Lucky Strike Read online

  “Hmph.” Gen scowled as she eyed the ramp and the moat. “No such thing as luck being all one way or the other.” She swung her club. Her ball fell into the slimy, stinking water.

  “That’s unlucky,” he said. “Now you’ve got to rescue your ball.”

  She refused. “No doubt that water is infested with malaria germs.” Without a backward glance, Gen marched off to the next hole.

  Nate sighed and fished her ball out of the moat. He caught up with her at the volcano, waiting behind Ricky.

  Ricky Sands eyed the scubbly slope of the volcano leading to the crusty mouth of a cave. He winked at the gaggle of girls. He puffed out his skinny chest and whacked the ball. It climbed confidently up the slope and into the cave, where it dropped into the cup.

  “Yes!” Ricky crowed. “A hole in one!” Flames shot from the hole at the top of the volcano.

  Ricky stepped aside for Nate. “Now watch the loser at work.” The girls giggled.

  Nate felt his ears turn red. He hit the ball into the one and only miniature tree on the volcano’s flank. The ball ricocheted off the tree and fell into the hole at the top of the volcano. The volcano coughed and belched smoke.

  Gen wiped at a smear of ash on her overalls. “That’s okay, Nathaniel. Next is the windmill, and I’m good at that one.”

  Ricky Sands and his entourage of girls were definitely not good at the windmill. He cursed and threw his golf club down on the ground. The man in the golf shack hollered at him to watch his mouth or he’d have to leave.

  Gen stepped over to Ricky and tapped his arm. “There’s one revolution per twelve seconds and there’re four blades on the face of the windmill. The time between blades three and four is point-five-eight seconds, so —”

  “Shut up!” Ricky barked.

  She stumbled backward, tripped over the fake tree gracing the volcano (which promptly burped clouds of smoke), and fell fanny-first into the slimy, stinky, malaria-infested moat.

  Gen whimpered and flapped her hands as if trying to fly away from her predicament.

  “What did I tell you?” Ricky said. “A weirdo.”

  “You didn’t have to yell at her like that,” Nate snapped. “She was just trying to help you.”

  Ricky rolled his eyes. “I need her help like I need a hole in my head.” The girls laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  Nate threw down his golf club (which brought another warning holler from the man in the golf shack) and told Ricky to take a flying leap.

  “Come on, Gen, calm down,” he said, pulling her from the moat.

  “I’ve got malaria all over me,” she whimpered. “I’ll be dead before my next birthday.”

  He did his best to wipe the green slime from Gen’s overalls. “No you won’t,” he assured her. “I’m sure they put all kinds of insecticide and stuff in that water to keep the germs out.”

  Her eyes grew big. “Insecticide? Did you say insecticide? That’s even worse! I’ll end up with cancer or grow a third eye or …” She trailed off with a moan.

  Nate sighed. Goofy Golf on his birthday was not going well. He looked up to the heavens, to that blue, blue sky, and asked, “Why me?”

  And very far off in the distance, way out over the Gulf of Mexico, thunder rumbled.

  “Okay, Gen, last one,” Nate said as he gazed up into the great gaping mouth of the Tyrannosaurus rex, poised and ready to bite the head off of anyone — a luckless boy especially — who dared get a hole in one. Because as everyone in Paradise Beach knew, if you got a hole in one on the T. rex hole, you won a free game of golf. Something that, in the history of Nate’s now eleven years on God’s green earth, had never happened to him.

  He dug deep down into his chest and found that tiny flicker of hope.

  As he placed his golf ball on the tee and eyed the long ribbon of green between himself and the T. rex, something approximating a roar gurgled from the dinosaur’s mouth. Its jaws creaked open and closed; its small arms jerked up and down.

  Nate shuddered. He took a deep breath and gripped his golf club. “This is my last chance,” he muttered to himself. “My last chance to get a hole in one and show everybody I’m not a loser.”

  It would take a miracle of the highest order, he knew, to get a hole in one. Still, wasn’t Reverend Beam talking all the time about miracles? The face of Jesus in a tortilla? Lazarus rising from the dead? Jonah inside that whale?

