Boy's Life (59 page)

     “I don’t want any spice cake. I don’t want any apple pie, or coconut muffins, or blueberry fritters. All I want is some—” He had to stop speaking, but the rush of emotion choked him.
Peace
might have been the next word he was going to say. “I’m gonna go talk to Cory,” he told her, and he came to my room and knocked on the door.

     I let him in. I had to. He was my dad. He sat down on my bed, while I held a Blackhawk comic book close to my face. Before he’d come in, I’d been remembering something Vernon had said:
Sheriff Amory’s a good man, just not a good sheriff. He lets the birds fly when he’s got his paws on them
. I guess it could never be said that Sheriff Amory wasn’t trying to do well by his family. Dad cleared his throat. “Well, I reckon I’m lower than a snake’s pecker, is that right?”

     I would’ve laughed at that any other time. I just stared at my comic book, attempting to climb inside the world of sleek ebony airplanes and square-jawed heroes who used their wits and fists for justice.

     Maybe I betrayed myself somehow. Maybe Dad had an instant of reading my mind. He said, “The world’s not a comic book, son.” Then he touched my shoulder, and he stood up and closed the door on his way out.

     I had a bad sleep that night. If it wasn’t the four girls calling my name, it was the car going over the red rock cliff into black water, and then Midnight Mona raced through me and Biggun Blaylock’s demonic, bearded face said
I threw in an extra for good luck
and Lucifer’s shotgun-ripped head screamed from his grave and Mrs. Lezander offered me a glass of Tang and said
Sometimes he stays up until dawn listening to the foreign countries
.

      I lay staring into darkness.

     I hadn’t told Dad or Mom about Dr. Lezander’s distaste for milk or his liking to be a night owl. Surely that had nothing to do with the car in Saxon’s Lake. What earthly reason would Dr. Lezander have to kill a stranger? And Dr. Lezander was a kind man who loved animals, not a savage beast who had beaten a man half to death and then strangled the other half with a piano wire. It was unthinkable!

     Yet I was thinking it.

     Vernon had been right about Sheriff Amory. Could he be right about the milk-hating night owl, too?

     Vernon was crazy, but like the Beach Boys, he got around. Like the eye of God, he watched the comings and goings of the citizens of Zephyr, saw their grand hopes and mean schemes. He saw life laid bare. And maybe he was aware of more than he even knew.

     I decided. I was going to have to start watching Dr. Lezander. And Mrs. Lezander, too. How could he be such a monster under his civilized skin, and her not know it?

     The next day, which was cold and drizzly, I pedaled Rocket past Dr. Lezander’s after school. Of course he and his wife were both inside. Even the two horses were in the barn. I don’t know what I was looking for, I just wanted to look. There had to be more to tie the doctor to Saxon’s Lake than Vernon’s theories. That night, the silence at the dinner table couldn’t have been cleaved with a chain saw. I didn’t trust myself to meet Dad’s gaze, and Dad and Mom were avoiding looking at each other as well. So it was a merry dinner, all around.

     Then, as we were eating the pumpkin pie that we were all getting so heartily sick of, Dad said, “They let Rick Spanner go today.”

     “Rick? He’s been with Green Meadows as long as
you!
”

     “That’s right,” Dad said, and he picked at the crust with his fork. “Talkin’ to Neil Yarbrough this mornin’. He hears they’re cuttin’ back. Have to, because of that damn… that supermarket,” he corrected himself, though his curse was already flying. “Big Paul’s Pantry.” He snorted so hard I thought pumpkin pie might come through his nose. “Milk in plastic jugs. What’ll they figure out next to mess things up?”

     “Leah Spanner just had a baby in August,” Mom said. “That’s their third one. What’s Rick gonna do?”

     “I don’t know. He left as soon as they told him. Neil says he heard they gave him a month’s pay, but that won’t go very far with four mouths to feed.” He put down his fork. “Maybe we can take ’em a pie or somethin’.”

     “I’ll make a fresh one first thing in the mornin’.”

