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    Boy's Life
    Boy's Life
    Boy's Life
    Ebook737 pages13 hours

    Boy's Life

    By Robert McCammon

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An Alabama boy’s innocence is shaken by murder and madness in the 1960s South in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of Swan Song.

    It’s 1964 in idyllic Zephyr, Alabama. People either work for the paper mill up the Tecumseh River, or for the local dairy. It’s a simple life, but it stirs the impressionable imagination of twelve-year-old aspiring writer Cory Mackenson. He’s certain he’s sensed spirits whispering in the churchyard. He’s heard of the weird bootleggers who lurk in the dark outside of town. He’s seen a flood leave Main Street crawling with snakes. Cory thrills to all of it as only a young boy can.
     
    Then one morning, while accompanying his father on his milk route, he sees a car careen off the road and slowly sink into fathomless Saxon’s Lake. His father dives into the icy water to rescue the driver, and finds a beaten corpse, naked and handcuffed to the steering wheel—a copper wire tightened around the stranger’s neck. In time, the townsfolk seem to forget all about the unsolved murder. But Cory and his father can’t.
     
    Their search for the truth is a journey into a world where innocence and evil collide. What lies before them is the stuff of fear and awe, magic and madness, fantasy and reality. As Cory wades into the deep end of Zephyr and all its mysteries, he’ll discover that while the pleasures of childish things fade away, growing up can be a strange and beautiful ride.
     
    “Strongly echoing the childhood-elegies of King and Bradbury, and every bit their equal,” Boy’s Life, a winner of both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards, represents a brilliant blend of mystery and rich atmosphere, the finest work of one of today’s most accomplished writers (Kirkus Reviews).
      
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781453231562
    Author

    Robert McCammon

    Robert McCammon (b. 1952) is one of the country’s most accomplished authors of modern horror and historical fiction, and a founder of the Horror Writers Association. Raised by his grandparents in Birmingham, Alabama, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award–winning McCammon published his first novel, the Revelations-inspired Baal, when he was only twenty-six. His writings continued in a supernatural vein throughout the 1980s, as he produced such bestselling titles as Swan Song, The Wolf’s Hour, and Stinger. In 1991, Boy’s Life won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. After his next novel, Gone South, McCammon took a break from writing to spend more time with his family. He did not publish another novel until 2002’s Speaks the Nightbird. Since then, he has followed “problem-solver” Matthew Corbett through seven sequels, in addition to writing several non-series books, including The Border and The Listener. McCammon still lives in Birmingham.

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    Reviews for Boy's Life

    4.5/5

    137 ratings44 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a beautifully constructed novel set in the 1960s southern US. It explores the goodness and awfulness of the era, with elements of fantasy seamlessly integrated into the story. The characters are believable and the storytelling is top-notch. While there are some historical errors and a slow plot, the book is still considered a treasure by many readers. Overall, it is a poignant and thought-provoking read that stays with you long after finishing.

