Fat Lightning Read Free Page B

and Nancy never tried very hard to get him back. He joined the Army after they filed for divorce, just in time for Viet Nam, and she gave up the apartment to live with a girlfriend near the campus. Nancy typed the rest of “Fair Chance” in four months in the back bedroom of her shared place in the Fan District. Buddy wrote her once from Fort Polk, Louisiana. She didn’t write him back.
    She worked up the nerve to ask one of her younger, less-intimidating professors to take a look at her novel. He kept it for three months, then told her that it was “very interesting,” but that it started slowly and seemed not to go anywhere in particular. To Nancy, that seemed to pretty much cover things, but he said he thought it could be helped if it were written from the daughter’s point of view.
    So Nancy rewrote “Fair Chance,” trying to “punch it up a bit” without really knowing how to, retelling the story through the eyes of a young girl not unlike her youngest sister, Candy.
    This time, she got a list of regional publishers and started writing them, one at a time. The first one sent it back three months later with a letter that started “Dear Writer.” “See,” said Marilou, “they know you’re a writer.” The second one lost it. The third one actually sent a two-paragraph explanation of why “Fair Chance” was being rejected, which Nancy might have mistaken for progress if the letter hadn’t noted that the story might best be told from the viewpoint of an omniscient observer.
    â€œYou know,” said Marilou, two years younger and the second oldest, one Sunday when Nancy was having dinner with her family, “this novel of yours reminds me of that old homing pigeon Candy used to have. No matter how far away you sent the fucker, it’d always find its way home.”
    Suzanne tried to chastise Marilou, but everybody broke up, even Nancy. From then on, “Fair Chance” was known only as the homing novel.
    Being the oldest, Nancy always felt guilty for setting what Pat had warned her once was a Bad Example for the rest. For years after Buddy and she got married and then slogged toward divorce court, she would try to impress Marilou and Candy and Robbie with how stupid they’d be to follow her sorry example. Whenever Robbie would get caught skipping school or Candy would get a “C,” she could almost feel Suzanne and Pat blaming her. It was a great relief to Nancy when the other three “buckled down,” more or less, even went to college and graduated, after which they hounded her to finish school.
    That’s OK, she thought. Better nagging than nagging guilt.
    That day, turning off Route 17 onto the semicircular road that connected Monacan to the rest of the world, Nancy could only wonder what came next. She could find some solace in the fact that her husband had done something spontaneous for the first time in recent memory. She hoped that this was a good thing.
    â€œWe’re going on an adventure, Wade,” she whispered to their son as she picked him up out of the back seat in Sam’s parents’ driveway. “Daddy’s taking us on an adventure.”

CHAPTER THREE
    Dreamed that dream again last night, where I was eating fat lightning. It tasted salty as Smithfield ham, but bitter as gall, like when I used to bite down on the pencil in grade school and give it a little chew, and then Miss Watkins would make fun of me in front of class, the old bitch.
    I wake up with a sourness in my mouth, thirsty like I’ve really been gnawing on wood instead of just dreaming about it, and my jaw hurts from chewing in my sleep. Funny thing is, it makes me want to get right up and eat something salty, bad as that fat lightning tastes in my sleep. I been eating salt herring and fatback for breakfast. And, you know, when I pick up a piece of fat lightning when I’m fixing to use it to start a fire, I look at