Lightning Song (22 page)

He said, “Tits.”

Ruby Rae smiled into the mirror. Leroy was stone, he was the petrified man, he was the entire petrified forest. He could only just retain consciousness.

She turned from the mirror and faced him.

He said, “Knockers.”

He said, “Hair.”

Later on, down at the New People's cottage where Leroy would start to visit regularly after this day, the New Guy would tell Leroy that pornography is a dangerous pursuit, for the woman is objectified. He was referring to the video he was watching after his son was murdered. He said, “When the breast appears the woman disappears.”

Ruby Rae disappeared, only her sexuality remained. For a child it was as true in life as in pornography. He could not see her. Leroy could not consider his own objectification for the blinding light of Ruby Rae's nakedness, into which all the peoples of the earth were swallowed up. She stood before Leroy entirely naked. The soft space between her legs socked him in the stomach like a punch. It was her nakedness only that Leroy could see.

She did not delay, or parade about, this was not a striptease. She stepped into the shower and turned on the water and adjusted the direction of the nozzle and the temperature and force of the stream. She stood beneath the falling spray and turned her face up to receive it. She took a bar of soap from a soap dish and lathered herself fully, then turned herself slowly beneath the nozzle to rinse away all the suds. The hair between her legs flattened out in the water and formed a little curl down at the bottom.

She turned off the water and stepped out onto a bath mat.

She took a heavy white towel from a rack and dried herself vigorously, like an athlete.

She snapped Leroy playfully with the towel.

He giggled, despite himself. It was the driest, the saddest of giggles.

Afterwards, when they had risen from the snowy sheets, Leroy looked around on the floor for his clothes and put them on. He buttoned his shirt. He pulled on his socks, tied his sneakers. Ruby Rae dressed, too, and they got ready to go out
to the car. She lent him a good baton, which he carried with him out to the car and held on his lap all the way home. When she let him off at his house she gave him a peck on the cheek.

She said, “Don't tell, okay?”

The sound from his throat was almost laughter, almost a wail.

N
ext morning when the girls were jumping into their daddy's pickup with their batons, Leroy followed them out into the yard and said he wasn't going.

Swami Don said, “Not going?”

He said, “I don't want to go anymore.”

Swami Don scratched his armpit.

He said, “Ever? You don't ever want to twirl?”

Leroy didn't answer. He looked like he might cry.

Swami Don said, “You liked it so much, you were so good at it.”

Tears flowed out of Leroy's eyes, he couldn't stop them.

Swami Don knelt down to speak to him.

He said, “Did somebody tease you? Did anybody call you a sissy?”

Leroy just stood there with the tears.

Elsie came out in the yard then.

She said, “Don't be late for twirling.”

Swami Don said, “Well, you'll have to return Ruby Rae's baton, I guess.”

Leroy said, “You.”

Swami Don looked at Elsie.

“He says he doesn't want to twirl.”

She said, “Oh, of course he's going to twirl, don't be silly.”

Just then a thing happened that changed everything.

Leroy began to scream. He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. No words at first, just screaming.

Elsie and Swami Don could only stand and stare.

They said, “What on earth?”

Molly wet her pants. Laurie stood with wide eyes.

Leroy began to call them names. He said, “Goddamn, fuck, motherfucker, shit, piss, cunt, cock, death, corpse, suicide, murder, blood, cadaver, cigarette.” He didn't know where these names came from. He ran inside the house screaming. The girls were crying. Swami Don tried to comfort them. Elsie ran after Leroy.

He was tearing the curtains down from the window. He turned over a table and spilled all its contents. He grabbed a knife off a kitchen counter and threw it across the room and hit the door and broke off the tip.

Laurie had come inside now. She was hysterical with tears. She thought he had thrown the knife at her.

Leroy flailed about, he swung his arms, his fists, he showed his teeth like an animal. Elsie was afraid of him.

What has happened, what has happened to our family? Elsie and Swami Don asked this, with broken hearts.

Eventually the incident ended. It had seemed to go on forever, and then it stopped. Everyone was left dazed. The adults spoke calming words. They put the best face on things. The children were held, petted, calmed down, given assurances. They were taken to separate rooms, separate beds.

Everyone was most worried about Leroy. All the children were pampered that day, but Leroy especially. No one knew what to say, which questions to ask. Later they went over and over the details. Leroy calmed down and cried for a long time. He slept. He was allowed to prop up against two pillows in Elsie and Swami Don's bed for the rest of the day. They brought him ginger ale and comic books.

