their feet. Gotha, not used to having anybody fight back, was showing his
weakness; he was throwing wild punches, and he was so tired he was stumbling
like a drunkard. Johnny danced in and out, making Gotha strike air again and
again. When Gotha roared with rage and rushed in, the smaller boy dodged aside
and Gotha tripped over his own feet and fell headlong, scraping his bruised
chin raw over the pebbly ground. He got up again, his arms heavy. Again he
attacked, and once more Johnny eluded him, using his clubfoot as Pan might
twist and turn on a hoof. “Stand still!” Gotha gasped. “Stand still, you
niggerblood!” His chest was heaving, his face as red as a beef chunk.
“All right,” Johnny said, his nose bleeding and a gash across his
cheekbone. “Come on, then.”
Gotha charged him. Johnny feinted to the left. Davy Ray would say later
that it was like watching Cassius Clay in action. When Gotha shifted to meet
the feint, Johnny put everything he had into a haymaker that caught Gotha’s
jaw and snapped his head around. Ben said that was when he’d seen Gotha’s eyes
roll up and go white. But Johnny had one more thunder in him; he stepped
forward and hit Gotha in the mouth so hard everybody heard two of Johnny’s
knuckles pop like gunshots.
Gotha made no noise. Not even a whimper.
He just fell like a big dumb tree.
He lay there, drooling blood. A front tooth slid from his lips, and then
Gotha started shaking and he began to cry in hard, angry silence.
Nobody offered to help him. Somebody laughed. Somebody else sneered,
“Gonna go cryin’ home to his momma!”
Ben clapped Johnny on the back. Davy Ray grabbed his shoulder and said,
“You showed him who’s tough, didn’t you?”
Johnny pulled loose. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, which
Dr. Parrish would be splinting soon for the two broken knuckles. Johnny’s
parents would give him hell. They would finally understand why he’d spent so
much time in his room alone, over the long hot summer, reading a book that had
cost three dollars and fifty cents from a mail-order publisher and had the
title Fundamentals of the Fight by Sugar Ray Robinson.
“I’m not so tough,” Johnny replied, and he leaned down beside Gotha and
said, “You want some help?”
I, however, did not have the benefit of Sugar Ray’s experience. I only
had Rocket beneath me and Gordo a relentless pursuer, and when Rocket suddenly
turned with a whip of the handlebars and started onto a trail into the woods,
I feared I was fast approaching the last roundup.
Rocket refused the brake, refused my frantic tugging on the handgrips. If
my bike had gone crazy, I had to get off. I tensed to jump for the underbrush.
But then Rocket burst out through the trees and there was a big ditch
right in front of us full of weeds and garbage and with a burst of speed that
made the hair stand up on my scalp Rocket took flight.
I think I screamed. I know I wet my pants, and that I hung on so tightly
my hands ached for days afterward.
Rocket leaped the ditch and came down on the other side with an impact
that cracked my teeth together and made my spine feel like a bowstring that
had just been snapped. The jump was too much for even Rocket; the frame
thrummed, the tires skidded on a mass of leaves and pine needles, and we went
down all tangled up together. I saw Gordo tear along the path toward me, and
his face contorted with terror when he saw the ditch yawning for him. He hit
the brake, but he was going too fast to stop in time. His black bike slid on
its side, and carried Gordo with it as it toppled over into the weeds and
trash.
The ditch wasn’t all that deep. It wasn’t full of thorns, or sharp rocks.
Gordo really had a soft landing amid thick green three-leafed vines and a
hodgepodge of things: pillows with the stuffing spilling out, garbage can
lids, empty tin cans, a few aluminum pie pans, socks and torn-up shirts, rags,
and the like. Gordo thrashed around in the green vines for a minute, getting
himself loose from the black bike. He was none the worse for wear. He said,
“You wait right there, you little shithole. You just wait right—”
He screamed suddenly.
Because something was in the ditch with him.
He had landed right on top of it, as it had been eating the last of a
coconut cream pie stolen from the sill of an open kitchen window less than ten
minutes before.
And now Lucifer, who did not care to share his den of trash-can
treasures, was very, very angry.
The monkey squirted up out of the vines and jumped Gordo, its teeth bared
and its rear end spraying forth a nasty business.
