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- - - - Copyright 2000-2001 Sweet Fancy Moses
- - - - Hammock, Lightning By Lawrence Krauser Old Hoot McGee died in his hammock, strung between the two giant oaks in the backyard, planted for the purpose by Hoot's great-great-great-grandfather back when he was a boy. The oaks were struck by the tines of a perfect fork of lightning, which ripped down through their trunks and rejoined near the ground, right about at Hoot's belly. It wasn't raining. Freak bolt. What remained of Hoot's body was discovered in the morning. Two kids from the house up the road stumbled upon Hoot's human-shaped char shortly after dawn. One of them poked at it with a stick, and Old Hoot crumbled and fell right through the mesh of the hammock. Wife had to vacuum him up from the grass. Hoot wound up in his favorite lunchbox--no need for a cremator's services--together with dropped cigarette butts and leaves and a few small insects. The butts were Hoot's. It was his ritual, long after midnight, to lie on the hammock and look at the stars and smoke his tobacco for the day. Mrs. McGee was overjoyed. "What a fantastic death! Better than he ever dreamed of! Hooter, wherever you are, good going! I love you! Congratulations!" An investigation was instigated by interested parties into the possibility of collaboration between Mrs. McGee and the finger of death. The widow patiently answered all questions; she respected people's efforts to keep their minds occupied, but denied any role in wrongdoing. Everyone who knew her knew she spoke the truth. She was much loved by the community. Informal consensus regarding Mrs. McGee's innocence was made formal. This did not, however, end acquaintances' embarrassment at the glee of Mrs. McGee over Hoot's demise. Certain persons wondered whether Hoot's fondness for tobacco could be profitably blamed for his presence on the hammock when lightning struck, whether smoke plumes might draw lightning, etc., and this wonder was expressed in preliminary legalistic terms. Big Tobacco quickly discovered through the testimony of a popular chaos theorist that the lightning bolt might not have formed at all, much less have killed a man, had Hoot not been on the hammock in the first place. Neither side seemed to know what to make of its own findings, which anyhow were in both cases deemed irrelevant and unprovable and circular by a grand jury, and speculations ceased. The two oak trees in the backyard were smacked to metabolic oblivion by that lightning. Sprouts of black splinters speared the air. Between them, still gently moving with the wind, inexplicably not one iota affected by the deadly bolt, hung the hammock. When Big Tobacco's peripheral brief involvement in Hoot's death became known to the public, so did many details of the case, and the manufacturer of the hammock climbed Wall Street like King Kong. Competing outdoor-furniture manufacturers acquired numerous samples of the lightning-proof hammock and examined them in research laboratories, where it was determined that the invincible mesh was not 100 percent Alpine Cotton, as ads and labels boasted, but was in fact 36 percent Bronx Scrapmetal, which ingredient accounted for the hammock's tremendous ppi capacity and evident prowess as a conductor of electricity. The Friends of Hoot McGee, a hastily assembled and largely local society, with a smattering of international membership thanks to the Internet station down at the library, brought a lawsuit against the makers of their cause's hammock. Mrs. McGee would have no part of it. "Any true friend of Hoot knows the value of a clean exit from this world, and is grateful, as am I, for any assistance in the matter." Her words were more to the point than she knew. Moments before the lightning struck, Hoot had been listening to the nearby sound of what he took for a giant summer insect: a fluttery buzzing coming at him from low brush a few yards away. He figured it for a cricket, extra-large. It was, in fact, the agitated respiration of a mother grizzly bear who perceived herself separated from her cubs by the swaying horizontal human that was Hoot. The lightning bolt that in the very next instant struck and killed Hoot terrified and disoriented the mother bear and her cubs into true separation. They were, however, reunited a few minutes later, about a mile downstream, where the salmon collect in a convenient shallow eddy, their default meeting place during local emergencies. - - - -
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