Three Strikes
Joe Baumann
“What would my superhero name be?” Charlie said. “Or would I be a villain?”
We were lying in opposite directions, faces next to each other, on the front porch of the house my parents had rented at Myrtle Beach, waiting for the rain to stop. The nubby heads of a pair of carpenter’s nails bit into the low slope of my skull, and I rocked back and forth so my view of the verandah’s defunct ceiling fan blurred. I wanted to feel the sharpness of the nails, pain that would distract me from the heat coming from Charlie, who wasn’t wearing a shirt, his nascent muscles—already growing strong and large at fifteen thanks to time spent plucking corn on his father’s small farm in Asheville—giving off the smell of suntan lotion and day-old salt water.
“You’d never be a villain,” I said. “You’re a good guy.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him lean up on one arm. Soon, his face loomed over mine: his hair was sun-bleached and long, curling at the ends. It framed him like a stylish mophead, its light tone a shocking contrast to the deep leather of his face.
“That’s awfully kind of you.” One of his hands floated in the air as though he didn’t know what to do with it. I wished for it to land on my chest, for his fingers to flutter against the fabric of my tank top like the little feelers of a butterfly, desiring, investigating, prying.
Before I could say anything, a shock of lightning ruptured the quiet storm. I felt it in my teeth, in my hamstrings, the heels of my feet, as though the porch itself had been hit. Through the open front window, I heard my father moan out: “Whoa.”
“That was close,” Charlie said. He looked down at me. His eyes were chocolate, like a pair of tiny bonbons, edible and smooth and dark. “I told you so.”
No more lightning came caterwauling down. As soon as the drip from the roof’s awning had dried up, Charlie hauled off down the front steps and waved for me to follow.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“The beach,” he said. Then, without waiting to see if I was actually coming, Charlie took off. I loved and hated that he knew I was there, following him like magnets were pulling me toward his sloping, twitchy back.
The lightning had been close; its crash had surrounded us in a blanket of sound and electricity, its point of origin indiscernible. But Charlie marched with indelible confidence, never once hesitating or looking back at me or reconsidering his route. His feet slapped through the sand in hard, staccato steps. Instead of sinking my feet into them, I followed off to the side, staring down at the pushed-out sand where his heels prodded away the grains.
When I saw it, my breath flung itself out like I was being crushed by a corset. Charlie stopped, too, but he didn’t appear to have been vacuumed out as I had. The thing—fulgurite, I would later learn—looked like a plume of smoke frozen in time, angling up out of the beach like a bowie knife plunged cockeyed into the sand. The side facing the ground was smooth and straight, while the skyward plane reminded me of the ridged back of a stegosaurus.
“Don’t,” Charlie said when I moved to approach it.
“Is it dangerous?”
“The sand. It’ll be too hot.”
Another thing I did not ask him about. He simply knew. Charlie always knew. He was charged with something I couldn’t touch or understand, like why I yearned to take his hand in mine when he held his arm out to keep me safe.
Charlie did not want me. That had been clear to me forever. He slept over at my house all the time, escaping his father and uncles when they played poker, smoked cigars, and drank too many heavy American beers, cans gathering in piles just like their betting chips. I had convinced my parents to buy me a set of bunk beds so Charlie and I both had a mattress to sleep on when he came over, and I let him choose whether he wanted the top or bottom. Every time, when we finally turned off the light and tucked under the top sheets, he would wait until he somehow knew I was drifting off before whispering my name. Then he would ask me about girls, inventing insane scenarios that, as an adult, I would realize were absurd in their adolescent boyish understanding of sex: “If you had to get stuck inside one girl in our class, who would it be?” “Which girl do you think would have sex with you the most times in a row?” “If you could make out with only three girls in our class for the rest of your life, who would they be?”
