Lightning Song Read online

  That 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.”

  2

  Right 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.

  “You’re soaked!” Leroy’s mama was saying to Swami Don as he came into the house. Swami Don was an odd name, nobody seemed to remember why he was called that. He took off his John Deere cap and shook the rain off onto the porch floor. Swami Don was a big man, with just one good arm. The other one was just a withered limp little wet rag of an arm. Old Pappy had shot him when he was a child. It was
an accident. Swami Don didn’t hold any grudges, he had said this plenty of times, Leroy had heard him. Leroy didn’t mention that Old Pappy had died and come back to life. Swami Don shook himself in a funny way, like he was a dog, and this made everybody laugh. He said, “A towel, somebody!” and Laurie came a-running.

  Later on they ate dinner together, all of them. They sat around the little kitchen table covered with checkered oilcloth. There were big white bowls of steaming food, a wooden salad bowl with lettuce out of the garden and red chunks of ripe tomato. Leroy thought about Old Pappy up in the attic, breathing, but he didn’t say anything. Elsie had made a big chicken stew, with carrots, green peas, and potatoes and onions, and served it in a big crockery bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. There were other dishes, too. She had also made biscuits, which were golden and fragrant, and placed them in a wicker basket with a blue towel over them to keep them warm. A little plate with butter sat with a butter knife perched on the side. Little Molly made a fuss and wouldn’t sit in the high chair, but that was all right. Laurie got a big pillow and put it on a regular chair for her to sit on. Swami Don said, “She’s growing up, that’s all, first thing I know, she’ll be married, they’ll all be married, and I’ll be a granddaddy.” He smiled and winked when he said this. Elsie said, “Oh, please!” and this made everyone laugh. Leroy tried to laugh with them, but he couldn’t do it. He was wondering if Old Pappy had died again yet. He grinned, that was the best he could do. He felt Old Pappy’s cracked lips again upon his own.

  Chicken stew and biscuits was Leroy’s favorite supper. He looked at the steaming bowl, the wicker basket of bread, the butter dish, and thought he could never eat enough chicken stew. He was as hungry as a wild dog for chicken stew and biscuits. He would never get enough, he just knew he wouldn’t. He was suddenly so hungry he was ready to fight for chicken stew. He grabbed the bowl even before his daddy could get any. He dug into it with the big serving spoon and shoveled it onto his plate. He piled up his plate, he spooned it on, dollop after dollop. He grabbed up his fork and ate so fast his teeth were clashing against the metal loud enough to hear in the next room. His mama finally said, “Whoa, honey, slow down.” He felt wild, he wasn’t sure he could slow down. He forced himself to eat more slowly. He ate and ate. When he was finished with the stew, he buttered a biscuit, then another, and put both on his plate and poured syrup over them. His daddy said, “Guess who’s hungry tonight?” He smiled at Leroy. “Is that some good eating?” Leroy ate as much as he could. He was so full he was about to bust, but he couldn’t quit eating. He drank two glasses of milk. The storm was blowing, the lightning was cracking, fireballs danced through the house. He said, “Is anybody going to check on Old Pappy?” Elsie said, “I was up there earlier today.” He sat at his plate, sodden with food. He didn’t know what to say. When he went to bed his stomach felt like he had swallowed a basketball. Old Pappy wasn’t dead when he left him, that’s all Leroy cared about. If he was dead now, it wasn’t Leroy’s fault. Later on Leroy’s mama came into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. The rain was falling and falling and making big puddles in the yard. The lightning had moved on through. A light from the llama shed, which burned all night, shined a dim glow in the rainy darkness that he could see from the bed. He could see the outline of his mama’s form beside him. He could feel her weight on the side of the bed. She said, “Are you okay, sweetie? You ate so much, I was afraid you were going to make yourself sick.” He said, “I didn’t kill Old Pappy.” She put her hand upon his face, as he had put his own hand on Old Pappy’s face. She said, “Well, of course you didn’t, darling. Of course not.” Leroy said, “He ain’t dead.” “I know, punkin,” Elsie said. “He’s in a coma, we’ve talked about this, he’s just sleeping right now, you remember. You didn’t do anything.” “Are you going to check on him?” “Well, sure. I always check one last time before I go to bed. Don’t you worry about a thing.” When she leaned down and kissed Leroy on the forehead, her lips felt cool on his skin. She told him the bedtime story she always told when any of the children were sick or scared, the drive into the country, the wide field at sunset, the musical sad voices coming from far off in the distance. It was llamas, singing to the setting sun. They sang and sang, this strange song. “Those innocent faces,” she said.

  When she was gone, Leroy lay in the bed looking out his window and listening to the falling rain. It was hard to do, but he stayed awake until he heard his mama go up the stairs through the trapdoor and find Old Pappy dead. He heard her whisper this to Swami Don. He heard his daddy crying and knew that she was holding his daddy’s head in her lap and touching his hair. He heard the ambulance come and heard the men come in and take Old Pappy down the stairs and out the door. He heard the ambulance drive away in the rain.

