[20]

Merry Weather, 1978

Buckley sits alone in the common area of Hawthorne Dormitory at the University of Arkansas, thinking about the past—his mother and Clementine, and sometimes the reverend and his grandmother. He remembers his mother, half the woman she had been, her skin fatless and sagging in yellowed pouches off her bones. Clementine giggling and drunk, calling him Scott. Clementine saying “Ah.” How she would “Ah” and “Ah” and “Ah,” and how she would say it softly, like she was in ecstasy and she was the happiest person he’d ever known, and how she would say “You need to relax. You’re just a kid, for Christ’s sake.” Buckley’s stepfather, the Reverend John Whitehouse, said, “No man nor woman should be loved more than the Lord.” Buckley’s mother’s breathing fainter, the skin swinging from her arms and drooping from her knees. How he loved his mother more than any lord. How he loved Clementine more than any lord. How the nitrates in Vienna sausages and pork rinds will make you mean, and he sees the summer squash nose of the reverend, puffy and bumpy and red, and he imagines he’s pulling that nose out of one of those big jars, his hand in the cold liquid, digging for it like it’s a red-hot sausage, and someone shouts, “Loser,” and he sits up on the tattered sofa and the past is gone. His dorm-mate Cliff plops down beside him.

“Have you got it?”

“What?”

“The questions for the exam. Shit, man! The questions. Are you jerking off?”

“Yeah, man, right here.” Buckley shuffles through the papers, which are damp and crinkled on the sofa.

“You made my fucking day.”

Buckley stole the questions from Dr. Cooper’s desk, mimeographed the two sheets, and replaced them within the same hour. Though he knows he’ll be expelled—if caught—he doesn’t care. To tell the truth, he’s got nothing to lose.

At three o’clock he waits in the dark, windowless corridor outside Dr. Jack’s office. His appointment’s for three-fifteen, but he’s not supposed to be late again. He’s been warned. He’s lucky he wasn’t expelled already, but there’s no pre ce dent for such behavior, nothing in the code of conduct about standing on top of a university dorm with a TV antenna during a thunderstorm. Buckley apologized. How many times? A hundred, and yet he’s here waiting for Dr. Jack to once again ask him about his classes, about his family, about the antenna and the rubber gloves and Martin Merriwether. Does he feel responsible for what happened to Martin? It’s implied that he should feel responsible.

Buckley rooms alone now. He’s still in the dormitory because that’s part of his scholarship, but he has a private room, and Tad, Martin Merriwether’s replacement, is always dropping by, poking his head in, forcing his way into Buckley’s corner of the world to make sure everything’s “on the up-and-up,” because ultimately, the new resident assistant explains, he’s responsible for the safety of the residents. Doesn’t Buckley understand these things? And Tad has no intention of putting his life at risk to help Buckley. According to Tad and the rest of them, Buckley is a problem. He’s to be watched.

Buckley explains to Dr. Jack, “It’s impossible to make someone get struck by lightning.” Sure, thinks Buckley, there are models and drawings and diagrams and pictures of lightning strikes, but there’s never been a case where someone made lightning strike somebody. Or somebody else, he should say. Buckley imagines some poor sap with an electrical rod duct-taped to his torso on top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and chuckles inwardly. It’s ludicrous. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course not,” agrees Dr. Jack, who sits across from Buckley in a squeaking leather chair. There’s no sofa, just Dr. Jack and his junky old wooden desk, his steno note pad, and beyond that, a filthy window beaded and streaked with late-summer rain. “Not directly.”

Buckley tries to think of something else to say, because he’s always wanted to be a team player and he’s supposed to talk, to tell how he feels. That’s why he’s required to be here. To get it all out in the open. He retrieves a dusty paperback from his satchel. He licks his pointer finger and opens the book to page three. “According to Dr. Schwartz, only twenty percent of people struck by lightning actually die.” He holds the book Lightning Statistics open for Dr. Jack.

Dr. Jack takes the book.

Buckley says, “Dr. Schwartz has studied Florida storms for the past twenty-five years, and he writes that no one has systematically compiled statistics in terms of counting how many people have survived being struck. There are just case studies. See. Look.” Buckley points. “Right there.” He’s invading Dr. Jack’s space again. “Dr. Schwartz guesses, based on his own compiling of case studies, that almost eighty percent of people struck survive, like Martin, but then they have burns, paralysis, sometimes amnesia.” Buckley folds his arms across his chest and leans back in the chair. “Like Martin.”

Dr. Jack turns the page. “So?”

“Can I have that back, please?” Buckley reaches across Dr. Jack’s desk. “Please.”

“What does all this mean, Buckley?”

“It probably means that whether or not you survive depends on the power of the storm, and from what I can tell, most people who die are struck in the head. They die from brain injury or heart attacks. But, let’s face it, Dr. Jack. It means that if you hear thunder, you ought to take cover.” Buckley snatches the dusty book and slips it in his backpack. “It means that the hair on your head and your arms will really stand up if you get hit or if you’re about to be hit.” Buckley brushes his own black arm hair with his fingers. He’s felt it.

“And Martin?”

“I told you. It was a mistake. I’m sorry.” He is, he truly is, but he didn’t know Martin was going to spy on him. He didn’t intend for the lightning to hit Martin. It was supposed to strike him—Buckley. All logic would dictate that the lightning hit Buckley, not Martin, and it might have, if Martin hadn’t fouled everything up by nosing into Buckley’s business and following him onto the roof.

“Why,” Dr. Jack begs, “would anyone want to get struck by lightning?”

Buckley has explained the experiment before—the reasoning behind it. After years of sitting in dusty libraries reading about lightning experiments, from Benjamin Franklin to C. T. R. Wilson to NASA, it was Buckley’s turn. He knew what he was doing, or he thought he knew what he was doing, and standing in dead brown fields during thunderstorms had accomplished nothing but sopping shirts that were still wet the next morning, when the reverend forced him to wear those same damp clothes to school. He wasn’t looking to die when he went up on the dormitory roof, but he was hoping and wishing and strategically prepared to get struck. After Martin was hit instead of him, when Buckley had first thought Martin was dead, he thought of the physicist Richmann, the ball lightning reportedly a fiery blue, the mark they found on the dead physicist’s forehead the size of a baseball, the two holes burned in one of his shoes. But Martin sustained finger burns. Charred fingertips. Martin wasn’t a very good resident assistant anyway. He was always smoking somebody’s reefer, hitting on somebody’s girlfriend. Buckley never liked him, but now he envies him. Martin got what Buckley wants. He’s been struck by lightning and survived. Of course, Martin doesn’t remember being hit. He doesn’t know his own name. He has burned fingertips, singed blond hair, and amnesia.

Martin was the captain of the swim team, a finalist in the Arkansas state championships, king of the butterfly stroke, but now he can’t swim. It’s one of the things he’s forgotten how to do. It’s one of the reasons Buckley is in counseling twice a week. The other boys say Buckley is plain lucky, because if and when Martin Merriwether remembers who Buckley is, Martin will kill him.

Buckley has been to the hospital once as part of his penance and to discover what effects the lightning had on Martin.

The nurses whispered as he made his way down the newly painted avocado green corridor. Buckley thought it was an ugly color and the nurses thought he was an ugly boy. He knows what they thought. A nurse blocked his way into Martin’s room. “Are you family?” she asked.

Buckley didn’t respond. The idea that he and Martin Merriwether, so handsome and popular, could be related was preposterous.

People are leery of Buckley, and here he sits once again trying to convince his psychiatrist (Dr. Jack’s degree is in social work, but Buckley hasn’t bothered to read the degrees that hang crookedly on the wall) that he isn’t crazy. That someone has to find out the effects of lightning on those who survive. Somebody has to find out why some people die and others live. Why did Martin Merriwether live?

Dr. Jack notices Buckley’s brown corduroy pants, his green shirt with white lettering, ARCHIE’S PIZZERIA. Dr. Jack thinks he remembers Buckley working there last year. He thinks Buckley is an odd young man. And funny-looking.

It’s only three-thirty. There’s still time for the mother talk, which Buckley has hoped to avoid by bringing Lightning Statistics by Dr. Herman Schwartz.

“How are your classes going?” Dr. Jack asks.

Buckley thinks, It’s like he’s checking questions off a list.

Dr. Jack marks his steno pad with a check.

“Good,” Buckley says. “I have a B in American literature.” He does it for his mother. Reads the books, memorizes the passages, tries to figure out what these novelists are saying but won’t just say outright. It’s hard. He hates literature, but his mother loved it. He hates art history too but had to choose between art history and music appreciation. His mother loved the arts. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t even be in college, but this is what she wanted, and he owes her his life.

“Is that with Dr. Cooper?”

“Yes.”

“I had a class with him. God, how many years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

That was a rhetorical question, thinks Dr. Jack. “So, how are things going? How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.”

“What have you been doing other than your classes? Any more experiments?”

Buckley rolls his eyes and thinks to tell Dr. Jack, I’ve been stealing exam questions so the other boys will like me or at least tolerate me. I’ve been following Marjorie Danato around campus because she looks like Clementine Wistar, a girl I once loved. I’m an upstanding young man waiting to graduate. Working as hard as I can so I don’t ever have to see my stepfather again. Buckley squirms in his chair. “I’m not allowed to do any more experiments.” Besides, it hasn’t thunderstormed since the night Martin loused everything up. Now it just rains.

“You can tell me the truth, Buckley.”

It’s three thirty-five. He might as well get it over with. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom.”

“You’ll never forget what happened. You’ll never forget her, and you shouldn’t.”

“Are your parents alive?” Buckley asks.

“Happily, yes.”

“I miss my mom.” Buckley leans forward and rocks, both hands on his knees, his knuckles white. “She was my best friend.”

A week earlier, the night of the infamous Martin Merriwether incident, Buckley sits on his bed, clutching his transistor radio listening to the National Weather Service. Dangerous lightning. Possible hail. He opens his dorm window. The sky outside is a deep purple and the normally bustling quad, bare but for a few stragglers rushing to Parson’s dining hall for dinner. The starlings usually perched in the birch tree dot the darkening sky, taking flight. A handful of leaves drops to Buckley’s window and he pins one to the sill with his palm. The air is thick with wet heat, and Buckley wipes the perspiration from the stubble above his lip before trailing a leaf to his bed. Buckley is prepared.

He pulls the blue rubber mat he stole from the school gymnasium out of his closet. A month ago, he bound it into a roll with two pieces of rope and propped the mat against his few good shirts. When his roommate, Jeremy, first saw the mat bulging out of Buckley’s half of the closet, he joked, “For your own rubber room.”

Ha. Ha. You’re so funny, thought Buckley.

Buckley retrieves the rubber-duck yellow dishwashing gloves he bought at Collier Drugs from his top drawer and stuffs them in his back pocket. Lastly, he ties on his new rubber-soled canvas tennis shoes with the price tag still attached. (He can be absent-minded.)

He’s got everything but the 1963 TV antenna he bought secondhand at Michael’s Antiques downtown. It was the biggest one he could find, and the cheapest, but there was no way he could fit that thing in the dorm room. He imagines his roommate Jeremy’s face if he’d seen the antenna, and he laughs. He’s giddy with anticipation. Darkness falls and the wind picks up, tossing stray leaves onto the dorm room floor. Buckley forgets to shut the window but shuts his door and awkwardly lugs the gym mat down the stairs. On the first floor, he sees his resident assistant, Martin Merriwether, sitting in the common area, reading a book. Buckley smiles and tries to act normal (but he doesn’t actually smile that much). “Hi,” he says, holding the gym mat at his chest. Every few feet, Buckley has to set the mat down.

“Somersaults?” Martin rests his book on his thigh and watches Buckley.

“Yeah. Gymnastics.” That was a dumb thing to say.

Buckley pushes the door open with his back, and once free of Martin’s glare, pulls the mat across the quad toward the girls’ dorm and cafeteria, Hopewell Hall, the tallest dormitory and hippest dining hall on campus, where he’s stashed his antenna in the corner of the service stairs. He asked Mr. Schumacher, the cafeteria manager, if he could keep it there. “Not for long,” Buckley explained. “Only a couple weeks. It’s for an experiment for class.” Mr. Schumacher grumbled and mumbled as he did with everyone about anything. He smelled of cabbage and gravy, his cafeteria smock browned with grease, his white chef’s hat adorned with an angel pin, the hat wilting like a flattened soufflé from the kitchen heat. “A birthday present from the wife,” Mr. Schumacher explained, pointing to the gold pin centered above his forehead.

Buckley remembers saying, “It’s really nice.”

