he got on his bike and the two brothers started pedaling frantically back the
way they’d come. “Wait a minute!” the mailman shouted, but the Branlins
listened only to their inner demons. They raced across the field, dust
swirling up behind them, and then they hit the trails they’d carved through
the brushy grass and were gone into the patch of woods that stood beyond. Some
ravens screamed in there: scavengers, welcoming their own.
It was all over but the cleaning up.
Mr. Gerald Hargison, our mailman who delivered my monthly issue of Famous
Monsters magazine in a plain brown envelope, reached me and stopped when he
saw my face. “Good God!” he said, which told me it was bad. “Cory?”
I nodded. My lower lip felt as big as a goosedown pillow, and my left eye
was swelling up.
“You okay, boy?”
I didn’t feel like twirling a Hula Hoop, that’s for sure. But I could
stand up, and all my teeth were still in their sockets. Davy Ray was all
right, too, except his face was a mass of bruises and one of the Branlins had
stepped on his fingers. Johnny Wilson, however, had been the hardest hit. Mr.
Hargison, who had a fleshy, ruddy-cheeked face and smoked plastic-tipped
cheroots when he was walking his route, winced as he helped Johnny sit up.
Johnny’s Cherokee hatchet of a nose was broken, no doubt about it. The blood
was dark red and thick, and Johnny’s swollen eyes couldn’t hold a focus.
“Boy?” Mr. Hargison said to him. “How many fingers am I holdin’ up?” He held
up three, right in front of Johnny’s face.
“Six,” Johnny said.
“I believe he’s got a—”
And here was a word that never failed to frighten, giving images of
brain-damaged drooling.
“—concussion. I’m gonna take him to Doc Parrish. Can you two get home?”
Us two? I saw Davy Ray, but where was Nemo? The ball was lying on the
ground next to home plate. The boy with the perfect arm was gone.
“Those were the Branlin brothers, weren’t they?” Mr. Hargison helped
Johnny stand, and he took a handkerchief from his shorts pocket and held it
against Johnny’s nostrils. In no time, the white was spotted with blood.
“Those fellas need their butts kicked.”
“You’re gonna be all right, Johnny,” I told him, but Johnny didn’t answer
me and he walked rubber-legged as Mr. Hargison led him to the truck. Davy and
I stood watching as Mr. Hargison got him in and then went around and started
the engine. Johnny leaned back in the seat, his head lolling. He’d been hurt
bad.
After Mr. Hargison had turned the mail truck around and sped off in the
direction of Dr. Parrish’s office, Davy and I rolled Johnny’s bike up under
the bleachers, where it wouldn’t be readily seen. The Branlins might come back
and tear it to pieces before Johnny’s dad could come get it, but it was the
best we could do. Then it dawned on our foggy minds that the Branlins might be
in the patch of woods still, where they’d been waiting for Mr. Hargison to
leave.
That thought hurried us up some. Davy retrieved his baseball and got on
his bike and I picked Rocket up again. I saw, for a brief instant, the golden
eye in the headlight. It seemed to regard me with cool pity, same to say,
“You’re my new master? You’re gonna need all the help you can get!” Rocket had
had a rough first day, but I hoped we’d get along all right.
Davy and I pedaled away from the field, both of us hurting. We knew what
was to come: horror from our parents, indignation at the Branlins, angry phone
calls, probably a visit by the sheriff, an empty promise from Mr. and Mrs.
Branlin that their boys would never, ever do anything like this again.
We knew better.
We had escaped the Branlins for now, but Gotha and Gordo held grudges. At
any moment, they might swoop at us on their black bikes and finish what they’d
started. Or what I had started, by throwing that danged baseball.
Summer had suddenly been poisoned by the Branlin touch. With July and
August still ahead, we were not likely to have all our teeth by September.
4
I Get Around
OUR PREDICTIONS OF THE FUTURE WERE CORRECT.
After the parental horror and the angry phone calls, Sheriff Amory made a
call on the Branlins. He did not, as he told my dad, find Gotha and Gordo at
home. But he told their parents that the boys had broken Johnny Wilson’s nose
and come close to fracturing his skull, and this was what Mr. Branlin replied,
with a shrug: “Well, Sheriff, I kinda figure boys will be boys. Might as well
learn ’em when they’re young that it’s a tough old world.”
