Boy's Life Part 5

Her black eyes were unblinking. Her mouth began to open.

No, I begged her, mind to mind. No, please don't do it!

The Demon slid her green-capped finger toward her wet pink tongue.

I could do nothing but stare as my stomach drew up into a hard little knot.

Green against pink. Dirty fingernail. A sticky strand, hanging down.

The Demon licked her finger, where the green thing had been. I think I must've squirmed violently, because Dad gripped my knee and whispered, "Pay attention!" but of course he never saw the invisible Demon or her act of p.r.i.c.kly torment. The Demon smiled at me, her black eyes sated, and then she turned her head away and the ordeal was over. Her mother lifted up a hand with hairy knuckles and stroked the Demon's fiery locks as if she were the sweetest little girl who ever drew G.o.d's breath.

Reverend Lovoy asked everyone to pray. I lowered my head and squeezed my eyes shut.

And about five seconds into the prayer, something thumped hard against the back of my skull.

I looked around.

Horror choked me. Sitting directly behind me, their pewter-colored eyes the hue of sharpened blades, were Gotha and Gordo Branlin. On either side of them, their parents were deep in prayer. I imagined they prayed for deliverance from their brood. Both Branlin boys wore dark blue suits, white shirts, and their ties were similar except Gotha 's had black stripes on white and Gordo's had red. Gotha, the oldest by one year, had the whitest hair; Gordo's was a little on the yellow side. Their faces looked like mean carvings in brown rock, and even their bones-lower jaws jutting forward, cheekbones about to tear through flesh, foreheads like slabs of granite-suggested coiled rage. In the fleeting seconds that I dared to look upon those cunning visages, Gordo thrust an upraised middle finger in my face and Gotha loaded a straw with another hard black-eyed pea.

"Cory, turn around!" my mother whispered, and she tugged at me. "Close your eyes and pray!"

I did. The second pea bounced off the back of my head. Those things could sting the whine out of you. All during the rest of that prayer, I could hear the Branlins back there, whispering and giggling like evil trolls. My head was their target for the day.

After the prayer was over, we sang another hymn. Announcements were made, and visitors welcomed. The offering plate was pa.s.sed around. I put in the dollar Dad had given me for this purpose. The choir sang, with the Gla.s.ses playing piano and organ. Behind me, the Branlins giggled. Then Reverend Lovoy stood up again to deliver his Easter sermon, and that was when the wasp landed on my hand.

My hand was resting on my knee. I didn't move it, even as fear shot up my spine like a lightning bolt. The wasp wedged itself between my first and second fingers and sat there, its blue-black stinger twitching.

Now let me say a few things about wasps.

They are not like bees. Bees are fat and happy and they float around from flower to flower without a care for human flesh. Yellowjackets are curious and have mood swings, but they, too, are usually predictable and can be avoided. A wasp, however, particularly the dark, slim kind of wasp that looks like a dagger with a head on it, was born to plunge that stinger into mortal epidermis and draw forth a scream like a connoisseur uncorking a vintage wine. Brushing your head against a wasps' nest can result in a sensation akin to, as I have heard, being peppered with shotgun pellets. I have seen the face of a boy who was stung on the lips and eyelids when he explored an old house in the middle of summer; such a swollen torture I wouldn't even wish on the Branlins. Wasps are insane; they have no rhyme or reason to their stingings. They would sting you to the marrow of your bones if they could drive their stingers in that deeply. They are full of rage, like the Branlins. If the devil indeed ever had a familiar, it was not a black cat or monkey or leather-skinned lizard; it was, and always will be, the wasp.

A third pea got me in the back of the head. It hurt a lot. But I stared at the wasp wedged between my first and second fingers, my heart beating hard, my skin crawling. Something flew past my face, and I looked up to watch a second wasp circle the Demon's head and land on her crown. The Demon must've felt a tickle. She reached back and flicked the wasp off without knowing what she was flicking, and the wasp rose up with an angry whir of black wings. I thought sure the Demon was about to be stung, but the wasp must've sensed its brethren because it flew on up to the ceiling.

