over us, a touch of the grave. He looked at his broken wrist, and he made a
deep moaning noise.
“Get off him!” Dad shouted. “For God’s sake, get off my son!”
Dr. Lezander shuddered and coughed. On the third cough, bright red blood
sprayed from his nose and mouth. He grasped at his side, and suddenly there
was blood on his hand. The beast from the lost world had staved his ribs right
through his innards.
The water was roaring now. The Buick was sinking at the trunk.
“Please!” Dad begged, still straining to reach me. “Please give me my
son!”
Dr. Lezander looked around as if trying to figure out exactly where he
was. He lifted himself off me a few inches, which made me able to breathe
without feeling like I was jammed in a sardine can. Dr. Lezander looked back
at the sinking trunk and the water surging dark and foamy where the rear
windshield had been and I heard him whisper “Oh.”
It was the whisper of surrender.
Dr. Lezander’s face turned. He stared at me. Blood dripped from his nose
and ran down my cheek. “Cory,” he said, and his voice gurgled. His good hand
closed on my wrist.
“Up you go,” he whispered. “Bronco.”
He lifted himself up with an effort that must’ve racked him, and he
guided my hand into my father’s.
Dad pulled me out, and I flung my arms around his neck. He held me, his
legs treading water and tears streaming down his heroic face.
With a great buckling and moaning noise, the Buick was going down. The
water rushed around us, drawing us in. Dad started kicking us away from it,
but the pull was too strong. Then, with a hissing noise of heat and liquid at
war, the Buick was drawn down into the depths. I felt my father fighting the
suction, and then he gasped a breath and I knew he had lost.
We went under.
The car was sinking below us, into a huge gloomy vault where the sun was
a stranger. Air bubbles rose from it like silver jellyfish. Dad was kicking
frantically, trying to break the pull, but we were going down with Dr.
Lezander. In the underwater blur I saw the doctor’s white face pressed up
against the windshield. Bubbles were streaming from his open mouth.
And suddenly something had drifted up from below and was clinging to the
trunk. Something that might have been a big clump of moss or rags somebody had
dumped into Saxon’s Lake with their garbage. Whatever this thing was, it moved
slowly and inexorably into the Buick through the broken rear windshield. The
car was turning, turning over like a bizarre ride at the Brandywine Carnival,
suspended against darkness. As my lungs burned for breath I saw the blur of
Dr. Lezander’s white face again, only this time the ragged mossy thing had
wrapped itself around him like a putrid robe. Whatever this thing was, it had
hold of his jaw. I saw a faint glint of a silver tooth, like a receding star.
Then the Buick turned over on its back like a huge turtle and as air bubbles
rushed up again I felt them hit us and break us loose from the suction. We
were rising toward the realm of light.
Dad lifted me up, so my head broke the surface first.
There wasn’t much light up there today, but there was a whole lot of air.
Dad and I clung together in the choppy murk, breathing.
At last we swam to where we could pull ourselves out, through mud and
reeds to solid earth. Dad sat down on the ground next to the pickup truck, his
hands scraped raw with glass cuts, and I huddled on the red rock cliff and
looked out over Saxon’s Lake.
“Hey, partner!” Dad said. “You okay?”
“Yes sir.” My teeth were chattering, but being cold was a passing thing.
“Better get in the truck,” he said.
“I will,” I answered, but I wasn’t ready yet. My shoulder, which would
become one swollen lump of bruise in the next couple of days, was mercifully
numb.
Dad pulled his knees up to his chest. The sleet was falling, but we were
already cold and wet, so what of it? “I’ve got a story to tell you about Dr.
Lezander,” he said.
“I want to tell you one, too,” I answered. I listened; the wind swept
over the lake’s surface and made it whisper.
He was down in the dark now. He had come from darkness and to darkness he
had returned.
“He called me Bronco,” I said.
“Yeah. How about that?”
We couldn’t stay here very much longer. The wind was really getting cold.
It was the kind of weather that made you catch your death.
Dad looked up at the low gray clouds and the January gloom. He smiled,
with the face of a boy unburdened.
“Gosh,” he said, “it’s a beautiful day.”
Hell might have been for heroes, but life was for the living.
