First the Thunder Read online

  “That could be problematic,” she said. “Traveling, I mean.”

  Kirby said, “Only if you let it be.”

  Will asked his daughter, “What do you think of your mom’s boss?”

  Molly looked to the bar. “What do you mean, what do I think of him?”

  “He looks kind of, I don’t know . . .”

  “Skeevy?”

  “Is that the same as sleazy?”

  “Sort of, but not quite. It’s more like creepy. Not to be trusted.”

  “That pretty much nails him, doesn’t it?”

  “On the other hand,” Molly said, “he might just be a metrosexual.”

  “And what does that word mean?”

  “It’s been around awhile, Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not as worldly as you. What does it mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Something to do with sex and heavy traffic,” he said.

  She laughed. “It means a guy who dresses well, spends a lot of time self-grooming, and probably likes to go shopping.”

  “In other words, gay.”

  “Not necessarily. Or even exclusively.”

  “Not even exclusively?” Will said. “You’re fourteen years old. How is it you know this stuff?”

  “You’re in your forties,” she answered with a grin. “How is it you don’t?”

  He said, “Do you find guys like that attractive?”

  “He’s old,” she told him.

  “He’s younger than your mom.”

  “Still ewwww.”

  “But if he wasn’t,” Will said. “If he was your age. Is that the kind of guy you would like?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She gave Kirby another long glance, then looked away. “There’s a guy I like now but he’s a jock. Mom’s boss was never a jock.”

  The mention of a boyfriend for Molly made something go tight in Will’s throat. “What sport does he play?” he asked as casually as he could.

  “Basketball and track.”

  “When did the junior high start a track team?”

  Molly looked down at her lap, brushed off an imaginary crumb. “He’s varsity.”

  “Excuse me?” Will said.

  “It’s no big deal, Daddy. Lots of girls date guys in high school.”

  “Dating?” he said. “Since when are you dating? And what grade is he in?”

  She looked at him but did not answer.

  “Sophomore?” he said, and received no reply. “Junior? Senior?”

  He gave her time to respond, but when she did not, he said, “He’d better not be a senior, Molly.”

  “It’s only four years! You’re eight years older than Mom!”

  “There is no way you are going to date a senior. Not until you are a senior. No way.”

  “We were having a nice time talking. Why do you have to be like this all of a sudden?”

  “Does your mother know about him?” he asked.

  She threw her fork into the wooden salad bowl so hard that the utensil bounced out and onto the table. Then she sat back hard against the booth and clamped both arms over her chest.

  Will sat there leaning forward, tense in every muscle. Then realized that he might be frightening her. Slowly leaned back and tried to let his body loosen. But still wanted to strangle someone, wanted to throw some boy up against the wall.

  Laci picked up her glass of iced tea, saw there was only an inch of liquid left, most of it melted ice, and drank it all.

  “I will be happy to take photographs for your new project,” she told him. “Any subject short of pornography. Hourly rate or salary, I don’t care which as long as it’s fair. But any kind of extensive travel . . . that’s not really going to be possible for me.”

  Again he was silent for a while. Then he said, “I also happen to know about an adjunct position opening up for somebody to teach photography. The art of the camera.”

  “I’m self-taught,” she reminded him. “You know that. Don’t you need a degree to teach in college?”

  “Most times,” he said. “But I happen to have a lot of influence over the people who will do the hiring.”

  “And how much would something like that pay?”

  “Depends on the class load. For a full academic year, two classes per semester, maybe twenty thousand or more.”

  “Seriously?” she said. “Which college?”

  “Well . . . if we’re going to keep this discussion on a strictly business level, then there has to be a quid pro quo, right? A benefit for you, a benefit for me.”

  “Are you always like a dog in heat?” she asked.

  “Do you want the job or not?”

  It took her a long time to respond. She turned again to face her family. “Exactly what kind of quid are you looking for here?”

  “Commensurate,” he said. “What’s twenty thousand a year worth to you? Plus a significant bump in your pay rate as a stringer.”

  She looked at her daughter, her husband. Thought college fund. New clothes. Air-conditioning. A life of my own.

  Then she noticed their postures: Molly sitting huddled up on her side of the booth, as if she had been scolded or insulted; Will slouched back with his head cocked to the side, eyes on the floor. To Kirby she said, “I need to get my daughter home now. She probably has homework to do. Thanks for the iced tea.”

  “So you’re going to think about it?” he asked.

  She paused a moment before answering. “Unfortunately,” she said, and crossed to the booth.

  12

  There were only two customers in the bar when Will and Laci and Molly returned, two divorced men in their sixties, both gone to paunch and self-pity. They had been taking turns riffing on the asexuality of two prominent female senators, making analogies to “prune stew” and “a bowl of cold pudding,” when the door sprang open and Molly came striding in. Both men immediately went silent.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” Stevie said.

  Without a word, Molly strode past him, into the kitchen and up the stairs.

  Laci said, “Hey, boys,” then followed after her daughter.

  Will came around the bar and crossed to Stevie and the others. “Gentlemen,” he said. “How goes it?”

  “Just keeps on going,” one of them answered.