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    • 5/5
      Another great book that I stumbled across and will never forget. A coming of age story with a bit of fantasy/horror thrown in the mix (but not so much as to alienate anyone who just loves a moving story). A definate 5 star book.
    • 5/5
      A great life adventure.
    • 4/5
      There are many things I liked about Boy's Life by Robert McCammon.: an insightful, humorous and sometimes poignant story of growing up in small town Alabama in the mid 1960's. Right off you can tell the writer is capturing his childhood in a loving and nostalgic way. The quality of the writing shows throughout. The author is quite a storyteller and mixes in fantasy and mystery in this coming of age novel. I knocked off half a star because the book was too long by about 100+ pages. Just like an overlong movie, it lost focus and so did I. Other than that, it's a finely crafted story of childhood in the rural south.
    • 4/5
      This book reminds me of Stand By Me, but a lot darker and with a hint of magic. I thoroughly enjoyed it!
    • 5/5
      A tale set in the early 60s, reminiscient of Stephen King's "Stand by Me." The thread binding "Boy's Life" together is the mystery surrounding the dead man in Saxon's Lake. Who killed him and why? But, this novel is so much more - it is the memories of a boy's childhood - some good and some not. This novel will make you laugh, it will bring you to tears and it will make you think. Spending some time in the town of Zephyr and mingling with it's inhabitants is well worth your time.
    • 5/5
      Well here is a novel that is better than the average bear. Robert McCammon has created a very special book with Boy's Life. He's managed to capture time in a bottle, just like Jim Croce tried to in that song long ago. He's also captured that magic one has when one is young. When one dreams of flying, and a boy and his bike can ride, and have adventures with friends. McCammon clearly remembers those day, like the last day of school, when the ticking clock counts down to the start of summer vacation. As we get older we tend to forget the importance those small events held in life. We view them through a lens of nostalgia, recalling favorite movies or books or times we went on bike rides exploring. McCammon brings those things to clear focus, makes them fresh and of the moment. Although the story is set mostly in the year 1964 the story itself is a rather timeless memory of anyone's youth. There is a dark side to the book also. Dark events that start very early, and pulse through our whole journey with young Cory Mackenson. This isn't a perfect book but it is darn close. The book slowly took me under it's spell and I loved it. It caught my attention immediately when I started reading it, but the sheer enjoyment of it was something that grew as I read through it. This is one of those books that one wishes would not end. There are some almost perfect moments in this book, and some perfect ones. There are also one or two elements that push the ability to suspend belief just a little too far. There are good things and some very bad things. Moments captured and described so well. I don't think one needs to have lived through those days to appreciate the perfect touches, but knowing those days makes those touches all the more delicious. I really liked this book.McCammon paid a great deal of attention to details when writing the book, with the brand names of candies and toys, hair tonics and household things, and the names of stores from the past. There was one thing though that I am fairly certain he got wrong. A rather big deal is made in the story about milk. The protaganist of the story is young Cory Mackenson, who is 12 in 1964. His father is a home delivery milkman in a small Alabama town. When a supermarket opens in a nearby town it spells the beginning of the end for the dairy and the home delivery of milk in glass bottles. It is mentioned several times that the supermarket has a whole row of milk in plastic jugs. Imagine that, the people say, milk in plastic jugs. Well, I don't think there were plastic milk jugs in 1964. When I was a child the glass bottles of milk from the dairy were replaced with wax coated paper milk cartons, and also a plastic coated paper carton and those paper milk cartons were used as the standard for quite a few years. The plastic jugs that are now the standard for buying milk in supermarkets began being used many years after the introduction of the paper cartons. So making a big deal about the plastic jugs of milk kept nagging me.When I finished reading this I felt like I had read a memoir from McCammon. I don't know if there is any truth behind the adventures in the story, but i am sure there is some moments from his youth within it, and certainly some of his heart. This was a fine novel.
    • 3/5
      Started out great and lost steam about halfway through. Not my favorite but still enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      A danger always lurks in re-reading books which one cherished many years ago; the scenes we recall, the characters we hold dear, may not live up on paper to the images we have in our minds. Fortunately, that is not the case with Boy's Life.I first read Robert McCammon's masterpiece upon its publication in 1991 and immediately fell in love with Zephyr, Alabama and its citizens. Through the 20 years since then I've found myself wanting to revisit the small town and its intoxicating blend of magical realism, the supernatural and bucolic small town bliss. Finally, I picked it up and once again found myself transported to the deep South in 1964, a time when boys rode their bikes like the wind, magic was possible and the unexplainable commonplace.The tale of 11 going on 12-year-old Cory Mackenson and his adventures reads like the episodes of a cliffhanger serial. Each scene could be a story unto itself, yet they all work together to paint the broader canvas McCammon works upon. Starting with being the final witness to a dead man and ending with confrontations with Nazism and Klansmen, Boy's Life is jammed with more poignant observations on life and death, moments of insane joyfulness and darkest fears, anecdotes of wisdom and tons of inspiration from every boy's childhood than any other "coming-of-age" novel I've read.I cannot recommend this novel enough; those of you who have never had the pleasure of reading it, I envy the journey you are about to take.
    • 5/5
      Sometimes you read a book that you sense will become a classic. For me, Boy's Life by Robert McCammon is one of those novels. I've read reviews of this and it was always highly recommended. I've been a McCammon fan for years but have just not pulled this one off my shelf. Now that I've finished it, I wonder why I've waited so long.Boy’s Life is the coming of age story of a young boy in a small town set in the early 60s. McCammon manages to make this time and place come alive in so many ways. The atmosphere is spot on, the characters believable and you feel their pain and anguish as well as their joy and unbridled freedom and young boy would feel at that pre-teen age. The story covers for the most part a little under a year or so I believe, but oh so much happens. Some is a bit fantastic and of course not realistic, but it’s hard to tell if it is there on purpose, to add to the fanciful storyline, or if it is meant to be more of insight into a youngsters mind and thoughts where fantasy easily becomes reality.This is definitely one for the ages and one of McCammon's best. If you haven't tried McCammon yet, don't be scared away by his typical categorization into the horror section as this is not your typical horror, other than the horror of ones childhood (or how one may remember it when looking back years later). This is one I would highly recommend.
    • 3/5
      This book has some exciting and poignant parts but is spoiled by the elements of fantasy injected into the story line. While some of the fantastic events are explained away--boys and dogs flying is admitted to be just imagination, and a trip on a train is explained in an old cheating way--yet there are fantasy features which one is expected to accept. .The closing chapter is, I admit, poignant, but would be better if it were true (as the aurhor denise it is).
    • 4/5
      Wonderful story about a boy growing up in a small town. The boy, Corey, is in his early teens. The essence of life for a pre-teen in a small town is beautifully captured: the joy of leaving school for summer break - which is both too long and too short; the ability to believe fantastic, magical things; the stirring of love; and the realization that one's parents are not invincible. Beautifully written and completely enchanting.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant, captivating journey, in which the author succeeds in making you as reader one with his main character - 11 year old Cory Mackenson. At times you will hold your breath and wish that if you closed YOUR eyes the bad things would go away and things would be better for Cory... sometimes you will find yourself laughing out loud - unable to stop the joy from bubbling over... and more often than anyone would wish a little kid to, you will feel terrible sadness and pain - as if someone has ripped your heart out of your chest... Such is the power and realism with which this story is told - truly a journey that every boy (and girl) from I'd say about 10 to 100 should experience, by reading... no LIVING through Cory's long, exhausting adventure!If you have any children of your own, or any children in your life that you care about (young nephews/nieces, cousins, etc) - do them the favour of giving them a copy of this book!
    • 5/5
      This book opens with Cory Mackenson and his father witnessing a murder made to look like a car accident whilst they are on a milk round. This eventful start though (graphically depicted on the cover of my copy of the book) really does not even begin to hint at the content of this book.Yes that mystery is key to a greater part of the story, but this book is more a coming of age story than a murder mystery. And it is a very fine example of such a story too.There is conflict in the story. Some of it is racial conflict, other is just about bullying, and power, and what money can buy you and what it can't. There are good families, unorthodox ones and downright odd ones. There is an eccentric millionaire who likes to walk around without clothes. There are stories of boy's own adventures, magical bicycles and dark plots.This book cannot really be summed up and placed in a single category. It works on so many levels, but it really does work. I enjoyed it very much, and would have no hesitation in recommending it. It made me yearn for a slice of American life I never had and now perhaps no longer exists.
    • 3/5
      This book was sentimental and riddled with cliches, but I still enjoyed reading it. It was sort of an odd mixture of suspense, magical realism, and coming of age. Back in the glorious 1960s, when men were milkmen, women spent much of their time baking, and children said "Yes, sir" to their elders, a young boy came of age in the small town of Zephyr, Alabama. The story begins when 12-year old Cory Mackenson and his father (a milkman) were driving around on his milk route when a car careens out of the forest in front of them and crashes into the lake. Cory's father jumps into the lake in a rescue attempt, but finds that the "driver" is dead, naked, strangled, and handcuffed to the steering wheel. The remainder of the book is split between Cory's attempts to solve the mystery of the man in the lake, and darkly amusing vignettes involving the monster that lives in the river, the escape of a demonic monkey who craps everywhere, boys and their bicycles, the guy who walks around town naked, a zombie dog, the Ku Klux Klan, going to the carnival, etc. It contains a typical example of the tiresome cliche of the Magical Negro in Moon Man and the Lady, two magical Negroes who live on the Negro side of town. There was always a deus ex machina who would save the day when someone was in trouble, sometimes in the form of a magical Negro. Predictably, everything was wrapped up tight in the end, the bad guys were in prison, the magical Negroes triumph over the KKK, and Cory and his friends go on to become productive members of society. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading this, but it's time to go back to real books.
    • 5/5
      This book has for a very long time been one of my most favorite books. Top 10 easily. I found the story to be incredible touching and interesting. The parts about his dog really struck a chord. Especially when the dog gets sick. Tissue anyone? It truly captures the magic of childhood.
    • 5/5
      This book is pure magic and a joy to read. Narrated by a boygrowing up in a simpler time in a small southern town.
    • 4/5
      Love Robert McCammon. Vivid writing. McCammon sets the scenes so well that you find yourself imagining the place's smells, sounds, and even the air itself. Terrific story.
    • 4/5
      It’s southern fiction, it’s a coming of age tale, it’s a mystery, it has parts that wander into the realm of magic realism. It shouldn’t work. It should be a big ol’ mess. But it isn’t a mess and it does work - beautifully.
    • 5/5
      A fairytale written for adults with monsters and everything. What a fun magical read! For every reader who still longs for the feeling they had when the first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
    • 5/5
      A very touching and enjoyable book. Brought tears to my eyes, bringing me back to childhood.
    • 4/5
      Highly recommended. A wonderful story.
    • 4/5
      Awkward introduction and epilogue but the middle is worth it. The author owes quite a bit to Stephen King and a smidge to Harper Lee but he manages to keep his own voice.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book. This book will stay with you for a long long time.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant story in an interesting setting. I think this is possibly the best novel I’ve read in years.
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite book of all time. I have read it four times so far and I will surely read it again. It's absolutely magical.
    • 5/5
      I LOVED IT!!! Please write moe of these...It really rocks!!
    • 5/5
      Filled with every emotion you can imagine. We all grow old at some point, and wish we were young again. This book helps to take you there. Pure Magic.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely amazing!!! I loved this book so much that I finished the entire thing in 2 days!!! Couldn't put it down!!
    • 4/5
      Warning: this book starts off strong, then slows down for a while. But keep going, because it eventually picks up speed again and the last half is worth the journey.

      As the novel's almost absurdly generic title implies, this is a novel with the classic tropes of a boy's coming-of-age story set in the 1960s: a group of four 12-year-old boys who are best friends, a dead body, a small town, and a little bit of magic. It actually sounds a lot like a Stephen King novel, and it borrows heavily from King--even mentioning Salem's Lot at some point. But it has enough of it's own style to be more than a King knockoff.

