Fat Lightning (5 page)

As with the Christmas before, it took half the afternoon to open the gifts, with Aileen, Grace and Holly taking turns playing Santa Claus and everyone pretending that every gift was perfect, a treasure dreamed of for years. Nancy's face hurt.

Sometime in mid-afternoon, Lot started complaining that he wished everybody wouldn't make such a fuss about Christmas, that this wasn't what the baby Jesus had in mind, that it was a sin to spend this much. He was feeling bad, Nancy thought, because he didn't get anyone any gifts and they'd all brought him something for when he came home later. But when Holly gently suggested what Nancy had been thinking, Lot's face reddened, and he got up and stomped out the door before anyone could stop him.

“He's just having one of his spells,” Aileen said in the silence he left in his wake, and Grace sighed.

But then, half an hour later, while Grace's husband Walter was showing Zoe how to crack walnuts with her hands, and Sam's aunts, who everyone referred to collectively as “the girls,” were gathering used wrapping paper, saving the bows, Lot came back, his hair more askew than it had been before. His nails were dirty, and his sleeves, as if he'd been digging.

He walked over to Cole McMeans, Grace's husband, put something in his hand, and said, “Merry Christmas, Cole.” Cole, a balding, slight man who seemed uncomfortable among the Chastains, mumbled a thank-you.

“I might be poor, but I might not be as poor as you all think,” he said, amid protests.

He handed something to Zoe, something shiny. She thanked him, but he'd already gone on to Carter.

When he got near her, Nancy saw that he was giving away silver dollars. He had a small bag full of them, and when he got to her, he gave her two.

“I reckon you think I didn't know you was expectin',” he said, with that same half-mocking smile. “That's one for each of you. And bring him to see me when he's born.”

“Thank you,” Nancy said. “I will.”

“She's got good manners,” Lot said, turning to Sam, “for a Richmond girl.”

He finished his rounds, giving what was left to Carlie's and Zoe's children, who were trying to hide behind their mothers.

“Go on, I ain't a-going to hurt you,” he said roughly, and he finally got them to take three each of the silver coins. Then, without speaking again, he was gone.

It was almost dark when Sam and Nancy left, promising everyone they'd come visit soon, Nancy hoping it would be Easter at least. As they walked to their car, Nancy's eyes burned from the slow, constant smoke of the sawdust pile, which had already smoldered three years and would smolder almost three more. They were even with the mobile home when they heard the trailer door slam. It was Lot, coming out with two cans of dog food, headed for the tree behind the house where he kept Granger tied up.

“You all leaving already?” he asked them. “The fun's just beginning.”

“I reckon we better,” Sam told him, and Nancy noticed again how his speech patterns seemed to change. He spoke in a more clipped style, all the g's enunciated, when he was in the city, but out here with his family, he fell into the softer cadence of the country.

“Well, come on in for a minute,” he said with such urgency that Sam looked at Nancy, who shrugged, miffed that he was putting her in the position of snubbing someone in his family.

He set the dog food down at the edge of the cinder-block steps leading up to the trailer door, and they followed him in.

The air inside had the indefinable quality that Nancy always associated with Sam's family, some aroma of stale-bread turkey stuffing or buttermilk biscuits in it. A TV was carrying a pro football playoff game in the background, sitting on an older TV that apparently didn't work any more. The furniture seemed to have come with the trailer.

They sat down on the couch, barely wide enough for two, and he took the only chair in the cramped living room.

“I'm glad to see you all populating the earth,” Lot said. “Be fruitful and multiply. I never did get married. Never found the right girl, I reckon.”

There wasn't much to say to that, Nancy thought.

He didn't offer anything to drink, and after a while he started watching TV. Sam was genuinely interested in the game, but after about five minutes, Lot started snoring.

“Come on,” Sam whispered. Nancy followed him, wondering what the old man would think when he woke up and found his trailer empty.

“He won't remember a thing,” Sam said, reading her mind as they stepped off the bottom step to the ground and she resisted the urge to sneeze as the smell of burning sawdust hit her again.

