Robert McCammon - Boy's Life

“WE ALL START OUT KNOWING MAGIC…

BUT THEN WE GET THE MAGIC

EDUCATED RIGHT OUT OF OUR SOULS.”

—Robert R. McCammon

“AN EXUBERANT CELEBRATION OF

CHILDHOOD MYSTERY AND

MARVEL… BY FAR McCAMMON’S

FINEST BOOK.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“BOY’S LIFE IS A WONDERFUL BOOK. IT RECAPTURES

THE MAGIC OF BEING A CHILD IN A WORLD OF

POSSIBILITIES AND PROMISE. IT IS ABOUT BEING BORN

‘WITH WHIRLWINDS, FOREST FIRES AND COMETS INSIDE

US,’ AND IT REMINDS US OF A MAGICAL TIME BEFORE

THE MAGIC WAS ‘CHURCHED OUT, SPANKED OUT,

WASHED OUT, AND COMBED OUT.’ BOY’S LIFE IS FOR

THE BOYS—AND GIRLS—IN ALL OF US.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Robert R. McCammon captivated millions of readers with his storytelling power

in such bestsellers as Mine, Swan Song and Stinger. Now he has created his

tour de force: BOY’S LIFE, a masterpiece of magic and mystery, of the

splendors of growing up in a small town, and of the wonders beyond. Narrated

by one of the most engaging young voices in modern fiction, BOY’S LIFE takes

us back to our own childhoods, when bicycles were enchanted steeds and

anything was possible…

Zephyr, Alabama, has been an idyllic home for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson…

a place where monsters swim in the belly of the river, and friends are

forever. Then, on a cold spring morning in 1964, as Cory accompanies his

father on his milk route, they see a car plunge into a lake some say is

bottomless. A desperate rescue attempt brings Cory’s father face-to-face with

a vision that will haunt him: a murdered man, naked and beaten, handcuffed to

the steering wheel, a copper wire knotted around his neck. As Cory struggles

to understand the forces of good and evil at work in his hometown, from an

ancient woman called the Lady who conjures snakes and hears the voices of the

dead, to a violent clan of moonshiners, he realizes that not only his life but

his father’s sanity may hang in the balance…

“IT’S McCAMMON’S THE PRINCE OF TIDES…

INCREDIBLY MOVING.”—Peter Straub

A Literary Guild Main Selection

Critical Acclaim for

Robert R. McCammon’s

“BOY’S LIFE IS REALLY JUST GORGEOUS—IT’S McCAMMON’S THE PRINCE OF TIDES…

INCREDIBLY MOVING—BOYHOOD AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN, RECOLLECTED IN GENUINE AND

GENEROUS DETAIL. I LOVED IT, AND I WANT MY SON TO READ IT, TOO.”

—Peter Straub

“ENTHRALLING… Midway through BOY’S LIFE, the young hero learns of a book

‘about [a] town and the people in it… maybe there wasn’t a real plot to it…

but the book was about life… [it] was sweet and deep and left you wishing for

more.’ That’s a perfect description of McCammon’s fictional autobiography as

well, an exuberant celebration of childhood mystery and marvel… McCammon

paints with a score of bull’s-eye details… BOY’S LIFE is teeming with smartly

realized characters… A CORNUCOPIA OF BITTERSWEET FANTASY STORYTELLING THAT IS

BY FAR McCAMMON’S FINEST BOOK.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“BOY’S LIFE, THE FIRST ‘MAINSTREAM’ NOVEL FROM ROBERT R. McCAMMON, IS A

WONDERFUL STORY OF POWERFUL EMOTIONS, MARVELOUS IMAGES AND INVENTIVE

NARRATIVE… FILLED WITH ENOUGH ADVENTURE, JOY, DISCOVERY AND HEARTACHE FOR A

DOZEN BOYS’ LIFETIMES.”

—Houston Chronicle

“FOR SHEER SCREWBALL STORYTELLING EXUBERANCE, McCAMMON’S BOOK IS HARD TO TOP.