Reverend Lovoy was really preaching now, about crucified Jesus and weeping Mary and the stone that had been rolled away.

I looked up at the church's ceiling.

Near one of the revolving fans was a small hole, no bigger than a quarter. As I watched, three wasps emerged from it and descended down into the congregation. A few seconds later, two more came out and swirled in the muggy, saccharine air.

Thunder boomed over the church. The noise of the rain almost drowned out Reverend Lovoy's rising and falling voice. What he was saying I didn't know; I looked at the wasp between my fingers again, then back to the hole in the ceiling.

More were coming out, spiraling down into the steamy, closed-up, rain-damp church. I counted them. Eight... nine... ten... eleven. Some of them clung to the fan's slow blades and rode them like a merry-go-round. Fourteen... fifteen... sixteen... seventeen. A dark, twitching fist of wasps pushed through the hole. Twenty... twenty-one... twenty-two. I stopped counting at twenty-five.

There must be a nest of them up there in the attic, I thought. Must be a nest the size of a football, pulsing in the damp dark. As I watched, transfixed at the sight as Mary must have been when a stranger on the road showed her his wounded side, a dozen more wasps boiled out of the hole. No one else seemed to notice; were they invisible, as the Demon had been when she picked a nose grape? The wasps spun slowly around and around the ceiling, in emulation of the fans. There were enough now to form a dark cloud, as if the outside storm had found a way in.

The wasp between my fingers was moving. I looked at it, and winced as another pea stung the back of my neck where the hair was stubbled. The wasp crawled along my index finger and stopped on the knuckle. Its stinger lay against my flesh, and I felt the tiny little jagged edge of it like a grain of broken gla.s.s.

Reverend Lovoy was in his element now, his arms gesturing and his hair starting to slide forward. Thunder crashed outside and rain beat on the roof. It sounded like Judgment Day out there, time to hew some wood and call the animals together two by two. All but the wasps, I thought; this time around we could fix Noah's mistake. I kept watching that hole in the ceiling with a mixture of fascination and dread. It occurred to me that Satan had found a way to slip into the Easter service, and there he was circling above our heads, looking for flesh.

Two things happened at once.

Reverend Lovoy lifted his hands and said, in his loud preacher's cadence, "And on that glorious mornin' after the darkest day the angels came down and gakkkk!" He had raised his hands to the angels, and suddenly he found them crawling with little wings.

My mom put her hand on mine, where my own wasp was, and squeezed in a loving grip.

It got her at the same instant the wasps decided Reverend Lovoy's sermon had gone on long enough.

She screamed. He screamed. It was the signal the wasps had been waiting for.

The blue-black cloud of them, over a hundred stingers strong, dropped down like a net on the heads of trapped beasts.

I heard Granddaddy Jaybird bellow, "s.h.i.tfire!" as he was pierced. Nana Alice let out an operatic, quavering high note. The Demon's mother wailed, wasps attacking the back of her neck. The Demon's father flailed at the air with his skinny arms. The Demon started laughing. Behind me, the Branlins croaked with pain, the peashooter forgotten. All across the church there were screams and hollers and people in Easter suits and dresses were jumping up and fighting the air as if grappling the devils of the invisible dimension. Reverend Lovoy was dancing in a paroxysm of agony, shaking his multiple-stung hands as if to disconnect them from the wrists. The whole choir was up and singing, not hymns this time but cries of pain as the wasps stung cheeks, chins, and noses. The air was full of dark, swirling currents that flew into people's faces and wound around their heads like th.o.r.n.y crowns. "Get out! Get out!" somebody was shouting. "Run for it!" somebody else hollered, behind me. The Gla.s.ses broke, running for the exit with wasps in their hair. All at once everybody was up, and what had been a peaceful congregation barely ten seconds before was now a stampede of terror-struck cattle.

Wasps will do that to you.

"My d.a.m.n leg's stuck!" Grand Austin shouted.

"Jay! Help him!" Grandmomma Sarah yelled, but Grand-daddy Jaybird was already fighting his way out into the clogged, thrashing ma.s.s of people in the aisle.