      If--like me--you're tired of cynical characters and dysfunctional families and want a wholesome-ish adventure novel (though with enough violence and twistedness to keep things unpredictable), then give this a shot.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful book, although it had dark moments in it. The only thing that made me wonder about the author's intention was how he portrayed a character who wrote a book about a little town but had to put a murder mystery in it, therefore bastardizing his own work. I hope this wasn't the case with the author himself, although I'm convinced, as Cory's mom, that I would have been satisfied with reading about the life in a little town even without the murder mystery.

    Book preview

    Boy's Life - Robert McCammon

    ONE

    The Shades of Spring

    Before the Sun — Down in the Dark — The Invader — Wasps at Easter — The Death of a Bike — Old Moses Comes to Call — A Summons from the Lady

    1

    Before The Sun

    CORY? WAKE UP, SON. It’s time.

    I let him pull me up from the dark cavern of sleep, and I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was already dressed, in his dark brown uniform with his name — Tom — written in white letters across his breast pocket. I smelled bacon and eggs, and the radio was playing softly in the kitchen. A pan rattled and glasses clinked; Mom was at work in her element as surely as a trout rides a current. It’s time, my father said, and he switched on the lamp beside my bed and left me squinting with the last images of a dream fading in my brain.

    The sun wasn’t up yet. It was mid-March, and a chill wind blew through the trees beyond my window. I could feel the wind by putting my hand against the glass. Mom, realizing that I was awake when my dad went in for his cup of coffee, turned the radio up a little louder to catch the weather report. Spring had sprung a couple of days before, but this year winter had sharp teeth and nails and he clung to the South like a white cat. We hadn’t had snow, we never had snow, but the wind was chill and it blew hard from the lungs of the Pole.

    Heavy sweater! Mom called. Hear?

    I hear! I answered back, and I got my green heavy sweater from my dresser. Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise’s blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman’s cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis’s, a closet, and the shelves. Oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books — Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four. There are Boy’s Life magazines, dozens of issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Screen Thrills, and Popular Mechanics. There is a yellow wall of National Geographics, and I have to blush and say I know where all the African pictures are.

    The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad’s got to fix it. My little book of suit cloth samples that I got from Mr. Parlowe at the Stagg Shop for Men. I use those pieces of cloth as carpet inside my airplane models, along with seats cut from cardboard. My silver bullet, forged by the Lone Ranger for a werewolf hunter. My Civil War button that fell from a butternut uniform when the storm swept Shiloh. My rubber knife for stalking killer crocodiles in the bathtub. My Canadian coins, smooth as the northern plains. I am rich beyond measure.

    Breakfast’s on! Mom called. I zipped up my sweater, which was the same hue as Sgt. Rock’s ripped shirt. My blue jeans had patches on the knees, like badges of courage marking encounters with barbed wire and gravel. My flannel shirt was red enough to stagger a bull. My socks were white as dove wings and my Keds midnight black. My mom was color-blind, and my dad thought checks went with plaid. I was all right.

    It’s funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into this world and you see yourself so clearly in them. You realize that every person in the world is a compromise of nature. I had my mother’s small-boned frame and her wavy, dark brown hair, but my father had given me his blue eyes and his sharp-bridged nose. I had my mother’s long-fingered hands — an artist’s hands, she used to tell me when I fretted that my fingers were so skinny — and my dad’s thick eyebrows and the small cleft in his chin. I wished that some nights I would go to sleep and awaken resembling a man’s man like Stuart Whitman in Cimarron Strip or Clint Walker in Cheyenne, but the truth of it was that I was a skinny, gawky kid of average height and looks, and I could blend into wallpaper by closing my eyes and holding my breath. In my fantasies, though, I tracked lawbreakers along with the cowboys and detectives who paraded past us nightly on our television set, and out in the woods that came up behind our house I helped Tarzan call the lions and shot Nazis down in a solitary war. I had a small group of friends, guys like Johnny Wilson, Davy Ray Callan, and Ben Sears, but I wasn’t what you might call popular. Sometimes I got nervous talking to people and my tongue got tangled, so I stayed quiet. My friends and I were about the same in size, age, and temperament; we avoided what we could not fight, and we were all pitiful fighters.

    This is where I think the writing started. The righting, if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.

    One thing I do know I got from my granddaddy Jaybird, my dad’s father: his curiosity about the world. He was seventy-six years old and as tough as beef jerky, and he had a foul mouth and an even fouler disposition, but he was always prowling the woods around his farm. He brought home things that made Grandmomma Sarah swoon: snake-skins, empty hornets’ nests, even animals he’d found dead. He liked to cut things open with a penknife and look at their insides, arranging all their bloody guts out on newspapers. One time he hung up a dead toad from a tree and invited me to watch the flies eat it with him. He brought home a burlap sack full of leaves, dumped them in the front room, and examined each of them with a magnifying glass, writing down their differences in one of his hundreds of Nifty notebooks. He collected cigar butts and dried spits of chewing tobacco, which he kept in glass vials. He could sit for hours in the dark and look at the moon.

    Maybe he was crazy. Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who’s got magic in them after they’re no longer a child. But Granddaddy Jaybird read the Sunday comics to me, and he told me stories about the haunted house in the small hamlet of his birth. Granddaddy Jaybird could be mean and stupid and petty, but he lit a candle of wonder in me and by that light I could see a long way beyond Zephyr.

    On that morning before the sun, as I sat eating my breakfast with my dad and mom in our house on Hilltop Street, the year was 1964. There were great changes in the winds of earth, things of which I was unaware. All I knew at that moment was that I needed another glass of orange juice, and that I was going to help my dad on his route before he took me to school. So when breakfast was over and the dishes were cleared, after I had gone out into the cold to say good morning to Rebel and feed him his Gravy Train, Mom kissed both Dad and me, I put on my fleece-lined jacket and got my schoolbooks and off we went in the coughy old pickup truck. Freed from his backyard pen, Rebel followed us a distance, but at the corner of Hilltop and Shawson streets he crossed into the territory of Bodog, the Doberman pinscher that belonged to the Ramseys, and he beat a diplomatic retreat to a drumroll of barks.

    And there was Zephyr before us, the town quiet in its dreaming, the moon a white sickle in the sky.

    A few lights were on. Not many. It wasn’t five o’clock yet. The sickle moon glittered in the slow curve of the Tecumseh River, and if Old Moses swam there he swam with his leathery belly kissing mud. The trees along Zephyr’s streets were still without leaves, and their branches moved with the wind. The traffic lights — all four of them at what might be called major intersections — blinked yellow in a steady accord. To the east, a stone bridge with brooding gargoyles crossed the wide hollow where the river ran. Some said the faces of the gargoyles, carved in the early twenties, were representations of various Confederate generals, fallen angels, as it were. To the west, the highway wound into the wooded hills and on toward other towns. A railroad track cut across Zephyr to the north, right through the Bruton area, where all the black people lived. In the south was the public park where a bandshell stood and a couple of baseball diamonds had been cut into the earth. The park was named for Clifford Gray Haines, who founded Zephyr, and there was a statue of him sitting on a rock with his chin resting on his hand. My dad said it looked as if Clifford was perpetually constipated and could neither do his business nor get off the pot. Farther south, Route Ten left Zephyr’s limits and wound like a black cottonmouth past swampy woods, a trailer park, and Saxon’s Lake, which shelved into unknown depths.