  Will nodded. Smiled. Turned to Stevie and asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Everything but these two nuts,” Stevie said, and grinned at his customers.

  “Just so you’re remembering to take their money,” Will said with another tired smile.

  Fifteen minutes later, Stevie was walking the long way home with a hand in his pocket, fingers rubbing the twenty-dollar bill Merle had left on the counter, money Will had insisted his brother accept as payment for his two hours of work. And now, in his pocket, it was something more than money, it was Will’s gratitude, and Will’s trust. Stevie seldom felt like a grown-up when he was with one of his brothers, but tonight he did, and that feeling made everything about the warm summer night look better.

  Instead of taking the zigzagging route through back streets that would have gotten him home twenty minutes sooner, Stevie walked the full length of the town, in no hurry to return to his trailer. The town was named Barrowton after its founder, Alfred Barrow, but in recent years its citizens favored another explanation for the word barrow, as in a barrow, or castrated, pig.

  In the fifties the population had crested at just over four thousand happy souls. The coal companies were busy then gouging money out of the earth and filling one rail car after another with cheap bituminous coal. Then came acid rain and regulations and now the strip mines had been reclaimed and the railroads were out of business.

  Until twenty years ago there was a factory that produced soft drink bottles, but plastic is cheaper and lighter and easier to dispose of. There had been a G.C. Murphy’s five-and-dime where Will and Harvey bought slingshots and Halloween masks, and where Stevie shoplifted Tootsie Rolls and Superman comic books. The store change
d ownership several times but never changed the original sign until the building was converted to a Goodwill store and collection center. The old Western Auto where Harvey and Will and Stevie bought their first hunting licenses was a Dollar General now.

  A few small businesses managed to survive the hard times but they too changed ownership frequently, and every few years another shopkeeper would declare bankruptcy. At last count there were eleven hundred and sixty-two citizens in Barrowton. Nearly all of them wished they lived somewhere else.

  He liked the town when the shops were dim and the streets quiet. He liked envisioning himself as the sole male survivor of a zombie apocalypse, after the zombies had been exterminated and now only a dozen or so of the sexiest unbitten females remained, having been sequestered during the battle that wiped out everybody else except for them and Stevie. He was sad that Will and Harvey were gone, but glad that the female members of the family were safe. Someday when their grief subsided, even Laci and Jennalee would finally surrender to his charms.

  It could happen, Stevie told himself now. Barrowton was ripe for an apocalypse. With its nearest access to the interstate highway some twenty miles away, the town was bleeding a slow death. As more and more businesses crowded into the farmland surrounding Greenfield’s exit and entrance ramps, locals kept promising themselves that more people would seek refuge from the noise and traffic by escaping back into the country, back to quiet places like Barrowton. Unemployment would decrease, drug use and domestic violence would dissipate, and real estate values would soar. With each passing year, the promises became weaker, more difficult to sustain. A zombie apocalypse was exactly what the town and Stevie needed.

  But until the apocalypse came, he had to satisfy himself with walking past the houses on the northern end of town, those big turn-of-the-century Victorians and sprawling prairie-style homes he envied. He knew where all the prettiest females lived, knew whom they were married to or were dating, how many children they had, whether they were teachers or office managers or stay-at-home MILFs. Those who worked outside the home usually had to drive thirty or forty miles to their jobs, but one in particular, a veterinarian who had converted her basement to an office and clinic, lived only a few blocks ahead. She was an inch or so taller than Stevie, with short reddish hair and lovely breasts and long, delicate fingers. Stevie had once brought her a dog he found along the side of the road, whimpering and bleeding, its back legs useless. “I don’t have any money to fix it,” he told her as he laid it on the examination table, “but I couldn’t just leave it laying there.”

  She said nothing until she had probed and examined it to her satisfaction. Then told him, “Both hips are shattered. And there’s internal bleeding.”

  Stevie nodded. “I figured it for a hit-and-run.”

  “The kindest thing would be to euthanize her,” she said. “My guess is she’s a stray. Poorly fed, her coat’s a mess, no collar, no license.”

  “I could pay you maybe twenty-five dollars,” he told her. “More if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “It was good of you to bring her in.”

  And now as he approached the house he could see a light in a second-floor window. The same window that was always lit when he walked through town after dark. He imagined her lying up there on her bed, Dr. Victoria Hall, Vicki, wearing maybe a black teddy and matching thong panties, watching a Netflix movie on TV. Sometimes he would see her around town and she was always alone. No wedding ring. No engagement ring. No jewelry of any kind. Her solitude confused and intrigued him. Why was such an attractive woman alone, when nearly everybody else in town, fat and homely, scrawny and skanky, nerd and geek and redneck, male and female alike, were paired up? She was like him, unlucky in love. Maybe that was why he felt a special bond with her.

  Frequently, as now, he kept his phone at the ready, hoping for a chance to snap a photo or two. Later he would download the photos onto his laptop, then enlarge and crop them, study her mouth and hands and eyes.

