Read Online Fat Lightning by Howard Owen - Free Book Online

all his life for this. Some people think he’s shy, but he’s just doing what his mother advised him to do, when he had not yet quit school and he’d get in fights every day, other children calling him “crazy” and “vacant Lot.”
    â€œSugar,” she told him, looking at him with those same nearly black eyes, her hand on his arm, “they’re just jealous because you know so much. But you got to keep it inside, otherwise they’ll make up stuff and put you in Central State just for spite. You know what you know. Don’t have to tell it to nobody.”
    Lot has never forgotten this. He tries not to let all the world’s sin get to him, because when it does, he winds up embarrassing his family. He’s lived at home for 71 of his 73 years, working as a carpenter here and there and helping his father farm from the time he got back from World War I until his father died. He never went to church, even though almost everyone who used to talk about him behind his back before the war was gone now. He and his mother got along much better after his father died, because the two men would always get into arguments, sometimes threatening to kill each other.
    But now, when he clears his throat, these people, some of them wearing fresh dresses and coats and ties like they were going to church, get quiet. And Lot finds that he has a lifetime of things to say.
    â€œHe’s a-coming back,” he says to his audience. “This here’s a sign; I know it is. He’s coming to pay us back for all this wickedness, all this here free sex and burnin’ the flag and all. You think we couldn’t beat them Viet Congs if we wasn’t being punished by God?”
    And sometimes Lot will throw in a verse from Revelation, which he has always read, more times than he can remember.
    â€œâ€˜And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and from his power,’” Lot will read, “‘and no man was able to enter into the temple, till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled.’” Lot can find most of what he wants to find in Revelation with a quick flip of his thumb through the worn pages. His Bible looks like a book that someone has started reading from the wrong end: dog-eared at the back instead of the front.
    Sometimes, when Lot reads, the wind will shift and blow in the strong scent of the burning sawdust pile from the south, causing people to take out handkerchiefs to wipe their eyes and blow their noses, giving a muffled air to the “Amens.”
    Billy Basset is usually among the crowd. He’s never seen anything like the image on the barn, and being there, along with the now-departed Terry Jeter, right from the beginning gives him a feeling of importance he’s not used to. Now, with school out, he doesn’t have anywhere better to go than the old home he’s always looked at from across the river, that looks smaller and more run-down than he’d always imagined it.
    But Billy isn’t camping out in the yard any more. A week after the old man let him stay the first time, he started slipping into the old house at night. He found that two of the beds still had mattresses, and he even found an old alarm clock, so he could get up and go back out to the tent before sunrise.
    He has also found that the old Chastain house has many items worth stealing. Billy has been a petty thief since he was 12. He finances his clothes and spending money by stealing and dealing drugs. His distributor, a retired Richmond city policeman who lives on the state road south of Monacan, can also sell just about any of the hot merchandise Billy brings him.
    Billy is smart enough to take small things from out-of-the-way places, things that won’t be missed. He’s discovered a cubbyhole behind a wall that contains many of what his distributor calls antiques: old jewelry boxes, some minor jewelry, a pair of candelabras, dolls. One happy