Lightning Song (5 page)

Leroy and Laurie looked at one another. What was that all about? What could you say? Leroy looked around. He said, “Where's Molly?” Laurie looked, too. Molly was not on the porch, they couldn't see her in the yard, or in the near pastures. She had slipped away. Where had she run off to? Where
had that child gone? They got down off the porch and out into the backyard looking. They started really looking for Molly. “Molly,” Leroy called, not very loud, since they were trespassing. Getting caught at creepy-crawly was not one of Leroy's favorite things. “Where are you, Molly?” After a while they found her, she was okay. Molly poked her head out of the old garage. She smiled in an odd way. Her cheeks were full and plump. Fishhooks were sticking out of Molly's mouth in all directions. Leroy walked over to her. He said, “Don't swallow. Okay, Molls, that's good. Just don't swallow.” He got them all out. He slung them off his fingers like snot.

T
o Leroy the way he felt was not just because he was growing up, like his mama said. To Leroy everything had seemed to change one fine summer day when his Uncle Harris Dearman had shown up on the llama farm, completely unexpected, wearing a great big smile on his face and plenty of styling mousse in his hair. This was right after Old Pappy died the second time. “There's gonna be some changes around here,” Uncle Harris seemed like he was saying to whoever might want to listen to him. Leroy had just turned twelve years old that summer as he watched his amazing and suntanned Uncle Harris come driving up the lane, all the way from the Gulf Coast, in that fancy convertible car. He didn't recognize his Uncle Harris at first, he'd only laid eyes on him once before, but he knew something special was about to happen, he knew from the ringing-bells feeling in his stomach, and even in his face, that things might never be the same again
now that Uncle Harris was here. He might get to ride in that fine little car, for one thing. That alone would surely mean he would never be the same again. Uncle Harris's little white sportster came flying down the lane trailing a dust cloud like a comet's tail, oh man, it was blaring, too, it was making music on the summer air, an ah-ooga horn and dual exhaust pipes, oh boy. Romance has entered the building, it sounded like somebody was saying. That's what Elsie Dearman would claim later on, though Leroy wouldn't have picked just that word exactly. Everything was about to change for the better, though, that was for sure, things were picking up around the llama farm, it seemed like to Leroy, anybody would have told you so.

When the sports car turned off the blacktop, Leroy was sitting in the sandbox packing sand around his bare feet to make a frog house. When he looked up and saw the car turn off the paved road and make its way down the lane, he pulled his feet out of the frog house and let the sand collapse around them. Who cared about a frog house? His two little sisters dropped their rag dolls on the porch swing and ran out the door and looked up the drive. The times they were a-changing, that was the song being played on Uncle Harris's ah-ooga horn, it might as well have been, to Leroy's ears.

Behind the wooden steering wheel of the little open-topped car Leroy finally recognized his glittering Uncle Harris, tanned face, brilliant hair, flowered shirt, luxurious upon white cordovan leather seats, his white teeth gleaming, the
heel of his hand pressing the button of a horn that made some extravagant sound of hilarity, maybe it played a few notes of “Dixie.” Uncle Harris had come to the farm, hot damn. For one amazing moment the notes of the horn's blast seemed actually to be imprinted on the summer air above the car's hood, with cartoon drawings of sharps and flats alongside them. The music of the car's horn filled the farm-world with alien, comic hilarity whose sound glowed as bright as a many-faceted gemstone and made tawdry everything it touched, the llama farm, the house and outbuildings, the truck crops in the field, the farm equipment, the great black walnut tree and lightning rod.

Maybe as Leroy remembered this moment years later its details were exaggerated. Much of the memory was contradictory. It was dreamlike. Even Harris himself seemed scarcely real in the memory. Everything had an antique look, and the people, especially Harris, seemed dressed in costumes, as if for an old-timey movie. Leroy's mama looked Amish almost in her simplicity and dowdiness. His daddy, who was clean shaven, might as well have worn a Mennonite's beard, his John Deere cap might have been a black hat with a severe brim. His sisters might have been selling quilts and goat cheese at a roadside stand. He himself—well, Leroy disappeared, for the moment anyway. For this exciting moment it was he himself who sat behind the wooden steering wheel of the amazing little car, Leroy not Harris, in glory, oh yes, oh yes.

