Boy's Life (86 page)

     Well, my last name’s neither Lovoy nor Blessett, so I ought to get off my pulpit now.

     I’ve changed somewhat since 1964, of course. I don’t have as much hair, and I wear glasses. I’ve picked up some wrinkles, but I’ve gained some laugh lines, too. Sandy says she thinks I’m more handsome now than I ever was. This is called love. But as I say, I really have tried to hold off the attitude aging. In this regard, music came to my rescue. I believe music is the language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger your attitude gets. I credit the Beach Boys with getting me interested in music to begin with. Now my record collection—excuse me, my CD collection—includes artists like Elvis Costello, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Concrete Blonde, Simple Minds, and Technotronic. I have to say, however, that sometimes I feel the classics pulling at me, like Led Zeppelin and the Lovin’ Spoonful. But with all this choice on my platter, I have a feast.

     I drive past a weeded-up road that cuts through the woods, and I know what ruin lies at its end fifty yards away. Miss Grace and her bad girls folded their tents right after the Blaylocks went to prison. The house’s roof was blown off during a windstorm in July of 1965. I doubt if there’s much left at all now. The kudzu vines around here have always been hungry.

     Ben started college at the University of Alabama the same year I did, majoring in business. He even stayed to go to graduate school, and I would never in a million years have thought that Ben would actually enjoy school. He and I got together from time to time at the university, but gradually he was more and more involved with his business fraternity and I didn’t see a whole lot of him. He joined Sigma Chi social fraternity and became vice president of the chapter. He lives now in Atlanta, where he’s a stockbroker. He and his wife, Jane Anne, have a boy and a girl. The guy is rich, he drives a gold-colored BMW, and he’s fatter than ever. He called me three years ago, after he read one of my books, and we see each other every few months. Last summer we drove down to a small town near the state line between Alabama and Florida to visit the chief of police there. His name is John Wilson.

     I always knew Johnny had the blood of a chief in his veins. He runs a tight ship in that town, and he accepts no nonsense. But I understand that he’s a fair man, and everybody there seems to like him, because he’s in his second term. While we were there, Ben and I met Johnny’s wife, Rachel. Rachel is a stunning woman who looks like she could easily be a fashion model. She hangs all over that guy. Though they have no children, Johnny and Rachel are perfectly happy. We all went deep-sea fishing off Destin one weekend, and Johnny caught a marlin, I got my line tangled up under the boat, and Ben got the sunburn of his life. But we sure did do a lot of laughing and catching up.

     It is there before I realize it. My stomach tightens.

     “Saxon’s Lake,” I tell them. They both crane their necks to look.

     It hasn’t changed at all. The same size, the same dark water, the same mud and reeds, the same red rock cliff. It wouldn’t take much effort to imagine Dad’s milk truck parked there, and him leaping into the water after a sinking car. It likewise wouldn’t take much effort to remember a Buick wallowing there, water flooding through the broken rear windshield, and my father straining to reach me with a glass-slashed hand. Not much effort at all.

    
Dad, I love you
, I think as we leave Saxon’s Lake behind.

     I remember his face, washed by firelight, as he sat there in the house and explained to me about Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke. It took us both—and Mom, too, and just about everybody in town—a long time to accept the fact that he and his wife had done such evil things. Though he wasn’t evil through and through, or else why would he have saved my life? I don’t think anyone is evil beyond saving. Maybe I’m like Dad that way: naive. But better naive, I think, than calloused to the core.

     It dawned on me sometime later about Dr. Dahninaderke and his nightly vigils at the shortwave radio. I firmly believe he was listening to the foreign countries for news on who else in the Nazi regime had been captured and brought to justice. I believe that under his cool exterior he lived in perpetual terror, waiting for that knock on the door. He had delivered agonies, and he had suffered them, too. Would he have killed me once he had that green feather in his fist, as he and Kara had tortured and killed Jeff Hannaford over blackmail money? I honestly don’t know. Do you?