The questions were always about girls. Charlie’s eyes always followed girls, strangers in bikinis and long one-pieces who splashed into the surf at the beach, girls in Daisy Dukes walking past us as we left school. Marian Harper, the girl of his dreams, sat in front of him in math class, and her ass was the sole recipient of his attention, even when her gluteal region was obscured by the hard curve of her desk chair. When he got going on the subject—Marian or any other girl, attainable or otherwise, local or televised or projected on the big screen—I found myself zoning out into a glum haze. I imagined Charlie with these girls, his arm slung over their shoulders, fingers dangling with yearning toward their breasts. I saw the lascivious want in his pulsing mouth, the cock of his head and slide of his eyes when he managed to catch a flash of midriff, like a hound catching a whiff of raw beef or a shark sensing a drop of blood. And then my imaginations became more complicated and heated, simmering with his slippery body on top of a girl’s, his back straining, buttocks contracting. I could picture his toes, even, curled with effort. And as he talked, I nodded and agreed, adding a periodic uh-huh and mmm and yeah, man, while I drifted further and further away.
Charlie invited me—probably at his mother’s insistence, a kind of repayment for taking him to the beach—when his family went south for a vacation, all the way down to Louisiana for a plantation house tour.
“It’ll suck,” he said. “You can say no.”
Of course I didn’t say no.
The drive was long but expedited by his father’s disregard for speed limits except when his probably illegal radar detector started whirring like a broken droid from Star Wars. Then he’d hit the brakes and turn things into a game, offering a dollar bill to whoever sighted the cop car first. I was convinced the thing was broken because at least three-quarters of the time there was no Crown Victoria or whatever other bulky vehicle the local precinct had gussied up with lights and a crash bar. We made the drive to Edgard, Louisiana, in just over nine hours, squirting through blazing and glimmering New Orleans along I-10, crossing the gloopy Mississippi River.
Charlie’s parents booked a hotel suite in Boutte, a town whose main attraction appeared to be its Popeye’s Chicken. Boutte had that hard-scrabble, falling-down look of small towns on their way to full decline, evocative of tumbling newspapers and empty plastic cups rattling in gutters. The motel, the Southern Style Inn, was surprisingly clean, the lobby smelling of lemon, and not the sort emitted from a spray can. The woman behind the desk, with large boughs of curled hair and fire-red nails approximately half the length of her fingers, smiled and explained the suite’s features with a lilt and twang, as though she was singing a sad country song. We each received our own key card, and she gave me and Charlie a wink as we left the office.
The suite was two rooms: the bedroom, which Charlie’s parents would occupy, and the kitchenette-living room, where we were banished to the fold-out sofa sleeper. I remembered our hushed games of sex talk, the way my body sprung with hot blood when I pictured the things Charlie whispered. Would he do that again, when we were in such close quarters? What would his voice and breath be like so near my ear? Would he be able to sense the tingled arousal emanating from me like some pheromone-laced beacon? But when we turned out the lights, he yawned and rolled away from me, declaring that he was tired. But before he fell asleep, he did say, “It’s going to storm tomorrow.”
“It’s what?”
“Going to strike.”
“But your mom said the weather report was great.”
“I’m telling you. Just wait.”
I did wait, sleepless, Charlie and his warm body so close. His breath hummed in and out, and try as I might, I could not count enough of those exhalations to fall asleep.
The day was blazing, the sun a yolk boiled runny, its heat wavering on the horizon as we drove toward the plantation. Not a single cloud bleached the oceanic sky. Charlie’s mom, waving her hand in her face even though the air conditioning was on high, extolled the gorgeous weather, ignoring the hurricane-level humidity that had left us all with stinky armpits in the short trek from our room down to the car.
The plantation was sprawling, Doric columns holding up second-floor balconies. Attic windows peeking out from beneath the high, pitched roof like little cat eyes. The entire thing had been painted a stark white, including the shutters pinned back from the windows like butterfly wings skewered to a Styrofoam mount. We parked in a dug-out cul-de-sac at the edge of the property and trudged up the long, slithering drive, our eyes shielded from the sharp sun by our oversized sunglasses. But nothing could alleviate the heat.
I glanced at Charlie as we stepped onto the endless verandah, raising an eyebrow and looking back to the sky, still cloudless.
“Just wait,” he whispered.
