Boy's Life Part 18

"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 sc.r.a.ped 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 gra.s.s 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 b.u.mpy 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 gra.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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. "h.e.l.l!" he growled. "You got a sense of humor as bad as your daddy's!"

One week. Oh, Lord.

There were two subjects the Jaybird could talk about for hours on end: his survival through the Depression, when he held such jobs as coffin polisher, railroad brakeman, and carnival roustabout, and his success as a young man with women, which according to him was enough to turn Valentino green. I would have thought that was a big deal if I'd known who Valentino was. Anytime the Jaybird and I were away from the reach of my grandmother's ear, he might launch into a tale about "Edith the preacher's daughter from Tupelo" or "Nancy the conductor's niece from Nashville" or "that buck-toothed girl used to hang around eatin' candy apples." He rambled on about his "jimbob" and how the girls got all fired up about it. Said there used to be jealous boyfriends and husbands after him by the dozens, but he always escaped whatever trap was closing around him. Once, he said, he'd hung on to the bottom of a railroad trestle above a hundred-foot gorge while two men with shotguns stood right above him, talking about how they were going to skin him alive and nail his hide to a tree. "Thing was," the Jaybird said to me as he chewed l.u.s.tily on a weed, "I spoiled them girls for every other fella. Yeah, me and my jimbob, we had us a time." Then, inevitably, his eyes would take on a sad cast, and the young man with the flaming jimbob would start slipping away. "I bet you I wouldn't know one of them girls today if I pa.s.sed her on the street. No sir. They'd be old women, and I wouldn't know a one of them."

Granddaddy Jaybird despised sleep. Maybe it had something to do with his knowing that his days on this earth were numbered. Come five o'clock, rain or s.h.i.+ne, he'd rip the covers off me like a whirlwind pa.s.sing through and his voice would roar in my ear: "Get up, boy! Think you're gonna live forever?"

I would invariably mumble, "No, sir," and sit up, and the Jaybird would go on to rouse my grandmother into cooking a breakfast that might have served Sgt. Rock and most of Easy Company.

The days I spent with my grandparents followed no pattern once breakfast was down the hatch. I could just as well be handed a garden hoe and told to get to work as I could be informed that I might enjoy a trip to the pond in the woods behind the house. Granddaddy Jaybird kept a few dozen chickens, three goats-all of whom closely resembled him-and for some strange reason he kept a snapping turtle named Wisdom in a big metal tub full of slimy water in the backyard. When one of those goats stuck his nose into Wisdom's territory, and Wisdom took hold, there was h.e.l.l to pay. Things were commonly in an uproar at the Jaybird's place: "All snakes and dingleberries" was his phrase to describe a chaotic moment, as when Wisdom bit a thirsty goat and the goat in turn careened into the clean laundry my grandmother was hanging on the line, ending up running around festooned in sheets and dragging them through the garden I'd just been hoeing. The Jaybird was proud of his collection of the skeletons of small animals which he'd painstakingly wired together. You never knew where those skeletons might appear; the Jaybird had a nasty knack for putting them in places you might reach into before looking, like beneath a pillow or in your shoe. Then he'd laugh like a demon when he heard you squall. His sense of humor was, to say it kindly, warped. On Wednesday afternoon he told me he'd found a nest of rattlesnakes near the house last week and killed them all with a shovel. As I was about to drift off to sleep that night, already dreading five o'clock, he opened my door and peered into the dark and said in a quiet, ominous voice, "Cory? Be careful if you get up to pee tonight. Your grandmomma found a fresh-shed snakeskin under your bed this mornin'. Good-sized rattle on it, too. 'Night, now."

He'd closed the door. I was still awake at five.

What I realized, long after the fact, was that Granddaddy Jaybird was honing me like one might sharpen a blade on a grinding edge. I don't think he knew he was doing this, but that's how it came out. Take the snake story. As I lay awake in the dark, my bladder steadily expanding within me, my imagination was at work. I could see that rattler, coiled somewhere in the room, waiting for the squeak of a bare foot pressing on a board. I could see the colors of the forest in its scaly hide, its terrible flat head resting on a ledge of air, its fangs slightly adrip. I could see the muscles ripple slowly along its sides as it tasted my scent. I could see it grin in the dark, same to say, "You're mine, bub."

If there could be a school for the imagination, the Jaybird would be its headmaster. The lesson I learned that night, in what you can make yourself describe in your mind as true, I couldn't have bought at the finest college. There was also the subsidiary lesson of gritting your teeth and bearing pain, hour upon hour, and d.a.m.ning yourself for drinking an extra gla.s.s of milk at supper.

