First the Thunder Read online

  Harvey looked at his bottle as if he had only then discovered it in his hands. He pulled it closer, as if to raise it for a drink, but did not, and only stared at the mouth of the bottle as he spoke.

  “So I drove her home and saw Kenny’s car was there too, so I said either you go in and get those photos or I will. And if it was me, I was more than likely going to turn her into an only child.”

  “Good for you,” Will said.

  “She used the cigarette lighter from the car and burned them right there along the curb. Used her bare hand to sweep the ashes down into the sewer drain.”

  And you probably thought that was touching, didn’t you? Will thought. Jennalee’s beautiful, perfect hand sweeping away the ashes. You poor helpless sonofabitch.

  Overhead, footsteps hurried across the floor. Will knew that Laci had been awakened from her sleep, either by the police scanner or a telephone call. Now she was throwing on a pair of jeans and a shirt, making sure she had fresh batteries for her camera, sitting on the bed to tie her shoelaces.

  Then the quick patter of her footsteps coming down the stairs. “I gotta turn the light on,” Will whispered, speaking quickly, and reached to the wall behind him, flipped on the bar light. “Tell her you were just walking by and saw the light.”

  The door at the rear of the kitchen opened, then closed softly behind her, and Laci was there on the threshold. Will turned to her and smiled. “Fire or car wreck?” he asked.

  “What a crazy weekend!” she said. “It’s not even a full moon. I swear this job is going to kill me.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Break-in over at the high school. What’s up with you two?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Will told her. “Came down to have another look at the books. Harvey was out walking, I guess. Getting some midnight exercise. Saw the light and decided to say hello.”

  Laci gave Will a long look before turning her gaze on Harvey. “You couldn’t sleep either?” she asked.

  He shrugged. Looked down at his bottle.

  “I guess it runs in the family,” Laci said to Will. Her gaze was so steady, her mouth so unsmiling, that he had to look away.

  “Want a Coke to go?” he asked, and before she could reply he reached down into the cooler, then brought up a dripping can of soda.

  As he was drying it off on the bar towel, she said, “You have any iced tea in there?”

  He lowered the can into the cooler again, looked at the other contents. “I know there’s some in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  She had only stepped into the kitchen when Harvey said, “Where’s that thing?”

  “Shh!” Will whispered with a quick nod toward the kitchen. “What thing?”

  “That pink thing. I want it.”

  “Shh!” Will repeated. “I already told you Stevie has it. Don’t worry.”

  “I want it,” Harvey said again.

  She came back into the bar with a bottle of iced tea in hand. She said, “You lose something, Harvey?”

  He said nothing. Stared down at the bar.

  Will turned to her and smiled. “You really think there’s anything going on at the school worth your time? Probably a couple of kids just tripped the alarm. They’re long gone by now.” His smile widened. “They bitch about having to be there, and then what do they do but break back in over summer vacation.”

  Laci smiled in return, studied his face, then slipped the bottle of tea into her bag.

  “Molly still asleep?” Will asked.

  “She was a minute ago.” She looked at Harvey again. Then back at Will. “I shouldn’t be long,” she said.

  “Take lots of pictures.”

  She gave him another look. “That’s what I do.” Then she turned away and headed for the door.

  Will watched her go, her posture so straight, that confident stride. Now and then he would look at her, and this was one of those times, and see nothing but perfection. Her short, neat hair, that trim, compact body in jeans and a pale yellow blouse . . . even the skate shoes she called her “work boots.” Perfect from the highest hair on her head to the dusty soles of her shoes. His chest ached with love for her. The one thing in his life he had done right.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She turned at the door. He smiled, wanted to tell her then and there how he felt, wanted to somehow erase his mistakes with a confession of love. But knew the futility of it. Knew the inadequacy of anything he would ever say or do.

  He pointed to the front of her blouse, sleeveless yellow cotton with a rounded collar. She looked down, saw that it was buttoned incorrectly, one side of the shirt higher than the other.

  “Geez,” she muttered as she yanked open the door, and unbuttoned on the run.

  44

  Will stood unmoving after Laci’s exit, stood marveling at this turn in his emotions, from a juvenile rush of adrenaline an hour earlier to this forlorn consideration of all that he surveyed. The night was quiet inside and out, Harvey as still as a toppled statue, the ineffectual air conditioner silent. No sounds of movement upstairs, Molly asleep, dreaming sweet dreams of bright possibilities. He wondered if she would speak to him in the morning. His little girl was now gone from him too, had been for a while, he supposed. When was the last time he’d made her giggle with delight? The last time she climbed into his lap just to snuggle against him?

  When she was small, every moment with her was filled with joy. Just a walk to the store was magical. She would be jabbering on about this or that, about school or her friends or something she had seen on TV, she would skip, swing her arms, sometimes walk with her small hand holding to the flap of his pocket.

  Then she got older. Replaced him. And he grew small. Heavy. And weak.

  Christ, it hurt. Every memory. Every loss.

  He gazed down at Harvey then, only forty-three years old. He looked ancient sitting there. He looked beaten and defeated.

  “What can I get for you?” Will asked.

