Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [81]
Lightning, like love, is never ruled by logic. Accidents happen, and they always will. Gary Hallet is personally acquainted with two men who’ve been hit by lightning and have lived to tell the tale, and that’s who he’s been thinking about as he navigates the Long Island Expressway at rush hour, then tries to find his way through a maze of suburban streets, passing the Y field when he makes a wrong turn off the Turnpike. Gary went to school with one of these survivors, a boy who was only seventeen at the time he was hit, and it messed up his life from that day on. He walked out of his house, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled out in the driveway, staring up at the indigo sky. The fireball had passed right through him, and his hands were as charred as a grilled steak. He heard a clattering, like keys being jangled or somebody drumming, and it took a while for him to realize that he was shaking so hard the sound he was hearing was being made by his bones as they hit against the asphalt.
This fellow graduated from high school the same year Gary did, but only because the teachers let him pass through his courses out of kindness. He’d been a terrific shortstop and was hoping for a try at the minors, but now he was too nervous for that. He would no longer play baseball out on the field. Too much open space. Too much of a chance he’d be the tallest thing around if lightning should decide to strike twice. That was the end for him; he wound up working in a movie theater, selling tickets and sweeping up popcorn and refusing to give any patrons their money back if they didn’t like the film they’d paid to see.
The other guy who was hit was even more affected; lightning changed his life and every single thing about it. It lifted him up, right off his feet, and spun him around, and by the time it set him back on the ground, he was ready for just about anything. This man was Gary’s grandfather, Sonny, and he spoke about being struck by what he called “the white snake” every single day until the day he died, two years ago, at the age of ninety-three. Long before Gary had ever come to live with him, Sonny had been out in the yard where the cottonwoods grew, and he’d been so drunk he didn’t notice the oncoming storm. Being drunk was his natural state at that point. He couldn’t recall what it felt like to be sober, and that alone was enough of a reason for him to figure he’d better go on avoiding it, at least until they put him in his grave. Maybe then he’d consider abstinence; but only if a good foot of dirt had been shoveled on top of him, to keep him in the ground and out of the package store over on Speedway.
“There I was,” he told Gary, “minding my own business, when the sky came down and slapped me.”
It slapped him and tossed him into the clouds, and for a second he felt he might never come back to earth. He got hit with enough voltage for his clothes to be burned to ashes as he wore them, and if he hadn’t had the presence of mind to jump into the scummy green pond where he kept two pet ducks, he’d have burned up alive. His eyebrows never grew back, and he never again had to shave, but after that day he never had a drink again. Not a single shot of whiskey. Not one short, cold beer. Sonny Hallet stuck to coffee, never less than two pots of thick, black stuff a day, and because of this he was ready, willing, and able to take Gary in when his parents couldn’t care for him any longer.
Gary’s parents were well intentioned, but young and addicted to trouble and alcohol; they both ended up dead long before they should have. Gary’s mother had been gone for a year when the news came through about his father, and that very day Sonny walked into the courthouse downtown and announced to the county clerk that his son and daughter-in-law had killed themselves—which was more or less the truth, if you consider a drinking-related death a suicide—and that he wished to become Gary’s legal guardian.
As Gary drives through