Boy's Life

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Yeah, Jerome’s a good ole fella,” the Jaybird said as he turned the Ford toward his friend’s house.

  Six miles later, he stopped in front of a ramshackle farmhouse that had a rotting sofa, a cast-off wringer, and a pile of moldering tires and rusted radiators in the front yard. I think we had crossed the line between Zephyr and Dogpatch by way of Tobacco Road somewhere a few miles back. Obviously, though, Jerome Claypool was a popular good ole fella, because there were four other cars parked in front of the place as well. “Come on, Cory,” the Jaybird said as he opened his door. “We’ll just go in a minute or two.”

  I could smell the stench of cheap cigars before we got to the porch. The Jaybird knocked on the door: rap rap rapraprap. “Who is it?” a cautious voice inquired from within. My grandfather replied, “Blood ’n Guts,” which made me stare at him, thinking he’d lost whatever mind he had left. The door opened on noisy hinges, and a long-jawed face with dark, wrinkle-edged eyes peered out. Those eyes found me. “Who’s he?”

  “My grandboy,” Jaybird said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Name’s Cory.”

  “Jesus, Jay!” the long-jawed face said with a scowl. “What’re you bringin’ a kid around here for?”

  “No harm done. He won’t say nothin’. Will you, Cory?” The hand tightened.

  I didn’t understand what was going on, but clearly this was not a place Grandmomma Sarah would have enjoyed visiting. I thought of Miss Grace’s house out beyond Saxon’s Lake, and the girl named Lainie who’d furled her wet pink tongue at me. “No sir,” I told him, and the grip relaxed again. His secret—whatever it might be—was safe.

  “Bodean won’t like this,” the man warned.

  “Jerome, Bodean can stick his head up his ass for all I care. You gonna let me in or not?”

  “You got the green?”

  “Burnin’ a hole,” the Jaybird said, and touched his pocket.

  I balked as he started pulling me over the threshold. “Grandmomma’s waitin’ for the ice cream sa—”

  He looked at me, and I saw something of his true nature deep in his eyes, like the glare of a distant blast furnace. On his face there was a desperate hunger, inflamed by whatever was going on in that house. Ice cream salt was forgotten; ice cream itself was part of another world six miles away. “Come on!” he snapped.

  I stood my ground. “I don’t think we ought to—”

  “You don’t think!” he said, and whatever was pulling him into that house seized his face and made it mean. “You just do what I tell you, hear me?”

  He gave me a hard yank and I went with him, my heart scorched. Mr. Claypool closed the door behind us and bolted it. Cigar smoke drifted in a room where no sunlight entered; the windows were all boarded up and a few measly electric lights were burning. We followed Mr. Claypool through a hallway to the rear of the house, and he opened another door. The windowless room we walked into was layered with smoke, too, and at its center was a round table where four men sat under a harsh light playing cards, poker chips in stacks before them and glasses of amber liquid near at hand. “Fuck that noise!” one of the men was saying, making my ears sting. “I ain’t gonna be bluffed, no sir!”

  “Five dollars to you, then, Mr. Cool,” another one said. A red chip hit the pile at the table’s center. A cigar tip glowed like a volcano in the maelstrom. “Raise you five,” the third man said, the cigar wedged in the side of a scarlike mouth. “Come on, put up or shut—” I saw his small, piggish eyes dart at me, and the man slapped his cards facedown on the table. “Hey!” he shouted. “What’s that kid doin’ in here?”

  Instantly I was the focus of attention. “Jaybird, have you gone fuckin’ crazy?” one of the other men asked. “Get him out!”

  “He’s all right,” my grandfather said. “He’s family.”

  “Not my family.” The man with the cigar leaned forward, his thick forearms braced on the table. His brown hair was cropped in a crew cut, and on the little finger of his right hand he wore a diamond ring. He took the cigar from his mouth, his eyes narrowed into slits. “You know the rules, Jaybird. Nobody comes in here without gettin’ approved.”

  “He’s all right. He’s my grandson.”

  “I don’t care if he’s the fuckin’ prince of England. You broke the rules.”

  “Now, there’s no call to be ugly about it, is th—”

  “You’re stupid!” the man shouted, his mouth twisting as he spoke the word. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face, and his white shirt was damp. On the breast pocket, next to a tobacco stain, was a monogram: BB. “Stupid!” he repeated. “You want the law to come in and bust us up? Why don’t you just give a map to that goddamned sheriff?”

