The Scent of Rain and Lightning Page 16

  He hopped off a step where he’d been sitting while everybody else played at recess and ran after them. He worried it was a trick, at first, that they’d kick the ball around him and laugh at him or kick it at his head, but they didn’t. A couple of other boys came over and kicked it out of his reach, and called out insults when they ran away. But his new friends didn’t do that—they just kicked it to him as if he were like any other boy.

  It felt so good to be included that Collin almost cried the way his mother had when their neighbor mowed their lawn. When he happened to glance at his teacher, Mrs. Davidson, he saw that she was watching their game. Collin saw her dab at her eyes with her fingers as if she’d gotten bits of dust in them.

  THE NEXT WEEK, storm clouds showed up on the horizon at the ranch and Jody went into a panic over them, just as she had over every storm since her father died and her mother vanished. As the child screamed and sobbed in her arms Annabelle exclaimed in despair to Hugh Senior, “What are we going to do?”

  They were on the side porch just outside the kitchen.

  The air already smelled like rain. Lightning periodically lit up sections of clouds as if somebody were turning a reading lamp on and off inside them. The three of them, grandparents and Jody, had come outside to look at the new paint job on the porch, without realizing a storm was visible to the west. As soon as Jody saw it, she went to pieces. Annabelle was holding her granddaughter and getting ready to rush back inside. Jody was clutching her and crying as if assassins on huge black horses were galloping toward them with rifles drawn. Hugh Senior was patting her back comfortingly to no effect.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Chase said, striding past them.

  “What?” Annabelle asked over Jody’s screams, but he was already walking out into the side yard.

  Her curiosity piqued, even while her tears flowed, Jody craned around in Annabelle’s arms to see her uncle.

  Chase stopped mid-yard with his legs apart.

  He raised a pistol in his left hand, pointed it at the clouds, and shot them.

  On the porch, his mother gasped at the crack of gunfire, and his father started.

  Only Jody stared without flinching. Her crying stopped with a hiccup.

  Chase turned around and walked back toward them.

  “I killed it,” he said with dead seriousness, looking into Jody’s eyes.

  She hiccuped one more time. “Really?”

  “Really. Watch, if you want to see it go away.”

  As if he took the result for granted, Chase walked back into the kitchen.

  Within half an hour the storm blew southeast, away from them.

  A little while later the sky over the ranch was a perfect cloudless blue.

  “How did you know?” his mother asked him later.

  “I called the weather service.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “You do what you have to do,” he said in a somber tone that convinced her that her middle son had changed more than any of them since his brother’s murder. He had taken over the duties that Hugh-Jay once performed, and most of Bobby’s as well, and he was growing both leaner and harder as he folded himself into the daily routine of ranch work that he had left behind in college. His handsome face was beginning to look sculpted out of golden rock, all cheekbones, long nose, and stern mouth, as if he were becoming one of the Testament Rocks himself. In profile he looked forbiddingly grim, but also compelling, and it was hard for people to look away from him. He was attentive to his mother, respectful to his father, and affectionate but increasingly tough with his niece. He shot off hectoring notes to Bobby to tell him to call home, and he stopped teasing their sister. He grew increasingly bossy with the ranch’s employees. His mother missed her flirting, charming, laughing boy, even while she saw that he was becoming an impressive man. She grieved for the cost of it. She wished she could shoot the clouds away from him.

  Chase had to “kill” the next storm, too.

  Fortunately for his plan, though not for local agriculture, that storm kept to the south/southeast wind pattern and bypassed them. When the one after that showed up and Jody asked him to make it go away, Chase said—knowing it was headed straight at them, “This is a different kind of storm. It’s the good kind that we need to give us water and give the animals water and all the crops on all the farms. It’s going to be loud and noisy, like Mr. George at the grocery store, but it has a good heart, like him. It’s blustery, that’s all, big and blustery like Mr. George, but it would never hurt you, any more than he would. It’s a good storm. It’s our friend. We need it.”

  “A good storm,” Jody repeated doubtfully.

  She had seen how Mr. George had spoken to the boy in the grocery store, and so she wasn’t sure about how nice he really was.

  “That’s right,” Chase said, seeing her skepticism.

  He sent up an order to God: no tornadoes.

  That storm came and poured, boomed, and flashed, with no damage done.

  Jody sat on Chase’s lap on a couch against a wall far from the windows and watched it with him. “Do you have your gun?” she asked when a crash of thunder scared her.

  “Of course,” he said, and lifted the next cushion to show her where he’d tucked it underneath. Jody nodded, reassured, and resumed watching the rain come down.

  “What’s that?” she said at one point, huddling into his chest.

  “Hail,” he told her. “You know what hail is. You’ve heard it before. It’s just ice, like we put in iced tea.” It was, thank God, only pea-sized, and not the softball-size stones that had taken roofs apart a few years ago. As the storm was easing down, Chase lifted his niece in his arms and strolled casually to a window, and they stood there looking out together, her cheek pressed to his, her arms wrapped around his neck.

  “I like rainy days,” she said, as if remembering a forgotten fact.