I waited a long while. Charlie’s parents paid the suggested ten-dollars-per-person donation, and then we were whirled up and down spiral staircases, led through bedrooms and a library, the kitchen, the formal dining room set for twelve. The air conditioning here, like in the car, was blasting, and I started shivering from the crusty cool that descended on me when my sweat evaporated, leaving me feeling like a vegetable stuffed in a crisper. Our tour was comprised of Charlie, me, his parents, and a trio of chunky northerners with Minnesotan accents and blubbery bellies, their noses sharpened to a raw, sunburnt red. Charlie, of the entire assembly, seemed to be the only one who hadn’t been affected by the charring heat, his white t-shirt without ringlets of sweat anywhere, his back an untrammeled snowbank. I could see the rise of his shoulder blades through the fabric, the twitch of his rear deltoids. The night before, Charlie slept without a shirt on, and his skin gleamed like a statue where it was hit by the singular beam of moonlight that infiltrated through the curtain. I could see the shift and blip of every muscle in his arms when he twitched in his sleep.
We were dragged outside again to march across the grounds to the former slaves’ quarters, a series of squat shacks that, as our tour guide said, would have housed up to twenty people each, a number that seemed astronomical to me: each room was smaller than the main house’s little study.
Charlie held back from the rest of the group and cuffed my arm at the elbow. He pressed a finger to his lips and pointed to the sky, which was still an uninterrupted topaz.
“What?”
“I told you,” he said. He bared his teeth, mouth smiling as it stretched. “Villain. Ka-boom.”
And then it came, from nowhere: a thunderous crash, much louder than the one at the beach. The noise was jarring, and my vision blanked at the flash of it. Charlie’s mother, twenty feet ahead of us, leapt off the ground, her hands clutching at her chest when she gained her composure.
“Over there,” Charlie said, pointing toward one of the slave cabins. “Look.”
A thin gray line was rising into the sky, bisecting the cabin’s slanted roof. Before I could say anything, Charlie took off, laser-beaming his way around the side of the cabin. I chased after him. I could hear the tour group ignoring the pre-ordained route and following, too.
I nearly ran into Charlie, who stood just around the back of the claptrap house. A small copse of trees stood fifty feet away in a small marsh, bald cypresses dripping their curtains of vines toward the stagnant water. But bursting forth from the ground on its own, halfway between the rear of the house and the rest of the trees, was a single zebra-striped birch, its twin trunk rising like a dousing rod from the ground.
It was on fire.
Well, not on fire exactly. It was clearly the source of the smoke, but its wider trunk had been split by the lightning, a long surgical cut down the center of a torso. Inside, the tree’s core was filled with magma-like heat, fiery bile charring it from the inside out.
“Whoa,” I said.
Charlie stared, wordless. I sidled up next to him and glanced from the tree to him. His eyes, wide and glossy, reflected the warmth pouring out of the tree’s hellmouth gash. The heat reminded me of the time Charlie and I went camping, guests of a friend who vanished out of our lives when his father took a job in California. I spent most of the evening staring at the impressive fire my friend’s father had managed to build. Its smoke kept darting to my eyes, and Charlie told me that the best way to get the smoke to shift elsewhere was to chant, “Chasing rabbits, chasing rabbits, chasing rabbits” as your eyes were starting to water. I did it, and the breeze did shift, the smoke pulsing toward Charlie, who sat to my left. I watched his lips, which never moved. He invited the billow and char in, closing his eyes and letting the smoke wash over him. When the two of us shared a tent later, I could smell it on him. I told myself that he had sacrificed his own comfort for me, because this was the kind of thing that showed love.
For a moment, Charlie and I were alone, shoulder to shoulder, the only ones bearing witness to the tree’s immolation. I knew that his parents and the galumphing Midwesterners would find us soon enough.
“How long do you think it will burn?” I said.
Charlie didn’t reply. He stared, transfixed.
“I knew,” he said finally, his lips pursed, Cupid’s bow glossy. His mouth flickered with moisture, beads boiling at the close heat.
“Charlie.”
“I told you I knew.”
“Yes,” I said.
And then the others were there. I heard his mother gasp. The Midwesterners took pictures, one of them recording a video that would go viral. I’m in it for just a second at the beginning, my shoulder clipped off from the rest of me. Charlie is nowhere to be found, but I know exactly where he stood.
For two years, Charlie made no more proclamations. On days the weather report called for rain I would ask him during homeroom or chemistry class if lightning would hit somewhere nearby and he would give me a ragged smile and shake his head. I never knew if he was saying no or I don’t know.
