Boy's Life (5 page)

     The days passed, warming into the heart of spring. A week after Dad had jumped into Saxon’s Lake, this was the story: Sheriff Amory had found no one missing from Zephyr or from any of the surrounding communities. A front-page article in the weekly Adams Valley
Journal
brought forth no new information. Sheriff Amory and two of his deputies, some of the firemen, and a half dozen volunteers got out on the lake in rowboats and dragged nets back and forth, but they only came up with an angry catch of snapping turtles and cottonmouths.

     Saxon’s Lake used to be Saxon’s Quarry back in the twenties, before the steam shovels had broken into an underground river that would not be capped or shunted aside. Estimates of its depth ranged from three hundred to five hundred feet. There wasn’t a net on earth that could scoop that sunken car back to the surface.

     The sheriff came by one evening for a talk with Dad and Mom, and they let me sit in on it. “Whoever did it,” Sheriff Amory explained, his hat in his lap and his nose throwing a shadow, “must’ve backed that car onto the dirt road facin’ the lake. We found the tire marks, but the footprints were all scuffed over. The killer must’ve had somethin’ wedged against the gas pedal. Just before you rounded the bend, he released the hand brake, slammed the door, and jumped back, and the car took off across Route Ten. He didn’t know you were gonna be there, of course. If you hadn’t been, the car would’ve gone on into the lake, sunk, and nobody would ever have known it happened.” He shrugged. “That’s the best I can come up with.”

     “You talked to Marty Barklee?”

     “Yeah, I did. Marty didn’t see anything. The way that dirt road sits, you can drive right past it at a reasonable clip and never even know it’s there.”

     “So where does that leave us?”

     The sheriff pondered my dad’s question, the silver star on his hat catching the lamplight. Outside, Rebel was barking and other dogs picked up the tribal call across Zephyr. The sheriff spread his big hands out and looked at his fingers. “Tom,” he said, “we have a real strange situation here. We’ve got tire marks but no car. You say you saw a dead man handcuffed to the wheel and a wire around his throat, but we don’t have a body and we’re not likely to recover one. Nobody’s missin’ from town. Nobody’s missin’ in the whole area, except a teenaged girl whose mother thinks she ran off with her boyfriend to Nashville. And the boy don’t have a tattoo, by the way. I can’t find anybody who’s seen a fella with a tattoo like the one you described.” Sheriff Amory looked at me, then my mother, and then back to my dad with his coal-black eyes. “You know that riddle, Tom? The one about a tree fallin’ in the woods, and if there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, if there’s no body and no one’s missin’ anywhere that I can tell, was there a murder or not?”

     “I know what I saw,” Dad said. “Are you doubtin’ my word, J.T.?”

     “No, I didn’t say that. I’m only sayin’ I can’t do anything more until we get a murder victim. I need a name, Tom. I need a face. Without an identification, I don’t even know where to start.”

     “So in the meantime somebody who killed another man is walkin’ around as free as you please and doesn’t have to be scared of gettin’ caught anytime soon. Is that it?”

     “Yep,” the sheriff admitted. “That about sums it up.”

     Of course Sheriff Amory promised he’d keep working on it, and that he’d call around the state for information on missing persons. Sooner or later, he said, somebody would have to ask after the man who had gone down in the lake. When the sheriff had gone, my father went out to sit on the front porch by himself with the light off, and he sat there alone past the time Mom told me to get ready for bed.

     That was the night my father’s cry awakened me in the dark.

     I sat up in bed, my nerves jangled. I could hear Mom talking to Dad through the wall. “It’s all right,” she was saying. “It was a bad dream, just a bad dream, everything’s all right.”

     Dad was quiet for a long time. I heard water running in the bathroom. Then the squeak of their bedsprings. “You want to tell me about it?” Mom asked him.

     “No. God, no.”

     “It was just a bad dream.”

     “I don’t care. It was real enough.”

     “Can you get back to sleep?”

     He sighed. I could imagine him there in the darkened bedroom, his hands pressed to his face. “I don’t know,” he said.

