The Lightning Rod: A Zig & Nola Novel (Zig & Nola #2)(11)

6



Guidry, Texas

Twenty-one years ago



This was Roddy when he was seven.

He was a boy who was good at hiding things. This knife was a perfect example. He’d stolen the switchblade with the pakkawood handle from Gary Dubursky’s older brother.

Holding it now in his open palm, Roddy liked the weight of the knife—it had heft, like it mattered—and though he couldn’t verbalize it yet, he knew that not everything in life mattered.

With his thumb, Roddy pressed the knife’s silver button. The spear blade sprang out like a Nazi salute.

“Roddy, you dumb shit, we’re not even looking for you anymore!” yelled twelve-year-old Ellen P., the one girl on the block who everyone was afraid of. “No one cares!”

“I bet he’s out of bounds,” clucked Chad, a mouthy ten-year-old.

Back before he and Nola got rescued from the group home in Arkansas, Roddy had learned the consequences of being out of bounds. Here, he wasn’t out of bounds. He was twenty feet straight up, well hidden by the leaves of the crooked red maple tree that served as home base for their game, a hasty merger of freeze tag and hide-and-seek.

Standing on a branch that curved like a hammock, he stared down at the tops of Chad’s and Ellen’s heads, watching them move around like ants. Roddy stretched his arm straight out, dangling the knife from his fingertips.

A few weeks ago, someone had lit a fire in the newspaper vending machine outside of Margie’s Luncheonette. Two weeks before that, one of the girls in Roddy’s class had come home crying, saying her knapsack smelled like pee. And last week, a neighbor had accused Roddy of using a stick to poke out her cat’s eye. Roddy swore on Jesus he didn’t do any of it.

In response, Roddy’s new foster dad, Mr. LaPointe, told him, “There’s both a Good Roddy and a Bad Roddy inside you—but you need to feed the good one. D’y’understand?”

Roddy shook his head. He didn’t understand.

“Try it like this,” added Mr. LaPointe, a devoted churchgoer. “We each have a little monster inside us.”

“A real monster?”

“Kinda real. Sorta real. Like the Bad Roddy versus the Good Roddy. You have to look inside and— Try it like this. In those moments where you want to figure out good from evil, well . . . y’know that little whisper that you hear at the back of your head? That’s your conscience—it’ll always lead you right.”

It was wise advice. Lately, though, the whisper at the back of Roddy’s head was starting to get louder.

“I bet he quit,” Ellen P. said, clearly annoyed as she took a seat at the base of the tree.

Roddy wouldn’t quit. Not when he was having fun like this, pinching the knife between his pointer finger and thumb, letting it dangle, the blade pointed straight at Ellen P.’s head.

“Hey, Nola, your brother run away?” Ellen P. called out to the little girl with the black eyes who was standing there with the group, but somehow also standing there by herself.

“Who you think’s weirder—him or you?” Chad added.

Nola stood there, eyeing a big rock on the ground, wondering what sound it would make hitting Chad in the teeth.

Up in the tree, Roddy shifted his outstretched arm to the left, now dangling the knife over Chad’s head. All he had to do was let go. He didn’t even need to aim. Gravity would do the rest. A smile lit Roddy’s eyes. An erection expanded in his pants. There was a deep thrill that came with thinking about the silver blade plummeting straight into Chad’s skull, but there was also something else . . . something Roddy didn’t quite have a word for.

“You’re definitely the weirder one, ain’t you, Nola?” Chad asked.

Nola still didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t do anything, still staring at the rock.

Fight back, Roddy tried to tell his sister, his fingers moistening with sweat, the knife still dangling above Chad’s head.

“She’s definitely the weirder one,” Ellen P. taunted, Roddy now moving the knife over Ellen, then back over Chad, and then, to his own surprise—in a perfect swirl of rage, embarrassment, and helplessness—Roddy shifted his arm so the knife was directly above his sister Nola.

For the rest of his life, Roddy would think back to this moment. It was here—as the knife dangled from his plump fingertips . . . as he held it above his twin sister’s head—that seven-year-old Roddy LaPointe finally understood the electric charge currently coursing through him.

This switchblade knife with the pakkawood handle wasn’t just a cheap thrill, or a childish impulse, or even a self-destructive whisper at the back of his head.

It was power.

That was the word for it. This knife . . . it gave Roddy power. And dear God, after all he’d been through in Arkansas, it felt good to have power.

“Roddy, where the hell are you!?” Ellen P. demanded.

I’m right here, Roddy thought, staring down at Ellen’s head, at all their heads, tiny targets that taught him what none of his future therapists or court-appointed counselors would ever take the time to explain: that the most potent power in the entire world came from having power over someone else.

Naturally, at seven years old, Roddy couldn’t articulate any of that. He just knew he felt good. Better than he’d ever felt in his life.