Up ahead was an elaborate mini-golf layout. It was mostly filled with laughing teenagers, and I thought I had arrived at Ground Zero. Wherever there are teenagers out for a night of fun, there are dealers in the vicinity who are happy to help them maximize said fun. And oh yeah, I could see a couple of fellows who had just the right look. By their shifty eyes and unwashed hair shalt thou know them.

The midway ended at a T junction beyond the mini-golf, one way leading back to the fairgrounds, the other to the racetrack. I had no desire to go to either place, but I’d been hearing a strange electric crackle off to the right, followed by applause, laughter, and cries of amazement. Now, as I drew closer to the junction, I could see that each crackle was accompanied by a bright blue flash that reminded me of lightning. The lightning on Skytop, to be perfectly specific. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Whatever the gaff was, it had drawn a big crowd. I decided the sharpies hanging around the golf course could wait a few minutes. Guys like that never go away until they shut off the neon, and I wanted to see who was making lightning on this hot and clear Oklahoma night.

An amplified voice cried, “Now that you have seen the power of my Lightning Maker—the only one in the world, I assure you—I’ll give an actual demonstration of the wonderful portrait that one portrait of Alexander Hamilton from your wallet or purse will buy you; one amazing demonstration before I open my Electric Studio and offer you the chance to sit for the photographic representation of a lifetime! But I’ll need a volunteer so you’ll see exactly what you’ll be getting for the best ten dollars you ever spent! Volunteer? May I have a volunteer? It’s perfectly safe, I assure you! Come on, folks, I always heard Sooners were famous in the Lower Forty-eight for their bravery!”

There was a good-size crowd, fifty or sixty, in front of a raised stage. The canvas backdrop was six feet wide and at least twenty feet high. On it was a photograph almost as big as a movie screen image. It featured a beautiful young woman on what appeared to be a ballroom floor. Her black hair was piled atop her head in a series of complicated twirls and tucks that must have taken hours to create. Her strapless evening gown was cut low, the tops of her breasts curving sweetly above it. She was wearing diamond earrings and bloodred lipstick.

Facing the giant ballroom girl was an old-fashioned camera, the nineteenth-century kind that stands on a tripod and has a black drape the photographer can throw over his head. Placed as it was, you would have said it could only snap the ballroom girl from the knees down. Next to it was a flash-powder tray on a post. The black-suited, top-hatted gaffmeister had one loosely curled hand on the camera, and I knew him at once.

All that is clear, but my memory of what happened next is untrustworthy—I freely admit it. I was a longtime junkie who had graduated to the needle two years previous, first just skin-popping, but more and more frequently aiming for the vein. I was malnourished and severely underweight. On top of that, I was running a temperature. It was the flu, and it had come on fast. Getting up that morning, I’d thought I just had the usual case of heroin sniffles, a cold at worst, but by the time I saw Charles Jacobs standing beside an old-fashioned tripod camera and in front of a canvas backdrop with PORTRAITS IN LIGHTNING written over a giant girl, I felt like I was living in a dream. It didn’t surprise me to see my old minister, now with touches of gray at his temples and lines (faint ones) bracketing his mouth. It wouldn’t have surprised me if my late mother and sister had joined him onstage, dressed as Playboy Bunnies.

A couple of men raised their hands in response to Jacobs’s call for volunteers, but he laughed and pointed at the beautiful girl looming over his shoulder. “I’m sure you guys are brave as the devil on Saturday night, but none of you would look good in a strapless.”

Good-natured laughter greeted this.

“I want a gal,” said the fellow who showed me Peaceable Lake when I was but a tyke in short pants. “I want a pretty gal! A pretty little Sooner gal! How ’bout you folks? You down with that?”

They clapped their hands to show how down with it they were. And Jacobs, who had surely already picked out his mark, pointed his cordless mike toward someone in the front of the crowd. “How about you, miss? You’re about as pretty a gal as anyone could want!”

I was at the back of the tip, but the crowd seemed to part before me as if I were possessed of some magical repelling force. Probably I just elbowed my way forward, but I don’t remember it that way, and if anyone elbowed me back, I don’t remember that, either. I seemed to float forward. All the colors were brighter now, the tootling of the carousel calliope and the screams from the Zingo louder. The humming in my ears had escalated to a tuneful ringing: G⁷, I think. I moved through an aromatic atmosphere of perfume, aftershave, and discount store hairspray.

The pretty Sooner gal was protesting, but her friends were having none of that. They pushed her forward, and she mounted the steps on the left side of the stage, tanned thighs flashing beneath the frayed hem of her short denim skirt. Above the skirt was a green smock that was high at the neck but left a flirty inch of midriff revealed. Her hair was blond and long. A few men whistled.

“Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge!” Jacobs told the crowd, and swept off his tophat. I saw him clench the hand holding it. For just a moment I felt sensations I hadn’t since that day at Skytop: gooseflesh on my arms, hair standing to attention on the nape of my neck, the air too heavy in my lungs. Then the tray beside the camera exploded with something that was certainly not flash powder, and the canvas backdrop lit up in a dazzling blue glare. The face of the girl in the evening gown was blotted out. As the dazzle faded I saw in her place—or thought I saw—the fiftysomething country girl who had kicked me out of the Fairgrounds Inn some nine hours earlier. Then the girl in the low-cut spangly gown was back.

It wowed the crowd and it wowed me, too . . . but it didn’t completely surprise me. Reverend Jacobs up to his old tricks, that was all. Nor did it surprise me when he put his arm around the girl, turned her to face us, and for an instant I thought it was Astrid Soderberg, once more sixteen years old and worried about getting pregnant. Astrid who sometimes used to blow smoke from her Virginia Slims into my mouth, giving me a hard-on for the ages.

Then she was just a pretty little Sooner gal again, in from the farm and ready for a night of fun.

Jacobs’s assistant, a kid with zits and a bad haircut, trotted out with an ordinary wooden chair. He put it in front of the camera, then made a comic business of dusting off Jacobs’s old-fashioned frock coat. “Sit down, honey,” Jacobs said, ushering the girl to the chair. “I promise you a shockingly good time.”

He waggled his eyebrows and his young assistant did a little electric jitter. The audience yukked it up. Jacobs’s eyes found me, now in the first row, passed on, then came back. After a second’s consideration, they moved on again.

“Will it hurt?” the girl asked, and now I saw she didn’t look much like Astrid, after all. Of course not. She was much younger than my first girlfriend would be now . . . and wherever Astrid might be, her last name was almost surely no longer Soderberg.

“Not a bit,” Jacobs assured her. “And unlike any other lady who dares to step forward, your portrait will be . . .”

He looked away from her, back at the crowd, this time directly at me.

“. . . absolutely free.”

He seated her in the chair, continuing with the patter, but he seemed a little hesitant now, as if he had lost the thread. He kept glancing at me as his assistant fastened a white silk blindfold over the girl’s eyes. If he was distracted, the crowd didn’t notice; a petite pretty girl was about to be photographed at the feet of a giant beautiful girl—while blindfolded, no less—and all that was very interesting. So was the fact that the live girl was showing a lot of leg and the one on the backdrop was showing a lot of cleavage.