Dad pulled me up. I heard an evil hum in my left ear, and the next instant I took a sting at the edge of my ear that caused the tears to jump from my eyes. "Ow!" I heard myself shout, though with all the screaming and hollering one little ow was of no consequence. Two more wasps, however, heard me. One of them got me in my right shoulder, stinging through my suit coat and shirt; the other darted at my face like an African lance and impaled my upper lip. I gave a garbled shout- owgollywowwow-of the kind that speaks volumes of pain but no syllable of sense, and I, too, fought the churning air. A voice squealed with laughter, and when I looked at the Demon through my watering eyes I saw her jumping up and down on the pew, her mouth split in a grin and red whelps all over her face.

"Everyone out!" Dr. Lezander hollered. Three wasps clung, pulsing and stinging, to his bald skull, and his gray-haired, stern-faced wife was behind him, her blue-blossomed Easter hat knocked awry and wasps crawling on her wide shoulders. She gripped her Bible in one hand and her purse with the other and swung tremendous blows at the attacking swarms, her teeth gritted with righteous anger.

People were fighting through the door, ignoring raincoats and umbrellas in their struggle to escape from torment into deluge. Coming into church, the Easter crowd had been the model of polite Christian civilization; going out, they were barbarians to the core. Women and children went down in the muddy yard, and the men tripped over them and fell facefirst into rain-beaten puddles. Easter hats spun away and rolled like soggy wheels until the torrent slammed them flat.

I helped Dad pry Grand Austin's wooden leg loose from under the pew. Wasps were jabbing at my father's hands, and every time one would sting I could hear his breath hiss. Mom, Nana Alice, and Grandmomma Sarah were trying to get out into the aisle, where people were falling down and tangling up with each other. Reverend Lovoy, his fingers swollen like link sausages, was trying to shield his children's faces between himself and sobbing Esther. The choir had disintegrated, and some of them had left their empty purple robes behind. Dad and I got Grand Austin out into the aisle. Wasps were attacking the back of his neck, and his cheeks were wet. Dad brushed the wasps off, but more swarmed around us in a vengeful circle like Comanches around a wagon train. Children were crying and women were shrieking, and still the wasps darted and stung. "Out! Out!" Dr. Lezander was shouting at the door, shoving people through as they knotted up. His wife, Veronica, a husky Dutch bear, grabbed a struggling soul and all but flung the man through the doorway.

We were almost out. Grand Austin staggered, but Dad held him up. My mother was plucking the wasps out of Grandmomma Sarah's hair like living nettles. Two hot pins jabbed into the back of my neck, one a split second after the other, and the pain felt like my head was going to blow off. Then Dad took hold of my arm and pulled and the rain pounded on my skull. We all got through the door, but Dad slipped in a puddle and went down on his knees in the muck. I grasped the back of my neck and ran around in circles, crying with the pain, and after a while my feet slipped out from under me and my Easter suit met Zephyr's mud, too.

Reverend Lovoy was the last one out. He slammed the church door shut and stood with his back against it, as if to contain the evil within.

Thunder boomed and rolled. The rain came down like hammers and nails, beating us all senseless. Some people sat in the mud; others wandered around, dazed; others just stood there letting the rain pour over them to help cool the hot suffering.

I was hurting, too. And I imagined, in my delirium of pain, that behind the church's closed door the wasps were rejoicing. After all, it was Easter for them, too. They had risen from the dead of winter, the season that dries up wasps' nests and mummifies their sleeping infants. They had rolled away their own stone and emerged reborn into a new spring, and they had delivered to us a stinging sermon on the tenacity of life that would stay with us far longer than anything Reverend Lovoy could have said. We had, all of us, experienced the thorns and nails in a most personal way.

Someone bent down beside me. I felt cool mud being pressed against the stings on the back of my neck. I looked into Granddaddy Jaybird's rain-soaked face, his hair standing up as if he'd been electric-shocked.

"You all right, boy?" he asked me.