“What about his dog?” Nancy asked, looking over at the opened cans.

“Screw the dog,” Sam said. “He's tried to bite me two times. Let's go.”

She didn't think until later to ask Sam where Lot had gone, when he came back with all the silver dollars. She'd noticed at the time that his red truck didn't move from the front of the house.

“Nobody knows where Uncle Lot goes, or what he does,” Sam said. “I don't think anybody wants to know.”

Now it's two weeks after Sam told Nancy they were moving to Monacan. Living with Sam's parents while they decide whether to rent or buy has meant sacrificing a lot of privacy, but he keeps telling her that it won't be much longer. They've looked at several homes for sale around Monacan, although it is becoming obvious to Nancy that what Sam really wants to do is build on the vacant lot one street back from the one where he was raised. They agree to rent a house on the same street until they, meaning he, Nancy thinks, can decide.

Nancy still can't understand why she didn't just refuse to budge from their brick home on the North Side, just, as Suzanne suggested, “clear out a place on the floor and throw a shit-fit.” Her family is more than a little hurt, although she alternately tells them it isn't permanent and that they'll visit every week, no matter what. They haven't seen Sam since the move. Monacan's not so bad, Nancy thinks half the time. It's not too late, she thinks the other half.

Sam makes his resignation from DrugLand official, and his father is in the process of having the papers drawn up to give Sam 50 percent of the Monacan Drug Store. Carter is almost 69, and Nancy can't help but think that this was a done deal before she ever met Sam.

The Monacan Drug Store is a treat, she has to admit. When she first visited here, when she and Sam were dating, she was taken by how much better Carter's working conditions were than those of his son. The Monacan Drug Store is in a two-story frame building that was the post office for a century. The second floor, reached by an outdoor stairway and surrounded by a spindle-railed porch, is taken up by Monacan Realty. The first level is Carter's. His drug store has a lunch counter running 25 feet down the left side as you walk in, so that the customers and Trudy French, behind the counter, can see everything that happens on Monacan's main street out the front or side windows with just a slight twist of their heads. Trudy makes milk shakes and limeade in addition to burgers, hot dogs and breakfast.

Carter Chastain is stationed at the back of the store, on a high stool behind smoky glass. He has a clerk to keep the shelves stocked and help the customers. The Monacan Drug Store is open 8–6, Monday through Friday, 8–12 on Saturdays, closed Sundays and national holidays.

What Monacan doesn't have, Nancy soon finds out, is a decent grocery store. She's trying to help Marie with the cooking, and she wants to fix Suzanne's chicken tarragon for Saturday night dinner the first week they're living in the big, red-brick house. She soon discovers that the Red Top Market, on courthouse square, doesn't have tarragon, shallots or white wine, so she leaves Wade with his grandmother and heads for the Giant in Westover, the closest grocery she can get to that doesn't depress her.

When she pulls the Duster into the lot, she sees that it is almost full of Friday evening shoppers. She loops around to the third, back row and finds a place near the end. She has the key out of the ignition and is opening the door when she sees a familiar red pickup on the second row, between her and the front door. It's after 7 and the light is fading, but she knows it's Lot. She also knows that any route she takes to the front door of the grocery store will take her close enough to him and his truck to make her uncomfortable. He doesn't seem to be going in. Maybe he's waiting for someone, but Nancy doesn't think so.

Finally, feeling foolish and a little mean-spirited, she turns on the ignition, drives out the exit, circles the building and enters the parking lot on the other side, parking even farther away. The only glance Lot could get of her from here, she knows, is when she rounds the corner to go in the front door.

Inside, with the sky almost given over to night at last, she sneaks a glance through the plate glass. The truck is still there, and she can see his silhouette. She takes her time shopping, and when she comes out, the truck is gone. She makes a mental note to go to the Ukrop's, five miles farther away, the next time.

CHAPTER SIX

I want you to look at them. Hanging around this parking lot, hooking up with each other to do who knows what later on.

