and I wear glasses. I’ve picked up some wrinkles, but I’ve gained some laugh
lines, too. Sandy says she thinks I’m more handsome now than I ever was. This
is called love. But as I say, I really have tried to hold off the attitude
aging. In this regard, music came to my rescue. I believe music is the
language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger
your attitude gets. I credit the Beach Boys with getting me interested in
music to begin with. Now my record collection—excuse me, my CD
collection—includes artists like Elvis Costello, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Concrete
Blonde, Simple Minds, and Technotronic. I have to say, however, that sometimes
I feel the classics pulling at me, like Led Zeppelin and the Lovin’ Spoonful.
But with all this choice on my platter, I have a feast.
I drive past a weeded-up road that cuts through the woods, and I know
what ruin lies at its end fifty yards away. Miss Grace and her bad girls
folded their tents right after the Blaylocks went to prison. The house’s roof
was blown off during a windstorm in July of 1965. I doubt if there’s much left
at all now. The kudzu vines around here have always been hungry.
Ben started college at the University of Alabama the same year I did,
majoring in business. He even stayed to go to graduate school, and I would
never in a million years have thought that Ben would actually enjoy school. He
and I got together from time to time at the university, but gradually he was
more and more involved with his business fraternity and I didn’t see a whole
lot of him. He joined Sigma Chi social fraternity and became vice president of
the chapter. He lives now in Atlanta, where he’s a stockbroker. He and his
wife, Jane Anne, have a boy and a girl. The guy is rich, he drives a
gold-colored BMW, and he’s fatter than ever. He called me three years ago,
after he read one of my books, and we see each other every few months. Last
summer we drove down to a small town near the state line between Alabama and
Florida to visit the chief of police there. His name is John Wilson.
I always knew Johnny had the blood of a chief in his veins. He runs a
tight ship in that town, and he accepts no nonsense. But I understand that
he’s a fair man, and everybody there seems to like him, because he’s in his
second term. While we were there, Ben and I met Johnny’s wife, Rachel. Rachel
is a stunning woman who looks like she could easily be a fashion model. She
hangs all over that guy. Though they have no children, Johnny and Rachel are
perfectly happy. We all went deep-sea fishing off Destin one weekend, and
Johnny caught a marlin, I got my line tangled up under the boat, and Ben got
the sunburn of his life. But we sure did do a lot of laughing and catching up.
It is there before I realize it. My stomach tightens.
“Saxon’s Lake,” I tell them. They both crane their necks to look.
It hasn’t changed at all. The same size, the same dark water, the same
mud and reeds, the same red rock cliff. It wouldn’t take much effort to
imagine Dad’s milk truck parked there, and him leaping into the water after a
sinking car. It likewise wouldn’t take much effort to remember a Buick
wallowing there, water flooding through the broken rear windshield, and my
father straining to reach me with a glass-slashed hand. Not much effort at
all.
Dad, I love you, I think as we leave Saxon’s Lake behind.
I remember his face, washed by firelight, as he sat there in the house
and explained to me about Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke. It took us both—and Mom,
too, and just about everybody in town—a long time to accept the fact that he
and his wife had done such evil things. Though he wasn’t evil through and
through, or else why would he have saved my life? I don’t think anyone is evil
beyond saving. Maybe I’m like Dad that way: naive. But better naive, I think,
than calloused to the core.
It dawned on me sometime later about Dr. Dahninaderke and his nightly
vigils at the shortwave radio. I firmly believe he was listening to the
foreign countries for news on who else in the Nazi regime had been captured
and brought to justice. I believe that under his cool exterior he lived in
perpetual terror, waiting for that knock on the door. He had delivered
agonies, and he had suffered them, too. Would he have killed me once he had
that green feather in his fist, as he and Kara had tortured and killed Jeff
Hannaford over blackmail money? I honestly don’t know. Do you?
Oh, yes! The Demon!
Ben told me this. The Demon, who had demonstrated later in high school
that she was indeed a genius, went to college at Vanderbilt and became a
chemist for DuPont. She did very well at that, but her strange nature would
not let her alone. The last Ben understood, the Demon has become a performance
artist in New York City and is locking horns with Jesse Helms over an art
piece she does in which she screams and rants about corporate America while
sitting in a baby pool full of… you can guess what.
