Lightning Strikes

by Gregory Meece

People who say lightning can’t strike twice lack imagination. Take the church at the end of Main Street. The cops were chasing some boys who might’ve swiped something from the car lot on the east end of Main. They hit the sharp bend at the west end too late and—BLAM!—right through the stained glass. A “Sinners Welcome” sign dangling above the hole seemed fitting for their arrival.

Just two weeks later, the paper shows another car, an Impala, if you can believe it, protruding from the same church—the ass end of the car sticking out of the plywood patch they installed over the vestibule window after the last incident. They haven’t found the drunk who parked it there.

The pastor blamed the devil for the unlikely double desecration. Some folks blamed dumb luck. I don’t know about the devil—plenty of dumb, of course. The point is, lightning’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. Happened to me, too.

The first time lightning struck close to me, a fat guy was out walking when I came up from behind and interrupted his ten-thousand daily steps. I don’t carry a gun, but what matters is that those being robbed believe I do. I’ve never heard anyone with what they think is a pistol pointed between their kidneys say, “You’re kidding, right?”

I emptied his wallet of three Jacksons and two Hamiltons, a presidential full house, which was better than the last hand I was dealt—two pair, Jacksons over Lincolns.

I returned the wallet because being a thief doesn’t mean you can’t be a gentleman. His wallet might have been lighter now, but his bloated carcass was as big as ever, and he still had to wedge it into his pants like stuffing a sausage casing.

He had been panting from towing all those L-bees around, but suddenly he stopped breathing and fell flat on his face. Normally, I’d have taken off right away, like a fox with something warm and furry between its jaws, but the guy wasn’t moving. I got curious and asked, “You okay, fella?” Nothing came out of him—not a word, not a breath. I didn’t look back.

The next day, the paper reported that a man died while walking; most likely, his heart gave out. Ironically, it was probably because a fat guy like him was trying to postpone cashing in his chips with those ten-thousand steps. The cops wouldn’t blame his death on an empty wallet. Lots of people have that condition.

Just to be safe, I held off robbing anyone for a while. At least, until I spotted an old lady shuffling toward her car with a walker. She’d just withdrawn a wad of cash from the ATM. I couldn’t resist.

I didn’t even have to stick my finger in her back. The moment I barked, “Drop the purse, lady!” she froze, threw up her bony hands. The bag landed square on my foot—the purse, not the old lady. It was right there on top—four of a kind, all Benjamins, smiling at me. The woman looked like she was going to cry. But she didn’t. She just crumbled beside her walker. Her wrinkly eyes kept staring at me. No use worrying about her telling the cops who she saw, though. She was already gone.

It was her time, anyway. The prune looked older than my mother did when she died, and they said my mother died of old age. So, this lady must have, too.

Funny thing, the last two people I robbed died right in front of me. Lightning. It does whatever it wants. Just because you draw an ace-high straight one time doesn’t mean you won’t pull the same cards the next. You’ve got to have some imagination to picture that, but it happens.