    Dad turned us onto Merchants Street, and we drove through the center of Zephyr, where the stores were. There was Dollar’s Barbershop, the Stagg Shop for Men, the Zephyr Feeds and Hardware Store, the Piggly-Wiggly grocery, the Woolworth’s store, the Lyric theater, and other attractions along the sidewalked thoroughfare. It wasn’t much, though; if you blinked a few times, you were past it. Then Dad crossed the railroad track, drove another two miles, and turned into a gate that had a sign above it: GREEN MEADOWS DAIRY. The milk trucks were at the loading dock, getting filled up. Here there was a lot of activity, because Green Meadows Dairy opened early and the milkmen had their appointed rounds.

    Sometimes when my father had an especially busy schedule, he asked me to help him with his deliveries. I liked the silence and stillness of the mornings. I liked the world before the sun. I liked finding out what different people ordered from the dairy. I don’t know why; maybe that was my granddaddy Jaybird’s curiosity in me.

    My dad went over a checklist with the foreman, a big crew-cut man named Mr. Bowers, and then Dad and I started loading our truck. Here came the bottles of milk, the cartons of fresh eggs, buckets of cottage cheese and Green Meadows’ special potato and bean salads. Everything was still cold from the ice room, and the milk bottles sparkled with frost under the loading dock’s lights. Their paper caps bore the face of a smiling milkman and the words Good for You! As we were working, Mr. Bowers came up and watched with his clipboard at his side and his pen behind his ear. You think you’d like to be a milkman, Cory? he asked me, and I said I might. The world’ll always need milkmen, Mr. Bowers went on. Isn’t that right, Tom?

    Right as rain, my dad said; this was an all-purpose phrase he used when he was only half listening.

    You come apply when you turn eighteen, Mr. Bowers told me. We’ll fix you up. He gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost rattled my teeth and did rattle the bottles in the tray I was carrying.

    Then Dad climbed behind the big-spoked wheel, I got into the seat next to him, he turned the key, and the engine started and we backed away from the loading dock with our creamy cargo. Ahead of us, the moon was sinking down and the last of the stars hung on the lip of night. What about that? Dad asked. Being a milkman, I mean. That appeal to you?

    It’d be fun, I said.

    Not really. Oh, it’s okay, but no job’s fun every day. I guess we’ve never talked about what you want to do, have we?

    No sir.

    Well, I don’t think you ought to be a milkman just because that’s what I do. See, I didn’t start out to be a milkman. Granddaddy Jaybird wanted me to be a farmer like him. Grandmomma Sarah wanted me to be a doctor. Can you imagine that? He glanced at me and grinned. Me, a doctor! Doctor Tom! No sir, that wasn’t for me.

    What’d you start out to be? I asked.

    My dad was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking this question over, in a deep place. It occurred to me that maybe no one had ever asked him this before. He gripped the spoked wheel with his grown-up hands and negotiated the road that unwound before us in the headlights, and then he said, First man on Venus. Or a rodeo rider. Or a man who can look at an empty space and see in his mind the house he wants to build there right down to the last nail and shingle. Or a detective. My dad made a little laughing noise in his throat. But the dairy needed another milkman, so here I am.

    I wouldn’t mind bein’ a race car driver, I said. My dad sometimes took me to the stock car races at the track near Barnesboro, and we sat there eating hot dogs and watching sparks fly in the collision of banged-up metal. Bein’ a detective would be okay, too. I’d get to solve mysteries and stuff, like the Hardy Boys.

    Yeah, that’d be good, my dad agreed. You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that’s the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don’t believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age.

    I’d like to be everybody in the world, I said. I’d like to live a million times.

    Well — and here my father gave one of his sagely nods — that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn’t it? He pointed. Here’s our first stop.

    That first house must’ve had children in it, because they got two quarts of chocolate milk to go along with their two quarts of plain milk. Then we were off again, driving through the streets where the only sounds were the wind and the barking of early dogs, and we stopped on Shantuck Street to deliver buttermilk and cottage cheese to somebody who must’ve liked things sour. We left bottles glistening on the steps of most of the houses on Bevard Lane, and my dad worked fast as I checked off the list and got the next items ready from the chilly back of the truck; we were a good team.

    Dad said he had some customers down south near Saxon’s Lake and then he’d swing back up so we could finish the rest of the street deliveries before my school bell rang. He drove us past the park and out of Zephyr, and the forest closed in on either side of the road.

    It was getting on toward six o’clock. To the east, over the hills of pine and kudzu, the sky was beginning to lighten. The wind shoved its way through the trees like the fist of a bully. We passed a car going north, and its driver blinked the lights and Dad waved. Marty Barklee deliverin’ the newspapers, Dad told me. I thought about the fact that there was a whole world going about its business before the sun, and people who were just waking up weren’t part of it. We turned off Route Ten and drove up a dirt drive to deliver milk, buttermilk, and potato salad to a small house nestled in the woods, and then we went south toward the lake again. College, my dad said. You ought to go to college, it seems to me.

    I guess so, I answered, but that sounded like an awful long distance from where I was now. All I knew about college was Auburn and Alabama football, and the fact that some people praised Bear Bryant and others worshipped Shug Jordan. It seemed to me that you chose which college to go to according to which coach you liked best.

    Gotta have good grades to get into college, Dad said. Gotta study your lessons.

    Do detectives have to go to college?

    I reckon they do if they want to be professional about it. If I’d gone to college, I might’ve turned out to be that man who builds a house in empty space. You never know what’s ahead for you, and that’s the —

    Truth, he was about to say, but he never finished it because we came around a wooded bend and a brown car jumped out of the forest right in front of us and Dad yelped like he was hornet-stung as his foot punched the brake.

    The brown car went past us as Dad whipped the wheel to the left, and I saw that car go off Route Ten and down the embankment on my right. Its lights weren’t on but there was somebody sitting behind the wheel. The car’s tires tore through the underbrush and then it went over a little cliff of red rock and down into the dark. Water splashed up, and I realized the car had just plunged into Saxon’s Lake.

    He went in the water! I shouted, and Dad stopped the milk truck, pulled up the hand brake, and jumped out into the roadside weeds. As I climbed out, Dad was already running toward the lake. The wind whipped and whirled around us, and Dad stood there on the red rock cliff. By the faint pinkish light we could see the car wallowing in the water, huge bubbles bursting around its trunk. Hey! Dad shouted with his hands cupped around his mouth. Get out of there! Everybody knew Saxon’s Lake was as deep as sin, and when that car went down into the inky depths it was gone for good and ever. Hey, get out! Dad shouted again, but whoever was behind the wheel didn’t answer. I think he’s been knocked cold! Dad told me as he took off his shoes. The car was starting to turn onto its passenger side, and there was an awful howling sound coming from it that must’ve been the rush of water pouring into the car. Dad said, Stand back. I did, and he leaped into the lake.

    He was a strong swimmer. He reached the car in a few powerful strokes, and he saw that the driver’s window was open. He could feel the suction of water moving around his legs, drawing the car down into the unfathomed deep. Get out! he hollered, but the driver just sat there. Dad clung to the door, reached in, and grabbed the driver’s shoulder. It was a man, and he wore no shirt. The flesh was white and cold, and my dad felt his own skin crawl. The man’s head lolled back, his mouth open. He had short-cropped blond hair, his eyes sealed shut with black bruises, his face swollen and malformed from the pressures of a savage beating. Around his throat was knotted a copper piano wire, the thin metal pulled so tightly that the flesh had split open.

