Boy's Life (77 page)

     “Yeah, I hear you! I don’t care what time you get back!”

     “Well, we’ll get back near ten o’clock. In the mornin’, day after Christmas. Thought you might want to know, so you could set your watch.”

     “Set my
watch?
Are you—” He stopped. “Oh. Yeah. Okay, I’ll do that.” He grinned, his face sweating as he looked up at the sheriff. “Gerald and me are supposed to help a friend clean out his garage day after Christmas. That’s why he’s tellin’ me what time he’ll be back.”

     “Is that so?” the sheriff asked. “What friend might that be, Dick?”

     “Oh… fella lives in Union Town. You wouldn’t know him.”

     “I know a lot of people in Union Town. What’s your friend’s name?”

     “Joe,” Mr. Hargison said, at the exact second Mr. Moultry said, “Sam.”

     “Joe Sam,” Mr. Moultry explained, still sweatily grinning. “Joe Sam Jones.”

     “I don’t think you’re gonna be helping any Joe Sam Jones clean out his garage the day after Christmas, Dick. I think you’ll be in a nice secure hospital room, don’t you?”

     “Hey, Dick, I’m headin’ off!” Mr. Hargison announced. “Don’t you worry, you’re gonna be just fine.” And with that last word the toe of his left shoe nudged the silver Christmas tree star that lay balanced on the hole’s ragged edge. Dad watched the little star fall as if in graceful slow motion, like a magnified snowflake drifting down.

     It hit one of the bomb’s iron-gray tail fins, and exploded in a shower of painted glass.

     In the seconds of silence that followed, all four of the men heard it.

     The bomb made a hissing sound, like a serpent that had been awakened in its nest. The hissing faded, and from the bomb’s guts there came a slow, ominous ticking: not like the ticking of an alarm clock, but rather the ticking of a hot engine building up to a boil.

     “Oh… shit,” Sheriff Marchette whispered.

     “Jesus save me!” Mr. Moultry gasped. His face, which had been flushed crimson a few moments before, now became as white as a wax dummy.

     “The thing’s switched on,” Dad said, his voice choked.

     Mr. Hargison’s speech was by far the most eloquent. He spoke with his legs, which propelled him across the warped floor, out onto the crooked porch and to his car at the curb as if he’d been boomed from a cannon. The car sped away like the Road Runner: one second there, the next not.

     “Oh God, oh God!” Tears had sprung to Mr. Moultry’s eyes. “Don’t let me die!”

     “Tom? I believe it’s time.” Sheriff Marchette was speaking softly, as if the weight of words passing through the air might be enough to cause concussion. “To vamoose, don’t you?”

     “You can’t leave me! You can’t! You’re the
sheriff!
”

     “I can’t do anythin’ more for you, Dick. I swear I wish I could, but I can’t. Seems to me you need magic or a miracle right about now, and I think the well’s run dry.”

     “Don’t leave me! Get me out of this, Jack! I’ll pay you whatever you want!”

     “I’m sorry. Climb on up, Tom.”

     Dad didn’t have to be told a second time. He scaled that ladder like Lucifer up a tree. At the top, he said, “I’ll steady the ladder for you, Jack! Come on!”

     The bomb ticked. And ticked. And ticked.

     “I can’t help you, Dick,” Sheriff Marchette said, and he climbed the ladder.

     “No! Listen! I’ll do anythin’! Get me out, okay? I won’t mind if it hurts! Okay?”

     Dad and Sheriff Marchette were on their way to the door.

     “
Please!
” Mr. Moultry shouted. His voice cracked, and a sob came out. He fought against his trap, but the pain made him cry harder. “
You can’t leave me to die! It’s not human!
”

     He was still shouting and sobbing as Dad and the sheriff left the house. Both their faces were drawn and tight. “Great job this turned out to be,” Sheriff Marchette said. “Jesus.” They reached the sheriff’s car. “You need a ride somewhere, Tom?”

     “Yeah.” He frowned. “No.” And he leaned against the car. “I don’t know.”

     “Now, don’t look like that! There’s not a thing can be done for him, and you know it!”

