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LIGHTNING MAN

The first time, he was fishing with Danny. Fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic intuitive troll for the deep pools of cool water beneath the gloss of a wind-dead afternoon. Each fish seemed to arrive as a miracle out of the silence: a largemouth bass gasping for air, gulping the sky, gyrating, twisting, turning against the leader’s force. But then he was struck by lightning and afterward felt like a fish on the end of the line. There was a paradigm shift: he identified purely—at least for a few months—with the fish, dangling, held by an invisible line tossed down from the heavens.

Lucy had languid arms and pearly-white skin—as smooth as the inside of a seashell, he liked to say—and he smelled, upon returning to the house on the Morrison farm one night, her peaty moistness on his fingers. He’d touched her—just swept his fingers into wetness—and now, unable to sleep, he’d gone outside to the porch swing to let the adrenaline subside. His hope was to score with her before he left for boot camp. A storm was coming. Sheets of heat lightning unfurled inside clouds to the west. Deep, laryngeal mumbles of thunder smothered the cricket noise. The bolt that hit him ricocheted off a fence twenty yards away. Later he would recall that he’d half-jokingly spoken to the storm, and even to God, in a surge of testosterone-driven delight. Come on, you bastards, give me what you’ve got—the same phraseology boys his age would soon be using to address incoming mortar rounds on East Asian battlefields. Come on, you bastard, try another one, he yelled just before the twin-forked purple-mauve bolt twisted down from the front edge of the squall line and tore off the fence at what—in flawed memory—seemed a squared right angle. It hit a bull’s-eye on his sternum, so far as the doctors could deduce, leaving a moon-crater burn that never really healed. His father came out shortly to lock up the barn before the storm began (too late), a cheroot lodged in his teeth—and found his son on his back, smoking slightly. During his two-week observational stay in the hospital his teeth ached and sang, although he wouldn’t pick up the apocryphal transmissions of those megawatt, over-the-border Mexican radio stations. Upon his return home, Lucy came to his house and—in the silence of a hot summer afternoon—ran her hand down under the band of his BVDs.

Just before the third strike, a few years later, he saw a stubby orphan bolt, a thumb of spark wagging at him from the fence. (Research would later confirm that these microbolts in truth existed.) When Life magazine ran a single-page photo montage entitled “Lightning Man,” the article said: “Nick Kelley claims he had a strange vision shortly before being struck. He was with two friends in a field a few hours south of Chicago, showing them some property he planned to develop. A small bolt of lightning was seen along a fence just before he was struck. Visions like this, possibly hallucinatory, have been reported by other eyewitnesses.” The photo montage showed him in the backyard with a barbecue fork, pointing it at a sky loaded with thick clouds. The report failed to mention the severe contusion along his cheek and certain neurological changes that would reveal themselves over the course of time. His love for Lucy had been obliterated after the second strike. With the third strike his friendship with Danny was vaporized. And in between the first two, he’d temporarily lost all desire to fish.

The fourth had his name on it and was a barn burner, the kind you see locking horns with the Empire State Building. As it came down he talked to it, holding his arms up for an embrace. This was, again, in a boat, out in the middle of Lake Michigan, trolling for coho and steelhead. (He liked the stupid simplicity of fishing in this manner, keeping an eye on the sonar, dragging a downrigger through the depths of the lake, leaning back in his seat, and waiting.) The boat’s captain, Pete, caught the edge of the bolt and was burned to a crisp. Nick held a conversation with the big one as he took the full brunt. It went something like this: no matter what, I’ll match you, you prick, this story, my story, a hayseed from central Illinois, struck once, twice for good luck, third time, a charm, and now, oh by Jupiter! by Jove! or whatever, oh storm of narrative and calamity. Oh glorious grand design of nature. Rage through me. Grant my heart the guts to resist but not too much. Make me, oh Lord, a good conductor. I will suffer imitatone Christi, taking on the burdens of the current and endeavoring to live again.