    Oh Jesus, my dad whispered, treading water.

    The car lurched and hissed. The head lolled forward over the chest again, as if in an attitude of prayer. Water was rising up over the driver’s bare knees. My dad realized the driver was naked, not a stitch on him. Something glinted on the steering wheel, and he saw handcuffs that secured the man’s right wrist to the inner spoke.

    My dad had lived thirty-four years. He’d seen dead men before. Hodge Klemson, one of his best friends, had drowned in the Tecumseh River when they were both fifteen years old, and the body had been found after three days bloated and covered with yellow bottom mud like a crusty ancient mummy. He’d seen what remained of Walter and Jeanine Traynor after the head-on collision six years ago between Walter’s Buick and a logging truck driven by a kid eating pep pills. He’d seen the dark shiny mass of Little Stevie Cauley after firemen doused the flames of the crumpled black dragster named Midnight Mona. He had looked upon the grinning rictus of death several times, had taken that sight like a man, but this one was different.

    This one wore the face of murder.

    The car was going down. As its hood sank, its tail fins started rising. The body behind the wheel shifted again, and my father saw something on the man’s shoulder. A blue patch, there against the white. Not a bruise, no; a tattoo. It was a skull with wings swept back from the bony temples.

    A great burst of bubbles blew out of the car as more water rushed in. The lake would not be denied; it was going to claim its toy and tuck it away in a secret drawer. As the car began to slide down into the murk, the suction grabbed my father’s legs and pulled him under, and standing on the red rock cliff I saw his head disappear and I shouted Dad! as panic seized my guts.

    Underwater, he fought the lake’s muscles. The car fell away beneath him, and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic of air.

    I saw his head break the surface. Dad! I shouted again. Come on back, Dad!

    I’m all right! he answered, but his voice was shaky. I’m comin’ in! He began dog-paddling toward shore, his body suddenly as weak as a squeezed-out rag. The lake continued to erupt where the car disturbed its innards, like something bad being digested. Dad couldn’t get up the red rock cliff, so he swam to a place where he could clamber up on kudzu vines and stones. I’m all right! he said again as he came out of the lake and his legs sank to the knees in mud. A turtle the size of a dinner plate skittered past him and submerged with a perplexed snort. I glanced back toward the milk truck; I don’t know why, but I did.

    And I saw a figure standing in the woods across the road.

    Just standing there, wearing a long dark coat. Its folds moved with the wind. Maybe I’d felt the eyes of whoever was watching me as I’d watched my father swim to the sinking car. I shivered a little, bone cold, and then I blinked a couple of times and where the figure had been was just windswept woods again.

    Cory? my dad called. Gimme a hand up, son!

    I went down to the muddy shore and gave him as much help as a cold, scared child could. Then his feet found solid earth and he pushed the wet hair back from his forehead. Gotta get to a phone, he said urgently. There was a man in that car. Went straight down to the bottom!

    I saw … I saw … I pointed toward the woods on the other side of Route Ten. Somebody was —

    Come on, let’s go! My father was already crossing the road with his sturdy, soggy legs, his shoes in his hand. I jump-started my own legs and followed him as close as a shadow, and my gaze returned to where I’d seen that figure but nobody was there, nobody, nobody at all.

    Dad started the milk truck’s engine and switched on the heater. His teeth were chattering, and in the gray twilight his face looked as pale as candle wax. Damnedest thing, he said, and this shocked me because he never cursed in front of me. Handcuffed to the wheel, he was. Handcuffed. My God, that fella’s face was all beat up!

    Who was it?

    I don’t know. He turned the heater up, and then he started driving south toward the nearest house. Somebody did a job on him, that’s for sure! Lord, I’m cold!

    A dirt road turned to the right, and my father followed it. Fifty yards off Route Ten stood a small white house with a screened-in front porch. A rose garden stood off to one side. Parked under a green plastic awning were two cars, one a red Mustang and the other an old Cadillac splotched with rust. My dad pulled up in front of the house and said, Wait here, and he walked to the door in his wet socks and rang the bell. He had to ring it two more times before the door opened with a tinkle of chimes, and a red-haired woman who made three of my mom stood there wearing a blue robe with black flowers on it.

    Dad said, Miss Grace, I need to use your telephone real quick.

    "You’re all wet!" Miss Grace’s voice sounded like the rasp of a rusty saw blade. She gripped a cigarette in one hand, and rings sparkled on her fingers.

    Somethin’ bad’s happened, Dad told her, and she sighed like a redheaded raincloud and said, All right, come on in, then. Watch the carpet. Dad entered the house, the chimney door closed, and I sat in the milk truck as the first orange rays of sunlight started breaking over the eastern hills. I could smell the lake in the truck with me, a puddle of water on the floorboard beneath my father’s seat. I had seen somebody standing in the woods. I knew I had. Hadn’t I? Why hadn’t he come over to see about the man in the car? And who had the man in the car been?

    I was puzzling over these questions when the door opened again and Miss Grace came out, this time wearing a floppy white sweater over her blue gown. She had on sneakers, her ankles and calves thick as young trees. She had a box of Lorna Doone cookies in one hand and the burning cigarette in the other, and she walked to the milk truck and smiled at me. Hey there, she said. You’re Cory.

    Yes’m, I answered.

    Miss Grace didn’t have much of a smile. Her lips were thin and her nose was broad and flat and her brows were black-penciled streaks above deep-set blue eyes. She thrust the Lorna Doones at me. Want a cookie?

    I wasn’t hungry, but my folks had always taught me never to refuse a gift. I took one.

    Have two, Miss Grace offered, and I took a second cookie. She ate a cookie herself and then sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke through her nostrils. Your daddy’s our milkman, she said. I believe you’ve got us on your list. Six quarts of milk, two buttermilks, two chocolates, and three pints of cream.

    I checked the list. There was her name — Grace Stafford — and the order, just as she’d said. I told her I’d get everything for her, and I started putting the order together. How old are you? Miss Grace asked as I worked. Twelve?

    No, ma’am. Not until July.

    I’ve got a son. Miss Grace knocked ashes from her cigarette. She chewed on another cookie. Turned twenty in December. He lives in San Antonio. Know where that is?

    Yes ma’am. Texas. Where the Alamo is.

    That’s right. Turned twenty, which makes me thirty-eight. I’m an old fossil, ain’t I?

    This was a trick question, I thought. No ma’am, I decided to say.

    Well, you’re a little diplomat, ain’t you? She smiled again, and this time the smile was in her eyes. Have another cookie. She left me the box and walked to the door, and she hollered into the house: Lainie! Lainie, get your butt up and come out here!

    My dad emerged first. He looked old in the hard light of morning, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Called the sheriff’s office, he told me as he sat in his wet seat and squeezed his feet into his shoes. Somebody’s gonna meet us where the car went in.

    Who the hell was it? Miss Grace asked.

    I couldn’t tell. His face was … He glanced quickly at me, then back to the woman. He was beat up pretty bad.

    Must’ve been drunk. Moonshinin’, most likely.

    I don’t think so. Dad hadn’t said anything over the phone about the car’s driver being naked, strangled with a piano wire, and handcuffed to the wheel. That was for the sheriff and not for Miss Grace’s or anybody else’s ears. You ever see a fella with a tattoo on his left shoulder? Looked like a skull with wings growin’ out of its head?

    I’ve seen more tattoos than the Navy, Miss Grace said, but I can’t recall anything like that around here. Why? Fella have his shirt off or somethin’?

