Boy's Life (70 page)

     There were so many of them. So many. I remember hearing this somewhere: when an old man dies, a library burns down. I recalled Davy Ray’s obituary in the Adams Valley
Journal
. They said he had died in a hunting accident. They said who his mother and father were, that he had a younger brother named Andy and that he was a member of the Union Town Presbyterian Church. They said his funeral would be at ten-thirty in the morning. What they had left out stunned me. They hadn’t said one word about the way the corners of his eyes crinkled up when he laughed, or how he would set his mouth to one side in preparation for a verbal jab at Ben. There had been no mention of the shine in his eyes when he saw a forest trail he hadn’t explored before, or how he chewed his bottom lip when he was about to pitch a fastball. They had written down the cut-and-dried of it, but they had not mentioned the real Davy Ray. I wondered about this as I walked amid the graves. How many stories were here, buried and forgotten? How many old burned libraries, how many young ones that had been building their volumes year by year? And all those stories, lost. I wished there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that had been. It would be a living memorial to the generations who had gone on before, and you could hear their voices though those voices had been stilled for a hundred years. It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed. We had thrown away the past, and our future was impoverished for it.

     I came to Davy Ray’s grave. The headstone hadn’t arrived yet, but a flat stone marker was set into the bare earth. He was neither at the bottom of the hill nor at the top; he occupied the middle ground. I sat down beside the marker, taking care not to trample on the slight mound that rain would settle and spring would sprout. I looked out into the darkness, under the cold, sharp moon. In the sunlight, I knew, there was a panoramic view of Zephyr and the hills from here. You could see the gargoyle bridge, and the Tecumseh River. You could see the railroad track as it wound its way through those hills, and the trestle as it crossed the river on its passage through Zephyr to the larger towns. It was a nice view, if you had eyes to see it. I somehow doubted that Davy Ray cared much whether he had a view of the hills and river or if his grave overlooked a swamp bowl. Such things might be important to the grievers, but not so much to the leavers.

     “Gosh,” I said, and my breath drifted out. “I sure am mixed up.”

     Had I expected Davy Ray to answer? No, I had not. Thus I was not disappointed at the silence.

     “I don’t know if you’re in darkness or heaven,” I said. “I don’t know what would be so great about heaven if you can’t get in a little trouble there. It sounds like church to me. Church is fine for an hour on Sunday, but I wouldn’t want to live there. And I wouldn’t want darkness, either. Just nothin’ and nothin’ and more nothin’. Everythin’ you ever thought or did or believed just gone, like a ripple in a pond that nobody sees.” I pulled my knees up to my chest, and locked my arms around them. “No voice to speak, no eyes to see, no ears, nothin’ at all. Then what are we born for, Davy Ray?”

     This question, as well, elicited a burst of silence.

     “And I can’t figure this faith thing out,” I went on. “Mom says I ought to have it. Reverend Lovoy says I’ve got to have it. But what if there’s nothin’ to have faith in, Davy Ray? What if faith is just like talkin’ on a telephone when there’s nobody on the other end, but you don’t know nobody’s there until you ask ’em a question and they don’t answer? Wouldn’t it make you go kind of crazy, to think you spent all that time jawin’ to thin air?”

     I was doing some jawing to empty air myself, I realized. But I was comforted, knowing Davy Ray was lying beside me. I shifted over to a place where the brown grass was unmarked by shovels and I reclined on my back. I stared up at the awesome stars. “Look at that,” I said. “Just look at that sky. Looks like the Demon blew her nose on black velvet, huh?” I smiled, thinking Davy Ray would’ve gotten a kick out of that. “Not really,” I said. “Can you see that sky from where you are?”

     Silence and more silence.

