Boy's Life

by Robert R. McCammon

  My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn’t show, I would have to live with.

  One Saturday my folks and I went to the public swimming pool, which was crowded with high-school kids. I have to tell you that it was for whites only. Mom jumped eagerly into the choppy blue water, but Dad took a seat and refused to leave it even when we both begged him to come in. I didn’t think until later that the last time Dad had been swimming, he’d seen a dead man sink into Saxon’s Lake. So I sat with him for a while as Mom swam around, and I had the opportunity to tell him for the third or fourth time about Nemo Curliss’s throwing ability. This time, though, I had his undivided attention, because there was no television or radio nearby and he wanted to focus on something beside the water, which he seemed not to want to look at. He told me I ought to tell Coach Murdock about Nemo, that maybe Coach Murdock could talk Nemo’s mother into letting him play Little League. I filed that suggestion away for later.

  Davy Ray Callan, his six-year-old brother, Andy, and their mom and dad showed up at the pool in the afternoon. Most of the bruises had vanished from Davy’s face. The Callans sat with my folks, and their talk turned to what ought to be done about the Branlin boys, that we weren’t the only ones who’d been beaten up by that brood. Davy and I didn’t especially want to relive our defeat, so we asked our folks for money to go get a milk shake at the Spinnin’ Wheel and, armed with dollar bills, we headed off in our flipflops and sunburns while Andy squalled and had to be restrained from tagging after us by Mrs. Callan.

  The Spinnin’ Wheel was just across the street from the pool. It was a white-painted stucco building with white stucco icicles hanging from the roof’s edge. A statue of a polar bear stood in front of it, adorned with such spray-painted messages as “Nobody Else Will Beat Our Score, We’re The Seniors ’64” and “Louie, Louie!” and “Debbie Loves Goober” among other declarations of independence. Davy and I guessed Mr. Sumpter Womack, who owned and managed the Spinnin’ Wheel, thought that “Goober” was some guy’s name. Nobody told him differently. The Spinnin’ Wheel was what might be called a teen hangout. The lure of hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, and thirty different flavors of milk shakes—from root beer to peach—kept the parking lot full of high school guys and girls in their daddy’s cars or pickups. This particular Saturday was no exception. The cars and trucks were packed in tight, their windows open and the radio music drifting out over the lot like sultry smoke. I recalled that I had once seen Little Stevie Cauley, in Midnight Mona, parked here with a blond girl who leaned her head against his shoulder, and Little Stevie had glanced at me, his hair coal black and his eyes as blue as swimming-pool water, as I’d walked past. I had not seen the girl’s face. I wondered if that girl, whoever she had been, knew that Little Stevie and Midnight Mona now haunted the road between Zephyr and Union Town.

  Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!”

  I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened.

  We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks.

  I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back.

  “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?”

  …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo…

  “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know.

  “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.”

  …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip…

  “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy.

  “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—”

  Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street.

  “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished.

  “What?”

  “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.”

  “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…”

  What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?

  “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied.

  It would have to do.

  …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd…

  I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

  The song faded. The voices went back into the speakers. Then I was just Cory Mackenson again, a son of Zephyr, but I had felt the warmth of a different sun.

  “I think I’m gonna ask my folks if I can take guitar lessons,” Davy Ray said as we crossed the street. Git-tar, he pronounced it.

  I thought that when I got home I would sit down at my desk and try to scratch out a story in Ticonderoga #2 about where music went when it got into the air. Some of it had gotten into Davy Ray, and he was humming that song as we returned to the pool and our parents.

  The Fourth of July sizzled in. There was a big barbecue picnic in the park, and the men’s team—the Quails—lost to the Union Town Fireballs by seven to three. I saw Nemo Curliss watching the game as he sat crushed between a brunette woman in a red-flowered dress and a gangly man who wore thick glasses and was sweating through his once-crisp white shirt. Nemo’s father didn’t spend much time with his son and wife. He got up after the second inning and walked off, and I later saw him prowling through the picnic crowd with a book full of shirt swatches and a desperate look on his face.