On the cusp of senior year, he dragged me to a party at a neighboring farm, where this kid we knew, Jim Cauley—whom everyone called Gin, for whatever reason—was celebrating that his parents were out of town. We stood on his back porch, the party spilling into the yard that hadn’t been mowed in ages so that the St. Augustine grass licked at people’s kneecaps and caught on girls’ skirts. Gin didn’t want anyone going inside and leaving a mess behind; he stood guard all night, glaring at anyone who came close to the sliding doors leading into the kitchen. Kids peed in the tall grass, girls screeching and worrying about falling over as they squatted.
I lost Charlie after only an hour. I searched the clumped bodies from the porch rail but couldn’t see him. I leaned there, nursing a skunky beer. My mouth felt like pennies. The air swirled with sweetness and the sound of swishing stalks. I thought of rain, but there were no clouds in the sky.
I wanted to ask Charlie if lightning would strike, but he was gone.
He appeared on the porch at eleven o’clock on the dot, like a Cinderella who has forgotten about the end of Daylight Savings Time. His arm was slung over a girl I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Marian Harper or any of our classmates he had spent the summer fantasizing about while I twitched and silently moaned on the top bunk in my bedroom. This girl was short, her hair a blazing blonde even in the dark. Her eyes were huge, pupils dilated and inky. She smiled at me and took a sip from her plastic cup, then set it on the porch rail.
“This is Bailey,” Charlie said. His words were gummed up like he’d been chewing on saltwater taffy.
“Hi,” I said.
“This is my best friend, Ben.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, her voice prim like a member of the British royal family. Each word tilted toward the sky as it came out of her mouth. She held out a hand and I took it, not sure how hard to squeeze.
“We’re thinking about leaving. You?”
I looked at them. Charlie had given me a ride. The farm was a mile from his house, where my car was tucked in the driveway.
“No,” I said. “You go.”
“You sure?” Charlie stared at me, unblinking. I had to look away.
“Positive.”
He nodded and offered me a fist bump. His skin was electric as always.
I left the party ten minutes later. I tripped twice in large, bent-out potholes, skinning both knees. Halfway to Charlie’s house, the breeze picked up and rain started to pour from nowhere. Despite the heat, the drops were cold pricks. I ran the rest of the way. Somewhere far behind me, thunder loosened its earth-moving rumble. I never saw whatever lightning split the clouds apart. Perhaps, I thought, it was too far away for Charlie to feel, to know. Or else, maybe he didn’t want to tell me anymore.
Charlie disappeared for six months. What I’d expected to be a one-and-done thing with Bailey turned into a flurried relationship. On the few occasions I saw Charlie alone, he couldn’t shut up about being in love with her, how they were applying to the same colleges—she wanted to be an A&M Aggie down in College Station, and so Charlie did too—how they were going to celebrate Christmas twice, once at his house and again at hers, and how over our last spring break as high schoolers they would abscond alone to Cape Cod or something, all on her dime because her father was some kind of investment banker. I watched from afar as they wandered the halls of our overcrowded high school, hands in each other’s back pockets. Instead of waiting for me after school, he waited for her.
And then, the Friday before Valentine’s Day, he crashed against the locker next to mine, pressing his forehead into the grille.
“She dumped me, Ben,” he said, slamming his fist against the metal, making the combination lock jump.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s killing me.”
I blinked and fished my calculus book out from the bottom of the stack and shoved it in my bag. Despite the slurry chill in the air, Charlie was in a t-shirt, pilot-light blue. His arms were still stained summer brown where everyone else was pale.
Despite his long absence, I immediately let him back in.
“What can I do?” I said.
A quizzical look passed on Charlie’s face, the quickest combination of confusion and fear. His brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, wiped clean.
“What is it, Charlie?”
“Nothing. Just, you know, bummed. Let’s hang out later, okay?” He thumped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, then, before I could say anything, turned and vanished down the hall. The bell warning me that I’d be late for math in just one minute rang, startling and loud. I let its painful bleat gong in my ears.
After the third lightning strike, I kept circling back to the day of the first one, when Charlie wondered if he was a villain. At the time, it was nothing. But then it was something.