There will be times when most adults will find themselves faintly embarrassed

to be gobbling the thing like hot buttered popcorn, but gobble they will all

the same… Not one to husband his narrative energies, McCammon writes here as

if he had several lives to squander, weaving together… enough plots and

subplots to fill a half-dozen ordinary novels.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“THIS SUPERBLY TOLD TALE COMBINES THE SENSIBILITIES OF MARK TWAIN, FLANNERY

O’CONNOR AND STEVEN SPIELBERG—SHIFTING FROM THE MORAL TO THE MAGICAL, AND ALL

THE WHILE SUCCEEDING AS A SOLID COMING-OF-AGE STORY AND A FINE MYSTERY…

FORTUNATELY, McCAMMON HAS NOT… HAD THE MAGIC TAKEN OUT OF HIM, ALLOWING US TO

WILLINGLY, AND HAPPILY, SUSPEND OUR DISBELIEF AND DEVOUR THIS BOUNTIFUL BOOK.”

—Newsday

“McCAMMON CAPTURES THE JOYS AND FEARS OF LATE CHILDHOOD WITH SURE STROKES,

ABLY CONVEYING HIS LOVE FOR THE TIME, THE PLACE AND ALL THE ATTENDANT FORMS OF

POP CULTURE: MONSTER MOVIES, COMIC BOOKS, ROADSIDE CARNIVALS AND BASEBALL.

INDIVIDUAL EPISODES RESONATE WITH WONDER, HUMOR AND TRAGEDY… AS AN AFFECTING

PAEAN TO THE MAGICAL POSSIBILITIES OF BOYHOOD… THE NOVEL WORKS EXCEEDINGLY

WELL.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“BOY’S LIFE IS CERTAINLY UNLIKE ANY OF McCAMMON’S OTHER NOVELS, AND IS EASILY

HIS BEST TO DATE, DISPLAYING A RANGE THAT IS ASTONISHING. A TOUR DE FORCE OF

STORY-TELLING, IT IS A POWERFUL STORY ABOUT THE MAGIC INHERENT IN EVERYDAY

LIFE, ABOUT THE MANY WONDERS AND PAINS OF GROWING UP, ABOUT THE STRANGE BEAUTY

AROUND US THAT WE SO OFTEN MISS… BOY’S LIFE HAS A WEALTH OF SMALL, ANECDOTAL

GEMS THAT GIVE IT ALL LIFE. LIKE A KALEIDOSCOPE TURNING TO REVEAL FASCINATING

PATTERNS IN THE LIGHT, SO McCAMMON SHOWS US A MULTITUDE OF INCIDENTS AND

CHARACTERS INTERTWINING TO CREATE ONE OF THE MOST ENTERTAINING BOOKS IN A LONG

TIME.”

—BookPage

“McCammon hangs this expertly told episodic tale on the bones of a skeleton

that becomes symbolic of evil doings in the quiet waters of small-town life…

This evocative novel is successful on more than one level. THE MYSTERY WILL

SATISFY THE MOST FINICKY AFICIONADO; McCAMMON HAS ALSO PRODUCED A BOISTEROUS,

POIGNANT TRAVELOGUE THROUGH A STORMY SEASON IN ONE BOY’S LIFE, PEOPLED WITH

THE ZANIEST, MOST MEMORABLE SOUTHERN CHARACTERS SINCE THOSE OF HARPER LEE.”

—Publishers Weekly

Books by Robert R. McCammon

Baal *

Bethany’s Sin *

Blue World *

Boy’s Life *

Mine *

Mystery Walk

The Night Boat *

Stinger *

Swan Song *

They Thirst *

Usher’s Passing

The Wolf’s Hour *

* Published by POCKET BOOKS

Most Pocket Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk

purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or

book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs.

For details write the office of the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket

Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020.

POCKET STAR BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are

either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is

entirely coincidental.

A Pocket Star Book published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster

Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230

Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-74305-8

First Pocket Books paperback printing May 1992

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster

Inc.

Cover art by Gerber Studio

Printed in the U.S.A.

We ran like young wild furies,

where angels feared to tread.

The woods were dark and deep.

Before us demons fled.

We checked Coke bottle bottoms

to see how far was far.

Our worlds of magic wonder

were never reached by car.

We loved our dogs like brothers,

our bikes like rocket ships.

We were going to the stars,

to Mars we’d make round trips.

We swung on vines like Tarzan,

and flashed Zorro’s keen blade.

