Fat Lightning (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Dreamed that dream again last night, where I was eating fat lightning. It tasted salty as Smithfield ham, but bitter as gall, like when I used to bite down on the pencil in grade school and give it a little chew, and then Miss Watkins would make fun of me in front of class, the old bitch.

I wake up with a sourness in my mouth, thirsty like I've really been gnawing on wood instead of just dreaming about it, and my jaw hurts from chewing in my sleep. Funny thing is, it makes me want to get right up and eat something salty, bad as that fat lightning tastes in my sleep. I been eating salt herring and fatback for breakfast. And, you know, when I pick up a piece of fat lightning when I'm fixing to use it to start a fire, I look at the way you can see light through it, and damned if I don't feel like taking a bite.

I don't tell the girls or nobody about it, though. Ain't none of their business, and it'd be just like that hateful Aileen to have the rest of them gang up on me and try and get me put in Central State. I think they're already messing with my food. That corn Grace brought yesterday tasted right peculiar. They want to take Momma's house away from me, tear apart the sawdust pile, wipe everything clean like it never was here.

Oh, they got all kinds of tricks. Last week, they sent a man and a woman out here, said they was from the historical society, tried to fool me into thinking they was interested in fixing the old house up so folks could come and look at it and, she said, “See how the original settlers lived,” like Daddy and Momma and their folks on back was something like you'd see in a zoo.

I know what they want. They want to sell this valuable land here, right on the river, make 'em all a bunch of money. Carter tries to tell me it ain't so, but I seen them fancy homes on the river in Richmond. I seen the big old mansion, big enough for a king, that that millionaire built between here and there. I ain't no fool.

When the man and woman are standing there, 'cause I won't let 'em in the trailer, he's kind of got his hand around her waist, and she ain't doing a blessed thing to stop him. They're probably whoring around together on the sly. Everybody does now. And God is going to put a stop to it right soon, you can be sure of that. Just like Sodom and Gomorrah. It just makes me sick. He ought to come and rain fire and brimstone on all of us, set our fields on fire. And he will, too.

But I told 'em right off they wouldn't be getting their hot little hands on the Chastain property any time soon. Momma left the house and the land right around it to me, not any of the rest. They all got their land, and done sold most of it, too. The history gal said it'd be my property until I died, or “passed on,” as she put it. Said they'd just fix up the house some, improve the road in, so folks could see how the county used to be. Who they trying to fool? Soon as I sign a paper, they'll forge my signature on some deed and I'll have to move my trailer so Aileen and Carter and Grace and even little Holly—she's in on it, too—can make a fortune off this here land.

But I told the two of them, the history people, to haul their tails off my land before I sicced Granger on 'em. And Granger was already growling, hoping I'd let him off that chain I keep him on so he won't kill no more of Jeter's damn chickens, so they went on back to their Jap car and headed back out towards the highway.

And what's the matter with letting that sawdust pile go on and burn, is what I asked Carter the last time he come out here, saying the county wanted to haul it off or put it out, one or the other.

It's been burning for six years come July, and it ain't hurt a soul yet. Carter says folks are afraid it might cave in, that the volunteer fire department thinks it's a health hazard. So who's it going to cave in on? I asked Carter. It's half a mile out to where the road's even paved, and a mile more to Route 17. Long as the history folks don't turn me into a museum, who's going to be messing with my sawdust pile? They gonna ford the river at French Cross and trespass? If they do that, some of that white trash I seen playing and sitting across the river over by the train tracks, then it serves them right. Let 'em all fall in.

Besides, that sawdust pile burning reminds me of how it was when I was a boy and Daddy and them was running a working sawmill, way before we went broke in Hoover's time. The cinders and the smoke gets in folks' eyes some, I reckon, but that'll teach 'em to stay away from here, trying to take my land.

Even Carter, he asked me wouldn't it be nice to be able to move back in the big house again, after they fixed it up? They'd let me do that, he said.

