John Lutz - Lightning

“It’s sad,” Carver agreed, and told Claire good-bye.

Mildred Otten, the second letter writer, was a different story.

She lived in an apartment on Evers Avenue a mile from the ocean, where the neighborhood began to decline. Her building was a four-story white stucco structure with green iron balconies and a front walkway that passed beneath a rotted wooden trellis rich with flaming red roses. Her unit was on the fourth floor, rear, and when she opened the door to Carver’s knock, heat rolled out at him.

Mildred Otten didn’t seem to notice the heat, though her thin yellow-and-white cotton dress was plastered with perspiration to her gaunt body. Her face, narrow as a board and with a mottled red birthmark covering most of its left cheek, was gleaming with sweat and she was blinking her tiny green eyes as if they stung. A lock of damp hair dangled down over one ear in a spiritless little curl. It was a strange color between blond and gray, as if she’d begun to dye it and then changed her mind.

Carver identified himself and showed her his license with its color photo that looked a little like him. She seemed satisfied, as if she didn’t distinguish between private and public cops, and stepped back and invited him in. He was careful not to step on her toes; she was wearing sandals made out of tire tread with rubber loops over the big toe of each foot. On several of her toes were the kind of flesh-colored, circular bandages used to treat corns.

The apartment was steaming hot. The furniture was cheap and stained, and there was a woven oval rug on the scarred hardwood floor. On gray walls that needed paint were hung various untrained religious prints that appeared to have been clipped from books and magazines. One print was of Prometheus chained to a mountain while his liver was being devoured by a vulture. Carver wondered if Mildred realized she was mixing Greek mythology with scripture. Maybe it didn’t matter. The theme seemed to be suffering. There was no sign of an air conditioner, and only one window was open-about two inches. There was no screen.

Mildred saw him looking at the window. “I don’t open it wider because of the gulls,” she explained in a firm, positive voice. “They’re the devil’s agents and they might fly in and pluck my eyes out if I allow it.” She glared at him. “It happened to a woman down in Boca Raton.”

“I think I read about that,” Carver said.

“Two summers ago, it was.”

“Yes.” Carver pulled out the letter she’d sent to Dr. Grimm. The paper was damp now, and some of the printing was blurred. “Did you mail this, Ms. Otten?”

She studied it. “Of course. Isn’t that my signature?”

“The letter’s a death threat,” Carver pointed out.

“The other police have talked to me already about that. Didn’t they tell you? I explained to them it wasn’t a death threat, it was a vision from the Lord. The sower hath reaped the whirlwind.”

“Dr. Grimm, you mean?”

“Of course. He took lives, and someone took his own. Wasn’t that just?”

“It depends on your point of view.”

“Just is just,” she said, shaking her head.

“Were you at the clinic the day it was bombed, Mildred? May I call you Mildred?”

“Yes and yes. I saw the wrath and lightning of the Lord loosed on the house of death.”

“Innocent people were killed,” Carver pointed out.

“Innocent people are killed there every day, day after day.”

“Again a matter of opinion, Mildred.” Carver was trying not to get angry, remembering Beth flying backward out of the clinic in a sunlit shower of glass fragments.

Mildred shook her head again, this time violently, as if flinging away his words before they might stick in her mind. “As you know not how the wind blows, nor how a babe within the womb grows.’”

“The Bible?”

“Ecclesiastes. We haven’t the wisdom to judge living tissue other than alive. It is the Lord’s work. That is plain in the Word.”

“I understand you’re a member of Operation Alive.”

“I am that, and proud of it. ‘Look at my agony; my maidens and my youth are in captivity.’”

It took Carver a few seconds to realize that she was quoting again.

“Ecclesiastes?”

“Lamentations,” she said. “ ‘He slaughters and kills the children, the delight of our eyes.’ That verse refers to Dr. Grimm and his kind. So I do what I can, Mr. Carver. I make picket signs, I stand before passersby whose eyes are blind and try to make them see. Ever since they released me from that place of doctors and sins, I’ve worked for the force of life and the reward of life everlasting.”

“What place was that?” Carver asked. But he knew.

Mildred suddenly appeared sly. She grinned like a mischievous schoolgirl. “Ask your friends among the Romans.”

“Romans?”

“The police. The ones who are crucifying Adam Norton.”

“Do you know Norton?”

“He is me and I am he.”

Carver stared at her. She smiled broadly. He decided she’d had nothing to do with bomb making or conspiracies; they were beyond her. Whatever anger he’d felt toward her dissipated, leaving only pity. She was probably certifiably insane.

“The police know that when the lightning struck, I was on the other side of the street picketing,” she said, “toiling in the service of the Lord. He is my salvation and my alibi.”

Maybe not so insane, he decided, thanking her for her time and easing his way out the door.

Maybe it was the heat.

After leaving Mildred Otten, Carver drove to Poco’s Tacos on Magellan near the public marina, where he sat outside at one of the small, round metal tables and had two burritos and a Diet Coke for supper. He watched the white-hulled pleasure boats bobbing gently at their moorings. They appeared impossibly clean and pure in the slanted bright sun of early evening; emblematic of money and position. Florida was different if you possessed wealth. It could be a vast playground then, Disneyworld bounded by Georgia, Alabama, and the sea.

When he was finished eating, he disposed of his paper plates and cup in an orange-and-white trash receptacle around which bees buzzed, then walked over to a bench where he wouldn’t bother any of Poco’s other customers and fired up a Swisher Sweet cigar. He put on his tinted glasses so the sun’s reflection off the water and the white hulls wouldn’t hurt his eyes. Then he sat back and smoked and looked out at the sea and the pelicans, so awkward on land and so graceful in the air, passing low over the water.

Beth hated Poco’s and had refused to eat there with Carver. She’d warned him that the food tasted tainted beneath the hot spices and he was going to contract some sort of illness from it. It had all started, he was sure, when she became sick here during the early days of her pregnancy, though she didn’t see it that way. He decided not to tell her he’d been here when he saw her that evening. Why upset her? He’d mention having eaten supper in the hospital cafeteria. A lie to facilitate healing.

More pelicans arrived. They put on a show, skimming low, sometimes splashing down to dive for a fish, always coming up empty. Beyond them at sea, boats with brightly colored sails tacked and canted to the wind. And beyond the boats, white clouds lay low and immense on the horizon. It was such a beautiful world, Carver thought; why did people have to plant bombs in it? But he knew the sick and the pained and possessed were out there, the ones who were sure they were striking back at something. They always had been, but now there seemed to be more of them, and coming from both ends of the spectrum. He’d always tried to practice and endorse the politics of reasonableness. He hadn’t moved much in his basic beliefs. But the rest of the world had moved. People he had admired and with whom he had agreed had made a journey from dedication to zealotry to fanaticism. He couldn’t go with them. He tried now to be apolitical, but people were dying.