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“Good,” Butch said, munching.
“Yes. Excellent. Did you have dreams from that stuff we breathed in, Butchie?”
“Nope.” He considered. “At least not that I remember. But look at this.”
He picked up his pad and flipped past the pictures he’d drawn during our evenings—the usual sketches and caricatures, including one of me with a big grin on my balloon head, flipping flapjacks in a skillet. Near the back he stopped and held the pad up to me. It was our young visitor from the previous night: blond hair, vest, khaki pants, shoulder bag. It was no caricature; it was that man (might as well call him that) to the life… with one exception. Butch had filled his eyes with stars.
“Holy shit, that’s terrific,” I said. “How long have you been up, anyway?”
“About an hour. I did that in twenty minutes. I just knew what to do. Like it was already there. Never changed a single line. Crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” I agreed.
I thought of telling him I’d dreamed about a burning barn. It had been incredibly vivid. I had tried several different ways to get into a story about a freak storm I’d been playing with for quite awhile. Years, actually; it had originally occurred to me when I’d been about the age my son was now. I’d try this character, then that character, then some overview of the town where I wanted to set the thing; once I even tried kicking things off with a weather bulletin.
Nothing worked. I felt like a guy trying to open a safe when he’s forgotten the combination. Then, this morning, courtesy of my dream, I saw a bolt of lightning hitting a barn. I saw the weathervane—a rooster—turn red with the heat as fingers of fire spread down the barn’s roof. I thought everything else would follow. No; I knew it.
I picked up the thing that looked like a spectacle case from where we’d left it the previous night and tossed it from hand to hand. “This did it,” I said, then tossed it to Butch.
He caught it and said, “Sure. What else?”
All that was over forty years ago, but the passage of time has never caused me to believe my recollection of that night is faulty. Doubt has never crept in and the pitchers have never excaped my memory.
Butch remembered it as well as I did: Ylla, the light, passing out, the young man, the spectacle case. That case, so far as I know, is still in the cabin. We went out there a few more Novembers before Butch headed west, and each took a turn blowing on the embossed wave, but the case never opened for us again. Nor will it open for anyone else, I’m sure. Unless someone has stolen it—and why would they?—it’s still on the mantel of the fireplace, where Butch put it the last time we were there.
The final thing Butch said to me before we left the cabin that day was that he didn’t want to draw in his pad anymore, at least not for awhile. “I want to paint,” he said. “I have a thousand ideas.”
I had only one—the burning barn that became the first scene in The Lightning Storm—but I felt sure others would follow. The door was open. All I had to do was walk through it.
Sometimes I’m haunted by the idea that I’m a fake. Before he died, Butch said the same in several interviews.
Is that surprising? I don’t think so. We were one thing when we went into the woods in the fall of 1978; we were something else ever after. We became what we became. I suppose the question has to do with talent—was it in us, or was it something given to us like a box of candy, because we saved Ylla’s life? Could we be proud of what we accomplished, kind of a lifting-up-by-the-bootstraps deal, or were we just a pair of poseurs, taking credit for what we never would have had if not for that night?
What the fuck is talent, anyway? I ask myself that question sometimes while I’m shaving, or—in the old book-promotion days—while waiting to go on television and sell my latest glut of make-believe, or when I’m watering my late wife’s daylilies. Especially then. What is it, really? Why would I be chosen when so many others try so hard and would give anything to be chosen? Why are there so few at the top of the pyramid? Talent is supposed to be the answer, but where does it come from and how does it grow? Why does it grow?
Well, I tell myself, we call it a gift and we call ourselves gifted, but gifts are never really earned, are they? Only given. Talent is grace made visible.
The young man said nothing can give you what isn’t already there. This is axiomatic. I hold onto that.
Of course, he also said he felt sorry for us.
3
Pop’s story ended there. Maybe he lost interest in his fantasy version of that hunting trip in 1978, but I don’t think so. Those last few lines felt like a climax to me.
I pulled a proof copy of The Lightning Storm from the shelf over his desk, maybe the same one I’d looked at not long after my mother’s death.
A ragged bolt of lightning struck the barn. It hit with a hollow bang, like the report of a shotgun muffled in a blanket. Jack barely had time to register it before the follow-thunder bellowed. He saw the weathervane—an iron rooster—turn red with the heat and begin spinning even as it sagged and runnels of fire spread down the barn’s roof.
It didn’t match the copy in the hand-written document exactly, but it was close. And better, I thought.
Which means nothing, I told myself. He held onto those lines, that image, because it was good… or good enough. That’s all it means.
I thought of my mother’s call that day in November of ’78. That was a lot of years ago, but I was clear on the first thing she said: Something happened to your father while they were on their hunting trip… and to Butch. She didn’t want me to come home right away, she said, because both of them were all right. But that weekend, for sure. She said they claimed to have gotten lost, although both of them knew the 30-Mile too well for that to happen.
“Like the back of their hand,” I murmured. “That’s what she said. But…”
I went back to Pop’s manuscript.
