First the Thunder

by Randall Silvis

“Thank you. It’s not easy losing somebody you spent your entire adult life with.”

  “I imagine it’s not.”

  “You lost your father a good while back.”

  “Yep. That’s true.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Living in Florida now.”

  “Well good for her.”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “But you and your brothers are still here. Harvey and Will. How are they doing?”

  “Good, good,” he said. “They seem to be doing all right.”

  “Both married,” she said. “And how many nieces and nephews do you have now?”

  “Just the one. Molly. Will and Laci’s.”

  “Molly is a smart girl. Very smart, from what I hear. All the teachers like her.”

  “She gets that from Laci. Obviously not from my side of the family.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your side of the family, Stevie. Boys are boys, that’s all. Especially in junior high. They have other things on their mind.”

  Hearing this, Stevie blushed. Was she aware of all the times he had stared at her breasts, envisioned them unmasked, full and heavy and warm against his face?

  “But you’ve never married,” she said. “Never settled down.”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Not right now,” he told her. “Used to, sort of. A while back.”

  “You had a sort-of girlfriend?” she asked with a smile.

  “More or less,” he said.

  She took another sip of tea. Looked at the bare tabletop. Ran her finger across a tiny nick in the wood. “What’s the term young people use these days for a relationship like that? Friends with benefits?”

  Again he blushed, but smiled, amused. “I guess that’s right.”

  “In my day we called them fuck buddies,” she said.

  Startled, he looked up at her. She was holding the glass of tea between her breasts, head lowered just a bit, but still smiling and meeting his gaze.

  “We still say that too,” he told her.

  “So we’re not really that different after all, are we?”

  “I guess we’re not,” he said.

  They sat quietly then for a few moments, long enough for Stevie to think this might be a good time to leave. He ate the last bite of his cookie, then washed it down with the rest of his tea.

  She said, “Do you not mind being alone? Without somebody close to you? I’m finding it very hard to live that way.”

  “It takes some getting used to, I guess.”

  “What do you miss most?” she asked.

  “You mean . . . from high school?”

  “From not having a girlfriend.”

  “Oh. Well . . .” He thought for a moment, then grinned. “That’s probably not something I should talk about here.”

  “I know what I miss most,” she said. “The touching. The intimacy. Eddie was a beast, you know.”

  “You mean . . . he hit you?”

  “Oh my no. I mean in bed. Four nights a week minimum. Almost forty-six years, and he never once slowed down. Even the night before his heart attack. And now it’s been eight long months without him.”

  “Wow,” Stevie said, and could think of nothing else to say, and so said it again. “Wow.”

  Again a silence. He hoped she wouldn’t start crying. She looked as if she might. He lifted his empty glass to his mouth, though there was nothing to drink.

  She said, “You’re welcome to take a shower if you’d like.”

  Again he was startled. Where did that statement come from? “I washed my hands and arms already,” he told her.

  “Even so. Crawling around in the dirt like I had you doing. All those cobwebs and who knows what else. It would feel good, wouldn’t it? A nice cool shower?”

  “I guess so,” he said, but he could not look at her now, was studying the cookies, trying to puzzle out the direction of this conversation.

  “It’s a nice big shower,” she told him. “Marble tiles, one of those showerheads that feels like rain falling down. There’s even a bench seat if you feel like sitting. Eddie installed it a couple years before he passed.”

  “Sounds nice,” Stevie said.

  She nodded. “It’s more than big enough for two people.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  “I could wash your hair and your back for you. The way I always did for Eddie.”

  And now, because he could not help himself, he lifted his gaze off the cookies.

  “I would do his back and he would do my breasts,” she said. “Eddie loved my breasts. He really, really loved them.”

  And Stevie found himself nodding, returning her smile. “I can understand that,” he said.

  28

  Laci walked away from the elementary school playground, where she had photographed empty swings, an empty jungle gym and sliding board, and was standing at the intersection with Main Street, wondering which way to walk next, when Jennalee’s Infiniti pulled up to the curb.

