Fat Lightning Read online

  Fat Lightning

  Howard Owen

  New York

  To Karen, with love

  And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.—Revelation 9:2

  NOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Manley James found it all on Monday afternoon.

  “He saw the buzzards floating overhead like his grandchildren’s kites every time he looked up from painting the barn that morning, dark shadows on the bright blue October canvas.

  “He saw them out the kitchen window while he ate the luncheon-meat sandwiches his wife fixed for him. And he smelled the smoke, even inside. Thicker than usual. Finally, at 1 o’clock, drowsy and wanting a nap, he decided he’d better see what Avery Booth was up to.

  “As he got nearer, the smoke became heavier, and he had to take out the handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose while he steered the pickup with one hand. The cinders burned worse than they ever had before. Rounding the last turn into Red Top, Manley saw that the buzzards’ attention were attracted by something off to his left, something he could get a whiff of even from the road, even through all the smoke.

  “Up ahead, he could barely make out the house through the haze, and he thought at first it was on fire. But then he saw that the smoke was coming from out back, on beyond the barn, and he realized that it was the sawdust.

  “The only sounds Manley James heard were Avery’s old mongrel barking, hoarse and steady as a clock, and a kind of sizzling sound behind that. He got out of the truck and fought the smoke until he reached the barn where so many people had stood and sat that summer, and then he saw that the big orange mountain wasn’t there any more.

  “It seemed to have imploded, like one of the buildings Manley would see once in a while on TV. He walked up to the edge of it, and he could see that it was burning in serious now, exposed to the air after smoldering underneath all that time.

  “He was about to turn around and go looking for Avery Booth when he saw something shine in the midst of all the gloom. He couldn’t make it out until he got 10 feet away, and then he saw that it was a ring, and that the ring was attached to a finger and thus a hand sticking out of the smoldering sawdust.

  “Manley ran, wheezing, to his truck, but before he could get in and start back to call the fire department or the rescue squad or the sheriff, he noticed the buzzards again. He walked out across Avery Booth’s yard, over toward where they were circling and squatting and eating. And this time he didn’t have to get 10 feet away, or even 100, before he saw what it was, before he saw that it wasn’t a dog or a possum or even a cow that the birds were feasting on.

  “‘Great gawd awmighty,’ the old man said. He’d broken into a sweat that a breeze now turned into goosebumps. And when one of the birds, startled by a human presence, gave out with a sharp sound, it was so like a laugh that Manley never looked back until Red Top was out of sight.”

  Nancy looks up, relieved. All done. There is polite clapping.

  “Anyhow, that’s how it starts.”

  “Thank you, Ms. O’Neil,” the president of the women’s club says, giving Nancy a smile and a slight jerk of her head that tells her it isn’t time to sit down, much as Nancy wants to. She hasn’t sung enough for her supper yet. “Now, are there any questions?”

  Front row, third from the left: “How long did it take you to write ‘Egypt’?”

  Hard question, Nancy thinks. “It depends. Either five months” (she realizes she’s saying EYE-ther instead of EE-ther and hopes Suzanne and Marilou don’t start snickering) “or 20 years, according to how you look at it.”

  Nancy can tell that this is taken for Writer Being Cryptic, but before she can explain, another hand shoots up, third row from the back, in the middle:

  “Where did you find the time?” There’s a murmur around the room, as if that was everybody’s next question. If they only knew how long it had all been building up, how I’d work it all out in my head, just like it happened, Nancy thinks. A frontal lobotomy wouldn’t have made it go away.

  She resists the urge to tell the woman, “The time found me,” and gives her stock answer about time management and an understanding family.

  Everything changed so fast and so much afterward, and so much of it was tied to writing, that she never wanted to put a piece of paper in a typewriter again.

  And, if Holly hadn’t died in February and if Sebara hadn’t reappeared in April, almost 20 years to the day after it all started, it might still be locked up inside my head, Nancy thinks to herself. So, like Dr. Jamison suggested, she just turned on the computer and let it flow, stranger than fiction.

