and a zigzag of lightning would make the radio crackle. It might shower for
thirty minutes or so, but most times the clouds just marched past with a
rumble and grunt and not a drop of rain. As evening cooled the earth, the
cicadas droned in their hundreds from the woods and lightning bugs rose from
the grass. They got up in the trees and blinked, and they lit up the branches
like Christmas decorations here on the edge of July. The stars came out, and
some phase of the moon. If I played my cards right, I could talk my folks into
letting me stay up late, like until eleven or so, and I would sit in the front
yard watching the lights of Zephyr go out. When enough lights were
extinguished, the stars became much brighter. You could look up into the heart
of the universe, and see the swirls of glowing stars. A soft breeze blew,
bringing with it the sweet perfume of the earth, and the trees rustled quietly
in its passage. It was very hard, at times like this, not to think that the
world was as well-ordered and precise as the Cartwright ranch on “Bonanza,” or
that in every house lived a “My Three Sons” family. I wished it were so, but I
had seen pictures of a spreading dark, a burning man, and a bomb-wrecked
church, and I was beginning to know the truth.
I got to know Rocket better, when my folks would let me ride again. My
mom told it to me straight: “You fall down and bust that lip open again, it’s
back to Dr. Parrish’s and this time it’ll be fifteen or twenty stitches!” I
knew better than to push my luck. I stayed close to the house, and I pedaled
Rocket around as gingerly as riding one of those swaybacked ponies that plods
in circles at the county fair. Sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of the
golden eye in the headlamp, but it was never there when I looked directly at
it. Rocket accepted my careful touch, though I sensed in the smoothness of the
pedals and chain and the snap of the turns that Rocket, like any high-strung
Thoroughbred, wanted to run. I had the feeling that I had a lot to learn yet
about Rocket.
My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my
confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn’t show, I would
have to live with.
One Saturday my folks and I went to the public swimming pool, which was
crowded with high-school kids. I have to tell you that it was for whites only.
Mom jumped eagerly into the choppy blue water, but Dad took a seat and refused
to leave it even when we both begged him to come in. I didn’t think until
later that the last time Dad had been swimming, he’d seen a dead man sink into
Saxon’s Lake. So I sat with him for a while as Mom swam around, and I had the
opportunity to tell him for the third or fourth time about Nemo Curliss’s
throwing ability. This time, though, I had his undivided attention, because
there was no television or radio nearby and he wanted to focus on something
beside the water, which he seemed not to want to look at. He told me I ought
to tell Coach Murdock about Nemo, that maybe Coach Murdock could talk Nemo’s
mother into letting him play Little League. I filed that suggestion away for
later.
Davy Ray Callan, his six-year-old brother, Andy, and their mom and dad
showed up at the pool in the afternoon. Most of the bruises had vanished from
Davy’s face. The Callans sat with my folks, and their talk turned to what
ought to be done about the Branlin boys, that we weren’t the only ones who’d
been beaten up by that brood. Davy and I didn’t especially want to relive our
defeat, so we asked our folks for money to go get a milk shake at the Spinnin’
Wheel and, armed with dollar bills, we headed off in our flipflops and
sunburns while Andy squalled and had to be restrained from tagging after us by
Mrs. Callan.
The Spinnin’ Wheel was just across the street from the pool. It was a
white-painted stucco building with white stucco icicles hanging from the
roof’s edge. A statue of a polar bear stood in front of it, adorned with such
spray-painted messages as “Nobody Else Will Beat Our Score, We’re The Seniors
’64” and “Louie, Louie!” and “Debbie Loves Goober” among other declarations of
independence. Davy and I guessed Mr. Sumpter Womack, who owned and managed the
Spinnin’ Wheel, thought that “Goober” was some guy’s name. Nobody told him
differently. The Spinnin’ Wheel was what might be called a teen hangout. The
lure of hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, and thirty different flavors of milk
shakes—from root beer to peach—kept the parking lot full of high school guys
and girls in their daddy’s cars or pickups. This particular Saturday was no
exception. The cars and trucks were packed in tight, their windows open and
the radio music drifting out over the lot like sultry smoke. I recalled that I
had once seen Little Stevie Cauley, in Midnight Mona, parked here with a blond
girl who leaned her head against his shoulder, and Little Stevie had glanced
at me, his hair coal black and his eyes as blue as swimming-pool water, as I’d
walked past. I had not seen the girl’s face. I wondered if that girl, whoever
she had been, knew that Little Stevie and Midnight Mona now haunted the road
between Zephyr and Union Town.
Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got
fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get
plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed
all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!”
I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever
tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened.
We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our
shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel
in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and
then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume
dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into
the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from
every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and
revved up and young laughter flew like sparks.
I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d
ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in
fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds,
and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty
guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back.
“What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?”
…Round… round… get around… wha wha wha-oooooo…
“What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know.
“Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.”
…Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip… I gotta find a
new place where the kids are hip…
“What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy.
“It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—”
Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the
music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a
peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean
chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street.
“—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished.
“What?”
“The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.”
“Man!” I said. “That sounds… that sounds…”
What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of
youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood?
What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long
as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will
inherit the earth?
“Cool,” Davy Ray supplied.
It would have to do.
…Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone… I get arounnnnddddd…
I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the
hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the
beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and
on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a
moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes
begging for my attention and I got around.