  Jennalee powered down her tinted window and said, “Hey, lady. You lost?”

  Laci turned, saw her sister-in-law’s pretty, smiling face, and, instead of answering, raised her camera and clicked off a couple of shots. Jennalee pulled off her sunglasses and widened her smile, so Laci clicked three more shots.

  Then Jennalee asked, “So what’s the haps, girl? You look like a woman in search of something.”

  Laci said, “Just fattening up my portfolio. There wasn’t a single child in the playground. Where have all the children gone?”

  “Didn’t you hear? We had an auction the other day. Sold them off to a textile mill in Bangladesh.”

  Laci smiled, though she didn’t find the joke very funny, especially coming from a third-grade teacher. “So what are you up to this morning?”

  “Shoe sale at the mall.”

  “I heard they’re going out of business.”

  “They are! Fifty percent off everything. I’m stocking up. Why don’t you come along? We’ll get a couple of frozen mocha cappuccinos and catch up.”

  “A frozen cappuccino sounds good. Unfortunately, I really do need to take some photos.”

  “Of what in particular?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just human-interest stuff.”

  “So come to the mall and take pictures of the mall walkers in their pink velour jogging suits.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Laci said. “But I promised Will I’d be home around noon.”

  Jennalee glanced up the street, then in the opposite direction. “Are you walking?”

  “Car’s around the corner.”

  “So go jump in it and meet me in the food court. Coffee’s on me.”

  Laci considered the offer.

  “Come on. We haven’t gotten together since Christmas. The boys see each other all the time. Why should they have all the fun?”

  Laci sensed that Jennalee had something more she wanted to talk about. As did Laci. “Okay,” she said. “See you in fifteen.”

  Jennalee blew a kiss out the window, then pulled away from the curb and drove off. Laci stepped back into the shade of a storefront, quickly reviewed the photos she had taken of Jennalee, and deleted them.

  29

  The morning was slower than usual in the bar. Halfway through his second beer, Eldon rose from his stool without a word, turned and trudged to the door, pulled it open and walked outside. Ralph finished off his own beer, then reached for his father’s glass.

  Will walked down behind the bar. “Was he not feeling well?” he asked.

  Ralph sipped his father’s beer. “He’ll nap in the truck awhile.”

  “It’s awfully warm out there, though. If he’s not feeling well . . .”

  “Worn down,” Ralph said. Another sip. “Winding down’s more like it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He’s been talking about joining Mom,” Ralph said.

  “Jeez,�
�� said Will. He took the empty glass off the bar and placed it in the basin filled with sudsy water.

  “Yep,” Ralph said. “We all wind down sooner or later.”

  Will said, “You think you should maybe get him to a doctor? Get him some antidepressants or something?”

  “Nope,” Ralph said. “He’s lived too long and so have I. We’ve both outlived our usefulness.”

  “Hell,” Will told him, “you’re describing sixty, seventy percent of this town.”

  “I think your figures are a little low,” Ralph said.

  Three beers later Ralph ambled off, and Will was left alone in an empty bar. He checked the time. Ten fifty-eight. Another sixty minutes at least until Molly and Laci came home for lunch.

  He spent half a minute wiping down the bar again, then four minutes more with his hand flat on the damp surface, thumb going up and down beating out a slow, dull thump while he stared at the opposite wall. Then he shook his head, blinked, and dug around beneath the bar until he found a small tablet and pen. On a blank sheet of paper he printed OPEN AT NOON. Then tore the sheet from the notebook, did another search under the bar and came up with a thumbtack, went to the door, stepped outside and pulled it shut, locked it, and tacked the note to the door.

  He told himself that he would take a nice leisurely stroll to the school, watch Molly and her friends skating for a while, then walk her back home. Maybe while walking he would come up with a plan for dealing with Kenny Fulton. The important thing was that nobody should get physically hurt, and that neither he nor Harvey would be implicated. What could they do that would so embarrass or humiliate Kenny that he would never live it down? Something that would make his life in this town as unpleasant as everybody else’s?

