Boy's Life (52 page)

     The ditch wasn’t all that deep. It wasn’t full of thorns, or sharp rocks. Gordo really had a soft landing amid thick green three-leafed vines and a hodgepodge of things: pillows with the stuffing spilling out, garbage can lids, empty tin cans, a few aluminum pie pans, socks and torn-up shirts, rags, and the like. Gordo thrashed around in the green vines for a minute, getting himself loose from the black bike. He was none the worse for wear. He said, “You wait right there, you little shithole. You just wait right—”

     He screamed suddenly.

     Because something was in the ditch with him.

     He had landed right on top of it, as it had been eating the last of a coconut cream pie stolen from the sill of an open kitchen window less than ten minutes before.

     And now Lucifer, who did not care to share his den of trash-can treasures, was very, very angry.

     The monkey squirted up out of the vines and jumped Gordo, its teeth bared and its rear end spraying forth a nasty business.

     Gordo fought for his life. The vicious monkey took plugs of flesh from his arms, his cheek, his ear, and almost gnawed off a finger before Gordo, screaming to high heaven and stinking like hell, was able to scramble out of the ditch and take off running. Lucifer raced after him, chattering, spitting, and shitting, and the last I saw of them Lucifer had leaped onto Gordo’s head and had handfuls of peroxided blond hair, riding Gordo like an emperor on an elephant.

     I pulled Rocket up and got on. Rocket was docile now, all the willful fight drained away. Before I pedaled off to find a path around the ditch, I thought of how Gordo would be feeling in a few days, his face and arms swollen with bites, when he’d realized all those green three-leafed vines down in Lucifer’s domain were poison ivy pregnant with silent evil. He would be a walking fester. If he
could
walk, that is.

     “You’ve got a mean streak,” I said to Rocket.

     The defeated black bike lay down at the bottom of the ditch. Whoever went in after it had better be stocked up on calamine lotion.

     I rode back to school. The fight was over, but three guys were searching the playground. One of them had a tackle box under his arm.

     We found most of the arrowheads. Not all. A dozen or so had been swallowed up by the earth. An offering, as it were. Among the lost was the smooth black arrowhead of Chief Five Thunders.

     Johnny didn’t seem to mind that much. He said he’d look again for it. He said if he didn’t find it, somebody else might, in ten years, or twenty years, or who knew how long. It hadn’t been his to own anyway, he said. He’d just been keeping it for a while, until the chief needed it on the Happy Hunting Grounds.

     I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about “grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.

     By that definition, Johnny’s grace was awesome.

     I didn’t know it yet, but I stood on the verge of my own test of grace.

5
Case #3432

AFTER THAT DAY ON THE PLAYGROUND, THE BRANLINS DIDN’T bother us anymore. Gotha returned to school with a false front tooth and a dose of humility, and when Gordo was released from the hospital he skulked away whenever I was near. The capper came when Gotha actually approached Johnny and asked to be shown—in slow motion, of course—the haymaker punch that he hadn’t even seen coming. That’s not to say Gotha and Gordo became saints overnight. But Gotha’s beating and Gordo’s itchy agony had been good for them. They’d been given a drink from the cup of respect, and it was a start.

     As October moved along, the hillsides lit up with gold and orange. The smell of burning autumn hazed the air. Alabama and Auburn were both winning, Leatherlungs had eased off her tirades, the Demon was in love with somebody other than me, and everything would have been right with the world.

     Except.

     I often found myself thinking about Dad, scribbling questions he could not answer, in the small hours of the morning. He was getting downright skinny now, his appetite gone. When he forced a smile, his teeth looked too big and his eyes shone with a false glint. Mom started biting her fingernails, and she was really nagging Dad now but he refused to go to either Dr. Parrish or the Lady. They had a couple of arguments that made Dad stalk out of the house, get in the pickup, and drive away. Afterward, Mom cried in their room. I heard her on the phone more than once, begging Grandmomma Sarah to talk some sense into him. “… Eatin’ him up inside,” I heard Mom say, and then I went out to play with Rebel because it hurt me to hear how much pain my mother was suffering. Dad, as I well knew, was already locked in his own cell of torment.

     And the dream. Always the dream: two nights straight, skip a night, there it is again, skip three nights, then seven nights in a row.

    
Cory? Cory Mackenson?
they whispered, standing in their white dresses beneath the scorched and leafless tree. Their voices were as soft as the sound of doves in flight, but there was an urgency about them that struck a spark of fear in me. And as the dream went on, little details began to be revealed as if through misted glass: behind the four black girls was a wall of dark stones, and in that wall the splintered window frame held only a few ragged teeth of glass.
Cory Mackenson?
There was a distant ticking noise.
Cory?
It was getting louder, and the unknown fear welled up in me.
Cor
—

     On this seventh night, the lights came on. I looked at my parents, my eyes and brain still drugged with sleep. “What was that noise?” Dad asked. Mom said, “Look at this, Tom.” On the wall opposite my bed there was a big scraped mark. Glass and gears lay on the floor, the clock face read two-nineteen. “I know time flies,” Mom said to me, “but alarm clocks cost money.”

     They chalked it up to the Mexican enchilada casserole Mom had made for dinner.

     For some time now, an event had been taking shape that was one of those destinies of place and circumstance. I was unaware of it. So were my folks. So, too, was the man in Birmingham who got into his truck at the soft-drink bottling company every morning and drove out to make his deliveries to a prearranged list of gas stations and grocery stores. Would it have made a difference, if that man had decided to spend an extra two minutes in the shower that morning? If he’d eaten bacon instead of sausage with his eggs for breakfast? If I had tossed the stick for Rebel to retrieve just one more time before I’d gone off to school, might that have changed the fabric of what was to be?

