Boy's Life (13 page)

     “See, here’s the story,” he said. “Been meanin’ to get rid of those old bikes for over a year. Tryin’ to clean the place up, ya see. Got to make room for more stuff comin’ in. So I said to Belle—that’s my wife—I said, ‘Belle, when I pick up one more bike I’m gonna do it. Just one more.’” He led us into an open doorway, into the building’s cool interior. Light bulbs hanging on cords threw shadows between more mounds of junk. Here and there larger things rose up from the gloom like Martian machines and presented a glimpse of mysterious curves and edges. Something squeaked and skittered; whether mice or bats, I don’t know. The place sure looked like a cavern, where Injun Joe would feel right at home.

     “Watch your step here,” Mr. Sculley cautioned us as we went through another doorway. Then he stopped beside a big rectangular machine with gears and levers on it and he said, “This here crusher just ate your bike about fifteen minutes ago. It was the first one in.” He prodded a barrel full of twisted and crumpled metal pieces. Other barrels were waiting to be filled. “See, I can sell this as scrap metal. I was waitin’ for one more bike to start breakin’ ’em up, and yours was the one.” He looked at me, the overhead bulb shining on his rain-wet dome, and his eyes were not unkind. “Sorry, Cory. If I’d known anybody was gonna come claim it, I’d have held on to it, but it was dead.”

     “
Dead?
” my father asked.

     “Sure. Everythin’ dies. It wears out and can’t be fixed for love nor money. That’s how the bike was. That’s how they all are by the time somebody brings ’em here, or somebody calls me to come pick ’em up. You know your bike was dead long before I put it in that crusher, don’t you, Cory?”

     “Yes sir,” I said. “I do.”

     “It didn’t suffer none,” Mr. Sculley told me, and I nodded.

     It seemed to me that Mr. Sculley understood the very nucleus of existence, that he had kept his young eyes and young heart even though his body had grown old. He saw straight through to the cosmic order of things, and he knew that life is not held only in flesh and bone, but also in those objects—a good, faithful pair of shoes; a reliable car; a pen that always works; a bike that has taken you many a mile—into which we put our trust and which give us back the security and joy of memories.

     Here the ancient hearts of stone may chortle and say, “That’s
ridiculous!
” But let me ask a question of them: don’t you ever wish—even for just a fleeting moment—that you could have your first bike again? You remember what it looked like. You remember. Did you name it Trigger, or Buttermilk, or Flicka, or Lightning? Who took that bike away, and where did it go? Don’t you ever, ever wonder?

     “Like to show you somethin’, Cory,” Mr. Sculley said, and he touched my shoulder. “This way.”

     My dad and I both followed him, away from the bike-crushing machine into another chamber. A window with dirty glass let in a little greenish light to add to the overhead bulb’s glare. In this room was Mr. Sculley’s desk and a filing cabinet. He opened a closet and reached up onto a high shelf. “I don’t show this to just anybody,” he told us, “but I figure you fellas might like to see it.” He rummaged around, moving boxes, and then he said, “Found it,” and his hand emerged from dark into light again.

     He was holding a chunk of wood, its bark bleached and dried mollusks still gripping its surface. What looked like a slim ivory dagger, about five inches long, had been driven into the wood. Mr. Sculley held it up to the light, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses. “See it? What do you make of it?”

     “No idea,” Dad said. I shook my head, too.

     “Look close.” He held the wood chunk with its embedded ivory dagger in front of my face. I could see pits and scars on the ivory’s surface, and its edges were serrated like a fishing knife.

     “It’s a tooth,” Mr. Sculley said. “Or a fang, most likely.”

     “A
fang?
” Dad frowned, his gaze jumping back and forth between Mr. Sculley and the wood chunk. “Must’ve been a mighty big snake!”

     “No snake, Tom. I cut this piece out of a log I found washed up along the river when I was huntin’ bottles three summers ago. See the shells? It must be from an old tree, probably laid on the bottom for quite a while. I figure that last flood we had pulled it up from the mud.” He gingerly ran a gloved finger along the serrated edge. “I do believe I’ve got the only evidence there is.”

     “You don’t mean…” Dad began, but I already knew.

     “Yep. This here’s a fang from the mouth of Old Moses.” He held it in front of me once more, but I drew back.

     “Maybe his eyesight ain’t so good anymore,” Mr. Sculley mused. “Maybe he went after that log thinkin’ it was a big turtle. Maybe he was just mean that day, and he snapped at everythin’ his snout bumped up against.” His finger tapped the fang’s broken rim. “Hate to think what this thing could do to a human bein’. Wouldn’t be pretty, would it?”

     “Can I see that?” Dad asked, and Mr. Sculley let him hold it. Mr. Sculley went to the window and peered out as Dad examined what he held, and after another moment Dad said, “I swear, I believe you’re right! It is a tooth!”

     “Said it was,” Mr. Sculley reminded him. “I don’t lie.”

     “You need to show this to somebody! Sheriff Amory or Mayor Swope! Heck, the
governor
needs to see it!”

     “Swope’s already seen it,” Mr. Sculley said. “He’s the one advised me to put it in my closet and keep the door shut.”

     “Why? Somethin’ like this is front-page news!”

     “Not accordin’ to Mayor Swope.” He turned away from the window, and I saw that his eyes had darkened. “At first Swope thought it was a fake. He had Doc Parrish look at it, and Doc Parrish called Doc Lezander. Both of them agreed it’s a fang from some kind of reptile. Then we all had a sit-down talk in the mayor’s office, with the doors closed. Swope said he’d decided to put a lid on the whole thing. Said it might be a fang or it might be a fraud, but it wasn’t worth gettin’ folks upset over.” He took the pierced wood chunk back from my father’s hands. “I said, ‘Luther Swope, don’t you think people would want to see real evidence that there’s a monster in the Tecumseh River?’ And he looked at me with that damn pipe in his mouth and he says, ‘People already know it. Evidence would just scare ’em. Anyway,’ Swope says, ‘if there’s a monster in the river, it’s
our
monster, and we don’t want to share it with nobody.’ And that’s how it ended up.” Mr. Sculley offered it to me. “Want to touch it, Cory? Just so you can say you did?”

