by Bobbie Pyron
Grandpa steered the truck through the crowded parking lot. All kinds of people — some Nate recognized, some he didn’t — strolled and skipped and raced to the park. Blankets and picnic baskets and small children hung from arms.
“Over here!” someone shouted. “Over here, Mr. Harlow!”
“That’s Coach Hull from my school,” Nate gasped.
Coach Hull trotted over to the truck. He grinned through the car window. “We’ve saved VIP parking right in front for the guest of honor. We don’t want Nate walking all the way across the parking lot and getting struck by lightning again,” he said, winking.
“Don’t think that’s too likely,” Grandpa said. Nate made a mental note to ask Gen about those odds.
Grandpa pulled Alfred, the old green truck, into the parking space that was sure enough marked VIP PARKING.
He shut off the engine and patted Nate on the knee. “You look like you’re about to be shot,” he said. “It’ll be fine. All these folks are here because of you.”
“Yeah, but … but why?” Nate asked. “Most of these people don’t know me well enough to say boo to.”
Grandpa pushed open the truck door. “Spunk up, boy. It’ll be fine.”
Nate stepped out of the safety of the truck cab and eyed the sky nervously. His grandfather took his bandaged hand in his own. “It’s okay, Nate. I won’t let anything hurt you.”
Nate was about to say that even his grandfather couldn’t control the heavens when he felt a warm surge of energy pass from his hand to his grandfather’s.
Grandpa gave Nate’s hand a careful squeeze. “Let’s go enjoy the fish fry.”
More people than he could ever remember seeing in his entire life covered the green grass of the park and the playing fields. Children raced back and forth playing tag and ambushing the unsuspecting with water pistols. Blankets and beach towels formed a giant patchwork quilt under the magnolias, live oaks, and palm trees.
And the most wonderful smells rode the salty air from the field house. “Mmmm,” Nate said, closing his eyes and smiling. “Hush puppies.” He could just taste one of those wondrous, golden, deep fat–fried balls of cornmeal, egg, chopped celery, and onion creating a symphony of joy in his mouth.
Suddenly, two squealing, bouncing things grabbed Nate’s hands. “He’s here! He’s here!” Ruth and Rebecca nearly turned inside out with excitement.
Ruthie scaled his bony legs and clamped her arms around his neck, tight as a tick. “You’re here, you’re finally here!” She hollered so loud that, just for a moment, Nate purely wished his hearing hadn’t come back.
Rebecca tugged on Grandpa’s hand. “Mr. Harlow,” she said, “you have to see all the food. Daddy says the folks of the church have outdone themselves and glory.”
And indeed they had. Table after table groaned under the weight of shrimp casseroles, crab cakes, pots of gumbo, pyramids of sweet corn that would put the pharaohs to shame, buckets of coleslaw, baked beans, three-bean salad, potato salad, pans of fried okra, oyster pies, heaps and heaps of corn bread and biscuits, and, of course, mounds of perfect, golden hush puppies. Nate nearly swooned.
“Well, sound the trumpets of Jerusalem,” a big voice boomed. Reverend Beam waved to Nate and his grandpa from a giant black vat. “Come on over and give me a hand, Jonah,” he called to Grandpa.
Planks of fish and balls of hush puppy dough sizzled and swam in the fry grease. The reverend threw an arm around Nate’s shoulders and spread the other arm wide. “Folks as far as the eye can see,” he said. “Hungry folks, all more than willing to pay six dollars a plate to help you pay your hospital bills.”
“I’d never have believed it,” Grandpa said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think there was this many people in all of Paradise Beach.”
“Oh, there’s lots more people here than just Paradise Beach folks,” Rabbi Levine said as he lifted platters of fish and hush puppies. “I know for a fact some have come all the way from Port Saint Joe, Apalachicola, Eastpoint, and as far away as Wewahitchka.”
Reverend Beam narrowed his eyes and nodded his head. “And they’re all hungry, praise the Lord.” He handed Grandpa an apron. “Don’t think you’re going to have to worry about selling your boat, Jonah,” the reverend said in a low, confidential voice. “Now tie this apron on and help me round up the fish and puppies. We’ve got the multitudes to feed.”