     Being a male, Rebel was wont to roam when the mood was right. Dr. Lezander had told my folks it would be best if Rebel and his equipment were removed from each other, to cure the wandering itch, but Dad winced every time he thought of it and I wasn’t too keen on it, either. So it just didn’t get done. Mom didn’t like to keep Rebel in his pen all day long, considering the facts that he stayed on the porch most of the day anyhow and our street never got much traffic.

     The stage was set. The die was cast.

     On the thirteenth of October, when I walked into the front door after school, I found Dad home from work early and waiting for me. “Son,” he began. That word instantly told me something terrible had happened.

     He took me in the pickup truck to Dr. Lezander’s house, which stood on three acres of cleared land between Merchants and Shantuck streets. A white picket fence enclosed the property, and two horses grazed in the sunshine on the rolling grass. A kennel and dog exercise area stood off to one side, a barn on the other. Dr. Lezander’s two-storied house was white and square, precise and clean as arithmetic. The driveway curved us around to the rear of the house, where a sign said PLEASE LEASH YOUR PETS. We left the pickup truck parked at the back door, and Dad pulled a chain that made a bell ring. In another minute the door opened, and Mrs. Lezander filled up the entrance.

     As I’ve said before, she had an equine face and a lumpish body that might’ve scared a grizzly. She was always somber and unsmiling, as if she walked under a thundercloud. But I had been crying and my eyes were swollen, and perhaps this caused the transformation that I now witnessed.

     “Oh, you poor dear child,” Mrs. Lezander said, and such an expression of care came over her face that I was half stunned by it. “I’m so, so sorry about your dog.”
Dok
, she pronounced it. “Please come in!” she told Dad, and she escorted us through a little reception area with portraits of children hugging dogs and cats on the pine-paneled walls. A door opened on stairs leading to Dr. Lezander’s basement office. Each step was a torture for me, because I knew what was down there.

     My dog was dying.

     The truck bringing soft drinks from Birmingham had hit him as he’d run across Merchants Street around one o’clock. Rebel had been with a pack of dogs, Mr. Dollar had told Mom when he’d called the house. It was Mr. Dollar who had heard the shriek of tires and Rebel’s crushed yelp as he’d been coming out of the Bright Star Cafe after lunch. Rebel had been lying there on Merchants Street, the rest of the dogpack barking for him to get up, and Mr. Dollar had gotten Chief Marchette to help him lift Rebel onto the back of Wynn Gillie’s pickup truck and bring him to Dr. Lezander. Mom was all torn up about it, too, because she’d meant to put Rebel in his pen that afternoon but had gotten wrapped up in “Search for Tomorrow.” Never in his entire life had Rebel roamed as far away as Merchants Street. It was clear to me that he’d been running with a bad bunch, and this was the price.

     Downstairs the air smelled of animals; not unpleasant, but musky. There was a warren of rooms lit up with fluorescent lights, a shine of scrubbed white tiles and stainless steel. Dr. Lezander was there, wearing a doctor’s white coat, his bald head aglow under the lights. His voice was hushed and his face grim as he said hello to Dad. Then he looked at me, and he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Cory?” he said. “Do you want to see Rebel?”

     “Yes sir.”

     “I’ll take you to him.”

     “He’s not… he’s not dead, is he?”

     “No, he’s not dead.” The hand massaged a tight muscle at the base of my neck. “But he’s dying. I want you to understand that.” Dr. Lezander’s eyes seized mine and would not let me look away. “I’ve made Rebel as comfortable as possible, but… he’s been hurt very badly.”

     “You can fix him!” I said. “You’re a doctor!”

     “That’s right, but even if I operated on him I couldn’t repair the damage, Cory. It’s just too much.”

     “You can’t… just… let him
die!
”

     “Go see him, son,” Dad urged. “Better go on.”
While you can
, he was saying.

     Dad waited while Dr. Lezander took me into one of the rooms. Upstairs I could hear a whistling noise: a teakettle. Mrs. Lezander was above us, boiling water for tea in the kitchen. The room we walked into had a sickly smell. There was a shelf full of bottles and a countertop with doctor’s instruments arranged on a blue cloth. And at the center of the room was a stainless steel table with a form atop it, covered by a dog-sized cotton blanket. My legs almost gave way; blotches of brown blood had soaked through the cotton.

     I must’ve trembled. Dr. Lezander said, “You don’t have to, if you don’t—”

     “I will,” I said.

     Dr. Lezander gently lifted part of the blanket. “Easy, easy,” he said, as if speaking to an injured child. The form shivered, and I heard a whine that all but tore my heart out. My eyes flooded with hot tears. I remembered that whine, from when Dad had brought Rebel home as a puppy in a cardboard box and Rebel had been afraid of the dark. I walked four steps to the side of the table, and I looked at what Dr. Lezander was showing me.

     A truck tire had changed the shape of Rebel’s head. The white hair and flesh on one side of the skull had been ripped back, exposing the bone and the teeth in a fixed grin. The pink tongue lolled in a wash of blood. One eye had turned a dead gray color. The other was wet with terror. Bubbles of blood broke around Rebel’s nostrils, and he breathed with a painful hitching noise. A forepaw was crushed to pulp, the broken edges of bones showing in the twisted leg.