He had turned his back on the rest of us and fled for his own skin. He had been a coward and a Judas, and there was no satisfaction in his offering of mud.

I didn't answer him. I looked right through him. He said, "You'll be all right," and he stood up and went to see about Grandmomma Sarah, who huddled with Mom and Nana Alice. He looked to me like a half-drowned, scrawny rat.

I might've punched him if I'd been my father's size. I couldn't help but be ashamed of him, a deep, stinging shame. And I couldn't help but wonder, as well, if some of Granddaddy Jaybird's cowardice might be inside me, too. I didn't know it then, but I was going to find out real soon.

Somewhere across Zephyr the bells of another church rang, the sound coming to us through the rain as if heard in a dream. I stood up, my lower lip and shoulder and the back of my neck throbbing. The thing about pain is, it teaches you humility. Even the Branlins were blubbering like babies. I never saw anybody act c.o.c.ky after they got a hide full of stingers, have you?

The Easter bells rang across the watery town.

Church was over.

Hallelujah.

V The Death of a Bike

THE RAIN KEPT FALLING.

Gray clouds hung over Zephyr, and from their swollen bellies came the deluge. I went to sleep with rain slamming the roof, and I awoke to the crash of thunder. Rebel shivered and moaned in his doghouse. I knew how he felt. My wasp stings had diminished to red welts, but for day upon day no ray of sunshine fell upon my hometown; only the incessant rain came down, and when I wasn't doing homework I sat in my room rereading old Famous Monsters magazines and my stock of comic books.

The house got that rainy smell in it, an odor of damp boards and wet dirt wafting up from the bas.e.m.e.nt. The downpour caused the cancellation of the Sat.u.r.day matinee at the Lyric, because the theater's roof had sprung leaks. The very air itself felt slick, like green mold growing on damp stones. At the dinner table a week after Easter, Dad put down his knife and fork and looked at the steamy wet windows and said, "We're gonna have to grow gills if this keeps up."

It did keep up. The air was heavy with water, the clouds cutting all light to a dim, swampy murk. Yards became ponds, and the streets turned into streams. School started letting out early, so everyone could get home, and on Wednesday afternoon at seventeen minutes before three o'clock my old bike gave up the ghost.

One second I was trying to pedal through a torrent on Deerman Street. The next second my bike's front wheel sank into a crater where the pavement had broken and the shock thrummed through the rust-eaten frame. Several things happened at once: the handlebars collapsed, the front wheel's spokes snapped, the seat broke, the frame gave way at its tired old seams, and suddenly I was lying on my belly in water that flooded into my yellow rain slicker. I lay there, stunned, trying to figure out how the earth had knocked me down. Then I sat up, wiped the water out of my eyes, and looked at my bike, and just like that I knew it was dead.

My bike, old in the ways of a boy's life long before it had reached my hands by merit of a flea market, was no longer a living thing. I felt it, as I sat there in the pouring rain. Whatever it is that gives a soul to an object made by the tools of man, it had cracked open and flown to the watery heavens. The frame had bent and snapped, the handlebars hanging by a single screw, the seat turned around like a head on a broken neck. The chain was off its sprockets, the front tire warped from its rim, and the snapped spokes sticking up. I almost cried at the sight of such carnage, but even though my heart hurt, I knew crying wouldn't help. My bike had simply worn out; it had come to the end of its days, pure and simple. I was not its first owner, and maybe that made a difference, too. Maybe a bike, once discarded, pines away year after year for the first hand that steered it, and as it grows old it dreams, in its bike way, of the young roads. It was never really mine, then; it traveled with me, but its pedals and handlebars held the memory of another master. Maybe, on that rainy Wednesday, it killed itself because it knew I yearned for a bike built for me and me alone. Maybe. All I knew for sure at that moment was that I had to walk the rest of the way home, and I couldn't drag the carca.s.s with me.

I pulled it up onto somebody's yard and left it under a dripping oak tree, and I went on with my drenched knapsack on my back and my shoes squeaking with water.