  As far as Will was concerned, Kenny’s comeuppance was long overdue. He and his mother, and even, in Will’s opinion, Jennalee, had always looked down their noses at Will’s family. And Will would never forget or forgive the way Kenny had hightailed it home after taunting Stevie to jump onto the garage roof. Would never forget those sickening moments on the roof when, before jumping down, he and Harvey had stood side by side, looking at their little brother motionless on the ground.

  The more he thought about those times, the faster Will walked, and the angrier he became. He soon found himself a hundred yards from the high school. Just in case Kenny was in there in his office, Will took a side street and circled around toward the rear of the building. He didn’t want Molly to see him approaching either, lest she accuse him of spying on her, which, he admitted, was exactly what he was doing.

  He walked past the long rows of windows on the side of the building, three empty classrooms in a row. How many hours had he wasted in those rooms? What good had his third-rate education ever done him? He had enjoyed music class, listening to and singing along with old folk songs. And he had enjoyed phys ed, was a fair athlete compared to most of the other kids, but nothing exceptional, just a smidgeon better than the rest of the lunkheads. Football had been fun now and then, but not when his coach mistakenly called him Harvey instead of Will, or when he said things like “Your brother never would have missed that tackle.” Or “Your brother would have intercepted that pass.”

  Will came to the corner of the building then. Beyond lay the parking lot, wide and flat and empty but for two cars parked at the far end, plus five boys and three girls skating back and forth from one end of the lot to the other, chasing and grabbing at each other, the boys showing off by skating fast and making hard, quick turns, the girls pretending to be unimpressed.

  Will watched them, smiling, and tried to spot Laci among the moving bodies. But she wasn’t there. He looked beyond the parking lot to the football field and bleachers. All empty. Then to the parked cars. The sun was glinting off the windshields but he thought he could detect movement inside the black Civic, shadows behind the reflected sunlight. And suddenly his stomach felt strange, hollow yet heavy, a peculiar kind of nausea.

  He crossed quickly toward the cars, walking in the shade close to the building, and was halfway there before the skaters noticed him. One by one they came to a stop and looked his way. They spoke softly to one another, looked toward the Civic, looked back at him. One of them reached into her pocket for a cell phone.

  Will cut directly toward the group. And they skated away quickly, one after the other, leaving him a clear path to the car.

  He yanked open the driver’s door, his body bent low, leaning in. For an instant he did not recognize the girl lying up against the passenger door with the boy atop her. But then she slid to the side to look his way. A moment later he was reaching inside, seizing the boy’s leg, dragging him over the console.

  “Daddy, don’t!” Molly cried.

  And he froze. Saw himself as she must be seeing him, his face tight and full of malice. He released the boy, pulled back his own hand, three quick breaths and exhalations. “Go home,” he told her.

  She twisted toward the door, popped it open, climbed out. She looked at him only once over the top of the car, her own eyes full of tears and anger, and then hurried away.

  He watched her for a few moments before looking inside the car again. “Move over,” he told the boy. He waited while the boy pulled his legs over the console and sat upright against the passenger door. Then Will climbed into the driver’s seat.

  For a while he did nothing but stare at the boy. Maybe it’s not him, he told himself. Maybe this is a boy her own age.

  But boys her age would have peach fuzz on their faces, and this one had black stubble above his lip, sparser stubble on his cheeks. Boys her age would be terrified, nearly pissing their pants with fear. This one sat with his body tense, fists held close to his belly.

  Boys her own age don’t drive, he told himself.

  The boy was at least as tall as Will but slender, arms tanned and muscled, stomach flat, jawline firm, eyes clear and body tensed; ready not to run but to defend itself.

