Boy's Life (12 page)

      I pulled it up onto somebody’s yard and left it under a dripping oak tree, and I went on with my drenched knapsack on my back and my shoes squeaking with water.

     When my father, who was home from the dairy, found out about the bike, he packed me into the pickup truck, and off we went to fetch the carcass on Deerman Street. “It can be fixed,” he told me as the wipers slogged back and forth across the windshield. “We’ll get somebody to weld it together or somethin’. That’ll be cheaper than a new bike, for sure.”

     “Okay,” I answered, but I knew the bike was dead. No amount of welding was going to revive it. “The front wheel was messed up, too,” I added, but Dad was concentrating on his driving.

     We reached the place where I’d pulled the carcass up under the oak tree. “Where it is?” Dad asked. “Was this the place?”

     It was, though the carcass was gone. Dad stopped the truck, got out, and knocked on the front door of the house we sat before. I saw the door open, and a white-haired woman peered out. She and Dad talked for a minute or so, and I saw the woman point toward the street. Then my dad came back, his cap dripping water and his shoulders hunched in his wet milkman’s jacket. He slid behind the wheel, closed the door, and said, “Well, she walked out to get her mail, she saw the bike lyin’ there under her tree, and she called Mr. Sculley to come pick it up.” Mr. Emmett Sculley was Zephyr’s junkman, and he drove around in a bright green truck with SCULLEY’S ANTIQUES and a telephone number painted on the sides in red. My dad started the engine and looked at me. I knew that look; it was hard and angry, and I could read a grim future in it. “Why didn’t you go to that woman’s door and tell her you were gonna come back for your bike? Didn’t you think of that?”

     “No, sir,” I had to admit. “I didn’t.”

     Well, my dad pulled the truck away from the curb and we started off again. Not toward home, but heading west. I knew where we were going. Mr. Sculley’s junk shop lay to the west, past the wooded edge of town. On the way, I had to endure my father’s tale, the one that began like this: “When I was your age, I had to walk if I wanted to get somewhere. I wish I’d had a bike back then, even a
used
one. Heck, if my buddies and me had to walk two or three miles, we didn’t think a thing about it. And we were healthier for it, too. Sun, wind, or rain, it didn’t matter. We got where we were going on our own two le—” And so on, you know the kind of speech I mean, the generational paean of childhood.

     We left the town limits behind us, and the glistening road wound through the wet green forest. The rain was still coming down, pieces of fog snagged on the treetops and drifting across the road. Dad had to drive slowly because the road around here was dangerous even when the pavement was dry. My dad was still going on about the dubious joys of not having a bike, which I was beginning to realize was his way of telling me I’d better get used to walking if my old ride was unfixable. Thunder boomed off beyond the hazy hills, the road deserted before us as it curved beneath the tires like a wild horse fights a saddle. I don’t know why I chose that moment to turn my head and look back, but I did.

     And I saw the car that was coming up fast behind us.

     The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the skin beneath it tingled like the scurrying of ants. The car was a black, low-slung, mean-looking panther with gleaming chrome teeth, and it rocketed around the long curve my father had just negotiated with an uneasy alliance of brake and accelerator. The pickup truck’s engine was sputtery, but I could hear no sound from the black car that closed on us. I could see a shape and a pale face behind the wheel. I could see red and orange flames painted on the slope of the ebony hood, and then the car was on our tail and showed no sign of slowing or swerving and I looked at my father and shouted, “
Dad!
”

     He jumped in his seat and jerked the wheel. The truck’s tires slewed to the left, over the faded centerline, and my father fought to keep us from going into the woods. Then the tires got a grip again, the truck straightened out, and Dad had fire in his eyes when he swung his face in my direction. “Are you crazy?” he snapped. “You want to get us killed?”

     I looked back.

      The black car was gone.

     It hadn’t passed us. It hadn’t turned off anywhere. It was just gone.

     “I saw… I saw…”

     “Saw
what?
Where?
” he demanded.