Sheriff Amory had clamped his anger down tight and stuck his finger in
Mr. Branlin’s rheumy-eyed face. “Now, you listen to me! You control those boys
of yours before they end up in reform school! Either you do it or I will!”
“Don’t matter none,” Mr. Branlin had said as he sat in front of the
television in a room where dirty shirts and socks were scattered around and
Mrs. Branlin moaned about her bad back from the bedroom. “They ain’t scared of
me. Ain’t scared of nobody on earth. They’d burn a reform school smack to the
ground.”
“You tell ’em to come see me, or I’ll come here and get ’em!”
Mr. Branlin, probing his molars with a toothpick, had just grunted and
shaken his head. “You ever try to catch the wind, J.T.? Them boys are free
spirits.” He had lifted his gaze from the Calling-for-Cash afternoon movie and
stared up at the sheriff, the toothpick between his teeth. “Say my two sons
beat the asses of four other boys? Sounds to me like Gotha and Gordo were
fightin’ in self-defense. They’d have to be crazy to pick a fight with four
boys at once, don’t you figure?”
“It wasn’t self-defense, from what I’ve heard.”
“From what I’ve heard”—Mr. Branlin paused to examine a brown glob on the
end of his toothpick—“that Mackenson boy threw a baseball at Gordo and came
near breakin’ his shoulder. Gordo showed me the bruise, and it’s as black as
the ace of spades. Those people want to push this thing, I reckon I might have
to press charges against that Mackenson kid.” The toothpick and the brown glob
went back into his mouth. He returned his attention to the movie, which
starred Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. “Yeah, those Mackensons go to church all
high-and-mighty, and they teach their kid to throw a baseball at one of my
boys and then whimper and whine when he gets his clock cleaned.” He snorted.
“Some Christians!”
In this matter, though, Sheriff Amory prevailed. Mr. Branlin agreed to
pay Dr. Parrish’s bill and for the medicine Johnny was going to need. Gotha
and Gordo had to sweep and mop the jail and couldn’t go to the swimming pool
for a week by order of the sheriff, which I knew, of course, simply stoked
their rage at Davy Ray and me. I had to have six stitches to seal the gash on
my lower lip—an experience almost as bad as getting the lip split in the first
place—but Mr. Branlin refused to pay for it on account of my throwing the
baseball at Gordo. My mother pitched a fury, but my father let it go. Davy Ray
went to bed with an ice pack, his violet-bruised face looking like two miles
of bad road. As I learned from my dad, Johnny’s concussion was severe enough
to put him on his back until Dr. Parrish gave him the green light, which might
be a couple of weeks or more. Even when Johnny was back on his feet, he was
not to do any running or roughhousing and he couldn’t even ride his bike,
which his father had rescued intact from beneath the bleachers. So the
Branlins had done something even worse than beating us up: they’d stolen part
of Johnny Wilson’s summer away from him, and he would never again be twelve
years old in June.
It was about this time that, sitting on my bed with my eyes puffed up and
the curtains drawn against the stinging light, I put my stack of Famous
Monsters magazines in my lap and began to cut out some of the pictures with
scissors. Then I got a roll of Scotch tape and started taping the pictures up
on my walls, on my desk, on my closet door, and just about anywhere that would
hold adhesive. When I finished, my room was a monster museum. Staring down at
me were Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris
Karloff’s Frankenstein and Mummy. My bed was surrounded by moody black and
white scenes from Metropolis, London after Midnight, Freaks, The Black Cat,
and The House on Haunted Hill. My closet door was a collage of beasts: Ray
Harryhausen’s Ymir battling an elephant, the monster spider stalking the
Incredible Shrinking Man, Gorgo wading across the Thames, the scar-faced
Colossal Man, the leathery Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Rodan in full
flight. I had a special place above my desk—a place of honor, if you will—for
Vincent Price’s suave, white-haired Roderick Usher and Christopher Lee’s lean
and thirsty Dracula. My mother came in, saw what I had done, and had to hold
on to the door’s edge to keep from falling down. “Cory!” she said. “Take these
awful pictures off the walls!”
“Why?” I asked her, my lower lip straining against its stitches. “It’s my
room, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you’ll have nightmares with these things starin’ at you all the
time!”