     “Let me rub your back.”

     The bedsprings squeaked again, as the weight of their bodies shifted. “You’re awful tight,” Mom said. “All up in your neck, too.”

     “That hurts like hell. Right there, where your thumb is.”

     “It’s a crick. You must’ve pulled a muscle.”

     Silence. My neck and shoulders, too, had been comforted by my mother’s supple hands. Every so often the springs spoke, announcing a movement. Then my father’s voice came back. “I had another nightmare about that man in the car.”

     “I figured so.”

     “I was lookin’ at him in that car, with his face beat all to pulp and his throat strangled with a wire. I saw the handcuff on his wrist, and the tattoo on his shoulder. The car was goin’ down, and then… then his eyes opened.”

     I shivered. I could see it myself, and my father’s voice was almost a gasp.

     “He looked at me. Right at me. Water poured out of his eyeholes. He opened his mouth, and his tongue was as black as a snake’s head. And then he said, ‘Come with me.’”

     “Don’t think about it,” Mom interrupted. “Just close your eyes and rest.”

     “I can’t rest. I can’t.” I pictured my father’s body, lying like a question mark on the bed as Mom kneaded the iron-tight muscles of his back. “My nightmare,” he went on. “The man in the car reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingernails were blue. His fingers bit hard into my skin, and he said, ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’ The car… the car started sinkin’, faster and faster, and I tried to break loose but he wouldn’t let me go, and he said, ‘Come with me, come with me, down in the dark.’ And then the lake closed over my head and I couldn’t get away from it and I opened my mouth to scream but the water filled it up. Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Oh, Jesus.”

     “It wasn’t real. Listen to me! It was only a bad dream, and everythin’s all right now.”

     “No,” Dad answered. “It’s not. This thing is eatin’ at me, and it’s only gettin’ worse. I thought I could put it behind me. I mean, my God, I’ve seen a dead person before. Up close. But this… this is different. That wire around his throat, the handcuff, the face that somebody had pounded into putty… it’s different. And not knowin’ who he was, or anythin’ about him… it’s eatin’ at me, day and night.”

     “It’ll pass,” Mom said. “That’s what you tell me whenever I want to worry the warts off a frog. Hang on, you tell me. It’ll pass.”

     “Maybe it will. I hope to God it will. But for right now, it’s in my head and I can’t shake it loose for the life of me. And this is the worst thing, Rebecca; this is what’s grindin’ inside of me. Whoever did it had to be a local. Had to be. Whoever did it knew how deep the lake is. He knew when that car went in there, the body was gone. Rebecca… whoever did this thing might be somebody I deliver milk to. It might be somebody who sits on our pew at church. Somebody we buy groceries or clothes from. Somebody we’ve known all our lives… or
thought
we knew. That scares me like I’ve never been scared before. You know why?” He was silent for a moment, and I could imagine the way the pulse throbbed at his temple. “Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world.” His voice cracked a little on the last word. I was glad I wasn’t in that room, and that I couldn’t see his face.

     Two or three minutes passed. I think my father was just lying there, letting Mom rub his back. “Do you think you can sleep now?” she finally asked him, and he said, “I’ll try.”

     The springs spoke a few times. I heard my mother murmur something close to his ear. He said, “I hope so,” and then they were silent. Sometimes my dad snored; tonight he did not. I wondered if he lay awake after Mom had drifted off, and if he saw the corpse in the car reaching for him to drag him under. What he’d said haunted me:
if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world
. This thing had hurt my father, in a place deeper than the bottom of Saxon’s Lake. Maybe it was the suddenness of what had happened, or the violence, or the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were terrible secrets behind closed doors, even in the kindest of towns.

     I think my father had always believed all people were good, even in their secret souls. This thing had cracked his foundations, and it occurred to me that the murderer had handcuffed my father to that awful moment in time just as the victim had been handcuffed to the wheel. I closed my eyes and prayed for Dad, that he could find his way up out of the dark.

     March went out like a lamb, but the murderer’s work was unfinished.

