Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  “Hilly?” It was Lonnie walking back with a six-pack in brown paper under his arm. “Where’s he taking off for?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Why you looking after him like that? What’s going on with you?”

  He had never asked me that. Never once had he wondered what went on in my life. I didn’t answer him but went back in the shop and he followed me in there.

  “You know anything about my beer money missing?”

  He meant the cup on top of the refrigerator. I dug in my pocket for two of the dollars Naomi’s flock had given me at Mama’s burial. I reached behind and held them toward him until he grabbed them from my hand.

  “Don’t you ever touch that money. That’s where me and the boys put our beer money.” Well he went on and on and I sat hard in the chair and moved it side to side and I stared at the papers.

  “Lonnie,” I said finally because he was still ranting about me and that money.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “They are going to shut off the electric at home. You got forty dollars in your checking here and I know this is payday. You think you could go talk to the match company for the money they owe? Even old Mac still owes for the sink you fixed. You think you could go ask about them paying on their bills?”

  “What you doin’ lookin’ into my money?”

  I shook my head.

  He kept studying me, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Don’t you think you’re ever gonna tell me what to do,” he said.

  “No sir,” I said, cause it didn’t matter, we just needed the money. I kept telling myself to stay calm.

  Lonnie didn’t know what to do with my politeness so he took his beer to the back to put it in the box. Then he came walking forward. “I’m gonna tell you somethin’ and I don’t want to hear a word about it. But…I know a woman who can help me…she’s a good woman. Now…it ain’t up to you…and I don’t want to hear a word…cause I did right by Renata…I waited and lived a long time with her walkin’ around like a ghost….”

  I just kept staring at him.

  “There is someone who can help. I ain’t payin’ to run some big empty house. I have had this on me ever since I come out of the war…no one to help me…carrying everything. Things are gonna change now and you ain’t gonna give me trouble. That old lady had that house tied up so tight I couldn’t get anything out of it. But that’s gonna change with her gone. It’s all gonna get opened up now.”

  I kept staring.

  “You are nearly grown…and you was more hers anyway. Didn’t it seem so?”

  I stared.

  “If you wanted to go on and move back with that one…well I wouldn’t stop you. I know I said some things yesterday in the truck I might of shouldn’t said. But you don’t know what it’s been like for me. So…you go on and move back with that one and I’ll leave you-ins alone. And you…should do likewise. And you don’t have to come in here at all. You just…go on and be with her. You can finish up today…them piles you like to mess with…then you can go on home and get your things and…like I said.”

  He went back to work then and I was sitting there moving side to side in the chair.

  Robert brought me my Coke and smiled at me and he said, “You okay?”

  And I smiled back. “Sure,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I held the cold bottle to my cheek. It felt nice. But it felt even nicer when I threw that bottle through Lonnie’s big plate glass window and glass fell to the sidewalk like brimstone might. If God cared.

  Finding My Thunder 13

  Robert got between Lonnie and me. I was as surprised as they were that I’d thrown the bottle. But when I saw the glass shatter, heard it, I felt kind of fascinated.

  Lonnie was going apeshit, batshit, crapshit, yelling and gesturing. But I only saw him on the sidelines, the thing was the window and the Coca-Cola splattered on the sidewalk, its own kind of art covered with diamonds, its own kind of protest. ‘Hell no, I won’t go.’

  We had so little and now we were going to destroy what was left. Well…he was trying to destroy me and I had broken a window.

  Morris came from the shop next door. He thought it was one of the coloreds rising up throwing a molotov cocktail. I heard him say, “Why would you do such a thing?”

  But before Lonnie burst a vessel, before he went insane there was something else in his face, in his eyes, just a flash…a knowing. He was afraid. He was afraid of her in me. My mother.

  “I’ll drive her home,” Robert said over and over.

  Officer Bixby was there and he asked me if I was hurt. He asked me what happened.

  “I threw the bottle,” I said.

