The Secret Goldfish. David Means
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