That gal over there, looks like she might not be more'n 14, her head stuck inside that car window a-talking to them two boys, showing her tail to anybody that wants to look at it, probably fixing to go off somewheres with them and do it, maybe with both of 'em.

And that grown woman standing there, flirting with that bag boy, who looks like he ain't hardly old enough to be her son. What you reckon she's got on her filthy mind? Not wearing nothing but one of them mini-skirts that Carter says ain't no harm, they just wear them to play tennis, but I know better. You can see near-bout everything she's got.

And them two colored folks in the truck up in front, her sitting right next to him like they was at the Riverview watching the X-rated drive-in movies or something. Been riding around town like that, I reckon, her probably playing with his thing. He gives her a big, long kiss before they get out to go inside. Just asking the Lord to rain down brimstone on them.

I remember how disgusted Momma used to act when we'd be a-looking at the soap operas on TV, how everybody seemed like they was going to bed with everybody else. And it's even worse now. It embarrassed me to death that she wanted to look at that stuff, but she never hardly missed a day until they took her to the hospital the last time.

And them magazines. I had to fuss with Johnny Wampler at the barber shop because of the filth he lets get in there. He had that there
Sports Illustrated
with all them girls in swimming suits where they might as well not of had anything on at all. Any young'un coming in for a haircut could just pick it up and look at it. And Johnny said he didn't see no harm in it, that that wasn't nothing compared to what they show in
Playboy
and them others.

I know. I had to get after Carter to quit carrying them magazines in the drug store, told him how ashamed Momma and Daddy would be of him, how they can still see him, up in heaven. And he did finally throw that filth out. Reckon he got tired of fussing about it.

You can see about anything you want, right here in the parking lot. Like that city girl Carter's boy married. She thinks I didn't see her when she turned in, then just sat there for a while, but I don't miss much. I spied her in my rearview mirror, cruising by in that Plymouth automobile of theirs, not a sign of Carter's boy or their baby. Looked like she was a-waitin' for somebody, then just drove off real quiet, circled around and come in the other side. Maybe she seen her boyfriend parked over on that side. Can't trust none of them. Momma was right. Just want to get you to work yourself to death so they can slip out and do it.

Had that fat lightning dream again, except now I'm at the table with all the family there. Don't know what they're eating, but I'm chewing on that fat lightning like it was ham. And don't nobody say anything or notice anything until Sam's wife starts staring at me, and then everybody does, and then they all start a-laughing, her louder than the rest, that trashy city laugh of hers.

And then I see Sam's wife slip around the corner and go in the front door of the Giant, giving a little glance over her shoulder like she knows she's been spied. Reckon maybe she'll pick up some milk for the baby and then go back to her van or his car and kiss some more. Maybe they'll just do it right there in the lot, with it not even dark yet. Maybe she'll just take off her panties and spread her legs like some whore right there in the van where if Sam was smart he'd even get a whiff of it when they was driving to church Sunday morning. Just do it right there where anybody could see 'em, and her not caring a-tall. Just do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

By the middle of May, Sam and Nancy have put their home in Richmond up for sale and moved into the Fischer place, a block back and two houses over from Sam's parents. Mrs. Fischer died a year ago, and her children, scattered throughout the state, are willing to rent with an option to buy.

It's not an old house, by Monacan standards, built in the first 20 years of the century, with a nook carved into the wall where the telephone was put in later, arched doorways and ornate trimwork. The outside is old brick, like most of the houses in Monacan. There's a basement with a washer and room for a dryer, a garage full of old magazines and bottles that even the Fischer children didn't want, a front porch and a back porch. The back yard even has a chain-link fence so that Nancy can turn Wade loose for a few minutes while she tries to write.

Nancy is still thinking of all this as a temporary move, or temporary insanity. When she sits in her family's comfortable house on Richmond's North Side or she and Marilou and Candy get away and spend the evening in the Fan's high-ceilinged restaurants and bars, she thinks that she can't devote the rest of her life to a town where you have to import green peppercorns.