Boys of Blur

Leepike Ridge

Books of the 100 Cupboards
100 Cupboards
Dandelion Fire
The Chestnut King

Ashtown Burials
I:
The Dragon’s Tooth
II:
The Drowned Vault
III:
Empire of Bones

Out in the muck, where a sea of sugarcane stops and swamps begin, sitting beside a lake bigger than some countries, there is a town called Taper.

Taper has only one hill, a flat-topped mound just above the northern edge of town, ringed by cane. On that mound is an old white church with nothing but a stump where its steeple used to be before it was torn away by some long-forgotten hurricane. As for the church bell, it crashed through the floorboards and settled into the soft ground below. It’s still down there, under the patched floor, ringing silence in the muck.

Most Sundays, the little church sees a few cars, and a minister under a wobbling ceiling fan preaching at old men and women who have heard it all before. But when this story starts, one of those men has moved right on beyond old and straight into dead. There’s a whole herd
of cars parked below that white church, and a whole herd of people standing around the rusty iron fence that cages in the graves.

The dead man’s name was Willie Wisdom. And if he hadn’t died, a boy named Charlie Reynolds might never have set foot on that mound in Taper, Florida, and this story would already have run dry of words.

Charlie Reynolds stood with his stepfather and his mother and his fidgeting little sister near the front of the crowd. From where he was standing, he could see loose black dirt mounded up on a tarp, ready to fill in a hole. He could see one end of the long box that held a man.

His neck itched. So he scratched it.

Charlie was not a boy who usually wore suits. And his neck wasn’t the only place crawling with itches—just the worst of them. He had brown hair that went blond in the summer, a cluster of freckles on his nose that multiplied like weeds in the sun, and gold flecks in his hazel eyes in every kind of weather.

Normally, he wore old T-shirts and heavy shorts with deep pockets that were empty when he left the house in the morning and full when he returned at night. While he had a closet full of clothes and a dresser overflowing with shirts and pants that still smelled like store, he never touched them. He dressed from the laundry basket at the foot of his bed, and in the laundry basket he always found
a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. On cold days, he added a raggedy hoodie that had belonged to his father.

Charlie hadn’t worn a suit since his mother’s wedding five years ago. He’d only been seven then, and he’d hated it, but he’d understood. Without the suit he couldn’t hold the rings, and his mother had really, really wanted him to hold the rings.

For a moment, Charlie tried to pay attention. He looked at the flush-faced minister beside the grave. A sweaty roll of neck was bulging above his ministerial collar. For some reason, the man was talking about gardening.

Charlie couldn’t listen. Not with the Florida sun shining and the wind rattling through miles of sugarcane fields and itches dribbling down his neck and in between his shoulder blades.

Not while he was sinking.

Charlie took a step back and stared at where he’d been standing—two wet footprints dented the turf on the hilltop. His stepfather’s feet weren’t making dents, they were making craters. Charlie leaned on one foot and bounced, testing just how far he could sink into the turf.

A hand landed on his shoulder and Charlie looked up.

Charlie’s stepfather, Prester Mack, knew how to wear a suit. Big square shoulders, brown skin a little slick in the sun, he looked down at Charlie and shook his head no more than a centimeter, then let go of Charlie’s shoulder.
Charlie knew his stepfather’s football knees would be hurting, but Mack was tough, and the old man sealed in the box ready to go down into the hole had been the closest thing to a father Mack had ever had.

The minister was talking about bones now, a whole valley full of them. More than in the muck, he said. More than in a thousand fossil beds. His voice sounded like he was almost done.

Charlie inhaled slowly and the air tasted charred. He turned. A tower of smoke was roiling up from the fields.

Some people didn’t care that old Coach Wiz had died. They had sugarcane to burn.

Three women sang.

Six big men stepped forward and lowered an old coach into the ground.

Willie Wisdom, foster father to twenty-seven, head football coach of the Taper Terrapins for thirty-two years. Rest in peace.

The crowd shifted and frayed around the edges. Men and women were hugging Mrs. Wiz where she sat by the grave in a white plastic chair. People were setting food on tables in the shade beside the church. A man was clattering glass Coke bottles into a little plastic swimming pool full of melting ice.

“You ever drink one from a bottle?” Charlie’s mother asked. He looked up at her and shrugged.

“If you had, you’d remember.”

Natalie Mack smiled at her son, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. Real smiles brought creases to the corners. Her look bounced away through the crowd before taking in the tower of smoke and then returning to Charlie.

“Mom?” Charlie asked.

His mother didn’t answer. Standing barefoot in the grass, she dangled her high heels from one hand and Charlie’s sister, three-year-old Molly Mack, from the other. Today and every day, his mother’s hair was pulled back into a high doubled-over ponytail, but it seemed blonder than normal above her black dress.

As Charlie watched her eyes, he felt something tighten in his chest.

Charlie had been four when he’d learned how his mother’s eyes looked when his father was on his way home. He’d been four the first time his mother hid him behind pillows on the top shelf of a closet. Five the first time he’d called the police. Five when he’d felt his first broken rib. Five when he’d learned to keep his face empty and five when his mother had loaded his backpack, taken his hand, and led him out the front door of their little house, past the rusted swing set, past his bike and his sandbox and an old worn football in the grass, and down the cracked sidewalk toward the bus station, never to return.

For a while after that, his mother’s eyes had always looked the way they did when Charlie’s father was on his way home, like he might be waiting around every corner,
in every motel, in every restaurant, or walking behind them on every street.

Charlie had been six when his father had caught up with them, but by then, Mack had been there, too. Mack had changed everything.

“Mom?” Charlie asked. “What’s wrong?”

Natalie sighed. Her eyes were on Mack, where he was laughing with three other old football men in the crowd. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She smiled again, forcing eye creases this time. She cocked her hip and tugged Molly up onto it. “We’ll be leaving soon, so make sure you eat something.”

Charlie nodded. Molly looked at him, widening her brown eyes and making a big fake surprised face. Then she curled her lip into a snarl—her very best monster face.

Charlie gasped silently in fear. His sister laughed and threw her weight at the ground until her mother set her back down.

“I know you, Charlie,” his mother said. “Wander if you like, just don’t go far.” Molly grabbed her mother’s hand and began to drag her away. “And eat something!”

Charlie ignored the food tables. He slipped past church ladies in hats, men in suits, and clusters of boys slouching in red and white jackets. Each jacket had a football patch on one shoulder and a nickname on the back. Charlie saw
ROCKET
and
SLIDE
,
J.TAG
and
WEAZEL
. Free of the crowd, he moved through the taller grass, down the shallow side of
the mound until only a narrow ditch in the black silt held him back from the cane fields.