     I folded my arms across my chest. It didn’t seem so cold, with my back against the earth. My head was next to Davy Ray’s. “I got whipped today,” I confided. “Dad really blistered me. Maybe I deserved it. But Leatherlungs deserves to get whipped, too, doesn’t she? How come nobody listens to kids, even when they’ve got somethin’ to say?” I sighed, and my breath rose toward Capricorn. “I can’t write that apology, Davy Ray. I just can’t, and nobody’s gonna make me. Maybe I was wrong, but I was only half wrong, and they want me to say I was whole wrong. I can’t write it. What am I gonna do?”

     I heard it then.

     Not Davy Ray’s voice, chiding me.

     But a train’s whistle, off in the distance.

     The freight was coming through.

     I sat up. Off in the hills I could see the headlight like a moving star as the train wound toward Zephyr. I watched it coming.

     The freight would slow down as it approached the Tecumseh trestle. It always did. It would slow down even more as it crossed the trestle, its heavy wheels making the old structure moan and clatter.

     As it came off the trestle, it would be slow enough to catch if someone had a mind to.

     The moment wouldn’t last very long. The freight would pick up speed, and by the time it had reached the far side of Zephyr it would be running fast again.

     “I can’t write any apology, Davy Ray,” I said quietly. “Not tomorrow, not the day after that. Not ever. I guess I can’t ever go back to school, huh?”

     Davy Ray offered neither opinion nor advice. I was on my own.

     “What if I was to go away for a while? Not long. Maybe two or three days. What if I was to show ’em I’d rather run away than write an apology? Then maybe they’d listen to me, don’t you think?” I watched the moving star come nearer. The whistle blew again, maybe warning a deer off the track. I heard it say
Corrrrryyyyyyyyy
.

     I stood up. I could make it to the trestle if I ran to Rocket. But I had to go right this minute. Fifteen more seconds and I would face one more day of anger and disappointment from my parents. One more day of being a boy closed up in a room with an unwritten apology staring me in the face. The freight that was about to pass through always returned again. I reached into my pocket, and found two quarters left over from some purchase of popcorn or candy bar at the Lyric last winter when things were good.

     “I’m goin’, Davy Ray!” I said. “I’m goin’!”

     I started running through the graveyard. As I reached Rocket and swung up onto the saddle, I feared I was already too late. I pedaled like mad for the trestle, the breath blooming around my face, I heard the moan and clatter as I pulled alongside the gravel-edged tracks; the freight was crossing, and I could yet meet it.

     And then there it was, the headlight blazing. The huge engine came off the trestle and passed me, going a little faster than I could walk. Then the boxcars began going past: Southern Railroad cars,
bump ka thud, bump ka thud, bump ka thud
on the ties. Already the train was starting to pick up speed. I got off Rocket and put the kickstand down. I ran my fingers along the handlebar. For a second I saw the headlamp’s golden eye, luminous with the moon. “I’ll be back!” I promised.

     All the boxcars were closed up, it seemed. But then here came one toward the end of the freight that had a door partway open. I thought of railroad bulls bashing heads and throwing freeloaders face-first into steam-scalded space, but I shook the thought away. I ran alongside the boxcar with the open door. A ladder was close at hand. I reached up, hooked four gloved fingers around a metal rung, got my thumb wedged there, too, and then I grabbed hold with the other hand and lifted my feet off the gravel.

     I swung myself toward the boxcar’s open door. I was amazed that I had such dexterity. I guess when you hear a few tons of steel wheels grinding underneath you, you can become an acrobat real quick. I went through that opening into the boxcar, my fingers released the iron rungs, and I hit a wooden floor sparsely covered with hay. The sound of my entrance was not gentle; it echoed in the boxcar, which was sealed shut on the other side. I sat up, hay all over the front of my outermost sweater.

     The boxcar rumbled and shook. It was clearly not made for passengers.

     But someone was indeed along for the ride.

     “Hey, Princey!” a voice said. “A little bird just flew in!”

     I jumped up. That voice had sounded like a combination of rocks in a cement mixer and a bullfrog’s lament. It had come from the dark before me.

     “Yes, I see him,” another man answered. This voice was as smooth as black silk and had the lilt of a foreign accent. “I think he almost broke his wings, Franklin.”