He looked hard at his Uncle Harris, who seemed to have changed again. Now he wore a wide-lapeled canvas driving coat, and on his head a jaunty cap with aviator goggles, and gloves for his hands, and a white silk scarf, which flowed behind him in the breeze. An orchestra played loud hopeful music all around. Dancers with long legs, dancers with top hats and canes, announced Uncle Harris's entrance onto the scene. Here he is! He has arrived! The llamas in the pasture stood up on their hind legs and pranced. The tractor in the field went “Toot toot!” like a comical train. Funny smoke rings blew out its tall exhaust. Fish rose up out of the farm pond and sang along. Ducks flew over in a chevron and they joined in the song. Jiminy Cricket was there. Uncle Harris had come to rescue them from their dull lives on the llama farm.

None of this was so, of course, how could it have been, the world did not become a cartoon, but so it seemed to Leroy, so it surely seemed for this moment, and seemed so perhaps to Elsie as well, Leroy's mother, perhaps to Elsie more than to anyone.

At least one thing was true. It was Harris, in that car, Leroy's daddy's extraordinary brother, and his appearance on the farm was as unexpected as a visitor from another planet. Leroy blinked away the extravagance of his imagination and looked upon the extravagance of Harris's reality. He was wearing sporty sunglasses, so dark you could not see his eyes. The black pools of his shaded eyes spoke of mystery. His hair was straight and cropped short in the modern way, his face
was golden brown. Leroy's own sun-blond hair and freckles seemed a loathsome thing. Harris was waving his arm and blasting away on the sassy horn. He brought his car to a crunching halt in the driveway and set the emergency brake. The car rocked forward and then back again it stopped so quickly. Even the crunch of gravel seemed filled with newness and miraculous distances. Harris's smile was white-toothed as a shark's. Leroy had never seen such a smile. His own teeth felt too big for his mouth. They felt gray by comparison. There had never been so wonderful a vision as his Uncle Harris, who sat before him like a king.

Harris did not open his door and step out in the normal way. No one would have expected this banality of him, in any case. Somehow—later it seemed impossible that this should have happened and yet surely it did—Harris vaulted, effortless, from his seat. He left the car as if by extra-human propulsion. He rose from his seat, it seemed to Leroy. He might as well have been ejected from it, with such ease he seemed to become airborne. He launched himself, Leroy might have said—over the doors of his car and through the air. He was not out of control of this leap, he was flying, he was Superman. Solidly he landed with both feet on the ground. He held his arms halfway out, palms up, and said, “Whoa, Mama!” His smile, honestly, was like sunlight.

Just then Elsie came out the back door to see what all the commotion was about. She had not yet been transformed by her brother-in-law's presence. She was drying her hands on
her apron. She wore no makeup, in her fresh-faced, farmwife way. She blew a strand or two of hair out of her eyes and scratched the tip of her nose with the dry back of her hand. Leroy watched her. He watched the neat little farm, the funny ducks on the pond, the baby llamas in the lot, he imagined the yellow pound cake on the table behind his mother, fresh from its pan, all the details of his life and contentment. Everything suddenly lost meaning and strength before his very eyes. What had been expected and usual and even invisible suddenly became tawdry and stupid, a judgment upon them all.

Leroy's mama had noticed none of this, yet. She saw only Harris.

She said, “Well, would you look!”

Her face showed such joy that Leroy wanted to shout to her, “Watch out!” He had no idea what he would have meant by this.

Elsie stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and stood looking at her glittering brother-in-law like a shy girl. Her farmgirl complexion was underlaid with a blush that even Leroy had to admit was beautiful. It was a thing he had not noticed in his mother before.

Harris hauled out his carpetbag from behind his seat and stretched himself good and looked exactly like a man making ready to settle in for a while.

Leroy was transfixed. He saw Harris and his mama see one another. He saw Harris hold his arms out wide. Harris cocked his head, rakish and teasing, to the side.

Elsie twisted her apron in her hands.

Leroy ran for cover. He hid behind a crepe myrtle bush and watched. He eased out again.

Harris said, “Hey, good-lookin', whatcha got cookin'!”

This caused Leroy's mama to blush even more and to become even more beautiful.

Leroy watched, incredulous.

