like the Hardy Boys.”
“Yeah, that’d be good,” my dad agreed. “You never know how things are
gonna turn out, though, and that’s the truth. You aim for one place, sure as
an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don’t believe I
ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your
age.”
“I’d like to be everybody in the world,” I said. “I’d like to live a
million times.”
“Well”—and here my father gave one of his sagely nods—“that would be a
fine piece of magic, wouldn’t it?” He pointed. “Here’s our first stop.”
That first house must’ve had children in it, because they got two quarts
of chocolate milk to go along with their two quarts of plain milk. Then we
were off again, driving through the streets where the only sounds were the
wind and the barking of early dogs, and we stopped on Shantuck Street to
deliver buttermilk and cottage cheese to somebody who must’ve liked things
sour. We left bottles glistening on the steps of most of the houses on Bevard
Lane, and my dad worked fast as I checked off the list and got the next items
ready from the chilly back of the truck; we were a good team.
Dad said he had some customers down south near Saxon’s Lake and then he’d
swing back up so we could finish the rest of the street deliveries before my
school bell rang. He drove us past the park and out of Zephyr, and the forest
closed in on either side of the road.
It was getting on toward six o’clock. To the east, over the hills of pine
and kudzu, the sky was beginning to lighten. The wind shoved its way through
the trees like the fist of a bully. We passed a car going north, and its
driver blinked the lights and Dad waved. “Marty Barklee deliverin’ the
newspapers,” Dad told me. I thought about the fact that there was a whole
world going about its business before the sun, and people who were just waking
up weren’t part of it. We turned off Route Ten and drove up a dirt drive to
deliver milk, buttermilk, and potato salad to a small house nestled in the
woods, and then we went south toward the lake again. “College,” my dad said.
“You ought to go to college, it seems to me.”
“I guess so,” I answered, but that sounded like an awful long distance
from where I was now. All I knew about college was Auburn and Alabama
football, and the fact that some people praised Bear Bryant and others
worshipped Shug Jordan. It seemed to me that you chose which college to go to
according to which coach you liked best.
“Gotta have good grades to get into college,” Dad said. “Gotta study your
lessons.”
“Do detectives have to go to college?”
“I reckon they do if they want to be professional about it. If I’d gone
to college, I might’ve turned out to be that man who builds a house in empty
space. You never know what’s ahead for you, and that’s the—”
Truth, he was about to say, but he never finished it because we came
around a wooded bend and a brown car jumped out of the forest right in front
of us and Dad yelped like he was hornet-stung as his foot punched the brake.
The brown car went past us as Dad whipped the wheel to the left, and I
saw that car go off Route Ten and down the embankment on my right. Its lights
weren’t on but there was somebody sitting behind the wheel. The car’s tires
tore through the underbrush and then it went over a little cliff of red rock
and down into the dark. Water splashed up, and I realized the car had just
plunged into Saxon’s Lake.
“He went in the water!” I shouted, and Dad stopped the milk truck, pulled
up the hand brake, and jumped out into the roadside weeds. As I climbed out,
Dad was already running toward the lake. The wind whipped and whirled around
us, and Dad stood there on the red rock cliff. By the faint pinkish light we
could see the car wallowing in the water, huge bubbles bursting around its
trunk. “Hey!” Dad shouted with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Get out of
there!” Everybody knew Saxon’s Lake was as deep as sin, and when that car went
down into the inky depths it was gone for good and ever. “Hey, get out!” Dad
shouted again, but whoever was behind the wheel didn’t answer. “I think he’s
been knocked cold!” Dad told me as he took off his shoes. The car was starting
to turn onto its passenger side, and there was an awful howling sound coming
from it that must’ve been the rush of water pouring into the car. Dad said,
“Stand back.” I did, and he leaped into the lake.
He was a strong swimmer. He reached the car in a few powerful strokes,
and he saw that the driver’s window was open. He could feel the suction of
water moving around his legs, drawing the car down into the unfathomed deep.
