Boy's Life

by Robert R. McCammon

  “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 un
til 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.

  The movie meandered to its conclusion like a jungle river to the sea. Tarzan defeated the evil elephant poachers, returned the Star of Solomon to its tribe, and swung into the sunset. The Three Stooges short subject came on, in which Moe wrenched out Larry’s hair by the handfuls and Curly sat in a bathtub full of lobsters. We all had a grand old time.

  And then, without fanfare, the second feature began.

  It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The title came up on the screen: Invaders from Mars. The movie looked old, like it had been made in the fifties. “I’m goin’ for popcorn,” Ben announced. “Anybody want anythin’?” We said no, and he negotiated the raucous aisle alone.

  The credits ended, and the story started.

  Ben returned with his bucket of buttered popcorn in time to see what the young hero saw through his telescope, aimed at the stormy night sky: a flying saucer, descending into a sand hill behind his house. Usually the Saturday-afternoon crowd hollered and laughed at the screen when there was no fighting going on, but this time the stark sight of that ominous saucer coming down silenced the house.

  I believe that for the next hour and a half the concession stand did no business, though there were kids leaving their seats and running for a view of daylight. The boy in the movie couldn’t make anybody believe he’d seen a flying saucer come down, and he watched through his telescope as a policeman was sucked down into a vortex of sand as if by a grotesque, otherworldly vacuum cleaner. Then the policeman came to visit the house and assure the boy that no, of course no flying saucer had landed. Nobody else had seen this flying saucer land, had they? But the policeman acted…funny. Like he was a robot, his eyes dead in a pasty face. The boy had noticed a weird X-shaped wound on the back of the policeman’s neck. The policeman, a jolly gent before his walk to the sand hill, did not smile. He was changed.

  The X-shaped wound began to show up on the backs of other necks. No one believed the boy, who tried to make his parents understand there was a nest of Martians in the earth behind his house. Then his parents went out to see for themselves.

  Ben had forgotten about the bucket of popcorn in his lap. Johnny sat with his knees pulled up to his chest. I couldn’t seem to draw a breath.

  Oh, you are such a silly boy, the grim, unsmiling parents told him when they returned from their walk. There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Everything is fine. Come with us, let us go up to where you say you saw this saucer descend. Let us show you what a silly, silly boy you are.

  “Don’t go,” Ben whispered. “Don’t go don’t go!” I heard his fingernails scrape against the armrests.

  The boy ran. Away from home, away from the unsmiling strangers. Everywhere he looked, he saw the X-shaped wound. The chief of police had one on the back of his neck. People the boy had always known were suddenly changed, and they wanted to hold him until his parents could come pick him up. Silly, silly boy, they said. Martians in the ground, about to take over the world. Who would ever believe a story like that?

  At the end of this horror, the army got down in a honeycomb of tunnels the Martians had burrowed in the ground. The Martians had a machine down there that cut into the back of your neck and turned you into one of them. The leader of the Martians, a head with tentacles in a glass bowl, looked like something that had backed up out of a septic tank. The boy and the army fought against the Martians, who shambled through the tunnels as if fighting the weight of gravity. At the collision of Martian machines and army tanks, with the earth hanging in the balance…

  …the boy awakened.

  A dream, his father said. His mother smiled at him. A dream. Nothing to fear. Go to sleep, we’ll see you in the morning.

  Just a bad, bad dream.

  And then the boy got up in the dark, peered through his telescope, and saw a flying saucer descending from the stormy night sky into a sand hill behind his house.

  The End?

  The lights came up. Saturday afternoon at the movies was over.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I heard Mr. Stellko, the Lyric’s manager, say to one of the ushers as we filed out. “Why’re they so d
arned quiet?”

  Sheer terror has no voice.

  Somehow we managed to get on our bikes and start pedaling. Some kids walked home, some waited for their parents to pick them up. All of us were linked by what we had just witnessed, and when Ben, Johnny, and I stopped at the gas station on Ridgeton Street to get air put in Johnny’s front tire, I caught Ben staring at the back of Mr. White’s neck, where the sunburned skin folded up.

  We parted ways at the corner of Bonner and Hilltop streets. Johnny flew for home, Ben cranked his bike with his stumpy legs, and I fought the rusted chain every foot of the distance. My bike had seen its best days. It was ancient when it came to me, by way of a flea market. I kept asking for a new one, but my father said I would have to do with what I had or do without. Money was tight some months; going to the movies on Saturday was a luxury. I found out, sometime later, that Saturday afternoon was the only time the springs in my parents’ bedroom could sing a symphony without me wondering what was going on.

  “You have fun?” my mother asked when I came in from playing with Rebel.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. “The Tarzan movie was neat.”

  “Double feature, wasn’t it?” Dad inquired, sitting on the sofa with his feet up. The television was tuned to an exhibition baseball game; it was getting to be that time of year.

  “Yes sir.” I walked on past them, en route to the kitchen and an apple.

  “Well, what was the other movie about?”

  “Oh…nothin’,” I answered.

  Parents can smell a mouse quicker than a starving cat. They let me get my apple, wash it under the faucet, polish it, and then bring it back into the front room. They let me sink my teeth into it, and then my dad looked up from the Zenith and said, “What’s the matter with you?”