The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go. Vera Smith became convinced that Christ would return from below the earth at the South Pole. This intelligence was based on a new pamphlet (seventeen pages, price $4. 50) entitled God's Tropical Underground. The startling hypothesis of the pamphleteer was that heaven was actually below our very feet, and that the easiest point of ingress was the South Pole. One of the sections of the pamphlet was “Psychic Experiences of the South Pole Explorers”.
Herb pointed out to her that less than a year before she had been convinced that heaven was somewhere out There, most probably circling Arcturus. “I'd surely be more apt to believe that than this crazy South Pole stuff,” he told her. “Mter all, the Bible says heaven's in the sky. That tropical place below the ground is supposed to be…
“Stop it I” she said sharply, lips pressed into thin white lines. “No need to mock what you don't understand.”
“I wasn't mocking, Vera,” he said quietly.
“God knows why the unbeliever mocks and the heathen rages,” she said. That blank light was in her eyes. They were sitting at the kitchen table, Herb with an old plumbing J. bolt in front of him, Vera with a stack of old National Geographics which she had been gleaning for South Pole pictures and stories. Outside, restless clouds fled west to east and the leaves showered off the trees. It was early October again, and October always seemed to be her worst month. It was the month when that blank light came more frequently to her eyes and stayed longer. And it was always in October that his thoughts turned treacherously to leaving them both. His possibly certifiable wife and his sleeping son, who was probably already dead by any practical definition. Just now he had been turning the J-bolt over in his hands and looking out the window at that restless sky and thinking, I could pack up. Just throw my things into the back of the pickup and go. Florida, maybe. Nebraska. California. A good carpenter can make good money any damn place. Just get up and go.
But he knew he wouldn't. It was just that October was his month to think about running away, as it seemed to be Vera's month to discover some new pipeline to Jesus and the eventual salvation of the only child she had been able to nurture in her substandard womb.
Now he reached across the table and took her hand, which was thin and terribly bony-an old woman's hand. She looked up, surprised. “I love you very much, Vera,” he said.
She smiled back, and for a glimmering moment she was a great deal like the girl he had courted and won, the girl who had goosed him with a hairbrush on their wedding night. It was a gentle smile, her eyes briefly dear and warm and loving in return. Outside, the sun came out again, sending great shutter-shadows fleeing across their back field.
“I know you do, Herbert. And I love you.”
He put his other hand over hers and clasped it.
“Vera,” he said.
“Yes?” Her eyes were so clear… suddenly she was with him, totally with him, and it made him realize how dread-fully far apart they had grown over the last three years.
“Vera, if he never does wake up… God forbid, but if he doesn't… we'll still have each other, won't we? I mean…
She jerked her hand away. His two hands, which had been holding it lightly, dapped on nothing.
“Don't you ever say that. Don't you ever say that Johnny isn't going to wake up.”
“All I meant was that we…”
“Of course he's going to wake up,” she said, looking out the window to the field, where the shadows still crossed and crossed. “It's God's plan for him. Oh yes. Don't you think I know? I know, believe me. God has great things in store for my Johnny. I have heard him in my heart.”
“Yes, Vera,” he said. “Okay.”
Her fingers groped for the National Geographics, found them, and began to turn the pages again.
“I know,” she said in a childish, petulant voice.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
She looked at her magazines. Herb propped his chin in his palms and looked out at the sunshine and shadow and thought how soon winter came after golden, treacherous October. He wished Johnny would die. He had loved the boy from the very first. He had seen the wonder on his tiny face when Herb had brought a tiny tree frog to the boy's carriage and had put the small living thing in the boy's hands. He had taught Johnny how to fish and skate and shoot. He had sat up with him all night during his terrible bout with the flu in 1951, when the boy's temperature had crested at a giddy one hundred and five degrees. He had hidden tears in his hand when Johnny graduated salutatorian of his high school class and had made his speech from memory without a slip. So many memories of him-teaching him to drive, standing on the bow of the Bolero with him when they went to Nova Scotia on vacation one year, Johnny eight years old, laughing and excited by the screwlike motion of the boat, helping him with his homework, helping him with his treehouse, helping him get the hang of his Silva compass when he had been in the Scouts. All the memories were jumbled together in no chronological order at all -Johnny was the single unifying thread, Johnny eagerly discovering the world that had maimed him so badly in the end. And now he wished Johnny would die, oh how he wished it, that he would die, that his heart would stop beating, that the final low traces on the EEG would go flat, that he would just flicker out like a guttering candle in a pool of wax: that he would die and release them.
The seller of lightning rods arrived at Cathy's Roadhouse in Somersworth, New Hampshire, in the early afternoon of a blazing summer's day less than a week after the Fourth of July in that year of 1973,” and somewhere not so far away there were, perhaps, storms only waiting to be born in the warm elevator shafts of summer's thermal updrafts.
He was a man with a big thirst, and he stopped at Cathy's to slake it with a couple of beers, not to make a sale. But from force of long habit, he glanced up at the roof of the low, ranch-style building, and the unbroken line he saw standing against the blistering gunmetal sky caused him to reach back in for the scuffed suede bag that was his sample case.
Inside, Cathy's was dark and cool and silent except for the muted rumble of the color TV on the wall. A few regulars were there, and behind the bar was the owner, keeping an eye on “As The World. Turns” along with his patrons.
