Boy's Life

by Robert R. McCammon

  “My dad’s gonna take me with him this year,” Davy Ray said. “He promised. So you’ll be laughin’ through your teeth when we bring Snowdown back from the woods.”

  I doubted that if Davy Ray and his father saw Snowdown, either one of them would pull a trigger. Davy had a boy-sized rifle that he sometimes fired at squirrels, but he never could hit anything with it.

  Ben chewed on a weed and offered his throat to an ice house breeze. “One thing I sure would like to know,” he said. “Who’s that dead guy down at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake?”

  I pulled my knees into my chest and watched two ravens circling overhead.

  “Ain’t it weird?” Ben asked me. “That your dad saw the guy go under, and now the guy’s down there in his car gettin’ all mossy and eat up by turtles?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You think about it, don’t you? I mean, you were there.”

  “Yeah. I think about it some.” I didn’t tell him that hardly a day went by when I didn’t think of the car speeding in front of the milk truck, or my dad jumping into the water, or the figure I’d seen standing in the woods, or the man with the green-feathered hat and a knife in his hand.

  “It’s spooky, for sure,” Davy Ray said. “How come nobody knew the guy? How come nobody ever missed him?”

  “Because he must not have been from here,” Johnny commented.

  “Sheriff thought of that,” I said. “He called around other places.”

  “Yeah,” Ben went on, “but he didn’t call everywhere, did he? He didn’t call California or Alaska, did he?”

  “What would a guy from California or Alaska be doin’ in Zephyr, dope?” Davy Ray challenged him.

  “He could’ve been! You don’t know everythin’, Mr. Smart!”

  “I know a big dope when I see one!”

  Ben was about to fire a reply back, but Johnny said, “Maybe he was a spy,” and that halted Ben’s tongue.

  “A spy?” I asked. “There’s nothin’ around here to spy on!”

  “Yes there is. Robbins Air Force Base.” Johnny systematically began to crack his knuckles. “Maybe he was a Russian spy. Maybe he was watchin’ the planes drop bombs, or maybe there’s somethin’ goin’ on over there that nobody’s supposed to know about.”

  We were silent. A Russian spy killed in Zephyr. The thought gave all of us delicious creeps.

  “So who killed him, then?” Davy Ray asked. “Another spy?”

  “Maybe.” Johnny contemplated this for a moment, his head slightly cocked to one side. The lid of his left eye had begun to tic a bit, another result of his injury. “Or maybe,” he said, “the guy at the bottom of the lake is an American spy, and the Russian spy killed him because the dead guy found out about him.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Ben laughed. “So somebody around here might be a Russian spy?”

  “Maybe,” Johnny said, and Ben stopped laughing. Johnny looked at me. “Your dad said the guy was stripped naked, right?” I nodded. “Know why that might be?” I shook my head. “Because,” Johnny said, “whoever killed him was smart enough to take the dead guy’s clothes off so nothin’ would float up to the top. And whoever killed him had to be from around here, because he knew how deep the lake is. And the dead guy knew a secret, too.”

  “A secret?” Davy Ray was all ears now. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what,” Johnny answered. “Just a secret.” His dark Indian eyes returned to me. “Didn’t your dad say the guy was all beat up, like somebody had really worked him over? How come whoever killed him beat him up so bad first?”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “’Cause the killer was tryin’ to make him talk, that’s why. Like in the movies when the bad guy’s got the good guy tied to a chair and he wants to know the secret code.”

  “What secret code?” Davy Ray asked.

  “That’s just for instance,” Johnny explained. “But it seems to me like if a guy was gonna kill somebody, he wouldn’t beat him up for no reason.”

  “Yeah, but maybe the dead guy was just plain beat to death,” Ben said.

  “No,” I told him. “There was a wire around the guy’s neck, chokin’ him. If he’d been beat to death, why would he get choked, too?”

