clenched every few seconds and I figured he was trying to decide whether I
needed to go see Dr. Parrish or get my butt busted.
I didn’t say anything more about the black car, because I knew Dad
wouldn’t believe me. But I had seen that car before, on the streets of Zephyr.
It had announced itself with a rumble and growl as it roamed the streets, and
when it had passed you could smell the heat and see the pavement shimmer.
“Fastest car in town,” Davy Ray had told me as he and I and the other guys had
lounged around in front of the ice house on Merchants Street, catching cool
breezes from the ice blocks on a sultry August day. “My dad,” Davy Ray had
confided, “says nobody can outrace Midnight Mona.”
Midnight Mona. That was the car’s name. The guy who owned it was named
Stevie Cauley. “Little Stevie,” he was called, because he stood only a few
inches over five feet tall though he was twenty years old. He chain-smoked
Chesterfield cigarettes, and maybe those had stunted his growth.
But the reason I didn’t tell my dad about Midnight Mona streaking up
behind us on that rain-slick road was that I remembered what had happened on a
night last October. My dad, who used to be a volunteer fireman, got a
telephone call. It was Chief Marchette, he’d told Mom. A car had wrecked on
Route Sixteen, and it was on fire in the woods. My dad had hurried out to
help, and he’d come home a couple of hours later with ashes in his hair and
his clothes smelling of burnt timber. After that night, and what he’d seen, he
hadn’t wanted to be a fireman anymore.
We were on Route Sixteen right now. And the car that had wrecked and
burned was Midnight Mona, with Little Stevie Cauley behind the wheel.
Little Stevie Cauley’s body—what was left of it, I mean—lay in a coffin
in the cemetery on Poulter Hill. Midnight Mona was gone, too, to wherever
burned-up cars go.
But I had seen it, racing up behind us out of the mist. I had seen
someone sitting behind the wheel.
I kept my mouth shut. I was in enough trouble already.
Dad turned off Route Sixteen and eased the truck onto a muddy side road
that wound through the woods. We reached a place where rusted old metal signs
of all descriptions had been nailed to the trees; there were at least a
hundred of them, advertisements for everything from Green Spot Orange Soda to
B.C. Headache Powders to the Grand Ole Opry. Beyond the signpost forest the
road led to a house of gray wood with a sagging front porch and in the front
yard—and here I mean “sea of weeds” instead of yard as ordinary people might
know it—a motley collection of rust-eaten clothes wringers, kitchen stoves,
lamps, bed-frames, electric fans, iceboxes, and other smaller appliances was
lying about in untidy piles. There were coils of wire as tall as my father and
bushel baskets full of bottles, and amid the junk stood the metal sign of a
smiling policeman with the red letters STOP DON’T STEAL painted across his
chest. In his head there were three bullet holes.
I don’t think stealing was a problem for Mr. Sculley, because as soon as
my dad stopped the truck and opened his door two red hound dogs jumped up from
their bellies on the porch and began baying to beat the band. A few seconds
later, the screen door banged open and a frail-looking little woman with a
white braid and a rifle came out of the house.
“Who is it?” she hollered in a voice like a lumberjack’s. “Whadda ye
want?”
My father lifted his hands. “It’s Tom Mackenson, Mrs. Sculley. From
Zephyr.”
“Tom who?”
“Mackenson!” He had to shout over the hound dogs. “From Zephyr!”
Mrs. Sculley roared, “Shaddup!” and she plucked a fly swatter from a hook
on the porch and swung a few times at the dogs’ rumps, which quieted them down
considerably.
I got out of the truck and stood close to my dad, our shoes mired in the
boggy weeds. “I need to see your husband, Mrs. Sculley,” Dad told her. “He
picked up my boy’s bike by mistake.”
“Uh-uh,” she replied. “Emmett don’t make no mistakes.”
“Is he around, please?”
“Back of the house,” she said, and she motioned with the rifle. “One of
them sheds back there.”
“Thank you.” He started off and I followed him, and we’d taken maybe a
half-dozen steps when Mrs. Sculley said, “Hey! You trip over somethin’ and
break your legs, we ain’t liable for it, hear?”
