“Are there lightning rods on this place?” Johnny asked.
Carrick threw his hands up. “I tell this guy the facts of life and he wants to discuss lightning rods! Yeah, I got lightning rods! A guy came in here, before I added on, must be five years ago now. He gave me a song-and-dance about improving my insurance rates. So I bought the goddam lightning rods! Are you happy? Jesus Christ!” He looked at Roger and Chuck. “What are you two guys doing? Why are you letting this asshole run around loose? Get out, why don't you? I got a business to run.
“Johnny… “Chuck began.
“Never mind,” Roger said. “Let's go. Thank you for your time, Mr. Carrick, and for your polite and sympathetic attention.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Carrick said. “Bunch of nuts!” He strode back toward the lounge.
The three of them went out. Chuck looked doubtfully at the flawless sky. Johnny started toward the car, looking only at his feet, feeling stupid and defeated. His headache thudded sickly against his temples. Roger was standing with his hands in his back pockets, looking up at the long, low roof of the building.
“What are you looking at, Dad?” Chuck asked.
“There are no lightning rods up there,” Roger Chatsworth said thoughtfully. “No lightning rods at all.”
The three of them sat in the living room of the big house, Chuck by the telephone. He looked doubtfully at his father. “Most of them won't want to change their plans this late,” he said.
“They've got plans to go out, that's all,” Roger said. “They can just as easily come here.”
Chuck shrugged and began dialing.
They ended up with about half the couples who had been planning to go to Cathy's that graduation evening, and Johnny was never really sure why they came. Some probably came simply because it sounded like a more interesting party and because the drinks were on the house. But word traveled fast, and the parents of a good many of the kids here had been at the lawn party that afternoon-as a result, Johnny spent much of the evening feeling like an exhibit in a glass case. Roger sat in the corner on a stool, drinking a vodka martini. His face was a studied mask.
Around quarter of eight he walked across the big bar/ playroom combination that took up three-quarters of the basement level, bent close to Johnny and bellowed over the roar of Elton John, “You want to go upstairs and play some cribbage?”
Johnny nodded gratefully.
Shelley was in the kitchen, writing letters. She looked up when they came in, and smiled. “I thought you two masochists were going to stay down there all night. It's not really necessary, you know.”
“I'm sorry about all of this,” Johnny said. “I know how crazy it must seem.”
“It does seem crazy,” Shelley said. “No reason not to be candid about that. But having them here is really rather nice. I don't mind.”
Thunder rumbled outside. Johnny looked around. Shelley saw it and smiled a little. Roger had left to hunt for the cribbage board in the dining room welsh dresser.
“It's just passing over, you know,” she said. “A little thunder and a sprinkle of rain.”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
She signed her letter in a comfortable sprawl, folded it, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it. “You really experienced something, didn't you, Johnny?”
“Yes.”
“A momentary faintness,” she said. “Possibly caused by a dietary deficiency. You're much too thin, Johnny. It might have been a hallucination, mightn't it?”
“No, I don't think so.”
Outside, thunder growled again, but distantly. “I'm just as glad to have him home. I don't believe in astrology and palmistry and clairvoyance and all of that, but… I'm just as glad to have him home. He's our only chick… a pretty damned big chick now, I suspect you re thinking, but it's easy to remember him riding the little kids” merry-go-round in the town park in his short pants. Too easy, perhaps. And it's nice to be able to share the the last rite of his boyhood with him.”
“It's nice that you feel that way,” Johnny said. Suddenly he was frightened to find himself close to tears. In the last six or eight months it seemed to him that his emotional control had slipped several notches.
“You've been good for Chuck. I don't mean just teaching him to read. In a lot of ways.”
“I like Chuck.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know you do.”
Roger came back with the cribbage board and a transistor radio tuned to WMTQ, a classical station that broadcast from the top of Mount Washington.
“A little antidote for Elton John, Aerosmith, Foghat, et al,” he said. “How does a dollar a game sound, Johnny?”
“It sounds fine.”
Roger sat down, rubbing his hands. “Oh, you're goin home poor,” he said.
They played cribbage and the evening passed. Between each game one of them would go downstairs and make sure no one had decided to dance on the pool table or go out back for a little party of their own. “No one is going to impregnate anyone else at this party if I can help it,” Roger said.
Shelley had gone into the living room to read. Once an hour the music on the radio would stop and the news would come on and Johnny's attention would falter a little. But there was nothing about Cathy's in Somersworth-not at eight, nine, or ten.
After the ten o'clock news, Roger said: “Getting ready to hedge your prediction a little, Johnny?”
“No.”
The weather forecast was for scattered thundershowers, clearing after midnight.
The steady bass signature of K. C. and the Sunshine Band came up through the floor.
“Party's getting loud,” Johnny remarked.
“The hell with that,” Roger said, grinning. “The party's getting drunk. Spider Parmeleau is passed out in the corner and somebody's using him for a beer coaster. Oh, they'll have big heads in the morning, you want to believe it. I remember at my own graduation party…”
“Here is a bulletin from the WMTQ newsroom,” the radio said.
Johnny, who had been shuffling, sprayed cards all over the floor.
“Relax, it's probably just something about that kidnapping down in Florida.”
“I don't think so,” Johnny said.
The broadcaster said: “It appears at this moment that the worst fire in New Hampshire history has claimed more than seventy-five young lives in the border town of Somersworth, New Hampshire. The fire occurred at a restaurant-lounge called Cathy's. A graduation party was in progress when the fire broke out. Somersworth fire chief Milton Hovey told reporters they have no suspicions of arson; they believe that the fire was almost certainly caused by a bolt of lightning.”
Roger Chatsworth's face was draining of all color. He sat bolt upright in his kitchen chair, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above Johnny's head. His hands lay loosely on the table. From below them came the babble of conversation and laughter, intermingled now with the sound of Bruce Springsteen.
Shelley came into the room. She looked from her husband to Johnny and then back again. “What is it? What's wrong?”
“Shut up,” Roger said.
“… is still blazing, and Hovey said that a final tally of the dead will probably not be known until early morning. It is known that over thirty people, mostly members of the Durham High School senior class, have been taken to hospitals in surrounding areas to be treated for burns. Forty people, also mostly graduating students, escaped from small bathroom windows at the rear of the lounge, but others were apparently trapped in fatal pile-ups at the…