are still around, tryin’ to find where the arrow fell.”
“Naw!” Ben scoffed. “There’s no such thing as ghosts! Is there, Cory?”
I shrugged. I had never told the guys about Midnight Mona. If they hadn’t
believed I’d shoved a broomstick down Old Moses’s gullet, how would they
believe a ghost car and driver?
“Dad says Snowdown’s a ghost,” Davy offered. “Says that’s why nobody can
shoot him, because he’s already dead.”
“No such thing as ghosts,” Ben said. “No such thing as Snowdown, either.”
“Yes there is!” Davy was ready to defend his father’s beliefs. “My dad
said Grandpap saw him one time, when he was a little kid! And just last year
Dad said a guy at the paper mill knew a guy who saw him! Said he was standin’
right there in the woods as big as you please! Said this guy took a shot at
him, but Snowdown was runnin’ before the bullet got there and then he was
gone!”
“No. Such. Thing,” Ben said.
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
This line of discussion could go on all afternoon. I picked up a pine
cone and popped Ben in the belly with it, and after Ben howled in indignation,
everybody laughed. Snowdown was a hope and mystery for the community of
hunters in Zephyr. In the deep forest between Zephyr and Union Town, the story
went, lived a massive white stag with antlers so big and twisted you could
swing on them as on the branches of an oak. Snowdown was usually seen at least
once every deer season, by a hunter who swore the stag had leaped into the air
and disappeared in the gnarly foliage of its kingdom. Men went out with rifles
to track Snowdown, and they invariably returned talking about finding the
prints of huge hooves and scars on trees where Snowdown had scraped his
antlers, but the white stag was impossible to catch. I think that if a massive
white stag really did roam the gloomy woods, no hunter really wanted to shoot
him, because Snowdown was for them the symbol of everything mysterious and
unattainable about life itself. Snowdown was what lay beyond the thickness of
the woods, in the next autumn-dappled clearing. Snowdown was eternal youth, a
link between grandfather and father and son, the great expectations of future
hunts, a wildness that could never be confined. My dad wasn’t a hunter, so I
wasn’t as involved in the legend of Snowdown as Davy Ray, whose father was
ready with his Remington on the first chilly dawning of the season.
“My dad’s gonna take me with him this year,” Davy Ray said. “He promised.
So you’ll be laughin’ through your teeth when we bring Snowdown back from the
woods.”
I doubted that if Davy Ray and his father saw Snowdown, either one of
them would pull a trigger. Davy had a boy-sized rifle that he sometimes fired
at squirrels, but he never could hit anything with it.
Ben chewed on a weed and offered his throat to an ice house breeze. “One
thing I sure would like to know,” he said. “Who’s that dead guy down at the
bottom of Saxon’s Lake?”
I pulled my knees into my chest and watched two ravens circling overhead.
“Ain’t it weird?” Ben asked me. “That your dad saw the guy go under, and
now the guy’s down there in his car gettin’ all mossy and eat up by turtles?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You think about it, don’t you? I mean, you were there.”
“Yeah. I think about it some.” I didn’t tell him that hardly a day went
by when I didn’t think of the car speeding in front of the milk truck, or my
dad jumping into the water, or the figure I’d seen standing in the woods, or
the man with the green-feathered hat and a knife in his hand.
“It’s spooky, for sure,” Davy Ray said. “How come nobody knew the guy?
How come nobody ever missed him?”
“Because he must not have been from here,” Johnny commented.
“Sheriff thought of that,” I said. “He called around other places.”
“Yeah,” Ben went on, “but he didn’t call everywhere, did he? He didn’t
call California or Alaska, did he?”
“What would a guy from California or Alaska be doin’ in Zephyr, dope?”
Davy Ray challenged him.
“He could’ve been! You don’t know everythin’, Mr. Smart!”
“I know a big dope when I see one!”
Ben was about to fire a reply back, but Johnny said, “Maybe he was a
spy,” and that halted Ben’s tongue.
“A spy?” I asked. “There’s nothin’ around here to spy on!”
“Yes there is. Robbins Air Force Base.” Johnny systematically began to
crack his knuckles. “Maybe he was a Russian spy. Maybe he was watchin’ the
planes drop bombs, or maybe there’s somethin’ goin’ on over there that
nobody’s supposed to know about.”
We were silent. A Russian spy killed in Zephyr. The thought gave all of
us delicious creeps.