These things happened, in the aftermath.
When Mom got up off the floor from her faint, she was all right. She
hugged both Dad and me, but she didn’t cling on to us. We had come back to her
a little worse for wear, but we were back. Dad in particular; his dreams of
the man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake were ended, good and truly.
Mr. Steiner and Mr. Hannaford, though dismayed that they had never even
gotten a finger on Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke, were at least satisfied with the
outcome of rough justice. They had Mrs. Kara Dahninaderke and her birds of
human bone in their custody, however, and that was a great consolation. The
last I heard of her, she was going to a prison where even the light lay
chained.
Ben and Johnny were beside themselves. Ben jumped up and down in a fit
and Johnny scowled and stomped when they realized they had been sitting in
front of a movie while I’d been battling for my life against a Nazi war
criminal. To say this made me a celebrity at school was like saying the moon
is the size of a river pebble. Even the teachers wanted to hear my tale.
Pretty Miss Fontaine was enthralled by it, and Mr. Cardinale asked to hear it
twice. “You ought to be a writer, Cory!” Miss Fontaine said. “You surely do
know your words!” Mr. Cardinale said, “You’d make a fine author, in my
opinion.”
Writer? Author?
Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.
On a cold but sunny Saturday morning toward the end of January, I left
Rocket on the front porch and got into the pickup truck with Mom and Dad. He
drove us across the gargoyle bridge and along Route Ten—slowly, all the time
watching for the beast from the lost world. Though the beast remained loose in
the woods, I never saw him again. I believe he was a gift to me from Davy Ray.
We reached Saxon’s Lake. The water was smooth. There was no trace of what
lay at its bottom, but we all knew.
I stood on the red rock cliff, and I reached into my pocket and pulled
out the green feather. Dad had tied twine around it, with a little lead-ball
weight on its end. I threw it into the lake, and it went down faster than you
can say Dahninaderke. Much faster, I’m sure.
I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.
Dad stood on one side of me, and Mom on the other. We were a mighty good
team.
“I’m ready now,” I told them.
And I went home, where my monsters and my magic box were waiting.
FIVE
Zephyr as It Is
IT HAS BEEN A LONG, COLD WINTER, AND I AM GOING HOME.
South from Birmingham on Interstate 65, that busy highway leading to the
state capital. A left turn at Exit 205, and then following the road as it
narrows and winds past drowsing towns named Coopers, Rockford, Hissop, and
Cottage Grove. No sign spells out the name Zephyr anymore, but I know where it
is and I am going home.
I am not going alone, on this beautiful Saturday afternoon at the
beginning of spring. My wife, Sandy, is beside me, and our own “young’un” in
the back, curled up wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball cap on backward and
baseball cards scattered over the seat. These days there might be a fortune
back there, who knows? The radio—pardon me, the stereo cassette player—is on,
with Tears For Fears coming out of the speakers. I think Roland Orzabal is a
fantastic singer.
It’s 1991. Can you believe it? We’re poised on the edge of a new century,
for better or worse. I guess we’ll all make up our own minds which. The year
1964 seems like ancient history now. The Polaroids taken in that year have
turned yellow. No one wears their hair like that anymore, and the clothes have
changed. People have changed, too, I think. Not just in the South, but
everywhere. For better or worse? You can decide for yourself.
And what we and the world have been through since 1964! Think of it! It’s
been a faster, more brain-busting ride than ever could be devised by the
Brandywine Carnival. We’ve lived through Vietnam—if we’ve been fortunate—and
the era of Flower Power, Watergate and the fall of Nixon, the Ayatollah,
Ronnie and Nancy, the cracking of the Wall and the beginning of the end of
Communist Russia. We truly are living in the time of whirlwinds and comets.
And like rivers that flow to the sea, time must flow into the future. It
boggles the mind to think what might be ahead. But, as the Lady once said, you
can’t know where you’re going until you figure out where you’ve been.
Sometimes I think we have a lot of figuring out to do.