When my father, who was home from the dairy, found out about the bike, he packed me into the pickup truck, and off we went to fetch the carca.s.s on Deerman Street. "It can be fixed," he told me as the wipers slogged back and forth across the windshield. "We'll get somebody to weld it together or somethin'. That'll be cheaper than a new bike, for sure."

"Okay," I answered, but I knew the bike was dead. No amount of welding was going to revive it. "The front wheel was messed up, too," I added, but Dad was concentrating on his driving.

We reached the place where I'd pulled the carca.s.s up under the oak tree. "Where it is?" Dad asked. "Was this the place?"

It was, though the carca.s.s was gone. Dad stopped the truck, got out, and knocked on the front door of the house we sat before. I saw the door open, and a white-haired woman peered out. She and Dad talked for a minute or so, and I saw the woman point toward the street. Then my dad came back, his cap dripping water and his shoulders hunched in his wet milkman's jacket. He slid behind the wheel, closed the door, and said, "Well, she walked out to get her mail, she saw the bike lyin' there under her tree, and she called Mr. Sculley to come pick it up." Mr. Emmett Sculley was Zephyr's junkman, and he drove around in a bright green truck with SCULLEY'S ANTIQUES and a telephone number painted on the sides in red. My dad started the engine and looked at me. I knew that look; it was hard and angry, and I could read a grim future in it. "Why didn't you go to that woman's door and tell her you were gonna come back for your bike? Didn't you think of that?"

"No, sir," I had to admit. "I didn't."

Well, my dad pulled the truck away from the curb and we started off again. Not toward home, but heading west. I knew where we were going. Mr. Sculley's junk shop lay to the west, past the wooded edge of town. On the way, I had to endure my father's tale, the one that began like this: "When I was your age, I had to walk if I wanted to get somewhere. I wish I'd had a bike back then, even a used one. Heck, if my buddies and me had to walk two or three miles, we didn't think a thing about it. And we were healthier for it, too. Sun, wind, or rain, it didn't matter. We got where we were going on our own two le-" And so on, you know the kind of speech I mean, the generational paean of childhood.

We left the town limits behind us, and the glistening road wound through the wet green forest. The rain was still coming down, pieces of fog snagged on the treetops and drifting across the road. Dad had to drive slowly because the road around here was dangerous even when the pavement was dry. My dad was still going on about the dubious joys of not having a bike, which I was beginning to realize was his way of telling me I'd better get used to walking if my old ride was unfixable. Thunder boomed off beyond the hazy hills, the road deserted before us as it curved beneath the tires like a wild horse fights a saddle. I don't know why I chose that moment to turn my head and look back, but I did.

And I saw the car that was coming up fast behind us.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the skin beneath it tingled like the scurrying of ants. The car was a black, low-slung, mean-looking panther with gleaming chrome teeth, and it rocketed around the long curve my father had just negotiated with an uneasy alliance of brake and accelerator. The pickup truck's engine was sputtery, but I could hear no sound from the black car that closed on us. I could see a shape and a pale face behind the wheel. I could see red and orange flames painted on the slope of the ebony hood, and then the car was on our tail and showed no sign of slowing or swerving and I looked at my father and shouted, "Dad!"

He jumped in his seat and jerked the wheel. The truck's tires slewed to the left, over the faded centerline, and my father fought to keep us from going into the woods. Then the tires got a grip again, the truck straightened out, and Dad had fire in his eyes when he swung his face in my direction. "Are you crazy?" he snapped. "You want to get us killed?"

I looked back.

The black car was gone.

It hadn't pa.s.sed us. It hadn't turned off anywhere. It was just gone.

"I saw... I saw..."

"Saw what? Where?" he demanded.

"I... thought I saw... a car," I told him. "It was... about to hit us, I thought."

He peered into the rearview mirror. Of course he saw only the same rain and empty road I was seeing. He reached out, put his hand against my forehead, and said, "You feelin' all right?"