  I had not forgotten about the man in the green-feathered hat. As I sat with my folks at a picnic table in the shade, munching barbecued ribs as the elderly men threw horseshoes and the teenaged guys heaved footballs, I scanned the crowd for that elusive feather. It dawned on me, as I searched, that the hats of winter had been put away, and every hat in evidence was made of straw. Mayor Swope wore a straw fedora as he moved through the throngs, puffing his pipe and glad-handing barbecue-sauced palms. Straw hats adorned the heads of Fire Chief Marchette and Mr. Dollar. A straw boater with a bright red band was perched on the bald skull of Dr. Lezander, who came over to our table to examine the scar’s pale line on my lower lip. He had cool fingers, and his eyes peered into mine with steely intensity. “Those fellows ever cause you a
ny more trouble,” he said in his Dutch dialect, “you just let me know. I’ll introduce them to my gelding clippers. Eh?” He nudged me with an elbow and grinned, showing his silver tooth. Then his heavyset wife, Veronica, who was also Dutch and whose long-jawed face reminded me of a horse, came up with a paper plate piled high with ribs and pulled Dr. Lezander away. Mrs. Lezander was a cool sort; she didn’t have a lot to do with any of the other women, and Mom told me that she understood Mrs. Lezander’s older brother and his family had been killed fighting the Nazis in Holland. I figured something like that could hurt your trust in people. The Lezanders had escaped from Holland before the country had fallen, and Dr. Lezander himself had shot a Nazi soldier with a pistol as the man burst through the door of his house. This was a subject that fascinated me, since Davy Ray, Ben, Johnny, and I played army out in the woods, and I wanted to ask Dr. Lezander what war was really like but Dad said I was not to bring it up, that such things were best left alone.

  Vernon Thaxter made an appearance at the picnic, which caused the faces of women to bloom red and men to pretend to be examining their barbecue with fierce concentration. Most people, though, acted as if Moorwood Thaxter’s son was invisible. Vernon got a plate of barbecue and sat under a tree at the edge of the baseball field; he wasn’t totally naked on this occasion, however. He was wearing a floppy straw hat that made him look like a happily deranged Huckleberry Finn. I believe Vernon was the only man Mr. Curliss didn’t approach with his shirt sample book.

  During the afternoon I heard the Beach Boys’ song several times from transistor radios, and every time it seemed better than the last. Dad heard it and wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled sour milk and Mom said it made her ears hurt, but I thought it was great. The teenagers sure went wild over it. Then, as it was playing for about the fifth time, we heard a big commotion over where some high school guys were throwing a football not far from us. Somebody was bellowing like a mad bull, and Dad and I pushed through the gawkers to see what it was all about.

  And there he was. All six-foot-six of him, his curly red hair flying around his head and his long, narrow face pinched even tighter with righteous rage. He wore a pale blue suit with an American flag pin on his lapel and a small cross above it, and his polished black size-fourteen wingtips were stomping the devil out of a little scarlet radio. “This. Has. Got. To. Cease!” he bellowed in time with his stomps. The guys who’d been playing football just stared at the Reverend Angus Blessett in open-mouthed amazement, and the sixteen-year-old girl whose radio had just been busted to splinters was starting to cry. The Beach Boys had been silenced under the boot, or, in this case, the wingtip. “This Satan’s squallin’ has got to cease!” Reverend Blessett of the Freedom Baptist Church hollered to the assembled throng. “Day and night I hear this trash, and the Lord has moved me to strike it down!” He gave the offending radio a last stomp, and wires and batteries flew from the wreckage. Then Reverend Blessett looked at the sobbing girl, his cheeks flushed and sweat glistening on his face, and he held out his arms and approached her. “I love you!” he yelled. “The Lord loves you!”

  She turned and fled. I didn’t blame her. If I’d had a nifty radio smashed right in front of me, I wouldn’t feel like hugging anybody either.

  Reverend Blessett, who’d been embroiled last year in a campaign to ban the Lady’s Good Friday ritual at the gargoyle bridge, now turned his attention to the onlookers. “Did you see that? The poor child’s so confused she can’t recognize saint from sinner! You know why? ’Cause she was listenin’ to that wailin’, unholy trash!” He aimed a finger at the dead radio. “Have any of you bothered to listen to what’s fillin’ our children’s ears this summer? Have you?”

  “Sounds like bees swarmin’ on a donkey to me!” somebody said, and people laughed. I looked over and saw Mr. Dick Moultry’s sweat-wet bloat, the front of his shirt splotched with barbecue sauce.

  “Laugh if you want to, but before God it’s no laughin’ matter!” Reverend Blessett raged. I don’t think I ever heard him speak in a normal voice. “You give that song one listen, and the very hairs will rise up on the back of your necks just like it did on mine!”

  “Aw, come on, Reverend!” My father was smiling. “It’s just a song!”

  “Just a song?” Reverend Blessett’s shiny face was suddenly up in my dad’s, and his ash-colored eyes were wild under eyebrows so red they looked painted on. “Just a song, did you say, Tom Mackenson? What if I was to tell you this ‘just a song’ was makin’ our young people itch with immorality? What if I was to tell you it preaches illicit sexual desires, hotrod racin’ in the streets, and big-city evil? What would you say then, Mr. Tom Mackenson?”

  Dad shrugged. “I’d say that if you heard all that in one listen, you must have ears like a hound dog. I couldn’t understand a single word of it.”