  She was one of several local females he liked to photograph whenever opportunity struck. But she was the only unattached female. Sometimes he would see a stray dog or cat wandering the streets, and he would consider grabbing it and inflicting some kind of minor injury. But then a voice would whisper from the front of his brain, She would never be with a loser like you, and he would leave the animal unscathed.

  It wasn’t fair, though, that he should have to go through life alone. Both of his brothers had wives; why shouldn’t he? Sure, Will was a nice-looking man with a business of his own, and Harvey had a steady job with a pension plan, but Harvey was nobody’s idea of a dreamboat. His hands were too big and his face rough looking, and there was a meanness in his eyes that intimidated people who didn’t know him well. It was a mystery why a beauty like Jennalee would ever fall for him.

  Even those two old farts from the bar had once had wives. And if they had been kinder to their women and kept themselves in shape instead of spending all their free time drinking beer and criticizing stupid politicians, they might still be married. Now all they had was each other, which, to Stevie’s mind, was worse than being alone.

  Stevie didn’t want to end up an aging lump on a barstool. He wanted what Will and Harvey had. He didn’t really need a dozen wives and a hundred or more children. One of each would be enough. But without a zombie apocalypse, what chance did a guy like him really have?

  13

  “You mind if I turn this thing off?” Will asked after he came into the bedroom. Some kind of music was emanating from the little TV atop the dresser, a repetitious bass thump that pulsed against the back of his eyes.

  Laci peered over the paperback she held open on her chest, a Ludlum thriller. “I didn’t even know it was on.”

  He stood before the TV for a few moments, remote in hand. Two black men in baggy clothes were striding vehemently back and forth across a stage, jabbing their hands at the air, chanting a mostly indecipherable rhyme. “What is this?” he asked. “MTV?”

  “Some awards ceremony. Molly was watching it.”

  He turned at the neck, cocked an eyebrow.

  “She was in bed by ten, don’t worry. So you can just quit looking at me like that.”

  He turned off the noise. “Must be a good book if you didn’t even know the TV was on for two hours.”

  “I have amazing powers of concentration,” she said, and with her smile he felt some of the heaviness lift away, as if her smile, like the fan in the corner, had blown the day’s chaff off his skin.

  He came to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, removed his shoes, pulled off his socks and then his shirt. Stood again to unbuckle his belt. Hopefully, he asked, “You want maybe I should lock the door?”

  “Well,” she said, and laid the book flat on her stomach, “I’ve been staying awake in hopes that Hugh Jackman might show up, but he’s usually here by eleven if he’s coming. So I guess it’s your lucky night, big boy.”

  He let his trousers slide to the floor. “You want me to get a shower first?”

  “How much beer did you spill on yourself tonight?”

  “Not a drop, surprisingly.”

  “So lock the door and get on down here.”

  She was wearing the short pajamas with the sleeveless top he liked, the powder-blue set he gave her for Christmas last year, and when he slid his hands between her legs he was as grateful for her as on the first time so many years ago. They made love slowly and quietly for a half hour. No woman had ever smelled and tasted as good to him as Laci, and when he pushed deep inside and felt the way her legs trembled as he held them and saw her lovely mouth gasping he knew he would never need any more than this, never want another woman.

  Afterward he felt that he had fallen from a great height, but landed softly and without injury. She lay curled against him, her head on his chest, her knees nudging his.

  “We’re still pretty good together, aren’t we?” he asked.

  “I th
ink it’s better than it ever was. Lasts longer too.”

  “But we could do it three or four times back in the old days.”

  “I like it better this way,” she said.

  He ran a hand up and down her spine, traced the ridges beneath his fingers, the lovely fragile stem beneath her skin, this flower in his hands.

  He said, “I meant more than just the sex, though. I mean everything. We work pretty good together, don’t we?”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Fifteen years and going strong.”

  He winced at the mention of so many years, a decade and a half. The tightness at the back of his skull returned. “I wish I could do better for you and Molly, though. I wish the bar did better.”

  “It will pick up again,” she said. But he did not believe it and knew she didn’t either. He was not certain when he had stopped believing it, but now, tired and weak, he knew it for certain. People drink when times are good, he had been told, and when times are bad they drink even more! But nobody had ever mentioned that nearly all those people would soon be doing their drinking elsewhere.

  “We’re barely getting by,” he said. “After fifteen years, I’d like more for us than just that.”

  “For instance?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Portugal maybe.”

  She laughed softly and rubbed his chest. “Not me, baby. No hablo Portuguese.”

  But he remembered the way she had looked that Sunday night when they had eaten spaghetti in front of the big-screen TV downstairs. His rule was that Molly could not watch TV during dinner unless it was an educational program, so they had found a travel series on PBS. In this show the host, a lanky New Englander with a mop of brown hair, was visiting the Iberian Peninsula. Molly nearly swooned at the sight of the white beaches.

  “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could go there?” she had asked. “Mommy, wouldn’t you like to go there?”

  “Mmm,” Laci had said, and then, “It would be awfully expensive, I’ll bet.”

  Will had felt a heaviness in his chest that night, and now, in bed with the woman he adored, as he inhaled the scent of her hair and absorbed the heat of her skin, the too-familiar heaviness washed over him again.