All I can say is, Jesse Helms better not get on her bad side. If he does,
I pity him. He might find himself glued to his desk one fine day.
I follow the same curves that scared the yell out of me when Donny
Blaylock flew around them. And then the hills move aside and the road becomes
as cleanly straight as a part made by Mr. Dollar and there is the gargoyle
bridge.
Missing its gargoyles. The heads of the Confederate generals have been
hacked away. Maybe it was vandalism, maybe it was somebody who would get a
thousand dollars apiece for them on the art market as examples of Southern
primitivism. I don’t know, but they are gone. There is the railroad trestle,
which is about the same, and there is the shine of the Tecumseh River. I
imagine that Old Moses is happier, now that the paper mill has closed. He
doesn’t get pollution in his teeth when he bites a mouthful of turtle. Of
course, he doesn’t get his Good Friday feast anymore, either. That ended, Ben
told me, when the Lady passed over her own river in 1967 at the grand old age
of one hundred and nine. The Moon Man, Ben said, left town soon afterward,
heading for New Orleans, and after that the community of Bruton began to
dwindle, getting smaller at even a faster rate than Zephyr. The Tecumseh River
may be cleaner now, but I wonder if on some nights Old Moses doesn’t lift his
scaly head to the surface and spout steam and water from the twin furnaces of
his nostrils. I wonder if he doesn’t listen to the silence beyond the sounds
of water sloshing over rocks and think in his own reptilian language “Why
doesn’t anybody ever come to play with me anymore?”
Maybe he’s still here. Maybe he’s gone, following the river to the sea.
We cross the gargoyle-less bridge. And there on the other side is my
hometown.
“Here we are,” I hear myself say as I slow the car down, but instantly I
know I am incorrect. We may be in a particular place in time, but this place
is no longer Zephyr.
At least not the Zephyr I knew. The houses are still here, but many of
them are tumbling down, the yards forlorn. It’s not totally a ghost town,
however, because some of the houses—a small, small number, it appears—are
still being lived in, and there are a few cars on the streets. But already I
feel that a great gathering—a wonderful party and celebration of life—has
moved on somewhere else, leaving its physical evidence behind like a garden of
dead flowers.
This is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.
Sandy senses it. “You all right?”
“We’ll find out,” I tell her, and I manage a feeble smile.
“There’s hardly anybody here, is there, Dad?”
“Hardly a soul,” I answer.
I turn off Merchants Street before I get to the center of town. I can’t
take that yet. I drive to the ball field where the Branlins made their savage
attack on us that day, and I stop the car on the field’s edge.
“Mind if we sit here for a minute, kids?” I ask.
“No,” Sandy says, and she squeezes my hand.
About the Branlins. Johnny supplied me with this information, being an
officer of the law. It seems that the brothers were not of a single nature
after all. Gotha started playing football in high school and became the man of
the hour when he intercepted a Union Town High School pass right on their goal
line and ran it back for a big TD. The acclaim did wonders for him, proving
that all the time he only craved the attention his mother and father were too
stupid or mean to give him. Gotha, Johnny told me, now lives in Birmingham and
sells insurance, and he coaches a peewee football team on the side. Johnny
told me Gotha needs no peroxide in his hair anymore, since he has not a strand
of it left.
Gordo, on the other hand, continued his descent. I’m sorry to say that in
1980 Gordo was shot to death by the owner of a 7-Eleven in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, where he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. Gordo died trying to steal
less than three hundred dollars from the register and all the Little Debbie
cakes he could carry. It seems to me that once upon a time he did have a
chance, but he didn’t listen to the poison ivy.
“I’m gonna get out for a minute and stretch my legs,” I say.
“Want us to go with you, Dad?”
“No,” I answer. “Not right now.”
I get out and walk across the overgrown baseball field. I stand on the
pitcher’s mound, caressed by cool breeze and warm sun. The bleachers where I
first saw Nemo Curliss are sagging. I hold my arm out with my palm toward the
sky, and I wait.
What would happen if that ball Nemo Curliss flung to heaven suddenly came
down into my hand after all these years?