They kept saying, “Are you all right, honey? Are you all right?”

Uncle Harris brought down his oscillating fan and plugged it in for him. He did a few puppet tricks, but Leroy wouldn't smile.

It happened so suddenly, they said. He was doing so well.

He seemed to really take to twirling. The teacher said he was a leader, they said. He just fell apart. He just completely lost it. What on earth could have caused him to act like that? What was that all about, what on earth got into that boy?

Elsie said, “Maybe it was the heat.”

Harris said, “Maybe it was, maybe it—” Well, Harris couldn't even guess.

Swami Don said, “There's no point in making him twirl, I guess. I guess we better let him stay home.”

T
he slow summer crept on. Leroy sat silent at the dinner table each night. He picked at his food. He played alone. He seemed to forget that he had sisters. Sometimes he only lay on the glider and stared. Other times he cried easily. On his worst days he screamed at Molly. Elsie felt Leroy's head often with her hand to check for a fever. She would say, “Feeling a little better today, sweetheart?”

The llamas were fed and milked and brushed. Their long hair was sold to rope makers. The excrement was shoveled and loaded for fertilizer and fuel. Zoos around the state sometimes called. Stud fees were collected. A few times wealthy persons around the country bought a llama for a pet and that paid for a whole year's expenses for the farm. Evenings fireflies came out and shined their strange cold light about the yard and fields. Figs ripened on the trees. A storm or two still rolled in, the house was struck a few times by lightning. Fireballs
rolled through the house. Harris told exciting tales of what happened in the attic when the fire was dancing. The tractor started up each morning with a
whoosh
with Swami Don riding in its saddle and crept out into the fields. Wild dogs yipped within hearing some nights, far out in the trees. Two dogs got into the pasture, but Swami Don managed to get the young llamas rounded up and out of harm's way.

Harris slept late most days and took long walks. He went into the village and drank coffee with men he knew. He read newspapers and talked on the telephone, which by now he had had installed in the attic. His phone bill was tremendous. He had started to call Hannah, his wife, down on the coast. He ate like a horse. Elsie asked him if he could contribute a little to household expenses.

Harris said, “Are you suggesting that I am a freeloader?”

She said, “Harris, I'm just asking whether you could share some expenses, for heaven's sake.”

He said, “I see. I see exactly what you're saying.”

He went into the attic and stayed there for three days. Nobody even saw him come down to go to the bathroom. He didn't seem to eat, either. He watched a little TV—he had gotten the television hooked up by now as well.

Swami Don told Elsie, “Maybe you were a little harsh.”

Elsie said, “I just don't think I was.”

Eventually she gave in and apologized.

She told Harris, “I've been so tense lately, I don't know why.”

Harris said he was not one to hold a grudge.

Elsie allowed herself an alcoholic drink each day now, with Harris in the evening. Sometimes she had to lie down on the couch for a while afterwards and take a nap with the TV on, while Swami Don went on to bed without her.

Leroy watched all this as if he were watching someone else's life, maybe a movie. When some days had passed and he was certain he would not have to see Ruby Rae again he began to feel a little better. He started to get out of the house a little. He walked down to the New People's cottage and visited with them one day. After that he went back every day, for a little while at least. They didn't seem quite so crazy when you saw them every day. One day he and the New Guy went down into a far field to feed pine siskins, small yellow birds, in a patch of sunflowers. The New Guy was dressed in a purple smoking jacket with satin lapels and a broad-brimmed white straw hat that he called a “boater.” Each day there seemed to be some new costume, a pirate's bandana and eye patch, a three-cornered hat, a tall silvery crown and rubber boots, a policeman's badge. He had a sailor's suit, with thirteen-button trousers, and a fireman's helmet. His wife carried a boomerang on a leather sling or wore a one-piece swimsuit and a banner across her chest that said Miss Argentina. She painted her face with white makeup and drew lines out from her eyes as if she were surprised.

Leroy said, “Why do you play dress-up?”

The New Lady said, “Hm. I never really thought of it.”