  Will’s voice when he spoke sounded strange to him, deeper and softer than he intended, and came from low in the throat, less like words than a growl. “If you ever touch her again,” he said, “if you ever, at any time, come near her again, do you know what I will do to you?”

  At first the boy said nothing. Then, “All we did was to kiss and make out a—”

  Will jerked toward him and the boy flinched, pulled back so quick that his head banged the glass. Will said, “Do you know what I will do to you?”

  A few seconds ticked by. “Yes,” the boy said.

  “No you don’t. You have no idea of the many ways I will mess up your life.”

  Will continued to glare at the boy until he looked away, out the windshield, into the glare. Then Will swung his legs out the door and stood. All the other kids were near the far wall of the building, clustered together, watching him. He was ashamed of himself, but was also glad for the confrontation. It’s what any father would do, he told himself. And regretted only that he had almost gone too far. And knew that, if not for Molly’s cry, he would have pulverized the boy.

  30

  Harvey’s walk across town and back was so exhausting, his neck and back so slick with sweat, that he didn’t even wait to get back inside the house, but jumped into his truck, started it up, turned the air conditioner on full blast, and held his face close to the vent. It’s a pitiful thing, he told himself, when air-conditioned air smells better than natural air. This town stinks.

  When his face was cool Harvey leaned back in his seat and let the blowing air wash over him. He had thought it would reenergize him, but the effect was the opposite. His body was too heavy and tired to move, even just to walk fifty steps into the house so that he could collapse on the bed.

  Great way to spend a Saturday, he told himself.

  And then he started thinking about previous Saturdays, all the good ones he had had back in the early days. He had loved the noise and dusty, smoky air at the tracks. Loved flying around the oval at triple-digit speed. Loved how all the easy, drunken gir
ls swarmed around him when he walked away with the trophy.

  And then came the early times with Jennalee. Those Saturdays were good too. Getting up early to wash and detail his car. He drove a vintage Eldorado back in those days, always had a thing for the old land yachts, the way they filled up the lane on the highway and commanded everybody’s attention and respect. Then hanging out with a few buds to learn who was doing what that night, where the good bands or movies were playing. Then grab a piece of shade somewhere, anywhere but home, and nap for a while, charge up the batteries for the long night ahead. Then sneaking back home as quietly as he could, hoping the old man was asleep in his ratty old chair and wouldn’t have some shit-brain job for Harvey to do. Picking out his clothes for the evening—his newest jeans and whitest shirt—and ironing them in the kitchen without waking up the old fart, then getting a long, cool shower, slapping on an abundance of deodorant and aftershave, getting dressed and slipping out of the house.

  What he liked best with Jennalee was being alone with her, and that usually meant the drive-in. Kenny had never wanted to double-date when Harvey was with his sister, and that was just fine with Harvey. There was nothing worse than being cock-blocked by another couple watching from the back seat when you were trying to put the moves on a girl.

  And now Harvey sat up in his truck, leaned over the steering wheel and looked through the windshield at the glaring day. Jesus, he had been so deep in his reverie that he could still smell the drive-in—that mashed-up scent of weed and pizza and carbon monoxide—and the perfume Jennalee used to wear.

  And now the emptiness returned. God, how he missed those days. How long ago they seemed!

  Drive, he heard himself think, and, for a moment, wondered why that thought had come to him. Then decided, Why the hell not? What else do you have to do?

  And as he pulled out of the driveway he told himself, Anyway, this is what you do best, isn’t it? You drive. It’s all you’ve ever done, really. It’s all you’re good for.

  Seventeen miles to the drive-in. Now it was overgrown with weeds, was used from time to time for a flea market, and for that goofy Civil War encampment during the last week of September. But now it was as silent and still as a cemetery. He drove slowly, reverently, past the dilapidated booth where he used to hand over a ten-dollar bill for entry. Then up and down over the low mounds until he came to their favorite spot, four rows from the back and just left of center. It was their favorite only because it had been where he parked the first time he brought Jennalee there, the first date he had with her.