Bob grunted and they started up the slope. The pack seemed to get heavier with every stride. He still felt dazed and unreal after the lightning strike. He screwed his face into a grimacing mask as they climbed, starting at each crash of thunder, each crackling flare of lightning. Will this ever end? he thought. Have I died and gone to hell? He swallowed dryly again and again. Believing in life after death wasn’t much of a comfort when you didn’t know if that death was coming at any second—sharply, violently, unexpectedly.
“Hold on,” Doug told him as they reached the cave.
“Why?” he asked but his voice was drowned out by a roar of thunder. As quickly as he could, he pulled off his pack to sit on it. Before he could get it off, a bolt of lightning struck about a hundred yards away. Thank God for that, he thought.
Why can’t we go in the cave? he wondered. He was getting soaked.
A few seconds later, he knew why as Doug emerged from the cave, a headless, flopping rattlesnake in his left hand, the golak in his right. Oh, Jesus, he thought, seeing how big the snake was as Doug flung it away. He grimaced at himself. Marian, don’t ever listen to me again, he thought.
They were in the cave now. It was reasonably big and Doug had placed their packs away from them so the metal frames couldn’t conduct electricity if lightning hit near the cave. He had placed their sleeping pads and sleeping bags under them to insulate them against ground shock and told Bob to keep his hands off the ground. Bob’s appetite seemed to be considerably lessened by the lightning strike. He wondered if there had been damage to any of his organs. His hand still looked a little ashen although the bluish-gray tinge had faded. I survived a lightning bolt, he kept thinking. Maybe he should write an article for the Enquirer: “Author Struck by Lightning and Survives!”
He tried to listen to what Doug was telling him, probably to get him back to feeling normal after what had happened. But he kept drifting off mentally, unable to get over what had happened. Doug had said something about how ordinarily a cave was the worst place to be in a lightning storm but this one was okay because of its height and depth, six to seven feet in each dimension. Any smaller and lightning was actually attracted to caves; something like that.
The only thing Doug said that stayed with him was his account of a forest ranger named Roy Sullivan who more than earned the nickname “Dooms,” because he’d been struck by lightning seven times over a period of thirty-five years, one strike even setting his hair on fire and heating his body so much that he had to pour a pail of water over his head.
“But none of them killed him,” Doug finished his story. “He died of something else entirely.”
“That’s comforting,” Bob said.
It didn’t help much when Doug informed him again that a cave wasn’t really all that safe a spot in a lightning storm. Or when he told Bob that he should listen for high-pitched zinging sounds because they indicated that a strike was near.
“Did you know that the odds of being struck by lightning are one in six hundred thousand?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t know,” Bob answered wanly. “Nice to know I’m special.”
He made the mistake of asking if they could set up the stove so he could make himself some soup.
“Put a metal stove right next to us in a lightning storm?” Doug said.
“No, of course not,” Bob replied, nodding feebly.
Doug patted him on the back. “You’re a lucky man, Bobby,” he said. “You were only splashed by the lightning. If you’d been hit directly, two or three hundred million volts would have gone through you.”
Bob shivered. I’d rather not hear any more about lightning if you don’t mind, he thought.
“If that had happened, you’d probably have amnesia, be temporarily blind or deaf, your blood vessels spasmed, your skin mottled. You were lucky.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, “I feel lucky.”
The thunder and lightning had passed but it was still raining hard.
Doug set up the stove and heated soup for the two of them. That it was his soup didn’t bother Bob. He sighed in pleasure as he ate it with crackers. Bob used his pot to boil some water for coffee. Bob felt a lot better with some hot soup in his stomach and sipping on a cup of hot, sweetened coffee, eating some oatmeal-raisin cookies with it. He still felt disoriented by the shock he’d gotten but—remarkably he was certain—he hadn’t been really injured in any way.
To his surprise, Doug took a small flask from his pack and unscrewed its cap. “Some brandy in your coffee?” he asked.
“I thought alcohol impaired the judgment,” Bob needled him without thinking.
Doug looked at him askance. “You want some or not?” he asked.
“I want some definitely,” Bob answered. “It can’t impair my judgment any more than being struck by lightning.”
Doug chuckled. “That’s for sure,” he said, pouring a small amount of brandy into Bob’s cup. “Anyway, I only thought you weren’t used to backpacking and the vodka might make it more difficult for you.”
“Got ya,” Bob said. He raised his cup in a toast. “To you, Douglas.”
Doug smiled a little. The hot, brandy-laced coffee tasted wonderful to Bob, making him sigh.
“Well, the weather’s giving you a chance to rest, isn’t it?” Doug said.
“For which I am intensely grateful to the weather,” Bob responded.
“Well, I just hope Marian doesn’t get upset if we don’t get to the cabin when she expects us,” Doug said.
Oh, that’s right, Bob thought; it would worry her. He sighed. “Well, I guess it can’t be helped,” he said.
The gas flame of the stove, now turned off, had warmed the cave a little. It seemed cozy now, especially with the brandied coffee warming his stomach. He leaned back against his pack, sighing with pleasure.
After a few minutes, he looked over at Doug, feeling, for some singular reason, a sense of affection for him. Sure, there was still that pain-in-the-ass quality to his behavior, and their politics were worlds apart. Still, Doug was taking him on this hike after all and he had seemed genuinely concerned about the lightning strike—correction, splash, he told himself.
Now he felt a genuine curiosity as to what had made Doug the contradictory man he was. He’d never asked before. The only times he’d been with Doug was when the two couples were together. Now he was alone with him, he felt warm and comfortable (if still a little woozy) and wanted to know more about his hiking companion than he knew. For that matter he knew nothing at all about Doug beyond his animated social behavior and his rather overbearing conduct during this hike.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Tell you about myself?” Doug turned it into a question.
“Yes,” Bob said.
“Tell you what?” Doug asked.
“Your childhood, for instance,” Bob replied.
“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that,” Doug told him.
“Why not?”
“Because it was a fucking nightmare,” Doug said.
“That bad.” Bob wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing up the subject. He’d only wanted to learn a little more about Doug. But, instead, if he’d opened up old wounds…
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry into—”
“My childhood,” Doug said as though he were reading the title of a book. “By Douglas Crowley, formerly Douglas Crowlenkovitch.”
“That was your name,” Bob said, surprised. “I presume you changed it when you became an actor.”
“Obviously,” Doug said. He took a sip of his coffee and sighed. “Well, it wasn’t anything like your childhood, that I’d bet on.”