If what lay in front of the house was a mess, what lay behind it was
nightmarish. The two “sheds” were corrugated metal buildings the size of
tobacco warehouses. To get to them, you had to follow a rutted trail that
meandered between mountains of castaway things: record players, broken
statuary, garden hose, chairs, lawn mowers, doors, fireplace mantels, pots and
pans, old bricks, roof shingles, irons, radiators, and washbasins to name a
few. “Have mercy,” Dad said, mostly to himself, as we walked through the
valley between the looming hills. The rain spilled and spattered over all
these items, in some places running down from the metallic mountaintops in
gurgling little streams. And then we came to a big twisted and tangled heap of
things that made me stop in my tracks because I knew I had found a truly
mystical place.
Before me were hundreds of bicycle frames, locked together with vines of
rust, their tires gone, their backs broken.
They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where
they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light
spirits at the end. I believed at that moment in time that I had found the
grave of the bicycles, where the carcasses flake away year after year under
rain and baking sun, long after the spirits of their wandering lives have
gone. In some places on that huge pile the bicycles had melted away until they
resembled nothing more than red and copper leaves waiting to be burned on an
autumn afternoon. In some places shattered headlights poked up, sightless but
defiant, in a dead way. Warped handlebars still held rubber grips, and from
some of the grips dangled strips of colored vinyl like faded flames. I had a
vision of all these bikes, vibrant in their new paint, with new tires and new
pedals and chains that snuggled up to their sprockets in beds of clean new
grease. It made me sad, in a way I couldn’t understand, because I saw how
there is an end to all things, no matter how much we want to hold on to them.
“Howdy, there!” somebody said. “Thought I heard the alarms go off.”
My dad and I looked at a man who pushed a large handcart before him
through the muck. He wore overalls and muddy boots, and he had a big belly and
a liver-spotted head with a tuft of white at its peak. Mr. Sculley had a
wrinkled face and a bulbous nose with small broken veins showing purple at its
tip, and he wore round-lensed glasses over gray eyes. He was grinning a square
grin, his teeth dark brown, and on his grizzled chin was a mole that had
sprouted three white hairs. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m Tom Mackenson,” my dad said, and offered his hand. “Jay’s son.”
“Oh, yeah! Sorry I didn’t recognize you right off!” Mr. Sculley wore
dirty canvas gloves, and he took one of them off to shake my father’s hand.
“This Jay’s grandson?”
“Yep. Cory’s his name.”
“Seen you around, I believe,” Mr. Sculley said to me. “I remember when
your daddy was your age. Me and your grandpa go back a piece.”
“Mr. Sculley, I believe you picked up a bike this afternoon,” Dad told
him. “In front of a house on Deerman Street?”
“Sure did. Wasn’t much to it, though. All busted up.”
“Well, it was Cory’s bike. I think I can get it fixed, if we can have it
back.”
“Oops,” Mr. Sculley said. His square grin faltered. “Tom, I don’t think I
can do that.”
“Why not? It is here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s here. Was here, I mean.” Mr. Sculley motioned toward one of
the sheds. “I took it in there just a few minutes ago.”
“So we can get it and take it back, can’t we?”
Mr. Sculley sucked on his lower lip, looked at me, and then back to Dad.
“I don’t believe so, Tom.” He pushed the handcart aside, next to the mound of
dead bikes, and he said, “Come on and have a look.” We followed him. He walked
with a limp, as if his hip worked on a hinge instead of a ball-and-socket.
“See, here’s the story,” he said. “Been meanin’ to get rid of those old
bikes for over a year. Tryin’ to clean the place up, ya see. Got to make room
for more stuff comin’ in. So I said to Belle—that’s my wife—I said, ‘Belle,
when I pick up one more bike I’m gonna do it. Just one more.’” He led us into
an open doorway, into the building’s cool interior. Light bulbs hanging on
cords threw shadows between more mounds of junk. Here and there larger things
rose up from the gloom like Martian machines and presented a glimpse of
mysterious curves and edges. Something squeaked and skittered; whether mice or
bats, I don’t know. The place sure looked like a cavern, where Injun Joe would
feel right at home.
“Watch your step here,” Mr. Sculley cautioned us as we went through
another doorway. Then he stopped beside a big rectangular machine with gears
and levers on it and he said, “This here crusher just ate your bike about
fifteen minutes ago. It was the first one in.” He prodded a barrel full of
twisted and crumpled metal pieces. Other barrels were waiting to be filled.
