This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New
England history finally broke-the night of July 19-the entire western Maine region was
lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.
We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across
the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The
American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole.
Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as
sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water
was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because
Billy couldn't. Billy is five.
We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and
potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but
Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.
After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and
I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake
to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back and forth. The evergreens
over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly
building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent
Norton's radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount
Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a
lawyer from
New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no
furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up
in county court. I won. Norton claimed I won because he was an out-of-towner. There
was no love lost between us.
Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her -halter. I
doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.
" I don't want to scare you," I said, "but there's a bad storm on the way, I think."
She looked at me doubtfully. "There were thunderheads last night and the night
before, David. They just broke up."."They won't do that tonight."