Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) Read Online Free PDF

siding weathered a lovely gray, and has a screen door on a spring. Most times when Polly and I hit it on the way outside to play, we’d hear Mom shout “Don’t let the door slam!” and one of us would do a quick reverse and make a diving catch.
    The long dock widens to become our covered back porch. Papa says in Louisiana it would be screened in if the owner could afford it. We don’t need that because we don’t have skeeters in
Rolling Thunder
.
    The porch has a big picnic table where we eat most of our meals, and is usually cluttered with fishing poles, nets, tackle, crawdad traps, and coolers. There is a live bait well full of minnows and a box for night crawlers, an ice machine, and a drink dispenser where you lift the lid and see the various kinds of soda in glass bottles hanging by their necks. It says RC Cola on the side. I usually choose the Grapette, Polly prefers Orange Crush, and Papa goes for Hires root beer. Mom likes Vernor’s ginger ale, a “Yankee drink,” according to Papa. We all like Dr Pepper.
    They’re all zero calorie, by the way. I think some of those brands are no longer made back at Old Sun. Our beverage factory can whip up anything you like.
    So, what I’m saying, from the outside the house looks like it’s about one big gator bite from falling into Seven Acre Pond. That’s all illusion, all for fun, done to keep everything in the ship from looking like everything else. The house is actually sturdy enough to weather hurricanes if we were dumb enough to have them.
    The house is roomy enough. It’s all on one level, three bedrooms, one for Mama and Papa and one each for us twins. The parental units were not the sort to make twins dress identically, and they both thought that one’s own private room was important.
    There’s a quite large family room with a raftered ceiling and room to seat several dozen on couches and around tables and window seats. There’s a big kitchen, Papa Jubal’s realm since Mama Podkayne doesn’t know which end of a wooden spoon to grab and which to stir with. She can somehow manage to make our smart toaster burn the bread, something the manufacturer claims is impossible. We learned to make our own breakfasts on the first day of school, when we were five.
    That’s it for the house. Then there’s the boathouse, and a separate building with a guest bedroom, a study/lab/machine shop for Papa to do his work concerning picking apart the structure of the universe, and a music room for Mom. There’s a storage shed that looks as ramshackle as the other buildings, and isn’t. There’s a three-room Victorian playhouse that Polly and I can barely squeeze into anymore, and a two-story tree house in our huge Spanish moss–draped live oak, both of them built by Papa and the envy of all our friends when we were young.
    And that’s about it for the grounds of Chez Broussard.
    The main room of the Broussard Mansion was jam-packed when we entered. I figured that was a good thing. It would keep Mom’s mind off her kids. Wood smoke drifted in from the open windows, from dozens of chickens and racks of ribs out on the grill, being tended to by our grand-père Jim, who at the age of ninety-four clock time (eighty-four body time) still runs the best Martian restaurant in
Rolling Thunder
. He was responsible for the heaping bowls of jambalaya, dirty rice, andouille sausage, hush puppies, okra, and boiled crawdads on the tables all around. There were also a few platters of a real delicacy: jumbo peeled shrimp. It’s something that appears on our table only at Thanksgiving, and on very few other tables in the ship.
    We farm all sorts of fish, but almost all of it is freshwater. We make some fairly good imitations of shrimp and crab, and we raise oysters, but we just don’t have the room to cultivate ocean fish or crustaceans. Neither Papa nor Uncle Travis wanted to face life without ever tasting shrimp or crab or redfish again, so they laid in what they called a hundred-year