  Second row, all the way to the right: “Does being a librarian help you as a writer? I mean, all those books and all …”

  Yeah, Nancy thinks to herself, if I’d really wanted to get away from writing, why did I get a master’s in library science, the cheapest master’s in the Western Hemisphere? Just look at my paycheck if you don’t believe it. Like the doc said, there must have been some subconscious part of me that still wanted to write, in spite of everything that happened.

  She staggers through 20 minutes of it, her first reading and Q-and-A, her words echoing off the 20-foot ceilings as the air conditioning goes on and off every five minutes. Finally, mercifully, the club president says, “One more question.”

  A woman about 50, about my age, Nancy thinks, raises her hand:

  “I’ve heard that some of what you wrote about in ‘Egypt’ was from first-hand experience. Could you talk about that?”

  Had to happen. Richmond’s not that big …

  “No,” Nancy tells her, trying to be polite. God knows, she thinks, I don’t want to hurt the feelings of any potential $19.95-a-book customers. “I don’t think I could talk about that. All I can say is that I’ve known some interesting people, and a piece of some of them is in the book.”

  And a big chunk, she thinks to herself, of one in particular, one black-eyed, red-haired demon that wouldn’t stay buried.

  Lot Chastain, she wishes, rest in peace. Please?

  1971

  CHAPTER TWO

  The window was up, because it was one of those rare April days when springtime in Virginia is more than a myth, so Nancy heard the Duster that Sam had bought the month before as it pulled into the gravel driveway, scattering a spray of stones into the grass, and she heard him slam the door, hard. It wasn’t yet two, so she thought maybe the night pharmacist was sick and Sam was taking a quick hour off before he had to pull double duty again.

  She could hear him fumbling with the keys. Sam said that having to have a deadbolt made him feel as if he were living in New York City instead of Richmond, but it was he who had insisted on it when they moved to the North Side four years before. Nancy was a city girl; a bump in the basement or a car door slammed three houses away didn’t bother her, then.

  The floor squeaked as he walked across the carpet and up the stairs, same as always.

  Wade, who had learned to say “Daddy” before even “Mommy,” called out to Sam as he passed by the upstairs bath, sputtering the word with water dripping down his face. But Sam walked right past, still wearing his white pharmacist’s coat with the name bar. He usually took it off before he got to the parking lot as he left work. He didn’t speak to either his wife or his two-year-old son, just walked straight into the bedroom.

  Nancy heard closet doors and drawers being yanked open. She gave Wade’s hair a rough drying-off, left him sitting in the tub, and walked down the hall, expecting the worst.

  Sam was standing in front of his sock drawer, picking out all the pairs he could find and throwing them into the biggest suitcase they owned.

  Nancy watched him pack a dozen pairs of socks and five or six singles, in case they matched. Then he started on the underwear.

  “Sam?” Nancy said. “Honey?”

  He didn’t answer the first time, so she tried again.

  Finally: “What?”

  “Are you running away from home?”

  He almost smiled.

  “We all are,” he said. “We’re moving.”

  Nancy looked at her husband for a sign. He used to play practical jokes. But all she saw now was a mind already made up.

  She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Where?” for lack of anything better.

  “Monacan. You better get moving. Bus leaves in half an hour.”

  What finally did it was tampons.

  Sam Chastain was, until April of 1971, head pharmacist for one of DrugLand’s two West End stores. After two drinks, he would tell anybody who would listen that he wasn’t really a pharmacist, just an office manager, the guy who hired and fired the checkout girls and counted the inventory. Most of the clerks missed a couple of days a month with cases of the flu that usually struck on Fridays or Mondays, according to which way the weekend needed to be stretched.

  Sam really hated Mondays. On Mondays, any underpaid DrugLand worker was liable to call in sick.