  “Man!” Ben plucked up a weed and chewed on it. Overhead, the two ravens cawed and flapped. “A killer right here in Zephyr! Maybe even a Russian spy!” He stopped chewing all of a sudden. “Hey,” he said, and he blinked as a new thought jabbed his mind like a lightning bolt. “What’s to keep him from killin’ again?”

  I decided it was time. I cleared my throat, and I began to tell my friends about the figure I’d seen, the green feather, and the man in the green-feathered hat. “I didn’t see his face,” I said. “But I saw that hat and the feather, and I saw him pull a knife out of his coat. I thought he was gonna sneak up behind my dad and stab him. Maybe he tried to, but he figured he couldn’t get away with it. Maybe he’s steamed ’cause my dad saw the car go down and told Sheriff Amory about it. Maybe he saw me lookin’ at him, too. But I didn’t see his face. Not a bit of it.”

  When I’d finished, they didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then Ben spoke up: “How come you didn’t tell us this before? Didn’t you want us to know?”

  “I was gonna tell you, but after what happened with Old Moses—”

  “Don’t start that bull again!” Davy Ray warned.

  “I don’t know who the man in the green-feathered hat is,” I said. “He could be anybody. Even…somebody we all know real well, somebody you wouldn’t think could do such a thing. Dad says you never know people through and through, and that everybody’s got a part they don’t show. So it could be anybody at all.”

  My friends, excited by this new information, flung themselves eagerly into the roles of detectives. They would agree to be on the lookout for a man in a green-feathered hat, but we also agreed to keep this knowledge to ourselves and not spread it to our parents, in case one of them happened to tell the killer without knowing it. I felt better for having relieved myself of this burden, yet I was still troubled. Who was the man Mr. Dollar said Donny Blaylock had killed? And what was the meaning of the piano music in the dream the Lady had told my mom about? Dad still refused to visit the Lady, and I still sometimes heard him cry out in his sleep. So I knew that even though that ugly dawn was long behind us, the memory of the event—and of what he’d seen handcuffed to the wheel—haunted him. If Dad went out walking at Saxon’s Lake, he didn’t tell me, but I suspected this might be true because of the crusty red dirt he left scraped on the porch steps on more than one afternoon.

  August came upon us, riding a wave of sultry heat. One morning I awakened to the realization that in a few days I would be spending a week with Granddaddy Jaybird, and I immediately pulled the sheet over my head.

  But there was no turning back the clock. The monsters on my walls could not help me. Every summer, I spent a week with Granddaddy Jaybird and Grandmomma Sarah whether I wanted to or not. Granddaddy Jaybird demanded it, and whereas I spent several weekends throughout the year with Grand Austin and Nana Alice, the visit with Granddaddy Jaybird was one lump sum of frenetic bizarrity.

  This year, though, I was determined to strike a bargain with my folks. If I had to go to that farmhouse where Granddaddy Jaybird jerked the covers off me at five in the morning and had me mowing grass at six, could I at least go on an overnight camping trip with Davy Ray, Ben, and Johnny? Dad said he’d think about it, and that was about the best I could hope for. So it happened that I said good-bye to Rebel for a week, Dad and Mom drove me out from Zephyr into the country, my suitcase in the back of the truck, and Dad turned off onto the bumpy dirt road that led across a corn field to my grandparents’ house.

  Grandmomma Sarah was a sweet woman, of that there was no doubt. I imagine the Jaybird had been a rounder in his youth, full of vim and vigor and earthy charm. Every year, however, his bolts had gotten a little looser. Dad would say it right out: Jaybird was
out of his mind. Mom said he was “eccentric.” I say he was a dumb, mean man who thought the world revolved around him, but I have to say this as well: if it wasn’t for the Jaybird, I would never have written my first story.

  I never saw Granddaddy Jaybird perform an act of kindness. I never heard him praise his wife or his son. I never felt, when I was around him, that I was anything but a—thankfully temporary—possession. His moods were as fleeting as the faces of the moon. But he was a born storyteller, and when he focused his mind on tales of haunted houses, demon-possessed scarecrows, Indian burial grounds, and phantom dogs, you had no choice but to willingly follow wherever he led.