You see, the Jaybird was teaching me well, though he didn't have a clue.

There were other lessons, all of them valuable. And tests, too. On Friday afternoon Grandmomma Sarah asked him to drive into town to pick up a box of ice cream salt at the grocery store. Normally the Jaybird didn't like to run errands, but today he was agreeable. He asked me to go with him, and Grandmomma Sarah said the sooner we got back the sooner the ice cream would be made.

It was a day right for ice cream. Ninety degrees in the shade, and so hot in the full sun that if a dog went running, its shadow dropped down to rest. We got the ice cream salt, but on the way back, in the Jaybird's bulky old Ford, another test began.

"Jerome Claypool lives just down the road," he said. "He's a good ole fella. Want to drop by and say howdy?"

"We'd better get the ice cream salt to-"

"Yeah, Jerome's a good ole fella," the Jaybird said as he turned the Ford toward his friend's house.

Six miles later, he stopped in front of a ramshackle farmhouse that had a rotting sofa, a cast-off wringer, and a pile of moldering tires and rusted radiators in the front yard. I think we had crossed the line between Zephyr and Dogpatch by way of Tobacco Road somewhere a few miles back. Obviously, though, Jerome Claypool was a popular good ole fella, because there were four other cars parked in front of the place as well. "Come on, Cory," the Jaybird said as he opened his door. "We'll just go in a minute or two."

I could smell the stench of cheap cigars before we got to the porch. The Jaybird knocked on the door: rap rap rapraprap. "Who is it?" a cautious voice inquired from within. My grandfather replied, "Blood 'n Guts," which made me stare at him, thinking he'd lost whatever mind he had left. The door opened on noisy hinges, and a long-jawed face with dark, wrinkle-edged eyes peered out. Those eyes found me. "Who's he?"

"My grandboy," Jaybird said, and put his hand on my shoulder. "Name's Cory."

"Jesus, Jay!" the long-jawed face said with a scowl. "What're you bringin' a kid around here for?"

"No harm done. He won't say nothin'. Will you, Cory?" The hand tightened.

I didn't understand what was going on, but clearly this was not a place Grandmomma Sarah would have enjoyed visiting. I thought of Miss Grace's house out beyond Saxon's Lake, and the girl named Lainie who'd furled her wet pink tongue at me. "No sir," I told him, and the grip relaxed again. His secret-whatever it might be-was safe.

"Bodean won't like this," the man warned.

"Jerome, Bodean can stick his head up his a.s.s for all I care. You gonna let me in or not?"

"You got the green?"

"Burnin' a hole," the Jaybird said, and touched his pocket.

I balked as he started pulling me over the threshold. "Grandmomma's waitin' for the ice cream sa-"

He looked at me, and I saw something of his true nature deep in his eyes, like the glare of a distant blast furnace. On his face there was a desperate hunger, inflamed by whatever was going on in that house. Ice cream salt was forgotten; ice cream itself was part of another world six miles away. "Come on!" he snapped.

I stood my ground. "I don't think we ought to-"

"You don't think!" he said, and whatever was pulling him into that house seized his face and made it mean. "You just do what I tell you, hear me?"

He gave me a hard yank and I went with him, my heart scorched. Mr. Claypool closed the door behind us and bolted it. Cigar smoke drifted in a room where no sunlight entered; the windows were all boarded up and a few measly electric lights were burning. We followed Mr. Claypool through a hallway to the rear of the house, and he opened another door. The windowless room we walked into was layered with smoke, too, and at its center was a round table where four men sat under a harsh light playing cards, poker chips in stacks before them and gla.s.ses of amber liquid near at hand. "f.u.c.k that noise!" one of the men was saying, making my ears sting. "I ain't gonna be bluffed, no sir!"

"Five dollars to you, then, Mr. Cool," another one said. A red chip hit the pile at the table's center. A cigar tip glowed like a volcano in the maelstrom. "Raise you five," the third man said, the cigar wedged in the side of a scarlike mouth. "Come on, put up or shut-" I saw his small, piggish eyes dart at me, and the man slapped his cards facedown on the table. "Hey!" he shouted. "What's that kid doin' in here?"

Instantly I was the focus of attention. "Jaybird, have you gone f.u.c.kin' crazy?" one of the other men asked. "Get him out!"

"He's all right," my grandfather said. "He's family."