“It’s such a lovely day,” Sandy says, and she leans back in her seat to
watch the countryside glide past. I glance at her and my eyes are blessed. She
wears sunlight in her blond hair like a spill of golden flowers. There’s some
silver in there, too, and I like it though she frets some. Her eyes are pale
gray and her gaze is calm and steady. She is a rock when I need strength, and
a pillow when I need comfort. We’re a good team. Our child has her eyes and
her calm, the dark brown of my hair and my curiosity about the world. Our
child has my father’s sharp-bridged nose and the slim-fingered “artist’s
hands” of my mother. I think it’s a fine combination.
“Hey, Dad!” The baseball cards have been forgotten for the moment.
“Yeah?”
“Are you nervous?”
“No,” I say. Better be honest, I think. “Well… maybe a little bit.”
“What’s it gonna be like?”
“I don’t know. It’s been… oh… let’s see, we left Zephyr in 1966. So it’s
been… you tell me how many years.”
A few seconds’ pause. “Twenty-five.”
“Right as rain,” I say. Our child gets an aptitude in math strictly from
Sandy’s side of the family, believe me.
“How come you never came back here? I mean, if you liked it so much?”
“I started to, more than a few times. I got as far as the turnoff from
I-65. But Zephyr’s not like it was. I guess I know things can’t stay the same,
and that’s all right but… Zephyr was my home, and it hurts to think it’s
changed so much.”
“So how’s it changed? It’s still a town, isn’t it?” I hear the baseball
cards being flipped through again, being sorted by team and alphabetized.
“Not like it was,” I say. “The air force base near here closed down in
1974, and the paper mill up on the Tecumseh shut down two years later. Union
Town grew. It’s about four or five times the size it was when I was a boy. But
Zephyr… just got smaller.”
“Um.” The attention is drifting now.
I glance at Sandy, and we smile at each other. Her hand finds mine. They
were meant to be clasped together, just like this. Before us, the hills rise
around Adams Valley. They are covered by trees that blaze with the yellow and
purple of new buds. Some green is appearing, too, though April’s not here yet.
The air outside the car is still cool, but the sun is a glorious promise of
summer.
My folks and I indeed did leave Zephyr, in August of 1966. Dad, who had
found a job working at Mr. Vandercamp’s hardware store, sensed the changing
winds and decided to search for greener pastures. He found a job in
Birmingham, as the assistant manager on the night shift at the Coca-Cola
bottling plant. He was making twice as much money as he’d ever made when he
was a milkman. By 1970, he’d moved up to be the night-shift manager, and he
thought we were in high cotton. That was the year I started college, at the
University of Alabama. Dad saw me graduate, with a degree in journalism,
before he died of cancer in 1978. It was, thankfully, a quick passing. Mom
grieved terribly, and I thought I was going to lose her, too. But in 1983, on
a cruise to Alaska with a group of friends from her church, Mom met a widowed
gentleman who owned a horse breeding farm near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Two
years later, she became his wife and she lives on that farm still. He’s a
great guy and is very good to my mother, but he’s not my dad. Life goes on,
and the roads always lead to unexpected destinations.
ROUTE TEN, reads a sign pocked with rust-edged bullet holes.
My heart is starting to beat harder. My throat is dry. I expect change,
but I’m afraid of it.
I’ve tried my damnedest not to get old. This in itself is a tough job. I
don’t mean age old, because that’s an honorable thing. I mean attitude old.
I’ve seen guys my age suddenly wake up one morning and forget their fathers
forbade them to listen to those demonic Rolling Stones. They’ve forgotten
their fathers demanding that they get out of the house if they’re going to
wear their hair down on their foreheads. They’ve forgotten what it meant, to
be the bossee instead of the bosser. Of course the world is tougher now, no
doubt about it. There are harder choices to be made, with more terrible
consequences. Kids need guidance, for sure. I did, and I’m glad I got guided
because it helped me miss making a lot of mistakes. But I think parents aren’t
teachers anymore. Parents—or a whole lot of us, at least—lead by mouth instead
of by example. It seems to me that if a child’s hero is their mother or
father—or even better, both of them in tandem—then the rough road of learning
and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing
helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults,
devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.
Well, my last name’s neither Lovoy nor Blessett, so I ought to get off my
pulpit now.
I’ve changed somewhat since 1964, of course. I don’t have as much hair,