“So who killed him, then?” Davy Ray asked. “Another spy?”
“Maybe.” Johnny contemplated this for a moment, his head slightly cocked
to one side. The lid of his left eye had begun to tic a bit, another result of
his injury. “Or maybe,” he said, “the guy at the bottom of the lake is an
American spy, and the Russian spy killed him because the dead guy found out
about him.”
“Oh, yeah!” Ben laughed. “So somebody around here might be a Russian
spy?”
“Maybe,” Johnny said, and Ben stopped laughing. Johnny looked at me.
“Your dad said the guy was stripped naked, right?” I nodded. “Know why that
might be?” I shook my head. “Because,” Johnny said, “whoever killed him was
smart enough to take the dead guy’s clothes off so nothin’ would float up to
the top. And whoever killed him had to be from around here, because he knew
how deep the lake is. And the dead guy knew a secret, too.”
“A secret?” Davy Ray was all ears now. “Like what?”
“I don’t know what,” Johnny answered. “Just a secret.” His dark Indian
eyes returned to me. “Didn’t your dad say the guy was all beat up, like
somebody had really worked him over? How come whoever killed him beat him up
so bad first?”
“How come?” I asked.
“’Cause the killer was tryin’ to make him talk, that’s why. Like in the
movies when the bad guy’s got the good guy tied to a chair and he wants to
know the secret code.”
“What secret code?” Davy Ray asked.
“That’s just for instance,” Johnny explained. “But it seems to me like if
a guy was gonna kill somebody, he wouldn’t beat him up for no reason.”
“Yeah, but maybe the dead guy was just plain beat to death,” Ben said.
“No,” I told him. “There was a wire around the guy’s neck, chokin’ him.
If he’d been beat to death, why would he get choked, too?”
“Man!” Ben plucked up a weed and chewed on it. Overhead, the two ravens
cawed and flapped. “A killer right here in Zephyr! Maybe even a Russian spy!”
He stopped chewing all of a sudden. “Hey,” he said, and he blinked as a new
thought jabbed his mind like a lightning bolt. “What’s to keep him from
killin’ again?”
I decided it was time. I cleared my throat, and I began to tell my
friends about the figure I’d seen, the green feather, and the man in the
green-feathered hat. “I didn’t see his face,” I said. “But I saw that hat and
the feather, and I saw him pull a knife out of his coat. I thought he was
gonna sneak up behind my dad and stab him. Maybe he tried to, but he figured
he couldn’t get away with it. Maybe he’s steamed ’cause my dad saw the car go
down and told Sheriff Amory about it. Maybe he saw me lookin’ at him, too. But
I didn’t see his face. Not a bit of it.”
When I’d finished, they didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then Ben
spoke up: “How come you didn’t tell us this before? Didn’t you want us to
know?”
“I was gonna tell you, but after what happened with Old Moses—”
“Don’t start that bull again!” Davy Ray warned.
“I don’t know who the man in the green-feathered hat is,” I said. “He
could be anybody. Even… somebody we all know real well, somebody you wouldn’t
think could do such a thing. Dad says you never know people through and
through, and that everybody’s got a part they don’t show. So it could be
anybody at all.”
My friends, excited by this new information, flung themselves eagerly
into the roles of detectives. They would agree to be on the lookout for a man
in a green-feathered hat, but we also agreed to keep this knowledge to
ourselves and not spread it to our parents, in case one of them happened to
tell the killer without knowing it. I felt better for having relieved myself
of this burden, yet I was still troubled. Who was the man Mr. Dollar said
Donny Blaylock had killed? And what was the meaning of the piano music in the
dream the Lady had told my mom about? Dad still refused to visit the Lady, and
I still sometimes heard him cry out in his sleep. So I knew that even though
that ugly dawn was long behind us, the memory of the event—and of what he’d
seen handcuffed to the wheel—haunted him. If Dad went out walking at Saxon’s
Lake, he didn’t tell me, but I suspected this might be true because of the
crusty red dirt he left scraped on the porch steps on more than one afternoon.
August came upon us, riding a wave of sultry heat. One morning I awakened
to the realization that in a few days I would be spending a week with
Granddaddy Jaybird, and I immediately pulled the sheet over my head.
But there was no turning back the clock. The monsters on my walls could
not help me. Every summer, I spent a week with Granddaddy Jaybird and
Grandmomma Sarah whether I wanted to or not. Granddaddy Jaybird demanded it,
and whereas I spent several weekends throughout the year with Grand Austin and
Nana Alice, the visit with Grand-daddy Jaybird was one lump sum of frenetic
bizarrity.