Gordo fought for his life. The vicious monkey took plugs of flesh from
his arms, his cheek, his ear, and almost gnawed off a finger before Gordo,
screaming to high heaven and stinking like hell, was able to scramble out of
the ditch and take off running. Lucifer raced after him, chattering, spitting,
and shitting, and the last I saw of them Lucifer had leaped onto Gordo’s head
and had handfuls of peroxided blond hair, riding Gordo like an emperor on an
elephant.
I pulled Rocket up and got on. Rocket was docile now, all the willful
fight drained away. Before I pedaled off to find a path around the ditch, I
thought of how Gordo would be feeling in a few days, his face and arms swollen
with bites, when he’d realized all those green three-leafed vines down in
Lucifer’s domain were poison ivy pregnant with silent evil. He would be a
walking fester. If he could walk, that is.
“You’ve got a mean streak,” I said to Rocket.
The defeated black bike lay down at the bottom of the ditch. Whoever went
in after it had better be stocked up on calamine lotion.
I rode back to school. The fight was over, but three guys were searching
the playground. One of them had a tackle box under his arm.
We found most of the arrowheads. Not all. A dozen or so had been
swallowed up by the earth. An offering, as it were. Among the lost was the
smooth black arrowhead of Chief Five Thunders.
Johnny didn’t seem to mind that much. He said he’d look again for it. He
said if he didn’t find it, somebody else might, in ten years, or twenty years,
or who knew how long. It hadn’t been his to own anyway, he said. He’d just
been keeping it for a while, until the chief needed it on the Happy Hunting
Grounds.
I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about
“grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it
broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.
By that definition, Johnny’s grace was awesome.
I didn’t know it yet, but I stood on the verge of my own test of grace.
5
Case #3432
AFTER THAT DAY ON THE PLAYGROUND, THE BRANLINS DIDN’T bother us anymore. Gotha
returned to school with a false front tooth and a dose of humility, and when
Gordo was released from the hospital he skulked away whenever I was near. The
capper came when Gotha actually approached Johnny and asked to be shown—in
slow motion, of course—the haymaker punch that he hadn’t even seen coming.
That’s not to say Gotha and Gordo became saints overnight. But Gotha’s beating
and Gordo’s itchy agony had been good for them. They’d been given a drink from
the cup of respect, and it was a start.
As October moved along, the hillsides lit up with gold and orange. The
smell of burning autumn hazed the air. Alabama and Auburn were both winning,
Leatherlungs had eased off her tirades, the Demon was in love with somebody
other than me, and everything would have been right with the world.
Except.
I often found myself thinking about Dad, scribbling questions he could
not answer, in the small hours of the morning. He was getting downright skinny
now, his appetite gone. When he forced a smile, his teeth looked too big and
his eyes shone with a false glint. Mom started biting her fingernails, and she
was really nagging Dad now but he refused to go to either Dr. Parrish or the
Lady. They had a couple of arguments that made Dad stalk out of the house, get
in the pickup, and drive away. Afterward, Mom cried in their room. I heard her
on the phone more than once, begging Grandmomma Sarah to talk some sense into
him. “… Eatin’ him up inside,” I heard Mom say, and then I went out to play
with Rebel because it hurt me to hear how much pain my mother was suffering.
Dad, as I well knew, was already locked in his own cell of torment.
And the dream. Always the dream: two nights straight, skip a night, there
it is again, skip three nights, then seven nights in a row.
Cory? Cory Mackenson? they whispered, standing in their white dresses
beneath the scorched and leafless tree. Their voices were as soft as the sound
of doves in flight, but there was an urgency about them that struck a spark of
fear in me. And as the dream went on, little details began to be revealed as
if through misted glass: behind the four black girls was a wall of dark
stones, and in that wall the splintered window frame held only a few ragged
teeth of glass. Cory Mackenson? There was a distant ticking noise. Cory? It
was getting louder, and the unknown fear welled up in me. Cor—
On this seventh night, the lights came on. I looked at my parents, my
eyes and brain still drugged with sleep. “What was that noise?” Dad asked. Mom
said, “Look at this, Tom.” On the wall opposite my bed there was a big scraped
mark. Glass and gears lay on the floor, the clock face read two-nineteen. “I
know time flies,” Mom said to me, “but alarm clocks cost money.”
