Lightning Song (23 page)

She put the book down. Maybe she was hungry, she thought. Maybe that was it. There did seem to be a sort of emptiness that needed filling, if she could just find the right thing to fill it with. She went to the refrigerator. The light was out when she opened the refrigerator door, but she felt cool air when she bent close to look inside. She took a flashlight out of a kitchen drawer and shined it into the refrigerator. A cold peach cobbler was there. No, she didn't think she wanted that. That was
not quite what she wanted. She kept looking, directing the beam on object after object on the shelves. A leftover stew in a Tupperware dish, Lord no. Milk, canned fruit cocktail, no. Then she noticed a bottle of port wine standing near the back of the first shelf. Harris had bought it for grog rations some time ago. It had been sitting open for a while. She took it out of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen counter, icy cold, almost full. This might do the trick, this might be just what she was looking for. She took out the cork and laid it on the kitchen table. She took a glass down from the cupboard and tilted the bottle against it and poured the syrupy wine. She had stopped using peanut butter jars, she had proper wine glasses now.

The rain outside was steady. She listened to it as she poured the wine. The lightning was coming closer. She lifted the glass to her lips.

As she drank, a warmth spread through her limbs and into her cheeks.

A heavy bolt struck the house and sent a shaggy basketball-sized fireball down the chimney, onto the hearth. It wallowed about, then broke up and dissipated. The phone gave an abrupt one-bell ring, so it was probably gone now, too, just like the electricity.

She took the flashlight and walked out onto the porch with it and turned the beam toward the llama shed. She didn't know what she was looking for. The llamas were all right. They didn't need any comforting in a storm. Elsie went back
in the house. She had never realized how sweet port wine was. It was sweet enough to make you sick. She looked at the bottle and noticed that it was empty. Well, how did that happen? she wondered. How could the bottle already be empty? It was almost full when she took it from the refrigerator. Man, this was some storm, she was thinking. The storm was pounding the living crap out of her house. She was sitting in the dark. She was afraid she was going to throw up, the wine had been so sweet. The house was struck again. A fireball as big as an orangutan leapt in the window and walked around on its hind feet and pounded its chest. She felt like she'd eaten a bag of sugar.

She rubbed her face in both her hands. She rubbed it really good and then opened her eyes wide. She was pretty sure she was going to throw up. She didn't want to but she might have to. She would wait a little longer. She would just wait and see. Take a wait-and-see approach. What did “wait-and-see approach” mean? she wondered. She would just have to wait and see, she supposed. She would practice positive thinking. Then she wouldn't have to throw up, she might not, it might work, you couldn't tell. No throwing-upping. Up. Whatever.

She heard something. What was that she heard? It wasn't the storm. She listened. She heard it again. Oh, yeah. She knew what it was now. She recognized it. It was that message. It was the message from her heart. It said
I want I want I want I want
.

She looked at the wine bottle. It was not only empty but
there were two of them. Two wine bottles, empty ones. She looked around the room. Two television sets. What do you know about that? She thought about what it means when you say “what about that.”

She hauled her head around and put one hand over one eye. She took it down. There were two, uh— Two something else, who cared, fuck it. She was sick of all this two shit.

She stood up. She didn't quite make it the first time. She flopped back on the couch. One more time. One more stand-up. She stood up again, hauled herself up. Made it. Okay. Okay, standing up. Maybe that was the other two thing. Two stand-ups. Standing-uppings. Two of them.

She took a couple of unsteady steps. No problem. No big hairy problem. Deal. Whatever.

She took off her clothes. That's the whole problem with clothes, she was thinking. Eventually you got to take them off. She threw her dress on the floor. She tried to kick her underpants off her foot. She weaved about in one spot for a while. She looked like a Weebly-Wobbly somebody had just punched.

Lightning struck the house and unsealed all the dill pickles. Now see, that's the problem with lightning, it makes you think of pickles. Why did she have to think of dill pickles? Oh God, she was so sick. She noticed that her underpants were still hooked around her ankle, so she kicked at them a few more times.