We were James Bond in his Aston,

we were Hercules unchained.

We looked upon the future

and we saw a distant land,

where our folks were always ageless,

and time was shifting sand.

We filled up life with living,

with grins, scabbed knees, and noise.

In glass I see an older man,

but this book’s for the boys.

I WANT TO TELL YOU SOME IMPORTANT THINGS BEFORE WE START our journey.

I lived through it all. That’s one problem about relating events in first

person. The reader knows the narrator didn’t get killed. So whatever might

happen to me—whatever did happen to me—you can be sure I lived through it all,

though I might be a little better or worse for the experience, and you can

make up your own mind which.

There might be some places where you’ll say, “Hey, how come he knows this

event right here happened or this person said or did this or that if he wasn’t

even there?” The answer to that question is that I found out enough later on

to fill in the blanks, or in some cases I made up what happened, or in other

cases I figured it ought to have happened that way even if it didn’t.

I was born in July of 1952. I am approaching my fortieth birthday. Gosh,

that’s some number, isn’t it? I am no longer, as my reviews used to say, a

“promising young talent.” I am what I am. I have been writing since I was in

grammar school, and thinking up stories long before I understood exactly what

it was I was doing. I have been a published writer since 1978. Or is it

“author”? Paperback writer, as the Beatles said. Hardback author? One thing’s

for sure: I certainly have developed a hard back. I have suffered kicks and

smiled at kindnesses just like any other brother or sister on our spinning

home. I have been blessed, to be able to create characters and worlds out of

whole cloth. Writer? Author?

How about storyteller?

I wanted to set my memories down on paper, where I can hold them. You

know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic

town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that

web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance.

But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic

lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into

the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my

opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest

fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the

clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic

educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed

out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be

responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you

know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid

of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and

sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back.

You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When

people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool

of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of

logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little

heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust

turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you

listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where

it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the

briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence

that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good,

some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in

wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another.

It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best

to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until

one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s

like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They

make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need

the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know

and remember, and I want to tell you.

My name is Cory Jay Mackenson. My hometown was a place called Zephyr, in

south Alabama. It never got too cold there, or too hot. Its streets were

shaded with water oaks, and its houses had front porches and screens on the

windows. There was a park with two baseball fields, one for the kids and one

for the grown-ups. There was a public swimming pool where the water was blue

and clear and children plumbed the deep end for pennies. On the Fourth of July

there was a barbecue, and at the end of summer a writing contest. When I was

twelve years old, in 1964, Zephyr held about fifteen hundred people. There was

the Bright Star Cafe, a Woolworth’s, and a little Piggly-Wiggly grocery store.

There was a house where bad girls lived out on Route Ten. Not every family had

a television set. The county was dry, which meant that bootleggers thrived.

The roads went south, north, east, and west, and at night a freight train

passed through on its way to Birmingham and left the smell of scorched iron in

its wake. Zephyr had four churches and an elementary school, and a cemetery

stood on Poulter Hill. There was a lake nearby so deep it might as well have

been bottomless. My hometown was full of heroes and villains, honest people

who knew the beauty of truth and others whose beauty was a lie. My hometown

was probably a lot like yours.

But Zephyr was a magic place. Spirits walked in the moonlight. They came

out of the grassy graveyard and stood on the hill and talked about old times

when Coca-Cola really had a bite and you could tell a Democrat from a

Republican. I know. I’ve heard them. The breeze in Zephyr blew through the

screens, bringing the incense of honeysuckle and awakening love, and jagged

blue lightning crashed down upon the earth and awakened hate. We had

windstorms and droughts and the river that lay alongside my town had the bad

habit of flooding. In the spring of my fifth year, a flood brought snakes to

the streets. Then hawks came down by the hundreds in a dark tornado and lifted

up the snakes in their killing beaks, and the river slinked back to its banks

like a whipped dog. Then the sun came out like a trumpet call, and steam

swirled up from the blood-specked roofs of my hometown.

We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a

gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a

monster in the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted

the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had

a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien

invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants

Street.

It was a magic place.

In me are the memories of a boy’s life, spent in that realm of

enchantments.

I remember.

These are the things I want to tell you.

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

Robert McCammon - Boy's Life

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: