Lightning Song by Lewis Nordan

Sweet’s roof had leaked and he’d had to move his meat cooler over in a corner and sweep the water out the front door with a straw broom and then mop up the whole store. A culvert was gushing. Leroy found a baby swamp elf that had drowned in a ditch. Its scaly little three-toed feet were sticking straight up. He didn’t stop to look, just kept on walking. He wondered if the swamp elf’s mama was looking for him. Grass wouldn’t grow around the New People, it looked like, and so there they were, standing ankle deep in red clay mud.
    Leroy was still out in the lane, a good distance from where the New People stood, but he could see that they seemed to be dressed in odd outfits. Just then he noticed another man, someone he’d never seen before, a bald-headed, red-faced man mopping sweat off his face with a white handkerchief. He was walking to his big shiny new car parked along the roadside. He came up to Leroy. He said, “Is it humid, son, or is it just me?” Sweat was pouring down his neck. Leroy couldn’t think of anything to say. He pulled up his shirt and started to rout out his belly button with his index finger. The man was carrying a little metal strongbox and a leather pouch with a drawstring and looking back over his shoulder at the New People like he was about halfway mad at them, put out anyway. He had several pens clipped to a plastic pocket protectorin his shirt pocket. His shirtfront was wringing wet with sweat. He gave Leroy a good hard looking-over. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. He said, “Y’all hillbillies ain’t got no pride, is you?” Leroy didn’t know what to say again, so he just stood there with his bag of groceries digging at his navel. Some of what he found there he put in his mouth. The man had on a shiny blue sport coat with dandruff on the lapels and big sweat stains underneath the arms. You could say he stunk. This was an insurance collector from Memphis, it turned out. He said, “They never told me nobody was going to die. You trust somebody, swear to God, and this is what happens, happens every time, you can’t trust nobody, that’s my newly revised opinion of the world, the human race of it, anyway, they’s still a few pretty good redbones, I guess.” Leroy cut his eyes out across the yard at where the New People were standing among the old cars. The New Guy was wearing a long warbonnet made of dyed chicken feathers, all colors, and the New Lady was wearing a large pair of angel wings, also made of feathers and chicken wire. They both were wearing boots of a kind that Leroy later learned to call Wellingtons. They were just standing among the junkers in the mud. At least they didn’t have knives. The insurance guy said, “Oh, they talk fancy, sure enough”—he indicated the New People with an angry jerk of his head in their direction—“but they’re hillbillies, too, you mock it down, son, down at the bone them two’s just like your ownself, some ig-runt, unrefined, hillbilly motherfuckers, if I ever seen a pair.”
    Leroy said, “Somebody died?”
    The insurance man said, “Jess look at them two out there. Ain’t they disgusting?” Leroy looked. The warbonnet was so long it almost touched the ground. The angel wings were just as long. The insurance man said, “I seen it all now. Junkers and bleach bottles and chain-saw art and jug bands and a sculpture of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on the Cross made out of beer cans, every goddamn redneck thing a hillbilly can think up, but I never seen no Indian and an angel, them’s a new one on me, takes the cake, don’t it, sons-a-bitches, anyway. You know what I heard? I heard this is the way hillbillies tell one another they in love, you know. Well, that is a joke, a big old funny joke. You mock it down, boy, a hillbilly knows not one goddamn thing about love, not one, it chaps my whole sweaty ass to