by Richard Cox
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR THE BOYS OF SUMMER
“ The Boys of Summer is a tense, intriguing, and beautifully observed puzzle of a book, so craftily plotted that it kept me guessing right to the end.”
—Tom Toner, author of The Promise of the Child
“Make no mistake, Cox has spun a hell of a yarn. Rich and complex characters, razor-blade prose, and a must-be-read-to-be-believed premise. Not since Stephen King’s It has there been such a poignant and exhilarating parable about family, friendship, and the demons that hitch a ride as we hit each our own lonesome road from childhood to adulthood.”
—Fred Strydom, author of The Raft
Also by Richard Cox
Rift
The God Particle
Thomas World
Night Shade Books
Copyright © 2016 by Richard Cox
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 10018.
Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.nightshade.start-publishing.com.
eIBSN: 978-1-59780-600-8
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cox, Richard, 1970- author.
Title: The boys of summer / Richard Cox.
Description: New York : Night Shade Books, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012889 | ISBN 9781597808781 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Bildungsromans | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O925 B69 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012889
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Printed in the United States of America
Permissions: Pages 24-25, 124, 142, 169, 210: “The Boys of Summer,” Words and Music by DON HENLEY and MIKE CAMPBELL © 1984 WOODY CREEK MUSIC and WILD GATOR MUSIC. All Rights For WOODY CREEK MUSIC Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Page340: “Crazy,” Words and Music by THOMAS “CEE LO” CALLAWAY, BRIAN BURTON, GIANFRANCO REVER-BERI and GIAN PIERO REVERBERI © 2006 WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD., CHRYSALIS MUSIC LTD. and BMG RICORDI MUSIC PUBLISHING SpA. All Rights for WARNER/ CHAPPELL MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD. in the U.S. and Canada Administered by WARNER-TAMERLANE PUBLISHING CORP. (“Crazy” contains elements of “Last Man Standing” by GIANFRANCO REVERBERI and GIAN PIERO REVERBERI, © BMG RICORDI MUSIC PUBLISHING SpA). All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission of Hal Leonard Corporation and Alfred Music.
For Kimberly
Acknowledgments
This novel would never have seen the light of day without the steady and challenging insight from my good friend and agent, Matt Bialer. I would also like to express gratitude to Jeremy Lassen, Cory Allyn, and Mark Tavani for their constructive and passionate editorial guidance.
Special thanks to Don Henley and Mike Campbell for their unwitting contribution to this project.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Kimberly Cox, whose support helped breathe new life into the characters you’ll soon meet. I sure do love her.
Author’s Note
The opening scenes of this novel depict an actual weather event that took the lives of more than forty citizens of Wichita Falls, Texas and remains one of the most devastating tornado strikes in U.S. history. While every effort has been made to capture the reality of that day, dramatic license, as one might expect, has found its way into the version of the event you’ll read in the upcoming pages. A detailed analysis of the weather conditions of the day, and the tornado outbreak that arose from them, can be found at: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/?n=events-19790410.
The forecasts in the novel have been modeled after formatting employed by the National Weather Service, and have also been fictionalized. Also, some of the language and procedures of the NWS have evolved over the years, but for the sake of simplicity all forecasts have been formatted to today’s practices.
I leave it to you, the reader, to discover what else in this story is real.
You’re either reading a book or you’re not.
—Jonathan Franzen
If you believe legend, the city of Wichita Falls was doomed from its first day. Erected near a small waterfall on a muddy tributary of the Red River, where white settlers displaced a tribe of Indians known to them as Wichita, the community was officially named on September 27, 1872. Just before sunset, as new landowners celebrated their good fortune, the revered chief named Tawakoni Jim recalled an old Caddo legend about a boy bestowed with the Power of the Cyclone, which enabled him to summon black clouds and bring their powerful winds to the ground. Tawakoni Jim did not recognize Texas claim upon tribal land and implored any white man in range of his voice not to make a home upon land stolen from his people.
“The Power of the Cyclone enjoys a long memory,” Jim is believed to have said. “You may build a settlement here that thrives for many years. But someday, when you have long forgotten our people, the boy will enact vengeance. Build your homes from the strongest wood bound together by the strongest iron, and still no white home will stand against his power. The boy will erase your town from the land and many lives will be lost. To avoid tragedy, I ask you kindly not to settle upon this site.”
Being Christians by birth, if not necessarily by nature, the new landowners considered this story a silly pagan myth told by a well-spoken, displaced savage. They built their town at the site of the falls and for many years it flourished. The Fort Worth and Denver Railway arrived in 1882 and oil was discovered nearby in 1911. By 1960, the city’s population had swelled to 100,000. And except for one small tornado in 1958 that killed a farmer, Wichita Falls avoided nature’s wrath. By that time, anyone present when Tawakoni Jim spoke his infamous prophesy had long since passed away. Even in 1964, when an intense stovepipe tornado raked across the city’s north side, only seven people were killed. New radar technology allowed weather experts to see storms in more detail than ever before, making it possible to warn the population of an impending tornado strike. Surely Jim could not have foreseen such scientific advances.