    Yeah, he did. Had that skull with wings tattooed right about here. He touched his left shoulder. Dad shivered again, and rubbed his hands together. They’ll never bring that car up. Never. Saxon’s Lake is three hundred feet deep if it’s an inch.

    The chimes sounded. I looked toward the door with the tray of milk quarts in my arms.

    A girl with sleep-swollen eyes stumbled out. She was wearing a long plaid bathrobe and her feet were bare. Her hair was the color of cornsilk and hung around her shoulders, and as she neared the milk truck she blinked in the light and said, I’m all fucked up.

    I think I must’ve almost fallen down, because never in my life had I heard a female use a word that dirty before. Oh, I knew what the word meant and all, but its casual use from a pretty mouth shocked the fool out of me.

    There’s a young man on the premises, Lainie, Miss Grace said in a voice that could curl an iron nail. Watch your language, please.

    Lainie looked at me, and her cool stare made me recall the time I’d put a fork in an electric socket. Lainie’s eyes were chocolate brown and her lips seemed to wear a half smile, half sneer. Something about her face looked tough and wary, as if she’d run out of trust. There was a small red mark in the hollow of her throat. Who’s the kid? she asked.

    Mr. Mackenson’s son. Show some class, hear?

    I swallowed hard and averted my eyes from Lainie’s. Her robe was creeping open. It hit me what kind of girl used bad words, and what kind of place this was. I had heard from both Johnny Wilson and Ben Sears that there was a house full of whores somewhere near Zephyr. It was common knowledge at the elementary school. When you told somebody to go suck a whore, you were standing right on the razor’s edge of violence. I’d always imagined the whorehouse to be a mansion, though, with drooping willow trees and black servants who fetched the customers mint juleps on the front porch; the reality, however, was that the whorehouse wasn’t much of a step up from a broken-down trailer. Still and all, here it was right in front of me, and the girl with cornsilk hair and a dirty mouth earned her living by the pleasures of the flesh. I felt goose bumps ripple up my back, and I can’t tell you the kind of scenes that moved like a slow, dangerous storm through my head.

    Take that milk and stuff to the kitchen, Miss Grace told her.

    The sneer won out over the smile, and those brown eyes turned black. I ain’t got kitchen duty! It’s Donna Ann’s week!

    "It’s whose week I say it is, missy, and you know why I ought to put you in the kitchen for a whole month, too! Now, you do what I tell you and keep your smart mouth shut!"

    Lainie’s lips drew up into a puckered, practiced pout. But her eyes did not register the chastisement so falsely; they held cold centers of anger. She took the tray from me, and standing with her back to my dad and Miss Grace, she stuck out her wet pink tongue in my face and curled it up into a funnel. Then the tongue slicked back into her mouth, she turned away from me, and dismissed all of us with a buttstrut that was as wicked as a sword slash. She swayed on into the house, and after Lainie was gone Miss Grace grunted and said, She’s as rough as a cob.

    Aren’t they all? Dad asked, and Miss Grace blew a smoke ring and answered, "Yeah, but she don’t even pretend she’s got manners. Her gaze settled on me. Cory, why don’t you keep the cookies. All right?"

    I looked at Dad. He shrugged. Yes, ma’am, I said.

    Good. It was a real pleasure to meet you. Miss Grace returned her attention to my father and the cigarette to the corner of her mouth. Let me know how everything turns out.

    I will, and thanks for lettin’ me use the phone. He slid behind the wheel again. I’ll pick up the milk tray next trip.

    Ya’ll be careful, Miss Grace said, and she went into the white-painted whorehouse as Dad started the engine and let off the hand brake.

    We drove back to where the car had gone in. Saxon’s Lake was streaked with blue and purple in the morning light. Dad pulled the milk truck off onto a dirt road; the road, both of us realized, was where the car had come from. Then we sat and waited for the sheriff as the sunlight strengthened and the sky turned azure.

    Sitting there, my mind was split: one part was thinking about the car and the figure I thought I’d seen, and the other part was wondering how my dad knew Miss Grace at the whorehouse so well. But Dad knew all of his customers; he talked about them to Mom at the dinner table. I never recalled him mentioning Miss Grace or the whorehouse, however. Well, it wasn’t a proper subject for the dinner table, was it? And anyway, they wouldn’t talk about such things when I was around, even though all my friends and everybody else at school from the fourth grade up knew there was a house full of bad girls somewhere around Zephyr.

    I had been there. I had actually seen a bad girl. I had seen her curled tongue and her butt move in the folds of her robe.

    That, I figured, was going to make me one heck of a celebrity.

    Cory? my father said quietly. Do you know what kind of business Miss Grace runs in that house?

    I … Even a third-grader could’ve figured it out. Yes sir.

    Any other day, I would’ve just left the order by the front door. He was staring at the lake, as if seeing the car still tumbling slowly down through the depths with a handcuffed corpse at the wheel. "Miss Grace has been on my delivery route for two years. Every Monday and Thursday, like clockwork. In case it’s crossed your mind, your mother does know I come out here."

    I didn’t answer, but I felt a whole lot lighter.

    I don’t want you to tell anybody about Miss Grace or that house, my father went on. I want you to forget you were there, and what you saw and heard. Can you do that?

    Why? I had to ask.

    Because Miss Grace might be a lot different than you, me, or your mother, and she might be tough and mean and her line of work might not be a preacher’s dream, but she’s a good lady. I just don’t want talk gettin’ stirred up. The less said about Miss Grace and that house, the better. Do you see?

    I guess I do.

    Good. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The subject was closed.

    I was true to my word. My celebrityhood took flight, and that was that.

    I was about to open my mouth to tell him about the figure I’d seen in the woods when a black and white Ford with a bubble light on top and the town seal of Zephyr on the driver’s door rounded the corner and slowed to a stop near the milk truck. Sheriff Amory, whose first name was J.T., standing for Junior Talmadge, got out and Dad walked over to meet him.

    Sheriff Amory was a thin, tall man whose long-jawed face made me think of a picture I’d seen: Ichabod Crane trying to outrace the Headless Horseman. He had big hands and feet and a pair of ears that might’ve shamed Dumbo. If his nose had been any larger, he would’ve made a dandy weathervane. He wore his sheriff’s star pinned to the front of his hat, and underneath it his dome was almost bald except for a wreath of dark brown hair. He pushed his hat back up on his shiny forehead as he and my dad talked at the lake’s edge and I watched my father’s hand motions as he showed Sheriff Amory where the car had come from and where it had gone. Then they both looked out toward the lake’s still surface, and I knew what they were thinking.

    That car might’ve sunken to the center of the earth. Even the snapping turtles that lived along the lakeshore couldn’t get far enough down to ever see that car again. Whoever the driver had been, he was sitting in the dark right now with mud in his teeth.

    Handcuffed, Sheriff Amory said, in his quiet voice. He had thick dark eyebrows over deep-set eyes the color of coal, and the pallor of his flesh suggested he had an affinity to the night. You’re sure about that, Tom? And about the wire, too?

    I’m sure. Whoever strangled that fella did a hell of a job. Near about took his head off.

    Handcuffed, the sheriff said again. That was so he wouldn’t float out, I reckon. He tapped his lower lip with a forefinger. Well, he said at last, I believe we’ve got a murder on our hands, don’t you?

    If it wasn’t, I don’t know what murder is.