  “Cory won’t say anythin’. He’s a good boy.”

  “That so?” The small pig eyes returned to me. “You as stupid as your grandpap, boy?”

  “No sir,” I said.

  He laughed. The sound of it reminded me of when Phillip Kenner threw up his oatmeal in school last April. The man’s eyes were not happy, but his mouth was tickled. “Well, you’re a smart little fella, ain’t you?”

  “He takes after me, Mr. Blaylock,” the Jaybird said, and I realized the man who thought I was so smart was Bodean Blaylock himself, brother of Donny and Wade and son of the notorious Biggun. I recalled my grandfather’s brash pronouncement at the door that Bodean could stick his head up his ass; right now, though, it was my grandpop who looked butt-faced.

  “Like hell he does,” Bodean told him, and when he laughed again he looked around at the other gamblers and they laughed, too, like good little Indians following the chief. Then Bodean stopped laughing. “Hit the road, Jaybird,” he said. “We’ve got some high rollers comin’ in here directly. Bunch of flyboys think they can make some money off me.”

  My grandfather cleared his throat nervously. His eyes were on the poker chips. “Uh… I was wonderin’…since I’m here and all, mind if I sit in for a few hands?”

  “Take that kid and make dust,” Bodean told him. “I’m runnin’ a poker game, not a baby-sittin’ service.”

  “Oh, Cory can wait outside,” the Jaybird said. “He won’t mind. Will you, boy?”

  “Grandmomma’s waitin’ for the ice cream salt,” I said.

  Bodean Blaylock laughed again, and I saw the crimson flare in my grandfather’s cheeks. “I don’t care about no damned ice cream!” the Jaybird snapped, a fury and a torment in his eyes. “I don’t care if she waits till midnight for it, I can do whatever I damn well please!”

  “Better run on home, Jaybird,” one of the other men taunted. “Go eat yourself some ice cream and stay out of trouble.”

  “You shut up!” he hollered. “Here!” He dug into his pocket, brought out a twenty-dollar bill, and slammed it on the table. “Am I in this game, or not?”

  I almost choked. Twenty dollars to risk playing poker. That was an awful lot of money. Bodean Blaylock smoked his cigar in silence, and looked back and forth from the money to my granddaddy’s face. “Twenty dollars,” he said. “That’ll hardly get you started.”

  “I’ve got more, don’t you worry about it.”

  I realized the Jaybird must’ve raided the cash jar, or else he had a secret poker-playing fund hidden away from my grandmother. Surely she wouldn’t approve of this, and surely the Jaybird had agreed to get the ice cream salt as a ruse to come here. Maybe he’d just planned on dropping by to see who was playing, but I could tell the fever had him and he was going to play come hell or high water. “Am I in, or not?”

  “The kid can’t stay.”

  “Cory, go sit in the car,” he said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “But Grandmomma’s waitin’ for—”

  “Go do like I said and do it right now!” the Jaybird yelled at me. Bodean stared at me through a haze of smoke. His expression said: See what lean do to your granddaddy, little boy?

  I left the house. Before I got to the door, I could hear the sound of a new chair scraping up to t
he table. Then I walked out into the hot light and I put my hands in my pockets and kicked a pine cone across the road. I waited. Ten minutes went past. Then ten more. A car pulled up, and three young men got out, knocked on the front door, and were admitted by Mr. Claypool. The door closed again. Still my grandfather didn’t emerge. I sat in the car for a while, but the heat was so bad my sweat drenched my shirt and I had to peel myself off the seat and get out again. I paced up and down in front of the house, and I paused to watch ants stripping a dead pigeon to the bones. Maybe an hour went past. At some point, though, I realized my grandfather was treating me like a little piece of nothing, and that was how he was treating Grandmomma Sarah, too. Anger started building in me, beginning in the belly like a dull, throbbing heat. I stared at the door, trying to will him to come out. The door remained closed.

  The thought came to me, shocking in its decisiveness: To hell with him.

  I got the box of ice cream salt, and I started walking.