"Yes sir." I didn't have a fever. Of that, at least, I was certain. My father, satisfied that I was not building up heat, pulled his hand away and refastened it to the steering wheel. "Just sit still," he said, and I obeyed him. He fixed his attention on the tricky road again, but his jaw muscle clenched every few seconds and I figured he was trying to decide whether I needed to go see Dr. Parrish or get my b.u.t.t busted.

I didn't say anything more about the black car, because I knew Dad wouldn't believe me. But I had seen that car before, on the streets of Zephyr. It had announced itself with a rumble and growl as it roamed the streets, and when it had pa.s.sed you could smell the heat and see the pavement shimmer. "Fastest car in town," Davy Ray had told me as he and I and the other guys had lounged around in front of the ice house on Merchants Street, catching cool breezes from the ice blocks on a sultry August day. "My dad," Davy Ray had confided, "says n.o.body can outrace Midnight Mona."

Midnight Mona. That was the car's name. The guy who owned it was named Stevie Cauley. "Little Stevie," he was called, because he stood only a few inches over five feet tall though he was twenty years old. He chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, and maybe those had stunted his growth.

But the reason I didn't tell my dad about Midnight Mona streaking up behind us on that rain-slick road was that I remembered what had happened on a night last October. My dad, who used to be a volunteer fireman, got a telephone call. It was Chief Marchette, he'd told Mom. A car had wrecked on Route Sixteen, and it was on fire in the woods. My dad had hurried out to help, and he'd come home a couple of hours later with ashes in his hair and his clothes smelling of burnt timber. After that night, and what he'd seen, he hadn't wanted to be a fireman anymore.

We were on Route Sixteen right now. And the car that had wrecked and burned was Midnight Mona, with Little Stevie Cauley behind the wheel.

Little Stevie Cauley's body-what was left of it, I mean-lay in a coffin in the cemetery on Poulter Hill. Midnight Mona was gone, too, to wherever burned-up cars go.

But I had seen it, racing up behind us out of the mist. I had seen someone sitting behind the wheel.

I kept my mouth shut. I was in enough trouble already.

Dad turned off Route Sixteen and eased the truck onto a muddy side road that wound through the woods. We reached a place where rusted old metal signs of all descriptions had been nailed to the trees; there were at least a hundred of them, advertis.e.m.e.nts for everything from Green Spot Orange Soda to B.C. Headache Powders to the Grand Ole Opry. Beyond the signpost forest the road led to a house of gray wood with a sagging front porch and in the front yard-and here I mean "sea of weeds" instead of yard as ordinary people might know it-a motley collection of rust-eaten clothes wringers, kitchen stoves, lamps, bed-frames, electric fans, iceboxes, and other smaller appliances was lying about in untidy piles. There were coils of wire as tall as my father and bushel baskets full of bottles, and amid the junk stood the metal sign of a smiling policeman with the red letters STOP DON'T STEAL painted across his chest. In his head there were three bullet holes.

I don't think stealing was a problem for Mr. Sculley, because as soon as my dad stopped the truck and opened his door two red hound dogs jumped up from their bellies on the porch and began baying to beat the band. A few seconds later, the screen door banged open and a frail-looking little woman with a white braid and a rifle came out of the house.

"Who is it?" she hollered in a voice like a lumberjack's. "Whadda ye want?"

My father lifted his hands. "It's Tom Mackenson, Mrs. Sculley. From Zephyr."

"Tom who?"

"Mackenson!" He had to shout over the hound dogs. "From Zephyr!"

Mrs. Sculley roared, "Shaddup!" and she plucked a fly swatter from a hook on the porch and swung a few times at the dogs' rumps, which quieted them down considerably.

I got out of the truck and stood close to my dad, our shoes mired in the boggy weeds. "I need to see your husband, Mrs. Sculley," Dad told her. "He picked up my boy's bike by mistake."

"Uh-uh," she replied. "Emmett don't make no mistakes."

"Is he around, please?"

"Back of the house," she said, and she motioned with the rifle. "One of them sheds back there."

"Thank you." He started off and I followed him, and we'd taken maybe a half-dozen steps when Mrs. Sculley said, "Hey! You trip over somethin' and break your legs, we ain't liable for it, hear?"