  The macabre, it may be said, was his territory. He was grave smart and life stupid, as he’d never gotten past the fourth grade. Sometimes I wondered how my dad had turned out as he had, having lived seventeen years in the Jaybird’s strange shadow. As I’ve said, though, my grandfather didn’t really start going crazy until after I was born, and I guess there were sensible genes on my grandmother’s side of the family. I never knew what might happen during that week of suffering, but I knew it would be an experience.

  The house was comfortable, but really nothing special. The land around it was, except for the stunted corn field, a garden and a small plot of grass, mostly forest; it was where the Jaybird stalked his prey. Grandmomma Sarah was genuinely glad to see us when we arrived, and she ushered us all into the front room, where electric fans stirred the heat. Then the Jaybird made his appearance, clad in overalls, and he carried with him a big glass jar full of golden liquid that he announced to be honeysuckle tea. “Been brewin’ it for two weeks,” he said. “Lettin’ it mellow, ya see.” He had mason jars all ready for us. “Have a sip!”

  I have to say it was very good. Everybody but the Jaybird had a second glass of it. Maybe he knew how potent the stuff was. Within twelve hours, I would be sitting on the pot feeling as if my insides were flooding out, and at home Dad and Mom would be just as bad off. Grandmomma Sarah, who was surely used to such concoctions by now, would sleep like a log through the whole disgusting episode, except in the dead of night she was liable to make a high, banshee keening noise in her sleep that was guaranteed to lift the hair right off your scalp.

  Anyway, the time came when Dad and Mom had to be getting back to Zephyr. I felt my face sag, and I must’ve looked like a wounded puppy because Mom put her arm around me on the porch and said, “You’ll be all right. Call me tonight, okay?”

  “I will,” I vowed, and I watched them as they drove away. The dust settled over the brown cornstalks. Just one week, I thought. One week wouldn’t be so bad.

  “Hey, Cory!” the Jaybird said from his rocking chair. He was grinning, which was a bad sign. “Got a joke for ya! Three strings walk into a bar. First string says, ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender looks at him, says, ‘We don’t serve strings in here, so get out!’ Second string tries his luck. ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender says, ‘Told you we don’t serve strings in here, so you hit the trail!’ Then the third string’s just as thirsty as the devil, so he’s got to try, too. ‘Gimme a drink!’ he says. Bartender looks at him squinty-eyed, says, ‘You’re a danged-gone string, too, ain’t ya?’ And the string, he puffs out his chest and says, ‘’Fraid not!’” The Jaybird hooted with laughter, while I just stood there staring at him. “Get it, boy? Get it? ‘’Fraid not’?” He frowned, the joke over. “Hell!” he growled. “You got a sense of humor as bad as your daddy’s!”

  One week. Oh, Lord.

  There were two subjects the Jaybird could talk about for hours on end: his survival through the Depression, when he held such jobs as coffin polisher, railroad brakeman, and carnival roustabout, and his success as a young man with women, which according to him was enough to turn Valentino green. I would have thought that was a big deal if I’d known who Valentino was. Anytime the Jaybird and I were away from the reach of my grandmother’s ear, he might launch into a tale about “Edith the preacher’s daughter from Tupelo” or “Nancy the conductor’s niece from Nashville” or “that buck-toothed girl used to hang around eatin’ candy apples.” He rambled on about his “jimbob” and how the girls got all fired up about it. Said there used to be jealous boyfriends and husbands after him by the dozens, but he always escaped whatever trap was closing around him. Once, he said, he’d hung on to the bottom of a railroad trestle above a hundred-foot gorge while two men with shotguns stood right above him, talking about how they were going to skin him alive and nail his hide to a tree. “Thing was,” the Jaybird said to me as he chewed lustily on a weed, “I spoiled them girls for every other fella. Yeah, me and my jimbob, we had us a time.” Then, inevitably, his eyes would take on a sad cast, and the young man with the flaming jimbob would start slipping away. “I bet you I wouldn’t know one of them girls today if I passed her on the street. No sir. They’d be old women, and I wouldn’t know a one of them.”