Suddenly Harris rushed to Elsie as if he had returned from the wars, he did this in a single sudden sweep of his whole self across the property. In a split second he was upon her. He grabbed her around the waist like a movie star, as if Elsie weighed nothing at all. He flung her into the air. Elsie said, “Eek!” She actually said that word.
Eek
. Leroy had never heard that word spoken. He had seen it in “Nancy and Sluggo” comics, when Aunt Fritzi stood on a chair with a cute mouse on the floor. What was happening to their lives? Maybe, later on, when Leroy executed his creepy-crawly, it was an answer to this question—as much as the dirty pictures—that he had hoped to find. Harris swung Elsie up into the air, up and up, her feet off the ground, and then around and around in a circle, as easily as if she were a child. Her golden hair became a halo, it swung over her shoulder. She said, “Oh, oh, oh!” Her skirt flew up above her knees. Suddenly her smile was as bright as Harris's. Leroy had never seen his mother so happy. She was no longer Amish. She looked like a teenager. She looked almost modern. Leroy wanted to be modern, he
wanted to be a teenager. He had seen them on television, heard of them all his life. He was twelve years old. He would die of old age before it was time for him to be a teenager. He wanted to drive a car. He wanted to have a date. He wanted to fall in love with somebody like his mother. Like his mother? What was he saying, had he lost his mind? Elsie held on to Harris's neck and allowed herself to be held by the waist. She flung her head back in laughter and joy. She said, “Oh my!” At last Harris stopped swinging her. At last he let her come back to earth. Then he hugged her, the biggest, funniest hug Leroy had ever seen, a real bear hug, all around, engulfing her. He held her straight back from him, at arms' length. He said, “Yahoo!” then hugged her again.

Leroy was spellbound. What he saw next terrified him. Harris kissed Elsie, kissed his mama. Kissed her three times, smack, once on the forehead, smack, once on the tip of her nose, and then, smack, right on the lips. When he did this, the kiss on the lips, he actually said, “Smooch!” in a loud voice. He held her at arms' length again. The two of them laughed and laughed and said happy hellos.

Elsie said, “You're crazy! What are you
doing
here!”

She said, “The children!”

“The children!” Harris said.

He crouched, he turned slowly, he crooked his fingers in the way of old-timey movie monsters.

Laurie and Molly squealed in happiness and appreciation.
They ran in circles. Molly peed in her pants. Come to think of it, this was the first time Molly started wetting her pants again, the day Uncle Harris arrived.

Harris picked up each of the children, the two girls anyway, and swung them around and kissed them with noisy kisses in the same way as he had done with Elsie. He didn't care about wet pants.

Leroy took off running. He was out of here. He didn't know why. He rounded the corner of the house. He tore out around the side of the house and hid in a lean-to shed he had made with some spare boards against a corner of the pasture fence. He was breathing hard. He wanted to be swung around. He even wanted to be kissed. He just couldn't take the pressure. He barely escaped. There was a stitch in his side. He stayed there in his lean-to for a while, wondering. The others went inside the house with Uncle Harris. He could hear them in there. He listened to their voices, their laughter. He burned with envy and relief. The thin scraps of boards above him were safety for now. Even the house he lived in seemed suddenly unsafe. The house where Leroy lived with his parents might as well have been the water a fish lived in, so familiar had it always seemed to Leroy, a frame structure built in the red clay hills. Its underside was one of Leroy's secret places, its attic another. His grandfather had died in the attic, and so its mysteries were rich. Leroy's bedroom was tiny, with a narrow steel cot where he slept. His sisters shared a larger room. The kitchen with its enormous old Chambers stove, his parents'
room, the living room with its stone fireplace from which wisps of smoke crept on fragrant winter days, the screened porch and its casual furniture of wicker painted white. Truck crops grew in the fields, tomatoes, corn, melons, squash, beans, carrots, turnips, alfalfa for the herd. Llamas stood behind rail fences. This was the world that began to fade from view when Uncle Harris arrived in it.

In another hour Swami Don came putt-putting out of the field on the tractor, Leroy's daddy, with only the one good arm. Leroy watched him from the lean-to. He was wearing Big Smith overalls and had a sweat-stained red bandana tied around his neck and the John Deere cap on his head. Swami Don didn't talk about his strange nickname. About all he ever said was he was named for a man down in the Delta who ran a salvage business. It made no sense.