  The first two miles were all right. On the third, the heat began getting to me. Sweat was pouring down my face, and my scalp felt as if it were aflame. The road shimmered between its walls of pine forest, and only a couple of cars passed, but they were going in the wrong direction. The pavement started burning my feet through my shoes. I wanted to sit down in some shade and rest, but I did not because resting would be weakness; it would be saying to myself that I shouldn’t have tried to walk six miles in hundred-degree heat and blazing sun, that I should have stayed at that house and waited for my grandfather to come out when he was good and ready. No. I had to keep going, and worry about my blisters later.

  I started thinking about the story I was going to write about this. In that story, a boy would be crossing a burning desert, a boxful of priceless crystals entrusted to his care. I looked up to watch hawks soaring in the thermals, and when my attention roamed from what I was doing I stepped in a pothole, twisted my ankle, and fell down and the box of ice cream salt burst open beneath me.

  I almost cried.

  Almost.

  My ankle hurt, but I could still stand on it. What hurt me most was the ice cream salt glistening on the pavement. The bottom of the box had broken open. I scooped ice cream salt up in my hands, filled my pockets, and started limping on again.

  I was not going to stop. I was not going to sit in the shade and cry, my pockets leaking salt. I was not going to let my grandfather beat me.

  I was nearing the end of the third mile when a car’s horn honked behind me. I looked around, expecting the Jaybird’s Ford. It was, instead, a copper-colored Pontiac. The car slowed, and Dr. Curtis Parrish looked at me through the rolled-down passenger window. “Cory? You need a ride?”

  “Yes sir,” I said gratefully, and I climbed in. My feet were about burned to the nubs, my ankle swelling up. Dr. Parrish gave it the gas, and we rolled on. “I’m stayin’ at my grandfolks’,” I said. “About three miles up the road.”

  “I know where the Jaybird lives.” Dr. Parrish picked up his medical bag, which was sitting between us, and put it onto the back seat. “Awful hot day. Where were you walkin’ from?”

  “I…uh…” Here was a crossroads of conscience, thrust upon me. “I…had to run an errand for my grandmother,” I decided to say.

  “Oh.” He was quiet for a moment. Then: “What’s that spillin’ out of your pocket? Sand?”

  “Salt,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, and he nodded as if this made sense to him. “How’s your daddy doin’ these days? Things ease up at work for him?”

  “Sir?”

  “You know. His work. When Tom came to see me a few weeks ago, he said his workload was so tough he was havin’ trouble sleepin’. I gave him some pills. You know, stress can be a mighty powerful thing. I told your dad he ought to take a vacation.”

  “Oh.” This time I was the one who nodded, as if this made sense. “I think he’s doin’ better,” I said. I gave him some pills. Dad hadn’t said anything about his work being tough, or that he’d gone to see Dr. Parrish. I gave him some pills. I stared straight ahead, at the unfolding road. My father was still trying to escape the realm of troubled spirits. It occurred to me that he was hiding part of himself from Mom and me, just as the Jaybird hid his poker fever from my grandmother.

  Dr. Parrish went with me to the front door of my grandparents’ house. When Grandmomma Sarah answered his knock, Dr. Parrish said he’d found me walking on the side of the road. “Where’s your granddaddy?” she asked me. I must’ve made a pained face, because after a few seconds of deliberation she answered her own question. “He’s gotten himself into some mischief. Uh-huh. That’s just what he’s done.”

  “The box of salt busted open,” I told her, and I showed a handful of it, my hair wet with sweat.

  “We’ll get us a new box. We’ll save what’s in your pockets for the Jaybird.” I wasn’t to know it for a while, but for the next week every meal the Jaybird sat down to eat would be so loaded with salt his mouth would pucker until it squawked. “Would you come in for a cold glass of lemonade, Dr. Parrish?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got to get back to the office.” His face clouded over; a concern was working its way out of him. “Mrs. Mackenson, did you know Selma Neville?”

  “Yes, I know her. Haven’t seen her for a month or more, though.”

  “I just came from her house,” Dr. Parrish said. “You know she’d been fightin’ cancer for the last year.”

  “No, I surely didn’t!”

  “Well, she put up a good fight, but she passed on about two hours ago. She wanted to pass at home instead of a hospital.”

  “My Lord, I didn’t know Selma was sick!”

  “She didn’t want a fuss. How she got through her last year teachin’ I’ll never know.”