She outfitted a costume wardrobe for Leroy. This was a large pasteboard box that she filled with old clothes of various sorts—dresses, hats, high heels, a tuxedo jacket with narrow lapels, men's shoes, purses, shirts, a church fan, a pair of seersucker pants, several pairs of old eyeglasses. She placed in the box the huge pair of wings she had used in grief therapy, in the Crown Victoria. She also put in a rusty baton with the larger bulb missing. Leroy avoided the baton. He didn't know what to make of the wings, though he liked them. There were other articles of clothing as well. When the notion struck him he went to the box and put together an outfit. Once it was a floral print dress and size-thirteen wing-tip shoes and a Mennonite bonnet. He added the wings at the last minute. He walked slowly in his unsmiling, melancholy way through the house. He stopped by the door of the New Guy's room. The New Guy looked up. “Very attractive,” he said, and went back to whatever he was doing. Another day Leroy was dressed in full drag, with lipstick and makeup and a wig. Once or twice he spent the night with them. Elsie and Swami Don let him do whatever he wanted these days. The New People made up a trundle bed and gave him two pillows just for himself.

One day on a walk a huge armadillo scurried past him in its slow-motion way. Leroy looked at its armor plating, the bone-encased tail. He leaned down and took the animal by the tail. It was a tug of war. The animal pulled and Leroy hung on. The armadillo began digging in the loam. Leroy kept hanging on. He was not a big boy. The armadillo could pull him along. The
armadillo kept digging. Dirt flew into Leroy's face, through the armadillo's little legs. The armadillo was going underground. Leroy lay down on his stomach and allowed himself to be pulled along. The armadillo was taking Leroy down with him. That was all right with Leroy. Being buried alive was just fine with Leroy. The New Guy pried Leroy's hands free from the steel cable–like tail. The armadillo disappeared beneath the loam.

T
he lights were out on account of a storm that was pounding the house with lightning and hail and so Elsie had to be careful on the stairway not to fall. The only light was the illumination of the fireballs that were rolling everywhere. Leroy was spending the night on the New People's rollaway, so he didn't learn about his mother's movements in her house until later that night. By then things had taken a pretty dramatic turn, but now it was only Elsie, who had just pulled down the trapdoor in the ceiling by its rope. She crept up and up the ladder, step by step, in the direction of Harris's room. The house was struck by a strong bolt. Gremlins of charged ions in many sizes, many shapes, danced near her. Lightning banged on the roof, let me in, let me in. Elsie knew that the house must look spectacular to anyone watching from outside; it was taking an unusual pounding. This night, in fact, someone
was
watching from outside the
house, three persons, across the llama pasture. Leroy, of course, was one of them, along with the New People. They were watching the storm from the New People's cottage, just as his mama was making this climb up the stairs and through the ceiling. Thunder cracked like the heavy couplings of metal boxcars in a train yard. Fireballs rolled through, in many shapes. Leroy watched a fireball in the shape of Santa Claus dance along the rain gutters and pop in through an open window, and by the time Elsie saw it, inside the house, it had broken into a thousand scampering elves with little hammers and saws and workbenches.

At the beginning of the storm, Elsie had been sitting at home alone. Swami Don was at the factory again. Harris had said he had some calls to make. The girls had gone to bed early and were already sound asleep. Even Molly no longer woke up at the sound of heavy thunder. The clatter of the falling rain began as a heaviness upon the shingles above Elsie and in the leaves of the trees and on the tin roofs of the outbuildings. It was hypnotic now. Later Elsie thought of blaming the sound of the rain for what she had it in her mind to do. Next, thunder in the distance, and flashes of lightning across the western swamp, in the direction of the river. She felt restless, she didn't know why. She liked being alone usually, but tonight something seemed missing. She wanted something, it was hard to say what. She picked up a magazine, thumbed through a few pages, and put it down again. She started to turn on the television and then remembered there was no electricity. The
house hadn't actually received a direct hit yet, but the electricity had gone off anyway. The storm kept up its pounding, rain at first mainly, the lightning remained at some distance. She walked to the porch and looked out. She couldn't see anything much, vague outlines of farm buildings. The llamas were safe in their barn. She could see the New People's cottage and knew that Leroy was there, her poor melancholy boy. Darkness had fallen some time ago, tinged with yellow. She moved restlessly, here and there, about the porch. She picked up a couple of Harris's newspapers and folded them and set them on a low table. She swatted a couple of flies against the screen. She came inside and closed the south windows against the rain and found a dirty undershirt of Swami Don's and wiped moisture off the windowsill with it and tossed the undershirt in the hamper. She snapped on the TV again and remembered again about the electrical outage. There was a generator in the barn, if Swami Don were here to get it running. She sat on the couch and picked up a book and tried to read in the dim light and gave that up, too.