Republican. I know. I’ve heard them. The breeze in Zephyr blew through the
screens, bringing the incense of honeysuckle and awakening love, and jagged
blue lightning crashed down upon the earth and awakened hate. We had
windstorms and droughts and the river that lay alongside my town had the bad
habit of flooding. In the spring of my fifth year, a flood brought snakes to
the streets. Then hawks came down by the hundreds in a dark tornado and lifted
up the snakes in their killing beaks, and the river slinked back to its banks
like a whipped dog. Then the sun came out like a trumpet call, and steam
swirled up from the blood-specked roofs of my hometown.
We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a
gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a
monster in the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted
the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had
a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien
invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants
Street.
It was a magic place.
In me are the memories of a boy’s life, spent in that realm of
enchantments.
I remember.
These are the things I want to tell you.
ONE
The Shades of Spring
Before the Sun—Down in the Dark—The Invader—Wasps at Easter—The Death of a
Bike—Old Moses Comes to Call—A Summons from the Lady
1
Before the Sun
“CORY? WAKE UP, SON. IT’S TIME.”
I let him pull me up from the dark cavern of sleep, and I opened my eyes
and looked up at him. He was already dressed, in his dark brown uniform with
his name—Tom—written in white letters across his breast pocket. I smelled
bacon and eggs, and the radio was playing softly in the kitchen. A pan rattled
and glasses clinked; Mom was at work in her element as surely as a trout rides
a current. “It’s time,” my father said, and he switched on the lamp beside my
bed and left me squinting with the last images of a dream fading in my brain.
The sun wasn’t up yet. It was mid-March, and a chill wind blew through
the trees beyond my window. I could feel the wind by putting my hand against
the glass. Mom, realizing that I was awake when my dad went in for his cup of
coffee, turned the radio up a little louder to catch the weather report.
Spring had sprung a couple of days before, but this year winter had sharp
teeth and nails and he clung to the South like a white cat. We hadn’t had
snow, we never had snow, but the wind was chill and it blew hard from the
lungs of the Pole.
“Heavy sweater!” Mom called. “Hear?”
“I hear!” I answered back, and I got my green heavy sweater from my
dresser. Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater
rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise’s blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers,
a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman’s cape, an
aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the
aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a
bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis’s, a closet, and the
shelves. Oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are
stacks of me: hundreds of comic books—Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern,
Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the
Fantastic Four. There are Boy’s Life magazines, dozens of issues of Famous
Monsters of Filmland, Screen Thrills, and Popular Mechanics. There is a yellow
wall of National Geographics, and I have to blush and say I know where all the
African pictures are.
The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in
a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in summer. My Duncan yo-yo
that whistles except the string is broken and Dad’s got to fix it. My little
book of suit cloth samples that I got from Mr. Parlowe at the Stagg Shop for
Men. I use those pieces of cloth as carpet inside my airplane models, along
with seats cut from cardboard. My silver bullet, forged by the Lone Ranger for
a werewolf hunter. My Civil War button that fell from a butternut uniform when
the storm swept Shiloh. My rubber knife for stalking killer crocodiles in the
bathtub. My Canadian coins, smooth as the northern plains. I am rich beyond
measure.
“Breakfast’s on!” Mom called. I zipped up my sweater, which was the same
hue as Sgt. Rock’s ripped shirt. My blue jeans had patches on the knees, like
badges of courage marking encounters with barbed wire and gravel. My flannel
shirt was red enough to stagger a bull. My socks were white as dove wings and
my Keds midnight black. My mom was color-blind, and my dad thought checks went
with plaid. I was all right.