But you can know something terrible is going to happen and still not be able to get out of the way. On April 10, 1979, a massive tornado churned through Wichita Falls, a multiple-vortex, mile-wide monster that demolished schools, businesses, and displaced 20,000 people from their homes. Pictures and video of the aftermath shocked viewers across the country. Damage was so widespread and costly it was not equaled by another tornado for over twenty years. And while the storm did not erase the town, as Jim had prophesized, it did set in motion a chain of events that led to a far worse disaster twenty-nine years later.
What happened in Wichita Falls on June 2, 2008 has been described as “biblical,” though Wichita Indians know the Bible had nothing to do with it. Careful readers of the story that follows, however, will find clues to a mysterious book that did contribute to the demise of a Middle American city and a number of characters contained herein.
PART ONE
April 10, 1979
ZONE FORECAST PRODUCT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK
TXZ086-111000-
WICHITA-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF ... WICHITA FALLS 155 PM CST TUE APR 10 1979
... TORNADO WATCH IN EFFECT FROM 230 PM UNTIL 700 PM CST ...
.THIS AFTERNOON ... MOSTLY CLOUDY WITH SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS. SOME STORMS MAY BE SEVERE, WITH DAMAGING WINDS, LARGE HAIL, AND TORNADOES POSSIBLE. HIGH IN THE LOWER 80S. WINDS SW 10-20 MPH AND GUSTY. CHANCE OF RAIN 70 PE
RCENT.
.TONIGHT ... CLOUDY AND TURNING COOLER. LOW AROUND 45. WINDS NW 10-20 MPH. CHANCE OF RAIN 40 PERCENT. .WEDNESDAY ... PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGH IN THE MID 60S. NW WINDS 10-15 MPH.
.THURSDAY ... MOSTLY SUNNY AND WARMER. HIGH IN THE MID 70S. WINDS LIGHT AND VARIABLE.
1
The day was electric, charged with possibility. Bobby Steele could feel it in the humid air and freshening wind, the power of the world. Ahead of him the sky was a gathering darkness. He was ten years old and had the strange feeling something important was about to happen, something that would alter the story of his life forever. At the moment Bobby was headed south toward Jonathan Crane’s house, and by the time he crossed Midwestern Parkway it was barely five o’clock.
His feathered hair bounced against his head, blonde and thick and sculpted by the wind. His smile was magnetic. It was the second day of Spring Break and his mom didn’t expect him before dark. She would have let him stay out longer if it weren’t for his dad, Kenny, who was unreasonable when it came to Bobby spending time with Jonathan. But his dad framed houses during the day and played cards in the evening, and he never walked into the house before eight. That was three hours from now. Three hours was forever.
The streets in this part of town were wider than those in his own neighborhood, the houses bigger and solid and made of brick. Anybody could take one look at Bobby’s banged-up, garage-sale Huffy and figure out he didn’t live around here. Anyone could see he was far away from home. But he rode how he pleased anyway—relaxed, no hands—because even as a kid he knew the best way to get on in a place was to act like you belonged there.
It was a long ride, and by now he was inhaling and exhaling great breaths of air, but if it had been a contest he could have gone on for a lot longer. He was a strong boy, after all. A competitive boy. He was a winner, he had to be, because his dad was pretty fond of saying how he hadn’t raised a loser.
Such was life for young sons born to legendary football stars. In 1966 Kenny had quarterbacked the Olney Cubs to the 1A Texas state football championship, where he rushed for five touchdowns in a lopsided victory over what Kenny liked to describe as “a team full of Mexicans.” On the game’s final play, however, with victory well in hand, his dad elected not to take a knee near the opponent’s end zone and had instead run a naked bootleg. The way his dad liked to tell the story, Kenny Steele had been a poor kid from a small town hoping to impress a bunch of big-time college coaches, and everything had been ruined by some long forgotten Mexican. But in reality the old man had been showboating, and Bobby supposed the angry linebacker who denied that sixth touchdown brought a little karma to the goal line. The collision shattered his dad’s kneecap as if it were made of glass, and that was the last time he had ever run a bootleg, naked or otherwise.
Bobby loved football and knew he would someday follow in his dad’s footsteps, but he also suspected there was more to life than sports. Lately he had been playing at Jonathan’s house more and more often because he could enjoy things that would never happen at home. Take chess, for instance. Where his own dad thought board games were pointless, Jonathan’s father liked watching the boys play and sometimes taught them strategy. Strategy was a concept foreign to Bobby until he started playing chess. It was like winning with your brain instead of your body. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he approached football as if it were a chess match, like if he combined athleticism with strategy, but his dad didn’t much care for the idea. Specifically he explained how football was a game of speed and power and intimidation, that chess was for pussies, and if his son wanted to grow up to be an Ivy League wimp he could go live somewhere else. After that Bobby didn’t say anything more about chess and promised not to visit Jonathan again. He wasn’t proud of himself for being dishonest, but sometimes his dad was too unreasonable for his own good.