     “Maybe somebody ought to wait around, in case the bomb squad shows up.”

     “Fine.” The sheriff glanced up and down the deserted street. “Are you volunteerin’?”

     “No.”

     “Me, neither! And they’re not gonna show up anytime soon, Tom. I think that bomb’s gonna explode and we’ll lose this whole block, and I don’t know about you, but I’m gettin’ out while I’ve still got my skin.” He walked around to the driver’s door.

     “Jack, wait a minute,” Dad said.

     “Ain’t got a minute. Come on, if you’re comin’.”

     Dad got into the car with him, and Sheriff Marchette started the engine. “Where to?”

     “Listen to me, Jack. You said it yourself: Dick needs magic or a miracle, right? So who’s the one person around here who might be able to give it to him?”

     “Reverend Blessett’s left town.”

     “No, not him!
Her
.”

     Sheriff Marchette paused with his hand on the gearshift.

     “Anybody who can turn a bag of shotgun shells into a bag of garden snakes might be able to take care of a bomb, don’t you think?”

     “No, I don’t! I don’t think the Lady had a thing to do with that. I think Biggun Blaylock was so blasted out of his mind on his own rotgut whiskey that he thought he was fillin’ that ammo bag full of cartridges when all the time he was shovelin’ the snakes in!”

     “Oh, come on! You saw those snakes the same as I did! There were
hundreds
of ’em! How long would it have taken Biggun to find ’em all?”

     “I don’t believe in that voodoo stuff,” Sheriff Marchette said. “Not one bit.”

     Dad said the first thing that came to mind, and saying it left a shocked taste in his mouth: “We can’t be afraid to ask her for help, Jack. She’s all we’ve got.”

     “Damn,” the sheriff muttered. “Damn and double-damn.” He looked at the Moultry house, light rising from its broken roof. “She might be gone by now.”

     “She might be. She might not be. Can’t we at least drive over there and find out?”

     Many houses in Bruton were dark, their owners having obeyed the siren and fled the impending blast. Her rainbow-hued dwelling, however, was all lit up. Tiny sparkling lights blinked in the windows.

     “I’ll wait right here,” Sheriff Marchette said. Dad nodded and got out. He took a deep breath of Christmas Eve air and made his legs move. They carried him to the front door. He took the door’s knocker, a little silver hand, and did something he never dreamed he would’ve done in a million years: he announced to the Lady that he had come to call.

     He waited, hoping she would answer.

     He waited, watching the doorknob.

     He waited.

     Fifteen minutes after my father took the silver hand, there was a noise on the street where Dick Moultry lived. It was a rumble and a clatter, a clanking and a clinking, and it caused the dogs to bark in its wake. The rust-splotched, suspension-sagging pickup truck stopped at the curb in front of the Moultry house, and a long, skinny black man got out of the driver’s door. On that door was stenciled, not very neatly: LIGHTFOOT’S FIX-IT.

     He moved so slowly it seemed that movement might be a painful process. He wore freshly washed overalls and a gray cap that allowed his gray hair to boil out from beneath it. In supreme slow motion, he walked to the truck’s bed and strapped on his tool belt, which held several different kinds of hammers, screwdrivers, and arcane-looking wrenches. In a slow extension of time he picked up his toolbox, an old metal fascination filled with drawers that held every kind of nut and bolt under the workman’s sun. Then, as if moving under the burden of the ages, Mr. Marcus Lightfoot walked to Dick Moultry’s crooked entrance. He knocked at the door, even though it stood wide open: One… two…

     Eternities passed. Civilizations thrived and crumbled. Stars were born in brawny violence and died doddering in the cold vault of the cosmos.

     …three.

     “Thank God!” Mr. Moultry shouted, his voice worn to a frazzle. “I knew you wouldn’t let me die, Jack! Oh, God have mer—” He stopped shouting in mid-praise, because he was looking up through the hole in the living room’s floor, and instead of help from heaven he saw the black face of what he considered a devil of the earth.

     “Lawdy, lawdy,” Mr. Lightfoot said. His eyes had found the bomb, his ear the ticking of its detonation mechanism. “You sure       in     a      big       pile’a mess.”