Shortly after his release from Chicago General, he began weekly attendance of the Second Church of God (or was it the Third?), where he met his first wife, Agnes, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Lucy (same peaches-and-cream complexion). When it came to his past and his history with lightning, scars aside, he had the reticence of a Cold War spy: the book was closed on cloud-to-ground, on hexes, on lightning rod drummers, and the mystical crowd. (He had been offered gigs selling Pro-teck-o-Charge Safe-T rods. LIGHTNING IS THE NO. 1 CAUSE OF BARN FIRES!!!! and from 1–800-Know Your Future.) The book was closed on media interviews, on direct one-on-one confrontations with big bolts. (He in no way worried about smaller variants of lightning, those stray electrical fields that haunt most houses, those freak power surges that melt phone lines and blow phones blank, or those bolts of energy that float bemused into farmhouse windows.) Later he’d come to think that he had been willfully ignoring these forms and thereby picked a fight with them. Once, a film crew from France tracked him down to dredge up the past, but for the most part he urged himself into a normal life and felt bereft of charge, working at the PR firm, representing some commodities brokers, so that when the next strike came it was out of the blue—the blue yonder, a rogue bit of static charge, summer heat lightning. This time he and Agnes were safely ensconced in their summer rental in upstate Michigan watching the Cubs on television. Agnes lay prone on the divan wearing only panties and a bra, exposing her long legs and her schoolgirl belly and the dimpled muscles of thigh. The cobwebby bolt radiated in a blue antimacassar across the window screen, collected itself, swept through the window, and seemed to congeal around her so that in that brief moment before she was killed, before the power failure plunged the room into black, he was granted a photo negative of her glorious form.

To get away from Chicago, he bought the old family farm, rebuilt the big barn, installing along its roof line six rods with fat blue bulbs attached to thick braided aluminum wires dangling from the barn’s sides. The horizon in those parts let the sky win. Even the corn seemed to be hunching low in anticipation of the next strike. In the evenings he read Kant and began dating a woman named Stacy, a large-boned farm widow who dabbled in poetry and quoted from T. S. Eliot, the whole first section of “Ash Wednesday,” for example, and entire scenes from The Cocktail Party. Nick was fifty now, lean from the fieldwork, with chronic back pain from driving the combine. But he loved the work. He loved the long stretches of being alone in the cab, listening to Mozart sonatas while the corn marched forward into the arch lights, eager to be engulfed by the mawing machine. Behind the cab—in the starlit darkness—emerged the bald swath of landscape.

No more messing around. His days of heady challenge were over, Nick thought, ignoring the pliant flexible nature of lightning itself, the dramatically disjointed manner in which it put itself into the air, the double-jointed way it could defy itself. The Morrison homestead was about as dead out-there as you could get. He was working night and day to harvest the soybeans, trying to compete with the big Iowa industrial farms. Too tired to give a shit. Thunderstorm season was mostly done. Those fall storms that heaved through seemed exhausted and bored with the earth, offering up a pathetic rain, if anything.

The bolt that struck him the sixth time came out from under the veil of the sky—as witnessed by his farmhand, Earl, who was unhitching some equipment and just happened to glance at Nick resting his back in the yellow lawn chair. The whopper bolt struck twenty feet away from Nick, balled itself up, rolled to his feet, and exploded. He flew head over heels against the barn. In the hospital he remembered the medicine ball exercises from grammar school gym class, heaving the leather-clad ball at each other, relishing the absurdity of the game: trying like hell to knock the other guy over, to overcome him with the inertia of the object. To properly catch a medicine ball you had to absorb the force and fall back with it so that at some point both you and the ball’s momentum were married to each other. It was a delicate dance. He was pretty good at it.

Nick suffered further neurological damage, strange visions, a sparkling bloom of fireworks under his eyelids. He began to remember. It became clear. He had separated from himself during the strike. A doppelganger of sorts had emerged from his body: a little stoop-shouldered man, thin and frail, making small poking gestures with his cane as he listed forward. A soil sniffer of the old type. A man who could gather up a palm full of dirt and bring it to his nose and give you a rundown of its qualities—moistness and pH and lime content; this was the old dirt farmer of yore who knew his dry-farming methods and gave long intricate dances to the sky urging the beastly drought to come to an end. This man longed more than anything for the clouds to burst open at its seams, for a release of tension in the air, for not just thunder and lightning but the downpour the land deserved. He was a remnant of all those dry-method farmers of yesterday: failed and broken by the land, trying as best they could to find the fix, an old traditional rain dance, or a man who came with a cannon to shoot holes in the sky. Beneath the spot where the lightning ball had landed the soil had fused to glass, and below that—Earl took a shovel and dug it up—the glass extended in an icicle five feet long, branching down to the underground cable that delivered current from the old barn to the storage shed. A power-company representative explained that these underground cables were as prone as aboveground wires to lightning strikes. God knows why, he added.