I wait.
But it doesn’t happen. Nemo, the boy with a perfect arm who was trapped
by all-too-imperfect circumstances, threw that ball beyond the clouds. It
never came down and it never will, and only Ben, Johnny, and I remember.
I close my palm, and return my arm to my side.
I can see Poulter Hill from here.
It, too, has been allowed to deteriorate. The weeds are pushing up amid
the headstones, and it appears that no new flowers have been put up there for
a long time. That’s a shame, I think, because there lie Zephyr’s faithful
ones.
I don’t want to walk amid those stones. I had never been back, after my
train trip. I had said my good-bye to Davy Ray, and he said his to me.
Anything else would be a numb-nuts thing to do.
I turn away from Death, and walk back to the living.
“This was my school,” I tell my wife and child as I stop the car beside
the playground.
We all get out here, and Sandy walks at my side as my shoes stir the
playground’s dust. Our “young’un” begins to run around in wider and wider
circles, like a pony set free after a long period of confinement. “Be
careful!” Sandy warns, because she’s seen a broken bottle. Worrying, it seems,
comes with the job.
I put my arm around Sandy, and her arm goes around my back. The
elementary school is empty, some of the windows shattered. There is a crushing
silence, where so many young voices whooped and hollered. I see the place near
the fence where Johnny and Gotha Branlin squared off. I see the gate where I
fled from Gordo on Rocket and led him to Lucifer’s judgment. I see—
“Hey, Dad! Look what I found!”
Our “young’un” comes trotting back. “I found it over there! Neat, huh?”
I look into the small, offered palm, and I have to smile.
It is a black arrowhead, smooth and almost perfectly formed. There are
hardly any cuts on it at all. It was obviously fashioned by someone who was
proud of his labors. A chief, most likely.
“Can I keep it, Dad?” my daughter asks.
Her name is Skye. She turned twelve in January, and she’s going through
what Sandy calls the “tomboy stage.” Skye would rather put on a baseball cap
backward and run grinning through the dust than play with dolls and dream
about the New Kids on the Block. These things will come later, I’m sure. For
right now, Skye is fine.
“I believe you ought to,” I tell her, and she eagerly pushes that
arrowhead down into the pocket of her jeans like a secret treasure.
You see, it’s a girl’s life, too.
And now we drive along Merchants Street, into the center of the stilled
heart.
Everything is closed. Mr. Dollar’s barbershop, the Piggly-Wiggly, the
Bright Star Cafe, the hardware store, the Lyric, everything. The windows of
the Woolworth’s are soaped over. The growth of retail outlets, apartments, and
a shopping mall with four theaters in Union Town consumed the spirit of
Zephyr, as Big Paul’s Pantry finished off the milkman’s route. This is a
going-forward, but is it progress?
We drive past the courthouse. Silence. Past the public swimming pool and
the shell of the Spinnin’ Wheel. Silence, silence. We drive past the house of
Miss Blue Glass, and the silence where there used to be music is heavy indeed.
Miss Blue Glass. I wish I can say I know what happened to her, but I
don’t. She would be in her eighties now, if she is still alive. I just don’t
know. The same is true with so many others, who drifted away from Zephyr in
the waning years: Mr. Dollar, Sheriff Marchette, Jazzman Jackson, Mr. and Mrs.
Damaronde, Nila Castile and Gavin, Mrs. Velvadine, Mayor Swope. I think they
are all alive, in other towns. I think they have kept part of Zephyr with
them, and wherever they go they leave Zephyr’s seeds in the earth. As I do.
I worked for a newspaper in Birmingham for two years after I finished
college. I wrote headlines and edited other people’s stories. When I went to
my apartment in that big city after work, I sat down at my magic box—not that
same one, but a new magic box—and I wrote. And I wrote. The stories went out
into the mail and the stories came back. Then, out of desperation, I tried to
write a novel. Lo and behold, it found a publisher.
I am a library now. A small one, but I’m growing.
I slow the car as we move past a house set back off the street next to a
barn. “He lived right there,” I tell Sandy.
“Wow!” Skye says. “It’s creepy! It looks like a haunted house!”