They chalked it up to the Mexican enchilada casserole Mom had made for
dinner.
For some time now, an event had been taking shape that was one of those
destinies of place and circumstance. I was unaware of it. So were my folks.
So, too, was the man in Birmingham who got into his truck at the soft-drink
bottling company every morning and drove out to make his deliveries to a
prearranged list of gas stations and grocery stores. Would it have made a
difference, if that man had decided to spend an extra two minutes in the
shower that morning? If he’d eaten bacon instead of sausage with his eggs for
breakfast? If I had tossed the stick for Rebel to retrieve just one more time
before I’d gone off to school, might that have changed the fabric of what was
to be?
Being a male, Rebel was wont to roam when the mood was right. Dr.
Lezander had told my folks it would be best if Rebel and his equipment were
removed from each other, to cure the wandering itch, but Dad winced every time
he thought of it and I wasn’t too keen on it, either. So it just didn’t get
done. Mom didn’t like to keep Rebel in his pen all day long, considering the
facts that he stayed on the porch most of the day anyhow and our street never
got much traffic.
The stage was set. The die was cast.
On the thirteenth of October, when I walked into the front door after
school, I found Dad home from work early and waiting for me. “Son,” he began.
That word instantly told me something terrible had happened.
He took me in the pickup truck to Dr. Lezander’s house, which stood on
three acres of cleared land between Merchants and Shantuck streets. A white
picket fence enclosed the property, and two horses grazed in the sunshine on
the rolling grass. A kennel and dog exercise area stood off to one side, a
barn on the other. Dr. Lezander’s two-storied house was white and square,
precise and clean as arithmetic. The driveway curved us around to the rear of
the house, where a sign said PLEASE LEASH YOUR PETS. We left the pickup truck
parked at the back door, and Dad pulled a chain that made a bell ring. In
another minute the door opened, and Mrs. Lezander filled up the entrance.
As I’ve said before, she had an equine face and a lumpish body that
might’ve scared a grizzly. She was always somber and unsmiling, as if she
walked under a thundercloud. But I had been crying and my eyes were swollen,
and perhaps this caused the transformation that I now witnessed.
“Oh, you poor dear child,” Mrs. Lezander said, and such an expression of
care came over her face that I was half stunned by it. “I’m so, so sorry about
your dog.” Dok, she pronounced it. “Please come in!” she told Dad, and she
escorted us through a little reception area with portraits of children hugging
dogs and cats on the pine-paneled walls. A door opened on stairs leading to
Dr. Lezander’s basement office. Each step was a torture for me, because I knew
what was down there.
My dog was dying.
The truck bringing soft drinks from Birmingham had hit him as he’d run
across Merchants Street around one o’clock. Rebel had been with a pack of
dogs, Mr. Dollar had told Mom when he’d called the house. It was Mr. Dollar
who had heard the shriek of tires and Rebel’s crushed yelp as he’d been coming
out of the Bright Star Cafe after lunch. Rebel had been lying there on
Merchants Street, the rest of the dogpack barking for him to get up, and Mr.
Dollar had gotten Chief Marchette to help him lift Rebel onto the back of Wynn
Gillie’s pickup truck and bring him to Dr. Lezander. Mom was all torn up about
it, too, because she’d meant to put Rebel in his pen that afternoon but had
gotten wrapped up in “Search for Tomorrow.” Never in his entire life had Rebel
roamed as far away as Merchants Street. It was clear to me that he’d been
running with a bad bunch, and this was the price.
Downstairs the air smelled of animals; not unpleasant, but musky. There
was a warren of rooms lit up with fluorescent lights, a shine of scrubbed
white tiles and stainless steel. Dr. Lezander was there, wearing a doctor’s
white coat, his bald head aglow under the lights. His voice was hushed and his
face grim as he said hello to Dad. Then he looked at me, and he placed a hand
on my shoulder. “Cory?” he said. “Do you want to see Rebel?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’ll take you to him.”
“He’s not… he’s not dead, is he?”
“No, he’s not dead.” The hand massaged a tight muscle at the base of my
neck. “But he’s dying. I want you to understand that.” Dr. Lezander’s eyes
