Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  A screwball matinee at the Royal, peach ice cream at Trellin’s, but no candlelit restaurants and certainly no smoky dance clubs where they might lose themselves. All the while, she kept Sage hidden, never mentioning that she had a child. She made it a point to be outside the house waiting for Lucius when he arrived; she’d told her mother she was seeing a proper man now and her mother had understood, taking Sage on errands beforehand.

  Then one day when she knew her mother had taken Sage out, she couldn’t resist inviting Lucius in, beckoning him with the promise of some pecan pie she’d baked—the restaurant where they’d just eaten had unaccountably been out of his favorite dessert, so she knew he wanted it. She knew he wanted a lot more.

  The curtains drawn in the dark parlor, she’d deliberately not turned on the light lest it reveal some child’s book or toy, not that Sage had many. This was the first time Lucius had set foot in her apartment. After each date he had insisted on walking her home, ever the gentleman, but she had always invented an excuse why he shouldn’t: her father was sick, or her mother was upset with her and would take it out on Lucius if she laid eyes on him. Once in the small kitchen, she hit the lights.

  She had only removed the pie tin, releasing the aroma of brown sugar and buttered crust, when she felt how close he was standing. She turned around and he kissed her, hurriedly, as if afraid she would try to escape. Which was the furthest thing from her mind. He wasn’t such a great kisser, truth be told, so rushed, almost panicked, though he’d get better in time.

  It was the kind of kissing that involved hands, that required hands, those fingers acting out in larger scale what his tongue was trying to say. She rubbed at his chest, she kissed his neck and loosened his tie so she could get at that delicious spot in his clavicle, and he took that as an invitation to work the buttons of her blouse, and maybe she’d intended that invitation, it was funny how one action caused another, not always deliberately planned but welcome nonetheless, and Lord it had been awhile since she’d done this, far too long.

  It was late afternoon and light poured in through the alley-side window above the sink. Lucius had some trouble with the buttons and she helped him, then moved on to his, and then he was really rushing, which she minded and didn’t mind, because who knew when her parents and Sage might return, and who knew when she might see him again, who knew how long this would last until he came to his senses and returned to the next pale and delicate Cecilia. One thing Julie did not feel right then was delicate as he hitched up her skirt and worked at her panties and she tore off the tourniquet of his belt. He was strong, lifting her up to get them started, and though she was not new to this she’d never done it standing up before, or really she wasn’t standing so much as leaning and being supported, but he was standing, quite tall and stiff until he wasn’t, as it didn’t last all that long but had been fun while it lasted.

  Fun while it lasted being the epitaph of their relationship, because they had barely finished when she heard the front door opening.

  His eyes bulged and she laughed at his panic. Quickly with the buttoning and fastening now, and she had to grab a dish rag and use it between her legs before stuffing it in the trash can, hurriedly washing her hands as Lucius wiped at the sweat on his forehead.

  She heard Sage’s voice before she heard her mother’s.

  She couldn’t look at Lucius right then. She stared at the entryway to the kitchenette and called out, “We’re back here.”

  She’d known it was inevitable but had somehow kidded herself into thinking he might respond differently.

  Little Sage barreled into the room as he always did, smiling, even though she saw blood on his left eyebrow.

  “Mama, Mama, I fell!” Voiced with enthusiasm, as if this were a great accomplishment.

  Then she was on her knees fussing with him. She wasn’t deliberately avoiding Lucius’s gaze, she told herself. Then her mother entered and it fell on Julie to make the awkward introductions.

  “Lucius, this is my mother, Glenda. And Sage, I’d like you to meet Officer Boggs.”

  Now her eyes could not shift fast enough, looking at Sage as she applied a small bandage to his brow, back at Lucius and the shock in his eyes, one of his hands actually at his breast as if trying to keep his heart inside, then back at her mother. Her mother’s face showed both guilt, for not keeping Sage away again, but also relief. The truth was out and the inevitable could occur.

  Sage was in the middle of a convoluted story that involved him pretending to be a fighter pilot and misjudging his landing and she told him to hush, they had a guest.

  The preacher’s son managed to say, “Hello, ma’am,” not abandoning etiquette even as everything was falling apart.

  Julie saw her son and her mother the way he probably did then. She’d been working in white folks’ homes long enough now, had gained that new perspective, and she saw her boy’s bare feet, her mother’s old housedress. Somehow Lucius had managed to see past the garbage sometimes found on their street, the cracks in the front of the bungalow, the shifty men shooting craps outside, but never again. She would have loved him on the spot if he’d managed to see beyond those bare, dirty feet and instead notice Sage’s impossibly beautiful round eyes, ignore the ill-fitting clothes and instead be charmed by his gentle nature, but surely that was too much to wish for.

  Her mother took Sage’s hand and told him, in Gullah, to use the bathroom. Julie had not made a secret of her ancestry, but still she felt ashamed to hear those syllables in front of Lucius.

  “You have a son?” he asked once they were alone, his eyes already moving from shock to hurt. Anger would be next. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “It’s not a joke. It’s my life.”

  “You just somehow failed to mention this before?”