  He felt things should resolve themselves without human intervention whenever possible, at home or at work, so he never fired anyone, no matter how many times they shagged and spilled beer on the Work Ethic. When Sam Chastain came home and started packing, Nancy knew things had gone far beyond irritating.

  The Monday it happened, he told Nancy that Etta Culbreth had called at five minutes ’til 9. It was supposed to reach 80 degrees by mid-afternoon, which it did, not a cloud in the sky. S
he called to tell Sam she was stuck in Virginia Beach with car trouble. Her transmission, she thought. It meant that Sam would have to stock the store, between prescriptions, while the girl who wasn’t planning on being sick until Friday ran the cash register.

  He was in the small section of the store that actually sold products related to the human body. He was tearing into a box of super tampons when he looked up and saw he was waist-high to Miss Mosby High of 1956, who was in town shopping. Corinne Cobb was wearing a pink miniskirt that hinted she had a better body than she did in high school, where Sam worshipped her pointed, bra-contoured breasts and golden-haired presence from afar.

  Nancy was pretty sure that Sam was not cool in high school, not like Buddy and she had thought they were. In the yearbooks she looked at, Sam was on the track team and the debate team, but he wasn’t in any of those spontaneously posed pictures that every yearbook staff always has taken of the “right” crowd. He was voted Most Studious.

  But Sam always felt he was a late bloomer, somebody who would someday make all those cheerleaders and majorettes moan, “I didn’t know THAT was Sam Chastain.”

  Now, though, on his knees wrestling with a box of super tampons, a little bit of a beer gut hanging over the belt of his white shirt, he saw the look on Corinne Cobb’s face just before she turned and walked away without a word, and he knew that his life might not be yielding all he’d hoped it would. He feared that maybe he was the same boy he was in high school, 14 years ago, and it really pissed him off. He blamed DrugLand for placing him, a Trained Pharmacist, in such a compromising position.

  Sam left the keys with the clerk and called Tim Litwin, his supervisor. He told him he had the flu.

  Then he picked up his coffee mug and his briefcase, and he left.

  From Richmond to Monacan was only 35 miles, but the suburbs fell away to country just past the last shopping center. By the time Sam, Nancy and Wade had gotten 10 miles from their brick colonial on the North Side, the woods were already starting to take over.

  Wade sat in the back, just happy to be going to Grandma and Grandy’s. Nancy looked out the window at a succession of cinder-block houses, dammed-up ponds and service stations and wondered what the hell they were doing. The woods were the light, new green of spring, with white dogwoods everywhere.

  Nancy was 28 years old, four years younger than Sam. At this point in her life, it was still her normal inclination, when someone told her to do something, to turn around and do the opposite. But something about Sam’s unblinking eyes, something about the absolute calm with which he prepared to move them all out of Richmond, convinced her that, for the time being, his mind was made up. He was going to Monacan, and he just assumed that she’d wrap up Wade and go with him.

  Nancy knew enough about Sam’s family to understand the Putting-Your-Foot-Down tradition. The men didn’t say much, didn’t make many decisions and yielded frequently on day-to-day things. The few times they did clench their jaws, though, she saw that they were treated as if they were privy to divine wisdom. Later, Nancy wrote it off as either an unwillingness to trample on hallowed Chastain tradition or the nagging feeling that she should have been more of a trouper in her first marriage. So she went along.

  Besides, she told herself, Sam is always threatening to move back to Monacan.

  Sam turned off the new interstate and approached town from the north. He drove his family across the river and past the drive-in theater, and then the water tower came into view, its faded red letters promising: “Monacan: Your Future’s Here.” Some high school kids had climbed it and painted “NOT” between and just above “Future’s” and “Here.” Nancy wasn’t sure which prediction was least ominous.

  Sam had been silent since they left Richmond. Finally, as they made the 45 degree turn that led off Route 17 and on to the road that would soon, around the bend, be Monacan’s main street, he spoke.