  Granddaddy Jaybird despised sleep. Maybe it had something to do with his knowing that his days on this earth were numbered. Come five o’clock, rain or shine, he’d rip the covers off me like a whirlwind passing through and his voice would roar in my ear: “Get up, boy! Think you’re gonna live forever?”

  I would invariably mumble, “No, sir,” and sit up, and the Jaybird would go on to rouse my grandmother into cooking a breakfast that might have served Sgt. Rock and most of Easy Company.

  The days I spent with my grandparents followed no pattern once breakfast was down the hatch. I could just as well be handed a garden hoe and told to get to work as I could be informed that I might enjoy a trip to the pond in the woods behind the house. Granddaddy Jaybird kept a few dozen chickens, three goats—all of whom closely resembled him—and for some strange reason he kept a snapping turtle named Wisdom in a big metal tub full of slimy water in the backyard. When one of those goats stuck his nose into Wisdom’s territory, and Wisdom took hold, there was hell to pay. Things were commonly in an uproar at the Jaybird’s place: “All snakes and dingleberries” was his phrase to describe a chaotic moment, as when Wisdom bit a thirsty goat and the goat in turn careened into the clean laundry my grandmother was hanging on the line, ending up running around festooned in sheets and dragging them through the garden I’d just been hoeing. The Jaybird was proud of his collection of the skeletons of small animals which he’d painstakingly wired together. You never knew where those skeletons might appear; the Jaybird had a nasty knack for putting them in places you might reach into before looking, like beneath a pillow or in your shoe. Then he’d laugh like a demon when he heard you squall. His sense of humor was, to say it kindly, warped. On Wednesday afternoon he told me he’d found a nest of rattlesnakes near the house last week and killed them all with a shovel. As I was about to drift off to sleep that night, already dreading five o’clock, he opened my door and peered into the dark and said in a quiet, ominous voice, “Cory? Be careful if you get up to pee tonight. Your grandmomma found a fresh-shed snakeskin under your bed this mornin’. Good-sized rattle on it, too. ’Night, now.”

  He’d closed the door. I was still awake at five.

  What I realized, long after the fact, was that Granddaddy Jaybird was honing me like one might sharpen a blade on a grinding edge. I don’t think he knew he was doing this, but that’s how it came out. Take the snake story. As I lay awake in the dark, my bladder steadily expanding within me, my imagination was at work. I could see that rattler, coiled somewhere in the room, waiting for the squeak of a bare foot pressing on a board. I could see the colors of the forest in its scaly hide, its terrible flat head resting on a ledge of air, its fangs slightly adrip. I could see the muscles ripple slowly along its sides as it tasted my scent. I could see it grin in the dark, same to say, “You’re mine, bub.”

  If there could be a school for the imagination, the Jaybird would be its headmaster. The lesson I learned that night, in what you can make yourself describe in your mind as true, I couldn’t have bought at the finest college. There was also the subsidiary lesson of gritting your
teeth and bearing pain, hour upon hour, and damning yourself for drinking an extra glass of milk at supper.

  You see, the Jaybird was teaching me well, though he didn’t have a clue.

  There were other lessons, all of them valuable. And tests, too. On Friday afternoon Grandmomma Sarah asked him to drive into town to pick up a box of ice cream salt at the grocery store. Normally the Jaybird didn’t like to run errands, but today he was agreeable. He asked me to go with him, and Grandmomma Sarah said the sooner we got back the sooner the ice cream would be made.

  It was a day right for ice cream. Ninety degrees in the shade, and so hot in the full sun that if a dog went running, its shadow dropped down to rest. We got the ice cream salt, but on the way back, in the Jaybird’s bulky old Ford, another test began.

  “Jerome Claypool lives just down the road,” he said. “He’s a good ole fella. Want to drop by and say howdy?”

  “We’d better get the ice cream salt to—”