     Oh, yes! The Demon!

     Ben told me this. The Demon, who had demonstrated later in high school that she was indeed a genius, went to college at Vanderbilt and became a chemist for DuPont. She did very well at that, but her strange nature would not let her alone. The last Ben understood, the Demon has become a performance artist in New York City and is locking horns with Jesse Helms over an art piece she does in which she screams and rants about corporate America while sitting in a baby pool full of… you can guess what.

     All I can say is, Jesse Helms better not get on her bad side. If he does, I pity him. He might find himself glued to his desk one fine day.

     I follow the same curves that scared the yell out of me when Donny Blaylock flew around them. And then the hills move aside and the road becomes as cleanly straight as a part made by Mr. Dollar and there is the gargoyle bridge.

     Missing its gargoyles. The heads of the Confederate generals have been hacked away. Maybe it was vandalism, maybe it was somebody who would get a thousand dollars apiece for them on the art market as examples of Southern primitivism. I don’t know, but they are gone. There is the railroad trestle, which is about the same, and there is the shine of the Tecumseh River. I imagine that Old Moses is happier, now that the paper mill has closed. He doesn’t get pollution in his teeth when he bites a mouthful of turtle. Of course, he doesn’t get his Good Friday feast anymore, either. That ended, Ben told me, when the Lady passed over her own river in 1967 at the grand old age of one hundred and nine. The Moon Man, Ben said, left town soon afterward, heading for New Orleans, and after that the community of Bruton began to dwindle, getting smaller at even a faster rate than Zephyr. The Tecumseh River may be cleaner now, but I wonder if on some nights Old Moses doesn’t lift his scaly head to the surface and spout steam and water from the twin furnaces of his nostrils. I wonder if he doesn’t listen to the silence beyond the sounds of water sloshing over rocks and think in his own reptilian language “Why doesn’t anybody ever come to play with me anymore?”

     Maybe he’s still here. Maybe he’s gone, following the river to the sea.

     We cross the gargoyle-less bridge. And there on the other side is my hometown.

     “Here we are,” I hear myself say as I slow the car down, but instantly I know I am incorrect. We may be in a particular place in time, but this place is no longer Zephyr.

     At least not the Zephyr I knew. The houses are still here, but many of them are tumbling down, the yards forlorn. It’s not totally a ghost town, however, because some of the houses—a small, small number, it appears—are still being lived in, and there are a few cars on the streets. But already I feel that a great gathering—a wonderful party and celebration of life—has moved on somewhere else, leaving its physical evidence behind like a garden of dead flowers.

     This is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.

     Sandy senses it. “You all right?”

     “We’ll find out,” I tell her, and I manage a feeble smile.

     “There’s hardly anybody here, is there, Dad?”

     “Hardly a soul,” I answer.

     I turn off Merchants Street before I get to the center of town. I can’t take that yet. I drive to the ball field where the Branlins made their savage attack on us that day, and I stop the car on the field’s edge.

     “Mind if we sit here for a minute, kids?” I ask.

     “No,” Sandy says, and she squeezes my hand.

     About the Branlins. Johnny supplied me with this information, being an officer of the law. It seems that the brothers were not of a single nature after all. Gotha started playing football in high school and became the man of the hour when he intercepted a Union Town High School pass right on their goal line and ran it back for a big TD. The acclaim did wonders for him, proving that all the time he only craved the attention his mother and father were too stupid or mean to give him. Gotha, Johnny told me, now lives in Birmingham and sells insurance, and he coaches a peewee football team on the side. Johnny told me Gotha needs no peroxide in his hair anymore, since he has not a strand of it left.

     Gordo, on the other hand, continued his descent. I’m sorry to say that in 1980 Gordo was shot to death by the owner of a 7-Eleven in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. Gordo died trying to steal less than three hundred dollars from the register and all the Little Debbie cakes he could carry. It seems to me that once upon a time he did have a chance, but he didn’t listen to the poison ivy.