Buckley now makes his way stealthily, as stealthily as possible with a thirty-pound rubber mat, through the back service entrance, where his great antenna waits, and he trudges past it, pulling the mat from stair to stair. He has to get the mat up on the roof first. He isn’t going to stand up there in the thunderstorm with his antenna and no mat. There isn’t much lightning research, not that Buckley’s been able to find anyway, but he figures that his chances of surviving a strike are better if he’s standing on a rubber mat. This way, the lightning can travel through him but the mat will stop the return charge. Or so he thinks. He doesn’t really know, because this isn’t the kind of thing you plan or implement on any old day.

On top of the roof, Buckley hears the tree limbs creaking around him, the leaves’ loud rattling like pennies in a can. He unrolls the mat and rushes back downstairs for the antenna. It takes him a good twenty minutes to carry the metal contraption up the eight flights of stairs, and he wonders why he didn’t just store the antenna on the roof to begin with. He has to stop five times to catch his breath, and the backs of his thighs ache. The new tennis shoes pinch his pinky toes.

It’s dark outside now, and lightning flashes in the distance. It zigzags, splitting the sky in two, revealing cookie-cutter town houses and the downtown Fayetteville mall. Like daylight. Buckley carries the antenna to the mat, which is centered on the roof, and there are more mini-explosions where the charge touches down, streaking the sky with gold. The first drop of rain strikes the back of his neck. He checks his antenna, bends the rod vertically, and remembers reading that George III insisted that the best lightning rods had round tips because Benjamin Franklin was a traitor and Benjamin Franklin said pointed rods worked best. What an imbecile George was. Buckley laughs. More raindrops fall, and they feel like needles on his exposed neck. Thunder claps in the distance. He sings, “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens.” Rain pours off the bridge of his nose. She loved that song. She loved Julie Andrews. He is already drenched. The gods are here. He positions himself on the mat, duct-taping his rubber gloves to his forearms for good mea sure, cutting away the sticky tape with his incisors, pulling and struggling, the fat silver roll of tape hanging from his right arm and bottom lip. He forgot scissors. He manages to pull the tape free, and with it a wide patch of arm hair. He drops the tape to the mat and it rolls away, propelled by the wind. Buckley lifts the antenna. Here it comes. Zeus.

Thunder bursts, and lightning strikes a two-hundred-year-old maple not four hundred feet away. Buckley watches half the tree fall, the wood splintering, the tree crashing down on top of a Volkswagen van. It’s Buckley’s turn. He thinks, Come and get me. I’m ready. Come on! Come on, you fucker. Buckley’s never been one to use profanity, but he thinks it, and the word explodes gutturally: “Fucker!” Sissy always said “Jesus God.” Buckley digs his two front teeth into his bottom lip, and Martin Merriwether busts through the roof door, shouting, “What the hell are you doing? Get off the roof!” Martin, clearly exasperated, runs toward Buckley. The roof turns white, everything white. Buckley sees a blinding, glittery, sparkling split second of white, and Martin lying on the roof in the pouring rain. Buckley doesn’t know what Martin saw. All he knows is that the lightning chose someone else. Not him.

Buckley drops the antenna on the mat and rushes over. Lightning continues to touch down all around them, striking Old Main, Hunt Hall, and the dusty Mullins Library. It is the most powerful, awesome storm Buckley has ever seen. He puts his ear to Martin’s chest and checks for a pulse. Martin’s hands are limp, his fingertips charred. Buckley wonders if Martin’s shoes are burned and begins CPR. There isn’t time to check the shoes. With each compression of Martin’s chest, Buckley weeps a little more. With each breath of air, Buckley’s teardrops fall to Martin’s cheek. When the others arrive, they either don’t notice Buckley’s tears or think he’s crying for Martin Merriwether. But really, he cries for himself. What else did she like? If the memories are ever gone, he’ll kill himself. She talked about this key lime skirt her dad bought. His name was Joe. He died. She loved macaroni and cheese. Someone says, “You saved his life, Buckley.” The rain continues, but the lightning has gone. The storm is over. Billy Joel is right: Only the good die young.

Martin was struck by lightning and is riding in an ambulance on his way to Fayetteville West Hospital. Buckley is in trouble for having a TV antenna and a stolen gymnasium mat on the roof of the girls’ dormitory—for getting Martin Merriwether struck by lightning in the first place.

Later that night, Buckley flips on the light switch in his dorm room. His new shoes make a squishing noise on the cheap carpet—where a pile of leaves sits as if raked there on the third floor intentionally. Buckley shuts the window and sits on the bed, hating Martin Merriwether for stealing his thunder.