Grandpa wiped at a suspiciously wet eye.
“Nate, Gen’s waiting for you over there in the shade. She’s serving up the sweet tea and lemonade. I’m sure she’d like your company.”
Sure enough, in the generous shade of the town’s oldest live oak tree stood Gen, stiff as a log in a starched white dress. A pair of yellow rubber gloves reached all the way up to her elbows. She took the money from the thirsty like it was a long-dead fish. She handed the customers their drinks carefully so as not to touch them.
Nate stepped behind the table. “Hey,” he said. “Thanks for doing this.”
A small shudder ran through Gen. “It’s bad enough I have to wear a dress when it’s not Sunday.” She took a particularly greasy dollar bill from a runny-nosed boy. “But I have to almost touch all these people.”
“I’m sorry,” Nate mumbled.
“I wouldn’t do it for anybody else,” Gen said.
“I know. Thanks,” he said. “Really.”
Gen wiped at a trickle of sweat on her forehead. Nate knew for a fact that Gen purely hated to sweat. Still, she smiled with one half of her mouth. “You know what they say.”
“Weirdos and losers stick together,” Nate said with a grin.
“Through thick and through thin, amen,” they said together, laughing.
Just then, Ricky Sands and his little brother, Brandon, stepped up to buy their drinks. Nate busied himself pouring lemonade into cups.
“Can I see it?” little Brandon asked.
Nate looked from Brandon to Ricky. Ricky shrugged.
“See what?”
“Where you got hit by lightning.”
Nate touched the bandages on his hand. “It’s all wrapped up right now.”
But little Brandon was not a boy to take no for an answer. “Well, shoot. Can I touch it then?”
Nate’s face reddened beneath a plague of freckles.
“The kids all say it’s a miracle,” Brandon explained. “It must be like magic, right Ricky? Like superpowers?” The boy looked up at Nate with wide eyes. “Do you got superpowers now?”
Nate fiddled with a cup. “I wasn’t really hit directly by the lightning.”
“Yeah, but —”
“Cut it out, Brandon,” Ricky said. “He was just lucky.”
“Yeah, but —”
Ricky grabbed the back of the little boy’s shirt. “Sorry,” Ricky said to Nate as he dragged his brother away. Nate about dropped the cup of lemonade in his hand. Ricky Sands said sorry to him?
Gen laughed. “So now you’re the miracle kid,” she said. “Do you feel like a miracle, Nate?”
He shook his head. “I never in a million years thought Ricky would apologize to me. That’s a true miracle.”
As the dusky shadows stretched long across the grassy fields and as the seagulls fussed and fought at the overflowing garbage cans, Councilman Lamprey climbed up on the slapdash stage. A microphone squealed in his hands. He cleared his throat.
“I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight to help one of our own in need. And I want to especially thank all the good folks who aren’t even from Paradise Beach for coming all this way.”
Applause and whistles scattered the gulls.
“I always say we may not have the big fancy high-rises and resorts that some of the other beach towns have, but fishing folks look after each other.”
“Amen to that,” someone called out.
“Course, I wouldn’t mind having some of that money all those tourists bring,” Councilman Lamprey said with a wink.
“Before we start the football game, I’d like to
invite our esteemed mayor to say a word or two.” The councilman turned to a grizzled black Labrador retriever sitting at the bottom of the steps. “Mayor Barnacle Bill, would you please come up here?”
The dog trotted up the wooden steps, wagging his slightly bent tail. A red bandanna with the word MAYOR hung around his neck, along with an old dog collar.
“Would you care to speak a word or two?” Councilman Lamprey held the microphone down to the mayor’s silver muzzle.
“Roof! Roo-roo-roof!” barked the mayor.
Everyone cheered. The mayor wagged his tail. Councilman Lamprey popped a hush puppy in the dog’s mouth.
Coach Hull set about organizing a flag football game between a bunch of the kids from Nate’s school and kids from their biggest rival, St. Mary’s Catholic School.