For three weeks Stacy sat beside his hospital bed and accompanied his anguish by singing odes and folk songs and small ditties she’d picked up as a kid in Alabama, in addition to going through the complete collected poems of Eliot. She had a pure hard voice that seemed carved out of the American soil. In the bandage casing, amid the welts of itching and the drips of sweat running down his legs—all unreachable locations—he had acute visions of combat in Korea, the U.S. First Cavalry Division taking the full brunt of a barrage of Katyusha rockets—until bolt no. 8 (as he envisioned it) intervened, with its thick girth, the revoltingly huge embrace of the horizon as it came eagerly down. It was the big one, the finalization of several conjoining forks into one, unimaginable fury.

After Stacy took off on him, he put the farm up for sale and moved six miles to the north. He would live a bachelor life in a small Illinois town. A siege mentality had set in. He would hunker down, avoid fate by immersing himself in the lackluster flow of the landscape, in the view from his room over the Ellison Feed & Seed store, a vista so boring it made you want to spit (and he did). Boarding in the rooms around him were exiled farm boys who sniffed glue from brown bags, listened to music, and whiled away days writing on the walls with Magic Markers. There was nobody as deviant and lost as an ex-farm boy, he would come to learn. They were depressed from knowing that the whole concept of the farm—the agrarian mythos of land-human love, not to mention the toil and tribulation of their own kin, who had suffered dust bowls, drought, and seed molds—had been reduced to a historical joke. Industrial farms ruled. Left perplexed in their skin, they listened to hip-hop, attempted more urbane poses (many had missing limbs), smoked crack and jimsonweed, stalked the night half naked in their overalls, carved tattoos into their own arms. Nick felt akin to them. In their own way, they’d been struck by lightning, too.

Of course the next strike (no. 7) did come. It arrived in a preposterously arrogant manner, in a situation so laden with cliché that even Nick had to laugh it off when he could laugh, weeks later, after the trembles, the delusions, and the spark-filled sideshows. He knew that the next one would be his last. The next one would be the killer. The end. No more after that one. He felt no. 8 at the side of his vision, as he stared out the window at the dead town, so dry—caught in a midsummer drought—it made his throat itch. In his field of vision there now appeared a blank spot, empty and deep and dark. The room crackled in the midsummer heat. The window opened to a view of a defunct farm town, circa 1920, with false-front facades in the Western style, buildings shell-shocked and plucked clean of life. The beaverboard walls grew rank and emitted a dry mustard smell. In the long afternoon shadows the farm boys hung out with crumpled bags to their faces—breathing the glue the way injured grunts took bottled oxygen. As if it made a difference. When he ventured downstairs he walked with a hobble, keeping his weight off the balls of his feet, which were swollen and raw. Now I can safely be called enfeebled, he told the boys. They gathered around him, fingering his scars, showing in kind their own tattoos and flesh wounds, stumps that flicked quickly, glossy twists that traced the half-healed paths of box-cutter slashes and paint-scraper battles. They offered him crumpled bags. He declined. They offered him gasoline to sniff, weed, Valium. They asked him to tell his stories, and he did, giving them long tales, embellishing details at will, watching them nod slowly in appreciation. Here was something they could understand. Nature playing mind games. Nature fucking with him. He dug deep into the nature of lightning. He made himself heroic. He raised his fist like Zeus, catching bolts out of air. He tossed balled lightning, dribbled in for a fast break. This was the least he could do for them. He pitied them for their empty eyes, for the dead slurry way they spoke.