     “That’d be good.” Dad reached out, and he placed his hand over Mom’s. With all that had been going on—said and left unsaid—it was a heartening sight. “I have a feelin’ that’s just the start of it, Rebecca. Green Meadows can’t compete with those supermarket prices. We cut our rates for our regular customers last week, and then Big Paul’s Pantry undercut us two days later. I think it’s gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.” I saw his hand squeeze Mom’s, and she squeezed back. They were in it together, for the long haul.

     “One other thing.” Dad paused. His jaw clenched and relaxed. He was obviously having a hard time spitting this out, whatever it was. “I talked to Jack Marchette this afternoon. He was at the Shell station when I stopped to fill up the truck. He said—” Again, this was a thorny obstruction in his throat. “He said J.T.’s only found one more volunteer deputy other than Jack himself. You know who that is?”

     Mom waited.

     “The Moon Man.” A tight smile flickered across Dad’s face. “Can you believe that? Out of all the able-bodied men in this town, only Jack and the Moon Man are gonna stand with J.T. against the Blaylocks. I doubt if the Moon Man can even
hold
a pistol, much less use one if he had to! Well, I suppose everybody else decided to stay home and be safe, don’t you?”

     Mom pulled her hand away, and she looked somewhere else. Dad stared across the table at me, his eyes so intense I had to shift in my chair because I felt their heat and power. “Some father you’ve got, huh, partner? You go to school today and tell your friends how I helped uphold the law?”

     “No sir,” I answered.

     “You should have. Should’ve told Ben, Johnny, and Davy Ray.”

     “I don’t see their fathers linin’ up to get themselves killed by the Blaylocks!” Mom said, her voice strained and unsteady. “Where are the people who know how to use guns? Where are the hunters? Where’re the big-talkin’ men who say they’ve been in so many fights and they know how to use their fists and guns to solve every problem in this whole wide world?”

     “I don’t know where they are.” Dad scraped his chair back and stood up. “I just know where I am.” He started walking toward the front door, and Mom said with a frightened gasp of breath, “Where’re you
goin’?
”

     Dad stopped. He stood there, between us and the door, and he lifted a hand to his forehead. “Out to the porch. Just out to the porch, Rebecca. I need to sit out there and think.”

     “It’s cold and rainin’ outside!”

     “I’ll live,” he told her, and he left the house.

      But he came back, in about thirty minutes. He sat before the fireplace and warmed himself. I got to stay up a little later, since it was a Friday night. When it was time for me to go to bed, between ten-thirty and eleven, Dad was still sitting in his chair before the hearth, his hands folded together and supporting his chin. A wind had kicked up outside, and it blew rain like handfuls of grit against the windows.

     “Good night, Mom!” I said. She said good night, from her Herculean labors in the kitchen. “Good night, Dad.”

     “Cory?” he said softly.

     “Yes sir?”

     “If I had to kill a man, would that make me any different from whoever did that murder at Saxon’s Lake?”

     I thought about this for a moment. “Yes sir,” I decided. “Because you’d only kill to protect yourself.”

     “How do we know whoever did that murder wasn’t protectin’
himself
in some way, too?”

     “We don’t, I guess. But you wouldn’t get any pleasure from it, like he did.”

     “No,” he said. “I sure wouldn’t.”

     I had something else to say. I didn’t know if he wanted to hear it or not, but I had to say it. “Dad?”

     “Yes, son?”

     “I don’t think anybody gives you peace, Dad. I think you have to fight for it, whether you want to or not. Like what happened with Johnny and Gotha Branlin. Johnny wasn’t lookin’ for a fight. It was forced on him. But he won peace for all of us, Dad.” My father’s expression didn’t alter, and I wasn’t sure he understood what I was driving at. “Does that make any sense?”

     “Perfect sense,” he replied. He lifted his chin, and I saw the edge of a smile caught in the corner of his mouth. “Alabama game’s on the radio tomorrow. Ought to be a humdinger. You’d better get on to bed.”

     “Yes sir.” I started toward my room.

     “Thank you, son,” my father said.