  He felt an unaccountable wind push at his back, urging him on.

  “Oh please don’t eat me, Mr. Dinosaur,” Ricky called from the sidelines in a high, girly voice.

  Nate took a deep breath. He looked up at the clear blue Florida sky and said to whoever watched over luckless boys, “Please, just this once. Please.” He squeezed his eyes shut. He swung his golf club high above his shoulder, the head of the club winking in the sun.

  “You can do it,” Gen said. “The odds are in your —”

  Nate never heard what Gen said next.

  At exactly the same time, the brightest flash of light and a crack as loud as the voice of God shook Nate’s world. And then it was as if the hand of God grabbed Nate (none too gently) by the hand, twirled him up and around, and flung him at the feet of the King of Dinosaurs.

  The last things he remembered seeing were the creaking jaws of the T. rex as they closed down upon him; the last thing he remembered thinking was that birthday wishes never, ever come true.

  Then he felt a rising, pulling him up with a thousand strings fine as spider’s silk. The strings pulled him up through his chest and stomach and arms and legs and, finally, free of his skin, with a soap-bubble pop!

  He floated through the air, an air spangled with a thousand million lights. It was as if every lightning bug in the United States of America had converged around him. They tickled his arms and head and chest. They filled him with delight and peacefulness.

  Music surrounded him and carried him aloft like the most beautiful angels all singing to him at once, or like the choir at The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light.

  “He doesn’t have a pulse!” a voice cried from below.

  Nate looked down upon the people swarming around a crumpled body.

  “Someone run across the road and get his granddaddy!” another voice cried.

  “Call nine-one-one!” Ricky Sands hollered to the man in the golf shack.

  Nate could not for the life of him figure out what all the ruckus was about. He felt fine. Finer, as a matter of fact, than he’d ever felt before.

  Someone pushed through the crowd and crouched down next to him. His heart swelled. Gen, bless her heart.

  He saw her pinch his nose, then cover his mouth with hers.

  “Ewww,” one of the girls said. “She’s kissing him!”

  She locked her hands and arms and pumped his chest — one, two, three, over and over — then breathed into his mouth again.

  “Don’t leave me, Nathaniel Harlow,” she commanded.

  He heard the wail of a siren in the distance. He saw his grandpa run across the road. He felt Grandpa’s heart hammering in his chest. Nate wanted so badly to tell him it was all okay.

  His grandpa threw himself down next to him and called his name over and over. Nate marveled at the tears streaming down the old man’s face. He had never, ever seen his grandpa cry, except when Nate’s parents had died.

  “Come on Nathaniel,” Gen said as she pumped his chest. “Losers and weirdos stick together.”

  With each breath Gen blew into his mouth, and with each call of his name, he felt the strings holding him aloft break, one by one — Ping! Ping! Ping! — until he felt himself falling, falling, falling back into his broken body.

  When Nate opened his eyes, he saw two things: his grandpa’s worried, sea-weathered face hovering above his, and a complicated-looking machine beside him with flashing lights and zigzaggity lines.

  Grandpa clutched his grandson’s hand and said something Nate couldn’t quite make out; his vo
ice sounded like it was two miles away.

  “What, Grandpa? I can’t hear you.” He licked his lips and tasted blood.

  Grandpa leaned in close and shouted, “You’re in the Panama City Hospital, boy. You were struck by lightning out on the Goofy Golf course.”

  Goofy Golf. The T. rex and his birthday. A loud crack and a blaze of light brighter than bright. A floating, hovery feeling. It all came back to him in flashes.

  He licked his lips again. “Gen,” he whispered. “Is Gen okay?” Every time he spoke, it felt like someone smacked a golf club against his skull.

  Grandpa squeezed Nate’s hand and nodded. “Gen’s just fine. She saved your life with that CPR stuff she’s always reading about.”

  Nate tried to nod his head. She was a walking medical encyclopedia, that was for sure. He had a vague recollection of her bending over him and pounding on his chest.

  He wanted to ask his grandpa if he’d gotten to ride in an ambulance and if they’d run the siren and the flashing red light. That would’ve impressed Ricky Sands and all those giggly girls.

