fell expertly into place in his palm again, a perfectly executed basic roll. Life was easier, his burden was lighter, Leroy was at home with his invisible baton.

Ruby Rae covered every imaginable facet of baton twirling.

She called this “an overview” of what was to come in later sessions.

When she had finished all the one-handed techniques, she said in her prettiest way, “Now let me tell you something I'll bet you all forgot.”

Forgot? Could they have forgotten something? Leroy couldn't believe there was something he had forgotten. He had done everything perfectly, followed every instruction. Well, he had forgotten his baton, but she didn't mean that, did she? She seemed to mean something else. The children listened intently for the solution to this mystery: what could they have forgotten? Leroy could not imagine. Tell us, Ruby Rae, what did we forget?

She said, “I'll bet each and every one of you forgot that you have—
two hands!
”

As she said this she expertly flipped her baton from her right hand to her left and began a series of basic rolls. The children applauded and laughed with joy. Two hands! Of course! They had forgotten that they had two hands. This was
Ruby Rae's means of demonstrating the important fact that everything they had just learned about one-handed baton manipulation applied equally to the other hand, left or right, whichever they had left out the first time around. Immediately each twirler-child in this company of children flipped her baton to the recessive hand and attempted a version of the same roll they had so recently learned.

Ruby Rae was a wonderful teacher. Everyone had to agree. The twirlers were not excellent twirlers yet, of course. How could they be expected to be experts at this point? The amateur nature of their endeavors was immediately apparent when thirty batons fell to the ground. No one could perform the operation in the weaker hand. There were no ambidextrous twirlers here just yet. Batons clattered everywhere, helter-skelter, crisscross, and bass-ackwards upon the turf grass. Literally everyone had dropped their baton.

Not everyone. All but one. One baton held firm. Leroy's left-handed roll was ideal, not a bobble, not a flaw, grace itself, the envy of many. Once again, as with his very first perfectly executed right-hand roll, Leroy stepped out in front of the pack. He was peerless among twirlers, right hand, left hand, it made no difference to Leroy. He was not showing off, he was good, he felt it.

When Leroy was finished and certain that it was a perfect maneuver, he held his imaginary baton high, in triumph, he pumped his arm, up and down, up and down, yes, yes, yes, in a kind of power salute. He brought his knees up high to his
chest in an exaggeration of in-place running.
I'm number one, I'm number one, I'm number one
. Maybe he was showing off. Maybe here was a time in life when self-appreciation was no sin, when celebration was only celebration. Move over, you clumsy little baton-dropping pissants, long live the king of twirlers, twirler-deaths to the many.

Or had Leroy spoken too soon? Something, he was unsure what, nagged at the corner of his vision. The midget girl? One of the many weird Quong sisters? He looked about him, a critical glance, ostensibly to survey and judge the destruction in his wake, and yet for the first time uncertain. He saw his nemesis. It was Mifanwy Moser, the fat girl with the flipper where her left hand should have been. She had not dropped her baton. She was still twirling. She was twirling with her flipper. Her flipper was the key to success. Around and around her flipper flew the baton, it looked like a propeller. The flipper was an admirable thing. Ruby Rae applauded her, and then so did everyone else. Even Leroy applauded her. There was no denying her superiority, her magic with a baton. Unskilled in the right-handed roll, as clumsy as all the other baton-clumsy little twerps, Mifanwy Moser had an advantage in her flipper almost as great as that of an invisible baton, greater when you factored in the obvious truth that Leroy was not twirling at all, only jacking himself off in a moment of lost sanity induced by a rush of pure testosterone to the brain.

One little girl wept, “No fair, Mifanwy's got a flipper!”

T
he day of twirling was one of many beauties and miracles, it seemed to Leroy. Lightly he tripped through the details of many two-handed techniques, the crossover, the pump, the over-the-shoulder, behind-the-back, slide-and-sleeve, and any number of combination moves, the pump-and-roll combo, for example, and many more. All the variations of the toss as well, basic, spin, and combo, and the many techniques by which the baton is then caught, or received. The double toss, the twist, the so-called jack-in-the-box, the so-called suicide maneuver, and the infamous flaming baton trick, its many combination forms, though without fire for now, for safety purposes today.

Leroy watched Ruby Rae, he was impressed by her, and because his baton was imaginary he was able to attempt all of these maneuvers himself. Despite the momentary setback of cold water dashed upon his enthusiasm by Mifanwy and her flipper, he found himself successful at many of them. Even Mifanwy could not compare.

Eventually shadows shortened on the field. The session was coming to an end. Cars started to pull into the school's driveway and to park along the fence that separated the football field from the rest of the school property. These were the children's parents, of course, coming to retrieve their twirlers at session's end. Twirling camp was finished for the day.

The sun above was hot as blue blazes. The twirling children were, for the most part, too young to sweat, though Ruby Rae was not. She was drenched. Even her hair was quite wet and stuck, as if plastered, to her scalp.

She was not tired, though. She was in wonderful physical shape, and cheerful and bright as she said good-bye to each child and shook hands with many of the parents.

