The Truth About Love and Lightning (27 page)

Sam stared at her, unable to blink, barely able to breathe.

One of those things?
Like, oops, I slipped and fell against the guy, and we made a baby.
God dammit. God dammit!

At that point, Sam couldn’t stand to listen further. Every word she’d already uttered was killing him, twisting his guts in the most painful way. He shut her out, closing his eyes, fingers curled around the edge of the bench until he felt splinters. He seethed inwardly and watched angry clouds rolling in. He fought to keep his heart from bursting out of his chest and creating a bloody mess.

Why, Gretchen, why?

How could she have done something like this? How could she have let this happen? Sam wasn’t naïve; he knew she loved him but she wasn’t
in love
with him, not the way he was with her. Still, he’d always imagined, had always hoped, that she would realize they were meant to be together. That someday, she would be his. They would marry, settle down, and have kids.

And now she was having some other man’s baby?

He touched the beads at his throat, fingering the turquoise that had once been his grandfather’s, wishing whatever magic they contained could make him forget everything he’d just heard. But he knew that wouldn’t work. Gretchen’s words had already been imprinted on his soul.

What do I do?
he thought.
Grandfather, help me deal with this.

The air whispered in his ear as the wind began to blow, rustling the leaves in the trees above them, ruffling the grass beneath his feet. It tugged at Gretchen’s hair, whipping the pale curls about her face. She didn’t even try to push them back, and Sam didn’t do it for her either.

“Do you hate me?” she asked, her voice so small he was hardly aware she’d said anything at all until she touched his cheek, startling him, and he kicked over the bottle of Coke he’d set aside.

“I can understand if you do,” she said and jumped to her feet. “I can understand if you never want to see me again. I let you down. I let everyone down.”

Sam could hardly refute her. He couldn’t think of a thing to say that would make her feel better. She could not have done anything that would have hurt him worse.

“It’s okay, I understand. I’d hate me, too,” she said, hugging her arms around her waist. “Well, okay, good-bye then, Sam. I hope you have a good trip.” She turned her back to him, her head down.

And he realized that if he allowed her to walk away, she might never come back. That it would surely be the end of them.

“Gretchen!”

Sam couldn’t let her go. If he left for Africa letting her believe he didn’t love her anymore, that he’d rejected her completely, he could never forgive himself. In that split second, he understood what he had to do, however it pained him.

He hopped up and went after her, catching her by the wrist before she’d gone too far. “Wait,” he begged, close to tears himself. “You can’t leave me, not like this.”

Gretchen stood stock-still, her hand limp in his grasp.

So Sam did the only thing he could, the only thing he knew he could do and live with himself. “A while ago, I made you a promise that I wouldn’t abandon you, and I meant it. If there’s any way I can make things right, you let me know, and I’ll do it.”

Her damp eyes glistened in the dusk. “Sam?”

“Whatever you need, Gretch. Anything.”

Her fingers slowly intertwined with his, and she squeezed his hand, smiling sadly before she released him.

“Thank you” was all she said.

She didn’t take him up on his offer, not then. He didn’t find out that she had until years and years later, long after he was already gone.

Twenty-three

August–September 1970

Once Sam arrived in the coastal West African town and tossed his duffel bag into the back of a battered Jeep, already crammed full, he didn’t have time to be homesick or even to dwell much on Gretchen. The drive out to the refugee camp near the interior border was one of the longest rides he’d ever taken, and not merely because the Jeep’s driver had packed four grown men and one woman inside so that they were wedged shoulder to shoulder; but the heat was oppressive, the road even dustier than the rural route for Walnut Ridge, and they were stopped at numerous checkpoints manned by sweaty and angry-looking armed militants.

They left behind the waving palms of the port—and the director of the mission, who seemed inclined to stay within his air-conditioned office—until all Sam saw was desert surrounding them and then dots of white littering the landscape the closer they came to the border. He quickly realized all those dots were tents, thousands of them, maybe even a hundred thousand. And there were people everywhere, moving like trails of ants, many of them standing in lines, some waiting for water, some trying to locate missing family, and others seeking medical attention.