  But Nate was so tired and cold, and his head hurt something fierce. So instead, he closed his eyes and held tight to his grandpa’s rough, warm hand.

  The next time Nate opened his eyes, he saw the face of Reverend Beam. The reverend’s eyes were closed and his lips moved, but Nate didn’t hear anything except a loud rushing and crashing, like the Gulf of Mexico during a January storm.

  “Did you say something?” he whispered.

  The reverend’s eyes flew open. “Praise the Lord! It’s a miracle!” His voice boomed in the tiny room.

  Grandpa’s face appeared beside the reverend’s.

  “I told you, Jonah,” Reverend Beam crowed. “The good Lord listens to our prayers.”

  Just then, the door to the hospital room swung open. A tall man in a white coat with a shiny stethoscope strode over to Nate’s bed. A nurse bustled in behind him.

  “How’s our miracle boy doing today?” the doctor asked as he put the rubbery ends of the stethoscope into his ears. He parted the front of Nate’s hospital gown and pressed the cold disc against the boy’s chest.

  Nate saw his grandpa’s lips move. He caught a few words here and there: deaf and gibberish and scars. He looked with alarm from his grandpa to the doctor. The doctor poked a pointed black thing into his ear and took a good look around.

  The doctor sat close to his left ear. “Nate, can you hear me?”

  Nate frowned. Why did it sound like the doctor was whispering from the bottom of a wishing well? “I can’t really hear you,” Nate said.

  The doctor wrote something down on his clipboard, then stuck his pen in his coat pocket. He moved so he could talk in Nate’s good ear.

  “It’s not unusual for someone who’s had a close encounter with lightning to lose some of their hearing, Nate,” the doctor said. “Sometimes the hearing doesn’t come back, but usually it does. Got a heck of a headache?”

  Nate nodded, then wished he hadn’t.

  “That will hopefully go away in time too. We’re going to change the dressing on your hand,” the doctor said. For the first time, Nate noticed the white bandage wrapping his right hand and arm like a mummy’s.

  “What …?”

  “That’s the hand you were holding the golf club with when the lightning struck,” the doctor explained in a voice loud enough for Nate to make out. “We figure it must have hit the head of your golf club, then traveled down the shaft into your hand. You were darned lucky, though,” the doctor added. “You didn’t take a direct hit. Most of the electrical force bounced off you and hit that T. rex.”

  “Blew half its head clean off,” Grandpa said in wonderment.

  The doctor began to unwind the gauze engulfing the boy’s hand. “You’re going to have some interesting scars, that’s for sure, but at least you’ll have a good story to tell.”

  They all watched as the unwinding of the gauze revealed Nate’s hand.

  “Yes,” the doctor said, “it’s a miracle you’re alive, young man. A true miracle.”

  Reverend Beam grinned and slapped Grandpa on the back. “See, Jonah? What did I tell you?”

  Nate gasped. Burned into the palm of his hand was a perfect imprint of the golf club’s rubber grip, seams and all.

  “Do you know what the odds are of a person surviving a lightning hit, even an indirect one?” the doctor asked.

  Nate shook his head. Where was Gen when he needed her?

  A week later, Reverend Beam and The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light held a fish fry for Nate and his grandpa. Like most of the fishermen in Paradise Beach, Nate’s grandpa couldn’t afford health insurance, and the fishing wasn’t what it used to be. Nate had overheard his grandfather say to Miss Trundle that he might have to sell his charter boat to pay the hospital bills. When he heard this, he felt hot, then cold, then sick all over.

  “My bad luck is catching, Gen,” Nate had told her. “If Grandpa loses the Sweet Jodie and can’t go out on the Gulf every day, I think he’ll just shrivel up and die.”

  So Gen had told her daddy, and Reverend Beam had told the congregation of The Church of the One True Redeemer and Everlasting Light, who had voted straightaway on a benefit fish fry. Because, as everybody knows, there’s not much a good fish fry won’t fix.

