Boy's Life (85 page)

     And suddenly something had drifted up from below and was clinging to the trunk. Something that might have been a big clump of moss or rags somebody had dumped into Saxon’s Lake with their garbage. Whatever this thing was, it moved slowly and inexorably into the Buick through the broken rear windshield. The car was turning, turning over like a bizarre ride at the Brandywine Carnival, suspended against darkness. As my lungs burned for breath I saw the blur of Dr. Lezander’s white face again, only this time the ragged mossy thing had wrapped itself around him like a putrid robe. Whatever this thing was, it had hold of his jaw. I saw a faint glint of a silver tooth, like a receding star. Then the Buick turned over on its back like a huge turtle and as air bubbles rushed up again I felt them hit us and break us loose from the suction. We were rising toward the realm of light.

     Dad lifted me up, so my head broke the surface first.

     There wasn’t much light up there today, but there was a whole lot of air. Dad and I clung together in the choppy murk, breathing.

     At last we swam to where we could pull ourselves out, through mud and reeds to solid earth. Dad sat down on the ground next to the pickup truck, his hands scraped raw with glass cuts, and I huddled on the red rock cliff and looked out over Saxon’s Lake.

     “Hey, partner!” Dad said. “You okay?”

     “Yes sir.” My teeth were chattering, but being cold was a passing thing.

     “Better get in the truck,” he said.

     “I will,” I answered, but I wasn’t ready yet. My shoulder, which would become one swollen lump of bruise in the next couple of days, was mercifully numb.

     Dad pulled his knees up to his chest. The sleet was falling, but we were already cold and wet, so what of it? “I’ve got a story to tell you about Dr. Lezander,” he said.

     “I want to tell you one, too,” I answered. I listened; the wind swept over the lake’s surface and made it whisper.

     He was down in the dark now. He had come from darkness and to darkness he had returned.

     “He called me Bronco,” I said.

     “Yeah. How about that?”

     We couldn’t stay here very much longer. The wind was really getting cold. It was the kind of weather that made you catch your death.

     Dad looked up at the low gray clouds and the January gloom. He smiled, with the face of a boy unburdened.

     “Gosh,” he said, “it’s a beautiful day.”

     Hell might have been for heroes, but life was for the living.

     These things happened, in the aftermath.

     When Mom got up off the floor from her faint, she was all right. She hugged both Dad and me, but she didn’t cling on to us. We had come back to her a little worse for wear, but we were back. Dad in particular; his dreams of the man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake were ended, good and truly.

     Mr. Steiner and Mr. Hannaford, though dismayed that they had never even gotten a finger on Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke, were at least satisfied with the outcome of rough justice. They had Mrs. Kara Dahninaderke and her birds of human bone in their custody, however, and that was a great consolation. The last I heard of her, she was going to a prison where even the light lay chained.

     Ben and Johnny were beside themselves. Ben jumped up and down in a fit and Johnny scowled and stomped when they realized they had been sitting in front of a movie while I’d been battling for my life against a Nazi war criminal. To say this made me a celebrity at school was like saying the moon is the size of a river pebble. Even the teachers wanted to hear my tale. Pretty Miss Fontaine was enthralled by it, and Mr. Cardinale asked to hear it twice. “You ought to be a writer, Cory!” Miss Fontaine said. “You surely do know your words!” Mr. Cardinale said, “You’d make a fine author, in my opinion.”

     Writer? Author?

     Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.

     On a cold but sunny Saturday morning toward the end of January, I left Rocket on the front porch and got into the pickup truck with Mom and Dad. He drove us across the gargoyle bridge and along Route Ten—slowly, all the time watching for the beast from the lost world. Though the beast remained loose in the woods, I never saw him again. I believe he was a gift to me from Davy Ray.

     We reached Saxon’s Lake. The water was smooth. There was no trace of what lay at its bottom, but we all knew.

     I stood on the red rock cliff, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the green feather. Dad had tied twine around it, with a little lead-ball weight on its end. I threw it into the lake, and it went down faster than you can say Dahninaderke. Much faster, I’m sure.

     I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.

     Dad stood on one side of me, and Mom on the other. We were a mighty good team.

     “I’m ready now,” I told them.

     And I went home, where my monsters and my magic box were waiting.

FIVE

Zephyr as It Is

IT HAS BEEN A LONG, COLD WINTER, AND I AM GOING HOME.

     South from Birmingham on Interstate 65, that busy highway leading to the state capital. A left turn at Exit 205, and then following the road as it narrows and winds past drowsing towns named Coopers, Rockford, Hissop, and Cottage Grove. No sign spells out the name Zephyr anymore, but I know where it is and I am going home.

     I am not going alone, on this beautiful Saturday afternoon at the beginning of spring. My wife, Sandy, is beside me, and our own “young’un” in the back, curled up wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball cap on backward and baseball cards scattered over the seat. These days there might be a fortune back there, who knows? The radio—pardon me, the stereo cassette player—is on, with Tears For Fears coming out of the speakers. I think Roland Orzabal is a fantastic singer.