“See, I can sell this as scrap metal. I was waitin’ for one more bike to start
breakin’ ’em up, and yours was the one.” He looked at me, the overhead bulb
shining on his rain-wet dome, and his eyes were not unkind. “Sorry, Cory. If
I’d known anybody was gonna come claim it, I’d have held on to it, but it was
dead.”
“Dead?” my father asked.
“Sure. Everythin’ dies. It wears out and can’t be fixed for love nor
money. That’s how the bike was. That’s how they all are by the time somebody
brings ’em here, or somebody calls me to come pick ’em up. You know your bike
was dead long before I put it in that crusher, don’t you, Cory?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I do.”
“It didn’t suffer none,” Mr. Sculley told me, and I nodded.
It seemed to me that Mr. Sculley understood the very nucleus of
existence, that he had kept his young eyes and young heart even though his
body had grown old. He saw straight through to the cosmic order of things, and
he knew that life is not held only in flesh and bone, but also in those
objects—a good, faithful pair of shoes; a reliable car; a pen that always
works; a bike that has taken you many a mile—into which we put our trust and
which give us back the security and joy of memories.
Here the ancient hearts of stone may chortle and say, “That’s
ridiculous!” But let me ask a question of them: don’t you ever wish—even for
just a fleeting moment—that you could have your first bike again? You remember
what it looked like. You remember. Did you name it Trigger, or Buttermilk, or
Flicka, or Lightning? Who took that bike away, and where did it go? Don’t you
ever, ever wonder?
“Like to show you somethin’, Cory,” Mr. Sculley said, and he touched my
shoulder. “This way.”
My dad and I both followed him, away from the bike-crushing machine into
another chamber. A window with dirty glass let in a little greenish light to
add to the overhead bulb’s glare. In this room was Mr. Sculley’s desk and a
filing cabinet. He opened a closet and reached up onto a high shelf. “I don’t
show this to just anybody,” he told us, “but I figure you fellas might like to
see it.” He rummaged around, moving boxes, and then he said, “Found it,” and
his hand emerged from dark into light again.
He was holding a chunk of wood, its bark bleached and dried mollusks
still gripping its surface. What looked like a slim ivory dagger, about five
inches long, had been driven into the wood. Mr. Sculley held it up to the
light, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses. “See it? What do you make of
it?”
“No idea,” Dad said. I shook my head, too.
“Look close.” He held the wood chunk with its embedded ivory dagger in
front of my face. I could see pits and scars on the ivory’s surface, and its
edges were serrated like a fishing knife.
“It’s a tooth,” Mr. Sculley said. “Or a fang, most likely.”
“A fang?” Dad frowned, his gaze jumping back and forth between Mr.
Sculley and the wood chunk. “Must’ve been a mighty big snake!”
“No snake, Tom. I cut this piece out of a log I found washed up along the
river when I was huntin’ bottles three summers ago. See the shells? It must be
from an old tree, probably laid on the bottom for quite a while. I figure that
last flood we had pulled it up from the mud.” He gingerly ran a gloved finger
along the serrated edge. “I do believe I’ve got the only evidence there is.”
“You don’t mean…” Dad began, but I already knew.
“Yep. This here’s a fang from the mouth of Old Moses.” He held it in
front of me once more, but I drew back.
“Maybe his eyesight ain’t so good anymore,” Mr. Sculley mused. “Maybe he
went after that log thinkin’ it was a big turtle. Maybe he was just mean that
day, and he snapped at everythin’ his snout bumped up against.” His finger
tapped the fang’s broken rim. “Hate to think what this thing could do to a
human bein’. Wouldn’t be pretty, would it?”
“Can I see that?” Dad asked, and Mr. Sculley let him hold it. Mr. Sculley
went to the window and peered out as Dad examined what he held, and after
another moment Dad said, “I swear, I believe you’re right! It is a tooth!”
“Said it was,” Mr. Sculley reminded him. “I don’t lie.”
“You need to show this to somebody! Sheriff Amory or Mayor Swope! Heck,
the governor needs to see it!”
“Swope’s already seen it,” Mr. Sculley said. “He’s the one advised me to
put it in my closet and keep the door shut.”
“Why? Somethin’ like this is front-page news!”
“Not accordin’ to Mayor Swope.” He turned away from the window, and I saw
that his eyes had darkened. “At first Swope thought it was a fake. He had Doc
Parrish look at it, and Doc Parrish called Doc Lezander. Both of them agreed
it’s a fang from some kind of reptile. Then we all had a sit-down talk in the