“No I won’t,” I said. “Honest.”
She retreated graciously, and the pictures stayed up.
I had nightmares about the Branlins, but not about the creatures who
adorned my walls. I took comfort in the belief that they were my watchdogs.
They would not allow the Branlins to crawl through my window after me, and
they spoke to me in the quiet hours of strength and endurance against a world
that fears what it does not understand.
I was never afraid of my monsters. I controlled them. I slept with them
in the dark, and they never stepped beyond their boundaries. My monsters had
never asked to be bora with bolts in their necks, scaly wings, blood hunger in
their veins, or deformed faces from which beautiful girls shrank back in
horror. My monsters were not evil; they were simply trying to survive in a
tough old world. They reminded me of myself and my friends: ungainly,
unlovely, beaten but not conquered. They were the outsiders searching for a
place to belong in a cataclysm of villagers’ torches, amulets, crucifixes,
silver bullets, radiation bombs, air force jets, and flamethrowers. They were
imperfect, and heroic in their suffering.
I’ll tell you what scared me.
One afternoon I picked up an old copy of Life from a stack of magazines
Mom was about to throw out, and I sat on the porch and looked through it with
Rebel sprawled beside me, the cicadas droning from the trees and the sky as
still as a painting. In this magazine were photographs of what had happened in
Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. There were sunny pictures of the president
and his wife in a long black convertible, and he was smiling and waving to the
crowd. Then, in a blur, it all changed. Of course I had seen that guy Oswald
get killed on television, and what I remembered about that was how small the
shot had sounded, just a pop and not at all like the cannon booms of Matt
Dillon’s six-shooter on “Gunsmoke.” I remembered how Oswald had cried out as
he fell. I made a louder noise than that stubbing my toe on a rock.
As I looked at the photographs of President Kennedy’s funeral—the
riderless horse, the dead man’s little boy saluting, rows of people standing
to watch the coffin go past—I realized what to me was a peculiar and scary
thing. In those pictures, you can see black pools spreading. Maybe it was just
the light, or the film, or something, but those pictures seemed to me to be
filling up with darkness. Black shadows hang in the corners; they spread
tendrils across men in suits and weeping women, and they connect cars and
buildings and manicured lawns with long fingers of shadow. Faces are shrouded
with darkness, and it has gathered around people’s shoes like ponds of tar.
The darkness seems like a living thing in those pictures, something growing
among the people like a virus and hungrily stretching right off the frame.
Then, on another page, there was a photograph of a man on fire. He is
baldheaded and Oriental, and he wears the flames like a cloak as he sits
cross-legged in the street. His eyes are closed, and though the fire is eating
up his face he is as serene as my dad listening to Roy Orbison on the radio.
The caption said this had happened in a city called Saigon, and the Oriental
man was a monk who poured gasoline on himself, sat down, and lit a match.
And there was a third picture that haunts me yet. It shows a burned-out
church, the stained-glass windows shattered and firemen picking through the
ruins. A few black people are standing around, their expressions dull with
shock. The trees in front of the church have no leaves on them, though the
caption said this event happened on September fifteenth of 1963, before
summer’s end. The caption said this was what was left of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, after somebody planted a bomb that went off as
Sunday school was just letting out and four girls died in the blast.
I looked out, across my hometown. I looked at the green hills and the
blue sky, and the distant roofs of Bruton. Beside me, Rebel whimpered in a
dog’s dream.
I never knew what hate really was until I thought of somebody wrapping up
a bomb and putting it in a church on a Sunday morning to kill little girls.
I wasn’t feeling very well. My head, still lumpy from Gotha Branlin’s
fist, was hurting. I went to my room and lay down, and there amid my monsters
I fell asleep.
This was early summer in Zephyr: an awakening to hazy morning heat, the
sun gradually burning the haze off and the air getting so humid your shirt
stuck to your skin by the time you’d walked to the mailbox and back. At noon
the world seemed to pause on its axis, and not a bird dared to wing through
the steaming blue. As afternoon rambled on, a few clouds rimmed with purple
might build up from the northwest. You could sit on the porch, a glass of
lemonade at your side and the radio tuned to a baseball game, and watch the
clouds slowly roll toward you. After a while you might hear distant thunder,