  “Maybe a night in jail is what she needs,” Lonnie said.

  Robert protested. He said to cool down, man, I had just lost my mother. Well, that explained everything they guessed.

  And before I knew it I was in Robert’s truck and we were driving down the road with the radio blaring.

  He didn’t say anything at first until we got off the square. Then he let out a big, “Ooooweee.”

  I looked at him like he was the crazy one, but I had to laugh, too. Then he opened the ashtray and took out a joint. I’d seen such at school, a show and tell in the girl’s john, not around the sink-sitters, God forbid, but in the back corner, where the girls sat and talked openly about the boys they planned to screw over the weekend.

  He lit that twisted little stick and the air filled with the pungent smell of burning plants that had dried and gone rotten.

  He offered it to me and the first time I said, “No thanks,” then he offered it again and told me how to do it and I did.

  I said, “Can you take me to the cemetery?” And he did.

  As soon as he entered that winding road amongst the tombstones I was looking for that fresh mound of soil. He took another hit of that and then me, and when I let it out he said, “You high?”

  I said, “No.” Another big deal that felt like nothing.

  He parked and I got out and walked slow to Mama’s plot.

  I dropped to my knees where Mama rested. I guess I was trying to believe it. She never liked closed in places, unless she put herself there, closets and corners and under drapes and beds.

  I stood slowly and dusted my knees. Robert was walking toward me. He was shirtless and his feet were bare. He was holding a bottle of wine now. Ripple.

  He held it toward me and offered it. I had a flash of communion at Naomi’s church, The Temple of Healing and Hope. That’s the last time I’d been offered wine and that was grape juice. The cap was already off of Robert’s bottle. I shook my head.

  “There’s some old markers in that far corner. Civil War and shit,” he said. He drank straight from the bottle and a purple drip ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto his chest. He was like, very full grown. Where Danny was just beautiful, Robert was frightening. His naked just looked more naked.

  This time when he offered, I took it and gagged down a swallow. He laughed at that, and I did too. I took a couple more swallows just to get back on that horse and all.

  We walked around then. We noted anyone who died young, especially children. I made a speech about how unfair it was…death. I thought I was saying profound things. Well, Robert was impressed enough to keep saying, “Really heavy, Mama. Speak for the people. Speak.”

  We kept drinking. We found the old markers, chalky and at odd angles. It was some time before we grew tired of that because I got stuck at one, Marybell Williams who died at age thirteen in nineteen-fifty-two, the same year I was born. There was a picture on her tombstone and she looked a little bit like Sandra Dee. Well I thought so, but Robert didn’t. I was crying pretty hard and going on about it.

  He dragged me away from there as I took to lying on the grave and railing at the Lord. But then we found a grave, still pretty fresh, the ground sunken in. It was a guy Robert went to school with and he was pretty shocked.

  “This is Jeff Collins,” he said. “I knew him.
Yeah…I heard he was wounded. He died, man. That’s three I know personally, just me, and a dozen more someone else knows or was related to.”

  So we spent time there and I told him all the reasons why I hated the war and Danny couldn’t go, and he agreed, he said Danny couldn’t go. I said he had to go to Canada and he agreed, yeah man he needs to get on the peace train.

  We were quiet for a while, him on Jeff’s grave leaning on the stone while he killed off the Ripple then poured the last few drops on Jeff’s grave. Then I was on a mission to find anymore who’d died in Vietnam.

  But after a while Robert got on his feet and called me off that mission. He said it was a bad scene and he didn’t want to talk about Vietnam anymore. Pretty soon he pushed me and said I was it. We set homebase at a big tree and the one who wasn’t it had to reach the tree before getting tagged. So he hid his eyes and I took off running so he couldn’t catch me. I sprinted toward a crypt with a crying angel on top. It was the fanciest grave in there.

  Robert finished counting but he couldn’t see me other side of that tomb. I watched and he disappeared, but I figured I’d go for it cause he was pretty wasted and he probably went toward the road.