"Not my family." The man with the cigar leaned forward, his thick forearms braced on the table. His brown hair was cropped in a crew cut, and on the little finger of his right hand he wore a diamond ring. He took the cigar from his mouth, his eyes narrowed into slits. "You know the rules, Jaybird. n.o.body comes in here without gettin' approved."

"He's all right. He's my grandson."

"I don't care if he's the f.u.c.kin' prince of England. You broke the rules."

"Now, there's no call to be ugly about it, is th-"

"You're stupid!" the man shouted, his mouth twisting as he spoke the word. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face, and his white s.h.i.+rt was damp. On the breast pocket, next to a tobacco stain, was a monogram: BB. " Stupid!" he repeated. "You want the law to come in and bust us up? Why don't you just give a map to that G.o.dd.a.m.ned sheriff?"

"Cory won't say anythin'. He's a good boy."

"That so?" The small pig eyes returned to me. "You as stupid as your grandpap, boy?"

"No sir," I said.

He laughed. The sound of it reminded me of when Phillip Kenner threw up his oatmeal in school last April. The man's eyes were not happy, but his mouth was tickled. "Well, you're a smart little fella, ain't you?"

"He takes after me, Mr. Blaylock," the Jaybird said, and I realized the man who thought I was so smart was Bodean Blaylock himself, brother of Donny and Wade and son of the notorious Biggun. I recalled my grandfather's brash p.r.o.nouncement at the door that Bodean could stick his head up his a.s.s; right now, though, it was my grandpop who looked b.u.t.t-faced.

"Like h.e.l.l he does," Bodean told him, and when he laughed again he looked around at the other gamblers and they laughed, too, like good little Indians following the chief. Then Bodean stopped laughing. "Hit the road, Jaybird," he said. "We've got some high rollers comin' in here directly. Bunch of flyboys think they can make some money off me."

My grandfather cleared his throat nervously. His eyes were on the poker chips. "Uh... I was wonderin'... since I'm here and all, mind if I sit in for a few hands?"

"Take that kid and make dust," Bodean told him. "I'm runnin' a poker game, not a baby-sittin' service."

"Oh, Cory can wait outside," the Jaybird said. "He won't mind. Will you, boy?"

"Grandmomma's waitin' for the ice cream salt," I said.

Bodean Blaylock laughed again, and I saw the crimson flare in my grandfather's cheeks. "I don't care about no d.a.m.ned ice cream!" the Jaybird snapped, a fury and a torment in his eyes. "I don't care if she waits till midnight for it, I can do whatever I d.a.m.n well please!"

"Better run on home, Jaybird," one of the other men taunted. "Go eat yourself some ice cream and stay out of trouble."

"You shut up!" he hollered. " Here!" He dug into his pocket, brought out a twenty-dollar bill, and slammed it on the table. "Am I in this game, or not?"

I almost choked. Twenty dollars to risk playing poker. That was an awful lot of money. Bodean Blaylock smoked his cigar in silence, and looked back and forth from the money to my granddaddy's face. "Twenty dollars," he said. "That'll hardly get you started."

"I've got more, don't you worry about it."

I realized the Jaybird must've raided the cash jar, or else he had a secret poker-playing fund hidden away from my grandmother. Surely she wouldn't approve of this, and surely the Jaybird had agreed to get the ice cream salt as a ruse to come here. Maybe he'd just planned on dropping by to see who was playing, but I could tell the fever had him and he was going to play come h.e.l.l or high water. "Am I in, or not?"

"The kid can't stay."

"Cory, go sit in the car," he said. "I'll be there in a few minutes."

"But Grandmomma's waitin' for-"

"Go do like I said and do it right now!" the Jaybird yelled at me. Bodean stared at me through a haze of smoke. His expression said: See what I can do to your granddaddy, little boy?

I left the house. Before I got to the door, I could hear the sound of a new chair sc.r.a.ping up to the table. Then I walked out into the hot light and I put my hands in my pockets and kicked a pine cone across the road. I waited. Ten minutes went past. Then ten more. A car pulled up, and three young men got out, knocked on the front door, and were admitted by Mr. Claypool. The door closed again. Still my grandfather didn't emerge. I sat in the car for a while, but the heat was so bad my sweat drenched my s.h.i.+rt and I had to peel myself off the seat and get out again. I paced up and down in front of the house, and I paused to watch ants stripping a dead pigeon to the bones. Maybe an hour went past. At some point, though, I realized my grandfather was treating me like a little piece of nothing, and that was how he was treating Grandmomma Sarah, too. Anger started building in me, beginning in the belly like a dull, throbbing heat. I stared at the door, trying to will him to come out. The door remained closed.