“Get out!” he hollered, but the driver just sat there. Dad clung to the door,
reached in, and grabbed the driver’s shoulder. It was a man, and he wore no
shirt. The flesh was white and cold, and my dad felt his own skin crawl. The
man’s head lolled back, his mouth open. He had short-cropped blond hair, his
eyes sealed shut with black bruises, his face swollen and malformed from the
pressures of a savage beating. Around his throat was knotted a copper piano
wire, the thin metal pulled so tightly that the flesh had split open.
“Oh Jesus,” my dad whispered, treading water.
The car lurched and hissed. The head lolled forward over the chest again,
as if in an attitude of prayer. Water was rising up over the driver’s bare
knees. My dad realized the driver was naked, not a stitch on him. Something
glinted on the steering wheel, and he saw handcuffs that secured the man’s
right wrist to the inner spoke.
My dad had lived thirty-four years. He’d seen dead men before. Hodge
Klemson, one of his best friends, had drowned in the Tecumseh River when they
were both fifteen years old, and the body had been found after three days
bloated and covered with yellow bottom mud like a crusty ancient mummy. He’d
seen what remained of Walter and Jeanine Traynor after the head-on collision
six years ago between Walter’s Buick and a logging truck driven by a kid
eating pep pills. He’d seen the dark shiny mass of Little Stevie Cauley after
firemen doused the flames of the crumpled black dragster named Midnight Mona.
He had looked upon the grinning rictus of death several times, had taken that
sight like a man, but this one was different.
This one wore the face of murder.
The car was going down. As its hood sank, its tail fins started rising.
The body behind the wheel shifted again, and my father saw something on the
man’s shoulder. A blue patch, there against the white. Not a bruise, no; a
tattoo. It was a skull with wings swept back from the bony temples.
A great burst of bubbles blew out of the car as more water rushed in. The
lake would not be denied; it was going to claim its toy and tuck it away in a
secret drawer. As the car began to slide down into the murk, the suction
grabbed my father’s legs and pulled him under, and standing on the red rock
cliff I saw his head disappear and I shouted “Dad!” as panic seized my guts.
Underwater, he fought the lake’s muscles. The car fell away beneath him,
and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up
and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic
of air.
I saw his head break the surface. “Dad!” I shouted again. “Come on back,
Dad!”
“I’m all right!” he answered, but his voice was shaky. “I’m comin’ in!”
He began dog-paddling toward shore, his body suddenly as weak as a
squeezed-out rag. The lake continued to erupt where the car disturbed its
innards, like something bad being digested. Dad couldn’t get up the red rock
cliff, so he swam to a place where he could clamber up on kudzu vines and
stones. “I’m all right!” he said again as he came out of the lake and his legs
sank to the knees in mud. A turtle the size of a dinner plate skittered past
him and submerged with a perplexed snort. I glanced back toward the milk
truck; I don’t know why, but I did.
And I saw a figure standing in the woods across the road.
Just standing there, wearing a long dark coat. Its folds moved with the
wind. Maybe I’d felt the eyes of whoever was watching me as I’d watched my
father swim to the sinking car. I shivered a little, bone cold, and then I
blinked a couple of times and where the figure had been was just windswept
woods again.
“Cory?” my dad called. “Gimme a hand up, son!”
I went down to the muddy shore and gave him as much help as a cold,
scared child could. Then his feet found solid earth and he pushed the wet hair
back from his forehead. “Gotta get to a phone,” he said urgently. “There was a
man in that car. Went straight down to the bottom!”
“I saw… I saw…” I pointed toward the woods on the other side of Route
Ten. “Somebody was—”
“Come on, let’s go!” My father was already crossing the road with his
sturdy, soggy legs, his shoes in his hand. I jump-started my own legs and
followed him as close as a shadow, and my gaze returned to where I’d seen that
figure but nobody was there, nobody, nobody at all.
Dad started the milk truck’s engine and switched on the heater. His teeth
were chattering, and in the gray twilight his face looked as pale as candle
wax. “Damnedest thing,” he said, and this shocked me because he never cursed
in front of me. “Handcuffed to the wheel, he was. Handcuffed. My God, that
fella’s face was all beat up!”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know.” He turned the heater up, and then he started driving
south toward the nearest house. “Somebody did a job on him, that’s for sure!
Lord, I’m cold!”