  “You’ve always loved them.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. Personally, me, I like blizzards.”

  She poked him with a finger. “No, you don’t! You hate snow.”

  “You remember that?” The previous Christmas break from school he’d cursed at all the times he had to drive out to break ice in ponds so the cattle could drink. “You were only two.”

  “I ’member lots of stuff.”

  I hope you don’t, Chase thought.

  “Let’s go outside and smell the rain, Josephus,” he suggested.

  “That’s not my name!”

  “It is now.”

  “Rain doesn’t smell!”

  “Oh, yes it does.” He didn’t try to explain ozone to her, or how raindrops hit rocks, releasing the fragrance of oils that plants had rubbed on them, or how spores in the ground give up their own earthy scent in the rain. He just took her out and let her sniff and sniff until she admitted that, yes, it smelled good outside after a thunderstorm. Then he removed Jody’s shoes and socks and set her down so she could run around in the wet, golden grass.

  “You do it, too, Uncle Chase. Come on!”

  “My feet stink in these old boots.”

  She giggled and then ran circles around him yelling, “Uncle Chase’s feet stink! Uncle Chase’s feet stink!”

  And that was mostly that, when it came to storms.

  There were either good or bad storms now, depending on whether the weather service said they were going away or coming toward. Chase continued to shoot the bad ones away from the house, while Jody agreed to allow the good ones to approach and bring their rain as long as they behaved themselves, and so long as Chase kept a gun nearby in case they acted up. She began to be able to bear them, even enjoy them, without hiding in a bathroom or clinging to a grown-up.

  Other fears started to fall away then. The little girl they used to know began to reemerge, the one who chased rabbits and lay down in the hay with dogs, who ran out into the yard by herself, who wanted to be swung “higher!” who giggled when a calf slobbered on her arm, and who didn’t cover her ears at
the sound of fireworks. On the day she asked her grandfather when she was going to get her pony, they knew that at least in some ways Jody was going to be okay.

  FOR A LITTLE WHILE after the scene in the grocery store when she was three and he was seven, Jody took peeks at Collin whenever she saw him, and sometimes it turned out that he was peeking at her, too.

  When that happened, they gave each other shy, secret smiles.

  Then they’d quickly look away as if it had never happened.

  But then, “Who is that boy?” she asked her grandma one time after they’d been in the grocery store and had seen him at his homework table again.

  Annabelle decided it was best to tell the truth.

  “That boy’s name is Collin Crosby, sweetheart.” She took a deep breath. “It was his daddy who killed your daddy.”

  Jody looked at her with horror.

  Annabelle nodded. “That’s why it’s best for you to stay away from him.”

  Jody looked at Collin differently then, as if he’d all of a sudden grown horns.

  “I hate him!”

  “Oh, honey, that little boy hasn’t done anything wrong. You shouldn’t hate him. It’s not his fault that his daddy is a bad man. You should feel sorry for Collin, and try not to hate him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would be awful to have a father like that, wouldn’t it?”

  Jody nodded slowly. It was awful not to have a father at all.

  When she was a little older she wondered if he missed his father like she missed hers.

  She wondered if he loved his daddy.

  If he did—if he loved that terrible man, even if it was his father—then she would hate Collin Crosby and she would always hate him, no matter what her grandma said about being feeling sorry for him. She tried to stop peeking at him after that when she saw him in the grocery store or other places around Rose, but her eyes kept looking. When he caught her staring—or she discovered he was looking at her—she didn’t smile even the teeniest smile at him.

  Collin stopped smiling at her, too.

  And still she couldn’t help sneaking glances through the years.

  “Do you like him?” a middle school friend asked her one time, looking shocked.

  “Collin Crosby?” Jody was mortified that she’d been caught staring. “Gosh, no!”

  It wasn’t that he was cute, although he was.

  It was his eyes. His eyes looked serious and kind and somehow gave her the impression that they knew each other better than they did—which wasn’t true at all. She didn’t understand how he made her feel like that. They were the last people on earth who could be friends. Collin Crosby couldn’t possibly know anything about her except for the terrible truth of what his father had done to hers.

  When she entered high school and was old enough to entertain the thought, she decided Collin held a creepy fascination for her like a snake, and that it was sick and she should be ashamed of herself and never look at him again.

  Soon after that, she turned her head one day and he was looking at her.

  Jody whirled around, putting her back to him, but she couldn’t seem to make her curiosity about him stop so easily.

  AS THEY GREW OLDER, they navigated around each other with the help of friends, who whispered, “We can’t go that way. Collin Crosby’s over there.” Or, in Collin’s case, “Don’t turn around. Jody Linder’s by the wall.” They averted their eyes when they had to, walked around corners to stay invisible, never joined the same clubs or activities, tactfully slid past each other in school hallways. Jody got tired of always needing to look down rows in auditoriums, gymnasiums, and football bleachers to make sure she wasn’t sliding in near him with her bag of popcorn or her soda pop, but that’s the kind of vigilance it took to keep from causing trouble.

  She didn’t know what kind of trouble there might be.

  It just felt as if trouble might happen if people saw them together.

