John Lutz: Lightning

Beth told him not to be so gentle. Which surprised Carver as he made love to her in the beach cottage with the surf whispering outside in the night.

It was cool for a summer evening, and a soft breeze was pressing through the screened window along with bright moonlight. Laura, Carver’s former wife and the mother of his children, had during the early months of both of her pregnancies reassured him that he wasn’t going to injure her or the fetus during sex. In passion she’d urged him not to be tentative; she was pregnant, not breakable. Still, Carver had been careful.

Beth was careful, too.

She’d been pregnant once before and it hadn’t turned out well. The baby had been stillborn after strangling on the umbilical cord.

Since her pregnancy their lovemaking had been unlike its usual desperate pleasure driven by lust as well as love. Love had become ascendant.

Carver felt her long body become rigid and arc beneath him. Her stomach muscles tensed and rippled, and he became still for a moment. Then, propped on knees and elbows so his weight wasn’t bearing down so heavily, his bad leg slightly to the side, he resumed thrusting into her. Her moans merged with the sighs of the surf and were like the low keening of powerful breakers turning deep water as they rolled toward shore.

Then they were both still. A single bead of perspiration dropped from the point of his chin and landed near her left ear, then tracked glistening along her neck in the moonlight before disappearing in shadow.

He kissed her lips as he withdrew from her. For a while he lay beside her, one of her long dark legs flung sideways across his, and listened to the sounds of their breathing even out. The scent of their sex still lingered, but the ocean breeze was fast chasing it from the room. The currents of cool air felt good as they played over his perspiring chest and stomach.

He was going to be a father again. He hardly ever saw his daughter Ann, who lived with Laura and her third husband in Saint Louis. And Chip, his son, had been a murder victim four years ago here in Florida, burned to death by another doomed son whom Carver eventually had come to pity. During that time he’d almost made the mistake of trying to reunite with Laura. Moth to flame.

“What are you thinking, lying over there so quietly?” Beth asked beside him.

That doomed sons keep me in business. “About marriage,” he said.

She stirred suddenly and her leg dragged off of him. “Wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said.

She’d misunderstood. He hadn’t been suggesting marriage, thinking about them. But he found himself probing, defending the idea. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Didn’t work out so well for either of us last time.”

“You were married to a drug lord,” he reminded her. She didn’t like to talk, or even think about, her years with the late Roberto Gomez, who’d blamed her for the death of their stillborn child and tried to kill her in retaliation,

“But you weren’t married to someone who was in that kind of life, Fred. And your marriage still failed.”

She could play mean, all right. Carver had struck a nerve and should have backed off. But he didn’t. Carver the moth.

“Marriage might be convenient, if nothing else,” he said. “We’re going to have a child, you and I, and the legalities ought to be clear.”

She raised her head and stared over at him, the moonlight highlighting her beautiful dark features, prominent cheekbones. She had the haughty air of an African princess, out of time and place, but royalty nonetheless. “This is going to be a racially mixed child, Fred. What problems there’ll be will have nothing to do with legal formalities. You want to get all legal, we can have an attorney draw up a prenuptial agreement.”

“You only have a prenuptial agreement if you’re planning on getting married,” he pointed out.

She let her head drop back on the pillow and laughed. “A few weeks ago you were willing to agree to my having an abortion,” she said. “Now you’re talking marriage. What’s next, a barbecue pit and a minivan with a flip-out infant seat?”

Carver didn’t think those infant seats were a bad idea. “I always wanted this baby,” he said. “You were the one considering an abortion. I would have gone along with it, not held it against you. It was your decision to make. That’s how I felt and still feel. There was never any doubt about that.”

She rolled over to face him, propped up on one elbow. She was smiling. “We arguing, Fred?”

He was quiet for a moment. “It does sound that way.”

“You gonna press me to get married?”

“No.” He hadn’t really thought hard about it, somehow knowing she wouldn’t consider it.

“I decided not to have an abortion,” she said. Her long forefinger with its bright red nail touched his lower lip. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” The nail was sharp and might have cut his lip if she hadn’t quickly withdrawn it.

“Is it what you wanted?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I made the decision. I want this baby, Fred. Want it in the worst way, when I’m not sick in the morning or I don’t wake up with second thoughts.”

I never have any second thoughts.

But he didn’t say what he was thinking. He figured he’d better lay off talking about marriage. At least until he’d considered it some more. Maybe it wasn’t such an unacceptable idea. They weren’t a couple of kids shacking up in the seventies. He was in his mid-forties. She was thirty-six. Sometimes he was bothered by the idea of growing older. She never seemed to think about it. She was a survivor; maybe she assumed she could somehow survive old age, somehow manage to skip over the unpleasant and inconvenient business of death.

“You thirsty?” he asked.

“No. What I am is tired, and I’d better get some sleep. I’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning to interview John York.”

“Isn’t he the guy who wants to make handguns and automatic weapons illegal in Florida for anyone but police?”

“Yeah. Burrow wants to do a feature on him.” Burrow was the small and aggressive newspaper Beth wrote for. It specialized in going after stories that for one reason or another the mainstream press shied away from covering. Being a giveaway paper, it couldn’t afford to pay its journalists much, so for Beth her job was mostly a labor of love, an outlet for her own outrage and resentment at the abuses of power.

John York had built a surprisingly large organization that was becoming a pest in the state legislature, lobbying for a change in Florida’s lenient gun control laws. Carver wondered where Beth stood on the issue. She was familiar with guns and he’d seen her use one without hesitation. Even with enthusiasm.

He decided to avoid the subject. Why start another argument? And as a private investigator with a class G license, he’d continue to be able to carry a gun if he needed one. Any change in the law wouldn’t affect him, except perhaps to make his world a little safer and more predictable.

He sat up, swiveled around, and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I’m going to get something to drink,” he said.

She didn’t answer as he reached for his cane, levered himself to his feet, and limped barefoot into the cottage’s kitchen area. He opened the refrigerator, found a can of Budweiser hiding behind a plastic container of lettuce, and opened it. Some of the foam fizzed coolly over his hand, and a little of it dripped onto his bare right foot.