Leroy looked into the parking lot and was pleased to see his father's pickup parked out there, not Harris's car. It meant a great deal to Leroy that this new activity was approved by his father, whom he knew had no ulterior motives in getting him out of the house. Swami Don was sitting alone in the cab of his truck. When Leroy saw him he waved and watched him open the door and step out, headed onto the field.

Leroy had now been in the presence of the admirable Ruby Rae for an entire morning, one of the strangest, most glorious mornings of his life. As his father walked in the direction of the end zone, Leroy was saying good-bye to his instructor and she was telling him how courageous and admirable a person he was, to have risked the embarrassment of being teased for being the only boy, and especially to have taken such a serious interest in twirling without even the advantage of a baton.

Leroy wanted to say how grateful he was to her for having breasts, and to tell her that he loved her and would die for one of her kisses, and to say how truly easy a choice humiliation had been, no risk at all really, under such remarkable tutelage as her own. He wanted with all his heart to reach out—indeed he was terrified he would do so—and touch her body with his hand and explain that he had had many erections but never one so painful as this, even in Uncle Harris's room with
the magazines, never one that endured for so long, through time and heat and stressful activity.

If Leroy could have successfully spoken any of these words, however regrettable their expression might have been, he would have done so, but he could not. He could say nothing. No actual words would come from his mouth. He stood in silence, it was all he could do. For once in his life Leroy understood his father's discomfort on this earth and loved him for his faults.

Leroy looked at his father, in fact. Ruby Rae's enormous sexuality could not have been lost even on Swami Don, and yet Swami Don was dignified and articulate as he spoke with her. He seemed unmoved by her beauty. He apologized to Ruby Rae for Leroy's not being prepared with the proper twirling equipment. He explained that no one had dreamed a young man like Leroy would have taken such an interest in twirling and that he himself had to take responsibility for Leroy's being batonless, that the boy's mother and uncle had offered to buy him a baton at Dollarhide's music store but that Swami Don had been the one to advise them to take a “wait-and-see approach,” and now, doggone it, he learns the boy has talent and finds out Dollarhide's is all sold out of batons and will not get any more in from the distributor for another ten days or two weeks. He said he wanted to stress that this mistake of the boy's parents should not be held against Leroy, it wasn't Leroy's fault.

Leroy had never seen his father in quite this light. He felt well loved, well protected, a part of this family for the first time in a long while. He was able to forget Ruby Rae long enough even to bring the conversation around to his sisters, for whom he felt such pride. Seeing them there with him he felt such hope that his mama's secret kisses did not mean the disintegration of all things important to him.

Laurie had enjoyed the morning, she said. Things had gone pretty well for her. She had felt successful with a few of the baton moves she had learned. She proved herself to be a nimble child, and dexterous, as skilled with a majorette's baton as with a high-powered rifle. She chattered briefly to Swami Don about what she had done. She asked whether he would buy Leroy a baton of his own so that he would not have to pretend to twirl but could be like everyone else.

Leroy was grateful for her concern but felt uncomfortable with the reminder that he had only been pretending, though it didn't seem to register with Swami Don how truly ridiculous this was and so did not dampen his enthusiasm for Leroy's participation.

Molly was tired and cranky. She had spent much of the morning playing in the dirt under a shade tree on the school grounds. She said she liked it okay, the twirling, but it was too long.

Then this odd day began to take its oddest turn. There were times in Leroy's life, in the succeeding years, when he thought back upon these remarkable hours and half wondered
whether such events as he remembered could actually have occurred. Some of them must have been exaggerated in memory, the strange twirling flipper of Mifanwy Moser, and much else, perhaps. And yet surely every important portion of the memory was true, Leroy was certain that it was so.

One needed only to stand in the company of Ruby Rae for a single morning to appreciate how fully her mind's circuits had been blown by twirling, or to understand the unfathomable depths of her own needs and compulsions as manifested in her relationship to her baton. She was, Leroy would say years later, a good girl, hardworking and ambitious, hopeful, sweet to a fault, the kind of girl her parents must have admired, must have driven her to become, and yet Leroy—even Leroy, lovesick swain that he was—was beginning to understand that something was not quite right here, that there was chaos behind the sweaty and perfect lashes of Ruby Rae's eyes, that Ruby Rae might quite possibly be a dangerous person.

These details of their immediate universe Leroy's father did not pick up on, no parent would have, it was not possible to see so much at once. It was remarkable enough that Leroy, who in his heart had already declared himself Ruby Rae's devoted slave, could have detected the flaw, or felt some intuition of it, enough anyway to remember years later.

Ruby Rae was too much the perfection of everything a parent wanted his or her own misfit child to turn out like, too much of what the parents had never been themselves and had
wanted to be, all those years ago, when the world was new and they themselves were the misfit child. The disguise of her manners and talent was made complete and impenetrable to detection by her inestimable beauty, whose brightness would have prevented any parent from noticing something amiss behind that brilliance, some mental instability, her excessive emphasis upon control and all of beauty's perfections, all of needs' fulfillments. But that body, those impossible comets that preceded her, constituted darkness visible beneath purple leotards, and it blocked from all parental view any flaw, however obvious or great.