  Harvey offered no reply.

  Will said nothing for a while. Then, “So? Now what?”

  “Now?” Harvey said, and looked up finally, his damp eyes fierce. But he spoke in a whisper. “Now I kill him. And this time nobody is going to stop me.”

  “Hell, brother,” Will answered. “I’m not going to stop you. I’m going to load the revolver and drive the getaway car.”

  Harvey smiled, though with not a trace of happiness in his expression. He held out a hand to Will. Will took it, gripped it hard. “But first we wait,” he said.

  Harvey jerked his hand away. “Wait for what?”

  We wait for you to cool down, Will thought. He said, “We wait until the shit hits the fan. News gets out about the porn in Kenny’s drawer, a lot of people around here are going to want his hide.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So in the meantime, you don’t say a word about any of this to Jennalee. Or to anybody. You think you can do that?”

  “Can you? Can Stevie?”

  “We have to,” Will said. “We have to just stand back and see how tonight plays out. We might wait a year before we do anything. Because by then, at the least Kenny will have lost his job and be living somewhere else. Us, we’re just going to go on with our lives same as always. Until that one night, a long time from now, when we pay Kenny a long-overdue visit.”

  Harvey turned the bottle slowly in his hands. The glass was warm now, sticky against his skin.

  Will wished his brother would say something more, offer his hand again, some affirmation. Instead, Harvey set his bottle in the center of the bar, then released it, his hands slipping off the glass, knuckles against the wood. Then he slid his stool away from the bar, and stood.

  Will asked, “Where you going?”

  “I’m not feeling so hot. I think I’ll call it a night.”

  “Have a ginger ale. It’ll settle your stomach.”

  “I guess not,” Harvey said.

  “At least stay until
Laci gets back. We can quiz her on how things went.”

  But Harvey was already headed for the door. “Tomorrow” was all he said.

  45

  Harvey walking. Unaware of his surroundings. Body stiff. Heavy. Sucking air through his mouth, hearing the animal grunts with every exhalation.

  He could not remember the last time he had been awake past midnight. No, not true; it was last New Year’s Eve at Will’s party at the bar. But how long had it been since he’d walked these streets alone after midnight, not wanting to go home because he would feel even lonelier there?

  He had done so hundreds of times as a young man. Sometimes even after a race, picking up another trophy, then banging some girl in a motel room or in the back of his Eldorado. Walking and wondering and feeling the emptiness engulf him. That had been his life back then, from childhood all the way up to his first night with Jennalee. Then he was happy for a while. Except that the gray cloud of emptiness never drifted away, but even with Jennalee seemed to hang out there on the horizon, waiting to slide over him again. And now it was here. Everywhere. Inescapable.

  A dog barked somewhere. A dog on a chain, he thought. Poor bastard; what a life that must be, even for a dog. Chained up and howling at distant sounds, wanting to chase after them, snap his tether, revert to the dog he should have been—a hunter, meat eater, not some neutered pseudodog grateful for an occasional pat on the head and a bowl of dry kibble.

  This heat, he thought, is something strange. It’s like a steam bath out here.

  Every breath was a heavy one, a soggy lump of air. Yet at his core he felt chilled. Every now and then a shiver racked through him, a quick icy rattle up his spine. His body ached with the hot heavy drag of the heat but he couldn’t stop the chills from rattling through him.

  He approached the high school from the long front drive, walked toward the white illumination of the lights in the windows, several rooms in a row and the lobby lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, a big brick Halloween pumpkin on a steamy August night. He counted five vehicles lined up around the circular drive. A patrol car, the sheriff’s cruiser, Laci’s Subaru, Kenny’s Sebring, and a red Jeep Wrangler. Probably the janitor’s, he told himself.

  He cut across the circle of grass in front of the school, dragged a hand over the flagpole. The metal was cold, flaked with rust. No flag flapping in the breeze, not the slightest breath of wind. He paused there beside the naked flagpole and watched the front entrance. Could almost hear the sounds the kids make piling out of the buses every morning, the yips and laughs and moans like the ones he used to make.

  If I had any kids, he wondered, would they be happy here? Would they be popular and smart?

  I was never smart, he told himself. I got decent grades but I was never very smart.

  From twenty yards away he could see through the window of Kenny’s office, could see Laci with her back to him in there, bent toward something with her camera in hand. Kenny was there beside her, standing in profile, waving one hand in the air, gesticulating. Laci nodded and said something and took another photo. Half a minute later Deputy Walters came into the room, stood close to Kenny and told him something, finger pointing toward the hall.

  Harvey watched it all as if it were a television show with the sound turned off. They were just characters in a show, nothing more. Superintendent Fulton, good-looking and well-dressed even at midnight, khakis and a red polo shirt, every hair in place. Laci the Photographer, the girl next door, cute as that girl in the movie with Tom Cruise. Renee somebody. And Deputy Walters, not the sharpest tool in the shed but wholly likable, self-deprecating, constantly trying to lose a few pounds but never able to resist just one more Big Mac, one more order of fries.