He didn’t find me later that day. I assumed that Charlie had simply found his own way to mourn the death of his relationship: maybe some illicit beer snagged from his parents’ fridge, maybe another girl he could find at a party to which he didn’t bother extending me an invitation. I spent the night lying on the upper bunk in my bedroom, staring at the popcorn ceiling and waiting for my phone to ring. Freezing rain tapped at the window, leaving splatters like bird shit on the glass. I decided I was too old for bunk beds and would ask my parents the next day if we could get rid of them.
But then Charlie appeared on Saturday afternoon. The gunmetal had been swept from the sky, the startling sun melting the freeze that had cupped over every surface, leaving runny snowmelt everywhere. Charlie stood on my front porch in combat boots and a hoodie.
“Aren’t you cold?” I said.
“You busy?”
“No.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
I put on my shoes. I didn’t ask where we were going. Charlie swept around the side of my house, his boots sinking into pools of mud. I skirted around these, clambering along the paving stones my father had installed the summer prior. They were slicked with black ice, and more than once my toe hit a slippery patch and I nearly fell into the desiccated banks of melting snow.
“What are we doing, Charlie?” I said when we rounded into my backyard. My parents didn’t own a farm in the same sense that his parents did, but our wedge of grass—maybe twenty yards by twenty yards—backed onto a wild field of untamed wheaty stalks blended with scutch and ryegrass. We had a small slab of patio on which sat a glass-topped table and a quartet of chairs, all of which were covered in uneven lumps of snow. One tree, a weeping willow, fawned over a third of our yard, on the left side. Charlie stood in the mucky grass on the right side, facing the field, where the snow had dribbled into mangy heaps.
I did not approach him at first, standing a good ten feet away. The air was dead, silence total except for the periodic slip-slide of icy slush from one of the draped branches of the willow tree.
When Charlie spoke, he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Ben.”
I took a few careful steps toward him, trying to avoid the thickest of the wet sludge.
“What do you mean?” It came out a whisper.
Charlie turned to me. He’d been crying. “There’s so much wrong with me. You don’t know.”
“I don’t?”
“Come here, will you? Please.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I stood close to him, our faces only inches apart. My blood pounded. In the sharp, cool air I could smell his musk, a cedar that made me think of a closed room. I shut my eyes.
Charlie wrapped his hands around my biceps, his thumbs pressing into my muscles so hard I let out a little weep of noise.
“Please, Ben.”
I opened my eyes. His were shimmering and scared. My heart thumped. I felt like an orchestra was blasting in my chest.
And then he kissed me. Quick, hard. His breath was hot, sour with saliva. Then it was over, so brief that I couldn’t so much as open my mouth to invite him in.
Then he pushed me, so hard I reeled and nearly fell into the muddy snow.
“Move away, Ben.”
When Charlie turned from me, I scrambled away. I knew what would happen. The air took on a tingling charge, like it had been spritzed out of an atomizer. From nowhere the wind blustered, sending snow swirling up around our legs. I looked up to the sky, expecting an interloping cloud, but there was nothing. Still, I tore backward, tripped, and fell, hands splayed in the cold chill. I shut my eyes.
And then Charlie was hit by lightning.
I felt the heat on my cheeks, as if I’d stuck my head in an oven door. The crackle of noise was immense, as if I was sitting inside a tympani. My ears rang and I felt a dizzy nausea. The last thing I wanted to do was look, but I did.
Charlie was on his back, head cupped by the wet earth. I stood, body slucking out of the muck with a noise I felt more than heard. Charlie’s hoodie was frayed and blackened, and his hands were covered in Lichtenberg lines. His face was scarred and burned.
His eyes were vacant.
When my hearing returned, I could make out the bustled yelling of my parents. One of them must have called 911 because eventually, as my ears cleared, I could hear a siren.
Charlie wasn’t breathing. His body was still, his face trapped in a look that mixed confusion and grace. Despite the heat radiating off of him, I pressed a hand to his chest and felt my palms burn. But I didn’t pull away. I looked at his face, which was bloated with burnt flesh. To anyone else, he’d have looked horrid, craggy and swollen and charred. But when I looked at him, I could only see the softness of his lips, the pure whiteness of his teeth. I wondered what he wanted, and why he felt so wrong. I touched my own lips, wondering if the saliva there came from me or him. And then I wondered whether he’d known about the lightning, if he’d brought it down on himself. My stomach pitched and wobbled.
I blinked and told Charlie he was no villain, but by then, there was no one left to hear me.