It’s funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into
this world and you see yourself so clearly in them. You realize that every
person in the world is a compromise of nature. I had my mother’s small-boned
frame and her wavy, dark brown hair, but my father had given me his blue eyes
and his sharp-bridged nose. I had my mother’s long-fingered hands—an “artist’s
hands,” she used to tell me when I fretted that my fingers were so skinny—and
my dad’s thick eyebrows and the small cleft in his chin. I wished that some
nights I would go to sleep and awaken resembling a man’s man like Stuart
Whitman in Cimarron Strip or Clint Walker in Cheyenne, but the truth of it was
that I was a skinny, gawky kid of average height and looks, and I could blend
into wallpaper by closing my eyes and holding my breath. In my fantasies,
though, I tracked lawbreakers along with the cowboys and detectives who
paraded past us nightly on our television set, and out in the woods that came
up behind our house I helped Tarzan call the lions and shot Nazis down in a
solitary war. I had a small group of friends, guys like Johnny Wilson, Davy
Ray Callan, and Ben Sears, but I wasn’t what you might call popular. Sometimes
I got nervous talking to people and my tongue got tangled, so I stayed quiet.
My friends and I were about the same in size, age, and temperament; we avoided
what we could not fight, and we were all pitiful fighters.
This is where I think the writing started. The “righting,” if you will.
The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have
been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no
power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.
One thing I do know I got from my granddaddy Jaybird, my dad’s father:
his curiosity about the world. He was seventy-six years old and as tough as
beef jerky, and he had a foul mouth and an even fouler disposition, but he was
always prowling the woods around his farm. He brought home things that made
Grandmomma Sarah swoon: snake-skins, empty hornets’ nests, even animals he’d
found dead. He liked to cut things open with a penknife and look at their
insides, arranging all their bloody guts out on newspapers.
One time he hung up a dead toad from a tree and invited me to watch the
flies eat it with him. He brought home a burlap sack full of leaves, dumped
them in the front room, and examined each of them with a magnifying glass,
writing down their differences in one of his hundreds of Nifty notebooks. He
collected cigar butts and dried spits of chewing tobacco, which he kept in
glass vials. He could sit for hours in the dark and look at the moon.
Maybe he was crazy. Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who’s got magic
in them after they’re no longer a child. But Granddaddy Jaybird read the
Sunday comics to me, and he told me stories about the haunted house in the
small hamlet of his birth. Granddaddy Jaybird could be mean and stupid and
petty, but he lit a candle of wonder in me and by that light I could see a
long way beyond Zephyr.
On that morning before the sun, as I sat eating my breakfast with my dad
and mom in our house on Hilltop Street, the year was 1964. There were great
changes in the winds of earth, things of which I was unaware. All I knew at
that moment was that I needed another glass of orange juice, and that I was
going to help my dad on his route before he took me to school. So when
breakfast was over and the dishes were cleared, after I had gone out into the
cold to say good morning to Rebel and feed him his Gravy Train, Mom kissed
both Dad and me, I put on my fleece-lined jacket and got my schoolbooks and
off we went in the coughy old pickup truck. Freed from his backyard pen, Rebel
followed us a distance, but at the corner of Hilltop and Shawson streets he
crossed into the territory of Bodog, the Doberman pinscher that belonged to
the Ramseys, and he beat a diplomatic retreat to a drumroll of barks.
And there was Zephyr before us, the town quiet in its dreaming, the moon
a white sickle in the sky.
A few lights were on. Not many. It wasn’t five o’clock yet. The sickle
moon glittered in the slow curve of the Tecumseh River, and if Old Moses swam
there he swam with his leathery belly kissing mud. The trees along Zephyr’s
streets were still without leaves, and their branches moved with the wind. The
traffic lights—all four of them at what might be called major
intersections—blinked yellow in a steady accord. To the east, a stone bridge
with brooding gargoyles crossed the wide hollow where the river ran. Some said
the faces of the gargoyles, carved in the early twenties, were representations
of various Confederate generals, fallen angels, as it were. To the west, the
highway wound into the wooded hills and on toward other towns. A railroad
track cut across Zephyr to the north, right through the Bruton area, where all
the black people lived. In the south was the public park where a bandshell
stood and a couple of baseball diamonds had been cut into the earth. The park
was named for Clifford Gray Haines, who founded Zephyr, and there was a statue
of him sitting on a rock with his chin resting on his hand. My dad said it
looked as if Clifford was perpetually constipated and could neither do his
business nor get off the pot. Farther south, Route Ten left Zephyr’s limits
and wound like a black cottonmouth past swampy woods, a trailer park, and
Saxon’s Lake, which shelved into unknown depths.