     “I… thought I saw… a car,” I told him. “It was… about to hit us, I thought.”

     He peered into the rearview mirror. Of course he saw only the same rain and empty road I was seeing. He reached out, put his hand against my forehead, and said, “You feelin’ all right?”

     “Yes sir.” I didn’t have a fever. Of that, at least, I was certain. My father, satisfied that I was not building up heat, pulled his hand away and refastened it to the steering wheel. “Just sit still,” he said, and I obeyed him. He fixed his attention on the tricky road again, but his jaw muscle clenched every few seconds and I figured he was trying to decide whether I needed to go see Dr. Parrish or get my butt busted.

     I didn’t say anything more about the black car, because I knew Dad wouldn’t believe me. But I had seen that car before, on the streets of Zephyr. It had announced itself with a rumble and growl as it roamed the streets, and when it had passed you could smell the heat and see the pavement shimmer. “Fastest car in town,” Davy Ray had told me as he and I and the other guys had lounged around in front of the ice house on Merchants Street, catching cool breezes from the ice blocks on a sultry August day. “My dad,” Davy Ray had confided, “says nobody can outrace Midnight Mona.”

     Midnight Mona. That was the car’s name. The guy who owned it was named Stevie Cauley. “Little Stevie,” he was called, because he stood only a few inches over five feet tall though he was twenty years old. He chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, and maybe those had stunted his growth.

     But the reason I didn’t tell my dad about Midnight Mona streaking up behind us on that rain-slick road was that I remembered what had happened on a night last October. My dad, who used to be a volunteer fireman, got a telephone call. It was Chief Marchette, he’d told Mom. A car had wrecked on Route Sixteen, and it was on fire in the woods. My dad had hurried out to help, and he’d come home a couple of hours later with ashes in his hair and his clothes smelling of burnt timber. After that night, and what he’d seen, he hadn’t wanted to be a fireman anymore.

     We were on Route Sixteen right now. And the car that had wrecked and burned was Midnight Mona, with Little Stevie Cauley behind the wheel.

     Little Stevie Cauley’s body—what was left of it, I mean—lay in a coffin in the cemetery on Poulter Hill. Midnight Mona was gone, too, to wherever burned-up cars go.

     But I had seen it, racing up behind us out of the mist. I had seen someone sitting behind the wheel.

     I kept my mouth shut. I was in enough trouble already.

     Dad turned off Route Sixteen and eased the truck onto a muddy side road that wound through the woods. We reached a place where rusted old metal signs of all descriptions had been nailed to the trees; there were at least a hundred of them, advertisements for everything from Green Spot Orange Soda to B.C. Headache Powders to the Grand Ole Opry. Beyond the signpost forest the road led to a house of gray wood with a sagging front porch and in the front yard—and here I mean “sea of weeds” instead of yard as ordinary people might know it—a motley collection of rust-eaten clothes wringers, kitchen stoves, lamps, bed-frames, electric fans, iceboxes, and other smaller appliances was lying about in untidy piles. There were coils of wire as tall as my father and bushel baskets full of bottles, and amid the junk stood the metal sign of a smiling policeman with the red letters STOP DON’T STEAL painted across his chest. In his head there were three bullet holes.

     I don’t think stealing was a problem for Mr. Sculley, because as soon as my dad stopped the truck and opened his door two red hound dogs jumped up from their bellies on the porch and began baying to beat the band. A few seconds later, the screen door banged open and a frail-looking little woman with a white braid and a rifle came out of the house.

     “Who is it?” she hollered in a voice like a lumberjack’s. “Whadda ye want?”

     My father lifted his hands. “It’s Tom Mackenson, Mrs. Sculley. From Zephyr.”

     “Tom
who?
”

     “Mackenson!” He had to shout over the hound dogs. “From Zephyr!”

     Mrs. Sculley roared, “
Shaddup!
” and she plucked a fly swatter from a hook on the porch and swung a few times at the dogs’ rumps, which quieted them down considerably.

