Boy's Life (61 page)

     But the Moon Man kept going with a deliberate stride, his head held high. He was going right to where Biggun Blaylock crouched by the Cadillac holding a loaded double-barreled shotgun.

     “Cease this violence!” the Moon Man intoned in a soft, almost childlike voice. I had never heard him speak before. “Cease this violence, for the sake of all that’s good!” His long legs stepped over Wade without hesitation.

     “Keep away from me, you nutty nigger!” Biggun warned. But the Moon Man would not be halted. Dad shouted, “Come back!” and started to get up, but Sheriff Amory’s hand closed on his forearm.

     “I’ll blow you to voodoo blazes!” Biggun said, indicating that he indeed knew the reputations of the Moon Man and the Lady. Biggun’s eyes had taken on the wet glint of fear. “Stay away from me! Stay away, I said!”

     The Moon Man stopped in front of Biggun. The Moon Man smiled, his eyes crinkling up, and he held out his long, slim arms. “Let us search for light,” he said.

     Biggun aimed the shotgun at the Moon Man at point-blank range. He sneered, “Well, light one for me!” and his thick finger wrenched both triggers at once.

     I flinched, my eardrums already cracking from the blast.

     But there was no blast.

     “Stand up and walk like a man,” the Moon Man said, still smiling. “It’s not too late.”

     Biggun gagged and gasped at the same time. He wrenched the triggers again. Still, no blast. Biggun snapped the shotgun open, and what was jammed into the chambers came spilling out over his hands.

     They were little green garden snakes. Dozens of them, all tangled together. Perfectly harmless, but they did some damage to Biggun Blaylock, and that’s no lie.

     “
Gaaaaakkkk!
” he choked. He knocked the snakes out of the chambers, reached into his ammo bag, and his hand came out full of rippling green bodies. Biggun made a noise like Lou Costello coming face-to-face with Lon Chaney Junior’s werewolf—“
Wo wo wo wo wo!
”—and suddenly that monstrous bulk was up on its feet and showed that he might not walk like a man but he sure could run like a rabbit. Of course, in such cases the reality of physics must eventually intrude and Biggun’s weight crashed him to the concrete before he got very far. He struggled and thrashed like a turtle turned on its shell.

     Tires shrieked. A pickup truck loaded with men roared into the gas station. I recognized among them Mr. Wilson and Mr. Callan. Most of the men held baseball bats, axes, or guns. Close behind them came a car, followed by another car. Then a second pickup truck skidded to a stop. The men of Zephyr—and many of the Bruton men, too—leaped out ready to bust some heads. “I’ll be,” Sheriff Amory said, and he stood up.

     They were sorely disappointed, to say the least, that it was all over. I later learned the noise of the shootout had thawed their guts and brought them out to defend their sheriff and their town. They had all thought, I suppose, that someone else would shoulder the responsibility, that they could stay home and be safe. A lot of wives had done a lot of crying. But they had come. Not all of the Zephyr and Bruton men, by far, but more than enough to take care of business. I imagine that seeing the crowd of wild men with butcher knives, Louisville Sluggers, hatchets, pistols, and meat cleavers, the Blaylocks thanked their lucky stars they weren’t going to jail in snuffboxes.

     In all the confusion, I came out from hiding. Mr. Owen Cathcoate was standing over Wade, lecturing him about the straight and narrow path. Wade was listening with only half an ear. My dad was with the Moon Man, over by the Blaylocks’ Caddy. I walked to him, and he looked at me and wanted to ask what I was doing there, but he didn’t because the answer to that would lead to a whipping. So he didn’t ask, he just nodded.

     Dad and I stood together, staring down at Biggun’s shotgun and the ammo bag. Green garden snakes wriggled around each other like a big mass of seaweed, overflowing from the bag.

     The Moon Man just grinned. “My wife,” he said. “She one craaaaazy old lady.”

8
From the Lost World

THE BLAYLOCKS, IT MAY BE SAFE TO SAY, WENT DIRECTLY TO jail. They did not have a Get Out of Jail Free card, they did not collect two hundred dollars, and their mean monopoly was smashed. I understood that they were as tight-lipped as clams at first, but then the family ties began unraveling as the state investigators drilled them. Wade learned that Donny had stolen a large chunk of his moonshine profits, Bodean found that Wade was skimming the gambling den’s money, and Donny suspected that Wade had put some arsenic in his bottle of moonshine and that’s why he thought he’d seen a ghost. As the Blaylock brothers began spilling their guts, Biggun decided to take the high road. He fell on his knees at the arraignment and professed, sobbing to shame Shakespeare, that he was Born Again and had been duped into following the paths of Satan by his own misguided sons. They must take after their mothers, he said. He vowed to devote his life to being a minister, if, by the grace of the Lord above, the judge would offer him the cup of mercy.

     He was told he would have a very long time in which to practice his preaching, and a nice secure place to catch up on his Bible reading.

     When they dragged him out of court, kicking and screaming, he damned everybody in sight, even the stenographer. They said he threw so many curses that if those bad words had been bricks, they’d have made a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage. The brothers went before judges as well, to similar results. I didn’t have any sympathy for them. If I knew the Blaylocks, they’d soon be running the prison store and making a killing off every cigarette and square of toilet paper.

     One thing, though, the Blaylocks refused to divulge: what was in the wooden box they’d sold to Gerald Hargison and Dick Moultry. It couldn’t be proven that any box even existed. But I knew better.