“Dear Lord,” said the brown-skinned woman beside him, whose name was Colleen. Her eyes looked as big as saucers as she surveyed the sprawl of the refugee camp. “How are the five of us supposed to make a dent?”

“Or even a ding,” a freckled and redheaded fellow named Brett groused from the front seat. He’d taken a semester away from college and looked like he was regretting it already.

Once the Jeep had jerked to a stop, they were all ordered out, told to grab their gear from the back, and given vague instructions about finding the proper tents. Before Sam could ask for more details, the driver hopped back into the Jeep and sped off.

“So where’s the welcoming committee?” Colleen asked, glancing around; her backpack was so heavy that it caused her left shoulder to sink under its weight.

They were surrounded by faces black and white and every color in between. Sam even saw a few dogs and some goats.

“The youth ministry volunteers’ tents?” he asked a few in passing. Some pointed them left and others right.

“Maybe we should just pick a direction and go,” Colleen suggested.

“Yeah, but which?” Sam wondered aloud, searching for a sign of some sort, an arrow pointing the way, perhaps. But no such signs existed.

“Where’s the rest of the group?” Colleen asked next and stood on the toes of her boots, looking for Brett and the other two from their shuttle.

“I haven’t a clue,” Sam told her, hanging on to the straps of his backpack and doing a slow circle around them, seeking Brett’s rust-red hair. But by the time he’d made a single turn within the noise and the smells and the confusion, he’d lost Colleen, too.

A bubble of panic seeped up from his gut, burning in his throat, and he thought about standing on the nearest truck and shouting for help.

“You must be fresh meat,” a voice said from behind him before he did anything too rash. “You look confused.”

“I’m just trying to find my way,” he replied, and faced a woman who looked to be in her early twenties wearing a dirty white shirt and even dustier jeans. She stared him squarely in the eye.

“We’re all trying to find our way,” she quipped and gave him a crooked grin. “Just be careful of the clean-looking ones who say they’re running things from their nice offices on the coast. Sods, the lot of them. They’re the ones who know the least,” she told him, adding with a shrug, “The rest of us have learned how to muddle our way through. It’s either that or lose our minds.”

“Got it,” Sam said, appreciating her directness.

She wasn’t pretty by any conventional means—tall, angular, hair as short as a boy’s, a wide nose, and a noticeable gap between her teeth—but she had a take-charge air about her that he liked on the spot.

“Sam Winston,” he introduced himself, letting go of a strap to extend his hand, “from Walnut Ridge, Missouri.”

“Cate,” she said simply, ignoring the gesture. “Follow me, Missouri, and I’ll see if I can’t get you settled so you can make yourself useful.” She started walking, brushing past unsmiling men in tan military uniforms and women in bright-colored rags tugging children by the hand.

One such mother grabbed Sam’s arm, begging him for something in a language he didn’t understand.

Cate gently took the woman’s arm, uttering a few words that made the dark head nod before she turned away. “It’s heartbreaking,” she said to Sam as they moved along, past another endless row of tents. “They’ve lost so much, and not just their possessions. Their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons. But you know what they say: war is hell. And, come to think of it, so is this place. Anyway, here’s your new digs, Missouri.”

Cate paused before a muddied canvas flap. “If you need anything, well”—she shot him that crooked grin again—“you’ll figure it out yourself, or you can find me again.”

“Thanks,” Sam said as she gave a backhanded wave and disappeared into the swarm.

Feeling hot and not a little sick to his stomach, Sam ducked inside to find a dozen cots, most of them littered with someone else’s detritus. He located the first empty bunk, topped with a coarse but neatly folded blanket and a pocket-sized Bible. He set his pack on the floor and slumped onto the makeshift bed, rubbing his head in his hands. As he pondered what the heck he was supposed to do next, two young men popped in.

“Are you with the new batch that just landed?” one asked, and Sam nodded. “Great! Come on with us, and we’ll get you started canvassing.”