This year, though, I was determined to strike a bargain with my folks. If
I had to go to that farmhouse where Granddaddy Jaybird jerked the covers off
me at five in the morning and had me mowing grass at six, could I at least go
on an overnight camping trip with Davy Ray, Ben, and Johnny? Dad said he’d
think about it, and that was about the best I could hope for. So it happened
that I said good-bye to Rebel for a week, Dad and Mom drove me out from Zephyr
into the country, my suitcase in the back of the truck, and Dad turned off
onto the bumpy dirt road that led across a corn field to my grandparents’
house.
Grandmomma Sarah was a sweet woman, of that there was no doubt. I imagine
the Jaybird had been a rounder in his youth, full of vim and vigor and earthy
charm. Every year, however, his bolts had gotten a little looser. Dad would
say it right out: Jaybird was out of his mind. Mom said he was “eccentric.” I
say he was a dumb, mean man who thought the world revolved around him, but I
have to say this as well: if it wasn’t for the Jaybird, I would never have
written my first story.
I never saw Granddaddy Jaybird perform an act of kindness. I never heard
him praise his wife or his son. I never felt, when I was around him, that I
was anything but a—thankfully temporary—possession. His moods were as fleeting
as the faces of the moon. But he was a born storyteller, and when he focused
his mind on tales of haunted houses, demon-possessed scarecrows, Indian burial
grounds, and phantom dogs, you had no choice but to willingly follow wherever
he led.
The macabre, it may be said, was his territory. He was grave smart and
life stupid, as he’d never gotten past the fourth grade. Sometimes I wondered
how my dad had turned out as he had, having lived seventeen years in the
Jaybird’s strange shadow. As I’ve said, though, my grandfather didn’t really
start going crazy until after I was born, and I guess there were sensible
genes on my grandmother’s side of the family. I never knew what might happen
during that week of suffering, but I knew it would be an experience.
The house was comfortable, but really nothing special. The land around it
was, except for the stunted corn field, a garden and a small plot of grass,
mostly forest; it was where the Jaybird stalked his prey. Grandmomma Sarah was
genuinely glad to see us when we arrived, and she ushered us all into the
front room, where electric fans stirred the heat. Then the Jaybird made his
appearance, clad in overalls, and he carried with him a big glass jar full of
golden liquid that he announced to be honeysuckle tea. “Been brewin’ it for
two weeks,” he said. “Lettin’ it mellow, ya see.” He had mason jars all ready
for us. “Have a sip!”
I have to say it was very good. Everybody but the Jaybird had a second
glass of it. Maybe he knew how potent the stuff was. Within twelve hours, I
would be sitting on the pot feeling as if my insides were flooding out, and at
home Dad and Mom would be just as bad off. Grandmomma Sarah, who was surely
used to such concoctions by now, would sleep like a log through the whole
disgusting episode, except in the dead of night she was liable to make a high,
banshee keening noise in her sleep that was guaranteed to lift the hair right
off your scalp.
Anyway, the time came when Dad and Mom had to be getting back to Zephyr.
I felt my face sag, and I must’ve looked like a wounded puppy because Mom put
her arm around me on the porch and said, “You’ll be all right. Call me
tonight, okay?”
“I will,” I vowed, and I watched them as they drove away. The dust
settled over the brown cornstalks. Just one week, I thought. One week wouldn’t
be so bad.
“Hey, Cory!” the Jaybird said from his rocking chair. He was grinning,
which was a bad sign. “Got a joke for ya! Three strings walk into a bar. First
string says, ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender looks at him, says, ‘We don’t serve
strings in here, so get out!’ Second string tries his luck. ‘Gimme a drink!’
Bartender says, Told you we don’t serve strings in here, so you hit the
trail!’ Then the third string’s just as thirsty as the devil, so he’s got to
try, too. ‘Gimme a drink!’ he says. Bartender looks at him squinty-eyed, says,
‘You’re a danged-gone string, too, ain’t ya?’ And the string, he puffs out his
chest and says, ‘’Fraid not!’” The Jaybird hooted with laughter, while I just
stood there staring at him. “Get it, boy? Get it? ‘‘Fraid not’?” He frowned,
the joke over. “Hell!” he growled. “You got a sense of humor as bad as your