  So I took off and I tripped a couple of times but I caught myself and he was nowhere. I was laughing as I ran toward that tree and I nearly reached it. I was under it and he dropped down out of the branches and landed right in front of me growling. I screamed and ran the other way, screaming so loud I couldn’t stop, screaming to wake the dead.

  I went spilling and he vaulted over me and fell, too. If someone was watching they’d see two crazy people and I hadn’t laughed like this, not ever even though I’d scraped my hands.

  I looked up from a vacuum of my own crazy sounds and there was Danny’s purple car. Danny was sitting in the driver’s side watching us.

  I got on my feet quick and called to him, “Danny…it was so funny.” He got out and slammed the door.

  “Hey brother,” Robert said, still on the ground.

  Danny didn’t answer but he walked toward us with purpose. “He’s the most beautiful thing,” I said, and Robert guffawed.

  “Where’s your shirt?” Danny said to Robert.

  “In my truck, man.”

  I was trying to tell Danny how Robert had dropped out of the tree.

  “Hilly…I came to take you home. Why don’t you come with me and get in the car?”

  “Well, I will, but what about Robert?”

  “Robert can get himself home,” Danny said. “He doesn’t want to be late for the love-in.”

  Robert thought that was funny. “Hey man…Hilly says you’re going to Nam. You can’t do that, man. That shit is fucked. Guess who is buried right over there,” he pointed to the north corner, “Jeff Collins, man, All-state nineteen-sixty-one to the graveyard man via Vietnam. Don’t go there, man.”

  “Yeah…thanks for the enlightenment. You’re like…what? Thirty? And she’s not legal. Hear me?”

  “I’m twenty-five,” Robert said.

  “You got like ten years on her man.”

  “I’ll be sixteen in a week,” I said but they weren’t listening.

  “We were just having fun,” Robert said.

  “Don’t you have a kid back in the commune?” Danny said.

  “It’s all good, brother. Me and the little mama were groovin’ around just hangin’ out. It’s cool.”

  “Hilly, you coming?”

  “I am,” I said, eager to be with him and also wondering why he was so serious. Things were better now. Things were good.

  I straightened my clothes, my jeans and my shirt, and threw my braid over my shoulder.

  Robert didn’t seem inclined to leave yet. He sat up and rubbed his hand through his thick blond hair. “Hilly…come here I want to tell you something.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said to Danny. He looked crabby like he wasn’t too happy, but Robert had been a good friend and I didn’t just want to walk away. Danny stood there and folded his arms. He wasn’t going to give Robert any privacy. I went back to hear Robert out.

  “Hilly,” he said, “don’t stay home alone and get sad. I mean…at my house…you can come and stay as long as you want. There’s always someone there, you know? It’s a mellow place. You ever need someone, little mama, you call me or just come out, you know?”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I lost my mom when I was eighteen. It’s hard at first…but it gets better. There’s lots of ways to find some comfort, girl. Don’t suffer…you know?”

  This was his effort to console and I was touched, even though it all had a seedy overtone. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Only this wasn’t joy and sorrow, this was crazy and sorrow. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Hilly…come on,” Danny said.

  Robert had a nice smile. I wondered how he had survived Lonnie all these years. He was so laid back and goofy, possibly always high in that he never sobered up enough before he was “comforting” himself again.

  “Don’t stay in the cemetery by yourself,” I said. “Sun’s going down. We’re the only ones in here still on the top.”

  He laughed at that. “Damn girl, that’s heavy.”

  I waved to him and followed after Danny. He held my door for me and I got in and he slammed it shut. Then he walked around the front and got in. I smiled at him and he looked away.

  “Are you mad or something?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Just…I thought you had some sense of caution. You need to forget everything he just said,” Danny said. “You don’t ever want to go to his pad. Not ever. Promise me.”