     I got out of the truck and stood close to my dad, our shoes mired in the boggy weeds. “I need to see your husband, Mrs. Sculley,” Dad told her. “He picked up my boy’s bike by mistake.”

     “Uh-uh,” she replied. “Emmett don’t make no mistakes.”

     “Is he around, please?”

     “Back of the house,” she said, and she motioned with the rifle. “One of them sheds back there.”

     “Thank you.” He started off and I followed him, and we’d taken maybe a half-dozen steps when Mrs. Sculley said, “Hey! You trip over somethin’ and break your legs, we ain’t liable for it, hear?”

     If what lay in front of the house was a mess, what lay behind it was nightmarish. The two “sheds” were corrugated metal buildings the size of tobacco warehouses. To get to them, you had to follow a rutted trail that meandered between mountains of castaway things: record players, broken statuary, garden hose, chairs, lawn mowers, doors, fireplace mantels, pots and pans, old bricks, roof shingles, irons, radiators, and washbasins to name a few. “Have mercy,” Dad said, mostly to himself, as we walked through the valley between the looming hills. The rain spilled and spattered over all these items, in some places running down from the metallic mountaintops in gurgling little streams. And then we came to a big twisted and tangled heap of things that made me stop in my tracks because I knew I had found a truly mystical place.

     Before me were hundreds of bicycle frames, locked together with vines of rust, their tires gone, their backs broken.

     They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end. I believed at that moment in time that I had found the grave of the bicycles, where the carcasses flake away year after year under rain and baking sun, long after the spirits of their wandering lives have gone. In some places on that huge pile the bicycles had melted away until they resembled nothing more than red and copper leaves waiting to be burned on an autumn afternoon. In some places shattered headlights poked up, sightless but defiant, in a dead way. Warped handlebars still held rubber grips, and from some of the grips dangled strips of colored vinyl like faded flames. I had a vision of all these bikes, vibrant in their new paint, with new tires and new pedals and chains that snuggled up to their sprockets in beds of clean new grease. It made me sad, in a way I couldn’t understand, because I saw how there is an end to all things, no matter how much we want to hold on to them.

     “Howdy, there!” somebody said. “Thought I heard the alarms go off.”

     My dad and I looked at a man who pushed a large handcart before him through the muck. He wore overalls and muddy boots, and he had a big belly and a liver-spotted head with a tuft of white at its peak. Mr. Sculley had a wrinkled face and a bulbous nose with small broken veins showing purple at its tip, and he wore round-lensed glasses over gray eyes. He was grinning a square grin, his teeth dark brown, and on his grizzled chin was a mole that had sprouted three white hairs. “What can I do for you?”

     “I’m Tom Mackenson,” my dad said, and offered his hand. “Jay’s son.”

     “Oh, yeah! Sorry I didn’t recognize you right off!” Mr. Sculley wore dirty canvas gloves, and he took one of them off to shake my father’s hand. “This Jay’s grandson?”

     “Yep. Cory’s his name.”

     “Seen you around, I believe,” Mr. Sculley said to me. “I remember when your daddy was your age. Me and your grandpa go back a piece.”

     “Mr. Sculley, I believe you picked up a bike this afternoon,” Dad told him. “In front of a house on Deerman Street?”

     “Sure did. Wasn’t much to it, though. All busted up.”

     “Well, it was Cory’s bike. I think I can get it fixed, if we can have it back.”

     “Oops,” Mr. Sculley said. His square grin faltered. “Tom, I don’t think I can do that.”

     “Why not? It is here, isn’t it?”

     “Yeah, it’s here.
Was
here, I mean.” Mr. Sculley motioned toward one of the sheds. “I took it in there just a few minutes ago.”

     “So we can get it and take it back, can’t we?”

     Mr. Sculley sucked on his lower lip, looked at me, and then back to Dad. “I don’t believe so, Tom.” He pushed the handcart aside, next to the mound of dead bikes, and he said, “Come on and have a look.” We followed him. He walked with a limp, as if his hip worked on a hinge instead of a ball-and-socket.