3
The Invader

THINGS SETTLED DOWN, AS THINGS WILL.

     On the first Saturday afternoon in April, with the trees budding and flowers pushing up from the warming earth, I sat between Ben Sears and Johnny Wilson surrounded by the screaming hordes as Tarzan—Gordon Scott, the best Tarzan there ever was—plunged his knife into a crocodile’s belly and blood spurted in scarlet Eastman color.

      “Did you see that? Did you see that?” Ben kept saying, elbowing me in the ribs. Of course I saw it. I had eyes, didn’t I? My ribs weren’t going to last until the Three Stooges short between the double features, that was for certain.

     The Lyric was the only movie theater in Zephyr. It had been built in 1945, after the Second World War, when Zephyr’s sons marched or limped back home and they wanted entertainment to chase away the nightmares of swastika and rising sun. Some fine town father dug into his pockets and bought a construction man from Birmingham who drew a blueprint and marked off squares on a vacant lot where a tobacco barn used to be. I wasn’t there at the time, of course, but Mr. Dollar could tell you the whole story. Up went a palace of stucco angels, and on Saturday afternoons we devils of the common clay hunkered down in those seats with our popcorn, candy, and Yoo-Hoos and for a few hours our parents had breathing space again.

     Anyway, my two buddies and me were sitting watching Tarzan on a Saturday afternoon. I forget why Davy Ray wasn’t there; I think he was grounded for hitting Molly Lujack in the head with a pine cone. But satellites could go up and spit sparks in outer space. A man with a beard and a cigar could jabber in Spanish on an island off the coast of Florida while blood reddened a bay for pigs. That bald-headed Russian could bang his shoe. Soldiers could be packing their gear for a trip to a jungle called Vietnam. Atom bombs could go off in the desert and blow dummies out of tract-house living rooms. We didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t magic. Magic was inside the Lyric on Saturday afternoons, at the double feature, and we took full advantage of getting ourselves lost in the spell.

     I recall watching a TV show—“77 Sunset Strip”—where the hero walked into a theater named the Lyric, and I got to thinking about that word. I looked it up in my massive two-thousand-four-hundred-and-eighty-three-page dictionary Granddaddy Jaybird had given me for my tenth birthday. “Lyric,” it said: “Melodic. Suitable for singing. A lyric poem. Of the lyre.” That didn’t seem to make much sense in regards to a movie theater, until I continued following
lyre
in my dictionary.
Lyre
took me into the story-poems sung by traveling minstrels back when there were castles and kings. Which took me back to that wonderful word:
story
. It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication—whether it’s TV, movies, or books—begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.

     The Lyric.

     “Stab it, Tarzan! Stab it!” Ben yelled, and that elbow was working overtime. Ben Sears was a plump boy with brown hair cropped close to his skull, and he had a high, girlish voice and wore horn-rimmed glasses. The shirt wasn’t made that could stay tucked into his jeans. He was so clumsy his shoelaces could strangle him. He had a broad chin and fat cheeks and he would never grow up to resemble Tarzan in any girl’s dream, but he was my friend. By contrast to Ben’s chubby exuberance, Johnny Wilson was slim, quiet, and bookish. He had some Indian blood in him that showed in his black, luminous eyes. Under the summer sun his skin turned brown as a pine nut. His hair was almost black, too, and slicked back with Vitalis except for a cowlick that shot up like a wild onion at the crease of his part. His father, who was a foreman at the sheet rock plant between Zephyr and Union Town, wore his hair exactly the same way. Johnny’s mother was the library teacher at Zephyr Elementary, so I suppose that’s how he got his affinity for reading. Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads. He had a nose like a Cherokee hatchet and a small scar warped his right eyebrow where his cousin Philbo had hit him with a stick when we were all playing soldiers back in 1960. Johnny Wilson endured schoolyard taunts about being a “squawboy,” or having “nigger blood,” and he’d been born with a clubfoot to boot, which only doubled the abuse directed at him. He was a stoic before I knew the meaning of the word.