     It’s 1991. Can you believe it? We’re poised on the edge of a new century, for better or worse. I guess we’ll all make up our own minds which. The year 1964 seems like ancient history now. The Polaroids taken in that year have turned yellow. No one wears their hair like that anymore, and the clothes have changed. People have changed, too, I think. Not just in the South, but everywhere. For better or worse? You can decide for yourself.

     And what we and the world have been through since 1964! Think of it! It’s been a faster, more brain-busting ride than ever could be devised by the Brandywine Carnival. We’ve lived through Vietnam—if we’ve been fortunate—and the era of Flower Power, Watergate and the fall of Nixon, the Ayatollah, Ronnie and Nancy, the cracking of the Wall and the beginning of the end of Communist Russia. We truly are living in the time of whirlwinds and comets. And like rivers that flow to the sea, time must flow into the future. It boggles the mind to think what might be ahead. But, as the Lady once said, you can’t know where you’re going until you figure out where you’ve been. Sometimes I think we have a lot of figuring out to do.

     “It’s such a lovely day,” Sandy says, and she leans back in her seat to watch the countryside glide past. I glance at her and my eyes are blessed. She wears sunlight in her blond hair like a spill of golden flowers. There’s some silver in there, too, and I like it though she frets some. Her eyes are pale gray and her gaze is calm and steady. She is a rock when I need strength, and a pillow when I need comfort. We’re a good team. Our child has her eyes and her calm, the dark brown of my hair and my curiosity about the world. Our child has my father’s sharp-bridged nose and the slim-fingered “artist’s hands” of my mother. I think it’s a fine combination.

     “Hey, Dad!” The baseball cards have been forgotten for the moment.

     “Yeah?”

     “Are you nervous?”

     “No,” I say. Better be honest, I think. “Well… maybe a little bit.”

     “What’s it gonna be like?”

     “I don’t know. It’s been… oh… let’s see, we left Zephyr in 1966. So it’s been… you tell me how many years.”

     A few seconds’ pause. “Twenty-five.”

     “Right as rain,” I say. Our child gets an aptitude in math strictly from Sandy’s side of the family, believe me.

     “How come you never came back here? I mean, if you liked it so much?”

     “I started to, more than a few times. I got as far as the turnoff from I-65. But Zephyr’s not like it was. I guess I know things can’t stay the same, and that’s all right but… Zephyr was my home, and it hurts to think it’s changed so much.”

     “So how’s it changed? It’s still a town, isn’t it?” I hear the baseball cards being flipped through again, being sorted by team and alphabetized.

     “Not like it was,” I say. “The air force base near here closed down in 1974, and the paper mill up on the Tecumseh shut down two years later. Union Town grew. It’s about four or five times the size it was when I was a boy. But Zephyr… just got smaller.”

     “Um.” The attention is drifting now.

     I glance at Sandy, and we smile at each other. Her hand finds mine. They were meant to be clasped together, just like this. Before us, the hills rise around Adams Valley. They are covered by trees that blaze with the yellow and purple of new buds. Some green is appearing, too, though April’s not here yet. The air outside the car is still cool, but the sun is a glorious promise of summer.

     My folks and I indeed did leave Zephyr, in August of 1966. Dad, who had found a job working at Mr. Vandercamp’s hardware store, sensed the changing winds and decided to search for greener pastures. He found a job in Birmingham, as the assistant manager on the night shift at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. He was making twice as much money as he’d ever made when he was a milkman. By 1970, he’d moved up to be the night-shift manager, and he thought we were in high cotton. That was the year I started college, at the University of Alabama. Dad saw me graduate, with a degree in journalism, before he died of cancer in 1978. It was, thankfully, a quick passing. Mom grieved terribly, and I thought I was going to lose her, too. But in 1983, on a cruise to Alaska with a group of friends from her church, Mom met a widowed gentleman who owned a horse breeding farm near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Two years later, she became his wife and she lives on that farm still. He’s a great guy and is very good to my mother, but he’s not my dad. Life goes on, and the roads always lead to unexpected destinations.

     ROUTE TEN, reads a sign pocked with rust-edged bullet holes.

     My heart is starting to beat harder. My throat is dry. I expect change, but I’m afraid of it.

     I’ve tried my damnedest not to get old. This in itself is a tough job. I don’t mean age old, because that’s an honorable thing. I mean attitude old. I’ve seen guys my age suddenly wake up one morning and forget their fathers forbade them to listen to those demonic Rolling Stones. They’ve forgotten their fathers demanding that they get out of the house if they’re going to wear their hair down on their foreheads. They’ve forgotten what it meant, to be the bossee instead of the bosser. Of course the world is tougher now, no doubt about it. There are harder choices to be made, with more terrible consequences. Kids need guidance, for sure. I did, and I’m glad I got guided because it helped me miss making a lot of mistakes. But I think parents aren’t teachers anymore. Parents—or a whole lot of us, at least—lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child’s hero is their mother or father—or even better, both of them in tandem—then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.