  “Ah-ha! Yes! See, that’s Satan’s trick!” Reverend Blessett stabbed my father’s chest with an index finger that had barbecue sauce under the nail. “It gets into our children’s heads without them even knowin’ what they’re hearin’!”

  “Huh?” Dad asked. By this time Mom had come up beside us and was holding on to Dad’s arm. Dad had never cared much for the reverend, and maybe she was afraid he might blow his top and take a swing.

  Reverend Blessett retreated from my father and surveyed the crowd again. If there’s anything that pulls people in, it’s a loudmouth and the smell of Satan in the air like charred meat on a griddle. “You good folks come to the Freedom Baptist Church at seven o’clock on Wednesday night and you’ll hear for yourselves exactly what I’m talkin’ about!” His gaze skittered from face to face. “If you love the Lord, this town, and your children, you’ll break any radio that plays that Satan-squallin’ garbage!” To my dismay, several people with dazed eyes hollered that they would. “Praise God, brothers and sisters! Praise God!” Reverend Blessett waded through the crowd, slapping backs and shoulders and finding hands to shake!

  “He got sauce on my shirt,” Dad said, looking down at the stain.

  “Come on, fellas.” Mom pulled at him. “Let’s get under some shade.”

  I followed them, but I looked back to watch Reverend Blessett striding away. A knot of people had closed around him, all of them jabbering. Their faces seemed swollen, and a dark sweat stain the shape of a watermelon wedge had grown on the back of the reverend’s coat. I couldn’t figure this out; the same song I’d first heard that day in the Spinnin’ Wheel’s parking lot was unholy? I didn’t know very much about big-city evil, but I didn’t itch with immorality. It was just a cool song, and it made me feel…well, cool. Even after all the listenings, I still couldn’t decipher what the chorus was after the I get around part, and neither could Ben, Davy Ray, or Johnny, who still had a wrapping of bandages across his beak and couldn’t yet leave his house. I was curious; what had Reverend Blessett heard in the song that I had not?

  I decided I wanted to find out.

  That night fireworks blossomed red, white, and blue over Zephyr.

  And sometime after midnight, a cross was set afire in front of the Lady’s house.

  5

  Welcome, Lucifer

  I AWAKENED WITH the smell of burning in my nostrils.

  Birds were singing and the sun was up, but I was reminded of a terrible thing. Three years ago, a house two blocks south of us had caught fire. It had been a hot, dry summer, and the house had gone up quick as pineknot kindling in the middle of an August night. The Bellwood family had lived there: Mr. and Mrs. Bellwood, their ten-year-old daughter Emmie, and their eight-year-old son Carl. The fire, which had started from a bad electrical connection, had consumed Carl in his bed before the Bellwoods could get to him. Carl died a few days later, and was buried on Poulter Hill. His tombstone had Our Loving Son carved on it. The Bellwoods had moved away soon after, leaving their son in Zephyr earth. I remember Carl clearly, because his mother was allergic to animals and wouldn’t allow him to have a dog, so he sometimes came up to my house to play w
ith Rebel. He was a slight boy with curly, sandy-colored hair and he liked the banana Popsicles the Good Humor man sold from his truck. He told me once that he wished he could have a dog more than anything in the world. Then the fire took him away, and Dad sat down with me and said God has a plan but sometimes it’s awfully hard to decipher.

  On this particular morning, the fifth of July, Dad had gone to work and Mom was left to tell me what that burning smell was. She’d been on the phone most of the morning, wired into Zephyr’s amazingly accurate information network: the society of women who circled gossip like hawks for the meat of truth. As I ate my breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits, Mom sat with me at the table. “You know what the Ku Klux Klan is, don’t you?” she asked.

  I nodded. I had seen Klansmen on the TV news, dressed in their white robes and conical hoods and walking around a fiery cross while they cradled shotguns and rifles. Their spokesman, a gent who had pulled his hood back to expose a face like a chunk of suet, had been talking about keeping your heart in Dixie or getting your ass out and “not lettin’ no Washington politician say I gotta kiss a colored boy’s shoes.” The rage in the man’s face had swollen his cheeks and puffed his eyelids, and behind him the fire had gnawed at the cross as the white-robed figures continued their grim parade.

  “The Klan burned a cross in the Lady’s yard last night,” Mom said. “They must be warnin’ her to get out of town.”

  “The Lady? Why?”

  “Your father says some people are afraid of her. He says some people think she’s got too much say-so about what goes on in Bruton.”

  “She lives in Bruton,” I said.

  “Yes, but some people are scared she wants to have say-so about what goes on in Zephyr, too. Last summer she asked Mayor Swope to open the swimmin’ pool to the Bruton folks. This year she’s been askin’ him about it again.”