  “Why mention it before? So you could look at me the way you’re looking at me now?”

  “How I’m looking . . .” He searched for words. “I can’t believe you lied to me.”

  “I never lied. You never asked.”

  “Is this funny to you? You think you’re being clever?”

  “I haven’t done anything you haven’t. You’re hiding your family from me. I’m betting the other girls you’ve seen, they woulda met your parents by now, right? You wouldn’t be taking them to random spots where you know your relatives won’t be ’cause they’re busy churchifying.”

  “That’s not . . . true.” But the fact that he could barely get that word out proved otherwise.

  “We’ve both been hiding things, so don’t pretend no different. At least I’m being honest.”

  He gave a hostile laugh. “You’re honest about your dishonesty. That’s wonderful.”

  “I don’t need to explain myself to you.” She stepped back and put a hand on the pie dish. Mockingly sweet, she asked, “Do you still want some pie, or maybe you’ve already had what you wanted and now you can go?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not the one in the wrong here.”

  “In the wrong?” The more horrified he looked, the angrier she grew. “In the wrong? That’s where I live, Lucius! Welcome to The Wrong! That’s how some of us live, believe it or not!” She stepped forward and swung, hitting him in the chest with the flat of her hand. He stumbled back, and as she pulled her hand back a second time he yelled at her to stop, and she froze there in that pose while he backed up again.

  Another step and he opened the door.

  She was alone and crying hard when the toilet flushed and Sage walked in asking for some dessert.

  It had taken him three whole weeks to return. Early March and she was in the front yard planting lilies—leftovers from her employer, who had bought too many. Her knees were damp through her long skirt when she leaned back and saw him. Late on another Sunday afternoon, he wore his finest once again—a gray plaid sport coat over black pants and shoes that winked at her—having wandered here after thanking God for His many blessings.

  “What do you want?” she said, standing up and
brushing dirt from her hands.

  “I wanted to see how you were.”

  “I’m fine—why wouldn’t I be? You think I’ve fallen apart without you?”

  Sage was inside. She had tried to talk him into planting with her, but his earlier obsession with digging and shovels had been mysteriously replaced with an equal passion for sweeping and mopping, which he was happily doing while her mother prepared a stew.

  “I wanted to say I was sorry,” he said. “For reacting the way I did.”

  She wielded silence like a weapon.

  “I was surprised. I think I had a right to be.”

  More silence. Each seemed afraid of what the other might say or do, and equally if not more afraid of what they themselves would say or do.

  “When were you planning to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. You talked a lot about how much you love playing with your niece and nephew. I thought maybe you wouldn’t be so against the idea once you found out.”

  “Nieces and nephews are different from . . . adopting someone.”

  That word, so hoped for as to be forbidden, was strangely thrilling to hear spoken aloud. As if by acknowledging that the word even existed, he opened the door to the possibility.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner. But I knew you’d be done with me.”

  He motioned to the three wooden steps. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Those fine britches will mind it. Steps are dirty.”

  He sat down anyway. As someone who laundered and folded clothes so many hours a day, the sight of such slacks on a step like that offended her, though she was glad he wasn’t running away this time.

  “Where’s the father?” he asked.

  “Very far away. He ran off once it happened.”

  “Do you know where to?”

  “Chicago. But I don’t care.”

  “He wasn’t that important to you?”

  She didn’t care for the implication. “He was, once. But he made some bad choices. Him leaving was good in a way. I haven’t heard from him in years. I certainly don’t want to.”

  She sat beside him. They were quiet for a while. She’d noticed this about him, that he could be so calm, that he didn’t feel that nervous or boastful need to fill all available space with himself the way other men did.

  “So is he named Sage because he’s wise or because he adds flavor to life?”

  “Because it’s easy to yell,” she laughed.

  “I didn’t really get a chance to meet him last time. Is he here?”

  “Wouldn’t be nowhere else. Hold on.”

  A minute later she’d coaxed the boy outside, though this time she made sure he was wearing shoes first. He was still holding his little broom, which her mother had woven herself.

  “Hi there,” Lucius said, standing now.

  “Say hello, Sage.”

  “Hello.”

  “What do you have there?”

  “My broom.”

  “You like to sweep?”

  “I love to sweep.” To demonstrate, he began sweeping the front walkway.

  “He’s real cute,” Lucius told her. “Has your smile.”

  She realized she was hugging her own arms then, aching over how tantalizingly close Lucius seemed, and how far away he was at risk of becoming.

  He would tell her weeks later that, when he had first seen Sage in her kitchen, seconds after he’d been inside of her, he had felt in a way that he was looking at his future. The preacher’s son had already moved on to guilt for what he had done, and he’d seen in Sage a personification of his lust, the natural result, as if Sage were his own boy and time had merely sped up. He would tell her this, admitting it made no sense, but he said it had been God’s way of talking to him, explaining that actions have consequences, and even more importantly they have reasons, which aren’t always understandable at the time. She would listen to this explanation from him, thinking it odd, as if she and her son were mere vessels for the Lord’s cosmic conversation with him, but if it’s how he made his peace with things, she could accept it.