  It hit me who they were talking about. Mrs. Neville. My Mrs. Neville. The teacher who’d said I should enter the short-story contest this year. Good-bye, she’d said as I’d left her room on the first day of summer. Not see you next year or see you in September, but a firm and final good-bye. She must’ve known she was dying, as she sat behind that desk in summer’s light, and she had known that for her there would be no new class of grinning young monkeys in September.

  “Thought you might like to know,” Dr. Parrish said. He touched my shoulder with a hand that had two hours ago pulled a sheet over Mrs. Neville’s face. “You take care now, Cory.” He turned around and walked to his Pontiac, and my grandmother and I watched him drive away.

  An hour later, the Jaybird came home. He wore the expression of a man whose last friend had kicked him in the rump and whose last Washington had snickered as it sailed off into another man’s pocket. He tried to work up a show of anger at me, for “runnin’ off and worryin’ me half to death” but before he could get steamed up on that route Grandmomma Sarah derailed him by asking, very quietly, where the ice cream salt was. The Jaybird wound up sitting by himself on the porch in the fading light, moths whirling around him, his face long and haggard and his spirits as low as his flagging jimbob. I felt kind of sorry for him, actually, but the Jaybird was not the kind of man you felt sorry for. One word of regret from me would’ve made him sneer and swagger. The Jaybird never apologized; he was never wrong. That was why he had no true companions, and that was why he sat alone on that porch in the company of dumb gleaming wings that swirled around him like his ancient memories of pretty farmers’ daughters.

  One last incident marked my week with my grandparents. I had not slept well on Friday night. I dreamed of walking into my classroom, which was empty of everyone but Mrs. Neville, sitting behind her desk straightening papers. Golden light slanted across the floor, bars of it striping the blackboard. The flesh of Mrs. Neville’s face had shriveled. Her eyes looked bright and large, like the eyes of a baby. She held her back rigid, and she watched me as I stood on the threshold between the hallway and classroom. “Cory?” she said. “Cory Mackenson?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I answered.

  “
Come closer,” she said.

  I did. I walked to her desk, and I saw that the red apple there on its edge had dried up.

  “Summer’s almost over,” Mrs. Neville told me. I nodded. “You’re older than you were before, aren’t you?”

  “I had a birthday,” I said.

  “That’s nice.” Her breath, though not unpleasant, smelled like flowers on the verge of decay. “I have seen many boys come and go,” she said. “I’ve seen some grow up and set roots, and some grow up and move away. The years of a boy’s life pass so fast, Cory.” She smiled faintly. “Boys want to hurry up and be men, and then comes a day they wish they could be boys again. But I’ll tell you a secret, Cory. Want to hear it?”

  I nodded.

  “No one,” Mrs. Neville whispered, “ever grows up.”

  I frowned. What kind of secret was that? My dad and mom were grown-up, weren’t they? So were Mr. Dollar, Chief Marchette, Dr. Parrish, Reverend Lovoy, the Lady, and everybody else over eighteen.

  “They may look grown-up,” she continued, “but it’s a disguise. It’s just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won’t let them. They’d like to shake off every chain the world’s put on them, take off their watches and neckties and Sunday shoes and return naked to the swimming hole, if just for one day. They’d like to feel free, and know that there’s a momma and daddy at home who’ll take care of things and love them no matter what. Even behind the face of the meanest man in the world is a scared little boy trying to wedge himself into a corner where he can’t be hurt.” She put aside the papers and folded her hands on the desk. “I have seen plenty of boys grow into men, Cory, and I want to say one word to you. Remember.”

  “Remember? Remember what?”

  “Everything,” she said. “And anything. Don’t you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure. Because it is. And memories are sweet doors, Cory. They’re teachers and friends and disciplinarians. When you look at something, don’t just look. See it. Really, really see it. See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it, too. It’s easy to walk through life deaf, dumb, and blind, Cory. Most everybody you know or ever meet will. They’ll walk through a parade of wonders, and they’ll never hear a peep of it. But you can live a thousand lifetimes if you want to. You can talk to people you’ll never set eyes on, in lands you’ll never visit.” She nodded, watching my face. “And if you’re good and you’re lucky and you have something worth saying, then you might have the chance to live on long after—” She paused, measuring her words. “Long after,” she finished.