No-one survives a lightning strike like that.
But then why did I? Sam would ask himself this for years to come. How come I stood there in the centre of that electric furnace and survived? Physically suffering nothing more serious than singed eyebrows and a bruised shoulder from the fall out of the tree.
In the hospital the Sheriff had stood by Sam’s bed, turning his hat round and round through his fingers, and tried to answer that one.
‘Lightning strikes are strange things, Sam. Why, I’ve seen where they’ve hit a group of golfers on the green. It takes one and spares another even though they might be closer to one another than you and I are now. I know losing your two friends like that’s going to be hard. Not much takes the pain out of it. That is, unless you have religious convictions?’
Sam had shaken his head, then closed his eyes.
And all the time the memories were there inside his head. They were painted in vivid, jangling colours as bright and as unreal as when you fool around with the colour control on your TV. He remembered standing there. In the ruins of the scorched tree. The bodies of his friends burning at his feet. Tony Urtz in his mask of brass. A bumble-bee had walked down across the burnished forehead to the tip of the shining nose. The smell of roasting pears with their sweet-as-syrup aroma. The grass that was a brilliant day-glo green. And there, nesting among the grass stalks, was a pocketful of nickels and dimes fused into a single lump. White butterflies the size of paperback books flitted to and fro.
And there were images that came right out of left-field, too. Jumbled with what must have been genuine memories were rogue images of a man hanging on this huge wooden cross. He had jet black hair and wore peculiarly vivid red shoes. A ghost girl sat beside him singing in a soft, husky voice, ‘Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight…’
The face of a bearded man with his eyes as lightly closed as a sleeper’s suddenly loomed before Sam. The man opened his eyes. And the moment the eyelid unsealed itself from the skin beneath the eye something darted from the eye socket to strike Sam on the lip, pricking it so sharply it felt as if he’d been stabbed with a pin.
Sam rocked back on his heels in surprise.
And all the time, the girl sang under her breath:
Of course, those were just dreams, he told himself. Do you hear, Sam Baker? Nothing more than bizarre hallucinations triggered by what was, after all, one hell of a shock.
What really happened immediately after the lightning strike was that his aunt had found them.
He remembered she’d ran back to the house and returned with a wet flannel with which she’d washed his face as he stood there, still as a statue. Weird. Why she washed his face he didn’t really know, nor had she ever explained the reasons since. Only she must have decided it was vitally important, and that it seemed the right thing to do. To vigorously rub away the sooty smears and scorched remains of his eyebrows with the wet flannel while his friends lay at his feet roasted to their very hearts.
Later, back home in New York, he’d sit up late at night with his electric guitar across his knee, his fingers probing the fret board for notes, even for sounds that would say how it feels to stand there eyeball to eyeball with death. He was going to compose a song about it.
Only he never did find the sounds. He could never even find a title. Meanwhile, outside, the city’s traffic played its own melancholy heart-song that, in its own way, sounded like the rumble of distant thunder.
And he’d fall asleep thinking back to that holiday in Vermont when he was 12 years old. It was the first time he’d smoked a cigarette, drunk whiskey, fired a rifle. Oh, boy… that Thursday should have been an amazing day.
2
Fourteen years after the lightning strike that had knocked Sam Baker out of the pear tree and killed his two friends, he kicked open the TV studio’s gallery control room and headed for the staff lounge, where he poured himself a well-earned coffee.
After sitting in the director’s chair, mixing four hours of football that was being beamed out live across the whole of the blessed United States, he was more than ready to remove his head and leave it in a refrigerator to chill for a while. His brain sizzled like a hot roast inside his skull. At least, that was what it felt like. It had been a hell of an evening. Two cameras at the stadium had gone on the fritz. The commentator had forgotten the players’ names and had um’d and ah’d his way through the first match. Thunderstorms cavorting over New York had played havoc with the microwave link-ups.
Now Sam lusted after a few beers – a few very cold beers – in the Irish bar across the street. Then he wanted to go home to bed where a few hours’ sleep might soothe his frazzled brain.
Hell, whoever said TV work was glamorous needed their own head tested for brain-tissue content. Or lack thereof.
As the sign over the coffee machine so rightly said, You don’t have to be mad to work here – but it helps.
Sam folded himself down into one of the low armchairs, closed his sore, tired eyes and sipped the coffee.
‘My God, Mr Baker, how people would envy you! Paid good money to sit with your eyes closed and drink free coffee.’
The voice felt like a slap against his jangling head. Nevertheless, Sam smiled and gave a mock salute. ‘I’m not sleeping, I’m just regaining my will to live.’
A man of around 50 with flyaway white hair and a pink bow tie stubbed his cigar out into a potted plant on the window-sill before helping himself to coffee. Joe Kane was one of the indestructibly cheerful sort. Even after a ten-hour shift as deputy station manager. Grinning, he sipped his coffee with a grateful ‘Ah… that hits the spot. You’re not finding that director’s chair a mite too big, eh, Sam? Too wild and woolly?’
‘What, me? Sam the Wonderkid? Hell, no.’ He smiled. ‘Give me six hours’ sleep and I’ll be ready for the noon shift tomorrow.’
‘Oh, you’re on Football Shots at 12?’
‘Sure am.’
‘I see.’ Joe Kane looked down at his reflection in the coffee cup, his forehead wrinkling as he worked through a problem. ‘I’ll have to ask Katie to sit in the director’s hot seat, then.’
Jesus Christ, I’m being fired! were the words that snapped through Sam’s head. He sat up straight, suddenly wide awake. ‘What’s happening, Joe? I’ve been directing Football Shots for the last six months; I’ve been keeping it fresh, haven’t I?’
‘Fresh as a daisy, Sam.’
‘But it sounds from where I’m sitting as if I’m being shown the exit.’