Heat Lightning

southwest, over his shoulder, and saw the anvil of cloud coming in. “Yeah . . . gotta be thirty miles away. We got time.”
    “Until you reminded me . . . I hadn’t thought about the Terrace for years—I was never that much for it. Too busy. Now that I look back, I wonder what I was busy at. I should have had some lazy friends, you know, just sit out there with root-beer floats and watch the sailboats. But what the heck did I do?” She stared at the water, and Virgil flipped the lure into a niche in the weed line, twitched it a few times, and she said, “You know what I did? I worked. But I worked at all this art stuff. Dancing. Photography. Writing. All the time. Obsessively. I hardly ever went and sat and laughed with friends.”
    “Madison is the best place in the world if you want to hang out,” Virgil said. “You see these old gray-bearded guys on their rusty bikes, they’ve been hanging out since the sixties. Never quit.”
    “Yeah, but . . . ah, I don’t know. And the Rat. What a dump; that’s what I used to say. What a dump. Just too busy . . . busy, busy, busy . . .”
    So they floated and talked and she cast some more, and once almost tipped over the side, and he said, eventually, “If you cast any more, you’re gonna be sore in the morning. You’re going to feel like this muscle”—he rubbed his knuckles up and down the big vertical muscle just to the left of her spine—“is made out of wood.”
    She’d caught five fish at that point. “One last cast.”
    “No point. You never catch anything on the last cast.”
    She cast, and didn’t catch anything. “All right. I submit to your greater knowledge, although it doesn’t make any statistical sense.”
    “Sure it does—if you catch something, that’s never your last cast,” Virgil said. “You always keep going for at least ten minutes. So you never catch anything on the last cast.”
    He sat next to the motor, saw a distant flash of lightning, counted the seconds, and then said, “Six miles, more or less. Better get off the lake.”
    They got off, cranked the boat out of the water, pulled the plug, tied on the canvas cover, walked up to the cabin, washed their hands, got a couple of beers, sat on the lakeside porch, and watched the storm coming in.
    When the first fat drops of rain hit around them, she said, “We probably ought to go jump in bed.”
    “Probably,” he said.
     
 
SHE SAT on the edge of the bed and let him take her clothes off; he did it from behind her, kneeling on the mattress, with his face buried in the pit of her neck, his hands working the buttons on her blouse and jeans.
    “Ah, God, this is where I can’t stand it,” he said. He popped the hooks on her brassiere.
    She giggled with the stress. “What? You can’t stand it?”
    “It’s always so wonderful . . .” He popped her brassiere loose and let his hands slip up her stomach and cup her breasts.
    “It can’t always be wonderful,” she said.
    “No, no, it’s always wonderful,” he said. “It’s just like opening your Christmas presents when you’re eight years old. Ah, jeez . . .”
    Then it was underpants and she was pulling on Virgil’s jeans, which still smelled a little fishy from one of the northerns they’d caught, and then they were all over the place, and somewhere during the proceedings, though Virgil didn’t bother to check the time, she began to make a low ohhhh sound and then Virgil lost track, but not for long.
    WELL, HE THOUGHT as he lay on his back, the sweat evaporating from his stomach, he’d thought it would be pretty good, and it had been. And would be again in about, hmm, seventeen minutes.
    She said, “Why . . .” She giggled. “That was so crazy—all of a sudden, I realized, this afternoon, before we went out, you said you got a phone call from China. From China? You get calls from China?”
    “No, it’s this case. Trying to go back in time. There was a guy killed in Hong Kong a year or so ago, and there’s a question of how exactly he died. He’s connected with the guys here. The Chinese are going to look into it, see what they can find out.”
    “All the Chinese? That’s a lot of Chinamen.”
    “The Hong Kong police force.”
    “Really. Indians, Chinese, Hong Kong, the North Woods.”
    “Yeah . . . I gotta tell you, when I brought you up here, I was mostly thinking about this . . .” He slipped his hand up her thigh. “But I worry about your father and you. You don’t know anything about