In the dark room as the days turned and the sun raged over the cracked streets below, shrub-size weeds driving up through the damaged macadam, Nick let the siege mentality develop. He would avoid the next one. No. 7 had come just after his complete recovery, when he was called back to Chicago to make a court appearance in litigation over an option fund. He had gone out to the Oak Ridge Country Club with Albert Forster. The club would soon install lightning detection equipment—the first of its kind of the Chicago metro area—to forewarn of exactly the kind of conditions that led to strike no. 7. A mass of cold air arrived from Canada, dug into the hot reaches of the Central Plains, picked up steam, and formed a storm front that had already spawned a classic F-4 tornado, reducing one trailer park to a salad of pink fluffly insulation material, chips of fiberglass, and chunks of Sheetrock. As he teed up on the second hole, bunching his shoulders in a manner that foretold of his forthcoming slice, the front was tonguing into the sticky summer air overhead. In the end it was just another bolt. Simple as that. It appeared as a surprise. Two blunt rumbles swallowed the golf course, a flick behind them, and then, just as Nick threw his club into his backswing, adjusting his shoulders, head cocked, eyes upward on the sky, no. 7 forked down, split into five wayward crabs of raw voltage, and speared him in the brow the way you’d poke a shrimp with a cocktail fork.

In the room he listened to the walls crackle and sat in front of an oscillating metal fan and didn’t move for hours at a time. Down the street old Ralph the barber told his own kind of lightning stories about the Battle of the Bulge. If the rotating fan failed to keep him company, he’d go down to watch Ralph cut hair. Outside Ralph’s establishment a wooden pole turned to rot. Inside, the mirrors were clean and the chrome and white enamel basins were kept shiny. The sad parameters of his life became nicely apparent at Ralph’s. Here is a man defined by lightning, the shop said. Here is a man who could use a shave. A bit off the sides, layered in back. In the shop, his story was lore, it was myth, it was good talk. It was clear in those humble confines, amid the snip of sheers, the concise irreversible nature of cutting hair. (People just don’t realize how tough human hair is to cut, Ralph said.) Amid barbering—flattops, Princetons, layer cuts, wet and dry—the best Nick could do was to answer the probing questions that Ralph sent his way. He embellished as much as he could. But he didn’t lie. In the barbershop, words felt ponderous and heavy. He filled in with silence as much as he could, and when that didn’t work, he hemmed and hawed. But with Ralph the silence seemed necessary. What went unspoken was filled in with Ralph’s grunts and his nods and his attention to whoever was getting a cut; if he was between cuts, he might be cleaning the sink or arranging his scissors or stropping his razor with thoughtless Zen strokes. Christ, it’s a good story you got, Nick, he said after hearing an account of no. 7. Ralph had a long, pale face—the face of a man who seldom saw the sun—with eyes that drooped in sockets that drooped. Ralph sat on a fence between doubt and belief. He would never fully believe this strange man who came out of the blue and claimed to have owned the Morrison tract, the famous farm over in the next county, a farm that was at one time perhaps the best-run bit of land in that part of Lincoln County. He would only half believe this guy who seemed so weatherworn and odd. Men like this arrived often out of the Great Plains, even now, years after the great wanderings of hobos and tramps, and they often spoke in a reverent voice of preposterous and prophetic events, events that were mostly untrue but that somehow had the ring of truth. Ralph knew the importance of such souls. They walked the line between fact and fiction, and in doing so lightened the load of the truth. They made you aware of the great desolate span of the Central states, of the empty space that still prevailed. He snipped with care around the ears and then snapped the buzzers on and cleaned up the neck, working to create a neat line. He would listen to Lightning Man’s stories again, and by the time the man’s whole repertoire of tales was used up, another year or so would have passed and he’d be ready to hear them again, forgetting enough of the details to make it interesting. Lightning Man would become a fixture in the shop. He’d have his own chair and ashtray. Into the long afternoons his words would pass. A place would be found for this man. Odd chores would be offered so that he might find subsistence, a few bucks here or there. In this manner another soul would be able to conclude his days upon the earth—at least until the odd premonitions came and the air grew absurdly still and above the shop the clouds began their boiling congregation, and then a faint foreshadowing taste of ozone would arrive. Then everything would change, and nothing would be the same again.