When he parked his bike in Jonathan’s driveway, Bobby noticed the clouds in the southwestern sky had grown even darker and were moving in a way he’d never seen before. Like someone was up there stirring them on purpose. The sound of the doorbell was louder than he expected and reverberated in a way that seemed loaded with meaning. By the time Jonathan appeared, Bobby was ready to get inside.
“Hey, man. I didn’t think you would stop by today.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure. Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “It feels weird outside.”
“Yeah, there’s bad weather coming. Maybe you should have stayed home.”
Jonathan’s house smelled great like it always did, as if someone were frying chicken and boiling potatoes and baking cookies all at the same time. Sometimes Bobby wished Mrs. Crane could be his own mom.
“What kind of bad weather?” he asked.
“There was just a tornado in Vernon. My mom’s watching TV and they keep showing the radar.”
“Where’s Vernon?”
This question prompted a look of contempt on Jonathan’s face so evident that Bobby was tempted to punch him in the gut. But he didn’t. After all, the whole reason he had made friends with this guy was so the smart would rub off on him.
“Vernon is northwest of here,” Jonathan explained.
“So the tornado is coming this way?”
“Not that one. The guy on TV says another storm is coming up from Seymour.”
Bobby nodded as if this made complete sense, but in reality he didn’t have a clue where Seymour was, either. He was starting to think there would be no chess today.
“So what do you want to do?”
“Let’s go watch the radar with my mom. My dad’s still at work and she’s pretty worried.”
Jonathan started toward the back of the house, where the bedrooms were, and Bobby followed him.
“You don’t think a tornado is going to hit here, do you?”
“You never know,” Jonathan said. “They’re saying it’s pretty bad. Like there might be a bunch of tornadoes.”
He led them into a room where the TV was on. Mrs. Crane was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the screen, close enough to change channels without having to get up.
“Hey, Mom,” Jonathan said. “Bobby’s here.”
Now she looked up. “Bobby? Why aren’t you home?”
“I didn’t know bad weather was coming.”
“He could have dinner with us tonight,” Jonathan suggested. “He’ll never get back before it starts raining.”
“I don’t know. Bobby, can you call your mom to come get you? She’d probably feel more comfortable if you were there with her.”
“We just have the one pickup. My dad drives it to work every day.”
“He might get off early, though,” Jonathan said. “Since he can’t work in the rain.”
Bobby hadn’t considered this, and now he realized the decision to come over here had been a big mistake. If his dad showed up early looking for him, tornadoes would be the least of Bobby’s worries.
“Maybe I should go,” he said. “I might be able to get back before the storm hits.”
On the television, a man was explaining where to take cover and be prepared to do so at any time.
“Now that you’re here,” Mrs. Crane said, “it’s probably better that you stay unless we can get your parents on the phone.”
“But my dad—”
“We’ll call and let them know you’re staying, all right?”
“All right,” Bobby said. And while it was easy to blame his dad for what happened next, the truth was Bobby’s presence here was a product of deliberate deceit. Even worse, he’d wished (plenty of times!) that Mrs. Crane were his own mom. He hadn’t meant this literally, of course, but whoever was in charge of such things must not have understood. And when the tragedy was over, when his mother had been counted among the dead, Bobby felt he had no choice but to assume responsibility. It was a burden too onerous for a ten-year-old boy, especially a boy already saddled with the expectations of a disapproving father who had
blown his own chance at greatness. But Bobby shouldered it anyway, and carried that burden until a strange night twenty-nine years later, when he would give his life to make amends for this and all of his mistakes.
On the television, the radar remained covered with angry splashes of orange and yellow that for some reason made him think of fire. As if the storms approaching were not made of rain and wind but great monster columns of swirling flame.
A moment later, the tornado sirens began to sound.
2
The trees were thick by the river. Ten-year-old David Clark lived in one of Tanglewood’s newest homes, but he could walk down here where the construction stopped and take a few steps past a barbed wire fence and immediately be swallowed by wilderness. He loved the feeling of isolation, the palpable sense of stepping into the past, as if he were Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. In fact he spent so much time in the woods that several months ago he’d built himself a fort using two-by-fours and plywood and fence planks given to him by the house builders. Some of his friends were surprised at how easily the workers had given over the raw material, but not David. He’d learned from his father that people would do all sorts of things if you could summon the nerve to ask.
He’d intended for the fort to seem as remote as possible, like so far into the woods you could forget where you were, but the raw materials were difficult to carry through the trees. In the end he’d built his structure only thirty yards outside the barbed wire fence. What he really needed was a place to hang out closer to the river, which was where he spent most of his time.
Today was a perfect example. He’d been down by the water, watching for beavers and alligator gar, when the skies grew dark and threatened rain. Since David didn’t feel like being soaked, he turned and started back home, working his way through the trees and vines and watching for poison ivy. He was maybe halfway to the barbed wire fence when raindrops began to fall, large and fat.
