Boy's Life (20 page)

     “I don’t—”

     “Understand,” the Lady finished for her. “I know you don’t. Sometimes I don’t either. But I know the language of pain, Miz Mackenson. I grew up speakin’ it.” The Lady reached over to her bedside table, opened a drawer, and took out a piece of lined notebook paper. She gave it to my mother. “You recognize this?”

     Mom stared at it. On the paper was the pencil sketch of a head: a skull, it looked to be, with wings swept back from its temples.

     “In my dream I see a man with that tattoo on his shoulder. I see a pair of hands, and in one hand there’s a billy club wrapped up with black tape—we call it a crackerknocker—and in the other there’s a wire. I can hear voices, but I can’t tell what’s bein’ said. Somebody’s yellin’, and there’s music bein’ played real loud.”

     “Music?” Mom was cold inside; she had recognized the winged skull from what Dad had told her about the corpse in the car.

     “Either a record,” the Lady said, “or somebody’s beatin’ hell out of a piano. I told Charles. He recalled me a story I read in the
Journal
back in March. Your husband was the one who saw a dead man go down in Saxon’s Lake, ain’t that right?”

     “Yes.”

     “Might this have anythin’ to do with it?”

     Mom took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out. “Yes,” she said.

     “I thought so. Your husband sleepin’ all right?”

     “No. He… has bad dreams. About the lake, and… the man in it.”

     “Tryin’ to reach your husband,” the Lady said. “Tryin’ to get his attention. I’m just pickin’ up the message, like a party line on a telephone.”

     “Message?” Mom asked. “What message?”

     “I don’t know,” the Lady admitted, “but that kind of pain can sure ’nuff drive a man out of his mind.”

     Tears began to blur my mother’s vision. “I… can’t… I don’t…” She faltered, and a tear streaked down her left cheek like quicksilver.

     “You show him that picture. Tell him to come see me if he wants to talk about it. Tell him he knows where I live.”

     “He won’t come. He’s afraid of you.”

     “You tell him,” the Lady said, “this thing could tear him to pieces if he don’t set it right. You tell him I could be the best friend he ever had.”

     Mom nodded. She folded the notebook paper into a square and clenched it in her hand.

     “Wipe your eyes,” the Lady told her. “Don’t want the young man gettin’ upset.” When my mother had gotten herself fairly composed, the Lady gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There you go. Lookin’ pretty again. Now, you go tell the young man he’ll have his new bicycle soon as I can manage it. You make sure he studies his lessons, too. Potion Number Ten don’t work without a momma or daddy layin’ down the law.”

     My mother thanked the Lady for her kindness. She said she’d talk to my father about coming to see her, but she couldn’t promise anything. “I’ll expect him when I see him,” the Lady said. “You take care of yourself and your family.”

     Mom and I left the house and walked to the truck. The corners of my mouth still had a little Potion Number Ten in them. I felt ready to tear that math book up.

     We left Bruton. The river flowed gently between its banks. The night’s breeze blew softly through the trees, and the lights glowed from windows as people finished their dinners. I had two things on my mind: the hauntingly beautiful face of a young woman with green eyes, and a new bike with a horn and headlight.

     My mother was thinking about a dead man whose corpse lay down at the bottom of the lake but whose spirit haunted my father’s dreams and now the Lady’s dreams as well.

     Summer was close upon us, its scent of honeysuckle and violets perfuming the land.

     Somewhere in Zephyr, a piano was being played.

TWO

Summer of Devils
and Angels

Last Day of School—Barbershop Talk—A Boy and a Ball—I Get Around—Welcome, Lucifer—Nemo’s Mother & a Week with the Jaybird—My Camping Trip—Chile Willow—Summer Winds Up

1
Last Day of School

TICK… TICK… TICK
.

     In spite of what the calendar says, I have always counted the last day of school as the first day of summer. The sun had grown steadily hotter and hung longer in the sky, the earth had greened and the sky had cleared of all but the fleeciest of clouds, the heat panted for attention like a dog who knows his day is coming, the baseball field had been mowed and white-lined and the swimming pool newly painted and filled, and as our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Selma Neville, intoned about what a good year this had been and how much we’d learned, we students who had passed through the ordeal of final exams sat with one eye fixed to the clock.

    
Tick… tick… tick
.

     In my desk, alphabetically positioned between Ricky Lembeck and Dinah Macurdy, half of me listened to the teacher’s speech while the other half longed for an end to it. My head was full up with words. I needed to shake some of them out in the bright summer air. But we were Mrs. Neville’s property until the last bell rang, and we had to sit and suffer until time rescued us like Roy Rogers riding over the hill.

    
Tick… tick… tick
.

     Have mercy.

     The world was out there, waiting beyond the square metal-rimmed windows. What adventures my friends and I would find this summer of 1964, I had no way of knowing, but I did know that summer’s days were long and lazy, and when the sun finally gave up its hold on the sky the cicadas sang and the lightning bugs whirled their dance and there was no homework to be done and oh, it was a wonderful time. I had passed my math exam, and escaped—with a C-minus average, if truth must be known—the snarling trap of summer school. As my friends and I went about our pleasures, running amuck in the land of freedom, we would pause every so often to think of the inmates of summer school—a prison Ben Sears had been sentenced to last year—and wish them well, because time was moving on without them and they weren’t getting any younger.