Which, as Sam quickly learned, had nothing to do with art or political campaigns. Instead, it involved masses of paperwork, an endless list of refugees’ names as they flooded into the aid camp. Sam was sent around with a fellow named Theo who spoke half a dozen languages, and it was Theo’s job to pull information about family members from the displaced, translating to Sam, who did the best he could to jot everything down in some kind of order.

By nightfall, he was tired and hot and hungry. Dinner was rice and beans with bread and beer. As he lay down to try to get some sleep, he noticed that most of his tent-mates slowly disappeared. He wondered if he was missing some kind of prayer meeting or service, and he asked that of Theo the next morning.

“Are you kidding?” Theo said and laughed. “Give yourself a month of this, and you’ll be desperate for someone warm. If you can’t find a soul to connect with, you’ll go bat-shit crazy around here.”

But Sam hadn’t volunteered for the mission to meet girls, and he didn’t mind being alone. It didn’t even bother him to feel lonely. He was rather used it, having never made very many friends, having never trusted anyone completely. Well, anyone except Gretchen.

Besides, after his first two weeks in the camp, with his ears constantly filled with the buzz of people crying and shouting and talking, often in languages he didn’t know, he savored time by himself. He would take out the battered copy of Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
that he’d packed, slip Gretchen’s photograph from between the pages, and gaze at her face, rubbing his thumb across the Kodachrome square, and he’d imagine he could feel the softness of her skin or the curl of her hair. She seemed so foreign to him now, someone from another world entirely. She reminded him of what he’d left behind, what was familiar. And he took comfort in that.

Sam’s long days quickly fell into a pattern: up in the morning, bright and early, using hand-dug latrines that reeked of crap and buzzed with flies; swallowing down whatever food was offered, whether military MREs or rice and beans; distributing water to those who patiently waited in long lines; helping refugees search for missing family; doling out medicine or soap or whatever the hell they had to try to make life for the thousands of displaced humans even the slightest bit easier.

Having come from a place where he’d never wanted for much, Sam felt deeply affected by the desperation of the people at the camp. He knew he’d never grow accustomed to children with bloated bellies and dysentery and malnutrition.

Though he did what he could to ease their misery, it never felt like enough.

“Why is there so little water?” he asked Theo one afternoon after two months in the camp.

“Resources are finite, buddy, you know that. All we can do is dig more wells and truck in more jugs of the stuff.” His friend removed his glasses to mop his wet forehead. “There used to be a lake just over the ridge there,” he said, pointing toward a hump of earth that looked like a camel’s back. “But it hasn’t rained in these parts for ages so the thing’s pretty much just a crater.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah,” Theo agreed, “it does.”

The more Sam thought about it, the more he began pondering an idea, one that seemed crazy at first until he convinced himself it wasn’t so crazy after all. If the stories his mother had told him about Hank Littlefoot making it rain were true, if this gift of conjuring up the weather had truly been passed down to Sam as well, why shouldn’t he use it? Surely it would do no harm to try.

Sam had always been aware that he was different from everyone else. Even as a child, he’d felt a subtle stirring inside him that connected him to the sky and the earth in a way that wasn’t typical. He had always been sensitive to changes in the air around him, and he’d realized early on that his emotions had a strange effect on the sun and the sky and the breeze. If he felt angry or sad or frustrated, the atmosphere seemed to get riled up as well, stirring up the wind and clouds, even the thunder and the rain.

Sam could only hope there was a chance he could summon up his deepest feelings and make something happen here. So he decided to give it a shot that very night. Maybe he’d fail, but no one would be the wiser.

At that point, Sam had been around the camp long enough to know how to move about without attracting unwanted attention. When the night was darkest and the camp quietest, he took a full canteen and slipped away from his tent, skirting the guard stations where the orange glow of cigarettes pierced the dark like fireflies. Once safely out of bounds, he hiked the mile or so through scrubby grasses and sandy soil to where the lake used to be. He wasn’t sure what exactly to do once he got there, but he figured he’d come up with something.

Beneath the pale light of a quarter moon, the crater yawned before him, so vast he could only imagine how far its borders reached. Drawing in a deep breath, he stood at the precipice, peering into the empty basin below, noting the cracks veining the wall beneath where he stood, so many that it looked like a broken piece of pottery.