After the teams had been picked, Reverend Beam stepped to the center of the field and held up his hands. Silence fell across the well-fed crowd. “I want to thank each and every one of you for coming out this fine evening to help our good friends and neighbors, Nate and Jonah Harlow.” A wide plank of sunlight broke through the sunset and settled on the reverend’s shoulders. “Now I know our little town hasn’t had much to celebrate in a long while. What with the rerouting of the interstate and that hurricane year before last, we’ve seen some tough times. I reckon it’s seemed like good luck has passed us by, like the tourists.”
Heads nodded. Someone hollered, “You got that right.”
“It’s all them astronauts flying around up there,” old man Marler called out.
In a lower voice, the reverend said, “But hard times bring out the best in folks. And here we all are.”
Reverend Beam spread his arms wide, his big voice rising. “And then the miraculous happens: One of our very own gets struck by lightning — right out of the clear blue sky, I might add — and lives. That, my friends and neighbors, is something to celebrate!”
“Everyone seems to forget it wasn’t a direct hit,” Gen muttered.
The reverend smiled and turned to Nate and Gen, lounging on the sidelines. “I think it only fitting that Nate be the one to call the coin toss to see who gets the kickoff.”
Nate suddenly felt cold all over. His head pounded.
The reverend continued, “And I’d like Nate’s best friend, my lovely daughter Genesis Magnolia Beam, to toss the coin.”
Gen shook her head frantically.
The reverend reached down for them. “Come on up, you two,” he said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Despite the fact that Nate did not want to cause Ricky’s team to lose, and the last thing Gen wanted was a million eyes watching her, when the good Reverend Beam reaches his mighty hands down and calls you forth, all you can do is go.
“Okay, boys,” Coach Hull said. “Normally one of you’d pick heads or tails. But this time, Nate will pick.” Coach sighed and shook his head. “Ricky, if by some miracle Nate actually wins the coin toss, our team will get to kick off. If not, well …” He patted Ricky’s shoulder and said under his breath, “Sorry, son.”
Coach turned to Nate and Gen. “Ready?”
The two friends stood in the middle of that field, the last of the sun’s rays shining wide upon them. Nate looked nervously at the clouds gathering out over the Gulf.
Gen picked at her eyebrow. “Ready, Nate?”
Nate was purely not ready. He glanced across the field, his eyes searching and then finding his grandfather. His grandfather gave him a thumbs-up and a weak smile.
“You can do it, Nate!” Miss Trundle called.
He figured he might as well get this public humiliation over with. He touched the rabbit’s foot in his pocket and nodded. “Flip it,” he said.
Genesis Beam was probably the best coin flipper in all of Franklin County. The coin flipped end over end over end, higher and higher toward the sky. When it reached its highest point and hung there, suspended as if by wings, Nate took a deep breath.
Then the strangest feeling washed over him: a warm, glowing certainty like he’d never felt before. It was not frightening. It was true.
“Heads,” he called out with all the confidence he had never felt in his eleven years and one week on this earth. “It’ll be heads!”
A hush fell over the crowd as Gen caught the coin and slapped it on the back of her hand.
Just like she had done a hundred million times before.
But this time, when Gen lifted the hand covering the coin, she gasped and her mouth fell open. Then it closed and opened again, like a stranded fish.
“What’s wrong with that weirdo?” someone on the other team muttered.
“Gen,” hissed Nate. “Make the call.”
She held out her trembling hand for Coach and the good Reverend Beam and all the world to see. “Heads,” she called out. “It’s heads!”
Ricky Sands whooped. He and everyone else on the team grabbed Nate and hoisted him into the air like he’d just single-handedly won the football game.
A curious wind off the Gulf stirred the wind chimes in the tall pine next to Mr. Wood’s trailer.
The wind carried the whoops and hollers from the crowd at the fish fry and the heave and sigh of the waves upon the shore. Toots and Monk, listening with their oversize Chihuahua ears, heard the splash of a pelican diving beneath the waves to catch its own supper.
And there. Just there. The faint thrum and beat of a hundred flippers stroking and surging their way — many miles away — through the green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The flippers belonged to loggerhead turtles. Some turtles were returning to the white sand beaches of their birth for the first time to lay their eggs. These turtles were young at twenty years of age. Other turtles had returned many times before.