The song faded. The voices went back into the speakers. Then I was just
Cory Mackenson again, a son of Zephyr, but I had felt the warmth of a
different sun.
“I think I’m gonna ask my folks if I can take guitar lessons,” Davy Ray
said as we crossed the street. Git-tar, he pronounced it.
I thought that when I got home I would sit down at my desk and try to
scratch out a story in Ticonderoga #2 about where music went when it got into
the air. Some of it had gotten into Davy Ray, and he was humming that song as
we returned to the pool and our parents.
The Fourth of July sizzled in. There was a big barbecue picnic in the
park, and the men’s team—the Quails—lost to the Union Town Fireballs by seven
to three. I saw Nemo Curliss watching the game as he sat crushed between a
brunette woman in a red-flowered dress and a gangly man who wore thick glasses
and was sweating through his once-crisp white shirt. Nemo’s father didn’t
spend much time with his son and wife. He got up after the second inning and
walked off, and I later saw him prowling through the picnic crowd with a book
full of shirt swatches and a desperate look on his face.
I had not forgotten about the man in the green-feathered hat. As I sat
with my folks at a picnic table in the shade, munching barbecued ribs as the
elderly men threw horseshoes and the teenaged guys heaved footballs, I scanned
the crowd for that elusive feather. It dawned on me, as I searched, that the
hats of winter had been put away, and every hat in evidence was made of straw.
Mayor Swope wore a straw fedora as he moved through the throngs, puffing his
pipe and glad-handing barbecue-sauced palms. Straw hats adorned the heads of
Fire Chief Marchette and Mr. Dollar. A straw boater with a bright red band was
perched on the bald skull of Dr. Lezander, who came over to our table to
examine the scar’s pale line on my lower lip. He had cool fingers, and his
eyes peered into mine with steely intensity. “Those fellows ever cause you any
more trouble,” he said in his Dutch dialect, “you just let me know. I’ll
introduce them to my gelding clippers. Eh?” He nudged me with an elbow and
grinned, showing his silver tooth. Then his heavyset wife, Veronica, who was
also Dutch and whose long-jawed face reminded me of a horse, came up with a
paper plate piled high with ribs and pulled Dr. Lezander away. Mrs. Lezander
was a cool sort; she didn’t have a lot to do with any of the other women, and
Mom told me that she understood Mrs. Lezander’s older brother and his family
had been killed fighting the Nazis in Holland. I figured something like that
could hurt your trust in people. The Lezanders had escaped from Holland before
the country had fallen, and Dr. Lezander himself had shot a Nazi soldier with
a pistol as the man burst through the door of his house. This was a subject
that fascinated me, since Davy Ray, Ben, Johnny, and I played army out in the
woods, and I wanted to ask Dr. Lezander what war was really like but Dad said
I was not to bring it up, that such things were best left alone.
Vernon Thaxter made an appearance at the picnic, which caused the faces
of women to bloom red and men to pretend to be examining their barbecue with
fierce concentration. Most people, though, acted as if Moorwood Thaxter’s son
was invisible. Vernon got a plate of barbecue and sat under a tree at the edge
of the baseball field; he wasn’t totally naked on this occasion, however. He
was wearing a floppy straw hat that made him look like a happily deranged
Huckleberry Finn. I believe Vernon was the only man Mr. Curliss didn’t
approach with his shirt sample book.
During the afternoon I heard the Beach Boys’ song several times from
transistor radios, and every time it seemed better than the last. Dad heard it
and wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled sour milk and Mom said it made her
ears hurt, but I thought it was great. The teenagers sure went wild over it.
Then, as it was playing for about the fifth time, we heard a big commotion
over where some high school guys were throwing a football not far from us.
Somebody was bellowing like a mad bull, and Dad and I pushed through the
gawkers to see what it was all about.
And there he was. All six-foot-six of him, his curly red hair flying
around his head and his long, narrow face pinched even tighter with righteous
rage. He wore a pale blue suit with an American flag pin on his lapel and a
small cross above it, and his polished black size-fourteen wingtips were
stomping the devil out of a little scarlet radio. “This. Has. Got. To. Cease!”
he bellowed in time with his stomps. The guys who’d been playing football just
stared at the Reverend Angus Blessett in open-mouthed amazement, and the
sixteen-year-old girl whose radio had just been busted to splinters was
starting to cry. The Beach Boys had been silenced under the boot, or, in this
case, the wingtip. “This Satan’s squallin’ has got to cease!” Reverend
Blessett of the Freedom Baptist Church hollered to the assembled throng. “Day
and night I hear this trash, and the Lord has moved me to strike it down!” He
gave the offending radio a last stomp, and wires and batteries flew from the
wreckage. Then Reverend Blessett looked at the sobbing girl, his cheeks
flushed and sweat glistening on his face, and he held out his arms and
approached her. “I love you!” he yelled. “The Lord loves you!”
She turned and fled. I didn’t blame her. If I’d had a nifty radio smashed
right in front of me, I wouldn’t feel like hugging anybody either.
Reverend Blessett, who’d been embroiled last year in a campaign to ban
the Lady’s Good Friday ritual at the gargoyle bridge, now turned his attention
to the onlookers. “Did you see that? The poor child’s so confused she can’t