  Sage seemed so lost in sweeping that he seemed to have forgotten the adults behind him.

  Lucius said, “Maybe next Sunday we could take him to that new Disney movie, Cinderella.” About a poor girl turned into a princess, she’d heard.

  “Don’t say sweet things you don’t mean. Don’t be stringing no girl along.”

  “I’m not stringing you along. But . . . Do you have any other secrets I should know about?”

  Which would have been the time to answer honestly, to correct what she’d said about Jeremiah being in Chicago, but that had been at least partially true, hadn’t it, as Jeremiah’s people had fled there after his trial? Right then she’d felt surrounded by the many kinds of pain that truth can inflict, yet she felt like she had—miraculously, briefly—been spared that pain, and she was too scared to allow it any closer.

  So she’d grinned, sly, knowing what it could do to him. “None I feel like telling you about right now.”

  That had been more than a year ago.

  And tonight, the very rare evening when she was not at home but had been out at a friend’s house, getting a rare glimpse of what it was like to not already have children, playing bid whist with girls she’d known for years, a call from a neighbor came, saying there was a ruckus at her house and she needed to hurry back home.

  She hadn’t even entered the house yet when she saw through the open door the two Negro policemen talking to her mother, a notebook on one of their laps, and Sage holding a small shiny badge in his hands, and her heart sank as she realized that the time for telling Lucius those other secrets had come.

  21

  “MY BROTHERS,” THE Grand Wizard intoned, “we must discuss an urgent matter.”

  Dale’s view through his new hood was not clear, and as he wasn’t the tallest man in this Klavern he could only occasionally view through the spires of his brothers’ pointy hoods the head of the purple-garbed Grand Wizard.

  Dale had come to the basement of this Congregationalist church with profoundly mixed emotions. Per Rake’s instructions, he had not talked to anyone about what happened in Coventry. He hadn’t overheard any talk about the murder, other than some of Irons’s former coworkers expressing their shock at his death. No one from the Klavern had approached him, but that made him even more nervous, especially now.

  “A matter that may actually divide us good Christian men,” the Grand Wizard continued from the stage. He sure had a way of dragging things out, taking long pauses for effect.

  This was the local Klavern’s first gathering in months. Dale recalled when they had met monthly, but after the Georgia Bureau had cracked down on some of the more reckless branches, a chill had set in. A meeting was supposed to have occurred last month but was called off, either due to illness or schedules, which had struck him as both laughable and infuriating: this was war, so who gave a damn if some important poo-bah had a sore throat or someone’s wife had a birthday that night? What a sad outfit the Klan had become—and here in Atlanta, where it all started, the imperial City of the Invisible Empire!

  This was the reason he’d been so eager to take that night ride in Coventry, even against a white man under odd circumstances. Something needed to be done, goddammit, and it was finally happening: this meeting was overseen by the Grand Wizard himself, overseer of the entire KKK in Georgia. This meeting wasn’t a full Klonkave with Klansmen from all over the state, but still, Dale was glad the Grand Wizard was finally taking the events in Hanford Park seriously.

  The Grand Wizard stood alone on the Sacred Altar, and positioned around him at their proper stations were several officers in their resplendent satin finery: the red-caped Night Hawk (security), the blue-robed Kludd (chaplain), the golden Klaliff (vice president). The crimson-bedecked Kladd, or conductor, a building contractor who lived only a mile from Dale, had called the session to order but now deferred to the Grand Wizard.

  “A matter that may
in fact expose a rift between us, one that we must address lest it widen into a chasm that destroys us.”

  Oh no. Dale felt in his gut what was coming.

  “Some of you have already heard, but for those of you who haven’t”—and here he paused yet again, longer than he needed to, so long Dale felt even more certain that this was an elaborate production to expose him, to force him to come forward—“last week there was an unsanctioned ride in Coventry.”

  Unsanctioned. His fears were right: Whitehouse was not really with the Klan at all; he’d set Dale up, but why? Or perhaps he was with the Klan but was doing things his own way, forming some splinter group that had tired of the larger organization’s dithering, in which case Dale needed to keep quiet lest he become a casualty in this unexpected civil war.

  The penalty for betraying the Klan, he’d always been taught, was death at the hands of another brother. He’d been trying to help all along, but everything had gotten so mixed up.

  “The target was a good, Christian, white man of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Yet three men wearing the holy uniform attacked him, and very nearly killed him. Before they could finish the job, a bystander stepped forward and fired at the Klansmen, killing one of them.”

  In addition to fear, Dale felt anger, a sense of unjust persecution. If his beating of Letcher had led another Klavern to beat up the black man in Hanford Park, one hand washing the other, then the men in this Klavern should be happy about what he’d done. They clearly weren’t. That argued that the two attacks might not be related after all.

  He had persuaded Mott not to come tonight, the reason being that shoulder injury. Mott had needed five stitches and sported a thick bandage on his shoulder, but he’d been sure to wear dark shirts every day and had done his best to act normal, complaining about a pulled muscle whenever someone noticed him holding it funny. Hopefully no one would connect his bum shoulder to the night Irons was killed.