The seller of lightning rods lowered himself onto a bar stool and put his sample case on the stool to his left. The owner came over. “Hi, friend. What'll it be?”
“A Bud,” the lightning rod salesman said. “And draw another for yourself, if you're of a mind.”
“I'm always of a mind,” the owner said. He returned with two beers, took the salesman's dollar, and left three dimes on the bar. “Bruce Carrick,” he said, and offered his hand.
The seller of lightning rods shook it. “Dohay is the name,” he said, “Andrew Dohay. “He drained off half his beer.
“Pleased to meet you,” Carrick said. He wandered off to serve a young woman with a hard face another Tequila Sunrise and eventually wandered back to Dohay. “From out of town?”
“I am,” Dohay admitted. “Salesman. “He glanced around. “Is it always this quiet?”
“No. It jumps on the weekends and I do a fair trade through the week. Private parties is where we make our dough-if we make it. I ain't starving, but neither am I driving a Cadillac. “He pointed a pistol finger at Dohay's glass. “Freshen that?”
“And another for yourself, Mr. Carrick.”
“Bruce. “He laughed. “You must want to sell me some-thing.”
When Carrick returned with the beers the seller of lightning rods said: “I came in to lay the dust, not to sell anything. But now that you mention it… “He hauled his sample case up onto the bar with a practiced jerk. Things jingled inside it.
“Oh, here it comes,” Carrick said, and laughed.
Two of the afternoon regulars, an old fellow with a wart on his right eyelid and a younger man in gray fatigues, wandered over to see what Dohay was selling. The hard-faced woman went on watching “As The World Turns”.
Dohay took out three rods, a long one with a brass ball at the tip, a shorter one, and one with porcelain conductors.
“What the hell… “Carrick said.
“Lightning rods,” the old campaigner said, and cackled. “He wants to save this ginmill from God's wrath, Brucie. You better listen to what he says.”
He laughed again, the man in the gray fatigues joined him, Carrick's face darkened, and the lightning rod salesman knew that whatever chance he had had of making a sale had just flown away. He was a good salesman, good enough to recognize that this queer combination of personalities and circumstances sometimes got together and queered any chance of a deal even before he had a chance to swing into his pitch. He took it philosophically and went into his spiel anyway, mostly from force of habit:
“As I was getting out of my car, I just happened to notice that this fine establishment wasn't equipped with lightning conductors-and that it's constructed of wood. Now for a very small price-and easy credit terms if you should want them-I can guarantee that…”
“That lightning'll strike this place at four this afternoon,” the man in the gray fatigues said with a grin. The old campaigner cackled.
“Mister, no offense,” Carrick said, “but you see that?” He pointed to a golden nail on a small wooden plaque beside the TV near the glistening array of bottles. Spiked on the nail was a drift of papers. “All of those things are bills. They got to be paid by the fifteenth of the month. They get written in red ink. Now you see how many people are in here drinking right now? I got to be careful. I got to…
“Just my point,” Dohay broke in smoothly. “You have to be careful. And the purchase of three or four lightning rods is a careful purchase. You've got a going concern here. You wouldn't want it wiped out by one stroke of lightning on a summer's day, would you?”
“He wouldn't mind,” the old campaigner said. “He'd just collect the insurance and go down to Florida. Woon'tchoo, Brucie?”
Carrick looked at the old man with distaste.
“Well, then, let's talk about insurance,” the lightning rod salesman interposed. The man in the gray fatigues had lost interest and had wandered away. “Your fire insurance premiums will go down…”
The insurance is all lumped together,” Carrick said flatly. “Look, I just can't afford the outlay. Sorry. Now if you was to talk to me again next year…
“Well, perhaps I will,” the lightning rod salesman said, giving up. “Perhaps I will. “No one thought they could be struck by lightning until they were struck; it was a constant fact of this business. You couldn't make a fellow like this Carrick see that it was the cheapest form of fire insurance he could buy. But Dohay was a philosopher. After all, he had told the truth when he said he came in to lay the dust.
To prove it, and to prove there were no hard feelings, he ordered another beer. But this time he did not match it with one for Carrick.
The old campaigner slid onto the stool beside him.
“About ten years ago there was a fella got hit by lightning out on the golf course,” he said. “Killed him just as dead as shit. Now, there's a man could have used a lightning rod right up on his head, am I right?” He cackled, sending out a lot of stale beer-breath into Dohay's face. Dohay smiled dutifully. “All the coins in his pockets were fused together. That's what I heard. Lightning's a funny thing. Sure is. Now, I remember one time…
A funny thing, Dohay thought, letting the old man's words flow harmlessly over him, nodding in the right places out of instinct. A funny thing, all right, because it doesn't care who or what it hits. Or when.
He finished his beer and went out, carrying his satchelful of insurance against the wrath of God-maybe the only kind ever invented-with him. The heat struck him like a hammerblow, but still he paused for a moment in the mostly deserted parking lot, looking up at the unbroken line of roof-ridge. $19. 95, $29. 95 tops, and the man couldn't afford the outlay. He'd save seventy bucks on his combined insurance the first year, but he couldn't afford the outlay-and you couldn't tell him different with those clowns standing around yukking it up.
Maybe some day he would be sorry.