    As they talked, I got out of the milk truck and wandered over to where I thought I’d seen that person watching me. There was nothing but weeds, rocks, and dirt where he’d been standing. If it had been a man, I thought. Could it have been a woman? I hadn’t seen long hair, but then again I hadn’t seen much of anything but a coat swirling in the wind. I walked back and forth along the line of trees. Beyond it, the woods deepened and swampy ground took over. I found nothing.

    Better come on to the office and let me write it up, the sheriff told my father. If you want to go home and get some dry clothes on, that’d be fine.

    My dad nodded. I’ve got to finish my deliveries and get Cory to school, too.

    Okay. Seems to me we can’t do much for that fella at the bottom, anyhow. He grunted, his hands in his pockets. A murder. Last murder we had in Zephyr was in 1961. You remember when Bo Kallagan beat his wife to death with a bowlin’ trophy?

    I returned to the milk truck and waited for my dad. The sun was up good and proper now, lighting the world. Or, at least, the world I knew. But things weighed heavy on my mind. It seemed to me that there were two worlds: one before the sun, and one after. And if that were true, then maybe there were people who were citizens of those different worlds as well. Some moved easily through the landscape of night, and others clung to the bright hours. Maybe I had seen one of those darktime citizens, in the world before the sun. And — a chilling thought — maybe he had seen me seeing him, too.

    I realized I had brought mud back into the milk truck. It was smeared all over my Keds.

    I looked at the soles, and the earth I had collected.

    On the bottom of my left Ked was a small green feather.

    2

    Down in the Dark

    THE GREEN FEATHER went into my pocket. From there it found its way into a White Owl cigar box in my room, along with my collection of old keys and dried-up insects. I closed the box lid, placed the box in one of the seven mystic drawers, and slid the drawer shut.

    And that was how I forgot about it.

    The more I thought about seeing that figure at the edge of the woods, the more I thought I’d been wrong, that my eyes had been scared from seeing Dad sink underwater as the car went down. Several times I started to tell Dad about it, but something else got in the way. Mom threw a gut-busting fit when she found out he’d jumped into the lake. She was so mad at him she sobbed as she yelled, and Dad had to sit her down at the kitchen table and explain to her calmly why he had done it. There was a man at the wheel, Dad said. I didn’t know he was already dead, I thought he was knocked cold. If I’d stood there without doing anything, what would I have thought of myself after it was over?

    You could’ve drowned! she fired at him, tears on her cheeks. You could’ve hit your head on a rock and drowned!

    I didn’t drown. I didn’t hit my head on a rock. I did what I had to do. He gave her a paper napkin, and she used it to blot her eyes. A last salvo came out of her: That lake’s full of cottonmouths! You could’ve swum right into a nest of ’em!

    I didn’t, he said, and she sighed and shook her head as if she lived with the craziest fool ever born.

    You’d better get out of those damp clothes, she told him at last, and her voice was under control again. I just thank God it’s not your body down at the bottom of the lake, too. She stood up and helped him unbutton his soggy shirt. Do you know who it was?

    Never saw him before.

    Who would do such a thing to another human being?

    That’s for J.T. to find out. He peeled his shirt off, and Mom took it from him with two fingers as if the lake’s water carried leprosy. I’ve got to go over to his office to help him write it up. I’ll tell you, Rebecca, when I looked into that dead man’s face my heart almost stopped. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I hope to God I never see such a thing again, either.

    Lord, Mom said. "What if you’d had a heart attack? Who would’ve saved you?"

    Worrying was my mother’s way. She fretted about the weather, the cost of groceries, the washing machine breaking down, the Tecumseh River being dirtied by the paper mill in Adams Valley, the price of new clothes, and everything under the sun. To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them. As I said, it was her way. My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.

    My mother’s parents, Grand Austin and Nana Alice, lived about twelve miles south in a town called Waxahatchee, on the edge of Robbins Air Force Base. Nana Alice was even worse a worrier than Mom; something in her soul craved tragic manna, whereas Grand Austin — who had been a logger and had a wooden leg to show for the slip of a band saw — warned her he would unscrew his leg and whop her upside the head with it if she didn’t pipe down and give him peace. He called his wooden leg his peace pipe, but as far as I know he never used it for any purpose except that for which it was carved. My mother had an older brother and sister, but my father was an only child.

    Anyway, I went to school that day and at the first opportunity told Davy Ray Callan, Johnny Wilson, and Ben Sears what had happened. By the time the school bell rang and I walked home, the news was moving across Zephyr like a crackling wildfire. Murder was the word of the hour. My parents were fighting off the phone calls. Everybody wanted to know the grisly details. I went outside to ride my rusted old bike and lead Rebel for a chase in the woods, and it came to me that maybe one of those people who called already knew the details. Maybe one of them was just trying to find out if he’d been seen, or what Sheriff Amory knew.

    I realized then, as I pedaled my bike through the forest and Rebel ran at my heels, that somebody in my hometown might be a killer.

    The days passed, warming into the heart of spring. A week after Dad had jumped into Saxon’s Lake, this was the story: Sheriff Amory had found no one missing from Zephyr or from any of the surrounding communities. A front-page article in the weekly Adams Valley Journal brought forth no new information. Sheriff Amory and two of his deputies, some of the firemen, and a half dozen volunteers got out on the lake in rowboats and dragged nets back and forth, but they only came up with an angry catch of snapping turtles and cottonmouths.

    Saxon’s Lake used to be Saxon’s Quarry back in the twenties, before the steam shovels had broken into an underground river that would not be capped or shunted aside. Estimates of its depth ranged from three hundred to five hundred feet. There wasn’t a net on earth that could scoop that sunken car back to the surface.

    The sheriff came by one evening for a talk with Dad and Mom, and they let me sit in on it. Whoever did it, Sheriff Amory explained, his hat in his lap and his nose throwing a shadow, must’ve backed that car onto the dirt road facin’ the lake. We found the tire marks, but the footprints were all scuffed over. The killer must’ve had somethin’ wedged against the gas pedal. Just before you rounded the bend, he released the hand brake, slammed the door, and jumped back, and the car took off across Route Ten. He didn’t know you were gonna be there, of course. If you hadn’t been, the car would’ve gone on into the lake, sunk, and nobody would ever have known it happened. He shrugged. That’s the best I can come up with.

    You talked to Marty Barklee?

    Yeah, I did. Marty didn’t see anything. The way that dirt road sits, you can drive right past it at a reasonable clip and never even know it’s there.

    So where does that leave us?

    The sheriff pondered my dad’s question, the silver star on his hat catching the lamplight. Outside, Rebel was barking and other dogs picked up the tribal call across Zephyr. The sheriff spread his big hands out and looked at his fingers. Tom, he said, we have a real strange situation here. We’ve got tire marks but no car. You say you saw a dead man handcuffed to the wheel and a wire around his throat, but we don’t have a body and we’re not likely to recover one. Nobody’s missin’ from town. Nobody’s missin’ in the whole area, except a teenaged girl whose mother thinks she ran off with her boyfriend to Nashville. And the boy don’t have a tattoo, by the way. I can’t find anybody who’s seen a fella with a tattoo like the one you described. Sheriff Amory looked at me, then my mother, and then back to my dad with his coal-black eyes. You know that riddle, Tom? The one about a tree fallin’ in the woods, and if there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, if there’s no body and no one’s missin’ anywhere that I can tell, was there a murder or not?

    I know what I saw, Dad said. Are you doubtin’ my word, J.T.?

    No, I didn’t say that. I’m only sayin’ I can’t do anything more until we get a murder victim. I need a name, Tom. I need a face. Without an identification, I don’t even know where to start.