  His hair was already getting longer. It figured that God, being such an artist, would have a variety of work. There was the waterfall south of Ludicrous, then there was Niagra Falls, for example.

  I lit a cigarette and pulled that smoke into my lungs, letting it out slow. “You are God’s Niagra,” I told Danny.

  I passed him the cigarette I was holding and he took a drag. “You are the strangest girl. How long you been out here with him?”

  I guessed Robert was leaving cause I heard his truck start up somewhere behind us.”

  “Since I had to leave the shop. The…window.”

  “I saw that. Lonnie is really pissed. What happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly. He…said some stuff and next I knew…I just threw my Coca-Cola right through the window.” I had decided to rebraid my hair and my fingers were moving fast.

  Danny leaned closer to me looking deep into my eyes as Robert’s truck swung around us and he honked the horn. “Your pupils…did that asshole get you high?”

  I pulled my face back a little. “I got free will,” I reminded him.

  “What was it? He give you pills? That damn hippie. I’m gonna….” He hit the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. Then he got all determined and started the car.

  I said, “No pills.”

  We were driving pretty fast and I was moving around on the seat. He stopped before he pulled onto the two-lane. He looked at me for a minute. “Come here,” he said.

  I scooted beside him, but I left a gap between us. I just didn’t know what he expected.

  He put the car into park. “What am I going to do about you?” he said, so serious. Nothing like Robert. Just…serious.

  “I don’t…what do you want to do?” I whispered.

  His long fingers were moving hair off my face. Then he looked at my lips. “You mean that…about loving me?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “I…don’t want you goin’ off with other guys like you did with him.”

  “I wasn’t. Not like that.”

  “I mean…goin’ off with some old hippie….”

  “He’s nice,” I made the mistake of saying.

  “Hilly…he’s a bum. He would get you drunk or high or pregnant, or all of them if he could. And he’d be a great guy about it…a big smile and you could hang at his commune with the rest of the bums
and live off of lentils. Promise me you’ll stay away from him and…I wish I could wrap you in cellophane and just…put you away until I get back.” He ran his hand over his face and broke out in a laugh then said, “Shit.”

  I laughed at that. “You just talked about a future. When you get back.”

  “Look…Hilly…I was up all night thinking about what you said. I’m going to enlist. I’m going to take some control. I can’t stand this waiting. I’m going in and getting it over with. Then…you’ll be graduating by the time it’s over. Even before that. And maybe…I don’t know…but….”

  I pulled back and sat slow, looking at him.

  “Shit, these tears. I swear I ain’t cried since Mom married Paul. He could beat me and I don’t cry…shit,” he stared straight ahead, and I put my hand on his chin and tried to turn his face my way, but he resisted. He wouldn’t look at me. “When I got back and saw that window…I didn’t know what happened…and you weren’t home again…just like yesterday I couldn’t find you…and I made myself think…and when I saw you with him…he wasn’t wearing…and I thought for a minute maybe you and him…maybe…and…cause what you told me…how you feel…and I swear to God it wasn’t cause I cared about Naomi…I was protecting you. You got to believe me.” He grabbed the hand I’d put on his cheek. “I’m…I don’t know what it is…I feel like…crazy….”

  “Don’t go.”

  He held my hand on his leg and looked at me. “Men go to war, Hilly. Even the two biggest assholes in the world went to war.” He had to mean Lonnie and Paul. “It’s like I already told you, part of me feels like it’s my duty to go. I may be wrong…I may regret it. I don’t even know if I agree or don’t. But this is my country. And there’s a war. And I’m going. I’m not going to run away to someone else’s country and lose my right to live here. I’m not going to hide out in school or the reserves. I’m going to sign up and do my stint. I don’t relate to those guys talking on the television. They’re college guys who like to stir shit. I get the guy who does his duty…who doesn’t talk it to death…who just does it. That’s me.”

  We stared at each other. I swallowed hard. I was breathing like I’d run a mile or something. I’d said I loved him. “What…do you want me to do?”