     I awakened at seven o’clock to the clatter of the pickup truck’s cold engine starting. “Tom!” I heard my mother calling from the front porch. “Tom, don’t!” I peered out the window into the early sunlight to see Mom in her robe, running to the street. But the pickup truck was already moving away, and Mom cried out, “Don’t go!” Dad’s hand emerged from the driver’s window, and he waved. Dogs barked up and down Hilltop Street, roused from their doghouses by the commotion. I knew where Dad was going. I knew why.

     I was scared for him, but during the night he had made a momentous decision. He was going to find peace, rather than waiting for it to find him.

     That morning was an exercise in torture. Mom could hardly speak. She stumbled around in her robe, her eyes glazed with terror. Every fifteen minutes or so she called the sheriff’s office to talk to Dad, until finally around nine o’clock he must’ve told her he couldn’t talk anymore because she didn’t dial the number again.

     At nine-thirty, I got dressed. Pulled on my jeans, a shirt, and a sweater, because though the sun was bright and the sky blue the air was stinging cold. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I watched the clock tick toward ten. I thought of the Trailways bus, number thirty-three, on its way over the winding roads. Would it be early, late, or right on time? Today such a thing as seconds might mean life or death for my father, the sheriff, Chief Marchette, and the Moon Man. But I pushed thoughts like that aside, as much as I could. They came back, though, evil as poison ivy. I knew near ten-thirty that I would have to go. I would have to be there, to see my father. I could not wait for the telephone call that would say Donny was on the bus with the two marshals, or my father was lying shot by a Blaylock bullet. I would have to go. I strapped on my Timex, and I was ready.

     As eleven o’clock approached, Mom was so nervous she had both the television and the radio on and she was baking three pies at once. The Alabama game was just about to start. I didn’t care a damn for it.

     I walked into the pumpkin-and-nutmeg-fumed kitchen, and I said, “Can I go to Johnny’s, Mom?”

     “What?” She looked at me, wild-eyed. “Go where?”

     “Johnny’s. The guys are gonna meet there to…” I glanced at the radio.
Rollllll Tide!
the crowd was cheering. “To listen to the game.” It was a necessary lie.

     “No. I want you right here with me.”

     “I told ’em I’d be there.”

     “I
said
…” Her face flamed with anger. She slammed a mixing bowl down onto the counter. Utensils filmed with pumpkin slid to the floor. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she put a hand over her mouth to hold back a cry of anguish.

     Cool on the outside, hell-roasted in the guts. That was me. “I’d like to go,” I said.

     The hand could no longer hold. “Go on, then!” Mom shouted, her nerves at last unraveling to reveal the tormented center. “Go on, I don’t care!”

     I turned and ran out before the sob that welled up rooted my shoes. As I climbed onto Rocket, I heard a crash from the kitchen. The mixing bowl had met the floor. I started pedaling for Ridgeton Street, the chill biting my ears.

     Rocket was fast that day, as if it sensed impending tragedy. Still, the town lay quiet in its Saturday drowse, the cold having chased all but a few hardy kids indoors and most folks tuned to Bear’s latest triumph. I leaned forward, my chin slicing the wind. Rocket’s tires thrummed over the pavement, and when my shoes lost the pedals the wheels kept turning on their own.

     I reached the gas station just past eleven-fifteen. It had two pumps and an air hose. Inside the office part that connected to a two-stall garage, the gas station’s owner—Mr. Hiram White, an elderly man with a humped back who shambled around his wrenches and engine belts like Quasimodo amid the bells—sat at his desk, his head cocked toward a radio. At one corner of the cinderblock building a yellow tin sign with TRAILWAYS BUS SYSTEM on it hung from rusted screws. I parked Rocket around back, near the oily trash cans, and I sat on the ground in the sun to wait the coming of high noon.

     At ten minutes before twelve, my fingernails gnawed to the bone, I heard the sound of cars approaching. I edged around the corner and took a peek. The sheriff’s car pulled in, followed by Dad’s pickup truck. The Moon Man, wearing his top hat, was sitting beside Dad. Chief Marchette was in the passenger seat of the sheriff’s car, and seated behind Sheriff Amory was the criminal himself. Donny Blaylock wore a gray uniform and a smirk. Nobody got out. They sat there, both engines rumbling.