    
Tick… tick… tick
.

     Time, the king of cruelty.

     From the hallway we heard a stirring and rustling, followed by laughter and shouts of pure, bubbling joy. Some other teacher had decided to let her class go early. My insides quaked at the injustice of it. Still, Mrs. Neville, who wore a hearing aid and had orange hair though she was at least sixty years old, talked on, as if there were no noise of escape beyond the door at all. It hit me, then; she didn’t want to let us go. She wanted to hold us as long as she possibly could, not out of sheer teacher spite but maybe because she didn’t have anybody to go home to, and summer alone is no summer at all.

     “I hope you boys and girls remember to use the library during recess.” Mrs. Neville was speaking in her kindly voice right now, but when she was upset she could spit sparks that made that falling meteor look like a dud. “You mustn’t stop reading just because school is out. Your minds are made to be used. So don’t forget how to think by the time September comes around a—”

    
RINGGGGGGG!

     We all jumped up, like parts of the same squirming insect.

     “One moment,” Mrs. Neville said. “One moment. You’re not excused yet.”

     Oh, this was torture! Mrs. Neville, I thought at that instant, must have had a secret life in which she tore the wings off flies.

     “You will leave my room,” she announced, “like young ladies and gentlemen. In single file, by rows. Mr. Alcott, you may lead the way.”

     Well, at least we were moving. But then, as the classroom emptied and I could hear the wild hollering echoing along the hallway, Mrs. Neville said, “Cory Mackenson? Step to my desk, please.”

     I did, under silent protest. Mrs. Neville offered me a smile from a mouth that looked like a red-rimmed string bag. “Now, aren’t you glad you decided to apply yourself to your math?” she asked.

     “Yes ma’am.”

     “If you’d studied as hard all year, you might’ve made the honor roll.”

     “Yes ma’am.” Too bad I hadn’t gotten a drink of Potion Number Ten back in the autumn, I was thinking.

     The classroom was empty. I could hear the echoes fading. I smelled chalk dust, lunchroom chili, and pencil-sharpener shavings; the ghosts were already beginning to gather.

     “You enjoy writing, don’t you?” Mrs. Neville asked me, peering over her bifocals.

     “I guess.”

     “You wrote the best essays in class and you made the highest grade in spelling. I was wondering if you were going to enter the contest this year.”

     “The contest?”

     “The writing contest,” she said. “You know. The Arts Council sponsors it every August.”

     I hadn’t thought about it. The Arts Council, headed by Mr. Grover Dean and Mrs. Evelyn Prathmore, sponsored an essay and story-writing contest. The winners got a plaque and were expected to read their entries during a luncheon at the library. I shrugged. Stories about ghosts, cowboys, detectives, and monsters from outer space didn’t seem much like contest-winning material; it was just something I did for me.

     “You should consider it,” Mrs. Neville continued. “You have a way with words.”

     I shrugged again. Having your teacher talk to you like a regular person is a disconcerting feeling.

     “Have a good summer,” Mrs. Neville said, and I realized suddenly that I was free.

     My heart was a frog leaping out of murky water into clear sunlight. I said, “Thanks!” and I ran for the door. Before I got out, though, I looked back at Mrs. Neville. She sat at a desk with no papers on it that needed grading, no books holding lessons that needed to be taught. The only thing on her desk, besides her blotter and her pencil sharpener that would do no more chewing for a while, was a red apple Paula Erskine had brought her. I saw Mrs. Neville, framed in a spill of sunlight, reach for the apple and pick it up as if in slow motion. Then Mrs. Neville stared out at the room of empty desks, carved with the initials of generations who had passed through this place like a tide rolling into the future. Mrs. Neville suddenly looked awfully old.

     “Have a good summer, Mrs. Neville!” I told her from the doorway.

     “Good-bye,” she said, and she smiled.

     I ran out along the corridor, my arms unencumbered by books, my mind unencumbered by facts and figures, quotations and dates. I ran out into the golden sunlight, and my summer had begun.

      I was still without a bike. It had been almost three weeks since Mom and I had gone to visit the Lady. I kept bugging Mom to call her, but Mom said for me to be patient, that I’d get the new bike when it arrived and not a minute before. Mom and Dad had a long talk about the Lady, as they sat on the porch in the blue twilight, and I guess I wasn’t supposed to be listening but I heard Dad say, “I don’t care what she dreams. I’m
not
goin’.” Sometimes at night I awakened to hear my father crying out in his sleep, and then I’d hear Mom trying to calm him down. I’d hear him say something like “…in the lake…” or “…down in the dark…” and I knew what had gotten into his mind like a black leech. Dad had started pushing his plate away at dinner when it was still half full, which was in direct violation of his “clean your plate, Cory, because there are youngsters starvin’ in India” speech. He’d started losing weight, and he’d had to pull the belt in tight on his milkman trousers. His face had begun changing, too; his cheekbones were getting sharper, his eyes sinking back in their sockets. He listened to a lot of baseball on the radio and watched the games on television, and as often as not he went to sleep in his easy chair with his mouth open. In his sleep, his face flinched.