Lightning Song (2 page)

He kept looking at the picture. His you-know-what was seriously stiff now. He wondered if he ought not let it out for a little while, give it some air, it could smother in there, all cramped up. Something about this picture, though. Where did she think she was going in that outfit in the first place? Even if she'd had time to get finished dressing, even if she'd noticed these dinky clothes couldn't possibly belong to her, Leroy couldn't think of a single place on earth where she could have worn those shorts and a western-style vest and fit in. Nobody else would be wearing anything close to this, you could bank on it. Did she really imagine she could wear this getup and blend in with any group of normal people she'd ever heard of, even for one second? If you looked close you could see that the vest didn't have any buttons on it anyway, no buttonholes for them to go through. Well, see, right there. Where did she get that stupid vest? He hoped she had kept the receipt. She got gypped, man. She got gypped, and good. She went to Gyp City and took up residence, she ran for mayor. She'd never get a refund now, she'd already worn it. She should have tried it on at the store. He unzipped his pants to relieve a little strain on the fabric, to give one part of himself a little breathing room, even if there was no oxygen getting to his brain. He turned the page.

He turned many pages. Writing writing writing writing writing, some shoe advertisements. He turned the page again. Well, what do you know, he couldn't believe his eyes, here was somebody he recognized. It was another picture of the
same woman he had seen on the front cover, that poor girl. What had she done with her vest? She'd lost her vest! And where were her pants, for God's sake? What on earth had she done with her pants? Not only that. She had breasts. Nipples on the ends, one each, two total, count them for yourself. She had hair between her legs, like a triangle, right on her you-know-what place. Do you really need to hear any more?

That was not all, though. She was wearing a big white cowboy hat and a gun belt. She was pointing two silvery six-shooters out into the room she was standing in. At least she might be able to make a citizen's arrest of the person with the camera. She was wearing cowboy boots with yellow sunbursts at the ankles. She was still smiling, big smile, full set of white teeth, you could count them.

Leroy kept looking at the magazine. One part of him seemed to see the six-shooters pointing at it and that part was reaching for the rafters. He patted it to calm it down. Leroy understood now, he understood something about the woman in the picture, and it was not good, not a bit, it was bad, in fact, plenty bad. The lady in the picture suffered from mental illness, was retarded possibly, deranged, completely out of touch with reality. She needed help. She would never get her pants on now, even if she could find a pair that fit her. She would have to start all over, dressing herself, and Leroy had no confidence that she could do it. He hoped she wouldn't try to pull on her pants over those damn boots. They'd never make it. Leroy had tried that stunt on school mornings, half asleep, and
it doesn't work, just normal shoes, not even boots. Put the camera down, asshole. Find this lady's clothes. Where were her friends, her parents, her minister? The world seemed to be caving in around Leroy.

Just then the porch door downstairs opened and closed. Leroy heard the sound and sat still, with the magazine open in his lap. He looked at his penis and suspected it would never go back to normal. He stuffed it back inside his pants and zipped up and listened. He expected to hear voices but he did not, only footsteps. Only one set of footsteps. He closed the magazine and placed it on the bedside table. He stood and walked close to the trapdoor, the better to hear whoever was downstairs. He placed each foot on the floor carefully to prevent the boards from squeaking. He stood very still, just beside the hole in the floor. He heard the Evil Queen's baby crying a little. He heard the Evil Queen's voice. He understood now that the Evil Queen was going to kill the baby. He went to the attic window and looked out, the side of the house toward the llama lot. He saw his mother and sisters there, among the llamas. He watched a young doe go bounding away from Elsie like a spring-toy. The little tail was standing straight up, waving like a flag. Leroy walked down the attic steps without trying to hide. He didn't bother to put the trapdoor back up. He was probably too late to save the baby. He felt like he was smothering. Smothering in pain, he guessed he would have said, if he'd thought to say anything at all. He surprised the Evil Queen, whose back was to him, bent over the child, at
the bed. He said, “Don't.” She looked up. She was hideous, pale as a witch. He started to say, “Don't kill the baby,” but then decided not to. The Evil Queen finished changing the wet diaper, it took only a few seconds, and when she finished she lifted the infant, who had stopped crying now. She balanced it on her hip. Leroy realized with a shock that the Evil Queen was not ugly after all, she was beautiful. He couldn't believe it, but she was. In the strangest way she reminded him of the woman in the magazine, though they looked nothing alike. Suddenly he knew why people fell in love and wanted to marry, he understood why they wanted to have children, to live together for a lifetime. He couldn't believe he had ever thought she could harm her baby. She was so beautiful the sight of her made him ache, her washboardlike bony chest, the downy hair on her arms. He heard his heart begin to speak in his own silent voice, it cried out to her, words vague and surprising and indistinct, I want you, I need you, I love you, he understood Elvis Presley at last. The Evil Queen smiled a warm smile. She turned around. She said, “Why, Leroy, hello. I thought I heard somebody. Did you sneak up on me?”

T
hat evening, when the sun went down, a big yellow ball beyond the red clay hills in the hazy west, the llamas, who were many colors of brown and rust and pure white and pure black and mottled, turned to face the sun, as they did each evening, and again when it rose in the morning, and they flicked their big corn-shuck ears, they shrugged the coarse fur
of their broad backs, they stretched their giraffelike necks, and they began to groan, low, low, and then louder, to sing their strange llama-song, first one llama, and then another, and another, until all the llamas were singing in their rich individual voices, blended in a strange chorus. They sang each day to the rising and the setting sun. Leroy's daddy, a one-armed man, came in on the tractor from the fields, Uncle Harris, wearing one of his Hawaiian-print shirts, looked up from his newspaper, Leroy's mama dried her hands and walked out on the porch, Laurie, Molly, Leroy, too, all of them stood at the end of the day and listened in the last sunshine to the song of the llamas.

Later when Leroy was lying in his bed, wearing only his crinkly pajama bottoms on this warm night, he looked out his window where there was moonlight, yellow as gold in the tree limbs, and thought of the naked woman in the pictures in Uncle Harris's magazine. He wondered if he could be in love with her—he thought he was in love with her—because when he thought of her face, the nakedness of her flesh, the innocence of her smile, he wanted nothing more than to stay near her forever, to save her each day from some new danger, fire, wild beasts, evil men. He wondered how he could kiss her, as she was so much taller than himself, then realized he didn't know how to kiss, not the kind of kiss a boy would need to know about if he were in love with this woman. His head spun, the retarded magazine lady and the Evil Queen had become confused in his mind, they seemed now to be the same
person. He imagined kissing his mother's friend. All his dreams were heartbreaking, and all were vague in details. He found that he did not want to touch himself in the way he had in the attic, and then as he was realizing this he found that he was touching himself and thinking of her, this composite person, dark and fair, and he lay and touched and breathed hard and then did not need to do this anymore for a while.

His mama came in later, to say good night, as she always did, making her rounds of the children. She sat on the edge of his small bed.

She said, “Are you all right, honey?”

He said, “I guess so.”

She said, “I worry about you sometimes.”

He lay in the moonlight and could not think what to say. He could feel the warmth of her rear end against his leg. An electrical spark seemed to flash between their two bodies. He didn't want his mama's face getting mixed up with the faces of the magazine lady and the Evil Queen. He wondered if she knew he had been in the attic. He wondered if she knew about the magazines. He wondered whether she had come in before he finished with his touching and breathing and had seen him; it was possible, he had become too involved in his daydreams to pay close attention to whoever might have passed by his bedroom door.

He said, “I think something is wrong with me.”

His mama said, “What is it, Leroy?”

“I don't know.”

She patted his leg. She said, “Well, you're growing up. That's one thing, I suppose.”

He said, “Tell me the story.”

She said, “Oh, honey, no, not that old story. Not again.”

He said, “Tell it, Mama.”

She said, “Oh, well, all right, let's see.” She told the familiar tale, the one the children always wanted to hear. She told about the day she fell in love with their daddy. “We were young,” she said. “We hadn't known each other very long. Your daddy had an old car. He took me far out in the country on a long drive. He stopped beside a big field and parked the car. I thought he was going to kiss me. It was getting close to dark. Instead he said, ‘Listen.' I listened and heard them running, thirty of them, or more. I thought they were horses when I saw them. Their hooves were flying. They sounded like thunder in the hills. They came closer. I saw the slender bodies, the long necks, legs so thin you wondered how they held them up. I saw their faces, the pointed snouts and big ears and bulging eyes. They were all colors. Llamas. I had never seen a llama. They were running for the fun of it. That's when I fell in love.” She stopped. Leroy lay for a while in the moonlight with his mama beside him.

He said, “Is that the end?”

She kissed him on the forehead. “I guess so,” she smiled.

He said, “
Did
he kiss you?”

She said, “Leroy!”

He said, “Did he?”

She said, “Oh, well, sure he did, honey.” She blushed in a way that Leroy loved to see.

She said, “You
are
growing up, aren't you! Is my young man growing up? First thing I know, you'll be heading for trouble.”

R
ight after Leroy's Old Pappy went into his coma, Leroy rode with his daddy from the red clay hills down to the Gulf Coast where Old Pappy had drunk the poison, and his daddy asked a few questions, did a little detective work, making sure there was no foul play involved, was the way Leroy's daddy put it to Leroy. Leroy liked the coast pretty well, palm trees, pelicans, white sand beaches. They didn't find out anything, though. Most of the men they talked to were old bozos who stayed in the halfway house where Old Pappy had been living. They were pretty unreliable. One man wore long lilac-colored scarves tied around each ankle and kept tripping over them. He claimed to have given Allen Ginsberg a blow job in the early sixties. Leroy's daddy said, “I just can't believe Old Pappy would have tried to kill himself.” The man said, “I can't believe I gave Allen Ginsberg a blow job neither,
but I did, gimme a dollar, son, gimme two dollars, I got to catch a bus.”

Old Pappy weighed no more than eighty-five or ninety pounds in his coma, white as chicken dooky. After he drank the poison, Elsie took care of him in the attic for over a year. Each day, three or four times a day, Leroy's mama heaved down the trapdoor and went up and turned the old man in his bed. This prevented bedsores, she told Leroy. She kept the implanted catheter irrigated and the jug emptied out. She bathed the old man each day, top to bottom, with a washcloth and a pan of warm water with mild soapsuds. Once each week she washed his thin hair with Prell and shaved his tiny face. She took care of his bowel movements. She rubbed his poor, blue feet with talcum powder. He generally smelled pretty good, Leroy would give him that much.

One particular afternoon an electrical storm moved across the county. It wasn't especially late but the sky started getting dark. There was a faint yellow tinge to the air outside, it seemed like to Leroy. The rain started up. It was coming down pretty good. In the attic you could hear it on the roof like a drum. Leroy's daddy was still in the field, on the tractor, already making his way back home, so he was getting wet. Rain was sheeting off the roof. Leroy happened to be in the attic creepy-crawling. This was a game he played, snooping around. Just then Old Pappy died, Leroy noticed. He stopped breathing. Leroy noticed this as he was rifling through some stuff in an old trunk. There had been a rattling, and then it
stopped. Leroy went over and sat on the side of Old Pappy's bed. He looked at him. He'd quit breathing, all right. Leroy didn't know what to do. He just sat there for a while. He could have called his mama, she would have come up and done some kind thing, would have spoken the right words. He wasn't sure why he didn't call her. He felt responsible, that was it. He felt like he might have caused this to happen. He put his hand on the old man's forehead as if he were feeling to see whether he had a fever. Old Pappy's forehead was cool, but not like death, he just felt like a regular person lying in a well-ventilated room. A little rain was blowing through the open windows at either end of the attic, but not much. Leroy suddenly felt very tired. He thought he might cry, or he might just lie down in the bed with the old man for a minute, pull up the covers and stay there. He did lie down. He stretched out. He turned on his side then and cuddled up to the old man, as he had cuddled up to his parents in their bed when he was a little boy. He was going on twelve now. He held on to his Old Pappy. He wanted his Old Pappy back, even in a coma. He stayed like this for a while, not long. He sat up then. He knew what he had to do. He heaved himself around and straddled the old man in the bed. He pinched the tiny little nose together with his two fingers. He'd seen this on TV. They'd had a demonstration at school. He manipulated Old Pappy's jaw until he had his mouth open a little. Before he put his own lips to Old Pappy's, he noticed the thin lines, like razor cuts, in the old man's lips. He needed some ChapStick, it looked like to Leroy. He was
afraid the old man was going to have bad breath, so he held his own breath for a few seconds. He put his lips on the old man's mouth and breathed into his lungs. He did this many times. The tiny chest rose and fell. Rain kept falling, falling. Lightning hit the lightning rod once and a few shaggy balls of fire bounced through the room and then dissipated. Leroy's daddy was already coming inside. Leroy had heard the tractor pull into the shed and now could hear his daddy stomping his wet boots on the steps. Leroy kept on with the resuscitation. After a while he stopped. He sat back and looked at Old Pappy. Well, what do you know? he thought. Old Pappy was breathing again. That was really something. Leroy had brought him back to life. He watched him breathe for a while and then he got up and went back downstairs, where everybody was shutting windows and running about the house, making a big fuss about the rain.