     The Amorys left town. Mr. Marchette gave up being fire chief and stepped into the role of sheriff. I understand Sheriff Marchette told Mr. Owen Cathcoate anytime he wanted to wear a deputy’s badge it would be fine with him. But Mr. Cathcoate informed the sheriff that the Candystick Kid had gone to roam the frontiers of the Wild West, where he belonged, and from here on out he was just plain old Owen.

     Mom was in a zombie state for a while, as visions of what might have been careened through her mind, but she came out of it. I believe that deep in her heart she might have wanted Dad to stay safe at home but she respected him more for making up his own mind about what was right. When my lie became obvious, Dad debated not letting me go to the Brandywine Carnival when it came to town but he wound up making me wash and dry the dinner dishes for a week straight. I didn’t argue. I had to pay the piper somehow.

     Then the posters began appearing around town. BRANDYWINE CARNIVAL IS ON ITS WAY! Johnny was looking forward to seeing the Indian ponies and trick riders. Ben was excited about the midway, and the rides lit up with pulsing multicolored bulbs. I looked forward to the haunted house, which you rode through on rickety railcars while unseen things brushed your face and howled at you in the dark. Davy Ray’s excitement concerned the freak show. I never saw anybody who got so worked up about freaks as he did. They gave me the creeps and I could hardly look at them, but Davy Ray was a true connoisseur of freakdom. If it had three arms, a pinhead, crocodile-scaled skin, or sweated blood, he went into giddy fits of delight.

     So it happened that on Thursday night the park area near the baseball field where we’d had our Fourth of July barbecue was empty when the last Zephyr light went off. On Friday morning, kids on their way to school witnessed the transformation a few hours could bring. The Brandywine Carnival appeared like an island in a sea of sawdust. Trucks were chugging around, men were hoisting up tents, the frameworks of rides were being pieced together like dinosaur bones, and the booths were going up where food would be sold and Kewpie dolls not worth a quarter would be won for two dollars’ worth of horseshoes.

     Before school, my buddies and I took a spin around the park on our bikes. Other kids were doing the same thing, circling like moths in expectation of a light bulb. “There’s the haunted house!” I said, pointing toward the bat wings of a gothic mansion being hinged together. Ben said, “Gonna be a Ferris wheel this year, looks like!” Johnny’s gaze was on a trailer with horses and Indians painted on its side. Davy Ray hollered, “Looka there! Hoo
boy!
” We saw what he was so excited about: a big, garishly painted canvas with a wrinkled face at its center and in the center of the wrinkled face a single horrible eyeball. FREAKS OF NATURE! the words on the canvas said. IT COULD’VE BEEN YOU!

     In truth, it was not a large carnival. It was short of medium-sized, too. Its tents were patched, its trailers rust-streaked, its trucks and workers equally tired. It was the end of the carnival season for them, and our area was almost its last stop. But we never thought that we were getting the leftover crop of caramel apples, that the Indian ponies and trick riders went through their routines with an eye on the clock, that the rides clattered in need of oiling and the barkers were surly not to add flavor but because they were damned bushed. We just saw a carnival out there, aglow and beckoning. That’s what we saw.

     “Looks like a good one this year!” Ben said as we started to turn back for school.

     “Yeah, it sure—”

     And then a horn blasted behind me and Rocket zoomed out of the way as a Mack truck passed us. It turned onto the sawdust, its heavy tires crunching down. The truck was a hodgepodge of different-colored parts, and it was hauling a wide trailer with no windows. We could hear the suspension groan. On the trailer’s sides, an amateurish hand had painted crude green jungle fronds and foliage. Across the jungle scene was scrawled, in thick red letters that had been allowed to drip like rivulets of blood: FROM THE LOST WORLD.

     It rumbled away, toward the maze of other trucks and trailers. But in its wake I caught a smell. Not just exhaust, though of that there was plenty. Something else. Something… lizardy.

     “Whew!” Davy Ray wrinkled his nose. “Ben let one!”

     “I did not!”

     “Silent but deadly!” Davy Ray whooped.

     “You did it yourself, then! Not me!”

     “I smell it,” Johnny said calmly. Davy Ray and Ben shut up. We had learned to listen when Johnny spoke. “Came from that trailer,” he said.

     We watched the Mack truck and trailer turn between two tents and go out of sight. I looked at the ground, and saw the tires had smushed right through the sawdust and left brown grooves in the earth. “Wonder what’s in it?” Davy Ray asked on the scent of a freak. I told him I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was mighty heavy.

     On the ride to school, we formulated our plans. Parents permitting, we would meet at my house at six-thirty and go to the carnival together like the Four Musketeers. Does that suit everybody? I asked.

     “Can’t,” Ben answered, pedaling beside me. He spoke the word like a grim bell tolling.

     “Why not? We always go at six-thirty! That’s when all the rides are goin’!”

     “Can’t,” Ben repeated.

     “Hey, you got a parrot stuck in your throat?” Davy Ray asked. “What’s wrong with you?”

     Ben sighed, blowing a wisp of steam in the morning’s sunny chill. He had on a woolen cap, his round cheeks flushed with crimson. “Just… can’t. Not until seven o’clock.”

     “We
always
go at six-thirty!” Davy Ray insisted. “It’s… it’s…” He looked at me for help.

     “Tradition,” I said.

     “Yeah! That’s what it is!”

     “I think there’s somethin’ Ben doesn’t want to tell us,” Johnny said, swerving his bike up on the other side of Davy Ray. “Spit it out, Ben.”

     “It’s just… I can’t…” He frowned, and with another plume of steam decided to give up the game. “At six o’clock I’ve got a
piana
lesson.”

     “
What?
” Davy Ray had fairly yelled it. Rocket wobbled. Johnny looked as if he’d taken a Cassius Clay roundhouse punch to the noggin.