‘Uh! Now that is gross!’ Jools exclaimed with a delighted grin. ‘C’mere, let me have a look at your thumb again.’
All three studied Sam’s left hand. ‘There, you can tell now, can’t you? Fingers have two joints, thumbs have one. That there digit on my hand is in the same place as the thumb but it’s got two joints.’
‘Ergo a finger,’ Tony said, dropping his Southern drawl at long last. ‘Didn’t they let you keep the thumbs in a jar of formaldehyde or something?’
‘No. Like I said, I was a baby when they chopped them.’
Jools replaced his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, then solemnly raised the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘We should toast the guy with five fingers per hand. All hail the mutant.’
‘All hail the mutant,’ Tony echoed and reached out for his turn from the bottle.
After that, they toasted the girls in the magazine, then the pears on the tree, then whatever they could muster.
‘All hail the black cloud.’ Tony raised the bottle to the cloud that spiralled slowly above them. ‘May it never piss on our parade.’
‘May it never piss on our parade,’ they all echoed.
As Jools took his slug of whiskey he suddenly thought of something. ‘Hey, we forgot to buy peppermints. My dad’s sure to smell the whiskey on my breath.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Tony said with a wry smile.
‘Why not?’
‘The cigarettes’ll mask the smell.’
‘Oh yeah, he’ll tear me a new corn chute for these, too.’ He held up the cigarette, gave it an accusing glare, then, shrugging, put it into his mouth again. ‘What the hell. I’ll brush my teeth when I get in. Say,’ he sat up, remembering. ‘You all going to the fair on Saturday?’
Tony clasped the pipe between his teeth. ‘Count me in, boy.’
‘Sam?’
‘Sure. If I can get… Oh, hell, no. I can’t.’
‘Why not? Damned fine rides there.’
Sam felt disappointment weigh down in his stomach like a stone. ‘I’m going home Saturday. Shit. I forgot all about that.’
‘Back to New York?’ Tony asked, dismayed. ‘You can’t. School isn’t for another fortnight yet.’
‘I know, but my dad’s flying in from Miami and I arranged to spend that last fortnight with him. Oh, shit.’
‘Well, you’ll be relieved to get away from this hicksville.’ Tony took a slug from the bottle. ‘Back to the Big Apple. I bet it’s pretty cool roaming those mean streets, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said with no enthusiasm whatsoever. ‘It’s okay.’
The truth was he didn’t roam any mean streets. New York was a God Almighty prison for most kids. If you weren’t at school you stayed home with the door of the apartment locked and bolted. In his neighbourhood you certainly didn’t go out after dark. Night-time was the personal territory of street gangs, pimps, drug dealers and any demented asshole with a gun.
No and damned no. Shit to it. Shit with bells and whistles stuck into the whole steaming heap. He wanted to stay here among the hills, fields and forests of Vermont. He wanted to stay with his friends who were open, honest and easygoing. Through the branches of the tree, dangling pears in crazy profusion, he could see the white timber house where he was staying with his aunt and uncle. Here you could leave your windows open to the fresh air. There was no need for deadlocks, security shutters and electronic surveillance systems designed to stop some smackhead razoring your throat open as you slept. You didn’t live with the perma-hum of the air-conditioner. You didn’t breathe that Big Apple air of car fumes and fear. Shit, this was a good place. He liked it.
‘Uh-oh.’ Tony cocked an eye at the sky. ‘Looks as if Black Bertha’s gonna piss on our parade after all.’
A single raindrop fell onto the magazine, splashing wetly on the bare stomach of Gina La Touche, the blonde bombshell from Arkansas. (Only the cuffs didn’t match the collar, as Tony Urtz sagely observed.)
‘You save the ladies, Jools,’ Tony said, closing the magazine. ‘I’ll grab the booze. Sammy boy, you take the cigarettes. Got anywhere you can stash them at your aunt’s place?’
‘No problem,’ Sam said as another raindrop splashed onto a carton of rifle shells.
‘Can’t let these babies get wet,’ Tony said, taking off his hat. Quickly, he popped the cartons of ammunition into it and then covered it with a plastic carrier bag. ‘Righty-ho, boys, where do we go from here?’
Sam opened his mouth to speak. He wasn’t ever sure if he did manage to get the reply past his lips. Nor was he ever sure exactly what did happen in the next two to three minutes. Because that was when his universe – space and time and the whole of creation – was turned inside out in one searing flash of bluish-white light.
The cloud had been drifting north, pushed by warm, sticky air from the Gulf of Mexico. It had begun life as a tropical storm, shredding palm trees, flattening tobacco plants, tearing the corrugated-iron roofs off houses from Jamaica to Cuba. Its passing there would jack up the price of bananas in supermarkets nationwide six months from then; already farmers were burning ruined crops while turning their minds to the task of lobbying governments for disaster relief.
But all that was a long way from the orchard in Vermont.
Now the cloud was slowly dying. In an hour or two it would dissipate in the cool, clear air above the pine-clad mountains of the American-Canadian border. But at a little after one on that Thursday afternoon it decided on one final act of violence (if you choose to anthropomorphise a billion or so water droplets that have become electrically charged): whatever – it discharged a hundred million volts in the form of a lightning bolt to the ground.
The nearest thing to it that could be described as an ‘earth’ was the pear tree in which the three 12-year-olds sat.
Sam Baker’s recollection of the lightning strike made no sense to him for years afterward. He recalled a series of images so vivid they seemed to have been burned deep into his very brain tissue. But even though he tried his hardest he could not order them into their proper sequence.
He remembered standing beneath the pear tree. The grass was a stunning green: a far brighter green than it should have been. (Grass stalks had been boiled in their own juices by the lightning flash, so his uncle later told him.) The pear tree had become a blackened skeleton. Pears, cooked first on the branch, steamed on the ground, the pulpy flesh bursting from the skins, while hanging thickly in the air was the sweet aroma of the fruit’s roasted flesh. And Sam remembered being suspended in space, floating as weightlessly as an astronaut. For some reason he was convinced he was floating upward into what appeared to be a snowstorm of swirling flakes. Only these flakes were a violent electric blue that swirled around him in a dazzling shower of sparks.
And he remembered a great silence.
A complete and utter silence that, as he later reasoned, must have been impossible, because the lightning flash would have been accompanied by an almost simultaneous explosive roar of thunder.
Whether these images or hallucinations – tag on any label you want – came before or after his memory of standing beneath the tree, blasted black by lightning, he couldn’t tell. (And the doctor at the hospital did indeed stress that shock – both physical and mental – would scramble all memories until they were a cockeyed mess of fragmented pictures.)
He recalled, too, clumps of clothing lying on the ground, gently smouldering. What he took at first to be red buttons on a shirt were little spots of flame. He saw the sunglasses worn by Jools lying on the ground with one lens knocked out. He saw the burning stock of the rifle, the steel barrel bent into a question-mark shape. A symbol for this singular experience? Most wonderful of all was that an angel lay on its back on the grass, asleep. It was an angel, he decided, because the face was made out of gold. He saw the nose, the chin, the forehead, the closed eyes all covered with a golden skin. It was only months later that he realised that what he had actually seen was the dead body of Tony Urtz. The brass cases of the rifle ammunition had melted in the lighting blast and sprayed into his face like an aerosol. Doctors, police, friends, relatives – all assured Sam that Tony Urtz wouldn’t have felt a thing. That he must have been dead by the time the molten metal splashed his skin.