She staggered out into the hall and steadied herself. She reached up and took the rope and pulled down the trapdoor of
the attic. This was about when Santa and the elves popped in, who cares. She put her naked foot on the first step.

Lightning struck the house again. Fireballs scattered like a covey of quail.

She started up the attic steps. She knew now what she wanted, she could decipher the encoded message from her heart. She wanted to have sex with Harris in the attic during the lightning storm. That's what she was going to do, that was the answer to the question, what was the question? She was getting all mixed up. She rose up through the trapdoor into his room like a mermaid rising from the sea. She appeared before Harris in her nakedness.

L
eroy and the New People had been standing at the back door looking out at the clouds, heavy and low and tinted with a color of apple-green, as the storm blew in. The wind was high in the trees, shaking the brittle branches of the pecans and walnuts and tossing the willows and the chinaberries. The wind whistled in the eaves. Thunder came rumbling across the lowlands.

The New Lady said, “Come into the bedroom.”

Leroy and the New Guy followed her. She said she had an idea, no costumes required.

She opened the bedroom curtains wide and turned off all the lights. She looked out the window, they all did. The lightning lit up the pasture with golden light. The window looked out upon Leroy's house. She said, “We can watch the storm.”
The house seemed far away and sweet, like an old memory, a photograph you suddenly come upon unexpectedly. Leroy had never seen his house struck except from inside. The three of them stretched out across the bed on their stomachs. They lay on the taut-stretched tidy quilt and propped their chins in their hands. Leroy suddenly knew that he had been given many gifts.

The rain had already begun to fall, slowly at first, and then very hard. It pounded like great hammers upon the roof. It poured in sheets over the rims of the flooded gutters, fell through the trees, filling up the fields. The ditches flooded with water and flowed swiftly. The windward slope of the ravine, where they had shot the rifle, crumbled under the weight of the rain and became mud and slid, a chaos of erosion, into the channel below. Small birds were washed from the tree limbs, llamas bleated, small animals—raccoons and nutria and possums and swamp elves—were flushed from their dens, their lodgings in tree stumps, their warm nests in the cane, and were tumbled along, head over heels, upon the flood. Or so they must have been, so alive, so vivid, was Leroy's imagination in this safe place, with his chin in his hands, lying between his friends Hudson and Eve, watching the home of his birth as if on a television screen.

The lightning flashed. Leroy's house shone like a ghost ship on an illuminated sea. What they had been waiting for finally happened. A leader stroke hit the lightning rod, straight on.
A ball of fire as large as a manatee danced upon the chimney's rim and then dove like an otter down the flue.

One said, “Oh my.”

The other said, “Impressive.”

The pounding began in earnest now. The storm was going at full tilt. The world was rocking. With each flash of golden voltage Leroy's house appeared suddenly out of the darkness, then sank back into it again.

One said, “Shall I make some popcorn?”

The other said, “Oh, don't leave.”

H
arris was talking on the phone in the dark when he saw a dark form rise up through the floor of his room. News of this part of the storm came to Leroy the next day. It was the easiest part of all to learn the details of. Harris couldn't stop talking about it, he wouldn't shut up, he told it a dozen times, always indignant. Swami Don said if it was all the same to Harris he'd rather not hear it again. It was his wife, after all, who was drunk and naked. He was the cuckold here, so you know, Harris, if you don't have anything substantial to add, how about just not telling this again, in fact, shut up, if you don't mind my saying so. Harris couldn't shut up. He seemed halfway to blame Swami Don for what had happened, for being away, for having a wife who was a lush. He didn't know who he was blaming, he hardly knew what he was saying, all he knew was he was mortified, indignant, what on earth was going on,
what was the world coming to, I thought I knew you, Elsie, what did you imagine a few kisses behind the refrigerator meant, for God's sake? All this was later, after all hell had broken loose in other ways as well.

A flash of lightning showed Harris it was Elsie rising through his floor. He said, “Elsie, my God! You scared me half to death.”

She came toward him. Another flash showed him that she was naked.