  3

  It was one of those blue-sky summer Sunday afternoons in the red clay hills of Mississippi. Sometimes Elsie told Leroy to walk down to the end of the lane and down the blacktop and over to Mr. Sweet’s store for her, she might need some bread or something. It was kind of far, and the macadams did have traffic sometimes, but if you were careful it was pretty safe. She said, “Ask Mr. Sweet does he need me to bring him his supper tonight. He’s been poorly.” Leroy looked across the llama pasture, in the direction of Mr. Sweet’s store. He saw the white cottage there, surrounded by big pecan trees, a few old cars in the yard. Some new people had moved into the cottage not long ago, before that the house had sat empty for a long time. Everybody called them the New People. Nobody knew them, they kept to themselves. If they had another name, Leroy didn’t know about it. He looked over at the New People’s cottage. Nobody had met them yet. Leroy was starting to have him an idea.

  He said, “Can Laurie and Molly go with me?”

  Elsie said, “You might have to carry Molly partway back.”

  He said, “Okay.”

  She said, “Well, y’all walk in the ditch, I don’t want you close to that road. Molly, you hold hands, you hear.”

  Everybody talked about the New People. Nobody knew much. They seemed different from everybody else. They didn’t dress like farm people, maybe they spoke with a foreign accent, nobody was sure which country. The postmistress, a woman named Lolly Pinkerton who raised and sold cockroaches to fishermen, said she heard they came from Venezuela, maybe Trinidad, though if you talked to her long enough you could tell she had no idea that these were foreign countries. She seemed to think her boy, who was grown now and lived in Arkansas, had once played football against those teams, sometime after integration, down in the Delta maybe. How did she get that government job? Mr. Sweet, the old man who ran the store and gas station out on the highway, had them mixed up with a late uncle of his who had fought in the Mexican War, which made no sense at all. Mr. Sweet was failing. Poorly didn’t hardly cover how Mr. Sweet was doing. It was hard to get good information about the New People. Leroy felt the calling. Leroy was planning another creepy-crawly. This one was too big to do alone.

  It took a good long time to walk all the way to the store. It was hot, too. You could work up a sweat. Leroy started wondering if he’d made a mistake dragging his sisters along with him. Laurie wore a pair of new yellow boots, even though she didn’t need them, the weather was dry, and got a blister on one heel, first thing. She said, “Shit.” Molly said she had to go tee-tee, and Leroy said, “Don’t go in your pants,” but she did anyway. It ran all down her leg. Man, that was pretty bad. Leroy cleaned her up as well as he could. When did this start up, this pants-wetting? She’d been pretty well trained. Leroy told Laurie she could go barefoot and he’d carry her boots for her. She said, “If I step on a nail, I’m going to slap the shit out of you.” He made Molly take off her underpants and he wadded them up and stuck them down in Laurie’s boot while she wasn’t looking. They walked past the New People’s cottage on the way to the store.

  Leroy said, “Want to go for a visit?”

  Laurie gave him one of her slap-your-stupid-face looks.

  He said, “Sort of explore?”

  They walked on past the house and then along the blacktop. If a car came along they all three jumped in the ditch. Leroy finally pulled open the screened door of Mr. Sweet’s little store and the three of them went inside. Sometimes Mr. Sweet gave them each a cold drink, Leroy liked Nu Grape or Yoo-Hoo, but he’d take anything. The handle on the store’s door was a faded tin contraption in the shape of some kind of cola drink that Leroy had never heard of anyplace else. The one gas pump out front was a brand of gasoline nobody else ever heard of, with a dinosaur drawn on the globe. A man named Hot McGee was in the store trying to buy a jar of pickled pig’s feet. Mr. Sweet said he couldn’t remember what they were. “Describe pickled pig’s feet,” Mr. Sweet was saying to Mr. McGee. “Give me enough clues and I might be able to come up with it.” Hot McGee had a son Leroy’s age named Screamer McGee who could lick his own penis, double-jointed, he was well known in the county. Leroy had tried that trick and got nowhere close, it was a gift. Hot was a man with strange red arms, with forearms bigger than his biceps, a funny-looking guy if you wanted Leroy’s opinion. He carried a chair and a bullwhip with him wherever he went, like an animal trainer, though he wasn’t one. “Pickled pig’s feet, Mr. Sweet, you remember, come in a jar, real tasty, special good with beer, maybe some crackers, come on now, you can do it. Kind of pink? Got a knuckle and a toenail sometimes?” “It’s about to come back to me, I think I’m about to remember,” Mr. Sweet said from behind the little empty meat case. The meat case had one package of wieners and a shriveled-up fryer chicken in it. There were a couple of flies crawling around on the inside of the glass, so it probably wasn’t too cool in there either. “There you go,” Hot McGee was saying. “Now you’re talking. You can do it.” Mr. Sweet was a toothles
s little man with one leg shorter than the other. He walked on a built-up shoe. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his hand. Leroy didn’t know what a pickled pig’s foot was either, and proud of it.