  “I can take over for Daddy,” he told Nancy. “This is where we need to raise our family, right here where the kids can be with their Grandma and Grandy every day,” and he looked back at Wade for confirmation. Wade was asleep.

  Nancy wanted to say, “What about my family?” but something told her that this was a day to let it ride. It would take her years to stop depending on little voices of unknown origin for her guidance.

  When they first met, Sam seemed to Nancy as if he were content to spend the rest of his life in Richmond. He was in the last year of pharmacy school then. He was 26 years old, with straight, dark hair and a sharp, chiseled French look that Nancy would come to notice in all the Chastain men she would know. His weak eyes and habit of squinting were all that kept him from handsome. Nancy was taking 12 hours at Richmond Professional Institute, trying to finish a degree in English for no apparent reason other than to show that she could finish something.

  Sam was a blind date, on Valentine’s Day. He and Nancy rolled around in the mud at fraternity parties, went to Virginia Beach just to eat fried shrimp and made love on top of a rather small mountain. Nancy loved Sam’s dry wit; he made her laugh more than anything had in a long, long time. She thought he was a gift.

  He got on well enough with Nancy’s parents, although Suzanne did ask her one time, “What do you use to get him to talk, honey? Bamboo splints?”

  It was true that Sam had never been much of a talker, unless he’d had too many gin-and-tonics. He and Nancy’s father, Pat, could sit and watch nine innings of baseball on TV without the conversation going much beyond “Beer?” and “Yeah, thanks.” He had a way, too, of getting up and walking out of the room at any time he was not being directly spoken to. This put off the O’Neils, or the female O’Neils at least, but Nancy explained to Suzanne and to her sisters, Marilou and Candy, that everybody in Sam’s family was like that, even with each other. Nothing personal.

  “It’s just the Chastain in him,” Pat would say, partly, Nancy felt, to drive her crazy. Pat was a great believer in blood, and he’d had a couple of Chastain brothers work for him at the cabinet shop.

  “I saw Frank Chastain cut an inch off his little finger one day with a circular saw,” he said, “and he didn’t even yell. Just asked somebody to take him to the doctor. He was a smart worker, though.”

  Sam’s saving grace, even the first couple of years they were married, was his penchant for the outrageous, made all the more outrageous because it came from the most deadpan man in Richmond.

  The day of her 25th birthday, Nancy had a 10 a.m. class. Sam kissed her goodbye and gave her a card on his way out at 7:30. They were to go out to dinner that night.

  On her way to the RPI campus, though, Nancy saw the first of the signs. She realized, by the time she got to the first main intersection, that there were three 25-mile-per-hour speed limit signs in their neighborhood, and that Sam had somehow managed to plaster a piece of white cardboard over the top of each, with black letters that matched those of the highway department, so that the signs read:

  NANCY

  CHASTAIN

  IS

  25

  He never once conceded that it had been his doing, even after Nancy found the paint can in the basement.

  “Must of been the birthday fairy,” he maintained.

  Her last two birthdays, Sam had been predictable as clockwork. He seemed to be too old—or too tired—for pranks any more. Nancy wrote it off to parenthood.

  “He’s not deadpan, sweetie,” Suzanne told her over Thanksgiving. “He’s just dead.”

  None of her children, after puberty, ever called Suzanne “Momma,” and none of them, whatever age, called Pat anything except “Daddy.” But it never seemed to bother Suzanne. She was 24 when Nancy was born, but by the time her oldest child was in her 20s, people were mistaking her and Nancy for sisters.

  They had the same ash-blonde hair, the same slightly wide faces that turned beautiful into something between pretty and cute, the same toothy smile, the same impish blue eyes. But there was more to it than that. Suzanne never got tired, never failed to laugh at a dirty joke, never thought the music was too loud. “If it’s too loud,” she told Pat one time when he was complaining bitterly about the decibel level of one of Nancy’s Buddy Holly records, “you’re too old.”