     “Have you come to watch me get blown up, you black savage?” Mr. Moultry snarled.

     “Nossuh.       Come      ta      keep you       from     gettin’       blowed.”

     “
You?
Help
me?
Hah!” He pulled in a breath and roared through his ravaged throat: “
Jack! Somebody help me! Anybody white!
”

     “Mr.    Moultry,    suh?” Mr. Lightfoot waited for the other man’s lungs to give out. “That       there      bumb     might not      care       for       such a’   noise.”

     Mr. Moultry, his face the color of ketchup and the sweat standing up in beads, began fighting his condition. He thrashed and clawed at the pile of debris; he grasped at his own shirt in a fit of rage and ripped the rest of it away; he gripped at the very air but found no handholds there. And then the pain crashed over him like one wrestler bodyslamming another and Mr. Moultry was left gasping and breathless but still with two broken legs and a bomb ticking next to his head.

     “I   believe,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and he yawned at the lateness of the hour, “I’d     best     come      on   down.”

     It might have been New Year’s Eve before Mr. Lightfoot reached the bottom of the stepladder, the tools in his belt jingling together. He grasped his toolbox and started toward Mr. Moultry, but the poster of the bug-eyed minstrel on the wall caught his attention. He stared at it as the seconds and the bomb ticked.

     “Heh-heh,” Mr. Lightfoot said, and shook his head. “Heh heh.”

     “What’re you laughin’ at, you crazy jigaboo?”

     “Thass     a      white man,” he said. “All      painted up      and      lookin’      the fool.”

     At last Mr. Lightfoot pulled himself away from the picture of Al Jolson and went to the bomb. He cleared away some nail-studded timbers and roof shingles and sat down on the red dirt, a process that was like watching a snail cross a football field. He drew the toolbox close to his side, like a trusted companion. Then he took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his shirt, blew on the lenses, and wiped them on his sleeve, all at excruciating slowness.

     “What have I done to deserve this?” Mr. Moultry croaked.

     Mr. Lightfoot got his spectacles on. “Now,” he said. “I    can.” He leaned closer to the bomb, and as he frowned the small lines deepened between his eyes. “See       what’s     what.”

     He took a hammer with a miniature head from his belt. He licked his thumb and—slowly, slowly—marked the hammer’s head with his spit. Then he tapped the bomb’s side so lightly it hardly made a noise.

     “Don’t hit it! Oh Jeeeeesus! You’ll blow us both to hell!”

     “Ain’t,” Mr. Lightfoot replied as he made small tappings up and down the bomb’s side, “plannin’     on it.” He pressed his ear against the bomb’s iron skin. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I      hears you      talkin’.” As Mr. Moultry agonized in terrified silence, Mr. Lightfoot’s fingers were at work, moving across the bomb as one might stroke a small dog. “Uh-huh.” His fingers stopped on a thin seam. “Thass      the    way      ta      your   heart,      ain’t   it?” He located four screws just below the tail fins, and he lifted the proper screwdriver from its place on his belt like a glacier melting.

     “You came here to kill me, didn’t you?” Mr. Moultry groaned. He received a punch of insight. “
She
sent you, didn’t she? She sent you to kill me!”

     “Got,” Mr. Lightfoot said as he made the first turn of the first screw, “half      that      right.”

     Eons later, the final screw fell into Mr. Lightfoot’s palm. Mr. Lightfoot had started humming “Frosty, the Snowman,” in his somnolent way. Sometime between the removal of the second and third screws, the sound of the detonation mechanism had changed from a tick to a rasp. Mr. Moultry, lying in a stew of sweat, his eyes glassy and his head thrashing back and forth with dementia, had lost five pounds.

     Mr. Lightfoot took from his toolbox a small blue jar. He opened it and with the tip of his index finger withdrew some greasy gunk the color of eel’s skin. He spat into it, and smeared the gunk onto the seam that circled the bomb. Then he took hold of the tail fins and tried to give them a counterclockwise turn. They resisted. He tried it in the clockwise direction, but that, too, was fruitless.