The thought came to me, shocking in its decisiveness: To h.e.l.l with him.

I got the box of ice cream salt, and I started walking.

The first two miles were all right. On the third, the heat began getting to me. Sweat was pouring down my face, and my scalp felt as if it were aflame. The road s.h.i.+mmered between its walls of pine forest, and only a couple of cars pa.s.sed, but they were going in the wrong direction. The pavement started burning my feet through my shoes. I wanted to sit down in some shade and rest, but I did not because resting would be weakness; it would be saying to myself that I shouldn't have tried to walk six miles in hundred-degree heat and blazing sun, that I should have stayed at that house and waited for my grandfather to come out when he was good and ready. No. I had to keep going, and worry about my blisters later.

I started thinking about the story I was going to write about this. In that story, a boy would be crossing a burning desert, a boxful of priceless crystals entrusted to his care. I looked up to watch hawks soaring in the thermals, and when my attention roamed from what I was doing I stepped in a pothole, twisted my ankle, and fell down and the box of ice cream salt burst open beneath me.

I almost cried.

Almost.

My ankle hurt, but I could still stand on it. What hurt me most was the ice cream salt glistening on the pavement. The bottom of the box had broken open. I scooped ice cream salt up in my hands, filled my pockets, and started limping on again.

I was not going to stop. I was not going to sit in the shade and cry, my pockets leaking salt. I was not going to let my grandfather beat me.

I was nearing the end of the third mile when a car's horn honked behind me. I looked around, expecting the Jaybird's Ford. It was, instead, a copper-colored Pontiac. The car slowed, and Dr. Curtis Parrish looked at me through the rolled-down pa.s.senger window. "Cory? You need a ride?"

"Yes sir," I said gratefully, and I climbed in. My feet were about burned to the nubs, my ankle swelling up. Dr. Parrish gave it the gas, and we rolled on. "I'm stayin' at my grandfolks'," I said. "About three miles up the road."

"I know where the Jaybird lives." Dr. Parrish picked up his medical bag, which was sitting between us, and put it onto the back seat. "Awful hot day. Where were you walkin' from?"

"I... uh..." Here was a crossroads of conscience, thrust upon me. "I... had to run an errand for my grandmother," I decided to say.

"Oh." He was quiet for a moment. Then: "What's that spillin' out of your pocket? Sand?"

"Salt," I said.

"Oh," he said, and he nodded as if this made sense to him. "How's your daddy doin' these days? Things ease up at work for him?"

"Sir?"

"You know. His work. When Tom came to see me a few weeks ago, he said his workload was so tough he was havin' trouble sleepin'. I gave him some pills. You know, stress can be a mighty powerful thing. I told your dad he ought to take a vacation."

"Oh." This time I was the one who nodded, as if this made sense. "I think he's doin' better," I said. I gave him some pills. Dad hadn't said anything about his work being tough, or that he'd gone to see Dr. Parrish. I gave him some pills. I stared straight ahead, at the unfolding road. My father was still trying to escape the realm of troubled spirits. It occurred to me that he was hiding part of himself from Mom and me, just as the Jaybird hid his poker fever from my grandmother.

Dr. Parrish went with me to the front door of my grandparents' house. When Grandmomma Sarah answered his knock, Dr. Parrish said he'd found me walking on the side of the road. "Where's your granddaddy?" she asked me. I must've made a pained face, because after a few seconds of deliberation she answered her own question. "He's gotten himself into some mischief. Uh-huh. That's just what he's done."

"The box of salt busted open," I told her, and I showed a handful of it, my hair wet with sweat.

"We'll get us a new box. We'll save what's in your pockets for the Jaybird." I wasn't to know it for a while, but for the next week every meal the Jaybird sat down to eat would be so loaded with salt his mouth would pucker until it squawked. "Would you come in for a cold gla.s.s of lemonade, Dr. Parrish?"

"No, thank you. I've got to get back to the office." His face clouded over; a concern was working its way out of him. "Mrs. Mackenson, did you know Selma Neville?"

"Yes, I know her. Haven't seen her for a month or more, though."

"I just came from her house," Dr. Parrish said. "You know she'd been fightin' cancer for the last year."

"No, I surely didn't!"

"Well, she put up a good fight, but she pa.s.sed on about two hours ago. She wanted to pa.s.s at home instead of a hospital."

"My Lord, I didn't know Selma was sick!"