Young or ancient, it didn’t matter. The moon and the currents and an agreement older than time pulled them to the sugared dunes of Paradise Beach, where they would pull themselves upon the shore, dig their nests, lay their eggs, and, by the light of the full moon, return to the sea.
Monday morning found Nate fixing his own breakfast and telling himself to hurry up or he’d miss the bus.
“Sorry, boy,” his grandpa had said the night before as he packed his cooler for the next day. “I got so many fishing trips lined up this week, I have to be out the door before sunup every blessed day.” Grandpa bustled around the little trailer, smiling in a way Nate hadn’t seen in a long time. “Don’t know why my luck’s changed, but I got to get while the getting is good! Got to ride this wave right into red snapper season,” he said, pretending to ride the surfboard of his youth.
Nate popped two slices of bread into the toaster. He watched the appliance with an eagle eye while he stirred powdered cocoa into his milk. Yes, the toaster had been reliable lately, but he reckoned that wouldn’t last.
Ding! Both pieces of toast sailed into the air and landed neatly, side by side, on the paper towel. The toast was truly wondrous in its perfection.
“Jeez Louise,” Nate breathed. “Did you see that, Grandpa?” He turned to the couch, grinning. But of course, his grandpa had been gone for hours.
“I’m telling you, Gen,” Nate said as the school bus bumped along the sandy road. “It was like that toaster had it all planned out. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had buttered itself and opened the jelly jar.”
Gen looked up from her book on theoretical physics and sighed. “Nathaniel, a toaster cannot have a plan because a toaster does not have a brain.” She shook her head and poked her nose back into the book. She’d just started the chapter on chaos theory and found it … well, disturbing.
“I know that. I’m just telling you what I saw is all. They landed right next to each other, neat as you please. What do you think the odds are of that?” He poked her in the ribs with his elbow.
Not looking up from her book, Gen said, “It’s just like flipping a coin. If you do it enough times, the odds are in your favor. If the toast flies out of the toaster, as you claim, enough times, odds are they will
land side by side one of those times.”
Nate slumped in his seat and picked at the stuffing oozing from a tear in the vinyl. “It’s not the same at all,” he mumbled. “I knew that coin was going to land on heads. I felt it for a fact.”
The bus pulled up to the entrance of Liza P. Woods Elementary. The familiar dread Nate always felt when he got to school lodged in his stomach like cold, leftover grits.
Gen gathered her books and pushed her glasses up on her nose. She watched the chaos of running, screaming, laughing, crying kids and sighed. She reached up to pluck at an eyebrow, then popped a rubber band on her wrist instead — Mrs. Beam’s latest attempt to preserve Gen’s eyebrows. Nate pulled the sleeve down on his bandaged hand and arm.
Gen blinked up at him. “Okay, it’s your first day back. Are you ready?”
“I guess,” he said, and followed his friend off the bus. He knew he’d feel a whole lot better about things if he could still wear his favorite pair of red tennis shoes, but at least he had his lucky rabbit’s foot.
“See you back here after school,” she said, like she always did, something that gave him comfort.
A spitball sailed through the air and landed in her hair. Nate plucked it out.
He watched as she walked down the long corridor, through the gauntlet of kids who laughed at and taunted her. Her backpack full of books hung almost to the backs of her knees. She was the only kid in school who had ironed creases in her jeans and the face of Albert Einstein on her backpack. For one single second, Nate wanted to run to catch up with her, to glare and holler at the kids who made her life at Liza P. Woods miserable.
It wasn’t any use trying to protect Gen, though. They were the same kids who made his life miserable too. The difference, Gen always said, was he cared what those kids thought and she did not. Easy for her to say, he thought as he turned and headed to the other end of the building, where his classroom waited for him. She had the whole big, messy, noisy love of the Beam family behind her.
Nate pulled open the door to room 311. The cold lump of dread shimmied in his stomach. He hunched his shoulders, rubbed his thumb over his lucky rabbit’s foot, and braced for the snickers and the eye rolling and the feet that would try to trip him up as he walked to his desk.