Boy's Life (3 page)

     “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 chimey 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.