It most surely would not be nice, I told him. When Momma died, I moved out of that house. It was her house, and I don't aim to live in it without her. I can't believe the things some people do, even your own family, thinking it'll make you happy.

Today, one of the cats has come skulking around here like she's hiding something. Sure enough, I go back to the old barn, where I know she likes to slip in between the cracks to get away from Granger when I let him loose, and there's the kittens. Can't be more than two-three days old, near-bout like little rats, five of them, all mewing and all.

I run the momma cat off, which is not easy. “Ain't my fault,” I tell her. “I didn't go to it with some old Tom cat and bring all this into the world.” The momma hisses at me, but she knows better than to mess with Lot Chastain. Yes, sir. I think about all them babies I see on
TV
in that Biafra that ain't got enough to eat, and I get mad at cats, the way they seem like they want to take over the world.

The burlap sack is laying on the ground over by the steps up to the loft, where I left it last time. I get it and throw all the kittens inside, all crying for their momma. I take it over to the wall, rear back and slam it into the brick chimney. After about six times, I don't hear no more crying, but I hit it six more just in case. The momma cat has skulked around the corner, but I bet she's back when I put the scraps out after supper.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Chastains were all sitting on the front porch at Sam's parents' house, the first Sunday after the move. The porch was a good place to sit and rock until about 3 in the afternoon, when the sun dropped low enough to chase everybody to the back porch or inside for the rest of the day.

The houses in Monacan had been staggered so that, when you looked across the street, you looked not dead on at another house but at the space between two houses. Thus, you could see Main Street and the parking lot of the Chieftan Diner, a block away. Carter, Sam's father, liked to sit on the porch and try to figure out what was going on in town from the little swatch of it he could see. He said he learned more from the Chieftan Diner parking lot than he did from the Monacan Herald, which came out once a week.

“Looka there,” he said, about 1:30. “There goes Boy Ed Stringfellow.” Nancy could just make out a man getting into a Ford Torino, carrying what looked like Styrofoam containers. She could see him slam the door a split second before the sound swam to her in the already summer-humid air.

“Miss Mable must of found a hair in the hamburgers from Hardee's,” he said. Nancy asked him how he knew that.

Carter smiled, glad that all his knowledge hadn't gone to waste. “She always makes Boy Ed go to Hardee's for Sunday dinner, and if it don't muster up, she sends him back to the diner.”

Nancy offered that neither Hardee's nor the Chieftan Diner seemed like a great thing to depend on for Sunday dinner.

Carter explained that Miss Mable Stringfellow never cooked, that she had Boy Ed, her husband, bring everything from either Hardee's or the diner, because she didn't feel as if her stove was ever clean enough to cook on, no matter how much she scrubbed it. And then, half the time, she'd find something wrong with the take-out food.

Marie, Sam's mother, shook her head.

“Miss Mable's not right,” she said.

Carter had spent most of his life observing Monacan and its residents. He seldom talked much, and never when you expected him to. He was the one who told Nancy about the three kinds of crazy that were generally recognized around Monacan.

The worst, he said, was “crazy as a bat.” It came complete with private voices and overcoats in July and would earn a person full tuition at Central State Hospital.

The other two conditions, which didn't quite achieve the critical mass to cross the fine line between commitment and normalcy, were “not right” and “full of meanness.”

“Not right,” Carter instructed, implied a kind of passive lunacy whose practitioners posed more of a nuisance than a threat to those around them.

He told Nancy about Jeanette Faris' brother, Charles Royal, who had lived with Jeanette and her husband, Bob, for 14 years, in a back room up over their garage. He said Bob hadn't gotten a clear look at his brother-in-law for the last 12 years. They would just leave Charles' food by the door; he had his own bathroom. It didn't hurt anybody, and Jeanette told friends that Charles would come out after Bob went to work sometimes and talk to her, but nobody had seen him outside the house in 14 years. Carter said he and Marie used to visit Bob and Jeanette once in a while. They'd hear something go bump in the back room, and Jeanette might just kind of roll her eyes and they'd give her an understanding look. Marie added that the Royals were all a little peculiar, the unspoken other shoe being that all that “peculiar” is bound to spawn a little “not right” once in a while.