  Nate looked again at the grainy black-and-white photograph of the giant green T. rex at Goofy Golf, half its head blown to smithereens. The newspaper headline above it read MIRACLE BOY STRUCK BY LIGHTNING AND LIVES! If you looked real close, you could see something sprawled at the feet of the T. rex, something wearing just one red high-top tennis shoe. Where the other shoe went when the lightning struck was anybody’s guess.

  Gen thought Nate was awful lucky to have made the newspaper.

  “When I won the Math Olympics last year, the paper only wrote two poorly punctuated sentences about it on the last page, next to the obituaries,” Gen had said. “And did they run a picture of me and my trophy?”

  Nate knew they had not. But they had run a picture of little Jimmy Revell, who’d won the junior division in the worm grunting contest over in Sopchoppy.

  “Yeah, but the picture is mostly of the T. rex,” Nate had grumbled. “I just look like a bundle of rags at his feet. And they spelled my name wrong.”

  Gen tried not to laugh. “I bet no one noticed,” she’d said. “I mean, Nate and Kate are almost identical,” she snorted.

  He’d sighed. “Yeah, right.”

  He wandered to the living room. He’d finally persuaded his grandfather to go back to his fishing boat. “I only have a half day trip today,” his grandpa had said the night before. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for the fish fry.”

  Nate plugged in the toaster and dropped in the sacrificial slice of bread. He waited for the smell of burning toast.

  Instead, the toaster sang out the loveliest ding! you ever heard. Nate watched wide-eyed as a perfect, golden piece of toast popped up proudly.

  “Must be a mistake,” he muttered, and slipped in two more pieces of bread. Again, the toaster popped out the prettiest slices a person could ever want. “Cool.”

  Nate ate his perfect toast and listened to the mockingbird in the magnolia tree. Just as the doctor had said, the hearing in his left ear had, in fact, returned. He thought that bird had never sounded so sweet.

  He got ready to go over to Gen’s house. He pulled on shorts and carefully, very carefully, pulled a long-sleeve shirt over his bandaged hand and arm. Next week the bandages would come off. The thought of seeing what the lightning had left behind made the perfect toast flip in Nate’s stomach. Would the scar of the golf club’s handle be permanent? Would there be any other marks?

  Nate stepped out the front door and studied the morning sky for even the slightest sign of a storm, then headed to Gen’s.

  “Where’s everybody?” Nate asked the twin girls who were dressing up their cats, Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy (“Surely goodness
and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life….” Psalms 23:6). Rebecca held tight to Goodness while Ruth tied a tiny straw hat to the cat’s head.

  “Up in the kitchen cooking up a storm,” Ruth said.

  “For the fish fry,” Rebecca whispered.

  Nate found Mrs. Beam in the kitchen chopping cabbages for coleslaw. Gen shredded the carrots while Reverend Beam mixed his secret coleslaw dressing.

  “Good morning, Nate,” Mrs. Beam said with a smile. “You ready for your party tonight?”

  “I guess,” he said. He eyed the huge bowl of cabbage and carrots. “You’re going to have lots left over, though,” he said in a worried voice. “I don’t think there’s going to be that many people coming.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” the reverend said. “From the talk around town, I think there’s going to be more people coming tonight than you can imagine.”

  “Wow!” Levi called from his spot on the floor in front of the TV. “Maybe you and your grandpa will be millionaires!”

  “I don’t think the odds of becoming millionaires are very likely,” Nate said. “Right, Gen?”

  Gen shrugged. “Who knows? The odds of your getting struck by lightning are one in six hundred fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine, and you did.”

  “On a clear day,” Joshua said.

  “And your birthday,” Levi added.

  A shiver raced along the marks the lightning had set upon Nate.

  “Great granny’s garters,” Grandpa said when they drove to the corner of Billy Bowlegs Park.

  They gaped through the cracked windshield as the ancient truck idled in the middle of Turpentine Street. Cars filled the weedy parking lot as far as the eye could see. Mr. Billy, the town’s unofficial traffic director, waved cars this way and that with one hand while the other clutched his ever-present portable radio.

  “There must be something else going on — a baseball or soccer game,” Nate said, his eyes big as hubcaps. “Those can’t all be here for my fish fry, can they, Grandpa?”

  Grandpa threw the truck into gear. “One way to find out.”