  The show left Harvey cold and he soon tired of watching it. No drama, no comedy. He was not involved in any of it but felt as distant from the events in the school as a chained dog must feel when it howls at the moon. He turned his back to the building and started back down the long drive, past the darkened homes of people he knew, the lives he had no involvement in, the secrets they hid.

  He had been standing a few yards from the intersection with Main Street for maybe fifteen minutes, maybe more, just standing there thinking about the possibilities to his right and to his left, when a pair of headlights lit up the road ahead of him. The car came up from behind, slowed, and stopped. Laci leaned toward the open passenger window and asked, “You lost?”

  Harvey turned to look at her. He smiled. “Renee,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Anybody ever tell you you look like that actress in that movie with Tom Cruise?” “Jerry Maguire,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the title of the movie. With Renée Zellweger.”

  “You look just like her.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I wish I were that pretty.”

  “You are. Every bit,” he said. “I only watched that movie because of her. Never liked Tom Cruise. He can’t act for shit. And always struck me as kind of sleazy, you know?”

  “That’s a fairly old movie, Harvey.”

  “December 1999. I was twenty-three years old. Saw it at the drive-in.”

  She studied him for a moment. “You doing okay?”

  He wondered if she could see his coldness inside. If she could feel it radiating off his flesh, a chill of refrigerated meat. “Just thought I’d walk over before heading home, see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Some kids broke in and trashed the place. Spray-painted the walls, tore up Kenny’s office pretty good.”

  Harvey made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh. “Maybe Kenny did it himself. You know how he loves to redecorate.”

  Laci slipped the gearshift into park, then slid the whole way across the seat. “You still pissed at him?” she asked. “I mean earlier, you were mad enough to kill him, you said.”

  He nodded. “You know how I get. Lucky for me, Will talked me out of it. Even so . . . I can’t say I’m sorry for any trouble that comes Kenny’s way.”

  “I can understand that,” she said. “He’s not the world’s most likable guy.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He’s one of those touchy-feely guys, you know? Always has to have his hand on you during a conversation. Ten minutes with him and I feel like I’ve been licked all over with a long, slimy tongue.”

  Harvey smiled, pleased with her analogy. “They leave any clues behind?” he asked. “The kids, I mean.”

  “A couple cans of spray paint,” she said. “I think Ronnie Walters was kind of hoping they’d autographed their graffiti, but no such luck.”

  He nodded again.

  “Apparently we’re not the only ones Kenny rubs the wrong way,” she told him. “From the looks of it, those kids also planted some porno stuff in Kenny’s desk. Kiddie porn.”

  “Seriously?” Harvey said. “You sure it wasn’t Kenny’s?”

  “It looked brand-new. Magazines and DVDs. Sheriff’s going to dust them for prints. But if you ask me, it was all just too obvious. They even left the drawer hanging open so we’d be able to see inside.”

  Another nod. He was surprised by how detached he felt from it all. What the sheriff did or didn’t find was of no consequence to him. It was all just another television show. He could watch it or turn it off. What did any of it matter?

  What did matter to him was Laci. His brother’s wife. Mother of his niece. Standing there looking down at her pretty face, he felt so much affection for her. Will’s wife. His sister-in-law. He wished he could climb in beside her and sit with her and tell her everything he felt and believed. Wished he’d had the good sense to marry a woman like Laci, and could fall asleep every night with a woman like her in his arms. Knew it would change everything. Knew he would be a different man.

  “Will really loves you,” he said.

  She looked surprised by his comment. “He really does,” he said. “He’d be lost without you and Molly. Not worth a damn.”

  She let
a few moments pass. “Are you sure you’re okay, Harvey? You want me to give you a ride home? Does Jennalee know you’re out here wandering around?”

  A crooked smile came to his lips then, a twist of gathering pain.

  “Thanks anyway,” he said, and pulled away from the window. “I had a couple beers with Will and now I feel half sick to my stomach. It’s better if I walk it off.”

  “It’s a good night for walking, I guess. Better than for sleeping anyway.”

  “You need an air conditioner in that apartment.”

  She smiled. “Maybe next summer.”

  He reached for his wallet. “Why don’t you let me buy you one?”

  “Harvey, no. I mean thank you, but . . . you know Will would never take any money from you.”

  “You deserve an air conditioner,” he said.

  “It’s sweet of you to say that. But I would really like to give you a ride home now.”

  “Walking,” he told her, and stepped back farther and turned away, started moving down the street again. “Walking and walking.”

  She put the car into gear and coasted up beside him. “How about I call Jennalee? Let her come pick you up?”

  “No no no,” he said in a singsong voice. “No thank you, ma’am. Just me, myself and I tonight.”

  He kept walking but could feel the car waiting at the corner, could feel Laci watching him, wondering if he was okay. Just knowing that she cared about him made his eyes sting, made him want to turn around and tell her Thank you.

  But he didn’t, he kept walking. And finally her car pulled forward, turned to the left, and she headed toward home.

  And now he turned to watch the car pulling away. Something about her departure made him feel like crying, though he did not understand why. Something about the way the red taillights looked as they shrank smaller and smaller. Something about the vast darkness ahead.