     I did, with a tentative index finger. The fang was cool, as I imagined the muddy bottom of the river must be.

     Mr. Sculley put the piece of wood and the fang back up on the closet shelf, and he closed the door. The rain was coming down hard again outside, banging on the metal roof. “All this water pourin’ down,” Mr. Sculley said, “must make Old Moses mighty happy.”

     “I still think you ought to show somebody else,” Dad told him. “Like somebody from the newspaper in Birmingham.”

     “I would, Tom, but maybe Swope’s got a point. Maybe Old Moses
is
our monster. Maybe if we let everybody else know about him, they’d come try to take him away from us. Catch him up in a net, put him in a big glass tank somewhere like an overgrown mudcat.” Mr. Sculley frowned and shook his head. “Nah, I wouldn’t want that to happen. Neither would the Lady, I reckon. She’s been feedin’ him on Good Friday for as long as I can remember. This was the first year he didn’t like his food.”

     “Didn’t like his food?” Dad asked. “Meanin’ what?”

     “Didn’t you see the parade this year?” Mr. Sculley waited for Dad to say no, and then he went on. “This was the first year Old Moses didn’t give the bridge a smack with his tail, same to say Thanks for the grub.’ It’s a quick thing, it passes fast, but you get to know the sound of it when you’ve heard it so many years. This year it didn’t happen.”

     I recalled how troubled the Lady looked when she left the gargoyle bridge that day, and how the whole procession had been so somber on the march back to Bruton. That must have been because the Lady hadn’t heard Old Moses smack the bridge with his tail. But what did such a lack of table manners mean?

     “Hard to say what it means,” Mr. Sculley said as if reading my mind. “The Lady didn’t like it, that’s for sure.”

     It was starting to get dark outside. Dad said we’d better be getting home, and he thanked Mr. Sculley for taking the time to show us where the bike had gone. “Wasn’t your fault,” Dad said as Mr. Sculley limped in front of us to show us the way out. “You were just doin’ your job.”

     “Yep. Waitin’ for one more bike, I was. Like I said, that bike couldn’t have been fixed anyhow.”

     I could’ve told my dad that. In fact, I did tell him, but one sorry thing about being a kid is that grown-ups listen to you with half an ear.

     “Heard about the car in the lake,” Mr. Sculley said as we neared the doorway. His voice echoed in the cavernous room, and I sensed my father tightening up. “Bad way for a man to die, without a Christian burial,” Mr. Sculley continued. “Sheriff Amory got any clues?”

     “None that I know of.” My father’s voice was a little shaky. I was sure that he saw that sinking car and the body handcuffed to the wheel every time he lay down in bed and closed his eyes.

     “Got my own ideas about who it was, and who killed him,” Mr. Sculley offered. We reached the way out, but the rain was still falling hard onto the mountains of old dead things and the last of the sunlight had turned green. Mr. Sculley looked at my father and leaned against the door frame. “It was somebody who’d crossed the Blaylock clan. Must’ve been a fella who wasn’t from around here, ’cause everybody else in their right mind knows Wade, Bodean, and Donny Blaylock are meaner’n horny rattlers. They got stills hidden all up in the woods around here. And that daddy of theirs, Biggun, could teach the devil some tricks. Yessir, the Blaylocks are the cause of that fella bein’ down at the bottom of the lake, and you can count on it.”

     “I figure the sheriff thought of that already.”

     “Probably did. Only trouble is, nobody knows where the Blaylocks hide out. They show up now and again, on some errand of meanness, but trackin’ ’em to their snakehole is another thing entirely.” Mr. Sculley looked out the door. “Rain’s easin’ up some. Reckon you don’t mind gettin’ wet.”

     We trudged through the mud toward my dad’s truck. I looked again at the mound of bikes as we passed, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: honeysuckle vines were growing in the midst of the tangled metal, and the little sweet white cups were sprouting amid the rust.

     My father’s attention was snagged by something else that lay over beyond the bikes, something we had not seen on the way in. He stopped, staring at it, and I stopped, too, and Mr. Sculley, limping ahead, sensed our stopping and turned around.

     “I wondered where they brought it,” Dad said.

     “Yeah, gonna haul it off one of these days. Gotta make room for more stuff, y’know.”

     You couldn’t tell much about it, really. It was just a rusted mass of crumpled metal, but some of the metal still held the original black paint. The windshield was gone, the roof smashed flat. Part of the hood remained, though, and on it was a ripple of painted flames.

     This one had suffered.

     Dad turned away from it, and I followed him to the pickup. Real close, I might add.

     “Come back anytime!” Mr. Sculley told us. The hound dogs bayed and Mrs. Sculley came out on the porch, this time without her rifle, and Dad and I drove home along the haunted road.

6
Old Moses Comes to Call

MOM  HAD PICKED UP THE  PHONE WHEN  IT RANG, PAST TEN o’clock at night about a week after our visit to Mr. Sculley’s place.

     “Tom!” she said, and her voice carried a frantic edge. “J.T. says the dam’s burst at Lake Holman! They’re callin’ everybody together at the courthouse!”

     “Oh, Lord!” Dad sprang up from the sofa, where he’d been watching the news on television, and he slid his feet into his shoes. “It’ll be a flood for sure! Cory!” he called. “Get your clothes on!”