He sat straight up in bed and clutched at his sheet. He said, “Whoa! Hold on a minute. Stop right where you are.” He was speaking to Elsie, of course, but he also seemed to be saying the same words, with maybe a different meaning, to the person he was talking to on the phone, the person on the other end of the line. The telephone was not out of service after all.

Elsie did not stop. She had no intention of stopping. She walked right into the room. She staggered a little. She sat on the edge of Harris's bed. The lightning struck. Harris said, “Elsie, get your crazy ass out of my room, I mean it.”

Elsie saw now that Harris was on the phone. She had not noticed this before. She had not noticed much of anything. Now she saw in the flash of light what the darkness had hidden. Harris was holding the telephone in one hand and holding himself in the other. Hannah was on the other end of the line. Elsie had never known about phone sex before, but the minute she saw it she recognized it for what it was, it was inescapable, it could be nothing else. He said, “Get the hell
out of this attic, right now, I mean it, good-bye!” Into the telephone he said, “Are you still there, are you still there, honey, can you wait?”

Harris, later, even told this part, told whoever would listen, told Leroy, little Molly, everybody. He said Hannah said, “Oh baby, oh God, oh my God—” Harris said, “Honey, baby, whoa, sweetheart, could you hold the, ah, like line for a minute?” Lightning filled the room with fireballs. He covered the receiver with his hand. He said, “Elsie, leave right now or I will kill you, I mean this.” Elsie stood up from the bed. She was beginning to understand something important. Harris said, “I'm back, honey, here I am, wait for me, can you wait—”

Elsie was beginning to understand what was wrong with Leroy. She knew suddenly, as if in a flash, what was wrong with her son. She leapt up from the bed. She staggered into Harris's table and knocked it over. She limped across the floor and finally found her feet again. She bolted from the attic, down the stairs, out of the house, into the storm. The rain hit her solidly in the face. Immediately she was drenched. She was weaving, she staggered, she kept on. She ran into the pasture, past the sleeping llamas. She was still naked, she stepped on things, she didn't know what. She was running in the direction of the New People's cottage. She was so sick. She puked as she ran, blah, port wine blowing off to the side of her, the hard rain washing her clean. She saw the light in the New People's window. She splashed through puddles, she stepped in
shit. She leapt the cattle gap. The rain poured, the lightning flashed. She stood at the New People's bedroom window.

This was when what had been going on in his house started to become clear to Leroy. His mama appeared in the window from the darkness like a monster in the movies. Inside the cottage, all three people on the bed startled like children. They hadn't seen her coming. It took everyone a minute to understand who she was, what she was. She stood in the rain desperate and naked. They looked at her. She looked like a chicken washed out of the henhouse with a fire hose. The New Lady jumped up from the bed and grabbed a robe from a hook on the closet door to wrap Elsie in. She ran to the back door with the robe. Leroy left the bed, too. He didn't know where he was going. He was filled with rage and confusion. He ran in circles for a minute. He ran to the big box he called his wardrobe. He flung costumes everywhere until he found what he was looking for. He took out the damaged, rusted baton the New Lady had put there in case he ever needed it. He needed it tonight, for some reason.

The New People rescued Leroy's mama from the storm, they dried her with towels, they dressed her in the robe, sat her at the kitchen table, they started a pot of coffee. Now that he had the old baton, Leroy ran past all three of them, he might have made a sound like
whizzzz,
right out the back door, into the rain. Lightning was cracking, the air was filled with nitrogen. He almost slipped on the slick porch but he kept his feet, he was nimble as a llama, the rocks in the driveway did not pierce
his feet. He screamed, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” The others came out onto the porch, they called for him: “Leroy! Come back!” His feet had wings, he ran and ran, he sailed across the cattle gap, he flew through mud and shit, the air crackled, electrical daylight, his hair stood on end. Elsie screamed, tried to follow him, but the New People restrained her.

Lightning struck the baton.

Elsie watched her son light up like a bulb. Later she told Leroy these things, which he did not remember. Flames rose from his hair, flashed out like torches from his heels. All of his dark history was suddenly bathed in light. Ruby Rae was revealed.