Me, Jimmy, Johnny & JC were over at Doug’s house one day last summer, supposedly helping him put up a fence, but really we were drinking beer, telling lies and watching a deer hunting video on TV. We did go out and look at the yard we were going to fence, but the clouds were building up and it looked like it might storm sometime, so we decided to just wait it out in the house.
The door to the deck was open and we started hearing strange noises outside, kinda like electricity jumping an open circuit. JC went to the door and said, “Man, this is weird.” We all went out on the deck and everything was kinda glowing, like it does sometimes before a summer storm. But the wind was pretty calm and the clouds were so low it seemed like you could throw a rock up into them.
Every 30 seconds or so, we could hear electricity jumping around in the clouds. There was no thunder or lightening, just a crackling here and there. Johnny said it was like there was almost enough electricity to lightening, but not quite enough to actually make the commitment.
We listened for a couple of more minutes and Jimmy said, “I wonder if we was to shoot a gun up amongst the clouds, it would cause a spark or something and set off a lightening bolt.”
We all looked at each other and Doug said, “I’ll get my gun.”
He put a bullet in it and said we should go out front where we could stand up on top of a little hill. We all ran out the door, whooping like a bunch of rednecks. As we were running up the hill, I noticed the hair on my arms standing up and heard a little crackling in the hair on my head. It was like the air was full of static electricity. Since everything seemed so full of electricity, I thought “This just might work.”
When we got to the top of the hill, we all formed a circle around Doug and JC yelled, “Shoot the gun, Doug, shoot the gun!”
Doug held the gun up high over his head pointed at the sky, flipped the safety off, let out a “Yee-haw!” and then, just before he pulled the trigger, “BOOM!”
When I talked to the paramedic the next day, he said the lightening bolt that hit Doug’s gun had knocked us all about 20 feet down the hill, but didn’t do us any real damage. Doug was less lucky, having acted like a lightening rod. He said once the burns had healed, Doug might not have full use of his faculties, which was worse news for Doug than it would have been for any of the rest of us.
Since we felt partially to blame for Doug’s mishap, we decided to do something to help him out. JC said we ought to put up his fence for him, but home improvements are kind of a personal thing and I was afraid we wouldn’t do it to his liking, so we decided we would just take turns bringing him beer every Saturday, at least until he was able to drive again. We all felt good about that. I mean, what are friends for?