     “I’m gonna get out for a minute and stretch my legs,” I say.

     “Want us to go with you, Dad?”

     “No,” I answer. “Not right now.”

     I get out and walk across the overgrown baseball field. I stand on the pitcher’s mound, caressed by cool breeze and warm sun. The bleachers where I first saw Nemo Curliss are sagging. I hold my arm out with my palm toward the sky, and I wait.

     What would happen if that ball Nemo Curliss flung to heaven suddenly came down into my hand after all these years?

     I wait.

     But it doesn’t happen. Nemo, the boy with a perfect arm who was trapped by all-too-imperfect circumstances, threw that ball beyond the clouds. It never came down and it never will, and only Ben, Johnny, and I remember.

     I close my palm, and return my arm to my side.

     I can see Poulter Hill from here.

     It, too, has been allowed to deteriorate. The weeds are pushing up amid the headstones, and it appears that no new flowers have been put up there for a long time. That’s a shame, I think, because there lie Zephyr’s faithful ones.

     I don’t want to walk amid those stones. I had never been back, after my train trip. I had said my good-bye to Davy Ray, and he said his to me. Anything else would be a numb-nuts thing to do.

     I turn away from Death, and walk back to the living.

     “This was my school,” I tell my wife and child as I stop the car beside the playground.

     We all get out here, and Sandy walks at my side as my shoes stir the playground’s dust. Our “young’un” begins to run around in wider and wider circles, like a pony set free after a long period of confinement. “Be careful!” Sandy warns, because she’s seen a broken bottle. Worrying, it seems, comes with the job.

     I put my arm around Sandy, and her arm goes around my back. The elementary school is empty, some of the windows shattered. There is a crushing silence, where so many young voices whooped and hollered. I see the place near the fence where Johnny and Gotha Branlin squared off. I see the gate where I fled from Gordo on Rocket and led him to Lucifer’s judgment. I see—

     “Hey, Dad! Look what I found!”

     Our “young’un” comes trotting back. “I found it over there! Neat, huh?”

     I look into the small, offered palm, and I have to smile.

     It is a black arrowhead, smooth and almost perfectly formed. There are hardly any cuts on it at all. It was obviously fashioned by someone who was proud of his labors. A chief, most likely.

     “Can I keep it, Dad?” my daughter asks.

     Her name is Skye. She turned twelve in January, and she’s going through what Sandy calls the “tomboy stage.” Skye would rather put on a baseball cap backward and run grinning through the dust than play with dolls and dream about the New Kids on the Block. These things will come later, I’m sure. For right now, Skye is fine.

     “I believe you ought to,” I tell her, and she eagerly pushes that arrowhead down into the pocket of her jeans like a secret treasure.

     You see, it’s a girl’s life, too.

     And now we drive along Merchants Street, into the center of the stilled heart.

     Everything is closed. Mr. Dollar’s barbershop, the Piggly-Wiggly, the Bright Star Cafe, the hardware store, the Lyric, everything. The windows of the Woolworth’s are soaped over. The growth of retail outlets, apartments, and a shopping mall with four theaters in Union Town consumed the spirit of Zephyr, as Big Paul’s Pantry finished off the milkman’s route. This is a going-forward, but is it progress?

     We drive past the courthouse. Silence. Past the public swimming pool and the shell of the Spinnin’ Wheel. Silence, silence. We drive past the house of Miss Blue Glass, and the silence where there used to be music is heavy indeed.

     Miss Blue Glass. I wish I can say I know what happened to her, but I don’t. She would be in her eighties now, if she is still alive. I just don’t know. The same is true with so many others, who drifted away from Zephyr in the waning years: Mr. Dollar, Sheriff Marchette, Jazzman Jackson, Mr. and Mrs. Damaronde, Nila Castile and Gavin, Mrs. Velvadine, Mayor Swope. I think they are all alive, in other towns. I think they have kept part of Zephyr with them, and wherever they go they leave Zephyr’s seeds in the earth. As I do.