     I was in the company of boxcar-riding tramps who would slit my throat for the quarters in my pocket. I turned to jump through the doorway, but Zephyr was speeding past.

     “I wouldn’t, young man,” the foreign-accented voice cautioned. “It would not be pretty.”

     I paused on the edge, my heart pounding.

     “We ain’t gonna bite ya!” the froggish cement-mixer voice said. “Are we, Princey?”

     “Speak for yourself, please.”

     “Ah, he’s just kiddin’! Princey’s always kiddin’, ain’t ya?”

     “Yes,” the black silk voice said with a sigh, “I’m always kidding.”

     A match flared beside my face. I jumped again, and turned to see who stood there.

     A nightmare visage peered at me, so close I could smell his musty breath.

     The man would’ve made a railroad tie look like Charles Atlas. He was emaciated, his black eyes submerged in shadow pools and the cheekbones thrust against the flesh of his face. And what flesh! I had seen summer-baked creekbeds that held more moisture. Every inch of his face was cracked and wrinkled, and the cracks drew his mouth back from his yellow teeth and continued up like a weird cap over the hairless dome of his scalp. His long, skinny fingers, exposed by the matchlight, were likewise shriveled, as was the hand on which they were fixed. His throat was a dried mass of cracks. He wore a dusty white costume of some kind, but where shirt and pants met I couldn’t tell. He looked like a stick in a bag of dirty rags.

     I was frozen with terror, waiting for the blade to slice my neck.

     The wrinkled man’s other hand rose like an adder’s head. I tensed.

     He was holding a package with a few Fig Newtons in it.

     “Well, well!” the foreign man said with obvious surprise. “Ahmet likes you! Take a Fig Newton, he doesn’t speak.”

     “I… don’t think I…”

     The match went out. I could smell Ahmet next to me, an odor so dry it threatened to crisp the hairs in my nostrils. He breathed like the rustle of dead leaves.

     A second match was struck. Ahmet had a black streak across his pointed chin. He still held the Fig Newtons, and now he nodded at me. When he did so, I thought I heard his flesh creak.

     He was grinning like warmed-over Death. Baked and crusted Death, to be more exact. I slid a trembling hand into the package and accepted a Fig Newton. This seemed to appease Ahmet. He shambled over toward the boxcar’s other side, and he knelt down and touched the match to three candle stubs stuck with wax to the bottom of an upturned bucket.

      The light grew. And as it grew, it showed me things I wished I didn’t have to look at.

     “There,” the foreign man said from where he sat with his shoulder against a pile of burlap sacks. “Now we see eye-to-eye.”

     I wished we’d been back to back with five miles between us.

     If this man had ever seen the sun, the Lady was my grandmother. His skin was so pallid, he made the moon appear as dark as Don Ho. He was a young man, younger at least than my father, and he had fine blond hair combed back from a high forehead. A touch of silver glinted at his temples. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a necktie. Only I could tell right off that his suit had seen better days from the patches around the shoulders, the cuffs of his shirt were frayed, and brown blotches marred his tie. Still, there was an elegance about this man; even sitting down, he commanded your attention with a stare that had a trace of well-bred haughtiness in it. His wingtips were scuffed. At first I thought he was wearing white socks, but then I realized those were his ankles. His eyes bothered me, though; in the candlelight, the pupils gleamed scarlet.

     But this man, and Ahmet the dried-up one, looked like Troy Donahue and Yul Brynner compared to the third monstrosity in that boxcar.

     He was standing up in a corner. His head, which was strangely shovel-shaped, almost brushed the ceiling. The man must have been over seven feet tall. His shoulders looked as wide as some of the wings on the planes at Robbins Air Force Base. His body appeared bulky and lumpy and altogether not right. He was wearing a loose brown jacket and gray trousers with patches on the knees. The trousers looked as if they had gotten drenched and shrunken while he was still in them. The size of the man’s shoes astounded me; to call them clodhoppers is like calling an atomic bomb a pregnant grenade. They were more like earthmovers.