A dirt road turned to the right, and my father followed it. Fifty yards
off Route Ten stood a small white house with a screened-in front porch. A rose
garden stood off to one side. Parked under a green plastic awning were two
cars, one a red Mustang and the other an old Cadillac splotched with rust. My
dad pulled up in front of the house and said, “Wait here,” and he walked to
the door in his wet socks and rang the bell. He had to ring it two more times
before the door opened with a tinkle of chimes, and a red-haired woman who
made three of my mom stood there wearing a blue robe with black flowers on it.
Dad said, “Miss Grace, I need to use your telephone real quick.”
“You’re all wet!” Miss Grace’s voice sounded like the rasp of a rusty saw
blade. She gripped a cigarette in one hand, and rings sparkled on her fingers.
“Somethin’ bad’s happened,” Dad told her, and she sighed like a redheaded
raincloud and said, “All right, come on in, then. Watch the carpet.” Dad
entered the house, the chimey door closed, and I sat in the milk truck as the
first orange rays of sunlight started breaking over the eastern hills. I could
smell the lake in the truck with me, a puddle of water on the floorboard
beneath my father’s seat. I had seen somebody standing in the woods. I knew I
had. Hadn’t I? Why hadn’t he come over to see about the man in the car? And
who had the man in the car been?
I was puzzling over these questions when the door opened again and Miss
Grace came out, this time wearing a floppy white sweater over her blue gown.
She had on sneakers, her ankles and calves thick as young trees. She had a box
of Lorna Doone cookies in one hand and the burning cigarette in the other, and
she walked to the milk truck and smiled at me. “Hey there,” she said. “You’re
Cory.”
“Yes’m,” I answered.
Miss Grace didn’t have much of a smile. Her lips were thin and her nose
was broad and flat and her brows were black-penciled streaks above deep-set
blue eyes. She thrust the Lorna Doones at me. “Want a cookie?”
I wasn’t hungry, but my folks had always taught me never to refuse a
gift. I took one.
“Have two,” Miss Grace offered, and I took a second cookie. She ate a
cookie herself and then sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke through her
nostrils. “Your daddy’s our milkman,” she said. “I believe you’ve got us on
your list. Six quarts of milk, two buttermilks, two chocolates, and three
pints of cream.”
I checked the list. There was her name—Grace Stafford—and the order, just
as she’d said. I told her I’d get everything for her, and I started putting
the order together. “How old are you?” Miss Grace asked as I worked. “Twelve?”
“No, ma’am. Not until July.”
“I’ve got a son.” Miss Grace knocked ashes from her cigarette. She chewed
on another cookie. “Turned twenty in December. He lives in San Antonio. Know
where that is?”
“Yes ma’am. Texas. Where the Alamo is.”
“That’s right. Turned twenty, which makes me thirty-eight. I’m an old
fossil, ain’t I?”
This was a trick question, I thought. “No ma’am,” I decided to say.
“Well, you’re a little diplomat, ain’t you?” She smiled again, and this
time the smile was in her eyes. “Have another cookie.” She left me the box and
walked to the door, and she hollered into the house: “Lainie! Lainie, get your
butt up and come out here!”
My dad emerged first. He looked old in the hard light of morning, and
there were dark circles under his eyes. “Called the sheriff’s office,” he told
me as he sat in his wet seat and squeezed his feet into his shoes. “Somebody’s
gonna meet us where the car went in.”
“Who the hell was it?” Miss Grace asked.
“I couldn’t tell. His face was…” He glanced quickly at me, then back to
the woman. “He was beat up pretty bad.”
“Must’ve been drunk. Moonshinin’, most likely.”
“I don’t think so.” Dad hadn’t said anything over the phone about the
car’s driver being naked, strangled with a piano wire, and handcuffed to the
wheel. That was for the sheriff and not for Miss Grace’s or anybody else’s
ears. “You ever see a fella with a tattoo on his left shoulder? Looked like a
skull with wings growin’ out of its head?”
“I’ve seen more tattoos than the Navy,” Miss Grace said, “but I can’t
recall anything like that around here. Why? Fella have his shirt off or
somethin’?”
“Yeah, he did. Had that skull with wings tattooed right about here.” He
touched his left shoulder. Dad shivered again, and rubbed his hands together.