  He wasn’t popular like she was in her grade, but she could see that he had friends of his own, he wasn’t one of those loners who might show up and shoot off a gun and kill everybody in school, starting with her.

  At least, she hoped he wasn’t.

  Other people weren’t so sure.

  Jody had a feeling that Collin Crosby got watched pretty closely by the adults in town, as if they were all afraid he’d end up like his father. She knew what it was like to be watched all the time, because everybody watched out for her to make sure “the Linder girl” was okay. It was nice, even if it sometimes drove her crazy. But that was different from how they watched him.

  Well, they could watch him all they wanted, Jody thought, but she wasn’t going to look at him at all. And she didn’t until the next time.

  ACTUAL FRICTION only happened once, and Jody would have done anything to keep it from happening again. She was in high school by them, and one night she was standing behind the bleachers at a basketball game in Henderson City when she took a step back, colliding with somebody else’s back. When she turned to apologize, Collin Crosby was doing the same.

  It was only then that she realized she’d spilled pop all down her blouse.

  “Nice going, Crosby,” one of her male friends said to him, even though Collin was a lot older and bigger. Then Jody’s friend reached up and shoved Collin’s shoulder. “Back off.” His face rigid but otherwise expressionless, Collin took a step backward. When he started to say again to Jody, “I’m sorry,” her friend got between them. “Shut up, Crosby. Just shut the fuck up! Your goddamned father already did enough to her. Stay the hell away from her.”

  Without a word, Collin turned and walked away.

  Jody felt breathless from the episode that hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds.

  Her boy friends didn’t usually curse that way around the girls.

  There’d been real anger there, and protectiveness.

  For a moment it unveiled something hidden and violent that scared her and that she had never known existed in the people around her.

  Jody was quickly enfolded in her circle of friends again and they moved en masse back to the basketball bleachers. Nothing was said about the incident. Nobody seemed to think their friend had done or said anything wrong, but nobody seemed to want to talk about it, either. Talking about it would have meant referring to her parents. Jody’s heart kept beating hard. She was just glad it wasn’t worse and that Collin decided not to shove back. Did that make him smart, or did it make him a coward? She didn’t know. She felt she should have said something, but she hadn’t. What did that make her? She felt bad, as if she had done something wrong. Or failed to do something right. And she felt bad for him. Her attention was badly distracted from the game and she kept scanning the bleachers, pretending to look at the players as they moved up and down the court, but really looking to see if a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired boy had come in and found his seat again.

  She didn’t see him again that night or for a long while afterward.

  When she finally did, it was their first real contact since they were children, and this time the two of them were the only ones who knew it happened.

  SHE WAS SIXTEEN, fresh from getting her driver’s license and being able to drive solo, and one day her urge to drive and drive and drive alone took her out to Testament Rocks. She went as if pulled there by some strange magnet that compelled her to go, even though she knew that girls weren’t supposed to go out there alone. It was too isolated, too far away from help, too likely to attract the kind of man who would take advantage of its isolation and of her.

  Her new used truck, a birthday gift, just kept speeding in that direction, over the asphalt, then over the dirt. She was still getting the hang of this driving-on-highways thing, even though she’d been driving tractors and trucks around the ranch since she was thirteen. Now, with a truck of her own, she loved going fast a little too much. The truck was old and she didn’t care as much as some people would—teenage boys, for instance—about dings in
its chassis. So she sped down the long road toward the huge rock formations as if in training for an off-road race.

  Once there, she wasn’t sure why she had come.

  And then she saw she wasn’t alone.

  A male figure came out from around one of the tallest formations, wearing climbing gear.

  Jody thought, I’m not the only crazy person who does things alone that you shouldn’t do alone.

  She looked at how he was all wrapped up in ropes and belts and carrying equipment and decided that whoever he was, he was too encumbered to be a hazard to her.

  Then she recognized him.

  She thought about turning her truck back on and leaving.

  Instead, she got out, grabbed an old backpack from behind her seat—because she liked to collect things at the Rocks—and stood there, looking at him. It was the only time she had allowed herself to do that, to stare openly at Collin Crosby.

  Something—what the heck was wrong with her? she didn’t know—pulled her toward him. With a boldness she barely recognized in herself, she walked straight up to him and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips, while he looked a little flabbergasted.

  “Isn’t it kind of stupid to climb alone?” she said.

  “Like coming out to the Rocks by yourself?” he retorted.

  “Like that, yeah.”

  “I can be stupid sometimes,” he admitted, with a slight smile. “So far it hasn’t killed me.”

  “I climb that one,” Jody bragged, pointing at a rock called the Sphinx.

  That was stretching reality a little. What she did was clamber up a few yards to a good place to sit so she could gaze out over the landscape. When he turned to look in that direction, she stared at his profile.

  He was disturbingly good-looking and he acted like he didn’t know it.

  “The Sphinx?” he said, squinting at it.

  “Yeah, but not with all that fancy gear. Where did you get all that stuff?”

  He turned back toward her, making her take a quick breath. “Last summer I worked in a sports equipment store.”