    So in the meantime somebody who killed another man is walkin’ around as free as you please and doesn’t have to be scared of gettin’ caught anytime soon. Is that it?

    Yep, the sheriff admitted. That about sums it up.

    Of course Sheriff Amory promised he’d keep working on it, and that he’d call around the state for information on missing persons. Sooner or later, he said, somebody would have to ask after the man who had gone down in the lake. When the sheriff had gone, my father went out to sit on the front porch by himself with the light off, and he sat there alone past the time Mom told me to get ready for bed.

    That was the night my father’s cry awakened me in the dark.

    I sat up in bed, my nerves jangled. I could hear Mom talking to Dad through the wall. It’s all right, she was saying. It was a bad dream, just a bad dream, everything’s all right.

    Dad was quiet for a long time. I heard water running in the bathroom. Then the squeak of their bedsprings. You want to tell me about it? Mom asked him.

    No. God, no.

    It was just a bad dream.

    I don’t care. It was real enough.

    Can you get back to sleep?

    He sighed. I could imagine him there in the darkened bedroom, his hands pressed to his face. I don’t know, he said.

    Let me rub your back.

    The bedsprings squeaked again, as the weight of their bodies shifted. You’re awful tight, Mom said. All up in your neck, too.

    That hurts like hell. Right there, where your thumb is.

    It’s a crick. You must’ve pulled a muscle.

    Silence. My neck and shoulders, too, had been comforted by my mother’s supple hands. Every so often the springs spoke, announcing a movement. Then my father’s voice came back. I had another nightmare about that man in the car.

    I figured so.

    I was lookin’ at him in that car, with his face beat all to pulp and his throat strangled with a wire. I saw the handcuff on his wrist, and the tattoo on his shoulder. The car was goin’ down, and then … then his eyes opened.

    I shivered. I could see it myself, and my father’s voice was almost a gasp.

    He looked at me. Right at me. Water poured out of his eyeholes. He opened his mouth, and his tongue was as black as a snake’s head. And then he said, ‘Come with me.’

    Don’t think about it, Mom interrupted. Just close your eyes and rest.

    I can’t rest. I can’t. I pictured my father’s body, lying like a question mark on the bed as Mom kneaded the iron-tight muscles of his back. My nightmare, he went on. The man in the car reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingernails were blue. His fingers bit hard into my skin, and he said, ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’ The car … the car started sinkin’, faster and faster, and I tried to break loose but he wouldn’t let me go, and he said, ‘Come with me, come with me, down in the dark.’ And then the lake closed over my head and I couldn’t get away from it and I opened my mouth to scream but the water filled it up. Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Oh, Jesus.

    It wasn’t real. Listen to me! It was only a bad dream, and everythin’s all right now.

    No, Dad answered. It’s not. This thing is eatin’ at me, and it’s only gettin’ worse. I thought I could put it behind me. I mean, my God, I’ve seen a dead person before. Up close. But this … this is different. That wire around his throat, the handcuff, the face that somebody had pounded into putty … it’s different. And not knowin’ who he was, or anythin’ about him … it’s eatin’ at me, day and night.

    It’ll pass, Mom said. That’s what you tell me whenever I want to worry the warts off a frog. Hang on, you tell me. It’ll pass.

    "Maybe it will. I hope to God it will. But for right now, it’s in my head and I can’t shake it loose for the life of me. And this is the worst thing, Rebecca; this is what’s grindin’ inside of me. Whoever did it had to be a local. Had to be. Whoever did it knew how deep the lake is. He knew when that car went in there, the body was gone. Rebecca … whoever did this thing might be somebody I deliver milk to. It might be somebody who sits on our pew at church. Somebody we buy groceries or clothes from. Somebody we’ve known all our lives … or thought we knew. That scares me like I’ve never been scared before. You know why? He was silent for a moment, and I could imagine the way the pulse throbbed at his temple. Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world." His voice cracked a little on the last word. I was glad I wasn’t in that room, and that I couldn’t see his face.

    Two or three minutes passed. I think my father was just lying there, letting Mom rub his back. Do you think you can sleep now? she finally asked him, and he said, I’ll try.

    The springs spoke a few times. I heard my mother murmur something close to his ear. He said, I hope so, and then they were silent. Sometimes my dad snored; tonight he did not. I wondered if he lay awake after Mom had drifted off, and if he saw the corpse in the car reaching for him to drag him under. What he’d said haunted me: if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world. This thing had hurt my father, in a place deeper than the bottom of Saxon’s Lake. Maybe it was the suddenness of what had happened, or the violence, or the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were terrible secrets behind closed doors, even in the kindest of towns.

    I think my father had always believed all people were good, even in their secret souls. This thing had cracked his foundations, and it occurred to me that the murderer had handcuffed my father to that awful moment in time just as the victim had been handcuffed to the wheel. I closed my eyes and prayed for Dad, that he could find his way up out of the dark.

    March went out like a lamb, but the murderer’s work was unfinished.

    3

    The Invader

    THINGS SETTLED DOWN, as things will.

    On the first Saturday afternoon in April, with the trees budding and flowers pushing up from the warming earth, I sat between Ben Sears and Johnny Wilson surrounded by the screaming hordes as Tarzan — Gordon Scott, the best Tarzan there ever was — plunged his knife into a crocodile’s belly and blood spurted in scarlet Eastman color.

    Did you see that? Did you see that? Ben kept saying, elbowing me in the ribs. Of course I saw it. I had eyes, didn’t I? My ribs weren’t going to last until the Three Stooges short between the double features, that was for certain.

    The Lyric was the only movie theater in Zephyr. It had been built in 1945, after the Second World War, when Zephyr’s sons marched or limped back home and they wanted entertainment to chase away the nightmares of swastika and rising sun. Some fine town father dug into his pockets and bought a construction man from Birmingham who drew a blueprint and marked off squares on a vacant lot where a tobacco barn used to be. I wasn’t there at the time, of course, but Mr. Dollar could tell you the whole story. Up went a palace of stucco angels, and on Saturday afternoons we devils of the common clay hunkered down in those seats with our popcorn, candy, and Yoo-Hoos and for a few hours our parents had breathing space again.

    Anyway, my two buddies and me were sitting watching Tarzan on a Saturday afternoon. I forget why Davy Ray wasn’t there; I think he was grounded for hitting Molly Lujack in the head with a pine cone. But satellites could go up and spit sparks in outer space. A man with a beard and a cigar could jabber in Spanish on an island off the coast of Florida while blood reddened a bay for pigs. That bald-headed Russian could bang his shoe. Soldiers could be packing their gear for a trip to a jungle called Vietnam. Atom bombs could go off in the desert and blow dummies out of tract-house living rooms. We didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t magic. Magic was inside the Lyric on Saturday afternoons, at the double feature, and we took full advantage of getting ourselves lost in the spell.

    I recall watching a TV show — 77 Sunset Strip — where the hero walked into a theater named the Lyric, and I got to thinking about that word. I looked it up in my massive two-thousand-four-hundred-and-eighty-three-page dictionary Granddaddy Jaybird had given me for my tenth birthday. Lyric, it said: Melodic. Suitable for singing. A lyric poem. Of the lyre. That didn’t seem to make much sense in regards to a movie theater, until I continued following lyre in my dictionary. Lyre took me into the story-poems sung by traveling minstrels back when there were castles and kings. Which took me back to that wonderful word: story. It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication — whether it’s TV, movies, or books — begins with somebody wanting to tell a story.

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