The Truth About Love and Lightning by Susan McBride Page A

droughts on the reservation. With the magic of dry ice and fans and an improvised sprinkler system rigged up above, soon a misty rain began to drizzle onto the tarp-covered boards. The audience ate it up, often giving him a standing ovation, even though they had to know the spectacle was merely sleight of hand, not a miracle.
    “But you do make it rain, Hank,” Nadya Celeste, the magician’s doe-eyed assistant, told him one evening when he took her out for coffee at a twenty-four-hour diner after the show, requiring a shared umbrella as a light shower fell upon them from the evening sky. “Haven’t you noticed it’s always wet after your performance?”
    “No,” Hank told her, because he hadn’t thought anything of it, not until she had pointed it out.
    But when he began to pay attention, he realized she was right: every time without fail, no matter how clear the night was to begin with, it would be raining outside when the theater emptied. Sometimes it was no more than a drizzle; at other times, water came down in buckets. And it never seemed to reach more than a few blocks beyond the venue.
    “It could be coincidence,” he suggested, but Nadya didn’t agree.
    “What if it’s not? Maybe what you do is more than an act. Maybe you have a real gift,” she said, echoing what his father had once told him.
    Hank didn’t want to admit that he felt something quite beyond the ordinary when he did the rain dance, a kind of current rushing through him, a sense of being outside himself and part of the air around him. If he’d tried to explain that to Nadya, she would’ve thought he was insane.
    So he just smiled and squeezed her gloved hand, thinking the only gift he truly wanted was to make enough money to buy some land, build a house, and ask her to marry him. Then he could wake up to her dimples and wide eyes every morning, and he’d never have to deal with Wilbur Coonts again.
    When his probationary eight weeks had passed, Hank went to see Coonts and asked for more money, and not just the usual rate. He knew by the ads Coonts had been running in the newspapers that “Chief Littlefoot’s Authentic Rain-Making Ceremony” was the show’s biggest draw.
    He even lied and told Coonts he’d had an offer from a rival vaudeville troupe, a remark that instantly quieted the man. His boss rubbed fat fingers together before nodding his double chin. “So long as the box office keeps coming in, I’ll pay you what you ask. But the public’s a fickle bunch, Littlefoot, and if they tire of you, your check will be the first I cut in half.”
    Hank was hardly worried about the crowds losing interest. In fact, they only seemed to swell, and Coonts added shows in Omaha and Springfield, Leavenworth and Salina, Peoria and Des Moines. Every night, Hank found more folks standing outside the venues, farmers in coveralls with grim faces who waited for him in the damp after the theater lights dimmed.
    “We haven’t had rain in two months,” one would step forward and say. “My crops are turning to dust. I’ll give you whatever I’ve got if you’ll come do your tricks on my land and make the sky loosen up.”
    At first, Hank wasn’t sure what to do with this newfound attention. He would mumble, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” and hurry off with one hand clutching Nadya and the other his umbrella.
    Then the letters started arriving, at first in a trickle and then in a flood so great that Coonts turned red-faced, stuck his thumbs inside his vest, and blustered at him, “For God’s sake, Littlefoot, if you can make it rain outside the theaters every damned night we have a show, don’t you figure you can give these poor bastards a shot?”
    But the theater was the theater, Hank knew. Playing God with people’s lives was something else entirely.
    “I can’t do it,” he said, shaking his head, because he wasn’t his grandfather. He hadn’t even stayed true to his native roots. If his father realized what he was