Most of those classified as “not right” tried to stay away from society in general as much as possible, Carter said. Those seen to be “full of meanness,” though, were more aggressive, and it was society that did most of the avoiding.

“Like Uncle Lot,” Sam said, and Carter didn't say anything.

Everybody in Monacan and the northern half of Mosby County seemed to know not to get Lot Chastain started. Carter said he'd seen him get into a fight with a man over whether you should use red pepper and Vaseline to keep snakes out of a bluebird house. Lot's argument was that if God meant for the snake to get the bluebirds, then it was His will and we shouldn't do anything to get in the way of His will.

In addition to the regular menu of religion, sex and politics, Lot Chastain was said to always have a blue-plate special or two boiling inside his brain, and the only way to find out what was cooking at any particular time was to talk to him, so Lot didn't have much company.

Before he became something of a celebrity, the last time anybody outside his family had seen him have one of his spells was in February. Carter was the one who told Nancy about it. He was the one who usually had to make things right.

Lot was at Wampler's Barber Shop, waiting to have his hair cut. A man who they said was from Wood's Store, who had brought his wife to Monacan to visit her aunt, was in the chair. Lot was second in line, drinking a Nehi strawberry soda, reading a back issue of Life.

Carter told Nancy that, the way it was related to him, the man from Wood's Store said he was thinking about buying one of “them Toyotas,” and that from what he had heard, they were good little cars.

Lot looked up and smiled, but only with his mouth.

“That's that Jap car, isn't it?” he asked, in the quiet way he always seemed to start, the first small dark cloud presaging the storm.

Pen Graves, who was next in line, told Carter that he and John Wampler looked at each other, both of them hoping that the man from Wood's Store would just let it ride.

The man from Wood's Store didn't, though.

“Yeah, I reckon so,” he said, giving the room in general a wink. “I reckon I can forgive 'em for World War II, though, if they'll give me a car that don't need a new transmission every 30,000 miles.”

He was still chuckling to himself when Lot said, in a voice that had risen a decibel or two, “You wouldn't of thought it was so goddamn funny, I bet, if you'd of been on one of them islands out there in the Pacific, with them slant-eyed bastards waiting to skin you alive. That's what's wrong with this here country. We'd sell our mommas to make a dollar or two.”

“I don't want to start nothin',” the man from Wood's Store said, and the other men in the barber shop saw his hands spread in a gesture of mollification under the striped sheet. “Hell, I was in the Army. I just want to buy a car.”

“Don't want to start nothin'?” Lot was on cruise control now, just a missile that might land anywhere. “Don't want to start nothin'? Why, you dumb son of a bitch. Why you think we ain't speaking Japanese or German over here now? You think them bastards don't want to do it to us again? And we're helping them. God's going to punish us for not learning nothin'.”

Lot Chastain was a big man to be 73 years old, a couple of inches over six feet, still rangy, not fat and not wasting away. He had long, hairy arms and long, bony fingers with gnarled knuckles. He had most of his hair, as much dark red as gray. When he got very angry, his face would turn purple in splotches where the blood seemed to gather, blocked there by the veins popping out in his neck. His eyes would go almost completely black and, if he was standing, his heels would leave the floor as if his rage were about to carry him away like a rocket.

The man from Wood's Store took offense, either to “dumb” or “son of a bitch,” neither John Wampler nor Pen Graves was sure which.

He got out of the barber's chair, the sheet still around him. All he had a chance to get out was, “Now just a minute, old man. You can't call me …”

Lot jumped over the magazine table, spilling his strawberry soda all over his work shirt. He had his hands wrapped around the man from Wood's Store's neck before anybody could do anything about it. It took the other two men to pull him off.