Dad turned us onto Merchants Street, and we drove through the center of
Zephyr, where the stores were. There was Dollar’s Barbershop, the Stagg Shop
for Men, the Zephyr Feeds and Hardware Store, the Piggly-Wiggly grocery, the
Woolworth’s store, the Lyric theater, and other attractions along the
sidewalked thoroughfare. It wasn’t much, though; if you blinked a few times,
you were past it. Then Dad crossed the railroad track, drove another two
miles, and turned into a gate that had a sign above it: GREEN MEADOWS DAIRY.
The milk trucks were at the loading dock, getting filled up. Here there was a
lot of activity, because Green Meadows Dairy opened early and the milkmen had
their appointed rounds.
Sometimes when my father had an especially busy schedule, he asked me to
help him with his deliveries. I liked the silence and stillness of the
mornings. I liked the world before the sun. I liked finding out what different
people ordered from the dairy. I don’t know why; maybe that was my granddaddy
Jaybird’s curiosity in me.
My dad went over a checklist with the foreman, a big crew-cut man named
Mr. Bowers, and then Dad and I started loading our truck. Here came the
bottles of milk, the cartons of fresh eggs, buckets of cottage cheese and
Green Meadows’ special potato and bean salads. Everything was still cold from
the ice room, and the milk bottles sparkled with frost under the loading
dock’s lights. Their paper caps bore the face of a smiling milkman and the
words “Good for You!” As we were working, Mr. Bowers came up and watched with
his clipboard at his side and his pen behind his ear. “You think you’d like to
be a milkman, Cory?” he asked me, and I said I might. “The world’ll always
need milkmen,” Mr. Bowers went on. “Isn’t that right, Tom?”
“Right as rain,” my dad said; this was an all-purpose phrase he used when
he was only half listening.
“You come apply when you turn eighteen,” Mr. Bowers told me. “We’ll fix
you up.” He gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost rattled my teeth and
did rattle the bottles in the tray I was carrying.
Then Dad climbed behind the big-spoked wheel, I got into the seat next to
him, he turned the key, and the engine started and we backed away from the
loading dock with our creamy cargo. Ahead of us, the moon was sinking down and
the last of the stars hung on the lip of night. “What about that?” Dad asked.
“Being a milkman, I mean. That appeal to you?”
“It’d be fun,” I said.
“Not really. Oh, it’s okay, but no job’s fun every day. I guess we’ve
never talked about what you want to do, have we?”
“No sir.”
“Well, I don’t think you ought to be a milkman just because that’s what I
do. See, I didn’t start out to be a milkman. Granddaddy Jaybird wanted me to
be a farmer like him. Grandmomma Sarah wanted me to be a doctor. Can you
imagine that?” He glanced at me and grinned. “Me, a doctor! Doctor Tom! No
sir, that wasn’t for me.”
“What’d you start out to be?” I asked.
My dad was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking this question
over, in a deep place. It occurred to me that maybe no one had ever asked him
this before. He gripped the spoked wheel with his grown-up hands and
negotiated the road that unwound before us in the headlights, and then he
said, “First man on Venus. Or a rodeo rider. Or a man who can look at an empty
space and see in his mind the house he wants to build there right down to the
last nail and shingle. Or a detective.” My dad made a little laughing noise in
his throat. “But the dairy needed another milkman, so here I am.”
“I wouldn’t mind bein’ a race car driver,” I said. My dad sometimes took
me to the stock car races at the track near Barnesboro, and we sat there
eating hot dogs and watching sparks fly in the collision of banged-up metal.
“Bein’ a detective would be okay, too. I’d get to solve mysteries and stuff,
